Eckhart has a short German phrase that sums up a great deal of his teaching: sunder warumbe, without a why. He uses it to describe a person, or an act of love, or justice, that does not reach past itself for a reason. Such a person acts without seeking reward, without aiming for heaven, without trying to please God. The act simply flows from what the person has become.
This calls for attentiveness rather than carelessness. It describes what happens when love or justice or life itself stops being a means to something else and becomes, in Eckhart's word, its own ground.
What sunder warumbe means
In Sermon 59 Eckhart draws a sharp line between people who work for a reason and people who simply work rightly. The first group, he says, are hired hands. The second have let go of the whole transaction.
The righteous person seeks nothing in his work; only servants and hired hands ask for anything in return for their work, or work for any why. If you want to be shaped by, transformed into, righteousness, have no ulterior purpose in your work; form no idea in yourself, in time or in eternity, not reward nor happiness nor this nor that, for truly all such works are dead.
Sermon 59: The just man lives in God, without a why
He makes the same point about love in Sermon 81, where he says that love which still asks for something back is not really love of the other person, it is love of yourself using the other person as a means.
All God's commandments come from love, from the kindness of his nature; if they did not come from love they would not be God's law, for God's law is the goodness of his nature and his nature is his kind law. Whoever lives in love lives in the goodness of his nature: he lives in God's love, and love is without why.
Sermon 81: Love without why and the true meaning of letting go
The target here is the habit of mind that keeps asking what we get out of our own goodness, not effort or discipline itself. Eckhart wants that question to fall away.
Life living from its own ground
Eckhart's own image for this, in Sermon 13, is not a flower but life itself. He imagines putting the question to life directly, across a thousand years, and getting an answer that refuses to explain itself.
We could question life for a thousand years: 'Why do you live?' It would only say, if it answered at all, 'I live because I live.' For life lives out of its own ground, wells up out of itself. It lives without a cause, for it lives itself.
Sermon 13: Sharing Christ's nature and living without a why
Life does not live in order to arrive somewhere else. It lives because living is what it is. Eckhart applies the same shape of thought to the just soul and, more boldly, to the ground of the soul meeting the ground of God.
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
A work done out of that ground, he says, does not need a why attached to it, because the why has already been absorbed into the doing.
The rose that blooms without why, and why it isn't his
The line most readers associate with this idea is the rose that blooms without a why, asking nothing, seeking no reason, not even looking to see if it is seen. It is a beautiful line and it fits Eckhart's thinking closely. It is not his.
It comes from Angelus Silesius, a German mystical poet of the seventeenth century, in his book Cherubinischer Wandersmann (The Cherubinic Wanderer), written some three hundred years after Eckhart's death. Silesius had read the German mystical tradition that Eckhart helped start, and this line is one of the places where that reading left a mark. The rose is his contribution, built on ground Eckhart cleared, and worth reading in its own right. It should not be quoted as Eckhart's, and on this site it never will be.
Eckhart's own writing has plenty of images for a life without why. He reaches for burning coal, for fire in wood, for the voice crying in the wilderness. He does not reach for the rose, and there is no reason to put the flower in his mouth when he gave us life, fire, and the ground of the soul instead.
Where it comes up in his own sermons
The phrase and the thought behind it run through several sermons in the Pfeiffer collection. Sermon 13 is the clearest statement, with its image of life answering for itself and its claim that God's ground and the soul's ground are, at bottom, one ground.
Sermon 59 applies the idea to justice, arguing that the truly just person does right because doing right is what they are, not as a transaction with God.
Sermon 74 pushes further still, into what Eckhart calls spirit without why, where even unity itself has stopped needing a reason.
This spirit has no why, for if it had a why the unity would also have its why. This spirit is in unity and freedom.
Sermon 74: The promise of the Father and the life that asks no why
Sermon 81 takes up love specifically, warning against loving someone or something for what it gives back rather than for what it is.
A late collected saying puts the payoff plainly, without the theology attached.
Whoever lives without a why has given up nothing, and by doing this we gain the whole world and abundance.
The Sayings: Sayings of Meister Eckhart: God born in the soul, part one
Where to read next
Living without a why rests on two other ideas worth following: detachment, which clears the ground, and the ground of the soul, which is the ground Eckhart means when he says a true work is wrought out of it.
If you want to meet the idea in his own words before reading commentary on it, start with Sermon 13 and go on to Sermon 81. For a wider first look at Eckhart's thought, how to read Eckhart is a good place to begin.
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