Faith & Spirit Quote by Meister Eckhart

Eckhart drops a theological grenade in the calm language of a man describing geometry: if you insist on God as an object “over there,” you’ve already misunderstood what knowing is. The hook is that first line, “The knower and the known are one,” which refuses the usual setup where the human mind peers outward at a distant divinity. He targets “simple people” not as an insult so much as a diagnosis of religious common sense: the devotional imagination loves a stage picture, with God standing somewhere and the believer stationed opposite, looking up.

The subtext is radical, even if the syntax is spare. Eckhart is smuggling in a non-dual account of consciousness that destabilizes the Church’s everyday spiritual economy: if God is not primarily encountered as an external person to be placated, petitioned, or visually contemplated, then the most “religious” posture might be interior transformation rather than public performance. “God and I, we are one in knowledge” is carefully framed. He doesn’t say “God and I are one” simpliciter, which would invite an easy pantheist reading; he specifies the site of unity as knowledge, the act in which subject and object collapse.

Context matters: late medieval Europe is thick with sacramental ritual, pilgrimage, and images, but also with a flowering of mysticism that insists on direct experience. Eckhart, a Dominican trained in scholastic precision, speaks like someone using the academy’s tools to pry open its boundaries. No wonder his ideas brushed up against heresy proceedings: he makes God less a monarch on a throne than the ground of awareness itself, which is spiritually liberating and institutionally unnerving.