Eckhart sometimes talks about God the way the creeds do: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a Lord who makes the world, hears prayer, and can be addressed as 'thou'. But in a number of sermons he pushes past this and speaks of something he calls the Godhead, Gottheit, a ground behind the Persons and even behind the name God itself.
This is simply Eckhart doing what Dionysius the Areopagite and Augustine had already done before him, rather than proposing a second deity or a secret doctrine: admitting that every word we use for God, including the word God, is a human handle on something that has no handle.
God and Godhead are not the same word twice
Eckhart states the distinction plainly in one of his sermons on the soul's work.
God and Godhead are as different as earth is from heaven. More than that, I say: the outward and the inward man are just as different, like earth and heaven. God is higher, by many thousand miles.
Sermon 56: God's work in the soul: the flowing out and the return
'God' here is God as we can address him: as creator, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as the one who acts toward us and whom we act toward. The Godhead is what lies under all of that, prior to any relation, prior even to being named. Eckhart affirms the Trinity while saying that the Trinity, like everything else we can think or say, is already a kind of clothing on something bare underneath.
The desert of the Godhead
Eckhart's favourite image for this bare ground is a desert or wilderness, a nameless place with nothing in it to grasp.
In Sermon 38 he reads Jacob's stone pillow at Bethel this way.
Jacob rested in the place that is nameless. By not naming it, it is named. When the soul reaches this nameless place she will rest: where all things are being God in God, there she will rest. The home of the soul, which God is, is unnamed. I say, God is unspoken.
Sermon 38: Peace, Jacob's nameless place, and rest beyond will
And in Sermon 60 he describes the soul's spark wanting to get past every distinct thing, even the Persons of the Trinity, into this ground.
More than that, and even stranger to say, I promise you this light is not satisfied with the unchanging, undivided essence of God, which neither gives nor takes, but wants to find its own source. It wants to get into its plain ground, into the silent desert where no distinct thing has ever looked in, not the Father, the Son, nor the Holy Ghost. At the center, where no one lives, this light is put out in a still stronger light, in which it is more one than it is in itself, for this ground is the undivided stillness, unmoving in itself, and by this stillness all things are moved, and all those have their life who, gathered into themselves, live the life of the mind.
Sermon 60: Likes love and unite: the soul's spark and the ground beyond God
Note what he includes in the list of things left behind: not just creatures, not just images, but 'Father, Son nor Holy Ghost'. The desert is empty of everything that can be told apart from anything else, not just of bad things, because telling-apart is exactly what the Godhead is beyond.
Leaving God for God
The most startling line on this subject comes in Sermon 96, where Eckhart reads Paul's wish in Romans to be cut off from Christ for the sake of his brothers.
A person's last and highest act of letting go is leaving God for the sake of God. St Paul left God for God: he left behind everything he could take hold of or receive from God, every idea of God. In letting go of these he left God for God, since God still remained to him in his essential self, not as an idea of himself, nor as something acquired, but God in his essential reality. This is not a matter of giving and taking between him and God: it is the one, perfect union.
Sermon 96: Hearing the eternal Word, and St Paul's wish to leave God for God
This is often remembered as Eckhart's prayer to be rid of God for God's sake, and it is worth being careful about what it means. He is describing a letting go of every concept, image and benefit we attach to the word God, rather than asking to be rid of God the way an atheist might wish God away, so that what is left is God in himself rather than God as an idea we are holding onto. The giving up is itself an act of love, not of unbelief.
Why this mattered, and why it was dangerous
Statements like these were among the ones scrutinised at Eckhart's trial in Cologne in 1326, and some near them appear in the list of propositions condemned in the 1329 bull In agro dominico. Preached in German to nuns and laypeople rather than argued in a Latin classroom, they could sound like a claim that the church's God was somehow less than ultimate.
Read alongside the rest of his sermons, the point is narrower and more traditional than it first appears. Eckhart stands in a line that runs back through Augustine's confession that no word can capture God and Dionysius's theology of unknowing. What he adds is the sharpness of the German words themselves, God and Godhead, and his willingness to preach the distinction out loud rather than confine it to technical argument.
It connects directly to his teaching on detachment and on the ground of the soul: the same stripping away that empties the soul of images is what lets her sink, as he puts it elsewhere, into the ground and essence of the Godhead rather than stopping at any image of God along the way.
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