Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328) was the most daring and philosophically sophisticated mystic of the Middle Ages, and his influence extends far beyond medieval mysticism into modern German idealism, existentialism, and contemporary philosophy of religion. A Dominican friar, master of theology at Paris, provincial of the German Dominican province, and prolific preacher in the vernacular German of the Rhineland, Eckhart developed in his sermons, Latin treatises, and commentaries on Scripture a philosophical mysticism centered on the idea of the birth of God in the soul - the claim that the Son is eternally born not only in the divine nature but in the 'ground of the soul' (Seelengründlein or Seelengrund) of every human being who has been emptied of all created attachments. John 1:14 ('the Word became flesh') and John 17:21 ('that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me') are his primary scriptural texts, and he reads them with a boldness that scandalized his inquisitors and fascinated his successors.
The Thinker and His Work
Eckhart studied and taught in Paris, Cologne, and Strasbourg, representing the tradition of Dominican mystical theology that ran from Albert the Great through Thomas Aquinas. He was a rigorous scholastic theologian as well as a vernacular preacher, and his Latin works - the Opus Tripartitum (a massive planned systematic theology, largely incomplete), the commentary on Genesis, and the commentaries on John and Exodus - are philosophically dense engagements with Aristotelian metaphysics, Neoplatonism, and biblical exegesis. His German sermons translate these philosophical ideas into the vernacular, addressed to communities of nuns and laypeople in the Rhineland.
In 1326 he was investigated for heresy, and in 1329 - a year after his death - Pope John XXII issued the bull In Agro Dominico condemning 28 propositions from his works as heretical or dangerous. The condemnation drove Eckhart underground for centuries, though his influence continued through his disciples Tauler and Suso and through the Theologia Germanica.
Biblical Texts Engaged
John 1:14 - 'And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us' - is Eckhart's primary text for the birth of the Word in the soul. If the eternal Son became incarnate in human flesh, then human nature has been shown to be capable of bearing the divine - and this capacity is not merely historical but eternal. The incarnation reveals the structure of the relation between God and the soul: God is always and eternally speaking the Word, and the soul that is properly disposed receives this eternal speaking. The birth of the Word in the soul is, for Eckhart, not metaphorical but metaphysically real: the same eternal generation by which the Father begets the Son in the divine nature is the generation by which the Son is born in the properly prepared soul.
John 17:21 - 'that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us' - grounds Eckhart's doctrine of union. Jesus's high-priestly prayer for the unity of his disciples with the Father and the Son is, for Eckhart, not merely a prayer for moral harmony or ecclesial solidarity but a statement about ontological union: the soul that is emptied of everything that is not God becomes one with God in the way that Christ is one with the Father. This is not the absorption of the soul into the divine (pantheism) but the union-in-distinction that characterizes all genuine love.
Luke 17:21 - 'the kingdom of God is in the midst of you' (or 'within you') - grounds the inward turn of Eckhart's spirituality. The kingdom is not a place but a condition of the soul's relation to God. This inwardness anticipates the Protestant and modern emphasis on the interior religious life while grounding it in the eternal divine action within the soul rather than in the soul's autonomous self-development.
Core Argument
Eckhart's central philosophical argument concerns the relationship between God and the soul at the level of their deepest ground. God's ground (Grund) and the soul's ground (Seelengründlein) are the same ground: not identical in the sense of being numerically the same thing, but identical in the sense that what is most fundamental in both is a pure, undifferentiated being prior to all distinctions - prior even to the distinction between Creator and creature. This is Eckhart's most radical and most contested claim.
The practical consequence is the concept of Gelassenheit (releasement, letting-go): the soul must detach itself from all created things - including its own will, its own spiritual experiences, even its own 'God-images' - in order to arrive at the pure openness in which the birth of the Word can occur. This detachment is not nihilistic but the precondition of the fullest life: 'What I said about an empty man is this: I am at the apex of all things, I am the head of all creatures, I am the friend of God.'
Intellectual Context
Eckhart drew on the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus (mediated through Pseudo-Dionysius), on Augustinian theology, on the Dominican scholastic tradition of Albert the Great and Aquinas, and on the emerging vernacular mystical tradition of women mystics (Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg). His use of scholastic precision in the service of mystical depth is characteristic of Dominican spirituality, and his willingness to push Thomistic categories to their logical extreme alarmed the theologians who investigated him.
Reception and Critique
Hegel considered Eckhart one of his philosophical predecessors, particularly for the dialectical movement in Eckhart's thought between the soul's nothingness and its union with God. Schopenhauer drew on Eckhart for his account of the will's self-negation. Heidegger lectured on Eckhart and found in Gelassenheit a medieval anticipation of his own concept of 'letting-be' (Gelassenheit is in fact the German word Heidegger chose for his concept).
In the twentieth century, D.T. Suzuki argued that Eckhart's mysticism was structurally parallel to Zen Buddhism, initiating a tradition of Buddhist-Christian dialogue that has found in Eckhart a Christian counterpart to Buddhist enlightenment. John Caputo's The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (1978) provided a systematic account of Eckhart's influence on Heidegger.
Legacy
Eckhart established the philosophical vocabulary of apophatic mysticism in the vernacular German tradition, coining or innovating dozens of philosophical terms that shaped German philosophy from the Rhineland mystics through Luther's German theology to Hegel and beyond. His insistence that genuine religion is not a matter of external performance but of interior transformation - that the soul's emptying and the divine birth are more important than all external works - anticipates Lutheran and Protestant spirituality even as it remains within a Catholic sacramental framework.
Key Passages
'The Father speaks the Word eternally, and in the same eternal Word he speaks all creatures, and in this same Word the soul is spoken together with God... When the soul has totally forsaken itself, it is drawn into the Word.' (German Sermon 10, trans. Walshe)
'To be empty of all created things is to be full of God, and to be full of created things is to be empty of God.' (German Sermon 4)
Contemporary Relevance
Eckhart has become one of the most read medieval theologians in contemporary contemplative and interfaith circles. His concept of Gelassenheit - the release of the ego's grip on experience and outcome - has found resonance in mindfulness practice, in psychotherapy (particularly in the work of Gerald May, Care of Mind, Care of Spirit), and in interfaith dialogue. His willingness to push theological language to its breaking point, acknowledging that all God-talk falls short of the divine reality, makes him a resource for contemporary apophatic theology and for those navigating the intersection of mysticism, philosophy, and neuroscience.