The collected writings of the medieval German preacher and theologian whose vernacular mysticism reshaped Christian thought
What the Work Is
Werke is a German-language collection of the writings of Meister Eckhart, the Dominican priest, theologian, and mystic of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The collection gathers his German sermons and treatises, the works for which he is best remembered. The catalogued first publication of this collection dates to 1938, though Eckhart’s writings themselves circulated in manuscript form from the early fourteenth century onward.
Eckhart was born around 1260 near Gotha in Thuringia and joined the Dominican Order at Erfurt around 1278. He studied and taught at Paris, served as Dominican provincial superior for Saxony, and spent time in Strasbourg and Cologne. His career unfolded during the Avignon Papacy, a period of heightened tension among monastic orders and growing inquisitorial scrutiny of mystical and lay religious movements.
What the Book Is About
The writings collected in Werke present Eckhart’s distinctive vision of the relationship between God, the soul, and being itself. Although he was an accomplished academic theologian trained in medieval scholasticism, Eckhart’s most influential works are his sermons delivered in vernacular German rather than Latin. These sermons were addressed to monks, nuns under his jurisdiction, and pious lay groups, offering practical guidance on spiritual transformation rather than abstract theological speculation.
The central theme running through Eckhart’s German sermons is the presence of God in the individual soul and the dignity of the soul of the just person. In one sermon, Eckhart summarized his message as concerning four things: detachment, the emptying of the self so that one may be reconstructed in the simple good that God is, the great nobility God has established in the soul through which a person may attain to God, and the purity of the divine nature. This focus on interior transformation and the direct presence of the divine in the soul gives his preaching its characteristic intensity and explains both its appeal and its controversial reception.
Key Ideas and Themes
Eckhart’s theology centers on the fecundity of God—the idea that God, out of an overabundance of love, gives birth to the Son, the Word, in all souls. This notion draws on Neoplatonic ideas about the One that cannot contain its abundance of Being, though Eckhart framed creation not as a necessary overflow but as the free act of will of the triune God.
One of Eckhart’s most distinctive teachings is his distinction between God and the Godhead. Using the German term Gottheit (Godhood or Godhead), he distinguished between God as manifest and nameable and the Godhead as the unmanifest, absolute ground beyond all names and categories. This distinction had roots in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and John the Scot, but Eckhart developed it with characteristic boldness into a profound polarity between the Unmanifest and the Manifest Absolute.
Eckhart also taught that God does not destroy anything that has being but perfects all things—a position that has led some scholars to conclude he may have held to some form of universal salvation.
His approach to the contemplative life emphasized detachment and the emptying of the self. According to Reiner Schürmann, four stages can be discerned in Eckhart’s understanding of mystical development: dissimilarity, similarity, identity, and breakthrough. Unlike some medieval spiritual writers, Eckhart did not leave a systematic guide to the spiritual life; his ideas on contemplation must be gathered from his short treatises on suffering and detachment and from his sermons.
Structure and Approach
The works collected in Werke consist primarily of Eckhart’s German sermons and treatises. His sermons are notable for their unusual language and their willingness to push at the boundaries of orthodox expression—a quality that made them suspect to church authorities during the tense years of the Avignon Papacy but also gave them their enduring power.
Eckhart’s method was shaped by his training in medieval scholasticism and his familiarity with Aristotelianism, Augustinianism, and especially the Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dionysius. Yet his vernacular preaching translated these learned influences into direct, vivid German addressed to audiences that included nuns and laypeople. He frequently used striking metaphors and paradoxical formulations, aiming to inspire in his listeners the desire above all to do good.
Significance and Influence
Eckhart was one of the most influential Christian Neoplatonists of his day and remained widely read in the later Middle Ages. His work was not forgotten after his death, as some early twentieth-century writers believed. A manuscript discovered in 1960 containing six hundred excerpts from Eckhart, with notations from the papal bull condemning his writings inserted into the text, demonstrates that Dominicans and Carthusians continued to read him. Nicholas of Cusa, Archbishop of Cologne in the 1430s and 1440s, engaged in extensive study of Eckhart and assembled an annotated collection of his Latin works.
