Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart

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Meister Eckhart (around 1260 to around 1328) was a German Dominican friar and theologian. He taught twice as a master of theology in Paris and held senior posts in his order. Most of what you will read from him on this site comes from the German sermons he gave to ordinary people and to nuns in Strasbourg and Cologne, not from his more technical Latin writing.

In 1326 he was accused of heresy in Cologne. He appealed to the pope and died before any ruling came. Three years after his death, a papal document called In agro dominico condemned twenty eight statements drawn from his work. None of that stopped his sermons being copied, read, and loved in the centuries since.

If you have never read him before, this page is for you. Below are five pieces from the library that make a good doorway, a note on how to read him without rushing, and some pointers to the rest of the site.

Five places to start

There is no single correct order to read Eckhart in, but some pieces make a better first encounter than others. The five below are short enough to sit with in one go, and each one says something plain about an idea that runs through almost everything he wrote.

Start here if you want the heart of Eckhart in one sermon. He preaches on the birth of the Word in the soul and says plainly that this is something meant to happen in you, here, now, not a doctrine to admire from a distance.

Sermon 4: The eternal birth, finding God in the ground of the soul

If you want to find this noble birth, you must truly leave the crowd behind and return to the starting point, into the ground you came from.

Sermon 4: The eternal birth: finding God in the ground of the soul

This sermon makes one of Eckhart's boldest claims, that because Christ took on human nature, what belongs to Christ also belongs to us. It ends with his teaching on living without a why, maybe his most quoted idea and the hardest one to get right.

Sermon 13: Sharing Christ's nature and living without a why

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

This is Eckhart's own short treatise on detachment, Abgeschiedenheit, not a sermon but an essay, and it is the clearest statement of why he ranked detachment above even love. The argument builds carefully, so it rewards patience.

Tractate 9: On detachment

True detachment means a mind as little moved by what happens, by joy and sorrow, honor and disgrace, as a wide mountain is by a gentle breeze. This unmoving detachment makes a person supremely like God. God is God because of his unmoving detachment, and it is from his detachment that he gets his purity and his simplicity and his unchangeableness.

Tractate 9: On detachment: Eckhart's treatise on letting go of all things

A plain, short sermon on what the soul is actually looking for underneath all its wanting. If you come to Eckhart from meditation or centering prayer, this one will feel familiar almost immediately.

Sermon 45: Rest, what the soul is really looking for

If I were asked to say what end the creator has created creatures for, I would answer: rest. And if I were asked a second time, what are all creatures seeking so eagerly by nature? I would answer: rest. And if a third time I were asked what the soul seeks in all her restlessness, again I would say: rest.

Sermon 45: Rest: what the soul is really looking for

A good one to end on, because it brings the whole thing down to earth. God is nearer to you than you are to yourself, closer than any far-off place you might imagine reaching toward.

Sermon 69: The kingdom of God is nearer than you think

God is nearer to me than I am to my own self; my life depends on God being near me, present in me. So he is also in a stone, a log of wood, only they do not know it.

Sermon 69: The kingdom of God is nearer than you think

How to read him slowly

Eckhart preached these sermons aloud to people sitting in a chapel, not to scholars reading at a desk. His sentences circle a point and come back to it from another angle. That style rewards a slow reading more than a fast one.

Try reading a whole sermon once, just for its shape, without worrying about every line you do not follow. Then go back and read a single paragraph again, slowly, the way you might sit with a line in lectio divina. Let the sentence sit rather than trying to pin it down straight away.

Some of his claims are meant to stop you short. He pushes ordinary language to its edge to talk about something beyond language, and a few of his statements are among the ones the church later condemned. Reading him too fast, or trying to pull a tidy doctrine out of every sermon, tends to flatten exactly the thing he is pointing at.

Where to go next

If a term in these sermons puzzles you, the key ideas pages take words like detachment, the ground of the soul, and living without a why one at a time, with his own words alongside.

For more on the man himself, his life, and his trial, see his life.

The quotes page collects short passages by theme, which is a good way to browse if you are not ready to read a whole sermon.

And if you would rather be walked through all of this slowly, a little at a time, there is a free 30-day email course that moves through his sermons one at a time. It costs nothing, and you can stop whenever you like.

This page was put together by Gregory Lahn, who edits this site.