Sermons of Meister Eckhart

Overview

Meister Eckhart (~1260-1328) was a Dominican friar, theologian, and the most radical voice in the Rhineland mystical tradition. His German sermons, delivered to communities of lay people and religious women (Beguines), stand among the most philosophically daring texts in the history of Western spirituality. Where most Christian preachers exhort moral behaviour, Eckhart dismantles the very framework of self and God as separate entities. His central insight — “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love” — anticipates non-dual formulations found in Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism by centuries.

Eckhart’s theology revolves around several interlocking ideas: Gelassenheit (releasement, letting-go), the birth of the Word (Logos) in the ground of the soul, and the identity of the soul’s deepest ground (Seelengrund) with the divine ground (Gottesgrund). For Eckhart, God is not an object to be found but the very condition of finding. The soul must become so empty — so released from images, concepts, and even the desire for God — that God has no choice but to pour into it, because nature does not tolerate a vacuum. This poverty of spirit is not deprivation but the highest fullness: “The just man does not serve God or himself. He serves because he is just and because he is just he acts justly.”

The sermons were translated by Claud Field in 1909 from Franz Pfeiffer’s 1857 German edition. This translation preserves the startling directness of Eckhart’s vernacular preaching, though modern scholars (notably Bernard McGinn and Frank Tobin) have since refined the critical text. Even so, the Field translation remains valuable for its accessibility and its historical importance in introducing Eckhart to an English-speaking audience. Readers should know that Eckhart was tried for heresy near the end of his life; a papal bull (In agro dominico, 1329) condemned 28 propositions drawn from his works, though Eckhart himself had already died. He was never formally declared a heretic in the full canonical sense, and the Dominican Order has pursued his rehabilitation.

Key Themes

• Gelassenheit (Releasement) — The soul must let go of all attachments, including attachment to God as an object, to discover the God who is the ground of its own being. “If I had a God I could understand, I would no longer consider him God.”
• The Birth of the Word in the Soul — The same eternal generation by which the Father begets the Son occurs in the ground of the detached soul. The Incarnation is not merely a historical event but an ongoing metaphysical reality.
• Seelengrund / Gottesgrund — The innermost ground of the soul and the ground of God are one and the same. This is not pantheism but a radical ontological claim about the nature of being itself.
• Poverty of Spirit — True spiritual poverty means wanting nothing, knowing nothing, and having nothing — not as ascetic deprivation but as the condition for divine union. The soul must become so poor it does not even have a place for God to act in.
• God Beyond God (Gottheit vs. Gott) — Eckhart distinguishes between God (Gott) as the Trinity known through relation and the Godhead (Gottheit) as the silent desert of absolute unity beyond all names and distinctions.
• Living Without a Why — The just person acts justly not for reward, not for God, not for any reason, but simply because justice is their nature. Life lived “without why” (sunder warumbe) is life lived from the divine ground.
• Detachment Over Love — In a striking departure from Augustinian tradition, Eckhart ranks detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) above even love as the highest virtue, because detachment compels God to come to the soul.

Historical Context

Eckhart operated at the intersection of several powerful currents: the Dominican intellectual tradition rooted in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, the Neoplatonic inheritance channeled through Pseudo-Dionysius and the Liber de causis, and the women’s mystical movement of the Beguines and Dominican nuns in the Rhineland. His German sermons were shaped by his role as spiritual director to these communities, which may explain their extraordinary combination of speculative depth and pastoral urgency.

The early 14th century was a period of intense spiritual ferment and institutional anxiety. The Free Spirit heresy — loosely defined as the belief that the perfected soul is identical with God and beyond moral law — was a persistent concern of Church authorities. Eckhart’s language, which freely declared the soul’s identity with God, made him vulnerable to charges of exactly this kind. The trial proceedings reveal that Eckhart carefully distinguished his position from Free Spirit antinomianism, insisting that union with God produces greater virtue, not licence. Nevertheless, the posthumous condemnation cast a long shadow, and Eckhart’s influence went underground, surfacing in the works of his students Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso, and later in the anonymous Theologia Germanica.

Who Should Read This

Read these sermons if you are drawn to the radical edge of Christian thought — the place where theology becomes indistinguishable from metaphysics and contemplative practice. Eckhart is essential for anyone interested in the non-dual currents within Western religion, the relationship between Christian and Eastern mysticism, or the philosophical question of how a theistic tradition can harbour what looks remarkably like monism. He is also indispensable for understanding the later tradition: Silesius, the Theologia Germanica, and the entire trajectory of German mysticism through Böhme to Hegel. If you find apophatic theology too abstract, Eckhart grounds it in lived experience with startling concreteness. If you find devotional piety too sentimental, Eckhart offers an alternative that is intellectually rigorous and spiritually uncompromising.

Those who prefer systematic argument over paradox, or who are uncomfortable with language that pushes against doctrinal boundaries, may find Eckhart frustrating. He is not interested in being safe. That is precisely his value.

Connections

• meister-eckhart — Biographical and philosophical overview
• non-dual-recognition — Eckhart’s identity of Seelengrund and Gottesgrund as a Western expression of non-dual awareness
• god-as-pure-awareness — “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me”
• self-knowledge-as-god-knowledge — The Eckhartian insight that knowing oneself in one’s ground is knowing God
• desert-fathers — Early Christian roots of the apophatic and ascetic tradition Eckhart draws upon
• Cherubinic Pilgrim - Silesius — Angelus Silesius as Eckhart’s most devoted poetic inheritor
• Theologia Germanica — Anonymous text directly shaped by Eckhart’s school
• pseudo-dionysius — The Neoplatonic-Christian apophatic tradition Eckhart channels

Further Reading

Full text: Sermons - Eckhart