Eckhart’s Godhead Is Not a Theological Abstraction but a Map of the Psychoid Unconscious

Steven Herrmann has spent decades building toward this argument. From his early thesis work under William Everson at UC Santa Cruz through Doorways to the Self and his studies of Walt Whitman’s shamanic vocation, Herrmann has consistently pursued a single intuition: that Meister Eckhart’s sermons on the Godhead—the unspecified, formless ground lying “beyond and above the Trinity”—describe the same territory Jung would later call the psychoid unconscious. The Birth of God in the Soul crystallizes this intuition into a sustained thesis. Eckhart’s “Ground” (or Grunt) is not a theological nicety or a piece of speculative metaphysics; it is a phenomenological report from the borderland where psyche becomes indistinguishable from matter and world. Jung himself acknowledged this debt obliquely in Psychological Types, where he called Eckhart’s relativistic conception of God “one of the most important landmarks on the way to a psychological understanding of religious phenomena.” Herrmann presses the claim further than Jung did: the psychoid—that infrapsychic layer where archetype shades into instinct and body—was not merely suggested by Eckhart’s writings but was already articulated in them, seven centuries before Jung coined the term. As Everson noted in his reader’s report on Herrmann’s thesis, “Jung’s positing of the psychoid, a broad psychic dimension suggested by Eckhart’s Ground, is rendered persuasive by correspondence to its model.” The correspondence is not analogical. It is structural. Both thinkers describe a domain that is neither purely spiritual nor purely material, that resists the subject-object split, and that generates the numinous images consciousness then projects outward as “God.”

Vocation, Not Contemplation, Is the True Engine of the Birth of God in the Soul

What distinguishes Herrmann’s reading from the many existing treatments of Eckhart-Jung parallels—including those by Matthew Fox and J.J. Clarke—is his insistence on vocation as the catalytic principle. Fox brought out Eckhart’s earthiness and creation-centered spirituality. Clarke situated Jung’s reading of Eckhart within the broader East-West dialogue, noting how both Eckhart and Zen Buddhism disclose “a new way of seeing” rather than a discovery of new content. Herrmann’s contribution operates on a different axis entirely. Drawing on Everson’s theory of the poet-shaman and on Heinz Kohut’s developmental psychology of nuclear ambitions, Herrmann argues that the “birth of God in the soul” is not a contemplative event but a vocational one. It happens when the individual answers a summons from beyond quotidian consciousness—what Jung called the transcendent function of the Self—and that answering is the creative act. Eckhart’s sermon on driving the merchants from the temple becomes, in Herrmann’s reading, a statement about the necessary destruction of assimilated forms so that the inferior function can erupt into consciousness. The anger Christ displays in the temple is not allegorical moral instruction; it is the instinctual energy required for genuine creative breakthrough. This reframes individuation as something closer to shamanic initiation than to the measured ego-Self negotiations described in Edinger’s Ego and Archetype. Where Edinger maps the rhythmic cycle of inflation and alienation between ego and Self with clinical precision, Herrmann insists on the violent, chthonic, katabatic descent that precedes any new symbol’s emergence—a descent Everson enacted in his poetry and that Eckhart theorized as the involution to the Godhead.

The Missing Link Between James and Jung Is Not Philosophical but Experiential

Herrmann’s positioning of Eckhart as “the missing link between Jung and James” is his most consequential historiographical claim. Jung began reading Eckhart at fifteen. He met William James at Clark University in 1909. Between these two encounters, the basic architecture of analytical psychology took shape. Herrmann demonstrates that the “basic attitude” Jung found in James—the radical empiricist’s willingness to treat religious experience as data rather than delusion—was the same attitude he had already discovered in Eckhart’s sermons during adolescence. This is not a vague intellectual genealogy. It is a claim about the specific psychic posture that made depth psychology possible: the refusal to choose between metaphysical literalism and reductive materialism, opting instead for what Jung would call the “relativity of God.” From this vantage, the God-image is understood as “the symbolic expression of a particular psychic state, or function, which is characterized by its absolute ascendancy over the will of the subject.” That formulation from Psychological Types is, Herrmann shows, a direct translation of Eckhart’s insight that “the eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.” Cody Peterson’s Sobering Wisdom independently corroborates this lineage by tracing the same psychological attitude through Bill Wilson’s Twelve Steps, where “the relativity of God” becomes operational: Wilson’s insistence that “our own conception, however inadequate, was enough to make the approach” is Eckhart’s relativism democratized for the alcoholic ward. Herrmann’s scholarship supplies the missing intellectual history that makes Wilson’s pragmatic theology intelligible as something other than folk religion.

The Shaman at the Center Where Christ Stood

The book’s deepest provocation lies in its claim that Christianity is undergoing a transformation in which the shamanic archetype is “invading the sacred space formerly occupied by Christ.” Herrmann does not mean this polemically. He means it psychologically: the rigid, exteriorized Christ-image of Western Protestantism is yielding to an interior, chthonic, body-rooted figure that more closely resembles the medicine man than the suffering servant. Eckhart’s pantheistic leanings—his God as “a great underground river”—anticipate this shift. So does Jung’s observation that American patients spontaneously produce hero-figures with traits drawn from Native American religion. Herrmann weaves Everson’s concept of the poet-shaman, Jung’s theory of “Indianization,” and Eckhart’s creation-centered mysticism into a single developmental arc: the Western psyche is assimilating what it formerly colonized, and Eckhart’s sermons are the earliest Western document of this movement.

For anyone working at the intersection of depth psychology and spirituality today, this book does what no other single volume accomplishes: it provides the intellectual genealogy that connects a thirteenth-century Dominican’s heresy trial to Jung’s psychoid archetype to the lived spiritual practice of millions who have never heard of either. It transforms Eckhart from a historical curiosity into a living diagnostic instrument for understanding why the Western God-image keeps failing—and what the psyche is trying to birth in its place.