Apostleship of Prayer Spirituality
 

MEISTER ECKHART
1260 - 1328

The central teaching of Eckhart’s mystical spirituality concerns the birth of the Word of God in the souls of the just. In one sermon Eckhart demanded,

“Why do we pray, why do we fast, why do we do all our works, why are we baptised, why (most important of all) did God become man?  -- I would answer, in order that God may be born in the soul and the soul be born in God. For that reason all the scriptures were written, for that reason God created the world and all angelic natures....”

For Eckhart God is uniquely present in the depths of the soul, waiting to break forth into joyful consciousness:

“As surely as the Father in his simple nature bears the Son naturally, just as surely he hears him in the inmost recesses of the spirit, and this is the inner world. Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.”

What prevents this awareness occurring in everyone is our inattentiveness, greed and indifference to love and justice. Eckhart remained a God-centred mystic, finding all things in God, and God in all things.

Eckhart has four preaching themes but all are synonymous in goal.

“When I preach, I am careful to speak about detachment and that a person should become free of self and of all things.

Secondly, that one should be reformed in the simple good that is God.

Thirdly, that one should think of the great nobility which God has placed in the soul, so that person may thereby come to God in a wonderful way.

Fourthly, concerning the purity of divine nature -- there is such brilliance in it that it is inexpressible.”

Thus ‘Detachment’ signifies the becoming free of oneself and of all things, which is the becoming like unto God in his simple essence. Unity is arrived at as the individual becomes more and more detached. As one becomes detached so there is a conversion, a reformation, a recreation in God that is the confirmation of that unity that is inherent in the creaturely nature of human beings.

Without God human beings are nothing of themselves, since they receive all being from God. However being is the unity of creaturely nothingness and the being of God. God differentiates himself from all created things in that He is differentiated from nothing. The “nobility” in such souls is God’s enduring presence in them, which gives them being as well as their preexistent unity.

The “purity of divine nature” is the triumphal content of Eckhart’s preaching. God, as the splendour of all beings, works through them in giving being. the greater unity of God and the rational creature will lead intothe always greater difference between the two. Creatures must let God be God, so that divinity -- God in the aspect of his unity -- will be present. The basic affirmation in Eckhart’s teaching is the graciously granted unity between the all-powerful God and the “nothing” of human beings.
 
 
 

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