Eckhart and Modern Catholicism

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Meister Eckhart and the Return of the Unsayable: A Mystic for the Modern Catholic

In the late 13th century, as Gothic cathedrals were reaching heavenward and the Scholastic mind was chiselling doctrine into syllogistic stone, a Dominican friar named Meister Eckhart began to preach sermons so stark, so paradoxical, so disconcertingly luminous that even now, seven centuries later, they pulse with a strange contemporary urgency.

Eckhart was no backroom eccentric. He studied in Cologne, taught at the University of Paris, and held senior positions in the Dominican Order. But something in him strained against the scholasticism of his contemporaries. Though shaped by the logic of Aquinas and fluent in the syllogisms of Aristotle, Eckhart looked not upwards toward celestial hierarchies, but inward—into the dark, unlit interior of the soul where, he claimed, God is not merely encountered but begotten.

"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."

This, from a man licensed to teach theology at Paris.

Historical Soil: Rhineland and Reason

Eckhart emerged from a fertile moment. He belonged to the Dominican Order—those intellectual shock troops of orthodoxy—and was immersed in the dialectical rigours of high scholasticism. Yet he lived in the Rhineland, a region aflame with lay mysticism, especially among women. The Beguines—semi-cloistered women mystics living beyond canonical norms—spoke of interior transformation, holy detachment, and union with God. Some were canonised. Others were condemned. Their influence, whether direct or atmospheric, is palpable in Eckhart's sermons.

Intellectually, Eckhart was steeped in Neoplatonism: the writings of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Plotinus. These thinkers suggested that God is not a being among beings but the very ground of being, unknowable, beyond form, beyond even the category of 'God'.

The Distinctive Theology

At the core of Eckhart's mysticism is a process of subtraction. One must detach from all things, not merely sinful ones, but even holy desires and images of God. The soul, he claims, must become utterly empty—a spiritual tabula rasa:

"I pray God to rid me of God."

He distinguishes between God (the personal, Trinitarian Creator) and the Godhead (deitas), which is beyond all names, all distinctions. This is no flirtation with pantheism but a rigorous apophatic theology (referring to the knowledge of God obtained through negating concepts that might be applied to Him).

God, in God's innermost essence, is not even 'God' in any creaturely sense. And yet, Eckhart insists, the soul's ground is identical with this divine ground. Not analogously. Not metaphorically. Ontologically.

This raises eyebrows even now. At the time, it raised inquisitors.

In 1326, complaints reached Pope John XXII in Avignon. By 1329, after Eckhart's death, a papal bull condemned 28 of his propositions, some as heretical, others merely suspect. Yet the bull carefully noted that Eckhart had recanted anything heretical before his death, preserving his orthodoxy—just.

Then, silence. His Latin works vanished into the archives; his German sermons passed underground. For centuries, he was a ghost.

The Birth of God in the Soul

Of all Eckhart’s startling pronouncements, none is more charged with mystical voltage than this:

“The soul must become empty of all things. Then God can be born there.”

It is the distilled essence of his vision. To modern ears, it might sound like poetic hyperbole or some florid metaphor for piety. But for Eckhart, it is metaphysical reality. The soul is not merely a vessel to be filled with divine grace—it is the very site of divine generation.

This is not poetry. This is ontological midwifery.

For God to be born in the soul, the soul must be emptied—not only of sin or distraction, but of everything: desires, images, doctrines, even the idea of God. All must be let go. Eckhart calls this Abgeschiedenheit—a radical detachment so pure that even the will is surrendered, even the longing for heaven relinquished.

This emptiness is not sterile nihilism. It is a virginal stillness—the womb of the soul where the eternal Logos, the second Person of the Trinity, can be born just as He is eternally begotten in the Godhead. In this sense, the Incarnation is not only a historical event; it is an interior event, one that recurs whenever the soul becomes a new Bethlehem.

This is the summit of Eckhart’s thought: the divine birth within. The same Word who was with God in the beginning can be begotten in me, if I become nothing.

It is the most audacious idea in Christian mysticism—and perhaps the most liberating.

Eastward Echoes: Eckhart and the Buddha

In the 20th century, that ghost began to stir.

Zen Buddhists, beginning with D.T. Suzuki, recognised in Eckhart a kindred spirit. Here was a man speaking of interior emptiness, the futility of concepts, the transcendence of duality, the importance of not clinging even to God. Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk who dabbled in Zen, claimed that Eckhart was "the one Christian mystic closest in spirit to Zen."

The comparisons, while not precise, are illuminating:

• Zen says: "If you meet the Buddha, kill him."

• Eckhart says: "I pray God to rid me of God."

Both traditions reject idolatry of the mind. Both seek union, not through acquisition but through loss. For the Buddhist, this is anattā; for Eckhart, Abgeschiedenheit (detachment).

Does He Speak to Today?

And here we arrive at the crux. Why is Eckhart returning now? Why does a medieval German Dominican speak to our postmodern, post-Christian moment?

Because he offers something many contemporary Catholic traditions struggle to articulate:

• A mysticism without sentimentality

• A depth theology that transcends ideology

• A path of interiority that does not depend on moralism or political activism

Eckhart speaks to: the spiritual but not religious; the devout but disenchanted; the Catholics who find piety insufficient but do not want to leave the tradition behind. He offers a vision of God who is not a cosmic manager, but the silent abyss in which all things move and have their being. He offers Christ not as moral exemplar but as the eternal Word born in the soul.

In an age of noise, Eckhart speaks of silence. In a time of spiritual branding, he teaches namelessness. In a Church often caught between bureaucracy and banality, he points to the unspeakable mystery at its core.

He does not replace Catholicism; he deepens it. He burns away the accretions, not with fire, but with stillness.

"The soul must become empty of all things. Then God can be born there."

Put historicity aside. Move beyond the stories. Go deeper than community and ethics. Perhaps this is the Catholicism we need. Not a new theology, but a return to the deepest ground.

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Further Reading:

• Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart

• D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist

• Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience

• Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings (Penguin Classics)

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