Meister Eckhart

The teaching

Taught from his German sermons, the Counsels on Discernment, On Detachment and the Book of Divine Consolation.

Let go of yourself

Eckhart's first counsel to the young friars is to look at oneself. Begin with yourself, he says, and let yourself go: wherever you find yourself, there let go of yourself. Whoever leaves his own will has left everything; whoever keeps it has left nothing, though he gave up all the riches and honours of the world.

And people should not think so much about what they ought to do as about what they are. If they are good, their works shine; holiness does not rest on doing but on being. The works do not make us holy; we make the works holy.

God in all things

The one who truly has God has him everywhere: in the street and among people as much as in church or in the cell, because he carries God with him in all he does. This is learned as writing is learned. At first the pupil must attend to every letter and keep it in mind; once the art is mastered, he writes freely without thinking of the letters, and the art works through him. So a person must be steeped in God until God shines in everything without effort.

For the same reason, love outranks rapture. If someone were caught up in a rapture like Saint Paul's and knew of a sick man who needed a little soup, it would be far better to come out of the rapture and serve him in love.

Detachment

His detachment and his birth of God in the soul stand among the other contemplatives on The Christian contemplatives; here they are as he unfolds them. On Detachment asks which virtue joins a person most closely to God, and answers: pure detachment, above love itself. Love makes me love God, but detachment makes God love me, for it is God's nature to fill what is empty, as nature cannot bear a void.

Detachment is a heart that stands unmoved by whatever befalls it, as a door swings to and fro on its hinge while the hinge stays where it is: the outer person may be busy and stirred while the inner person rests in God. The swiftest beast that carries a person to this perfection, he says, is suffering.

The birth of the Word in the soul

The Father speaks his Word eternally, and the same birth takes place in the ground of the soul. What good is it to me, he asks, that the Son was born of Mary long ago, if he is not born in me now, in my time and in my person? For this birth the soul must be still. The scripture says that while all things were in quiet silence, the almighty Word leaped down from heaven, and he reads it of the soul: its powers must be drawn in from the senses and from images, so that God can speak where nothing else speaks.

The ground

There is something in the soul, he preaches, so pure and so one that no time or flesh touches it: he calls it a spark, a little castle, a power, and at last simply the ground. There God's ground is the soul's ground and the soul's ground is God's ground. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one loving.

His Latin works say it in the language of the schools: being is God, and whatever is, is by God's being. A creature taken on its own is a pure nothing, and all it has it receives from God at every moment.

Without a why

Life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, without a why. If you asked life for a thousand years why it lives, it would answer only: I live because I live. So the just person works without why, not for a reward, not for heaven, not even for God as for a payment, but because the good is good. Some people, he warns, love God as they love a cow, for the milk and the cheese and their own profit.

The poor in spirit

The poor in spirit, in his most famous sermon, are those who want nothing, know nothing and have nothing. They do not even want to do God's will, because that too is a wanting of their own; they are as free of their own will as they were before they were. That is why he prays God to rid him of God: of every idea of God that stands between the soul and God himself.

Martha and Mary

He turns the old story of the two sisters round. Mary sits at the Lord's feet and listens, and is still learning; Martha has learned already, and works in the world from a ground so well grounded that her work does not hinder her. Christ names her twice, Martha, Martha, because she is complete in time and in eternity. The mature soul is not the one that keeps still, but the one that can act without being scattered.

Consolation

The Book of Divine Consolation teaches how to bear loss. The good person, insofar as he is good, is born of goodness, and goodness lives in him, so nothing that can be lost was ever truly his. If I suffer for God and in God, God suffers with me, and a suffering borne in him loses its bitterness, because it is his.

Whoever wants only what God wants has nothing to fear from any loss. What God wills, he wills too, and he would not have it otherwise.