Eckhart was the leading German theologian of his generation, twice holding the Dominican chair at Paris that Aquinas had held before him. He was also the most radical Christian mystic the West has produced. His German vernacular sermons, preached to lay audiences and to the Beguine and Dominican women’s communities of the Rhineland, push apophatic theology into formulations that read like Advaita translated into thirteenth-century German.
His central teaching is the birth of the Word in the ground of the soul. The soul has a deepest centre, what Eckhart calls Seelengrund, the soul’s ground, which is one and the same with the ground of God. In this ground, beyond image, beyond name, beyond the distinctions of the Trinity itself, the eternal Word is born continuously. Liberation is the recognition of what is already and always the case.
He went further. Beyond the named God of religion, beyond even the Trinity, Eckhart speaks of the Gottheit, the Godhead, a groundless ground that is no thing and no person, in which the soul and God are not two. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. The pointing is so close to the Vedanta of Gaudapada and Shankara, written nine centuries earlier on the other side of the world, that comparative scholars have spent a century trying to account for it.
Eckhart was tried for heresy by the Papal court at Avignon in his last years. He died before judgment was passed. The condemnation in 1329 placed twenty-eight propositions from his work on the index, and he became a marginal figure for centuries. He was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by German philosophers and in the twentieth by D.T. Suzuki and the new wave of comparative mysticism.
