Book: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense

Overview

Meister Eckhart’s The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense (1981) presents a carefully chosen cross-section of the Dominican theologian’s German and Latin writings, making accessible the heart of his mystical theology and scholastic rigor. Edited and translated by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn for the Classics of Western Spirituality series, the volume gathers sermons delivered in the vernacular, short spiritual treatises intended for lay and monastic readers, selections from scriptural commentaries and academic disputations, and the legal-theological materials tied to Eckhart’s defense when his teachings were investigated for heresy. Read together, these texts chart Eckhart’s distinctive vision of the soul’s birth of the Word, its breakthrough into the divine ground, and a life shaped by detachment, poverty of spirit, and compassionate justice.

Contents and Structure

The sermons form the living core of the book, combining bold exegesis with arresting images to announce the birth of God in the soul here and now. The treatises distill recurring sermon themes into concise spiritual counsel, exploring detachment (abgeschiedenheit), letting-be (gelassenheit), and the noble ground of the soul where God is known beyond images. The Latin materials exhibit Eckhart’s scholastic method, careful distinctions, authorities marshaled, objections posed and answered, while pursuing the same horizon of union. The defense documents, including declarations of intent and clarifications, show him articulating the orthodoxy of his positions under scrutiny and offer a rare window into how his mystical language intersects with doctrinal boundaries.

Core Themes

At the center stands the claim that the eternal Word is born in the ground of the soul when the soul is emptied of all that is not God. Detachment is not indifference but freedom from possessiveness, enabling God to work unimpeded. Poverty of spirit names a radical non-clinging, a readiness to be the place of God’s work rather than to seek one’s own. Eckhart contrasts God and the Godhead: God as Trinity active in creation and salvation, the Godhead as the simple abyss beyond all names. The soul’s breakthrough touches the Godhead beyond images and concepts, yet returns to the world in love. Ethical fruit is integral: true union yields justice, mercy, and neighbor-love, not private rapture. Creation is an outflow from God and a call to return; the image of God in the intellect grounds the possibility of deification without erasing the Creator, creature distinction.

Style and Method

The sermons move through paradox and metaphor, desert and birth, spark and ground, while anchoring claims in Scripture. Their rhetoric urges a present-tense transformation rather than deferred piety. The Latin pages show the architectonic side of Eckhart: precise terms, layered authorities, and fine-grained distinctions that safeguard transcendence while expressing intimacy. Together they reveal a thinker who weds apophatic reserve to bold proclamations, refusing to let language limit God yet risking language so that hearers may awaken.

Historical Context and Defense

Eckhart preached in early 14th-century Germany within Dominican pastoral and scholastic networks. His public teaching drew lay audiences, including women in urban convents, and pushed the frontier of vernacular theology. Complaints to ecclesial authorities led to an inquiry in Cologne; Eckhart appealed to the papacy and submitted statements clarifying that any error was unintended and retractable. The defense texts in the volume show him distinguishing metaphor from assertion, intention from reception, and expounding how unity with God does not collapse the creature into divinity but perfects created being in grace.

Legacy and Use

This collection has become a standard gateway to Eckhart in English, balancing the warmth of the German preaching with the discipline of the Latin works. It equips readers to see how mystical experience, rigorous doctrine, and ethical practice interpenetrate. The volume’s selections convey why Eckhart has influenced later mystics, philosophers, and poets, while letting his most characteristic conviction sound clearly: that the human person, emptied and freed, is the place where God is born and the world is loved.