Meister Eckhart — Selected Sermons
c. 1290–1327 CE · Medieval Christianity (late 13th – early 14th century CE) · Rhineland (present-day Germany) — Cologne, Strasbourg, Erfurt
The Spark of the Soul
The Eye With Which I See God
On Detachment
The Poverty of Which Christ Speaks
The Birth of the Word in the Soul
Nothing Is So Like God as Silence
Now — the Fullness of Time
The Great Mystery
notes
Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim, c. 1260–1328) was a German Dominican theologian, philosopher, and mystic — Provincial of the Dominicans in Saxony, professor at the University of Paris, and prior in Erfurt and Strasbourg. He is now regarded as one of the greatest Christian mystics and one of the most philosophically ambitious of medieval thinkers, but in his own time he ended in disgrace: the Archbishop of Cologne accused him of heresy, and after his death (before the Papal court could rule on the appeal) Pope John XXII condemned twenty-eight propositions from his writings in the bull In agro dominico (1329). The condemnation drove Eckhart's German sermons underground, preserved in scattered manuscripts. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries was he restored to central importance in Christian and world spirituality. His doctrine of the "spark" (funklein) of the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable, at one with the divine ground; the "birth of the Word" in the soul; radical detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) as the highest virtue; and the "poverty of spirit" that wills nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing — these have made him a touchstone for later German idealism (Hegel, Schelling), for the modern rediscovery of Christian contemplative traditions, and for East-West dialogue. D.T. Suzuki, the great expositor of Zen to the West, wrote that Eckhart's teachings could be read as Zen; Thomas Merton, Rudolf Otto, Karl Rahner, and many others have drawn on him deeply. Translation: C. de B. Evans, "Meister Eckhart, by Franz Pfeiffer," London: John M. Watkins, 1924. Public domain.
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