Detachment is one of Eckhart's own words for the condition in which God can act in a person without anything getting in the way. In his German sermons and treatises he calls it Abgeschiedenheit, a word built from a verb meaning to separate or cut away. It describes what has been cleared out of the way, rather than naming a mood.
He gave the idea its own short treatise, known in English as On Detachment, which appears on this site as Tractate 9. There he makes a claim that still catches readers off guard: of all the things the schools and the preachers praised, love, humility, mercy, compassion, detachment comes first. This priority holds because without detachment, the others stay tangled up with the self that is supposedly practicing them.
What Eckhart means by detachment
Eckhart opens On Detachment by asking which virtue puts a person closest to God, closest to the condition a person had before anything was made, when there was no difference yet between the self and God. His answer is detachment, despite having preached on love constantly.
I have read many writings of pagan philosophers and sages, of the old covenant and the new, and I have searched hard and carefully for the best and highest virtue by which a person can bind himself most closely to God, and by which he becomes most like his original pattern, as he was in God, where there was no difference between himself and God, before God created any creature. And after studying all these writings as deeply as I could, I find it is nothing other than complete detachment from all created things.
Tractate 9: On detachment: Eckhart's treatise on letting go of all things
The phrase "ere God created creature" is doing real work here. Eckhart is pointing past created things, past the self as a bundle of wants and fears, to something prior. Detachment is the practice of letting go of everything that stands between a person and that ground, including good things, including spiritual comforts, including one's own wish to be virtuous or to be loved by God in return.
Above love and humility
Eckhart's reasoning is almost mechanical. Love, as he describes it elsewhere, can still be bent toward the self: I love God because I want something from the exchange, even if what I want is only to feel close to him. Detachment has no such angle. It does not ask to be moved by joy or by loss, by praise or by blame.
True detachment means a mind as little moved by what happens, by joy and sorrow, honor and disgrace, as a wide mountain is by a gentle breeze. This unmoving detachment makes a person supremely like God. God is God because of his unmoving detachment, and it is from his detachment that he gets his purity and his simplicity and his unchangeableness.
Tractate 9: On detachment: Eckhart's treatise on letting go of all things
A mountain's stillness comes from a nature that wind cannot move, not from any choice to stop caring. Eckhart wants the same kind of stillness in the soul, built into the ground of the person rather than achieved by effort of will each time trouble comes. He compares the self to a door on its hinges.
The door swings back and forth on its hinges. Now I compare the projecting door to the outward person and the hinge to the inner person. As it shuts and opens the door swings to and fro while the hinge stays unmoved in the same place without undergoing any change. And it is the same here.
Tractate 9: On detachment: Eckhart's treatise on letting go of all things
The door swings, opens, shuts, meets the world. The hinge does not move at all. Eckhart's claim is that detachment is what it looks like when a person lives from the hinge rather than from the door.
What detachment is not
It would be easy to hear all this and picture someone cold, withdrawn, unmoved because they do not care. That is not what Eckhart is describing, and he says so directly.
I want you to know that to be empty of creatures is to be full of God, and to be full of creatures is to be empty of God.
Tractate 9: On detachment: Eckhart's treatise on letting go of all things
Fullness, not emptiness for its own sake, is the point. Detachment empties a person of grasping so that something else can fill the space. It is not contempt for the world. Eckhart preached to nuns and ordinary laypeople about work, prayer, and daily life, and he had no patience for showy asceticism performed for an audience, including an audience of one's own conscience. In Sermon 72 he even takes the Pharisee, usually a figure of pride, and reads the name itself as pointing toward a kind of detachment.
Pharisee means someone solitary, someone who knows no limit to the soul's detachment. The nobler the powers, the more they set free. Some powers are far higher than the body and detached enough to shed everything and separate completely.
Sermon 72: On mercy, detachment, and the Pharisee who asked Christ to dine
Even there, the word he chooses is about release, not about building walls around oneself. Detachment, in Eckhart's sense, has nothing to do with disliking people or things. It has to do with no longer needing them to complete you.
Where the idea appears in the sermons
On Detachment is the fullest statement, and it is worth reading on its own, as Tractate 9. Sermon 72 takes up the theme through the story of the Pharisee who invited Christ to dine, and sets detachment alongside mercy rather than against it. Eckhart circles the same ground under other names in Sermon 55, where he tells his listeners to seek nothing at all, not even inwardness or peace, but only God's will, and in Sermon 100, where he links purity of heart to this same kind of separation from attachment.
Purity of heart means separation, a cleansing from all bodily things, the setting apart of the self, and in that withdrawal, plunging into God and being made one with him.
Sermon 100: One God and Father of all: Eckhart on divine oneness
The theme also sits close to what Eckhart calls living without a why, the refusal to do good or love God for any return at all. Readers who want to follow that thread can see how the two ideas lean on each other.
Where to read next
If detachment raises the question of what a person is left with once the grasping stops, the idea of living without a why picks up directly where this one leaves off. For the companion idea of letting God act rather than forcing an outcome, see letting-be.
These notes were put together by Gregory Lahn. If a passage sounds too stark on first reading, it is worth sitting with Eckhart's own insistence that none of this is about coldness. He preached it to people trying to live ordinary lives, not to hermits.
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