Meister Eckhart

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Eckhart von Hochheim — the title Meister records his Paris doctorate — was born around 1260 in Tambach, Thuringia. He entered the Dominican house at Erfurt while still a teenager, probably around 1278, drawn into an order that was simultaneously consolidating the great Scholastic synthesis that Thomas Aquinas had recently brought to completion and serving as the primary institutional home for the spiritual hunger gathering in the German-speaking lands — among Beguine communities, laypeople, and nuns — that no system alone could satisfy.

Formation and the two Paris chairs

Eckhart’s academic career was extraordinary by any measure. He lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences at Paris in 1293, and by late 1294 he was prior at Erfurt and provincial of Thuringia. Around 1295–1298, in those early Erfurt years, he composed the Reden der Unterweisung (Talks of Instruction) — practical counsel addressed to young Dominican friars that already announces his characteristic insistence on inner detachment over outward observance. It is one of the authenticated works the modern critical tradition finds most securely his.

In 1302–1303 he held the external Dominican chair at Paris as magister actu regens, the first of two such appointments. The second came in May 1311, when the Dominican order sent him back to Paris for a further regency lasting until the summer of 1313. This double Paris magistership was, as the record preserves, an honor accorded among his Dominican predecessors only to Thomas Aquinas. Between the two Parisian stints he served from 1303 as provincial superior for Saxony, overseeing some forty-seven convents across eastern and northern Germany and the Low Countries, and from 1306 to 1311 as vicar-general for Bohemia, where he founded three women’s convents. The administrative work and the speculative project ran in the same person simultaneously.

The Latin Opus tripartitum — projecting a book of propositions, a book of disputed questions, and a book of biblical expositions — was his announced design and was never completed. The surviving Prologues, biblical commentaries, and Parisian disputed questions (Quaestiones Parisienses) were first edited by the Dominican Heinrich Seuse Denifle, whose 1886 article in the Archiv für Litteratur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters established the Latin corpus; the full critical edition appeared only in the Kohlhammer Lateinische Werke (1936–2015).

Strasbourg and Cologne: the German works

After the second Paris regency, Eckhart spent the years 1313–1322/23 as vicar for the Dominican Master General in the Strasbourg region, in sustained contact with the Dominican convents and Beguine houses that formed the primary audience for his German preaching. Late in 1323 or early 1324 he moved to the studium generale at Cologne.

The German corpus — sermons (Predigten), the Buch der göttlichen Tröstunge (Book of Divine Consolation) with Von dem edeln Menschen (The Nobleman), and the Reden der Unterweisung — deploys scholastic precision in the vernacular pulpit. Franz Pfeiffer’s 1857 edition gathered 110 sermons and eighteen treatises, but the modern critical Deutsche Werke under Josef Quint (begun 1936, completed with Georg Steer’s continuation in April 2022) established that roughly 65–75 percent of Pfeiffer’s sermons are authentic. Of the Tractate, only the Book of Divine Consolation, The Nobleman, the Talks of Instruction, and Von Abgeschiedenheit (On Detachment) are certainly by Eckhart; the notorious Schwester Katrei (Sister Catherine Treatise) is now firmly attributed to an anonymous Free Spirit author working under Eckhart’s verbal influence.

The teaching

The center of Eckhart’s thought is the Gottesgeburt — the birth of the Word (the eternal Son, the logos) in the ground of the soul — and everything else in the German sermons organizes itself around that event or around what stands in its way.

The ground (grunt) is Eckhart’s name for the deepest register of the soul, the place below intellect and will and memory where the soul has no distinguishing features, where it is not yet “this” or “that” but simply is. God too has a ground — not the trinitarian God of Father, Son, and Spirit (Got) but the silent, undivided Gottheit (Godhead), the divine desert, abyss, and wasteland that lies beyond the Persons. And Eckhart’s most characteristic claim is that the soul’s ground and the Godhead’s ground are one and the same ground: where God is, there is the soul, and where the soul is, there is God — the sermons return to that equivalence again and again. The Word is eternally born in that shared ground, and the purpose of the contemplative life is to become what one already is in that ground: the locus of the divine self-utterance.