Eckhart’s followers in the lay group known as the Friends of God carried on his ideas across the region, under the leadership of priests such as John Tauler and Henry Suso. His practical communication of the mystical path is also thought to lie behind the influential fourteenth-century Theologia Germanica, an anonymous work that influenced Martin Luther and was viewed by some historians as pivotal in provoking the Protestant Reformation.
Eckhart was largely forgotten from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, apart from occasional interest from figures such as Angelus Silesius. Interest revived in the early nineteenth century, especially among German Romantics and Idealist philosophers. Franz Pfeiffer’s 1857 publication of Eckhart’s German sermons and treatises greatly increased attention to his work, and Henry Denifle recovered his Latin writings from 1886 onward.
In the modern era, Eckhart has attracted interest from philosophers, theologians, and spiritual seekers. Martin Heidegger developed his concept of Gelassenheit (releasement) from Eckhart’s thought. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida distinguished Eckhart’s negative theology from his own concept of différance. Matthew Fox drew on Eckhart for his movement of Creation Spirituality. Eckhart’s famous formulation that the eye with which one sees God is the same eye with which God sees oneself has been cited by thinkers across religious traditions as a point of contact between Christian mysticism and other spiritual paths.
Scholars have debated whether Eckhart should be called a “mystic” at all. Some, like Kurt Flasch, argue for understanding him strictly as a philosopher, while others, like Clint Johnson, argue on the basis of Eckhart’s appeals to experience that he is a mystic in the tradition of Augustine and Dionysius. What remains undisputed is the depth and originality of his writings and their continuing capacity to provoke reflection on the nature of God, the soul, and the possibility of direct encounter with the divine.
In late 1323 or early 1324, Eckhart left Strasbourg for the Dominican house at Cologne. It is not clear exactly what he did there, though part of his time may have been spent teaching at the prestigious Studium in the city. He continued to preach during a time of disarray among the clergy and monastic orders, rapid growth of pious lay groups, and the Inquisition’s continuing concerns over heretical movements throughout Europe.
Some Dominican authorities already appear to have had concerns about his teaching. The Dominican General Chapter held in Venice in the spring of 1325 spoke out against “friars in Teutonia who say things in their sermons that can easily lead simple and uneducated people into error.” This concern, or perhaps concerns held by the archbishop of Cologne, Henry of Virneburg, may have been why Nicholas of Strasburg, to whom the Pope had given temporary charge of the Dominican convents in Germany in 1325, conducted an investigation into Eckhart’s orthodoxy. Nicholas presented a list of suspect passages from the Book of Consolation to Eckhart, who responded sometime between August 1325 and January 1326 with the treatise Requisitus, now lost, which convinced his immediate superiors of his orthodoxy. Despite this assurance, the archbishop in 1326 ordered an inquisitorial trial. Eckhart then issued a Vindicatory Document, providing chapter and verse of what he had been taught.
Throughout the difficult months of late 1326, Eckhart had the full support of the local Dominican authorities, as evident in Nicholas of Strasbourg’s three official protests against the actions of the inquisitors in January 1327. On 13 February 1327, before the archbishop’s inquisitors pronounced their sentence, Eckhart preached a sermon in the Dominican church at Cologne and then had his secretary read out a public protestation of his innocence. He stated that he had always detested everything wrong and that, should anything of the kind be found in his writings, he now retracted it. Eckhart himself translated the text into German so that his vernacular audience could understand it. The verdict then seems to have gone against him. Eckhart denied competence and authority to the inquisitors and the archbishop, appealed to the Pope, and in the spring of 1327 set off for Avignon.
