God in the Basement: The Radical Mysticism of Meister Eckhart

alanbjones
13 minutes ago
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God in the Basement: The Radical Mysticism of Meister Eckhart

How a fourteenth-century Dominican friar dissolved the self, annoyed the Pope, and accidentally invented half of Western philosophy

Imagine you are a senior manager at one of the most powerful organisations in medieval Europe. You are respected, educated, articulate, and genuinely pious.

You have a gift for preaching that fills churches to capacity. And then one day, after a long and distinguished career, your employer takes you to court on twenty-eight charges of heresy. And they do so six months after you die, just to make absolutely certain.

This is the story of Meister Eckhart von Hochheim, born around 1260 in Thuringia, Germany, and arguably the most audacious mystical theologian ever to have worn a habit. He was a man who looked at the infinite chasm between the human soul and the divine, shrugged, and said: “Actually, I think you’ll find there isn’t one.”

The institutional Church, understandably, did not entirely agree.

But before we arrive at the heresy trial, which is, admittedly, one of history’s more entertaining pieces of ecclesiastical overreach, we should spend some time understanding what Eckhart actually taught, because it is extraordinary. Not merely extraordinary for the fourteenth century, though it certainly was that. Extraordinary in the way that genuinely original thought is always extraordinary: it makes you stop, put down your coffee, and stare at the middle distance for a while.

The Man Behind the Meister

Eckhart was a Dominican friar, which is worth pausing on. The Dominicans were the intellectual powerhouse of the medieval Church, the order that produced Thomas Aquinas, and whose motto was, essentially, “study everything, preach everywhere, and argue with anyone who will stand still long enough.” They were not, as a rule, given to quiet contemplation. They were given to systematic theology, which is considerably noisier.

Eckhart thrived in this environment.

He studied and later taught in Paris, the Oxford of the medieval world, only with better bread and worse weather. He held the prestigious Chair of Theology at the University of Paris (twice, a rarity), served as Prior of Erfurt, Vicar of Thuringia, and Provincial Vicar of Bohemia. This was a man navigating spreadsheets, personnel disputes, and institutional politics with the same mind that was simultaneously producing some of the most radical mystical philosophy in European history. There is a lesson in that about compartmentalisation, though I am not sure we should apply it too literally.

He preached prolifically in Middle High German, in the vernacular, to ordinary people in convents, churches, and markets, at a time when theologians were expected to confine themselves to Latin and the educated classes. This was not merely democratic outreach. It was philosophically significant. Eckhart was developing a new German vocabulary for concepts that barely had Latin words, let alone German ones. He essentially had to invent the language as he went.

Several terms he coined — Gelassenheit (releasement, letting go), Abgeschiedenheit (detachment) — are still used in philosophy today, primarily because Heidegger was an avid reader of Eckhart and borrowed shamelessly.

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love — Meister Eckhart, Sermons

The Godhead and the Ground: A Very Strange Theology

Let us now wade into the deep water, because Eckhart’s theology is where things become genuinely peculiar — and genuinely fascinating.

Most medieval Christian theology operated on the assumption that God is a being, an extraordinarily powerful, eternal, transcendent being, certainly, but a being nonetheless. God creates. God judges. God loves. These are all things that beings do. Thomas Aquinas had devoted enormous energy to systematising this God, categorising divine attributes, and demonstrating, through logical argument, that this supreme being must necessarily exist. It was careful, brilliant work. It was also, Eckhart felt, slightly missing the point.

Eckhart distinguished between Gott — God as understood by theology and as encountered in religious life, the God of scripture and sacrament and prayer — and what he called the Gottheit: the Godhead.

The Godhead is not a being. The Godhead is beyond being. It is the ground, the source, the silent abyss from which all things, including God, emerge. It is absolutely simple, absolutely still, absolutely one. It has no attributes, because attributes would make it a thing, and it is not a thing.

If you are thinking that this sounds rather more like certain strands of Buddhist philosophy than mainstream Christianity, you are not alone. Scholars have been making this comparison for decades. Eckhart probably arrived at these ideas through Neoplatonism, particularly the work of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius, rather than through any direct contact with Eastern traditions, but the convergence is striking and worth sitting with.

Now here is where it gets really interesting. Eckhart argued that within the human soul there is something. He calls it the Seelenfünklein, the “little spark of the soul,” or sometimes the Grund der Seele, the “ground of the soul” — that is of the same nature as the Godhead. Not like the Godhead. Not connected to the Godhead. Of the same nature. Identical, even.