The birth of the Word is not achieved but received. What the soul must undo is captured in Gelassenheit (releasement, letting-go): the complete release of self-will, of attachment to particular goods, of the very desire for God framed as a possession. In the sermon on poverty of spirit (Beati pauperes spiritu, Quint sermon 52), he pushes this to its sharpest edge: the poor person wills nothing, knows nothing, has nothing — not merely nothing sinful but nothing at all, including the pious will to do God’s will. The soul in this poverty cannot be distinguished from what it was before it was created.

Running through the sermons is sunder warumbe — without a why. The just person works without a why; the soul must love God without a why. To act sunder warumbe is to act from the ground, where the usual logic of motive and reward no longer reaches.

Alongside the Gottesgeburt and Gelassenheit, Eckhart speaks of the vünkelîn — the spark of the soul, that uncreated or quasi-uncreated point in the human person that is never fully submerged in creaturely time, the place in the soul most immediately adjacent to the divine. The proposition that the spark is “something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable” became one of the most contested articles in the inquisitorial proceedings; Eckhart himself hedged the formulation differently in different contexts, distinguishing between the spark as a faculty (created) and as a kind of image or trace of the divine (not subject to the same analysis).

The distinction between Got and Gottheit — the personal God of the Trinity and the impersonal Godhead beyond the Persons, the divine “desert” and “pure nothingness” beyond being — belongs to a line running back through Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and the Neoplatonic tradition of the One that transcends being. What Eckhart did with that apophatic inheritance, carried into Middle High German from Bernard of Clairvaux and the Victorines, was to preach it from the pulpit to congregations in Strasbourg and Cologne in the language they spoke at home.

The trial

The proceedings opened in the context of Archbishop Heinrich II von Virneburg’s broader campaign against Rhineland lay mystical movements following the Council of Vienne (1311–12). Nicholas of Strasbourg, as papal vicar, examined Eckhart in 1325–1326 and cleared him; Virneburg bypassed this verdict and opened a diocesan inquisitorial proceeding. The commission worked from lists that at one stage ran past a hundred suspect articles drawn from the Latin and German works; the canonical list of twenty-eight belongs to the later Avignon stage.

Eckhart appeared before the commission and defended himself on the ground that whatever error might attach to his propositions was intellectual error, not heretical intent of will. On February 13, 1327, he made a public declaration of orthodox intent at the Dominican church in Cologne — formally submitting any error of expression to the Church’s correction, while insisting he had never willed heresy. In the spring of 1327 he appealed to the papal court at Avignon and departed for the south. He died, probably on January 28, 1328, most likely at Avignon, before the Avignon commission had issued its verdict.

Pope John XXII issued the bull In agro dominico on March 27, 1329 — posthumously, since Eckhart was already dead. The bull condemned seventeen of the twenty-eight articles as heretical (the first fifteen and the last two); the remaining eleven it characterized as male sonantes, temerarios, et suspectos de haeresi — ill-sounding, rash, and suspect of heresy. It explicitly noted that Eckhart had retracted, before his death, anything he might have taught contrary to the faith. Eckhart himself was thus never personally condemned; the condemnation fell on extracted propositions, not on the man, and the bull was ordered to be promulgated only in the Cologne province.

Transmission and the Rhineland line

The teaching did not disappear with the trial. Johannes Tauler, the Strasbourg Dominican preacher who had likely known Eckhart personally, preserved the structural core — ground, birth, Gelassenheit — in a more pastorally cautious idiom. Heinrich Suso wrote in a lyrical vernacular that brought the same themes into devotional literature for lay audiences; he was eventually beatified by the Church that had condemned Eckhart’s propositions. The Theologia Germanica — an anonymous late-fourteenth-century Frankfurt treatise, later championed by Luther as the clearest mystical theology he had encountered outside Augustine — transmits the Rhineland idiom without naming Eckhart. The English apophatic tradition that produced The Cloud of Unknowing works a parallel vein of radical unknowing, though the Cloud-author does not appear to have known Eckhart’s texts directly.

