Meister Eckhart
1260–1328 · German
Medieval German Dominican friar, theologian, and mystic who pioneered vernacular spiritual instruction and faced papal heresy charges.
In the record
- Born
- 1260, Tambach, near Gotha, Landgraviate of Thuringia, Holy Roman Empire
- Training
- Dominican convent at Erfurt (c. 1278); studied at Cologne (before 1280); possibly University of Paris; ordained to priesthood by 1294
- Affiliation
- Dominican Order; Catholic Church
Key works
- Reden der Unterweisung (Talks of Instruction / Counsels on Discernment) (1295)
- Liber Benedictus (Book Benedictus)
- Daz buoch der götlîchen trœstunge (The Book of Divine Consolation)
- Von dem edeln menschen (Of the Nobleman)
- Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem (Commentary on John)
- Prologus generalis in Opus tripartitium (General Prologue to the Three-Part Work)
Sebastian reads Eckhart
Eckhart is where the Apeiro-Daimonic current finds one of its most beautiful and most treacherous expressions. He is the mystic who genuinely refused easy comfort — who insisted that *Abgeschiedenheit*, detachment, required the annihilation of every image the soul uses to console itself — and yet who finally arrives at a pneumatic conclusion: beneath the suffering, beneath the creature’s poverty, there is a *Fünklein*, a spark, that the Trinity never left and cannot leave. Jung read that spark with considerable excitement as an anticipation of the Self; Hillman would hear in it one more ascent away from the soul’s concrete images toward a unity that dissolves them. The tension is the right place to sit with Eckhart. He is not sentimental and he does not promise comfort, which makes him unusual among the mystical tradition’s countercurrents. Turn to him when a reader wants to understand how Christianity — at its most rigorous — still reached for pneuma as its ground, and what it cost the soul’s plurality to do so.