Meister Eckhart

Questions people ask about Meister Eckhart

Some questions about Meister Eckhart come up again and again, from readers who have just heard his name and from people who have read him for years. This page answers the most common ones in plain language, with Eckhart's own words quoted where they settle the point.

If a question you have is not here, the how to read Eckhart page and the ideas pages go into more depth on specific terms and themes.

Was Meister Eckhart a heretic?

He was never personally condemned as a heretic. He was investigated for heresy in Cologne starting in 1326, and the process continued after his death at the papal court in Avignon.

Eckhart appealed for judgment, publicly submitted his words to the Church, and expressed his willingness to retract anything proven contrary to the faith. He died before any verdict on him personally was reached.

What did happen is that the pope condemned a list of statements drawn from his writing. The bull In agro dominico, issued in 1329,condemned 17 articles from the syllabus as heretical and 11 more as suspect of heresy. So it is accurate to say that 28 of his propositions were condemned. It is not accurate to say that he himself was ever formally declared a heretic, since that judgment never reached him.

Scholars still argue about how fair the trial was and how much his words were taken out of context. That argument is part of why Eckhart remains interesting rather than settled.

Was he Catholic?

Yes. Eckhart was a Dominican friar for his whole adult life, ordained a priest, and he held senior positions inside the order. He preached and wrote as a churchman addressing other churchmen, nuns and lay Christians, not as someone working outside the tradition.

When his teaching came under suspicion he did not defy the Church or break with it. He appealed through the Church's own process and offered to correct anything shown to be wrong. That is the posture of someone who considers himself bound by the Church's authority, even while pushing its language to its limits.

Reading Eckhart today, Christian or not, it helps to remember that his sermons were preached inside the Mass and his treatises were written for monks and nuns trying to pray better. The vocabulary is startling in places. The context is ordinary Catholic religious life.

Was he a pantheist?

Mostly no, though the question is reasonable. Pantheism says that everything simply is God. Eckhart says things that can sound that way, especially when he talks about the soul's ground being one with God's ground, or about God being in all things.

Despite his views on God's intellective conception of the world, Eckhart need not be viewed as a pantheist, or even a panentheist. His sharper distinction is between creatures, which have borrowed being, and God, who simply is being itself. Creatures depend on God for their existence at every instant; God does not depend on creatures at all. Creatures and God remain fundamentally separate in his account, with God existing wholly in his own right while creatures exist only through him.

Older surveys sometimes filed him under Neoplatonic or Stoic pantheism because of the emanation language he inherited from writers like Proclus and Plotinus. See Eckhart and Neoplatonism for more on that background. But Eckhart also insists on a Creator who is radically other than creation even while being intimately present in it. That combination is closer to what later writers would call a mystical or apophatic theology than to pantheism in the strict sense.

Did he say "the eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me"?

Yes, in substance. It is one of the most quoted lines attributed to him, and it comes from a German sermon, close to this version:

My eye can see color because it is free to take on color. When I see blue or white, my eye, which is seeing the color, is taking in the color it sees. The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Sermon 96: Hearing the eternal Word, and St Paul's wish to leave God for God

The line gets passed around in slightly different wordings depending on the translation, which is normal for Eckhart. The underlying claim concerns a shared act: the seeing by which a soul perceives God and the seeing by which God perceives that soul are, at the deepest point, the same act, regardless of whether the physical eye literally sees God. The point concerns union, a matter of spiritual perception rather than physical optics.

Was he influenced by Buddhism?

No, not directly. Eckhart lived and died in the Rhineland in the early 1300s. There is no evidence he knew anything about Buddhist thought, and nothing in his own writing refers to it. His sources are Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, the Neoplatonists and Aquinas, all squarely within the Christian and late-antique philosophical world.

The comparison to Buddhism, and to Zen in particular, is a later development. The Japanese Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki read Eckhart's sermons and found striking parallels in how both traditions talk about emptying the self and about a reality beyond concepts. He set this out in a 1957 book, and the comparison has shaped a lot of popular reading of Eckhart ever since, including among readers who came to him through Zen or through meditation rather than through Christianity.

The parallels are real enough to be worth taking seriously, and they are explored on this site at Eckhart and Zen. But it is worth being honest that Eckhart worked as a Dominican preacher within a Christian framework, not as a scholar of comparative religion, even when his language reaches for something that framework can barely hold.

Where should I start?

If you are new to Eckhart, do not start with the condemned propositions or with academic summaries of his metaphysics. Start with a sermon and let it work on you the way a sermon is meant to.

The start here page gives a short path into the site, and the free course walks through his core ideas a step at a time with his own words at each stage. If you want a single sermon to begin with, Sermon 4 is a good entry point: it is short, it stays close to ordinary experience, and it contains some of his best known lines, including the eye passage above.

From there, the ideas pages on detachment, the ground of the soul and the birth of God in the soul cover the themes that recur across almost everything he wrote, so they are useful once you have a feel for his voice.

Which translation is best?

There is no single best translation, only translations suited to different purposes. Three are worth knowing about.

C. de B. Evans produced the first substantial English translation of Franz Pfeiffer's German edition, published in 1924 and 1931. It is public domain, which is why it is the text used throughout this site, and its Victorian-inflected English has its own plain dignity even where it shows its age.

Maurice O'C. Walshe produced a later translation, first published in three volumes and later combined and revised by the scholar Bernard McGinn as The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart.Walshe began his version, as he tells us, as a revision of Evans's translation, and it benefits from decades of further scholarship on the German text, including the critical edition prepared by Josef Quint.

Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn also produced Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, a smaller selection with careful scholarly notes, useful if you want fewer texts covered in more depth.

For a closer look at how these editions differ and which sermon numbering each one uses, see editions.