Eckhart’s surviving works fall into two main bodies. The Latin works, written for the academy, are systematic theology in the scholastic mode and were never controversial. The German works, the Predigten and Traktate, were preached and circulated in vernacular Middle High German to lay audiences, especially the Beguine and Dominican women’s communities of the upper Rhine. They were the basis of the heresy proceedings against him.
What disturbed his judges and continues to startle careful readers today is the directness of the formulations. Eckhart speaks of a Seelengrund, the soul’s ground, which is identical with the ground of God. He speaks of a Gottheit beyond the named God of religion, a Godhead that is no thing and no person. He says the eye with which the soul sees God is the eye with which God sees the soul. He says God’s birth in the soul is happening continually and the work is to recognise it, not to accomplish it.
The Evans translation gathers the major sermons in roughly the order accepted by modern scholarship. It is dated, the German manuscript tradition has been substantially clarified since 1924, and modern translations such as those of Bernard McGinn and Maurice O’C Walshe (now Penguin Classics) are more accurate. But Evans is in the public domain, and the Eckhart of these pages is unmistakably the Eckhart of the great German sermons.
Sermon one — Surge illuminare Jerusalem
Opening
Arise, be enlightened, O Jerusalem, for thy light is come. Saint Augustine says: God is nearer to the soul than the soul is to itself. The nearness of God and the soul has no distinction whatsoever in truth. The same knowledge in which God knows himself is the knowledge of every detached spirit, and no other.
Continuation
The soul that wills to find God must let go of all things, even God-as-object. As long as one clings to anything as one’s own, one has not yet entered the ground of one’s soul. There the soul finds nothing but God, for God’s ground and the soul’s ground are the same.
[ One sermon among many. Eckhart’s German sermons survive in roughly fifty texts, each a complete teaching organised around a single scriptural verse and dilated into a metaphysical disclosure. The complete Pfeiffer collection is at the source linked above. ]