“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” (“Das Licht leuchtet in der Finsternis und die Finsternis hat es nicht erfasst” (“the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”)
from the Gospel of John, 1.5), is the most beloved phrase of the Eckhart – Meister Eckhart,
Master / Meister Eckhart – Meister Eckhart, also known as Eckhart of Hochheim (Eckhart von Hochheim, 1260 – 1328) was a major German Christian theologian, philosopher and mystic of the Late Middle Ages, a Dominican monk and university professor, whose ideas greatly influenced both his contemporaries and many later thinkers. However, at the end of his life he was accused by the Roman Catholic Church as a heretic and certain aspects of his teaching were condemned.
As is evident from his biography, the life of Master Eckhart revolved mainly around two axes. He was a consistent academic teacher and this is reflected in his very eloquent and detailed Latin works, but at the same time he was also the head of the Dominican order, so he tried as a responsible person to respond to the particular spiritual and mystical quests of the monks through his sermons and treatises in German, after a very detailed reading of religious texts. In these texts he develops a particular theological teaching with which he attempts to interpret the way in which the eternal and uncreated God comes into communion and union with his finite creation, man. In the time of Master Eckart, mysticism had spread to wider layers of monks, but also lay people who were seeking the ideal of the “mystical union” (“unio mystica”) with God.
From Master Eckhart comes a vision of the soul’s search for God that begins with a sharp existential division: Those who serve God through external works are rewarded with “created” things: Heavens, shining spheres and celestial splendor. Those who serve Him “internally” receive something uncreated as a gift from God: the living action of the Holy Trinity itself! For Master Eckhart, the highest service does not come from work, from the tireless effort for a “grandfather”, a “prize”, but from an inner turning towards the source, where the Power of the Father, the Wisdom of the Son and the Love of the Spirit dwell together in the soul. The divine is present in all creatures, but manifests itself differently in each one. The soul exists to recognize this truth, to sink into the bottomless wellspring of God’s nature and to unite with Him, so much so that it can speak of itself as God, a self stripped of all forms and names, just as God is stripped of all forms and names.
Mysticism in Western Christianity refers to spiritual traditions that seek the direct and personal experience of the divine, often through the union of the Mystic with God. These practices and teachings may include a variety of exercises, meditation, and inner searches, with the goal of transcending the material world and achieving a deeper spiritual understanding. In Western Christianity, mysticism is the search for a direct and personal relationship with the divine, beyond formal religious structures and rituals, and has its roots in various sources, such as the Church Fathers, monastic traditions, and ancient Greco-Roman philosophical influences.
Key characteristics of Western Christian Mysticism are: Union with God [The main goal is union with God, which includes feelings of divine love, ecstasy, and transformation] – Transcendence of the ego and experiencing a sense of oneness with the divine and all of creation – Spiritual practices [such as prayer, meditation, fasting, and inner search, to facilitate spiritual evolution] – Esoteric knowledge [beyond rational thought, revealed through experience].
Master Eckhart tries to interpret theologically the possibility of the “union” of God and man, and the starting point of his thought is that God was born and became man (Christ), so that man can also become god, “be born as god” [“Die Deutschen Werke”, volume B, page 84-first comprehensive edition of his works, 1934, derivative of the “Eckhart Commission of the German Research Foundation” (“Eckhart – Kommission der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft”]. That is why his teaching focuses on the two poles: “god” and “man”, as he attempts to find and describe the way in which the union between them becomes possible.
One of Master Eckhart’s special teachings is that which concerns the distinction between god and divinity. By the term “god” he refers to the triune, personal God of Christian theology (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), while with the term “divinity” he describes the inaccessible divine essence beyond and above the triune god. To emphasize the distinction between god and divinity he claims that “god and divinity are as far apart as the earth and the sky” [“Die Deutschen Werke”, volume IV, page 767]. The great difference between them is that the triune god acts, while the divinity does not perform any work, is in absolute and eternal immobility.
Eckhart, like most Dominican thinkers, describes the divinity in Neoplatonic terms [as the American Catholic theologian, religious historian and scholar of spirituality, expert in medieval mysticism Bernard McGinn, brilliantly records in his book The Mystical Thought of the Master Eckhart” (“The mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart”), New York, 2001, page 47] as he identifies the divine essence with the absolute unity of all things. He uses the term “grunt” (Grund) to describe the subsoil, the “depth” or “foundation” of the divine essence, where the primary, undifferentiated unity prevails.
