The German Sermons

Meister Eckhart was a Dominican friar who twice held the Paris chair of theology reserved for non-French members of his order, an honor he shared with Thomas Aquinas. But the German sermons were not academic work. They were preached, mostly between his years at Erfurt and his final period in Cologne, to Dominican nuns, beguines, and lay hearers in the Rhineland whose pastoral care had fallen to his order. The texts survive because listeners took them down. That origin explains their character: they are spoken theology, compressed, aphoristic, willing to overstate for effect, and pressing the most difficult speculative material of the schools into a vernacular that had to be partly invented to carry it. In 1326 an inquisitorial process opened against Eckhart in Cologne; he appealed to Avignon and died before judgment. In 1329 the bull In agro dominico condemned seventeen propositions drawn largely from this preaching as heretical and eleven more as suspect.

The sermons circle a small number of claims. The soul has a ground, uncreated and unnameable, where God is closer to it than it is to itself, and in that ground the Father speaks his eternal Word — the birth of God in the soul is not metaphor but the actual event of salvation. Access to it requires detachment: not asceticism as achievement but the emptying of possessiveness, image, and purpose. Eckhart preaches poverty of spirit as willing nothing, knowing nothing, having nothing, and prays God to rid him of God, meaning every God the mind has manufactured. He insists on living without a why, since love that acts for a reason has not yet loved. He overturns the standard reading of Martha and Mary, making Martha the mature one because her work has become free of self. Throughout he refuses to let his hearers rest in religious experience as a possession.

The condemnation drove the texts underground but not out of use. Tauler and Suso carried the substance forward; the Theologia Germanica transmitted it to Luther; Nicholas of Cusa read Eckhart closely. Nineteenth-century German editors recovered him, and the twentieth century made him a bridge figure between Christian contemplation and Zen. The Dominican order has petitioned for the removal of the censure.

Who should read this: those drawn to apophatic and contemplative theology, preachers willing to learn radical compression, and readers who have found devotional writing too tame. Not for beginners looking for a first book on prayer, not for those who need doctrinal edges kept tidy, and not for anyone seeking warm affective piety or a Christ-centered devotional narrative — Eckhart will strip rather than console. Best read slowly, in small portions, ideally with Tauler alongside.