Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1327), the Dominican mystic and speculative theologian, occupies a privileged position in the depth-psychology corpus as a precursor whose intuitions anticipate modern psychological insight with remarkable precision. Jung’s engagement is the most consequential: he reads Eckhart as a medieval witness to the reality of the unconscious, citing his distinction between ‘God’ and ‘Godhead’ as evidence that the God-image is a psychological function of the soul even as the soul is a function of Godhead — a reciprocal, relativistic ontology that Jung regards as a ‘landmark’ on the road to modern depth psychology. Campbell situates Eckhart within the history of individuated mysticism against ecclesiastical authority, stressing the birth of God in the ground of the soul as a decisive turning point toward an interior, non-confessional spirituality. McGilchrist recruits Eckhart as a phenomenologist avant la lettre, mapping his contrast between the serial active intellect and immediate intuitive Gestalt onto the left-hemisphere/right-hemisphere distinction. Suzuki and Spiegelman find in Eckhart a Christian parallel to Zen and Buddhist spiritual poverty. Across these voices, the core tension is between Eckhart as orthodox mystic and as proto-psychological radical: whether his paradoxes are symbolically orthodox or genuinely subversive of institutional theology remains contested, but his utility for the depth-psychological project of relocating the divine within the psyche is uniformly affirmed.
Eckhart distinguishes between God and Godhead. Godhead is All, neither knowing nor possessing itself, whereas God is a function of the soul, just as the soul is a function of Godhead.
Jung’s key analytical formulation: Eckhart’s God/Godhead distinction proves that the God-image is a reciprocal psychological function, not an absolute metaphysical entity.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
The world-embracing spirit of Meister Eckhart knew, without discursive knowledge, the primordial mystical experience of India as well as of the Gnostics, and was itself the finest flower on the tree of the ‘Free Spirit’.
Jung positions Eckhart as a transhistorical witness whose non-discursive knowledge converged spontaneously with Indian and Gnostic mystical insight, anticipating modern psychology’s discovery of the unconscious.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
Eckhart’s relativistic conception of God was ‘a landmark’ on the way to our modern psychological understanding of religious phenomena, ultimately paving the way for each of us to ‘rediscover the gods as a psychic factor’.
Peterson, drawing on Jung, establishes Eckhart’s relativistic God-concept as the historical hinge between medieval mysticism and depth-psychological approaches to religious experience.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis
The cardinal lesson, as presented by the Chinese texts and by Meister Eckhart, was that of allowing psychic events to happen of their own accord: ‘Letting things happen, the action through non-action, the letting go of oneself of Meister Eckhart, became the key for me.’
Jung credits Eckhart’s practice of Gelassenheit — letting go of the self — as a methodological key that unlocked his own depth-psychological approach to the unconscious.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
The active intellect [LH] … cannot entertain two images together … [But] … if God prompts you to a good deed … whatever good you can do takes shape and presents itself to you together in a flash [RH], concentrated in a single point.
McGilchrist uses Eckhart’s contrast between serial intellection and immediate intuitive apprehension to illustrate left-hemisphere versus right-hemisphere modes of understanding.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
he seems to have intuited a distinction between two modes of understanding, one of which is more skilful here than the other.
McGilchrist argues that Eckhart anticipated the neurological distinction between two cognitive modes centuries before hemisphere research, aligning his mystical epistemology with right-hemisphere primacy.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Eckhart was instrumental in helping both William James and Carl Jung develop their unique conceptions of religious imagery, explaining that he is ‘the missing link… between Jung and James.’
Peterson, following Herrmann, argues that Eckhart forms the genealogical bridge connecting James and Jung, and that Jung first encountered the key attitudes he later found in James through his adolescent study of Eckhart.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis
this birth befalls in the ground and essence of the soul … God is in all things as being, as activity, as power. But he is procreative in the soul alone.