He identifies God with the Absolute One, following, at the same time, the negative or apophatic theology [the “Negative Way” – “Via Negativa”, the religious perception and theological view that attempts to describe God through “negation”, referring to God using exclusively terms that describe what could not be said about God and attempts to gain and express knowledge about God through the description of what God is not (“apophasis”)] and the Neoplatonic “Dionysius the Elder” or “Pseudo-Dionysius”. He refuses to attribute any characterization to God and for this reason prefers to describe him as “the negation of the negation” (“versagen des versagens”) and as “nothing” (“nichts”).
From the indescribable depth of the divinity, the three persons of the triune god will initially emerge as its “outflows” and then all creations. Emerging from the dark depth of the immobile divinity, the god carries within himself the models of all beings and his work is their creation. God the Father is the one who emerges first and constitutes the starting point of the intra-trinitarian differentiation of the persons. He eternally gives birth to his only-begotten Son and Word and from the two the Holy Spirit subsequently proceeds. The next stage of divine emanation is the creation by God of the world and all beings, which pre-existed as images in the depths of the divine essence. The ultimate goal of all beings and all creation is the reversal of this movement of differentiation, with a movement of returning everything to the original unity of the divinity that will abolish all otherness [see the book by the German-Swiss medievalist, Germanist, mystic and philosopher Alois Maria Haas (1934-2025) “Meister Eckhart as normative personality of spiritual life” (“Meister Eckhart als normative Gestalt geistlichen Lebens”), Einsiedeln, 1979, page 20.]
Master Eckhart’s teaching about man focuses mainly on his attempt to locate that element that makes man related to God, despite the fact that they are two different ontological categories. Man is an ephemeral, created and finite being, but he is capable of uniting with his creator, who is eternal and the source of all existence. To interpret this difficult point, Master Eckhart resorts to philosophical theories such as the Platonic theory of ideas, arguing that man, before receiving his created “Being”, exists eternally as an idea in the Son, who carries within himself all ideas. Whatever is found in God as an idea is superior to every creation because it is also divine.
Although all beings exist as an idea in God, man is the highest of all because he was created “in the image and likeness”. This means, according to Master Eckhart, that man and more specifically his soul carries within itself God as an image, in the way that an image is reflected in a mirror. The divine image is present in the human mirror without being identified with it.
In other parts of his German sermons he speaks of the existence of lower and higher powers in the human soul, as well as of a divine “spark of the soul” (“scintilla animae”), which the soul carries within itself and which is related to God [on this see the outstanding thesis of the Swedish theologian, philosopher and university professor Hans Birger Hof, (Hans Birger Hof, 1922- 2011) “Spark of the soul. A study of a fundamental concept in the philosophy of Master Eckhart, with particular emphasis on the relationship of Eckhart’s philosophy to the Neoplatonic and Thomistic view” (“Scintilla animae. Eine Studie zu einem Grundbegriff in Meister Eckharts Philosophie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Verhältnisses der Eckhartschen Philosophie zur neoplatonischen und Thomistischen Anschauung”). Bonn, 1952.] The highest point of the soul is often identified with the “intellect” (intellectus), which is not simply a power or faculty of the soul, but, according to Eckart, (“Die Deutschen Werke” vol. III, page 169) constitutes a divine and uncreated element that has been given to man and is liberated from space and time, as scholars of his work, such as the aforementioned Bernard McGinn, emphatically point out
In other cases he speaks of a highest point of the soul that he calls the depth (grunt) of the soul and which is essentially identified with the divine depth (grunt). As he characteristically emphasizes, “in the depth of the soul, there the depth of God and the depth of the soul are one and the same depth.” This and other similar passages from his sermons have led to his teaching being considered suspect for pantheism (the belief that nature and God are one and therefore the World is divine).
Modern researchers of his work [The German Dietmar Mieth, professor of “theological ethics” at the University of Tübingen – The Swiss Kurt Ruh (1914-2002), Germanist and medievalist, professor at the University of Würzburg – The German Bernhard Welte (1906-1983), professor of Christian philosophy of religion at the University of Freiburg – The Greek Theologian Doctor Christos Nasios]. Those who study his entire work believe that Master Eckhart taught about a higher, divine or “uncreated” element that the soul carries within itself, but which is not its own, which has been given to it by God as a “loan” and should be understood more as “an image of God in the human soul.”
