The Sermons and Treatises by Johannes Eckhart

First transcribed: c. 1300-1327 (English translation, 1941)

Edition(s) used:Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation, translated by Raymond B. Blakney. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Meditation and contemplation; mysticism; sermons; spiritual treatise

Core issue(s): Asceticism; attachment and detachment; silence; soul; suffering; union with God

Overview

Born in Thuringia of noble parents, Johannes Eckhart entered the Dominican order in Erfurt. He moved up in the order after attaining his master’s degree (hence receiving the title “Meister”) in Paris. Concerning himself mainly with union with the Godhead, which already is within the person, he became a popular and famous preacher at Strassburg and Cologne. His preaching finally led him to be tried as a heretic, and after his death some of his teachings were declared heretical. However, in 1980 the Dominican order formally requested that all censures be lifted.

Eckhart is concerned in his preaching, as are his followers Henry Suso (1295-1366) and John Tauler (c. 1300-1361), to emphasize the unfathomable depth and greatness of God, which can be “known” experientially but not rationally, and to encourage his listeners to seek this experiential knowledge. Another primary concern is “the birth of God in the soul.” This occurs through detachment from all creatures (this detachment aided by the usual ascetic practices) and is the union of the soul with God, both soul and God sharing the same ground. Eckhart is speculative and dualistic, even in his sermons, and frequently weaves his speculations into his preaching. His Neoplatonism is evident throughout his works. Here, rather than “proof text” from a number of sermons, we will examine a few of his sermons that illustrate major themes and finish with a brief look at one of his treatises, “About Disinterest.”

In a Christmas sermon Eckhart emphasizes the importance of the eternal birth of Christ in the soul. Christ was indeed born in Bethlehem, but Meister Eckhart asks, “Yet if it does not occur in me, how could it help me? Everything depends on that.” This birth can occur only in a pure soul, pure because God is pure, and in the soul because only the soul is, at its core, like God; that is, without thought or action.

The senses serve the soul, providing it with information and possibility, but the core of the soul is without information about itself, since, being like God, it cannot be apprehended by the senses. Because the soul is free of senses and ideas, because it simply is, God can unite with it. Like unites with like. Thus God begets God’s Son in the soul because it is there that Creator and creature (soul) are already one. Thus it is an event in and of itself, rather than an idea or knowledge of an event. The soul may receive God when it ceases to rely on its agents (the senses), hoping to receive some idea about God.

In silence and withdrawal, in forgetting the ideas and concepts gained through thought and perceptions, the soul receives not the right idea of God, but God himself. The birth of the Son in the person is at the same time the birth of the person in God. Eckhart tends to interpret Scripture in an extremely dualistic manner. He interprets, for example, Christ’s admonition to forsake self and even father and mother to mean, “’Whosoever will not depart from the externality of creatures cannot be born or received in this divine birth.’ By robbing yourself of all externalities you are admitted to the truth.”

In another Christmas sermon, Eckhart again points out that the birth of Christ occurs in the essence of the soul, “For creatures are only God’s footprints, but by nature, the soul is patterned after God.” Thus the soul alone is designed to receive the birth of God, which brings all joy and peace. In the cores of their beings sinners and saints are alike, but the birth of God in the soul brings “new light,” which radiates out through the believer. To receive the birth of God in the soul, then, one must rid it of ideas and the effects of creatures. If the agents of the soul (the senses) are not to clutter the person’s being, then they must be recollected by the soul and used for the soul’s purposes.

Eckhart claims that the sinful person’s core is filled with darkness and thus cannot comprehend the new light, and yet it is to this very core that the person must go if one is to find light and truth in the first place. On one hand we are to remain uncluttered by our faculties, and on the other we are to “focus all our faculties on the contemplation, the knowing of the unique . . . eternal truth.” Typical of contemplative mystics, Eckhart advises the seeker to forget all ideas and remain in un-self-consciousness, in stillness and silence. “Our blessedness does not depend on the deeds we do, but rather on our passiveness to God.” Elsewhere, however, he also says that even if one is caught up in contemplation, it is better to go help the needy person.