In Avignon, Pope John XXII seems to have set up two tribunals to inquire into the case, one of theologians and the other of cardinals. Evidence of this process is thin, but it is known that the commissions reduced the 150 suspect articles down to 28; the document known as the Votum Avenionense gives, in scholastic fashion, the twenty-eight articles, Eckhart’s defence of each, and the rebuttal of the commissioners. On 30 April 1328, the pope wrote to Archbishop Henry of Virneburg that the case was moving ahead, but added that Eckhart had already died; modern scholarship suggests he may have died on 28 January 1328. The papal commission eventually confirmed, albeit in modified form, the decision of the Cologne commission against him.
Pope John XXII issued the bull In agro dominico on 27 March 1329, in which a series of statements from Eckhart is characterized as heretical and another as suspected of heresy. At the close, it is stated that Eckhart recanted before his death everything which he had falsely taught, subjecting himself and his writing to the decision of the Apostolic see. It is possible that the Pope’s unusual decision to issue the bull, despite Eckhart’s death and the fact that Eckhart was not being personally condemned as a heretic, was due to the pope’s fear of the growing problem of mystical heresy and pressure from his ally Henry of Virneburg to bring the case to a definite conclusion.
Rehabilitation
Eckhart’s status in the contemporary Catholic Church has been uncertain. The Dominican Order pressed in the last decade of the 20th century for his full rehabilitation and confirmation of his theological orthodoxy. Pope John Paul II voiced a favorable opinion on this initiative, even quoting from Eckhart’s writings, but the outcome was confined to the corridors of the Vatican. In 2010, it was revealed that there had been a response from the Vatican in a letter dated 1992. Timothy Radcliffe, then Master of the Dominicans and recipient of the letter, summarized its contents: “We tried to have the censure lifted on Eckhart … and were told that there was really no need since he had never been condemned by name, just some propositions which he was supposed to have held, and so we are perfectly free to say that he is a good and orthodox theologian.” Winfried Trusen of Würzburg, a correspondent of Radcliffe, wrote in a defence of Eckhart to Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) that only 28 propositions were censured, but they were taken out of their context and impossible to verify, since there were no manuscripts in Avignon.
Attribution of Works
Since the mid-nineteenth century scholars have questioned which of the many pieces attributed to Eckhart should be considered genuine, and whether greater weight should be given to works written in the vernacular or in Latin. Although the vernacular works survive today in over 200 manuscripts, the Latin writings are found only in a handful of manuscripts. Denifle and others proposed that the Latin treatises, which Eckhart prepared for publication very carefully, were essential to a full understanding of Eckhart. In 1923, Eckhart’s Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (also known as the Rechtsfertigung, or “vindicatory document”) was re-published. The Defense recorded Eckhart’s responses against two of the inquisitional proceedings brought against him at Cologne and details of the circumstances of his trial. The excerpts in the Defense from vernacular sermons and treatises described by Eckhart as his own served to authenticate a number of the vernacular works. Although questions remain about the authenticity of some vernacular works, there is no dispute about the genuine character of the Latin texts presented in the critical edition.
Further Debates on Eckhart as a Mystic
Since the 1960s scholars have debated whether Eckhart should be called a “mystic.” The philosopher Karl Albert had already argued that Eckhart had to be placed in the tradition of philosophical mysticism of Parmenides and Plato and the neo-Platonist thinkers Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus. Heribert Fischer argued in the 1960s that Eckhart was a mediaeval theologian. Clint Johnson agreed with D. T. Suzuki and argued on the basis of Eckhart’s appeals to experience that he is a mystic in the tradition of Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite. Passages like the following, Johnson contends, point to experience beyond intellectual speculation and philosophizing: “Those who have never been familiar with inward things do not know what God is. Like a man who has wine in his cellar but has never tasted it, he does not know that it is good” (Sermon 10, DW I 164.5–8); and “Whoever does not understand what I say, let him not burden his heart with it. For as long as a man is not like this truth, he will not understand what I say. For this is a truth beyond thought that comes immediately from the heart of God” (Sermon 52, DW II 506.1–3).
