Meister Eckhart spent his life inside the machinery of medieval theology—lecturing, preaching, governing as a Dominican—and the works gathered here show both sides of that life at once. The volume presents his German writings in full: ninety-seven numbered sermons and the four vernacular treatises (The Talks of Instruction, The Book of Divine Comfort, The Nobleman, and On Detachment), alongside the documents of his condemnation and the legends that grew up around him. These are not abstract speculations but talk addressed to listeners—nuns, beguines, laypeople, students—about the birth of God in the soul, the ground of the self, and the poverty of spirit. Eckhart lived roughly from 1260 to 1328, preached in Strasbourg and Cologne, and died under a cloud of heresy charges that outlived him.
“In the midst of silence, there was spoken within me a secret word.”
The Birth of the Son in the Soul
The Editorial Frame and Eckhart’s Two Voices
The volume opens by distinguishing two streams in Eckhart’s writing: the Latin works, which lay out his thought with analytic precision, and the German vernacular sermons and treatises, where the more personal, “mystical” reflection lives—on the poverty of spirit, the birth of Christ in the soul, and kindred themes. Maurice O’C. Walshe’s translation gives the complete vernacular corpus, re-edited with a foreword by Bernard McGinn, and the book presents itself as the authoritative record of Eckhart’s legacy to Western Christianity and to anyone hunting for truth. A quoted saying sets the tone: a secret word spoken within him “in the midst of silence,” in the soul’s purest and noblest part, its ground, its most secret essence. The biographical note places Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328) among Christianity’s greatest mystics—theologian, philosopher, seeker—immensely influential in his own day as both technical and popular writer and as a teacher. The volume reissues Walshe’s three-volume Sermons and Treatises and is dedicated to the memory of Josef Quint. Its contents run from a foreword and prefaces through ninety-seven numbered sermons (with an appendix on Eckhart the Scholastic) to the treatises—The Talks of Instruction, The Book of Divine Comfort, The Nobleman, On Detachment—a fragment of an unknown sermon, four Eckhart legends, “The Master’s Final Words,” a concordance, and a biblical index.
The “Liber Positionum” and the Condemned Articles
An editorial note dismantles Pfeiffer’s title “Liber Positionum”: the guess is baseless, a garbled echo of Eckhart’s Latin Opus propositionum, and the collection of problems and sayings Pfeiffer assembled has no real connection to Eckhart; most passages are of obscure provenance. Brief notes identify the Beguines—semireligious sisterhoods founded in the Netherlands in the twelfth century, later spread to Paris and the Rhineland—and the Friends of God, the Strassburg group founded by Rulman Merswin, inventor of the mysterious “Gottesfreund von Oberland” and producer of much submystical literature. Then comes the grim catalogue: the articles condemned in John XXII’s bull In agro dominico of March 27, 1329. They include the claims that God could not have created the world earlier, that the world may be eternal, that God’s glory is equally revealed in every act—even evil—so that the worse one sins the more one praises God; that whoever prays for this or that prays for something evil; that we are transformed into God as bread into Christ’s body, one without difference; that all Scripture says of Christ is true of every good man; that the just man is the only-begotten Son, begetting the eternal Word, and God could do nothing without him; that a good man should not wish to have committed no sins, and that this is true penitence; that God does not command external works; that every distinction is alien to God; that all creatures are pure nothing; that there is something in the soul uncreated and uncreatable—the intellect; and that calling God good is as false as calling white black. Of the articles, reduced from the hundred and more objected to at Cologne, the first fifteen were declared erroneous or tainted with heresy, as were the last two; the remaining eleven were judged to have a very bad sound and to be suspect of heresy, though capable of a Catholic sense with explanation.
The Eternal Birth in Time
Sermon One takes Wisdom 18:14—”while all things were in quiet silence and night was in the midst of her swift course”—as the occasion for celebrating the eternal birth the Father bears unceasingly in eternity and now bears in time, in human nature. Augustine’s question supplies the sermon’s hinge: what does it avail that this birth always happens, if it does not happen in me? That it happen in me is what matters.
