Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart

How to read Eckhart

Eckhart did not write for people skimming a page on a screen. His sermons were spoken aloud, to nuns and townspeople, and they were meant to be heard more than once. If you read him the way you'd read a newspaper, fast and once through, you'll come away with a handful of strange phrases and not much else. Read him slowly and the same sentences start to open up.

This page is about pace and method, not about having the right opinions on Eckhart. There's no single correct way to read him. But there are ways that tend to work, and a few practical things worth knowing before you start, including why the sermon numbers on this site might not match the numbers in a book you already own.

Start with one sermon, not the whole book

It is tempting to read Eckhart the way you'd read a reference book, dipping in and out, collecting striking lines. Some of that is fine. But the sermons were built as single units of thought, often circling back to the same image three or four times from different angles. A sermon read whole, in order, teaches you something that quotations pulled out of it cannot.

If you are new to him, Sermon 4 or Sermon 13 are reasonable places to begin. Read one sermon a day for a week before you try to form a view of what Eckhart is saying overall. The start here page has a longer path if you want one.

Reading a sermon slowly

Eckhart's sermons move in a pattern that is easy to miss on a first pass. He states a text from scripture, pulls apart a word or phrase in it, and then returns again and again to the same idea, the birth of God in the soul, the ground beneath the soul's ordinary life, detachment from things. The repetition serves a purpose: he builds a single thought up from several sides until it lands.

A slow reading might go like this. Read the sermon once, straight through, without stopping to puzzle anything out. Then read it again, this time stopping wherever a sentence catches you, even if you can't say exactly why. Sit with that sentence for a minute before moving on. Eckhart was a university-trained theologian preaching to ordinary people, so a lot of his sermons carry real argument under the plain language. Slowing down is often the only way to see the argument at all.

Here is the kind of line that rewards this kind of pause.

Such people are allowed to know that the very best and furthest reach of attainment in this life is to stay still and let God act and speak in you.

Sermon 1: The eternal birth of the Word in the soul

Read quickly, that sentence sounds like good advice. Read slowly, it starts to ask something harder: what would it actually mean, today, to stop acting and let something else act in you.

Lectio divina with Eckhart

Lectio divina, the old monastic practice of reading scripture in four movements, reading, reflecting, responding, resting, was not designed with Eckhart's sermons in mind. But it adapts to them well, maybe because Eckhart himself was trained in a tradition that read scripture this way.

Read a short passage, no more than a paragraph, slowly and perhaps aloud. Then sit with whatever phrase stays with you, turning it over rather than analysing it. Let it lead you into whatever response arises, which might be prayer, might be a question, might be nothing you can put into words yet. Then simply rest, without trying to extract a conclusion or a lesson. Eckhart has a line that fits this last movement better than most spiritual writers manage.

We must sink into forgetting and not-knowing. In this silence, this quiet, the Word is heard. There is no better way to approach this Word than in silence, in quiet: we hear it and know it rightly in unknowing. To one who knows nothing it is clearly revealed.

Sermon 2: The birth of God in the ground of the soul

That is not a formula for emptying your mind so much as a description of what happens when you stop filling it. If you already practice centering prayer or a similar form of silent prayer, you may find Eckhart's sermons work less as new material to think about and more as confirmation, in another century's language, of something you already do in silence.

Why the sermon numbers don't match between editions

If you've read Eckhart before, in Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn's translations or in Oliver Davies's, or in Josef Quint's German edition, you may notice the sermon numbers on this site don't line up with what you remember. This reflects a quirk of how Eckhart's German sermons have come down to us.

Eckhart's sermons survive in manuscripts copied by other people, mostly nuns and friars who heard him preach or copied from other copies. No authoritative numbered collection exists from his own hand. Each modern editor has had to decide which sermons are genuinely his, how to order them, and how to number them, and different editors have made different decisions. Josef Quint's numbering became something like a standard in German scholarship, and Maurice O'Connell Walshe's English translation mostly follows Quint. This site follows the older numbering used by Franz Pfeiffer in his nineteenth-century German edition, which C. de B. Evans translated into English in 1924. Pfeiffer's order is not wrong, it is simply earlier, and it predates some of the later work sorting authentic sermons from sermons wrongly attributed to Eckhart.

Practically, this means that if someone tells you to read Walshe's Sermon 52, you may need to look for it under a different number here, or you may find that this site's edition doesn't include it at all, since not everything in Pfeiffer appears in every later edition and vice versa. The editions page has more detail on this if you want to go further into it.

The Evans translation and its old-fashioned English

The text used on this site is C. de B. Evans's English translation of Pfeiffer's edition, published in 1924 and now in the public domain. It reads like what it is: an early twentieth-century scholarly translation of a medieval German text, full of words like "natheless" and "wist" and sentence structures that twist back on themselves. Some readers find this charming. Others find it an obstacle.

It is worth pushing through the obstacle rather than around it. Evans was translating close to Eckhart's German, including the odd grammar and the repetitions that a smoother modern translation might tidy away. The awkwardness sometimes preserves something real, a sense that the writer is reaching for language that doesn't quite exist yet, bending ordinary German past its normal limits to talk about an experience it wasn't built to describe. A more fluent modern English can lose that strain.

If the archaic phrasing becomes a real barrier, reading a passage aloud often helps more than reading it silently. Older English prose was written to be heard as much as seen, and a sentence that looks tangled on the page can untangle itself when you speak it.

Keeping a reading notebook

A plain notebook, paper or digital, is probably the single most useful tool for reading Eckhart over time. His sermons repeat themes across decades of preaching, the ground of the soul, the birth of God, living without a why, and a notebook lets you notice the repetition instead of experiencing each sermon as a fresh start.

A simple method: after each sermon, write down the date, the sermon number and title, and one sentence that stayed with you, copied out in full rather than paraphrased. Add a line or two in your own words about why it stayed with you, or what question it raised that you can't yet answer. Resist the urge to summarise the whole sermon. The point of the notebook is not a record of what Eckhart said, it is a record of what happened in you while you read him.

Over months, patterns will show up in your own notebook that you wouldn't have predicted. You might find you keep underlining passages about detachment and skipping past the ones about the Trinity, or the other way round. That pattern is worth paying attention to. It tells you something about where your own attention keeps going, which is often more useful to know than any fact about Eckhart's biography or theology.

If you want a structured way into this, the free course walks through a set of sermons with this kind of slow, notebook-based reading in mind. There is no obligation to take it. Reading one sermon this week, slowly, is enough to start.

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