Kurt Flasch, a member of the so-called Bochum-school of mediaeval philosophy, strongly reacted against the influence of New Age mysticism and “all kinds of emotional subjective mysticism,” arguing for the need to free Eckhart from “the Mystical Flood.” He sees Eckhart strictly as a philosopher, arguing that the opposition between “mystic” and “scholastic” is not relevant because this mysticism, in Eckhart’s context, is penetrated by the spirit of the university in which it occurred. According to Hackett, Eckhart is to be understood as an “original hermeneutical thinker in the Latin tradition”; to understand Eckhart, he has to be properly placed within the western philosophical tradition of which he was a part.
Josiah Royce, an objective idealist, saw Eckhart as a representative example of 13th and 14th century Catholic mystics “on the verge of pronounced heresy” but without original philosophical opinions. Royce attributed Eckhart’s reputation for originality to the fact that he translated scholastic philosophy from Latin into German and wrote about his speculations in German instead of Latin. Eckhart generally followed Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the Trinity, but exaggerated the scholastic distinction between the divine essence and the divine persons. The very heart of Eckhart’s speculative mysticism, according to Royce, is that if, through what is called in Christian terminology the procession of the Son, the divine omniscience gets a complete expression in eternal terms, still there is even at the centre of this omniscience the necessary mystery of the divine essence itself, which neither generates nor is generated, and which is yet the source and fountain of all the divine. The Trinity is, for Eckhart, the revealed God, and the mysterious origin of the Trinity is the Godhead, the absolute God.
Several authors identified Eckhart as a pantheist, although interpretations are not unanimous. Hans Lassen Martensen affirmed this idea, although others, like Hegel, disputed it. According to John Dourley, current scholarship holds it likely that Eckhart’s philosophy “was close to a Platonic or Plotinian pantheism which he sincerely tried to reconcile with his Christianity with ambiguous success.”
Tauler, Merswin, and the Theologia Germanica
Eckhart is considered by some to have been the inspirational “layman” referred to in Johannes Tauler’s and Rulman Merswin’s later writings in Strasbourg, where he is known to have spent time, although it is doubtful that he authored the simplistic Book of the Nine Rocks published by Merswin and attributed to The Friend of God from the Oberland. Most scholars consider The Friend of God from the Oberland to be a pure fiction invented by Merswin to hide his authorship because of the intimidating tactics of the Inquisition at the time.
It has been suspected that Eckhart’s practical communication of the mystical path is behind the influential 14th-century “anonymous” Theologia Germanica, which was disseminated after his disappearance. According to the medieval introduction of the document, its author was an unnamed member of the Teutonic Order of Knights living in Frankfurt. The lack of imprimatur from the Church and the anonymity of the author did not lessen its influence for the next two centuries—including on Martin Luther at the peak of public and clerical resistance to Catholic indulgences—and it was viewed by some historians of the early 20th century as pivotal in provoking Luther’s actions and the subsequent Protestant Reformation. The Theologia Germanica contains the following passage depicting the conflict between worldly and ecclesiastical affairs: “The two eyes of the soul of man cannot both perform their work at once: but if the soul shall see with the right eye into eternity, then the left eye must close itself and refrain from working, and be as though it were dead. For if the left eye be fulfilling its office toward outward things, that is holding converse with time and the creatures; then must the right eye be hindered in its working; that is, in its contemplation. Therefore, whosoever will have the one must let the other go; for ‘no man can serve two masters’.”
Obscurity and the Manuscript Tradition
Eckhart was largely forgotten from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, barring occasional interest from thinkers such as Angelus Silesius (1627–1677). For centuries, his writings were known only from a number of sermons found in old editions of Johann Tauler’s sermons, published by Kachelouen (Leipzig, 1498) and by Adam Petri (Basel, 1521 and 1522). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, much Catholic interest in Eckhart was concerned with the consistency of his thought in relation to Neoscholastic thought—in other words, to see whether Eckhart’s thought could be seen to be essentially in conformity with orthodoxy as represented by his fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas.