The Virgin and the Wife
Sermon Eight presses further: the child must not only be born but brought to birth. Its text is Luke 10:38—Jesus received by a virgin who was a wife—and the preacher insists the receiver be virginal, void of alien images, as empty as before existence. A grown person full of images can still be virginal if he holds them without attachment, without before and after, free in the present Now. Yet virginity alone bears no fruit; to be fruitful the soul must be a wife, the nobler title. To receive God is good; for God to be fruitful in the soul is better, for only fruitfulness renders thanks, bearing Jesus again in the paternal heart. Gifts received in virginity and never reborn in wifely fruitfulness perish and profit nothing. The preacher likens the attached soul to married folk who bear one paltry fruit a year—those bound to set practices of prayer, fasting, and discipline, any attachment that denies freedom to wait on God in the here and now. The virgin who is a wife, free and unfettered, brings forth God Himself daily a hundred- and thousandfold from the ground where the Father ever begets His Word, radiant with him in one single unity.
The Citadel of the Soul
He recalls a power in the soul touching neither time nor flesh, where God is ever verdant and flowering, the Father begetting His Son without pause, this power jointly begetting with Him. A man who gave up a kingdom for God and suffered to his dying day would count it all nothing for one fleeting glimpse of how God is in this power, which is the eternal Now; were his spirit always united there he would not age, for the Now of the first man, the last man, and the speaker are one Now in God. Another power, immaterial, is where God burns and glows with all His riches and bliss; a single glimpse of that joy would make every suffering a trifle. The test: suffering for oneself hurts; suffering for God alone does not, for God bears the load. Returning to the text, he asks what the citadel is. He had called this free power the guardian of the spirit, a light, a little spark; now he says it is neither this nor that—a Something exalted above “this” and “that” more than heaven is above earth, free of all names, void of all forms, as one and simple as God, so that no man can glimpse it. In this power God ever blooms and the spirit is in God, giving birth with the Father to the same Son and to itself as that selfsame Son. So simple is this citadel that neither of the soul’s noble powers may cast a glance into it—nor even God Himself insofar as He exists in modes and the properties of His persons, for to look in He would have to leave all His divine names outside, entering only as the one indivisible Something, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, neither this nor that.
The Six Conditions and the Primacy of Intellect
Sermon Thirty sets out the soul’s approach to God without intermediary, and it demands six things: death to all that is unlike God, purification in light and grace, freedom from means, obedience to God’s word in the inmost part, subjection to the divine light, and a blessedness that lives according to the soul’s highest power, forever striving upward. Cephas means “head,” and the head of the soul is the intellect. Those who speak roughly give love precedence, but the more precise hold that the kernel of eternal life lies in understanding: love turns toward the beloved and takes what is good there, while intellect presses straight up and takes God as He is being. Honey is sweeter in itself than anything made from it. God’s own name is “He who is,” and when everything is peeled away until only a simple “is” remains, that is His name’s proper mark—the name given to Moses from the burning bush. The blessed sit at the table in the Father’s kingdom, receiving with the Son where the Son receives. The editorial notes identify the citations behind the sermon—Ennius through Augustine, Seneca, Democritus, Aristotle’s On the Soul, Jerome and Isidore on Cephas—and record the Dominican insistence on intellect against the Franciscan priority of will.
The Widow’s Oil and the Spark of the Soul
Sermon Thirty-One opens on the widow of 2 Kings 4, whose dead husband’s creditors have taken her two sons; the prophet bids her borrow empty vessels, pour out the oil, sell it, pay the debt, and live on what remains. The spark of intellect is the soul’s husband, a tiny spark of the divine nature, a ray and imprint of God. God’s first gift is the Holy Ghost, containing all gifts—living water welling up into eternity. The Samaritan woman’s five husbands are the five senses, Augustine says, and the one she has now is the intellect she does not obey. When God departs, the pain is immeasurable, for as the soul gives life to the body, God gives life to the soul. The servant is one who receives and keeps for his lord; to keep for himself would make him a thief. Intellect is more truly servant than will, for will and love fall on God as good and would ignore Him if He were not good, while intellect penetrates to the essence, taking God as pure being even if He were not wise or just. Intellect resembles the highest choirs: the Thrones where God rests, the Cherubim who know and persist, the Seraphim who burn. The two sons are read as the soul’s two faces—one toward the world, one turned directly to God—and as understanding and will, potentiality and actuality. The birth of the Son happens not once a year or a day but all the time, above time, which is why the child is called son and not daughter. Angels see into God’s justice and accept all things therein, so they cannot be sad at sin.