Even in a sermon on Luke 2:49 (“I must be about my father’s business”), Eckhart finds occasion to preach about the eternal birth, for “To know this birth at the core of the soul it is necessary above all that one should be about his Father’s business.” In this sermon Eckhart’s anthropology comes out: “Man has an active intellect, a passive intellect, and a potential intellect.” Active intellect is the thinking mind, passive intellect is the mind that remains inactive and lets God work in it, and potential intellect is the mind that has “a prevision of what is to be done.”

If one is to be detached from temporal things, is one to give up acts of love as well? Hardly, for contemplation and the acts of love that flow from it are one in God. Even Paul’s admonition to Timothy to “preach the word!” is spiritualized; Eckhart states expressly that this refers not to the spoken word but to the “inborn, secret word that lies hidden in the soul. This is what he preached, so that it might instruct the faculties of people and nourish them.”

This must occur in stillness and in solitude, for in silence God does for the contemplative what the active intellect does for the natural person. The stilled mind is God’s workshop, as it were, because it can experience God “the bedrock”: “The object and existence of the mind are essential and not contingent. The mind has a pure, unadulterated being of its own.” Again Eckhart sets up an apparently contradictory situation. We are to be still, yet “There is Truth at the core of the soul but it is covered up and hidden from the mind,” and thus the mind cannot come to rest.

Nonetheless, we are urged to stillness. “Above all, claim nothing for yourself. Relax and let God operate you and do what he will with you.” At the same time we are urged to “external acts of virtue”: praying, reading, singing, watching, fasting, doing penance—all meant to keep us from ungodly things. These are contingent, however, and may be boldly dropped when one has a “true spiritual experience.” Vows and practices that are no longer necessary or that turn out to be hindrances rather than helps are to be dropped, for unity with God takes precedence over everything.

In a sermon on Matthew 15:4, “Honor thy Father,” Eckhart covers several areas integral to his thought. First he points out that while no one is so simple that he or she cannot find help in Scripture and no one is so clever as to discover all the mysteries of Scripture, there is always “a second or hidden meaning, for [the literal] reading of the Scriptures differs from what they really intend.”

Second, he speculates on the meaning of the birth of God’s Son as “the idea of [God’s] own nature.” God cannot be demonstrated by analogy, but must be encountered within the core of the soul, for God remains withdrawn within the core of God’s own being. Thus as “each takes what it can identify in itself,” so our soul can receive God because “the idea of the soul and the idea of God are identical.”

This leads to a third important element, ascetic practices. Because our sense perceptions, and our dependence upon them, cloud the soul, and because it is the unclouded soul that receives God, nature’s “symbols” must be destroyed and its essence, where God dwells, must be sought. Here a key sentence for Eckhart is, “If you want the kernel, you must break the shell.”

Suffering, fourthly, plays a key role, for “when a man suffers and knows discomfort, he is nearest to the light.” In the darkness in which we know nothing the light of God will shine. Eckhart then hastens to warn against attaching ourselves to this darkness, lest we miss the light.

In the treatise “About Disinterest” (translated elsewhere as “On Detachment”) Eckhart begins by interpreting “the one thing necessary” (Luke 10:42) as disinterest. Disinterest is that state of being in which one is again similar to God as the soul and God were one before creation. Eckhart even argues with Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 13), putting disinterest higher than love. Since “Everything likes its own habitat best,” and God dwells in purity and unity (which are due to disinterest), the disinterested heart naturally draws God to itself. This identification of God and the person, then, means salvation for the person. Second, Eckhart puts disinterest ahead of love because love compels one to suffer for others or for God and suffering causes one to be at least aware of the source of suffering, whereas disinterest (which draws God) is aware of nothing and is therefore sensitive only to God. Experience must be of something, but disinterest “comes so close to zero [nothingness] that nothing but God is rarefied enough to get into it.” He also puts disinterest above humility, for humility requires self-denial while disinterest goes beyond that (and thus can attract God). As one abases oneself before creatures in humility, one at least is aware of them, and awareness, of course, precludes the disinterest necessary to draw God. Disinterest is also superior to mercy, for mercy is a response to human need and troubles the heart.

