Faith & Spirit Quote by Meister Eckhart

Eckhart’s line lands like a theological mic drop: the job isn’t to impress God, bargain with God, or even “be good” in the moral-accounting sense. The one expectation is evacuation of the ego - stepping out of the cramped, self-referential “I” that clings to status, fear, and control. For a medieval Dominican steeped in scholastic precision, this is also a daringly minimalist spiritual program: not more religious performance, but less self.

The key phrase is “in so far as you are a created being made.” Eckhart draws a sharp boundary between creatureliness (the constructed, finite, socially legible self) and the divine life that can shine through it. The subtext is almost anti-devotional: your piety can become another accessory for the ego, another way to be “someone.” His remedy is radical dispossession - what he elsewhere calls detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) - so that God isn’t an object you manage but a presence that acts.

“Let God be God in you” is the provocation. It suggests not mere imitation of God, but participation: the divine doesn’t just inspire you from the outside; it wants room within. In Eckhart’s historical context, this language brushed up against suspicion of heresy, because it compresses distance between human and divine. That risk is part of why it works. The sentence refuses a comfortable religion of transaction and replaces it with surrender: stop staging yourself, and the sacred stops being a spectator.