The Just Man Who Acts Without Why
Sermon Forty-Three presses the claim that the just man needs justice so much he could love nothing else; were God not just, he would care nothing for God. He loves nothing “this and that” in God and acts without why, as God acts and as life lives for its own sake. The hungry and thirsty after justice are never satiated—the more they have, the more they want—and those hungry for God’s will are so pleased by whatever He sends, sickness or poverty, that they would not wish to be let off. If it were not God’s will for an instant, it would not be. Whoever wants anything other than God’s will sells God like Judas. Origen is cited: we are born anew in God in every good thought and work. The Father has only one Son, and the less we look outward, the more the Son is born in us. God wishes to be alone, keeping the root of all satisfaction in Himself. Augustine’s “I have poured out my soul over myself” is preferred to the prophet’s “within myself.”
Following Christ and the Cheap Price of Heaven
Sermon Forty-Four takes John 12:24 and asks three things: that we follow and serve Christ, leaving whatever holds us back; that we serve seeking only God’s honor; and that our reward is dwelling where Christ is. Dionysius says God offers heaven cheaply—the price is one’s own will. A pupil taught by a master saw material things as a little ship on the sea and a bird in the air; a dying man would refuse food unless God’s likeness were in it. The soul united to God forgets herself and knows herself divinely, as white and black or something and nothing illustrate. Adam’s expulsion from paradise, guarded by an angel and a flaming sword, denotes return through the angelic nature and through works of fiery love.
Rest as the Goal of Every Creature
Sermon Forty-Five frames Sirach 24 as a conversation between Eternal Wisdom and the soul, and four questions—what Creator, Trinity, soul, and creatures seek—all answer: rest. The Father seeks rest in the Son, both in the Holy Ghost; the soul seeks rest in all her powers; every human action rejects a hindrance or draws in something to rest on. Nothing resembles God so much as rest. Anselm advises withdrawing from outward tumult and offering God rest as the most precious gift, for God cannot work where measure rules. Love, the highest power, breaks into God and unites the soul. A candle flame burns brighter away from the wick; writing on a mountain two leagues high stands untouched by wind and rain.
Humility, Self-Knowledge, and the Divine Mist
Sermon Forty-Six reads John 17:3 and notes that Christ raised his eyes from below, teaching descent in humility before ascent. God works most in a humble heart, as heaven’s power works best in earth. One must know oneself before knowing God, bearing what comes by grace into God’s goodness and one’s defects into His mercy. Creatures are bait for sun and stars; the divine mist draws the soul and makes her godlike, as water in a vessel over wine takes the wine’s color. Two manuscript versions run in parallel on heaven forming a tabernacle in earth. “Thee alone” means the soul should taste only God, and “true God” denotes essence, since whatever can be put into words encloses God.
Becoming the Only Son
Sermon Forty-Seven continues on the same text: no one knows the Father except the Son, so to know God one must be, with Christ, the only Son. The eternal Word took on one free, indivisible, imageless human nature, so that it is as true to say man became God as God became man. One must discard whatever makes for distinction, including “not,” for a power in the soul is immune from “not.” The one Son has what he has of his own, not on loan; works moved from without are dead works. Loving justice as toward oneself is loving it divided.
