Book: The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart

Overview

The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (2009) gathers in one volume the core of Eckhart’s vernacular sermons and spiritual treatises, offering the most comprehensive English gateway to the Dominican master’s pastoral and contemplative teaching. Drawn from his Middle High German corpus, these texts present Eckhart as preacher, guide, and speculative theologian, speaking to communities of nuns, laypeople, and seekers on the inner path to God. The translation renders his lapidary, image-rich homilies in accessible English while preserving the sharp paradoxes and daring formulations that made his thought both luminous and controversial.

Contents and Structure

The volume centers on the German sermons, which unfold through scriptural exposition and practical counsel ordered around the liturgical year. Alongside them stand compact treatises that crystalize Eckhart’s program: Talks of Instruction addresses novices on cultivating a life rooted in recollection; The Book of Divine Consolation offers a theology of suffering and trust to a grieving noblewoman; On Detachment and On Spiritual Poverty elevate interior freedom and dispossession as the apex of the virtues; The Noble Man portrays the soul’s inner nobility as the place where God gives birth to the Word. Fragments and shorter pieces round out the picture, revealing a teacher moving with ease between pulpit, classroom, and spiritual direction.

Central Vision

Eckhart’s mysticism turns on the ground of the soul, the uncreated “spark” where God is always already present. Spiritual life is learning to stand in this ground, beyond the noise of images and cravings, so that the eternal birth of the Word in the soul can be realized. Detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and letting-be (Gelassenheit) name the method: releasing every created thing, including one’s own religious consolations and ideas about God, so that God can be God in the soul without impediment. Poverty of spirit is the soul that wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing, not as nihilism but as pure availability to the divine.

God and the Godhead

Eckhart distinguishes God (as named and imaged in Scripture and worship) from the Godhead, the simple abyss beyond all names and attributes. The breakthrough (Durchbruch) is the soul’s passing beyond every image of God into this simple ground, where the eye with which the soul sees God is the same eye with which God sees the soul. He speaks of God as “no-thing, ” not to deny God’s reality but to free the seeker from mistaking any finite concept for the infinite source. This apophatic rigor anchors an ethic: the more purely the soul rests in God, the more freely and justly it acts in the world.

Time, Action, and Everyday Life

Eckhart situates the spiritual path in the eternal now where God continuously begets the Son. Far from withdrawing from life, the one united to the ground acts without why, performing ordinary tasks with the same evenness as liturgical prayer. A kitchen or marketplace can be as graced as the choir if the heart is single. Works do not make one holy; holiness makes works true. This integration of contemplation and action threads through the sermons’ homely images, birth, fire, seed, desert, mirror, binding speculative heights to daily sobriety.

Style and Translation

The prose marries scholastic precision to pastoral urgency, moving from biblical citation to audacious aphorism and back to careful clarification. The translation preserves Eckhart’s rhythm of argument and image while clarifying key terms, ground, spark, detachment, letting-be, that carry his doctrine. Notes and brief introductions situate texts historically and doctrinally, guiding readers through disputed attributions and the later condemnations of selected propositions without blunting the sermons’ living edge.

Significance

Taken together, these works disclose a resilient, Christ-centered non-duality at the heart of medieval Christian mysticism. The volume shows why Eckhart has shaped spiritual lineages from German mystics to modern contemplatives and philosophers: he calls readers past fear and grasping into the freedom where God’s life becomes theirs, and theirs God’s, for the sake of love and the world.