Eckhart in Modern Spirituality and Comparative Religion
Meister Eckhart has become one of the timeless heroes of modern spirituality, which, to historian of religion Wouter Hanegraaff, thrives on an all-inclusive syncretism. This syncretism started with the colonisation of Asia and the search for similarities between Eastern and Western religions. Western monotheism was projected onto Eastern religiosity by Western orientalists, trying to accommodate Eastern religiosity to a Western understanding, whereafter Asian intellectuals used these projections as a starting point to propose the superiority of those Eastern religions. Early on, the figure of Meister Eckhart played a role in these developments and exchanges. Renewed academic attention to Eckhart has attracted favorable attention to his work from contemporary non-Christian mystics. Eckhart’s most famous single quote, “The Eye with which I see God is the same Eye with which God sees me,” is commonly cited by thinkers within neopaganism and ultimatist Buddhism as a point of contact between these traditions and Christian mysticism.
The first European translation of the Upanishads appeared in two parts in 1801 and 1802. The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was influenced by these early translations, which he called “the consolation of my life.” Schopenhauer compared Eckhart’s views to the teachings of Indian, Christian, and Islamic mystics and ascetics: “If we turn from the forms, produced by external circumstances, and go to the root of things, we shall find that Sakyamuni and Meister Eckhart teach the same thing; only that the former dared to express his ideas plainly and positively, whereas Eckhart is obliged to clothe them in the garment of the Christian myth, and to adapt his expressions thereto.” Schopenhauer also stated: “Buddha, Eckhart, and I all teach essentially the same.”
A major force in the mutual influence of Eastern and Western ideas and religiosity was the Theosophical Society, which also incorporated Eckhart in its notion of Theosophy. It searched for ancient wisdom in the East, spreading Eastern religious ideas in the West. One of its salient features was the belief in “Masters of Wisdom,” described as “beings, human or once human, who have transcended the normal frontiers of knowledge, and who make their wisdom available to others.” The Theosophical Society also spread Western ideas in the East, aiding a modernisation of Eastern traditions and contributing to a growing nationalism in the Asian colonies.
The Theosophical Society had a major influence on Hindu reform movements. A major proponent of this “neo-Hinduism,” also called “neo-Vedanta,” was Vivekananda (1863–1902), who popularised his modernised interpretation of Advaita Vedanta in the 19th and early 20th century in both India and the West, emphasising anubhava (“personal experience”) over scriptural authority. Vivekananda’s teachings have been compared to Eckhart’s teachings. In the 20th century, Eckhart’s thoughts were also compared to Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta by Rudolf Otto in his Mysticism East and West. According to Richard King, the aim of this work was to redeem Eckhart’s mysticism in Protestant circles, attempting “to establish the superiority of the German mysticism of Eckhart over the Indian mysticism of Sankara.”
The Theosophical Society also had a major influence on Buddhist modernism and the spread of this modernised Buddhism in the West. Along with Henry Steel Olcott and Anagarika Dharmapala, Helena Blavatsky was instrumental in the Western transmission and revival of Theravada Buddhism. In 1891, Karl Eugen Neumann, who translated large parts of the Tripitaka, found parallels between Eckhart and Buddhism, which he published in Zwei buddhistische Suttas und ein Traktat Meister Eckharts (“Two Buddhist Suttas and a treatise of Meister Eckhart”). D. T. Suzuki, who joined the Theosophical Society Adyar and was an active Theosophist, discerned parallels between Eckhart’s teachings and Zen Buddhism in his Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, drawing similarities between Eckhart’s “pure nothingness” (ein bloss nicht) and sunyata. Shizuteru Ueda, a third generation Kyoto School philosopher and scholar in medieval philosophy, showed similarities between Eckhart’s soteriology and Zen Buddhism in an article.
