Person
Meister Eckhart
Dominican preacher and Christian mystic
Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328) was a German Dominican—member of a preaching order in the medieval Catholic Church. He taught in Paris and Cologne and served as prior of the Dominican house in Erfurt. He is remembered for sermons that press Christian language toward a depth he sometimes called the Godhead: God beyond the God we name, still inside Christian faith, not a second religion.
He preached in German as well as Latin, to nuns and laypeople as well as scholars. Recurring themes include detachment—releasing the grip of images, will, and possession so that God can be born in the soul—and a distinction, in his speech, between God as we name God and a ground he called the Godhead. In some sermons the seeing of God and God’s seeing of the soul sound like one act. That is mystical speech in a Christian frame. It is not Advaita’s claim that Atman and Brahman are not two, and it is not Spinoza’s later philosophical God-or-Nature.
After his death, in 1329, a papal bull condemned a list of propositions associated with his teaching. He had already appealed to the pope; he did not live to hear the sentence. Scholars still debate how the sermons relate to the condemned articles, and how far his language of union preserves a creature–Creator distinction. What is not in dispute is that he remained a Christian preacher of Trinity, incarnation, and grace—not a crypto-Hindu, and not a modern “all is one” slogan wearing a monk’s robe.
Words used here
Plain meanings for words on this page.
theology
The disciplined study and articulation of claims about God, the sacred, and ultimate reality within a religious tradition. Theology works from scripture, practice, and community—not from a single universal definition of “God.”
A little deeper
Theology is not the same as philosophy, though they overlap. A theologian may speak from within a tradition’s commitments; a philosopher may ask about first causes or being without accepting revelation. Both can use the word God and mean different things.
non-duality
The idea that the separation we normally experience between “me” and “everything else” is not the deepest level of reality.
Featured connections
Where Meister Eckhart meets other voices
Meister EckhartAdi Shankara
parallel
Oneness is not one doctrine
Both refuse to treat the everyday “me” as the last word about what is most real, and both use language of ground, oneness, and release of grasping.
Both teachers press language until ordinary separation sounds less final. English then says they taught the same thing. They did not. Shankara’s non-duality is Advaita: Atman and Brahman are not two. Eckhart’s intensity is Christian: Godhead, Trinity, the Word born in the soul, a Dominican preacher under later ecclesiastical judgment.
Where they differ
Advaita’s Self is not the Christian soul in relation to a personal God. Eckhart does not teach Brahman. Parallel fire is not a shared metaphysics, and it is not proof that “all mystics agree.”
Meister EckhartPlotinus
parallel
Source beyond the names we use
Each treats ordinary God-talk or world-talk as not yet the last word about the source.
Both press language toward a depth beyond the God or the world we usually name. Eckhart remains a Dominican preacher of Trinity and the Word. Plotinus remains a pagan philosopher of the One.
Where they differ
Eckhart’s Godhead is Christian mystical speech inside prayer and incarnation. Plotinus’s One is not the God of the creed. Influence of Platonism on later Christian thought is a historical field; it does not make Eckhart a Plotinian in a cowl.
Meister EckhartChristianity
historical relationship
A mystic inside the Church
Eckhart belonged to the Dominican order and preached inside medieval Catholic Christianity. Later readers sometimes lift him out as a generic mystic of oneness. The sermons, the order, and the 1329 condemnation all belong to Christian history.
Meister EckhartGod
shared concept
Godhead among the meanings of God
Eckhart’s sermons are one of the strongest Christian attempts to say that the God we name does not exhaust God. Godhead language can be set beside Trinity, tawhid, Brahman, and Spinoza without being merged with them.
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Christianity
Tradition
Adi Shankara
Person
God
Idea
Jesus of Nazareth
Person
Sources
What this reading rests on
German sermons of Meister Eckhart
original work
Primary source for preaching on detachment, Godhead, and the soul.
Meister Eckhart – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
encyclopedia
Scholarly orientation for life, order, sermons, and the 1329 condemnation.