Meister Eckhart

Life

Born around 1260 near Erfurt in Thuringia, Eckhart entered the Dominican order as a teenager. He rose rapidly through the order's intellectual ranks: prior at Erfurt, master of theology at Paris (a distinction previously held only by Thomas Aquinas), provincial of Saxony, vicar-general of Bohemia, and professor at Strasbourg and Cologne. He was equally at home in the Latin lecture hall and the vernacular pulpit, and it was his German sermons — delivered to Dominican nuns, Beguine communities, and lay audiences — that made him the most famous preacher of his age. In the 1320s, amid tensions between the Dominican and Franciscan orders, the Archbishop of Cologne initiated heresy proceedings against him. Eckhart appealed to the pope and traveled to Avignon to defend himself. He died around 1328, probably before the verdict was delivered. In 1329, Pope John XXII condemned twenty-eight propositions drawn from his writings. Eckhart was never personally condemned as a heretic, and in 1992 the Vatican confirmed that he is 'a good and orthodox theologian.'

Theological Vision

Eckhart's mystical theology centers on three interconnected ideas. First, Gelassenheit — releasement or detachment — the radical letting-go of all created things, all self-will, and even all images of God, so that the soul becomes empty enough to receive God directly. Second, the birth of the Word in the soul: Eckhart teaches that the same eternal act by which the Father generates the Son in the Trinity is replicated in the ground of the human soul when it achieves true detachment. The soul does not merely contemplate God; God is born in the soul. Third, the distinction between 'God' and the 'Godhead' (Gottheit): beyond the God who creates and redeems lies the desert of the Godhead — the absolute, undifferentiated ground of all being, beyond all names and concepts. Eckhart's language is deliberately paradoxical, designed to shatter the mind's habitual categories and force it into an encounter it cannot control. His intellectual lineage runs through Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Aquinas, but his voice is entirely his own.

Influence

Eckhart's influence is vast and complex. His immediate disciples — Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso — softened his most radical formulations while preserving his contemplative vision. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing draws on the same apophatic tradition. Martin Luther studied him. The Romantics rediscovered him. In the twentieth century, his thought attracted comparison with Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, and theologians from Karl Rahner to Bernard McGinn have rehabilitated his reputation. He remains the most searched-for Christian mystic on the internet, and his sermons — addressed to ordinary people in their own language — continue to challenge and transform readers who encounter them.