Campbell presents Eckhart’s doctrine of the birth of God in the soul’s ground as the decisive medieval articulation of an interior, individuated spirituality challenging institutional Christianity.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964thesis
Jung embarked upon an in-depth examination of the Upanishads, comparing it with the writings of William James and Meister Eckhart, his two most beloved gurus.
Peterson documents that Jung’s simultaneous reading of the Upanishads and Eckhart was the creative crucible in which a new God-concept was gestating in the Western psyche.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting
The relativity of God implies a reciprocal and essential relation between man and God, whereby man can be understood as a function of God, and God as a psychological function of man.
Peterson elaborates Jung’s reading of Eckhart’s God-relativity, showing how it disrupts both naive theism and pure atheism by grounding divinity in reciprocal psychic relation.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting
for Eckhart God is Deus absconditus, the God who hides himself … Esse absconditum, Being that hides itself: hiding itself in the inner recesses of the mind or heart.
Louth shows how Eckhart’s reading of Dionysius through Augustinian eyes produces a theology of divine hiddenness located in the soul’s innermost depths — a formulation with obvious resonances for depth psychology.
, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentsupporting
While he believed that it was rational to believe in God, he denied that reason alone could form any adequate conception of the divine nature … as regards the knowledge of God there can be neither a demonstration from sensory perception … nor from the intellect.
Armstrong contextualises Eckhart’s apophatic epistemology — his denial that either sense or intellect can adequately know God — and his consequent heresy trial as a tension between symbolic and literal theological interpretation.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
‘If anyone were to rob God of loving the soul, he would rob Him of His life and being, or he would kill God, if one may say so; for the self-same love with which God loves the soul is His life.’
McGilchrist cites Eckhart’s radical claim that God’s very life depends on his relation to the soul, illustrating the mutual ontological dependence at the heart of Eckhart’s mystical theology.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
‘God can no more do without us than we without Him, for even if we were able to turn from God, God still could not turn from us.’
A second citation from the same sermon reinforces Eckhart’s doctrine of divine-human mutual necessity, which McGilchrist treats as theologically cognate with his own relational ontology.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
‘The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.’
McGilchrist quotes Eckhart’s most celebrated expression of non-dual vision to support his argument about the identity of subject and object at the limit of genuine knowing.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Eckhart also said of the knowledge of God: ‘The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.’
Duplicate citation confirms the non-dual epistemology Eckhart represents for McGilchrist’s argument about the limits of left-hemisphere analytical knowing.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
This was evidently perceived by the great relativist Meister Eckhart when he said: For this reason God is willing to bear the brunt of sins and often winks at them, mostly sending them to those whom he has destined for great things.
Jung invokes Eckhart’s ‘relativist’ tolerance of the darker streams of human nature to support his argument that vital renewal requires integrating impure as well as clear psychic forces.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
It should be added, perhaps, that 28 of Eckhart’s theological propositions were condemned by Pope John XXII.
Campbell notes Eckhart’s papal condemnation as a marker of the institutional resistance to his radically interior mystical theology, contextualising his importance as a heterodox figure.
, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986supporting
Suzuki quotes the great Christian Mystic, Meister Eckhart … ‘He alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.’ Eckhart’s Enlightened man is close to the Zen man in this.
Spiegelman, following Suzuki, demonstrates the structural parallel between Eckhart’s Christian spiritual poverty and Zen non-attachment, underscoring Eckhart’s cross-traditional significance in depth-psychological discourse.
, Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, 1985supporting
the same De anima passage as the one in Aurora is cited in the commentary on the Wisdom of Solomon by Meister Eckhart, who took over a good deal from St. Thomas.
Von Franz notes a shared Aristotelian-Thomistic source between the alchemical Aurora Consurgens and Eckhart’s scriptural commentary, situating Eckhart within the scholastic-alchemical philosophical lineage.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966aside
BÜTTNER, H. Meister Eckhart’s Schriften und Predigten. Jena, 1909–17. 2 vols.
A bibliographic citation in Jung’s collected works attests to Eckhart’s writings as a primary scholarly reference in his psychological-religious research.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside