Meister Eckhart
MysticMedieval
The Dominican mystic who preached that the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one, and that the deepest prayer is to want nothing.
Eckhart was a respected Dominican master at Paris and Cologne who, in German sermons of startling boldness, took mysticism to its edge. In the ground of the soul, he taught, there is a spark uncreated and uncreatable, where God and the soul are not two; to find it, one must let go of everything, even the desire for God, and become so poor in will that there is room for nothing but the divine. He spoke of detachment, of the birth of God in the soul, of a Godhead beyond even the name God. Tried for heresy near the end of his life, he was never forgotten, feeding centuries of mystical thought.
Places
Ideas
Words
“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born in Thuringia
Born in Germany, he rose to be a respected Dominican master at Paris and Cologne.
German Sermons
Preached in the vernacular with startling boldness: in the ground of the soul, God and the soul are not two.
Detachment and the Godhead
Taught that the deepest prayer is to want nothing, even the desire for God, until only the divine ground remains.
Tried for Heresy
His daring German sermons on the union of soul and God brought him before an inquisition; he died before the verdict.
Influence
Influenced by
- John Scotus Eriugena
The Neoplatonic mysticism Eriugena carried into the Latin West flows toward the speculative mysticism of Eckhart.
- Gregory of Nyssa
Gregory's idea that the soul's approach to an infinite God has no final stopping point fed, through the later writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius, into the mystical tradition Eckhart inherited — the sense that the divine is reached less by knowing more than by unknowing.