One With God, Not Merely United
The sermon opens on the soul’s union with God, and Eckhart sharpens the claim past mere joining. Water in a tub clings to the wood but never becomes the wood—where one is, the other is not, and even a plank sunk in midstream stays only united. The soul is otherwise: she becomes one with God, so that where God is, there the soul is, and where the soul is, there God is. Scripture says Moses saw God face to face, but the masters deny it, since where two faces appear God is not seen; God is one and not two, and whoever sees God sees nothing but one. Taking up the text of his earlier sermon—God is Love, and he who dwells in love dwells in God—he addresses the one so dwelling with the words of the faithful servant entering into his Lord’s joy, and reads the promise of being set over all goods in three ways: over goods scattered among creatures, over them summed up in one, and finally set into the very source of unity, where the word “united” itself falls away. There God is to the soul as though the reason for His being God were to be hers; withhold a hair’s breadth of His being and He would not be God. Citing the prayer that they may be one as He and the Father are one, he concludes the soul will become one being, which is God, and no less, as true as that God is God. Then he begs his hearers not to suppose that freedom from forms makes forms better than abiding in unity—that would be wrong, and might be called heresy, for in the unity there is neither Conrad nor Henry. He would forget himself and everyone and merge himself in unity for them, praying they may abide there. Amen.
The Widow’s Dead Son
The next sermon takes the Gospel of the widow’s only son, whom Christ raises with the words, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” The widow is the soul; her husband dead, her son is dead too. The son is the intellect, which is the man in the soul—because she did not live in the intellect, the man was dead and she was a widow. To the woman at the well our Lord said, “Go home and bring me your husband,” meaning that because she did not live in the intellect she was not granted the living water, which is the Holy Ghost, given only to those who dwell there. Intellect is the soul’s highest part, where she keeps company with the angels in angelic nature, which touches no time—nor does the intellect, free of time. If the man does not live there, the son dies. Why a widow? No creature lives without some good and some shortcoming that leads it away from God; the widow’s lack was that her fruitfulness was dead, and so the fruit perished. In another sense a widow is one abandoned and abandoning: we must leave and forsake all creatures. The barren woman, says the prophet, has more children than the fruitful.
The Word’s Third Dignity
A sermon on the eternal Word closes by naming its third dignity from its eternal birth: equality with the Father, since it springs from the Father’s essential mind. Cleaving to that mind it is divine nature; turning toward the Word it is distinct in Person while remaining one simple essence—a distinction the unity and simplicity of that nature alone answers. The sermon ends in a prayer for oneness. The editorial notes record that this sermon is absent from the chief manuscripts, amended from Pfeiffer after Quint, and possibly the work of a pupil; they also gloss Arius, who denied the Son’s consubstantiality, held Christ half God and half man, drew followers including Wulfila, translator of the Gothic Bible, and was condemned at Nicaea and Constantinople.
Creaturely Comfort and the Hidden God
On Isaiah and John, a sermon holds that at the least good deed, will, or desire all saints and angels rejoice beyond all worldly joy—the higher each, the greater the joy, yet all together are as a lentil beside God’s joy, for God laughs at good deeds while works not done to His glory are ashes. The poor are left to God alone; a man owns a rich kinsman but dismisses the poor with “God protect you.” “I am” touches essence: all creatures can say “I,” but “sum” belongs to God alone, one thing containing all goodness. No creature satisfies wholly—bread comforts the hungry but not the thirsty; all have bitterness with some consolation, while the honeycomb of all creaturely goodness lies altogether in God. His comfort is pure, unmixed, complete; God is so besotted in love He seems to forget heaven and earth. The soul has three powers seeking the sweetest and best, and all creatures’ life depends on seeking God. God is hidden, yet has revealed His presence.
Likeness, Timelessness, and the Nameless Ground
On putting off self and putting on Christ, a sermon teaches that God made the soul like Himself—His nature, essence, and the ground where He bears His only-begotten Son. What is above flows down; God pours into the soul continually, and she receives as light from light, without difference or distance. There is something in the soul where God is bare and nameless, where He has always been; union there requires no grace, since grace is created. Human nature has nothing to do with time; God took on bare human nature, not any particular man, and Eckhart said in Paris that all scripture says of Christ is fulfilled in the righteous man. “Fullness of time” means either that all time drops away or eternity with no before and after. Another sermon, on prophets silenced, gives three reasons for their silence: the good seen was too vast to conceive, no image could express it, no words capture it. “Aliquando” implies time, which opposes God; even a smell of time must go, and the soul’s highest part has no truck with it. In the eternal birth the soul is poured forth and the Godhead’s image imprinted. The masters debated whether God’s image is like paint on a wall—refuted—or permanent; a fifth said there is one Now, becoming without becoming. Eckhart breaks off, leaving four things unspoken.
