Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher

Overview
Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher (1986) presents an authoritative, accessible doorway into the thought of the Dominican mystic through a judicious selection of his sermons and treatises. Edited by Bernard McGinn for the Classics of Western Spirituality series, with translations by McGinn, Frank Tobin, and Elvira Borgstadt, the volume foregrounds Eckhart’s dual vocation: university theologian and vernacular preacher. A substantial introduction situates him within late medieval scholasticism and pastoral life, charts his career from German Dominican houses to the University of Paris, and sketches the circumstances of the posthumous investigation of his teachings. The result is a portrait of a thinker who fused rigorous biblical exegesis and speculative metaphysics with practical spiritual counsel.

Structure and Contents
The book balances Eckhart’s Latin and German voices. The German sections gather sermons and short spiritual tracts that grew out of his guidance of friars, nuns, and lay audiences. Readers encounter selections such as the Talks of Instruction alongside signature homilies that meditate on poverty of spirit, detachment, and the birth of the Word in the soul. The Latin materials, drawn from academic preaching and theological disputation, reveal how Eckhart reasons within the scholastic framework while pressing language toward its limits. Headnotes and notes gloss key terms, scriptural contexts, and philosophical sources, and the translations aim to preserve Eckhart’s rhythmic, paradox-loving style without sacrificing clarity.

Core Themes
A throughline is the call to detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and letting-go (Gelassenheit), not as stoic apathy but as the inner freedom by which the soul is made receptive to God. From this follows the daring motif of the birth of the Word in the ground (grunt) of the soul: in the deepest simplicity, where the soul is empty of creatures and its own will, the divine Word is begotten. Eckhart’s distinction between God and the Godhead registers an apophatic thrust: God as named and known in Scripture and sacraments, and the Godhead as the ineffable source beyond images and predicates. Rather than canceling devotion, this deepens it, calling for a breakthrough (Durchbruch) beyond created forms so that the just person acts from God’s own life.

The ethical and practical implications are constant. Sermons on Martha and Mary, on the Beatitudes, and on justice challenge narrow contemplative-activist dichotomies: true contemplation flowers in just action, and true activity springs from an undivided heart. Poverty of spirit becomes the criterion of freedom and compassion, not social withdrawal. Throughout, Eckhart reads Scripture with a preacher’s immediacy and a master’s subtlety, threading Augustine, Dionysius, and Aristotle into homilies that return insistently to presence, simplicity, and interior birth.

Style and Significance
McGinn’s framing essays and annotations highlight how Eckhart’s bold formulations arise from pastoral aims: to awaken hearers to a non-possessive relation to God and neighbor. The translations retain the concrete, homely images, seed, spark, ground, desert, by which Eckhart dislocates the will toward God’s freedom. The Latin selections show that the provocative German sentences are not free-standing aphorisms but woven into a disciplined theological vision. The volume also clarifies why some propositions later drew scrutiny, while indicating Eckhart’s consistent avowal of fidelity to the church’s meaning.

As a whole, the book offers a coherent map of Eckhart’s spirituality across genres and audiences. It positions him not as an esoteric thinker on the margins but as a teacher and preacher whose metaphysics of the ground serves the formation of just, free persons. By pairing lucid scholarship with carefully chosen texts, it equips readers to follow the movement of Eckhart’s thought from detachment to union, from apophatic reserve to ethical urgency, and from preaching’s spoken moment to the soul’s unceasing birth of the Word.