Meister Eckhart: The Essential
Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises
and Defense (Classics of Western
Spirituality) by Houston Smith
A Key Mystic Of Christianity
The thought of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327), Dominican philosopher and
spiritual master, is among the most daring and difficult in the history of
Western mysticism. Thoroughly grounded in the Scholastic method of his
day and steadfastly loyal to the Church, Eckharts love of speculation,
paradox, and the apophatic way, nevertheless, resulted in the controversial
condemnation of certain of his teachings by papal bull in 1329. His
doctrines of detachment, the return of the soul to God, and the birth of the
Son in the soul have continued to perplex his critics and nourish his
disciples through the ages. This volume, based on the critical Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft edition of Eckharts works, represents the first

time that his technical Latin writings and more popular German sermons
and treatises have appeared together in English.
Personal Review: Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons,
Commentaries, Treatises and Defense (Classics of Western
Spirituality) by Houston Smith
Meister Eckhart comes to us with an somewhat shadowy legacy. He was
charged with heresy, and while this was not unique (many Christian
mystics were accused of heretical thought at some point and some even
burned, like Margarite Porete), what is surprising was that Eckhart was
what would now be a Professor of Theology.
Eckhart was in some ways like a religious Galileo. His mystical ideas are
very often shocking, from his notion of the birth of Jesus in the soul to the
Godhead beyond the Trinity itself. His ideas were in many ways (with their
paralells to Sufi Islam and Buddhism) very far ahead of their time and like
other great Christian speculative mystics such as Origen or Evagrius
Ponticus, the charge of heresy is never too far away in the shadows. It is
then not surprising the ecclesiastic authorities charged this man with erring
from established truth.
However Eckhart saw himself as an genuine mystic afire with the love of
God and sharing in the deepest possible relationship with him. Eckhart
certainly was a mystical genius, and one of the most brilliant and profound
spiritual teachers Christianity has ever seen. He certainly belongs in the
same rank as Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, John of Cross and Denys the
Aeropagite.
Eckhart's approach to God uses both the way of denial and the way of
affirmation. God is both an incomprehensible darkness, a beingless One
above all distinctions, an ineffable reality, and at the same time the highest
good, light and reality. God is to be reached mainly through the innermost
ground of the soul which Eckhart calls the 'ground', and sometimes as a
little 'castle.' In an obscure way by encountering the divine there by
shunning all thoughts, concepts and images we don't so much encounter
'God' (the being with attributes as we see in the Bible), rather the
Godhead, or the Absolute as it truely is, as a One above all distinctions,
divisions, concepts, and being. When we meet the Absolute here God is
no longer the Trinitarian God of Catholic Christianity but the simple, silent
Godhead, ineffable and quiet in itself, yet also the highest reality there is,
and the source of all else, even 'God' himself. In this sense Eckhart seems
to share a great deal in common with Plotinus or Buddhism and 'shunyata',
the mysterious emptiness which is the changeless source of being. Indeed
he sometimes says God is 'nothing', and at other times creatures are
nothing, pure emptiness (when compared to the super-essential richness
of God in terms of his giving being). While having much in common with
previous Christian mystics, these ideas sat rather ill with the Church
authorities who seemed to think he was denying some key Christian

dogmas as well as affirming heretical ideas, such as Pantheism or
reincarnation. Indeed, the same charges often occur today.
Eckhart was not helped by his students, who often took his mysticism to
very unhealthy extremes. Suso and Tauler were his best 'disciples', but
overall the irrationalism and antinominalism of German mysticism which
followed Eckhart tended to show the decadence even the best mysticism
can fall into, if not checked with reason and common sense.
Nevertheless Eckhart speaks immediately and profoundly to the soul, and
whether you are Christian or not, he is certainly a great Christian mystic
who deserves in my view better recognition for his insights and
achievements than he has.
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