Meister Eckhart

Eckhart and Neoplatonism

Meister Eckhart preached in German, to nuns and ordinary townspeople, using homely pictures: a seed, a coal, a drop of water in the sea. But underneath the pictures sits a body of thought that goes back to pagan Athens and Alexandria by way of Augustine's Africa, Dionysius's Syria, and the Arabic-to-Latin translation mills of the thirteenth century. Eckhart rarely stops to explain this. He simply uses it, the way a preacher uses whatever tools are at hand to point past words toward God.

This page traces four of those tools: Plotinus's idea of the One beyond being, the Book of Causes that carried a compressed version of Proclus into the Latin schools, Pseudo-Dionysius's theology of divine darkness, and Augustine, who had read the Platonists before he ever read Paul. None of this makes Eckhart a philosopher first and a Christian second. It helps explain why his sermons sound, at moments, uncannily close to things said centuries before Christ, and centuries after him in very different places.

A borrowed grammar for an unsayable God

Eckhart names his sources openly more often than you might expect from a preacher. Augustine turns up constantly, by name, as an authority he can lean on in front of a congregation. Dionysius appears almost as often, usually introduced as 'St Dionysius', treated as a near-apostolic voice rather than a philosopher. Other debts are quieter: a saying introduced as 'a heathen master says' or 'a philosopher says' is very often a line from the Book of Causes, a text medieval readers believed was Aristotle's and which was in fact a digest of the Neoplatonist Proclus.

Modern scholars who have gone through Eckhart's Latin works line by line find this debt is not casual.This work examines the influence of the Liber de causis and Proclus on the philosophical thought of Meister Eckhart, highlighting the interpretative approaches necessary to understand Eckhart's quotations. He was a working theologian who read scripture throughscholastic method, Aristotle, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Neoplatonic metaphysics, and that reading surfaces in sermon after sermon, even when he never says the word 'Neoplatonism' because the word did not yet exist.

Plotinus and the One beyond number

Plotinus, writing in Rome in the third century, described a first principle he called simply the One: beyond being, beyond thought, beyond any name, the source from which everything else overflows and the goal every soul is quietly trying to get back to.Plotinus's thought shaped later pagan philosophy and exercised a deep influence on Christian, Islamic, and Jewish intellectual traditions, including Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Avicenna, and Meister Eckhart. Eckhart almost certainly never read a word of Plotinus directly. The Enneads reached him filtered through Augustine, through Dionysius, and through the Proclus-based Book of Causes.

What survives is the shape of the idea. In Sermon 43, preaching on the ground where God and the soul meet, Eckhart reaches for exactly the kind of formula Neoplatonists used for the One: a unity defined by having nothing added, nothing other, nothing outside it.

one, that is, the denial of being anything else; the highest of the angels denies that it is the lowest. God is the denial of denials: the one that excludes all otherness.
Sermon 43: Knowledge, love, and the ground where God and the soul meet

This is the logical move Plotinus makes when he insists the One cannot be a thing among things, and Proclus repeats when he calls unity the ground of all multiplicity. Eckhart's readers who come from Zen or from nondual teaching often recognise the shape of this move before they recognise its source. See Eckhart and Zen and the godhead beyond God for where this leads.

Proclus and the Book of Causes

The Liber de causis, the Book of Causes, is a short set of propositions compiled in Arabic from Proclus's Elements of Theology and translated into Latin in the twelfth century. For most of the Middle Ages it circulated as a work of Aristotle. This ended only when Thomas Aquinas, with the help of William of Moerbeke's 1268 translation of the Elements of Theology, was able to show that the Liber de causis derived from Proclus's work, despite its long attribution to Aristotle. Eckhart, writing a generation or two after Aquinas, still used the book heavily, sometimes citing it as Aristotle, sometimes simply as 'a heathen master' or 'a philosopher'.

What he takes from it is mostly a vocabulary of causation: first cause, causeless cause, the thing that is free because nothing outside it determines it. In Sermon 58 he reaches for exactly this language to describe real freedom.

A pagan philosopher says, 'A thing is free when it clings to nothing and nothing clings to it.' So nothing is free except the first cause, that is, the cause of all things.
Sermon 58: Divine understanding and the Father's eternal play

That single sentence is close kin to a proposition of Proclus on self-caused, self-sufficient being. Eckhart turns it toward his own teaching on living without a why: a soul rooted in its own causeless ground, the way God is rooted in his.

Pseudo-Dionysius and the darkness called light

Dionysius the Areopagite, the writer Eckhart quotes as an apostolic authority, was almost certainly a Christian monk writing around the year 500, centuries after the Paul's convert whose name he borrowed.Pseudo-Dionysius, writing around 500 AD, heavily borrowed from Neoplatonist Proclus and pioneered apophatic theology. He was alsoinfluenced by later Neoplatonists such as Proclus and Damascius, and he folded their metaphysics into a Christian account of how the soul comes to know, and fails to know, God.

Eckhart treats this fusion as settled doctrine rather than borrowed philosophy. In Sermon 15 he cites Dionysius directly on the impossibility of naming God at all.

No one can say exactly what God is. According to St Dionysius, God is not anything we can say or think. St Augustine cries out: I who have always been in God and always will be, would rather never have been and never be again than that we found a single word we could say about God.
Sermon 15: Why no word or thought can reach God

The same sermon has Dionysius giving a disciple instructions that could be read as a short course in detachment and letting-be.

