Faith & Spirit Quote by Meister Eckhart

Eckhart’s line lands like a dare to every pious imagination that tries to picture salvation as a bigger, shinier version of worldly satisfaction. He’s saying the soul is not a container you can top off with more stuff, more beauty, more “creation,” even if that creation is literally everything. The hunger at the center of a person isn’t quantitative; it’s qualitative. The only thing that can meet it is the source, not the overflow.

The rhetoric is cunningly absolutist: “his whole creation” is maximal abundance, the most extravagant thought experiment possible, and it still fails. By pushing the hypothetical to infinity and declaring it inadequate, Eckhart quietly dismantles a common religious bargain - be good, get rewards - and replaces it with something more unsettling: the soul’s desire is oriented toward union, not compensation. The feminine “she” for the soul (traditional in medieval theology) also does work here, casting the soul as receptive yet unbuyable, not seduced by gifts when what she wants is presence.

Context matters: Eckhart is writing within Christian mysticism, but he presses against the limits of orthodox language. God is not one object among others, even the best object. God is the ground of being, the “is-ness” beneath every created thing. So the subtext is both devotional and critical: if your spirituality is basically consumerism with candles, you’ve missed the point.

It also explains why Eckhart attracted suspicion. A claim like this flirts with erasing the distance between God and soul, making religion less about external observance and more about an interior collapse into the divine - an idea as bracing now as it was in the 14th century.