Meister Eckhart

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

Beyond the God of three Persons lies the modeless Godhead

Both personal and impersonalStated explicitly

Eckhart affirms the Trinitarian faith without reservation and, in his Latin works, identifies God with being itself («being is God», prologue to the Tripartite Work) and, in the Parisian Questions, with understanding. But in the German sermons he distinguishes between God, who is spoken in Persons, acts and is named by creatures, and the Godhead (gotheit), a desert ground without mode in which there is no distinction. Hence in sermon 52 he prays that God rid us of «God», that is, of the image of God as an object, and in sermon 83 he proposes loving him as a non-God, a non-spirit, a non-person. Both levels are true: the personal God is the Godhead as manifested; the Godhead is that same God in his ground, which no name reaches.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

In the ground of the soul, God's ground and mine are one

The Self is the AbsoluteStated explicitly

Eckhart distinguishes in the soul its powers, which deal with images and creatures, and a ground (grunt), a spark or «little castle» so simple that not even God as Persons can peer into it (sermon 2). In that ground, he says in sermon 5b, God's ground is my ground and my ground is God's; there the Father begets his Son, and the eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me (sermon 12). Sermon 52 even evokes the state in which man was in God before being created. The true self is not the one who owns, knows and wills, but the one who, detached, coincides with the divine ground.

Why do we suffer?

All sorrow springs from love of what is lost

Craving and attachmentStated explicitly

In the Book of Divine Consolation, written for a grieving queen, Eckhart diagnoses suffering with precision: all sorrow comes from love of what loss takes from us. Whoever grieves over outward goods shows that their heart was set on them and not on God. The remedy is detachment: the soul that wills nothing of its own, that has left its will in God's, cannot be wounded in what is essential, because nothing it loses was its own. Eckhart adds a theological consolation: whoever suffers for God and in God does not suffer alone, because God suffers with him, and so pain loses its bitterness.

What happens after death?

The just live in eternity, which is a timeless now

Eternal life and resurrectionStated explicitly

Eckhart shares the faith in eternal life, but shifts the emphasis from afterwards to now. In sermon 6, on the verse «the just shall live for ever», he explains that the just man, as just, is begotten by justice and lives in it as the Son in the Father; this life does not begin after death, because eternity is a now that knows no before or after. The sermons on the eternal birth place in that same now the birth of the Son in the ground of the soul. The death that matters is the death of attachment and of self-will; whoever has died to himself already shares, in the ground, in the life that does not end.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Whoever seeks God by a way keeps the way and loses God

No method: total attentionStated explicitly

Eckhart distrusts paths that turn into ends. In sermon 5b he warns that whoever seeks God by a way takes the way and leaves God hidden in it; whoever seeks him without a way takes him as he is in himself. What is decisive is not what one does, but what one is: the Talks of Instruction ask us to think less about works and more about being. The path, if it can be called that, is detachment: a heart empty of images, of self-will and of desire for reward, in which God begets his Son. The noble man, poor in spirit, lives and acts «without why», like life that lives because it lives.

Is a teacher necessary?

God speaks his Word in the ground of the silent soul

The teacher is withinInferred from their doctrine

Eckhart was himself a master —the title came from his chair in Paris— and a preacher to communities of friars and nuns. But his doctrine places the true teacher within: in the sermons on the eternal birth, the Father speaks his Word in the ground of the soul, and to hear it the faculties and images must be silenced. No outward teaching can give what is received only in that silence. In sermon 12, the eye with which the soul sees God is the same with which God sees it: ultimate knowledge does not come from outside. The preacher can only point and awaken.

Is the world real?

Creatures are a pure nothing; all their being is God in them

Manifestation of the divineStated explicitly

Eckhart holds two theses that only appear contradictory. On the one hand, if being is God, creatures have no being of their own: in a German sermon he goes so far as to say that all creatures are a pure nothing, not small or something, but nothing. On the other, all they have they receive from God at every instant, so that every creature is full of God and is a book about him: whoever knew a single creature thoroughly would need no sermons. In the Commentary on Genesis he interprets «in the beginning» as the Word: God creates in the eternal now in which he begets the Son. The world is real as manifestation, never as something that stands by itself.

What is love?

To love without why, from a ground that seeks nothing

What appears when the self ceasesStated explicitly

Eckhart distrusts love that seeks something, even God or his consolation: whoever loves God for the reward treats him like a cow, wanted for its milk and cheese. True love is «without why», like life that lives because it lives. In the treatise On Detachment he goes so far as to place detachment above love, because love urges me to love God, whereas detachment compels God to love me. And in sermon 12 he explains that whoever truly loves himself loves all people as himself, without preference. Love appears when the possessive self yields: it is God loving himself in the bare ground of the soul.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

The will is free, and its summit is to let itself go into God's

Real free willInferred from their doctrine

Eckhart presupposes the scholastic doctrine of free will: in his Defence he distinguishes error, which belongs to the intellect, from heresy, which belongs to the will, and therefore asserts that he can err but cannot be a heretic. But his interest lies not in the freedom to choose, but in what the will does with it. The Talks of Instruction teach gelâzenheit, letting go: renouncing one's own will so that God's will may be one's own. Whoever achieves this wills all that God wills and acts without why. The highest freedom, for Eckhart, is not choosing among options, but willing nothing of one's own.

Why meditate or pray?

The most powerful prayer comes from an empty mind

Meditation is not a techniqueStated explicitly

Eckhart proposes no meditation techniques. In the Talks of Instruction, asked which prayer is most powerful, he answers that it is the one that comes from an empty mind, detached from all things and from itself. Asking God for this or that is, in a sense, treating him as a means; pure prayer asks for nothing. In sermon 52, the poor in spirit do not even wish to fulfil God's will, nor keep within themselves a place where God might act. And in the sermons on the eternal birth, the Word is spoken when all the faculties fall silent. Meditation is not a method to be carried out, but a silence without a centre of its own.

Can reason know the ultimate?

Expound faith and Scripture with the natural reasons of philosophers

Faith and reason help each otherStated explicitly

Eckhart, master of theology in Paris, states at the beginning of his Commentary on the Gospel of John his purpose: to expound what the Christian faith and the Scripture of both Testaments affirm by means of the natural reasons of the philosophers. For him, Scripture, theology and philosophy say the same thing in different ways, and Moses, Christ and Aristotle teach one truth. In the Parisian Questions he even asserts that in God understanding is more fundamental than being. But this intellectualism ends in silence: the intellect, carried to its ground, breaks through all images and concepts, and God remains beyond every name. Reason is a path, not a destination.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

Martha, mature, acts from the ground without losing God

Contemplation in actionStated explicitly

Eckhart reverses a traditional reading of the Gospel. In sermon 86, on Martha and Mary, he holds that Martha, who serves, is more mature than Mary, who listens seated at Jesus's feet: Mary is still learning, whereas Martha has come to act from the ground without activity separating her from God. The Talks of Instruction insist on the same point: whoever truly has God has him everywhere, in the street and among people as much as in church or in the cell, and need not flee things but learn to pass through them. Holiness depends not on place or work, but on the being from which one acts.