The Work
Meister Eckhart (c.1260-c.1328) composed his sermons and treatises in both Latin (for academic audiences) and Middle High German (for Dominican nuns and lay audiences). His German works - the sermons (Predigten), the Talks of Instruction (Reden der Unterscheidung), the Book of Divine Consolation (Buch der göttlichen Tröstung), and the treatise On Detachment (Von Abgeschiedenheit) - were collected in modern critical editions in the twentieth century, particularly in the monumental edition by Josef Quint. The German sermons and treatises are the primary basis for Eckhart's reputation as the greatest speculative mystic of the medieval period.
The vernacular sermons were delivered primarily to Dominican convents - communities of religious women under his care as Dominican Provincial for Saxony - but their language and concepts circulated widely through copies and adaptations. Their influence on the subsequent tradition of German mysticism (Tauler, Suso, Ruusbroec, the author of the Theologia Germanica) was immediate and profound.
Biblical Engagement
John 1:14 - 'And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us' - is the verse that Eckhart uses to ground his most distinctive theological concept: the 'birth of the Word in the soul.' The Incarnation is not merely a historical event that occurred once in Bethlehem; it is the model of an eternal divine self-communication that can and must occur in the soul of the believer. 'What good is it to me if Mary is full of grace and I am not full of grace? What good is it to me if the eternal Word is born in Bethlehem and not born in my soul?' The soul's participation in the divine life - its capacity to be the place where the Word is born - is the theological center of Eckhart's mysticism.
Colossians 1:27 - 'To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory' - is Paul's statement that Christ dwells within the believer, which Eckhart takes as the New Testament authorization for his theology of the soul's union with God. 'Christ in you' is not merely a metaphor of moral influence but an ontological claim: the divine ground of the soul (Seelengrund) and the ground of the Godhead are, in some real sense, the same ground. Eckhart's identification of the 'little spark' (vünkelein) within the soul with the uncreated divine light is his most controversial claim and the one that most directly drew the condemnation of Pope John XXII.
Galatians 2:20 - 'I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me' - is Paul's statement of mystical identification with Christ that Eckhart takes as the model for his concept of Abgeschiedenheit (detachment or releasement). The 'I' that is crucified with Christ is the self-preoccupied ego; the life that remains is the life of the divine ground operating through a soul emptied of itself. Eckhart's detachment is not a negative concept - the mere subtraction of ego - but a positive openness to divine life: 'the detached person is taken up by nothing else than what God is.'
John 10:30 - 'I and my Father are one' - is Christ's statement of unity with the Father that Eckhart uses to articulate the soul's potential for unity with God. The relationship between Christ and the Father is the model for the relationship between the purified soul and the divine ground. This is the point at which Eckhart's theology came under suspicion: critics charged that he was teaching that the soul and God are identical, which would be pantheism or (worse) the claim that the believer is God. Eckhart consistently denied this interpretation, insisting on the distinction between Creator and creature, while maintaining that in the act of mystical union this distinction is experientially overcome.
The Condemnation and Its Context
In 1326 the Archbishop of Cologne opened proceedings against Eckhart on charges of heresy. Eckhart appealed to the Pope, submitting a defense of twenty-eight propositions. He died before the papal verdict was issued; Pope John XXII's bull In agro dominico (1329) condemned twenty-eight propositions from his works as heretical or dangerous, while noting that Eckhart had recanted before his death anything in his works that might have been erroneous.
The condemnation has been debated ever since. Defenders argue that the condemned propositions were taken out of context and misunderstood; critics argue that Eckhart's language of identity between the soul and God genuinely crossed the boundary of orthodoxy. The modern consensus among scholars is that Eckhart was operating within the speculative tradition of Christian Neoplatonism that the Church had generally tolerated, that his language was more radical than his intentions, and that the condemnation reflected the anxious climate of the Avignon papacy rather than careful theological judgment.
Author and Context
Eckhart was born in Thuringia (central Germany), entered the Dominican Order, studied and taught in Paris (twice), served as Prior of Erfurt, Dominican Provincial for Saxony, and Vicar-General for Bohemia. He was thus a senior Dominican administrator as well as a speculative theologian - a man with considerable institutional responsibilities, not a solitary contemplative.
The Dominican tradition in which he worked was shaped by Thomas Aquinas - and Eckhart's speculative theology both continues and radicalizes the Thomistic tradition. His use of Dionysian apophatic theology (the via negativa: God is beyond all human categories) and Neoplatonic concepts of emanation and return through the Thomistic framework of Aristotelian logic produced a synthesis that was formally orthodox in its vocabulary and audacious in its conclusions.
Themes
The central themes of the German sermons are: the birth of the Word in the soul; detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) as the condition for this birth; the Grunt (ground) - the deepest point of the soul where it touches the divine ground; Gelassenheit (releasement, letting go) as the spiritual posture of the detached person; and the return of the soul to its origin in the divine unity.
Legacy
Eckhart's influence ran through his immediate disciples (Tauler, Suso) through the Theologia Germanica (which Luther read and published in 1516) to the Reformation, through Jacob Böhme to German Idealism (Hegel, Schelling), and in the twentieth century to Martin Heidegger (who engaged deeply with Eckhart's concept of Gelassenheit) and to the revival of Christian mysticism in figures like Thomas Merton and Dorothee Sölle. His recovery in the twentieth century has made him one of the most widely read medieval theologians among non-academic spiritual seekers.