Meister Eckhart

Why Did Jung Turn to Meister Eckhart?

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” This statement from Eckhart’s sermons collapses the boundary between subject and object, knower and known, in a way that directly anticipates Jung’s understanding of the Self as both the center and the circumference of psychic life. Jung cited Eckhart extensively in Psychological Types (CW 6), identifying the mystic as evidence that the introversion-extraversion dynamic operates even within theology — that Eckhart’s radical inwardness represented one pole of a psychological tension that runs through all of Western thought (Jung, CW 6).

What drew Jung to Eckhart was not piety but precision. Eckhart distinguished between Gott (God as experienced and named) and Gottheit (the Godhead, the formless ground beyond all attributes). This distinction mirrors Jung’s differentiation between the God-image as it appears in the psyche and the unknowable reality that the image points toward. In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung recognized Eckhart’s Godhead as a medieval formulation of the unus mundus — the unified ground beneath the opposites of psyche and matter (Jung, CW 14).

Eckhart’s signature concept, Gelassenheit (variously translated as “releasement,” “detachment,” or “letting-be”), describes a psychological attitude of radical receptivity. The soul must empty itself of all images, desires, and even the will to know God in order for the divine Word to be born within. This is not passivity but an active surrender — the same paradoxical stance that analytical psychology asks of the ego in relation to the unconscious. To receive what the Self has to communicate, the ego must relinquish its compulsion to control (Jung, CW 11).

How Does Eckhart’s Mysticism of Opposites Anticipate Depth Psychology?

Eckhart’s theology is structured by the coincidence of opposites — fullness and emptiness, speech and silence, presence and absence. The soul discovers God precisely in the act of abandoning its images of God. This paradox places Eckhart squarely within what Seba.Health maps as the Opposites Thread, the long tradition of thinkers who recognized that psychological wholeness requires the integration of what initially appears contradictory.

Eckhart’s via negativa — the way of negation, in which every positive statement about the divine must be unsaid — also parallels the alchemical nigredo, the blackening that inaugurates transformation. Hillman drew on this tradition when he argued that the soul deepens not through affirmation but through the stripping away of literalism and the descent into image (Hillman, 1975). Eckhart knew what the alchemists knew: that the ground of new life is reached only through the dissolution of the old.

Sources Cited

1. Jung, C.G. (1921). Psychological Types (CW 6). Princeton University Press.
2. Jung, C.G. (1955). Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14). Princeton University Press.
3. Jung, C.G. (1958). Psychology and Religion: West and East (CW 11). Princeton University Press.
4. Hillman, James (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row.