God Beyond Name and Mode
On the rich man and Lazarus, “man” denotes a rational entity, and by “man” scripture means God. God has no name; all names come from the soul’s understanding. He is superessential, superrational, beyond comprehension, without cause, mode, or activity. His riches are fivefold: first cause, one in essence, fountainhead, unchangeable, perfect. Bishop Albrecht is cited on simplicity and on God flowing into things with being, life, and light. The soul imbibing God becomes divine, but God does not become the soul; the will a man dies in he abides in eternally. On the Sermon on the Mount, whoever would take in God’s instruction must transcend scattered things and thought itself. Augustine’s three kinds of knowing are bodily, mental with images, and interior without image, resembling the angels.
The Ground of the Soul and the God Beyond God
Running through every sermon is a single conviction about where God is to be found: not in images, not in practices, not even in the concept of “God,” but in the naked ground of the soul. Eckhart calls it a spark, a little citadel, a something that is neither this nor that—so simple and free that God Himself, insofar as He wears the names and properties of the Trinity, must leave them at the door to enter it. The soul’s highest power, the intellect, takes God bare, stripped of the garment of goodness; the will, nobler in some accounts, grasps Him only under that cloak. This is why Eckhart insists that calling God “good” is as false as calling white black: goodness is a cloak, and the intellect draws it off.
The corollary is severe. If God is one, then whoever sees two does not see God; every distinction is alien to Him. The just man is so conformed to justice that he loves nothing “this and that” in God, acts “without why,” as God acts. All creatures, in themselves, are pure nothing; the soul that would receive God must be as empty as before it existed, virgin and free. And yet virginity alone bears no fruit—the soul must become a wife, letting God be fruitful in her, bearing the Son back into the Father’s heart in thanks. This is the paradox Eckhart returns to constantly: emptiness and fruitfulness are not opposites but two moments of one life.
Why the Church Condemned Him
The bull In agro dominico, issued by John XXII in 1329, lists the propositions that got Eckhart into trouble, and reading them alongside the sermons shows how easily his paradoxes could be heard as heresy. That God is equally glorified in every act, even evil; that whoever blasphemes praises God; that the good man is the only-begotten Son, begotten as the same Son without distinction; that all creatures are pure nothing; that there is something in the soul uncreated and uncreatable; that God is neither good nor better nor best. Of the articles drawn from his Cologne trial, fifteen were declared erroneous or heretical, eleven more suspect, and two—the ones about God’s will and the desire not to have sinned—condemned outright. Eckhart submitted, distinguishing his meaning from the condemned sense, but the machinery had done its work.
What the condemnation reveals is the risk built into his method. Eckhart pushes every formulation to its limit and then past it, insisting that whatever can be put into words already encloses God. The soul is not merely united to God but one with Him—where God is, there the soul is—and in that unity there is neither Conrad nor Henry, no names, no forms, no distinction. To the institutional mind this sounds like the dissolution of everything the Church exists to guard. To Eckhart it was simply the truth of what happens when a person lets go of self.
The Legacy of a Dangerous Teacher
Eckhart’s influence outlived the bull. His students and successors carried his vocabulary of the ground, the spark, and the birth of God into the mystical tradition of the Rhineland and beyond, and the volume’s editorial apparatus—the legends of his life, “The Master’s Final Words,” the concordance of his Latin and German works—testifies to how thoroughly he was remembered as a teacher. The sermons themselves are the record of that teaching: a collatio on letting oneself be advised and regarding only God, a discourse on the good and faithful servant, a meditation on the widow’s son who is the intellect, dead until the soul lives in it. Bernard McGinn’s foreword and Maurice Walshe’s translation place these texts before English readers as what they are—not system but speech, the record of a man thinking aloud in front of people who wanted to know how to be poor in spirit.
The final impression is of a thinker who trusted experience over formulation. A single glimpse of how God is in the soul’s highest power, he says, would make all suffering and poverty insignificant; the Now of the first man and the last man and the speaker are one Now in God. Whether that is mysticism or heresy depends on who is reading, and the book lets both verdicts stand side by side.
