Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart, who is probably the best-known Christian mystic of the Middle Ages, was totally committed to God and the Catholic Church. Because of his intellectual brilliance, he rose in the church hierarchy until he earned the position of Regent Master of the Studium Generale in Köln, Germany. In this position he had great influence over the religious life of central Europe. However, Eckhart had a series of profound mystical experiences of Christ-Consciousness, and as he gradually integrated those experiences into his teachings, his words became more and more mystical.

Today, his most famous statement, “The eye through which I see God is the very eye through which God sees me,” is quoted in hundreds of contemporary spiritual books. This is the kind of statement that, at the height of his teaching career, caused the Papacy to ban his writings as heretical. Although Eckhart is now recognized by the Catholic Church as one of its deepest and most enlightened priests, it is easy to see why he was so misunderstood during the Middle Ages. In 1985 the Pope, John Paul II, said,

Did not Eckhart teach his disciples: “All that God asks you most pressingly is to go out of yourself—and let God be God in you?’’ One could think that, in separating himself from creatures, the mystic leaves his brothers, humanity, behind. The same Eckhart affirms that, on the contrary, the mystic is marvelously present to them on the only level where he can truly reach them, that is in God.

What a wonderful case of rehabilitation! The church that initially condemned Eckhart now praises him. Imagine how shocked his contemporaries must have been when Eckhart said,
“What is truth? Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep to the truth and let God go.” Along this same line he also said, “All those who want to make statements about God are wrong, for they fail to say anything about Him. Those who want to say nothing about Him are right, for no word can express God.”

This statement is remarkably similar to a statement by Lao Tzu in the Daodeqing that says, “The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The unnamable is eternally real.” Although they came from different cultures and different times, both Eckhart and Lao Tzu had discovered the same core reality. Eckhart uses the word “God” and Lao Tzu uses the word “Dao,” but both men advise that the word or concept is far from the living truth. Like so many other mystics, saints, sages, and religious masters, Eckhart discovered that, at a certain level, our mind encounters the Infinite. To reach that level we must limit the mental habit of cognition, which splits the world into self and not self. Judging from world history very few of us have had the patience, persistence, or necessary desire to reach that level and meet God face-to-face. Most of us are content to think about God, talk about God, and periodically petition God for assistance.