Rediscovery

Eckhart’s German works were effectively lost to broad readership from the early fifteenth century until Pfeiffer’s 1857 edition restored them to German philosophical and theological attention. Eckhart was immediately read as a forerunner — by some as proto-Hegelian, by others as the root of German spiritual inwardness. Denifle’s 1886 recovery of the Latin corpus, while foundational, also imposed a harsh verdict: Denifle judged Eckhart a pantheist who had misunderstood the Scholastic tradition. That judgment dominated German scholarship for decades before being overturned by the Kohlhammer critical editions — the Deutsche Werke under Quint from 1936 and the Lateinische Werke completed in 2015 — which established both the authentic German sermon corpus and the full Latin texts on defensible philological ground.

The Dominican rehabilitation and the question of the bull

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Dominican order pursued a formal rehabilitation through the Vatican. In 1992, Master General Timothy Radcliffe received a letter from the relevant Vatican congregation stating that formal rehabilitation proceedings were unnecessary: Eckhart himself had never been condemned by name, only certain extracted propositions, and his preemptive declaration of orthodox intent before his death had placed him in the position of a faithful son of the Church who had sought correction. The bull In agro dominico was not formally rescinded — the Vatican letter held that there was no need to rescind what had never formally condemned a person — but the effect was to establish, on the Church’s own terms, that Eckhart died as an orthodox Dominican and not as a heretic.

Reception across traditions

D. T. Suzuki’s mid-twentieth-century comparative work drew sustained parallels between Eckhart’s Gottheit — the divine desert, “pure nothingness” — and Buddhist śūnyatā, and read the sunder warumbe as functionally equivalent to certain Zen emphases on non-purposive action. Reiner Schürmann argued that Suzuki’s equation smoothed over Eckhart’s irreducible Christological grounding: the birth in the soul’s ground is the birth of the Word, the second Person of the Trinity, not simply a generic union with the absolute. Rudolf Otto’s West-östliche Mystik (1926) had earlier paired Eckhart with Śaṅkara as the clearest Western analogue to Advaita Vedanta’s non-dual metaphysics; Otto’s influence on comparative mysticism scholarship is substantial and the pairing remains debated.

Carl Jung read the vünkelîn and the soul’s ground as anticipations of the self as a totality encompassing both conscious and unconscious dimensions — a reading that circulated through the same John M. Watkins imprint that published Evans’s Eckhart translation in 1924 and Jung’s Septem Sermones ad Mortuos in 1925.

Sources and scholarship

The foundational modern text for any study of the historical Eckhart is Heinrich Seuse Denifle’s “Meister Eckeharts lateinische Schriften, und die Grundanschauung seiner Lehre” (Archiv für Litteratur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, vol. 2, 1886, pp. 417–615, with trial documents at pp. 616–640), freely accessible at https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/details/bsb11619033 — the article that first edited the Latin Prologues, biblical commentaries, and trial record, establishing the cross-reference that anchors the German works.

The critical edition of the German sermons is the Kohlhammer Deutsche Werke, begun by Quint in 1936 and completed with Steer’s continuation in 2022; in copyright and institutionally accessed. The standard complete English translation is Maurice O’C. Walshe’s The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, revised and introduced by Bernard McGinn (Crossroad, 2009; https://www.crossroadpublishing.com/products/the-complete-mystical-works-of-meister-eckhart). The best modern English monograph is Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (Crossroad, 2001; https://www.crossroadpublishing.com/products/the-mystical-thought-of-meister-eckhart). Frank Tobin’s Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language (Penn, 1986) is the essential analysis of grunt, abegescheidenheit, durchbruch, vünkelîn, and ohne warum. Reiner Schürmann’s Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Indiana UP, 1978; expanded 2001) is the classic phenomenological reading. For the life and trial, Walter Senner OP in A Companion to Meister Eckhart (Brill, 2013, pp. 7–84; https://brill.com/display/title/22551) is authoritative.

In the public-domain Anglophone record, W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism (Methuen, 1899; https://archive.org/details/christianmystici189900inge) — where Inge calls Eckhart “next to Plotinus the greatest philosopher-mystic” — and Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (Methuen, 1911; https://archive.org/details/mysticismstudyin00undeuoft) remain indispensable pre-critical syntheses. The only substantial public-domain English translation is C. de B. Evans, Meister Eckhart by Franz Pfeiffer, Vol. I (Watkins, 1924; https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.31707), carrying Pfeiffer’s authenticity problems forward. The current state of the field is comprehensively surveyed in Markus Vinzent and Christian Jung in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (latest revision 2025; https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meister-eckhart/).

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