Eckhart keeps coming back to one image across many sermons: something in the soul lies beyond the reach of time and the touch of the body. He uses different names for it across his sermons. Sometimes it is a spark, sometimes a castle, sometimes simply "a power," sometimes the head or husband of the soul. The German word behind the image is often given as vunkelin, a little spark, and in one sermon he pictures the soul itself as a small fortified place, a little castle, where God alone holds the key.
This page gathers his own words for it and points to the sermons where it shows up, under whichever name he happened to reach for that day.
something untouched by time and flesh
In Sermon 8, preached on the soul as virgin and spouse, Eckhart names the thing directly.
I've said elsewhere that there is a power in the soul untouched by time and flesh, flowing from the Spirit, staying in the Spirit, entirely spiritual. In this power is God, always green, flowering in all the joy and glory of his true self.
Sermon 8: The castle of the soul: virgin and wife
That is the core claim: whatever this power is, it remains ageless, free from hunger, untouched by fear. It is where he says God is already "ever verdant," always in flower, regardless of what the rest of the soul is going through.
a spark, a castle, a head
The names shift from sermon to sermon, and Eckhart does not seem bothered by the inconsistency. In Sermon 31 he calls it the intellect, the "husband" of the soul, and ties it directly to the word spark.
The spark (that is, the intellect, the head of the soul), the so-called husband of the soul, is nothing other than a spark of the divine nature, a divine light, a ray, an imprint of divinity.
Sermon 31: The man in the soul: Eckhart on intellect as the soul's husband
Earlier, in Sermon 1, he describes the same thing from the inside, almost confessing to his listeners that he feels it without being able to name it.
I notice something in me that flashes in my understanding; I clearly sense that it's something, but I can't grasp what it is. Yet I think if I could only take hold of it, I would know all truth.
Sermon 1: The eternal birth of the Word in the soul
That line is worth sitting with. Eckhart the master of theology, trained in Paris, admits he cannot grasp the thing he is pointing at. He only knows it sparkles.
a permanent leaning toward good
In Sermon 32, preached on the parable of the great supper, he gives the spark a stranger and more exact description. He sets it apart from the soul's ordinary powers, the way memory or will or understanding are. It is something else entirely.
And in another sense the servant means the angels, *the angels always calling us with an inner voice.* Third, I think this servant is the spark of the soul, which is sent there by God and is his light striking down from above, the reflection, or image, of his divine nature, always opposed to anything ungodly: not a power of the soul, as some theologians make it, but a permanent tendency toward good; even in hell it is inclined toward good.
Sermon 32: The great supper and the spark of the soul
That last clause is startling if you read it slowly. Even in hell, he says, this spark stays turned toward good. This holds regardless of virtue; it is built in, prior to choice, prior to sin.
opposed to anything that is not God
By Sermon 60 the spark has become almost a technical term, something he can lean his whole argument on.
Now I say, if you turn away from your own self and from created things, then to the extent you do this you reach unity and happiness in your soul-spark, a thing that is beyond time and space. This spark opposes creatures. It wants nothing but God, God as he is in himself.
Sermon 60: Likes love and unite: the soul's spark and the ground beyond God
Here the spark is not just untouched by time, it actively refuses anything less than God. It has no interest in comfort, in reward, in a particular vision or feeling. Eckhart is using the same word he used for fire earlier in the sermon: wherever a spark flies, that is where the fire's resting place is shown to be.
across the sermons
The image recurs often enough that it is worth tracking by name rather than by sermon number. He calls it the exalted spark in Sermon 18, where he says it "never parts from God nor is there anything between." He calls it a spark of God's own celestial nature in Sermon 76. He returns to it again in Sermon 84 and in Sermon 88, where he links it to something uncreated that existed before any creature was made.
It is not always the main subject of a sermon. More often it surfaces for a sentence or two, as a kind of anchor, before he moves on to the birth of the Word or the soul's return to her ground. That is part of why the word changes so much. He was preaching to nuns and townspeople in Strasbourg and Cologne, not writing a glossary.
how it differs from the ground of the soul
Readers sometimes wonder if the spark and what Eckhart elsewhere calls the ground of the soul are the same thing. He does not draw a clean line between them, and scholars have argued about it for a long time. What can be said is that the spark language tends to come up when he is talking about a point of contact, something that already touches God without having earned it. The ground language tends to come up when he is talking about depth, about sinking down past the soul's powers altogether. The two pictures overlap more than they compete.
If you want to follow that second thread, see the ground of the soul.
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