THE CORE TEACHINGS AT A GLANCE

The Godhead (Gottheit)

Beyond God, beyond being, beyond all attributes. The silent ground of all existence. Neither creator nor created — simply the source from which everything flows and to which everything returns. Don’t try to imagine it. That’s rather the point.

The Ground of the Soul (Grund der Seele)

The deepest part of the human self is not “like” God — it is, in its essence, of the same nature as the divine Godhead. The mystic’s task is to discover this ground beneath all thought, image, and desire.

Detachment (Abgeschiedenheit)

The great virtue for Eckhart, surpassing even love. To detach from all created things, including one’s own ego, preferences, and even one’s sense of a separate self, is to clear the ground for divine birth within the soul.

The Birth of the Word (Geburt des Wortes)

God is eternally being born in the ground of the soul. This is not a metaphor. It is, for Eckhart, the central event of mystical life — happening now, always, if one is sufficiently detached to notice it.

Detachment: The Art of Caring About Nothing (Strategically)

Eckhart’s great practical teaching is Abgeschiedenheit — detachment — and it is frequently misunderstood, so let us be careful here. He is not recommending apathy. He is not suggesting one should fail to turn up for supper or neglect one’s administrative duties (of which, as we have noted, he had many). He is not even suggesting one should cease to feel emotions.

What Eckhart means by detachment is something more radical and more interesting: a release of the grasping self. The self that defines itself by what it wants, what it fears, what it owns, and what it has achieved. He argues that this grasping self — the ego, we might say now, reaching for a slightly more contemporary vocabulary — is the primary obstacle to the experience of the divine ground. Not because the divine ground is distant and the ego stands in the way, but because the ego is the illusion of distance. Strip away the ego’s frantic self-definition, and what remains is the ground - already there, always there, identical with the divine.

This is also why Eckhart makes the rather startling claim that detachment is a greater virtue than love. He does not mean love is unimportant. He means that love, as ordinarily experienced, still involves a self that is doing the loving and an object that is being loved. True union dissolves that subject-object distinction entirely. In the ground of the soul, there is no lover and beloved.

There is only the one act of loving, which is also the one act of being, which is also — and here Eckhart refuses to stop — the one act of knowing.

“To be empty of all created things is to be full of God, and to be full of created things is to be empty of God.”— Meister Eckhart, Sermons

The Problem with Saying Audacious Things Loudly

All of this is, from a certain angle, beautiful. From another angle, specifically the angle occupied by the Archbishop of Cologne, and subsequently Pope John XXII, it is alarming.

The problem was not merely what Eckhart said, but who he said it to. When learned theologians, among others, discuss the identity of the soul’s ground with the divine in Latin at a university, this can be managed. It can be contextualised, qualified, and surrounded by sufficient caveats.

But Eckhart was saying these things in German, from pulpits, to nuns, craftsmen and market traders. “You and God are one” is a sentiment that requires rather careful unpacking before you deliver it to several hundred people who may not have studied Neoplatonism.

The investigation began in Cologne in 1326. Eckhart defended himself vigorously, insisting that his words had been taken out of context, that his accusers had misunderstood his meaning, and that in any case everything he had ever said was subject to correction by the Church (this last being the standard theological get-out clause of the era).

He appealed to the Pope in Avignon. He died, probably in 1328, before the appeal was resolved.

In 1329, Pope John XXII issued the bull In agro dominico (“In the Lord’s field”), condemning twenty-eight propositions drawn from Eckhart’s works. Seventeen were declared heretical outright. Eleven were declared “evil-sounding, rash, and suspect of heresy,” which is a wonderfully precise gradation of theological disapproval. The bull noted, with somewhat strained magnanimity, that Eckhart had recanted before his death. A claim that remains disputed by historians, and which Eckhart, being dead, was unable to contest.

And then something rather interesting happened: nothing. The condemnation was issued. It was not widely enforced. Eckhart’s works continued to circulate in manuscripts, copied out by the very Dominican nuns and Brothers of the Common Life he had preached to.

His influence quietly permeated German mysticism — Tauler, Suso, the anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica. Martin Luther, two centuries later, found the Theologia Germanica so compelling that he had it printed, describing it as among the most instructive books he had ever read (which tells you something about the Reformation’s complicated relationship with institutional authority).

