Daily Inspiration Quote by Meister Eckhart

Eckhart’s line is a quiet provocation aimed at anyone who treats language as a self-contained tool. In medieval scholastic culture, words were being systematized, classified, weaponized in disputation. Eckhart, the mystic-philosopher, steps sideways from that machinery: the power of words is not primarily rhetorical skill or logical precision, but proximity to the “original word” - the Logos, the divine utterance that precedes human naming.

The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a theory of meaning: language works when it participates in something prior and more real than itself. On another, it’s an ethical critique of talk untethered from reality. If words have power only by derivation, then speech that flatters, bullies, or dazzles without grounding is counterfeit power. Eckhart is warning his audience - preachers, theologians, educated Christians - that eloquence can become a spiritual con.

Subtext: the “original word” is not just God as an abstract source, but an inner event. In Eckhart’s thought, the divine Word is “born” in the soul when the self stops clinging and becomes receptive. So the line also smuggles in a demand: purify the speaker. The authority of language depends on the speaker’s alignment with what is deepest, not on performance.

Context matters because Eckhart was later scrutinized for heresy. A claim like this resists institutional control: it implies that genuine speech may draw legitimacy from an encounter with the divine that no hierarchy can fully police. In an era obsessed with correct formulation, he re-centers correctness on origin, not orthodoxy as mere phrasing.