Context and Authorship
On Humility (Sur l’humilité) is a short German sermon by Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328), the Dominican friar, theologian, and mystic. The French title reflects its later rendering into French, and the work is generally known in English under the title given here. Eckhart is one of the central figures of late medieval German mysticism, and his preaching in the vernacular, addressed to both religious and lay audiences, is distinctive for the boldness of its language and its insistence that the divine birth takes place in the human soul. The sermon belongs to the body of his German sermons, which were delivered in the Rhineland and survive in a number of manuscripts compiled after his death, and it is best read in that setting: as an address meant to move the listener toward an inner transformation rather than as a systematic treatise.
The Central Thesis
The sermon’s argument turns on a paradox that runs through much of Eckhart’s thought: humility is not primarily a virtue practiced by the self, but a condition in which the self has been emptied so that God alone can act within it. Eckhart’s humility is therefore not the cultivation of a modest self-image or the performance of self-abasement. It is a radical renunciation of selfhood, a letting-go that opens the soul to what lies beyond it. The emptiness required is not a feeling of unworthiness but a state of having nothing of one’s own to rely upon, including one’s achievements, one’s virtues, and even one’s sense of spiritual progress.
Eckhart presents this through a logic of depth. The more the soul descends into its own lowliness, the more it becomes a receptacle for the divine. Humility, understood this way, is the ground on which the other virtues stand and the precondition for the indwelling of God. Where pride locates the self at the center, humility dislodges it, and in that dislodging the soul discovers that its true ground is the divine ground.
How the Argument Is Built
The sermon proceeds less through discrete sections than through a sustained movement of thought, returning again and again to its central image of emptiness and receptivity. Eckhart begins from the scriptural and traditional sense that God looks upon the humble and that the lowly are exalted, but he quickly moves beyond a moralizing reading of these commonplaces. For him the point is metaphysical as well as ethical: God’s regard for the humble reflects a structural fact about how the divine works in creatures. Because God is not a being among beings but the ground of being, God cannot enter a soul that is already filled with itself.
From this starting point the preacher develops the idea that the soul must be brought down to nothing, or to the state he elsewhere calls the “poverty” of the spirit. This poverty is not deprivation for its own sake but a clearing. Eckhart uses the figure of a vessel to make the point: a container can receive only what it does not already hold. A soul crowded with its own concerns, desires, and self-regard has no room for the divine, however earnestly it may seek God. The humble soul, by contrast, has relinquished what it possessed and so stands open.
Eckhart is careful to distinguish genuine humility from its counterfeits. A person may appear humble while secretly deriving satisfaction from the appearance, or may practice outward self-deprecation in order to be praised for it. Such humility is itself a subtle form of pride. True humility is not aware of itself as humility and does not measure its own progress, because the moment the soul observes its own lowliness it has reinstated the self as the object of attention. This insight gives the sermon much of its interior tension: the soul must forget even its own humility.
Key Ideas and Images
Several recurring ideas give the sermon its texture. The first is the notion of detachment, which Eckhart treats as closely related to humility. To be detached is to be without attachment to creatures, to one’s own will, and to the particular goods one might otherwise cling to. Detachment and humility reinforce each other, since both involve the surrender of the self’s claims.
A second central idea is the birth of God in the soul. Eckhart holds that the eternal Word is continually generated in the soul that has become empty and receptive, and that this generation is the true substance of the spiritual life. Humility is what makes room for this birth, because the lowly soul is the only place where it can occur. The divine does not arrive from outside as an addition to an already complete self; it rises within a self that has been made low enough to be its ground.
A third strand concerns the relation between the soul’s lowliness and the divine height. Eckhart uses the language of descent and ascent, but he inverts the usual sense of spiritual climbing. The soul ascends by going down, and the lowest point is where it touches the depth of God. This reversal is among the most characteristic features of his preaching, and in this sermon it serves to explain why humility is the surest path to union.
Method and Tone
The sermon is addressed directly to the listener, with Eckhart speaking in a voice that is by turns exhortative, paradoxical, and intimate. He does not offer a list of rules for becoming humble. Instead he shifts the listener’s point of view, asking them to consider the nature of the self, the nature of God, and the relation between them, and to see how these fit together when rightly understood. The style is dense with scriptural reference and with the terminology of the schools, but Eckhart translates these resources into the language of the vernacular so that his hearers can follow the reasoning and feel its force.
The tone is confident but not comfortable. Eckhart does not console the listener with reassurance; he unsettles them, pressing toward the recognition that the self they most value is the chief obstacle to what they seek. The sermon thus works as spiritual instruction in the strict sense: it aims to change how the hearer stands before God, not merely to inform them about doctrine.
Conclusion
The sermon closes by bringing its arguments back to the figure of the emptied soul open to the divine birth. Humility, in the end, is revealed as the condition of possibility for everything else in the spiritual life: for virtue, for knowledge of God, and for union with the ground of being. The soul that has become nothing in itself is the soul in which God becomes everything, and Eckhart leaves the listener with the paradox that losing oneself in humility is the only way to find the truth of who one is.
Significance and Influence
On Humility exemplifies the qualities for which Eckhart’s German sermons are most admired: their philosophical depth, their pastoral urgency, and their willingness to press Christian teaching to the edge of paradox. Eckhart’s work was later examined by ecclesiastical authorities, and several propositions drawn from his writings were condemned after his death, yet his sermons continued to be copied, read, and treasured by readers seeking a rigorous and intimate account of the soul’s relation to God. The theme of humility as self-emptying, which this sermon develops with particular clarity, has been influential in the subsequent history of Christian mysticism and continues to attract readers interested in the meeting point of ethics, metaphysics, and spiritual practice.
