Understand in about 5 minutes
Seven medieval sermons argue that God is nearer to you than you are to yourself, and that the soul reaches Him by emptying itself of all created things until His birth takes place within.
Mind Map
Core Message
Eckhart's recurring claim is that the divine is not distant but already present at the ground of the soul. The work is not to travel toward God but to notice and clear away what hides a nearness that is closer to a person than that person is to himself.
The quality Field renders as sanctification or separation is ranked above love, humility, and pity. To be empty of all love of creatures is to be full of God, so the soul is told to stay self-contained, unmoved by joy or sorrow, like a mountain untouched by a gentle breeze.
Eckhart turns the Nativity inward. It is more worthy of God to be born spiritually in every pure soul than to have been born once of Mary, and the Father is said to bring forth His Son in a person whether they sleep or wake.
At the height of the sermons the line between the soul and God dissolves. The eye with which a person sees God is the same eye with which God sees that person, so knowing God finally means being one with God rather than observing Him from outside.
Summary
Meister Eckhart's Sermons gathers seven sermons by the Dominican preacher Eckhart (about 1260 to 1327), in the first English translation by Claud Field. A short preface sketches Eckhart's life, his trouble with the Inquisition at Cologne, and his governing idea: an absolute, attribute-free Godhead from which all things flow and to which they long to return.
The opening sermons place God astonishingly close. In the second, on the nearness of the kingdom, Eckhart says God is nearer to him than he is to himself, and that happiness depends not merely on God being present but on a person knowing and loving that presence. To know God, the soul must grow still and remote from all earthly things, ready to receive Him outside of time and place.
Several sermons describe the birth of God within the soul. In the sermon on the angel's greeting, Eckhart claims it is more worthy of God to be born spiritually in every pure soul than to have been born once of Mary, and that the Father brings forth His Son in a person whether they will it or not. The task is to become the kind of soul in which this birth can happen.
The longest sermon, which Field titles sanctification (and notes means separation from all outward things), is the book's center of gravity. Eckhart sets this detachment above love, humility, and pity, because it draws God to the soul of necessity: God's own place is oneness, and a heart emptied of everything created is the place where He must come and write. To be empty of all love of creatures is to be full of God.
The closing sermons join inner stillness to outer life. Detachment is not the end in itself but the condition for union, in which the soul loses its own distinctness and vanishes in God as the colour of sunrise disappears in the sun. Yet Eckhart insists that grace must still express itself in works of love, and that on earth no one stays perfectly unmoved. The deepest claim remains apophatic: the Godhead itself stays unknown, a light shining in a darkness that does not comprehend it.
Key Concepts
The quality Field translates as sanctification or separation from all creatures: a stillness in which the soul is unmoved by love or hate, joy or sorrow, and stays contained within itself rather than going out toward things.
Eckhart ranks it above love, humility, and pity, because an emptied heart is the one place God can fully enter. It reframes the spiritual task as subtraction rather than acquisition.
The idea that the eternal generation of the Son is repeated inwardly: God is born spiritually in every pure soul, and a person is meant to become a son who in turn brings forth God.
It moves the sacred from a single historical event into the present interior life of the reader, making the soul itself the site where the divine appears.
There is a somewhat in the soul, as the preface calls it a spark, that is akin to God, has nothing in common with anything created, and through which a person can at rare moments touch the Absolute.
It grounds Eckhart's confidence that union is possible at all: something uncreated in the soul answers directly to the uncreated God.
Mental Models
If God is to write on the heart, everything else must first be wiped away, because whatever is already written there, however noble, gets in the way of what God would inscribe.
It gives a concrete test for inner work: ask not what to add to the soul but what still needs to be cleared from it.
The eye with which a person sees God is the same eye with which God sees that person, so at the summit there is one sight, one knowledge, and one love rather than two parties looking at each other.
It pictures union not as a reward earned at a distance but as a shared act, dissolving the gap between seeker and sought.
When the soul reaches its goal it loses its own distinctness and disappears in God the way the crimson of sunrise is lost in the risen sun.
It offers a way to imagine self-loss as completion rather than destruction, the small light absorbed into the larger one it came from.
Selected Quotes
The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.
to be empty of all creature's love is to be full of God, and to be full of creature-love is to be empty of God.
It is more worthy of God that He be born spiritually of every pure and virgin soul, than that He be born of Mary.
Source
Source text: Christian Classics Ethereal Library text of Meister Eckhart's Sermons, translated by Claud Field.
HTML text: https://ccel.org/ccel/e/eckhart/sermons/cache/sermons.txt
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library lists the rights status of this edition as Public Domain.
Claud Field's English translation was published in London by H. R. Allenson around 1909 (Heart and Life Booklets, No. 22). The sermons themselves date from the early fourteenth century.