Meister Eckhart

What this work carries

Eckhart's sermons and treatises carry forward the Neoplatonic current of the soul's return to its ground in the Godhead, transmitted through Pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine into the Dominican scholastic milieu. They surface the experiential dimension of Christian initiation that official theology increasingly suppressed after the early centuries. The motif of the 'birth of the Word in the soul' preserves an interior mystery-knowledge rooted in pre-Christian and early Christian contemplative practice.

Language frame

Eckhart worked in both Latin scholastic prose and Middle High German vernacular, the latter opening speculative mystical theology to lay audiences for the first time in the German-speaking world. His vernacular sermons are dense with technical coinages — Abgeschiedenheit, Gelassenheit, Grunt — that compress entire ontological schemas into single terms.

Steiner’s engagement

• GA 7Steiner devotes a dedicated chapter to Eckhart in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, treating him as the primary figure in whom the inner life of the soul first reaches toward self-grounded spiritual cognition in the Western Christian stream.
• GA 326, 1922-12-24Steiner notes that Thomistic shades of thought run through Eckhart's writings, yet each time Eckhart's soul attempts to rise from theological thinking it reaches toward a direct supersensible cognition that ecclesiastical authority could not sanction, resulting in his posthumous condemnation as a heretic.
• GA 51, 1904-10-29Steiner characterises Eckhart's doctrine of the divine eye opened in the soul as a form of spiritual resurrection — a real act of inner cognition, not merely a metaphor of piety.
• GA 10Steiner cites Eckhart as a firm Christian witness to supersensible reality, paraphrasing his statements about the soul's ground as evidence of genuine inner experience rather than speculative theology.
• GA 34Steiner references Eckhart alongside Tauler as exemplifying the Christian mystical tradition that approached the superphysical world through rigorous inner work rather than external authority.
• GA 197, 1920-07-25Eckhart is identified at this locus as a German mystic situated within the polarity of materialism and mysticism that Steiner traces through modern Western evolution.
• GA 199, 1920-08-08Steiner places Eckhart within the sequence of Dominican mystics — alongside Tauler and others — who represent a specific stream of interior Christian development crossing the threshold toward spiritual worlds.

Cross-tradition congruence

• Advaita Vedanta — Atman / Brahman identityEckhart's claim that the soul's ground and the divine ground are identical in their innermost nature bears structural cross-tradition congruence with the Advaitic proposition that Atman and Brahman are non-dual, though mediated through entirely different theological and linguistic frameworks.
• Neoplatonism — henosis and the OneThe soul's return to the Godhead beyond all attributes in Eckhart's sermons is structurally congruent with the Plotinian concept of henosis, the reversion of the soul to the undifferentiated One, transmitted to Eckhart via Pseudo-Dionysius and Proclus.
• Kabbalah — Ein Sof and the withdrawal of GodEckhart's Godhead beyond God (the Gottheit prior to all trinitarian determination) bears cross-tradition congruence with the Kabbalistic Ein Sof as the infinite divine ground prior to the Sefirot, though each operates within its own doctrinal architecture.