Meister Eckhart

Eckhart of Hochheim, OP

Most religion tells you to climb toward a God who is high above you. Meister Eckhart, a Dominican preaching in plain German to crowds of nuns and ordinary people seven hundred years ago, taught something far more dangerous: that you do not have to climb at all, because at the very bottom of yourself there is already something that was never separate from God. He called it the ground of the soul, or the spark, and he said the most shocking thing a medieval Christian could say about it, that it is uncreated. There is a point in you, deeper than your thoughts, deeper than your will, deeper even than your sense of being a self, where you and God are not two things but one, and where the gap between creature and creator simply does not exist. The whole spiritual life, for Eckhart, is therefore not a matter of acquiring anything or rising anywhere. It is a matter of getting out of the way, of letting fall everything you cling to, until the divine ground that was there all along can come to light.

Letting everything go. The discipline Eckhart preaches has a name that became one of the most important words in German thought: Abgeschiedenheit, detachment, or as the word can also be rendered, releasement, a letting-be. And he ranks it, startlingly, above everything else: higher than love, higher than humility, higher than charity. To reach the ground, the soul must empty itself, not only of possessions and pleasures but of all its images, all the pictures and concepts it uses to grip the world, and finally of its own restless will, its endless wanting-this and avoiding-that. The empty soul, Eckhart says, is the only place God can fully enter, because as long as you are stuffed full of yourself and your things there is no room left for him; detachment, he writes, almost compels God to come. This is not the passivity it can sound like. Emptying yourself of everything you have spent a life accumulating, including the running commentary of your own ego, is among the hardest things a person can attempt, and Eckhart treats it as the central labor of a human life: the patient, deliberate releasing of your grip, finger by finger, on everything that is not the ground.

The God beyond God. Eckhart pushes the emptying to a point that still takes the breath away: you must let go even of your idea of God. He draws a daring distinction between "God," the God of the three persons whom we name and picture and pray to, and what he calls the "Godhead," a silent, imageless abyss, a "desert" in which there is no distinction at all, no this or that, no name, the ground beyond being itself. "God," for Eckhart, is in a sense how the ultimate appears to creatures; the Godhead is what it is in itself, past every concept the mind can form. And it is this nameless ground that answers to the uncreated ground in the soul, like calling to like. So Eckhart can voice the most outrageous-sounding prayer in Christian literature: "I pray God," he said from the pulpit, "to rid me of God." He means: free me even of my image of God, my manageable, mind-made deity, so that I can sink into the real and unnamable ground that lies past all of it. He is the boldest voice in the long Western tradition, running back through Maimonides and Plotinus, that insists the ultimate reality is beyond everything we can say or think, and that the highest knowing is a kind of luminous unknowing.

God born in you. Empty the soul, and something happens in the space that opens, which Eckhart describes in his boldest image of all. In the eternal life of the Trinity, the Father is forever giving birth to the Son. And that same birth, Eckhart insists, happens in you, in the ground of your soul, right now: God is eternally being born in the empty soul, and the entire point of the spiritual life is to become the place where that birth occurs. Not to imitate Christ from the outside, but to become, by grace, what Christ is by nature, a place where the divine enters the world. It was this, the apparent collapse of the distance between the believer and God, between the creature and Christ, that alarmed the authorities; phrases like "the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me" sounded, to nervous ears, like a man erasing the line between himself and the divine altogether. Eckhart insisted he meant something subtler and entirely orthodox. But there is no mistaking the audacity of the vision: that the deepest event in the universe, God giving birth to God, is not occurring far away in heaven but in the silent ground of an ordinary human soul that has learned to get out of its own way.

Without why. Out of all this comes the most beautiful and the most practical of Eckhart's teachings, and the one that travels furthest from its theology. The soul that has reached the ground, he says, acts "without why." We are used to doing everything for the sake of something else: we work for money, are kind for gratitude, seek even God for the reward of heaven. Eckhart calls all of this a subtle form of self-seeking, a bargaining, and he says the truly free soul has left it behind. It does good not in order to get anything, not even salvation, but simply because that is what a good soul does, the way, in the image his tradition gave us, a rose blooms without why, because it blooms. Ask a genuine person who acts from their own ground why they do what they do, Eckhart says, and the only true answer would be: I do it because I do it. To live without why is to stop using the present moment as a means to some future payoff, to stop turning every act into a transaction, and to do what is good for its own sake, fully present, expecting nothing in return. It is one of the deepest ideals of the inner life ever stated, and you do not have to share a word of Eckhart's metaphysics to notice that the freest and most generous people you have ever met are precisely the ones who somehow live this way.

The fire they could not put out. The room reads Eckhart in an old translation of his German sermons, cited by number; they are short, electric, and deliberately startling, built to jolt a listener out of lazy belief into a sudden deeper seeing, so they reward being read slowly and even aloud. The Church put twenty-eight of his statements on trial and condemned them, unable to tell his vertiginous talk of union from heresy. But you cannot condemn a fire out of existence once it has caught, and Eckhart's had caught everywhere. His pupils carried his teaching through the Rhineland; Nicholas of Cusa collected and cited his works; Luther loved a little book that came straight out of his school. Centuries later Hegel read him and declared that in Eckhart the philosophical core of religion had been reached; Schopenhauer found in his renunciation of the will a Western echo of the wisdom of India; Heidegger took his word for letting-be, Gelassenheit, and made it central to his own late thought; and modern teachers of Zen recognized in his empty, imageless ground a near-twin of the Buddhist emptiness. A condemned medieval friar turned out to be one of the most quietly influential minds in the history of Western thought.

It is easy to file Eckhart under mysticism and set him aside as too rarefied for ordinary use. That would be a real loss, because underneath the vertiginous theology lies a teaching anyone can test. Eckhart's whole message is that what you are most desperately seeking is not somewhere else, to be acquired by effort, but already present in the one place you never think to look, the silent ground beneath your own restless wanting; and that the way to it is not to grab harder but to let go, to loosen your grip on your possessions, your self-image, your anxious bargaining with the future, even your most cherished pictures of the truth, until what was there all along can finally show itself. In an age that runs on acquisition, on more, on optimizing every act toward some payoff, the old Dominican stands as a permanent dissent, insisting that the deepest things come not by getting but by letting go, and that the freest way to act is for no reason at all beyond the act's own goodness, blooming, like the rose, without why.