Faith & Spirit Quote by Meister Eckhart

Eckhart lands a theological mic drop in a single line: the distance between the seeker and the sought is an illusion built from habit, language, and ego. "The eye" isn’t a physical organ; it’s the faculty of awareness itself. By claiming that the eye that sees God is the same eye by which God sees him, Eckhart collapses the usual subject-object split that props up most devotional religion: me over here, God over there, a ladder of merit in between. His intent is not sentimental intimacy but metaphysical provocation. If the seeing is one, then "God" isn’t primarily an external ruler to be appeased; God is the ground of knowing, the source-condition that makes any perception possible.

The subtext is daring, even combustible in medieval Europe. Eckhart was a Dominican preacher operating inside a church that relied on clear boundaries: creator/creation, sacred/profane, cleric/laity. This line quietly reroutes authority away from institution and toward interior realization. It also reframes salvation as transformation of perception rather than accumulation of good deeds. You don’t climb toward God; you wake up to what is already true when the self stops narrating itself as separate.

That’s why the phrasing works: it doesn’t argue, it flips the camera. The symmetry of the sentence performs the union it asserts, making the reader feel the conceptual floor drop out. Historically, that move helped fuel the suspicion that Eckhart drifted toward heresy: non-dual language inside a dualistic system reads like sabotage. In a culture obsessed with mediation, he offers immediacy as the scandal.