Dionysius was urging one of his disciples. Friend,' he said, stop all activity and empty yourself of self so that you may be with the Sovereign Good, that is, God.
Sermon 15: Why no word or thought can reach God

And in Sermon 2, Eckhart passes on a story about Dionysius and his pupils that turns receptivity itself into the mark of spiritual advancement.

The students of St Dionysius asked him why Timothy was further along in perfection than they were. Dionysius said, Timothy is a man open to receiving God. Whoever is skilled at this surpasses everyone else.
Sermon 2: The birth of God in the ground of the soul

This is the clearest channel through which the Neoplatonic doctrine of the One beyond being reaches Eckhart's own teaching on the godhead beyond God: a reality prior to the names Father, Son and Spirit, known only by unknowing.

Augustine, the Platonist who became a bishop

Augustine is the single authority Eckhart cites most, after scripture itself. Before his conversion Augustine had read the Platonists in Latin translation, and he never fully set aside their vocabulary of ascent, interiority and return even after he became a Christian bishop. Eckhart sometimes makes this debt explicit, naming Augustine alongside the philosophers in the same breath, as in Sermon 77.

Now St Augustine and the New Philosophers say that in this lies undivided memory, intellect and will, and these three cannot be separated, that is, the hidden image corresponds to God's essence. The divine being, God, is shining straight into this image, and the image shines straight into God with nothing in between.
Sermon 77: The hidden image of God at the root of the soul

'The New Philosophers' is Eckhart's own term for the Neoplatonists, placed here as Augustine's companions rather than his rivals. The restless, homing instinct of the Augustinian soul, borrowed in large part from Plotinus's account of the soul's desire to return to its source, shows up all through Eckhart's preaching. In Sermon 101 he quotes Augustine's own line almost verbatim.

St Augustine says, 'My soul was created by you and for you, and so she is always restless until she finds you. In all created things that I search through with my understanding, there is no resting place for my soul, except in you, God, alone.'
Sermon 101: Resting in God alone: Eckhart on Mary's inner stillness

This single sentence carries the whole Neoplatonic pattern of exile and return into a sermon about Mary's inner stillness, and into Eckhart's own teaching on the ground of the soul.

Flowing out, flowing back

Neoplatonists describe reality as a single movement: everything proceeds from the One and everything longs to return to it. Eckhart's German has a homelier name for this: ebb and flow. Sermon 10 is built entirely around the image.

Just as the soul goes out on the outgoing tide to travel through eternity and time and through her own understanding, so on the ebb she returns; as God, the soul flows back again, without effort.
Sermon 10: How the soul flows out from God and flows back to God

A few lines later the sermon pushes the return all the way to its Neoplatonic end point, the soul losing even the categories of form and knowledge in the bare unity she came from.

Matter and form, being and knowledge, she loses in this oneness, because she herself has come to nothing. God does all her work, he keeps her in his being and leads her by his power into his very Godhead, where she flows with deity itself into everything God flows into.
Sermon 10: How the soul flows out from God and flows back to God

Sermon 56 names the pattern directly in its very structure, emanation and return, and ends with Eckhart describing his own imagined passage back into the source as something that outranks even his first coming forth from it.

When I return to God, where I am without form, my breaking through will be far nobler than my coming out was. I alone take all creatures out of their sense experience and into my mind, and make them one in me. When I go back into the ground, into the depths, into the well-spring of the Godhead, no one will ask me where I came from or where I went. No one will miss me: God passes away.
Sermon 56: God's work in the soul: the flowing out and the return

The same logic gives Eckhart one of his sharper paradoxes, stated plainly in Sermon 22: that going out and coming home are, from God's side, the very same motion.

I have said this many times: God's going out is his coming in. The nearer I am to God, the more he speaks himself into me. With rational creatures, the more they go out of themselves in their actions, the more they come into themselves. It is not so with physical things: the more active they are, the further they move from themselves.
Sermon 22: The Lord put forth his hand: Eckhart on the unspoken Word

This is the Neoplatonic doctrine of procession and reversion, stripped of its Greek vocabulary and preached in German to people who had never heard of Plotinus or Proclus.

Where the sermons leave the philosophers behind

It would be too tidy to call Eckhart a Christian who happened to use Neoplatonic furniture. The furniture matters, but so does what he refuses to do with it. Plotinus has no real interest in the Incarnation. Eckhart's sermons keep returning to Christ, to grace, to the birth of the Word in a particular soul on a particular day, going well beyond an impersonal first cause. Sermon 28 makes the aim explicit in a way no Neoplatonist would.

I have said before and I say it again, everything our Lord has ever done, he did simply so that God might be with us and so that we might be one with him, and that is why God became man.
Sermon 28: The angel Gabriel and the birth of God in the soul

Scholars still argue about how far Eckhart's metaphysics bends Christian doctrine toward Neoplatonic monism, and how far he keeps Trinity, creation and Incarnation intact underneath a borrowed vocabulary. That argument was part of what brought him before examiners in Cologne and, eventually, before the papal court. It is worth holding both things at once: a preacher steeped in Plotinus, Proclus, Dionysius and Augustine, and a Dominican friar who never stopped preaching Christ crucified. Readers who want to see how this same ground gets explored from a very different direction might look at Eckhart and Zen, or start closer to the texts themselves with How to read Eckhart.