A good number of Eckhart's sermons were preached on the Christmas gospel readings, in Strasbourg or Cologne, to nuns and to ordinary people who had come to church expecting a story about a baby born a long time ago in a particular town. Eckhart gave them that story, briefly, and then turned it around. The real question, he kept saying, was whether God is born in you, here and now.
This is what he calls the birth of God in the soul, or the eternal birth of the Word. It is one idea with several names across the sermons, and it sits at the center of his preaching for most of the church year, not just at Christmas. The claim is large: the same birth by which the Father eternally begets the Son in the Godhead also happens, or can happen, in the ground of a human soul. Not a memory of it. Not a symbol of it. The same birth.
A birth that happens now, not once
Eckhart leans on Augustine for the basic claim, then pushes past him: the birth is always happening, somewhere, in whoever is ready for it, rather than a historical fact to be admired from a distance.
St Augustine says this birth is always happening. But if it doesn't happen in me, what good does it do me? What matters is that it happens in me.
Sermon 1: The eternal birth of the Word in the soul
He says the same about the eternal Word itself: it is spoken once, and that speaking never stops.
God spoke only one word, ever, and he holds it so dear that he will never say another. If God stopped saying his Word, even for an instant, heaven and earth would disappear.
Sermon 26: The feast of the Virgin and the birth of God that never stops
Where it takes place
Eckhart is careful about location. This birth does not happen in the senses, in the intellect's ordinary working, or in any image the mind can form. It happens in what he calls the ground of the soul, the part of us that has no image of itself or of any creature. He sometimes calls it a kind of mid-silence.
First of all, when a word is conceived in my mind it is a subtle, intangible thing; it becomes a true word when it takes shape in my thought. Later, spoken aloud by my mouth, it is only an outward expression of the inner word. In the same way the eternal Word is spoken in the innermost and purest depths of the soul, in the summit of her rational nature, and there this birth takes place.
Sermon 29: The birth of God in the soul, beyond time
And it keeps happening, outside the clock. This is one reason Eckhart's sermons on time and eternity run so close to his sermons on the birth: the event he is describing has no calendar.
This birth doesn't happen once a year, or once a day, or once an hour, but all the time, above time, in the moment that is neither here nor now.
Sermon 43: Knowledge, love, and the ground where God and the soul meet
Not Mary's birth alone
Several of the Christmas and Annunciation sermons make a move that must have startled some of his listeners: Mary's bearing of Christ in the flesh, Eckhart says, was the visible result of something that had already happened in her soul, and that same thing is on offer to anyone.
I say: if Mary had not borne God in spiritual fashion first, he would never have been born of her in flesh. The woman said to Christ, 'Blessed is the womb that bore you.' Christ replied, 'Blessed not only is the womb that bore me: blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.' It is worth more to God that he is brought forth spiritually in each virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.
Sermon 88: The virgin birth: how God is born in every soul, and not in Mary alone
This is Eckhart doing what he does everywhere, without denying the nativity itself: taking a scene from scripture and asking what it means for the ground of the soul, here, now, in the person listening to the sermon.
What he asks of you
Eckhart does not describe this birth as something that simply arrives if you wait. He treats it as costing something, and he is blunt about the cost: a withdrawal from the senses and from the clutter of images that the mind keeps producing.
No one can reach this birth unless he can withdraw his mind entirely from things. And it takes real force to drive back all the senses and hold them in check. Force must be used on all of them, or this cannot happen. As Christ said: the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.
Sermon 3: Being about the Father's business: the birth of God and the active life
Fasting, prayer, religious practice generally, he says, exist for this one purpose and no other.
When anyone asks me, why do we pray or why do we fast or do our work, I say, so that God may be born in our souls.
Sermon 29: The birth of God in the soul, beyond time
Readers coming from centering prayer or other contemplative traditions will recognize the shape of this, even if Eckhart's language is more severe: the goal is not technique or feeling, it is getting out of the way.
Where the idea appears in the sermons
This theme runs through a long stretch of the collection. Sermon 1 and Sermon 2 state it plainly and set the terms Eckhart keeps returning to. Sermon 4, Sermon 9, and Sermon 17 work through what kind of readiness the soul needs. The Christmas and Marian sermons carry it most directly: Sermon 26, Sermon 28, Sermon 29, and Sermon 88 all preach on the nativity texts and turn them toward the soul's own birth. Sermon 39, Sermon 65, Sermon 79, and Sermon 90 pick it up again from different angles, and Tractate 8 is a short, dedicated treatment of the same ground. None of these sermons repeat each other exactly. Eckhart seems to have found new things to say about this one event every time he stood up to preach on it.
Where to read next
The birth of God in the soul connects closely to two other ideas on this site. The ground of the soul describes the place this birth happens in, and detachment describes the emptying Eckhart thinks it requires. If you want to start with the sermons themselves rather than a summary, Sermon 1 is the natural place to begin. And if Eckhart is new to you, how to read Eckhart has some notes on pace and expectation that may help before you go further.
Free by email
30 Days with Meister Eckhart
One short passage from his sermons each day for thirty days, with a plain paragraph on what he means. It is free, and leaving takes one click.
The 8-week course
The Ground of the Soul
A course on the teaching of Meister Eckhart
$59