Why Eckhart Matters Now

One could, at this point, regard Eckhart as a medieval curiosity, a man of remarkable intellectual gifts who pushed his luck, fell foul of ecclesiastical politics, and whose ideas were subsequently absorbed into the general stream of Western esotericism like so much else. This would be an underestimate.

Eckhart’s ideas have had a surprisingly robust afterlife in modernity. Heidegger drew on him extensively for the concept of Gelassenheit, a kind of open, receptive waiting rather than striving, and for his meditations on “the ground of being.” Schopenhauer saw in Eckhart a Western approximation of the Buddhist concept of the dissolution of the individual will. Aldous Huxley included him prominently in The Perennial Philosophy. The Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki engaged seriously with Eckhart as a point of genuine convergence between Christian and Buddhist thought.

More recently, Eckhart has been adopted, sometimes rather loosely, by the contemporary mindfulness and “consciousness” movements. His name appears with reliable frequency wherever people are discussing the nature of the self, the limitations of ego-consciousness, and the possibility of what we might cautiously call non-dual awareness. Eckhart Tolle, the author of The Power of Now, chose his first name as a deliberate homage. Whether Meister Eckhart would have approved of The Power of Now is an interesting question; one suspects he might have found it rather too focused on making the reader feel better, and insufficiently focused on the terrifying dissolution of everything the reader thinks they are.

Because that is the thing about Eckhart that gets smoothed over in popular reception: his mysticism is not comfortable. The ground of the soul is not a warm bath. To truly encounter what Eckhart is pointing at requires, or at least, Eckhart insists it requires, the complete relinquishment of the self-as-we-understand-it. Not a temporary relaxation of the ego. It's completely and utterly empty. He compares the process to a desert: silent, boundless, featureless, and utterly without the consolations we tend to associate with spiritual experience.

“The most important hour is always the present. The most significant person is precisely the one sitting across from you right now. The most necessary work is always love.” - Attributed to Meister Eckhart

The Rational Mystic’s Verdict

So, where does the Rational Mystic land on all this?

Here is what I think we can say with confidence: Eckhart was doing something genuinely unusual, which is holding two things simultaneously that most people are tempted to treat as mutually exclusive.

He was a rigorous intellectual, trained in the best scholastic tradition, deeply familiar with Aristotle, Aquinas, Neoplatonism, and the whole apparatus of medieval philosophical theology.

He did not abandon reason in pursuit of mystical conclusions. He followed reason, all the way to its limit, and then reported back on what he found at the edge.

What he found was that the self is not what it thinks it is. This is, of course, not a conclusion unique to Eckhart. It appears in Buddhism, in Vedanta, in Sufism, in strands of Taoism. The fact that it keeps appearing, in different cultural and intellectual contexts, reached by different routes, is worth noting. It does not prove the conclusion is correct. But it suggests that the question is a real one, and not merely a medieval confusion.

The contemporary psychologist or neuroscientist will point out that the “self” as a unified, continuous entity is indeed something of a construction. That the brain assembles a narrative of selfhood from disparate processes, and that this narrative can be disrupted in fascinating and instructive ways. This is not quite what Eckhart was saying, but it rhymes with it. The meditator who reports a temporary dissolution of the sense of self during deep practice is pointing to something that the mystic and the neuroscientist, from their very different vantage points, are both trying to describe.

Eckhart would have had no patience for the pop-spiritual version of his teaching, in which “letting go of the ego” becomes a lifestyle choice compatible with strong opinions about coffee and a curated Instagram presence. He was talking about something considerably more demanding: a complete reorientation of one’s relationship to existence, arrived at through sustained practice, intellectual honesty, and what can only be described as a willingness to be thoroughly inconvenienced by truth.

He was also, as his trial rather proves, a man willing to say difficult things in public and stand behind them. He did not soften his ideas to make them more palatable. He did not hedge his most radical claims into meaninglessness. He stood in front of crowds of ordinary people and told them that the deepest part of them was identical with the divine ground of all existence — and that they had, accordingly, considerably less excuse for petty-mindedness than they might have supposed.

For a Dominican friar born in 1260, that strikes me as a remarkably contemporary sensibility. And for the rest of us, still navigating the same tension between the institutional and the experiential, the rational and the mystical, the self we perform and the ground beneath it, Eckhart remains, six hundred years on, entirely worth arguing with.

Which is, perhaps, the highest compliment one can pay a philosopher.

Alan /|\