Key idea

The ground of the soul

Eckhart preached about many things: detachment, poverty, the birth of God in the soul. Under most of it sits one claim that is harder to soften than the rest. He called it the ground of the soul, der Grunt der Sele in his own German, and he did not mean closeness or likeness. He meant something closer to identity.

This page looks at what he meant by the ground, why it is probably the most daring thing he ever said from a pulpit, and where you can read it for yourself.

the claim itself

The clearest statement comes from a sermon on sharing Christ's nature, where Eckhart is talking about living without a why.

Here God's ground is my ground and my ground is God's ground. Here I live in what is my own as God lives in what is his own. To one who has seen into this ground even for an instant, a thousand ducats of pure beaten gold are worth no more than a counterfeit coin. Out of this innermost ground your works should be done without why.
Sermon 13: Sharing Christ's nature and living without a why

Read plainly, that sentence erases a line most theology works hard to keep in place, the line between the one who creates and the one who is created. Eckhart's claim goes further than saying the soul is close to God or favoured by God: at one point, in one place, there is no gap to measure.

what he means by ground

Ground, for Eckhart, is not one power of the soul among others, not memory or will or understanding. It sits under all of those, the way a floor sits under furniture. He describes it elsewhere as a kind of silence that no image has ever reached.

As I just said, it is in the purest part of the soul, in the noblest part, in her ground, yes in the very essence of the soul. That is the middle of silence, for no creature has ever gotten in there, nor any image, and the soul has there neither activity nor understanding, so she is not aware of any image, either of herself or of any creature.
Sermon 1: The eternal birth of the Word in the soul

He makes the same claim again in the dialogue known as Sister Katrei, where the soul tells her confessor plainly what she has found.

The masters say: to measure the soul we must measure her by God, for the ground of God and the ground of the soul are one nature.
Tractate 6: Sister Katrei: a soul's dialogue with her confessor

This claim goes beyond a comfortable mysticism of feeling close to God in prayer: it describes what the soul actually is, at her root, once everything added to her, every image, every name, every creaturely habit, has fallen away.

why this was so dangerous

Eckhart was not careless. In the same sermon where he makes the identity claim, he also draws the line a creature cannot cross.

Where the creature stops, there God begins. All God wants from you is for you to go out of yourself with respect to your creatureliness and let God be God in you. The smallest of creaturely images that ever takes shape in you is as big as God.
Sermon 13: Sharing Christ's nature and living without a why

That sentence sounds like a correction, and in a way it is: the ground is reached by letting creatureliness go, not by the soul puffing itself up into God. But the rhetorical weight of his sermons rarely falls on the careful qualifications. It falls on lines like here God's ground is my ground, preached in German to nuns and laypeople who had no training in scholastic distinctions.

That is most likely why, after his death, the papal bull In agro dominico (1329) singled out a number of his statements for condemnation. You can read more about the trial itself on the trial page. Eckhart appealed to Rome and died before any verdict came. What got him into difficulty was not one wild claim but a pattern: sermon after sermon pushing the soul and God closer together than most theology of his day was willing to allow, with the saving qualifications tucked in as asides rather than headlines.

where the idea appears

The phrase and the thought behind it run through a good part of Eckhart's preaching, not just one sermon. You can trace it through Sermon 13: Sharing Christ's nature and living without a why, Sermon 43: Knowledge, love, and the ground where God and the soul meet, Sermon 93: The crossing: how one true act outweighs a lifetime of effort, Sermon 100: One God and Father of all: Eckhart on divine oneness, and the dialogue in Tractate 6: Sister Katrei: a soul's dialogue with her confessor.

It is worth noticing that the ground is never presented as an achievement. Eckhart does not describe a ladder you climb to get there. He describes a floor that was always underneath you, waiting to be noticed once everything built on top of it is cleared away.

where to read next

The ground of the soul connects directly to two other ideas on this site: the spark of the soul, which is Eckhart's name for the part of us that touches this ground, and the birth of God in the soul, which describes what happens when that ground is reached. If the stakes of this claim interest you, the godhead beyond God goes even further into territory that worried his judges.

If you want to sit with Eckhart's own words slowly rather than read about them, how to read Eckhart is a good next stop, or start here if this is your first visit to the site.

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