What, then, is disinterest? A disinterested mind is “unmoved by any contingent affection or sorrow, or honor, or slander, or vice. . . . Unmoveable disinterest brings man into his closest resemblance to God.” Here Eckhart is speaking of God in God’s essence. The incarnation, according to Eckhart, made not the slightest ripple in the disinterest of God. Thus disinterest does not preclude activity, per se, but it does preclude any sort of investment in the activity, or outer person. Eckhart uses the example of a door—the swinging door is the outer person while the hinge is the inner person, unmoved and unchanged despite the movement of the door it supports. “Pure disinterest is empty nothingness.”

If God is to do God’s will, God must find a disinterested heart and can enter and work only “according to the preparation and sensitivity he finds in each.” In fact, a disinterested person has no prayer but one, that he or she may be uniform with God.

At its height, disinterest is not even aware of its knowledge, or loves its own love, and is even “in the dark about its own light.” Eckhart even interprets the sending of the Holy Spirit in this manner; it is as if Christ was saying, “You take too much pleasure in my visible form and therefore the perfect pleasure of the Holy Spirit cannot be yours.” Thus disinterest brings God and, therefore, life. Eckhart’s basic dualistic understanding of the world is clearly reflected in his statement, “There is no physical or fleshly pleasure without some spiritual harm, for the desires of the flesh are contrary to those of the spirit and the desires of the spirit are contrary to those of the flesh.” Eckhart goes so far as to say that “the pleasure we take in the physical form of Christ diminishes our sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.”

Thus we must flee all contact with things temporal—ideas, people, creatures, and preconceptions—and remain empty and still so that God, who is beyond creatureliness and is void, may be united with the void of our soul. Any experience of God will only be temporary, and our loss of it will bring great pain, but we are immediately to set about inwardness of contemplation.

Christian Themes

Meister Eckhart’s Sermons and Treatises above all emphasizes that the ground of God and the ground of the soul are the same ground; therefore, it behooves the person to enter his or her soul through ascetic practices in order to facilitate union with God. Union with God, or “the birth of God in the soul,” requires utter disinterest, or detachment from things temporal. Thus, the highest goal of humanity is total stillness and silence, for God is utterly still and silent, and like attracts like. The way to utter disinterest through stillness and silence is the ascetic way: an embrace of suffering, such as keeping vigils and fasting. However, these practices must always be seen as helps to detachment and never as ends in themselves, lest they become mere “externals” that interfere with the quest for detachment as much as the very things they are intended to help the seeker overcome. Those seeking union with God must bear in mind that beneath literal statements Scripture is a hidden message, which is to be interpreted in the light of the superiority of spirit over matter and the interior life over the exterior life. Finally, the experience of God cannot last and must be sought again and again until one is united eternally with God in the hereafter.

Sources for Further Study

Clark, James M. The Great German Mystics. 1949. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1970. A basic introduction to the lives and thought of Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso.

Eckhart, Meister. The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense. Translated with an introduction by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn. New York: Paulist Press, 1981. An excellent, if brief, collection and translation of a wide variety of Eckhart’s Latin and German works, with a very good introduction.

McGinn, Bernard. The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, 1300-1500. New York: Crossroad, 2005. This overview of medieval German mysticism includes a chapter on Eckhart, “Meister Eckhart: Mystical Teacher and Preacher.” Bibliography, index.

Woods, Richard. Mysticism and Prophecy: The Dominican Tradition. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1998. Includes the chapter “Meister Eckhart’s Wayless Way and the Nothingness of God.” Bibliography.

Zagano, Phyllis, and Thomas C. McGonigle. The Dominican Tradition. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2006. Part of the publisher’s Spirituality in History series; includes a chapter on Meister Eckhart. Bibliography.