Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart was the most daring and philosophically sophisticated Christian mystic of the medieval period — a Dominican friar and theologian whose sermons in vernacular German opened the treasury of Christian mysticism to ordinary people for the first time. His thought so transgressed conventional theological limits that he was posthumously condemned by the Pope, yet his influence has only grown with the centuries.

Educated in the most rigorous tradition of Scholastic theology, Eckhart brought that precision to bear on a single blazing insight: that the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one and the same ground. In the famous statement, ‘The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love,’ he collapsed the boundary between the human and the divine in terms that Vedanta masters would immediately recognise.

His German Sermons — preached to Dominican nuns and educated laypeople — are among the most profound religious texts ever produced in any language. He distinguished between ‘God’ (a concept formed in the mind) and ‘the Godhead’ (the nameless, formless absolute ground from which God, Trinity, and all names arise) — a distinction that parallels the Hindu distinction between saguna and nirguna Brahman. Thomas Aquinas and Neoplatonic thought run through his writing alongside an immediacy that is entirely his own.

After his death, his disciples — including Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso — carried his spirit forward. In the twentieth century, D.T. Suzuki noted the deep resonances between Eckhart’s mysticism and Zen Buddhism, cementing his place as a universal spiritual figure rather than merely a Christian sectarian one.