Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises

Overview

"Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises" (1987) gathers a substantial selection of Eckhart’s German sermons and shorter Latin and German prose works, offering a coherent portrait of the Dominican master’s daring mysticism. Preached and written in the early 14th century for monks, nuns, and lay audiences, these texts revolve around a single aim: awakening the hearer to the birth of the Word in the soul and to the ground where the soul and God are one. The collection shows Eckhart as preacher, philosopher, and spiritual guide, moving between scriptural exegesis and interior practice with a style that is both scholastic and startlingly direct.

Structure and Contents

The sermons, many delivered in the vernacular, expound biblical passages in a contemplative key. Familiar episodes, Mary and Martha, the Beatitudes, the Nativity, become springboards for teaching about inner poverty, detachment, and the present action of God. The treatises, including pieces of instruction for religious and works of consolation for noble patrons, distill the core of his preaching into compact spiritual doctrine. Throughout, brief scholastic arguments, images of the soul’s “spark, ” and paradoxical maxims intertwine, articulating both a path of practice and a metaphysics of divine presence.

Core Themes

At the center stands the birth of the Son in the soul. Eckhart insists this is not metaphor but event: in the ground of the soul, beyond the faculties, the eternal Word is born when the soul becomes free of images and self-will. Detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and releasement (Gelassenheit) name the disposition that lets God be God in the soul. Poverty of spirit is the radical emptiness in which the soul possesses nothing, not even a concept of God, and so receives God wholly.

Eckhart distinguishes God and the Godhead. “God” names the personal, triune source active in creation and grace; the “Godhead” names the ineffable ground beyond all names and attributes. The breakthrough (Durchbruch) is the soul’s passing beyond all created forms, and even beyond its own notions of God, into that simple ground where God’s ground and the soul’s ground are one. Hence his apophatic insistence that the highest knowing is unknowing, and the purest prayer is silent openness without why.

Action and contemplation are reconciled in the just person, who acts from the ground with equal mind in all things. The famous contrast of Mary and Martha is resolved: pure contemplation flowers in utterly free action. Works are not holy by kind but by the inner freedom from which they arise. Ethical consequences follow: justice, compassion, and readiness for service become spontaneous expressions of the divine life within.

Time and eternity interpenetrate. Creation happens in the “now” of God; the soul touches this eternal now when it stands in the ground. Suffering, trials, and the contradictions of life are not to be fled but received as occasions for detachment and deeper birth, a note struck in the consolatory pieces addressed to those in affliction. Scripture is read not only historically but as a drama of the soul’s present transformation.

Style and Method

The sermons blend scholastic precision with homiletic daring, using paradox, hyperbole, and arresting images to loosen the grip of habitual thinking. The treatises concentrate this strategy into short, incisive chapters: counsel to novices on inner recollection and surrender, guidance on prayer without multiplicity, and a steady critique of spiritual self-seeking. Eckhart’s method is to press concepts to their limits, then invite a letting-go that opens onto simplicity.

Significance

The collection shows why Eckhart could be both controversial and enduring. His bold formulations drew scrutiny in his lifetime, yet his aim is rigorously evangelical: to lead readers beyond spiritual consolations to the naked truth of God present at the soul’s core. As assembled here, the sermons and treatises form a unified school of freedom, teaching how to live from the ground where the Word is eternally born and where life becomes action without why.