On the Nobleman
A short vernacular treatise by the Dominican preacher and master of theology Meister Eckhart, written in Middle High German rather than the Latin of the schools, and transmitted in the manuscript tradition together with Daz buoch der gotlichen troestunge as a two-part work known as the Liber "Benedictus," addressed to Agnes of Hungary, widowed queen and daughter of Albrecht I. Its date is not documented. The pairing is telling: the first piece consoles a soul under affliction, while this one turns from suffering to the question of what the soul most deeply is. Eckhart is here writing for a reader outside the university, and the treatise shows him compressing the hardest part of his teaching into something that can be read in a sitting.
The whole is an exposition of a single verse: "A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive a kingdom for himself, and returned" (Luke 19:12). Eckhart takes the nobleman as the human being considered under a distinction he draws from Paul and Augustine — the outer man, bound to the senses and to time, and the inner man, in whom God's image is imprinted. That image, he insists, is not something the soul acquires or earns; it is a seed of the divine nature in the ground of the soul, never absent, only overgrown. Nobility therefore names what is already there rather than a moral attainment. The going into a far country is the soul's dispersal among creatures and images; the return is the stripping away of those images until God is known without medium. Along the way Eckhart sets out degrees of knowing God — through creatures, through likeness and image, and finally as God is in himself — and takes up the scholastic dispute over whether beatitude lies in the intellect or the will, arguing that the soul's highest reach is knowing, and more precisely the knowing that knows itself knowing God.
The treatise has mattered because it states Eckhart's anthropology in miniature. Everything the sermons develop at length — the ground of the soul, detachment, the uncreated image, the return without remainder — is present here in compact and traceable form. Tauler, Suso, and the later Rhineland tradition worked from this material, and it became a touchstone for nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers looking for the roots of German speculative thought.
Who should read this: anyone wanting the shortest reliable door into Eckhart, and readers working on the imago Dei, detachment, or apophatic anthropology. Not for those seeking practical devotional counsel, and not for readers who need a theology in which love plainly outranks knowing — Eckhart here argues the other way, and does not soften it.