Philosophy of Religion

German Sermons

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Meister Eckhart

c. 1290–1328

Preached to Dominican nuns and lay audiences across the Rhineland, Eckhart's vernacular sermons are among the most daring texts in the Western mystical tradition. In plain German rather than ecclesiastical Latin, he proclaimed that the soul possesses a hidden ground — a spark (Fünklein) — where it is one with God not by grace but by nature. The sermons overturn ordinary piety: poverty of spirit means releasing even the desire for God, and the highest act of union is not ecstatic but utterly still.