Book: Selected Writings

Overview
Meister Eckhart’s Selected Writings (1994) gathers a compact, representative cross-section of the Dominican mystic’s German sermons, brief treatises, spiritual talks, and Latin scholastic texts. The collection highlights his core vision: the birth of the Word in the soul, the radical inner freedom he calls detachment, and the breakthrough into the ground of the Godhead beyond all images. It presents Eckhart’s daring, paradoxical teaching in two voices, the vivid vernacular preacher and the precise Latin master, showing how a single metaphysical center animates both.

Contents and structure
The selection balances Middle High German sermons with texts such as Talks of Instruction and On Detachment, alongside Latin commentaries and academic questions. Sermons on themes like poverty of spirit, the beatitudes, and Mary and Martha reveal his pastoral urgency and love of everyday images. The treatises distill his spiritual program into brief, exacting counsel. The Latin excerpts display his scholastic scaffolding: distinctions between God and Godhead, intellect and will, image and likeness, and the way created being participates in uncreated Being. Notes and introductions situate each piece within Eckhart’s career in Paris, Strasbourg, and Cologne, and against the theological currents of late medieval Dominican thought.

Central themes
Detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and letting-be (Gelassenheit) stand at the heart of Eckhart’s path. The soul must become free of clinging to creatures, concepts, and even spiritual consolations so that God may be God in it without obstacle. This dispossession is not quietism but the condition for the most fruitful action. Eckhart’s celebrated reading of Mary and Martha argues that the active life, when pure of self-will, can surpass the merely contemplative.

A second axis is the birth of the Word in the soul. In the intellective ground, the uncreated spark, God eternally begets the Son; grace awakens this birth in the just person. Hence his bold formula: the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me. He distinguishes God (the trinitarian life as known in revelation) from the Godhead, the simple, ungraspable ground beyond names and oppositions. Through a breakthrough (Durchbruch), the soul passes beyond images and multiplicity into that ground, without losing created order or ethical responsibility.

Eckhart’s poverty of spirit culminates in wanting nothing, knowing nothing, and having nothing, a stripping that restores the soul to its likeness to God. From this emptiness flows genuine compassion and justice, since the detached person acts from God’s own goodness rather than private gain.

Language and style
The German sermons deploy homely metaphors, pots, fields, light, birth, to jolt hearers into apophatic insight, often via startling claims that he then carefully qualifies. The Latin pieces reveal a meticulous thinker who can argue with scholastic rigor for the same negating intuition: language about God must be unmade even as it is used. The tension between cataphatic proclamation and apophatic silence becomes a pedagogy of transformation.

Context and reception
Eckhart’s audacity drew scrutiny; after challenges in Cologne, some propositions were condemned posthumously in 1329. The selection frames this controversy without reducing him to it, showing how his contested theses emerge from a coherent metaphysical and spiritual vision shared, in different accents, with Pseudo-Dionysius and Thomas Aquinas. The editorial apparatus opens paths through the dense terminology, ground, spark, Godhead, while preserving the edge of his rhetoric.

Significance
The volume offers a navigable entry into a thinker whose thought dissolves the divide between metaphysics and spiritual practice. It reveals a teacher who weds radical inner freedom to active love, and whose language, stripped to the bone, points beyond itself to the nameless ground where God and the soul meet.