Meister Eckhart

"I think Mark Burrows and Jon Sweeney achieve something quite rare and wonderful here. They make Eckhart clear, concise, and very compelling!" —Richard Rohr, OFM, bestselling author of Falling Upward An elegant rendering of the great mystic's thoughts on the mysteries of the authentic life This is a little book about soul freedom. It is a book about discovering the secret to all the things we most desire: contentment, meaning, peace of mind, and true freedom. This skillfully edited translation of selections from the writings of Meister Eckhart provides a roadmap to the spiritual life for contemporary seekers. Eckhart takes us on a journey of discovery; a journey in which we learn to let go, relinquish our need to know everything, and lose those things that we think are important for a life of worth. And in the end he shows us that the true secret is this: to find yourself, you must lose yourself. Here is timeless wisdom from a medieval mystic who has influenced a wide range of spiritual teachers and mystics both inside and outside the Christian tradition. Erich Fromm, Arthur Schopenhauer, Dag Hammarskjöld, Eckhart Tolle, Richard Rohr, D. T. Suzuki, Rudolf Steiner, and Matthew Fox have all credited Eckhart as being an important influence on their thought. In addition, his work has influenced the development of 20th-century American Buddhism and the Theosophical tradition. Divided into five sections—Seeking the Light, Facing Darkness, Risking Love, Knowing Nothing, and Embracing Everything—the book leads readers on the path to an authentic spiritual life.

Composed during a critical time in the evolution of European intellectual life, the works of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) are some of the most powerful medieval attempts to achieve a synthesis between ancient Greek thought and the Christian faith. Writing with great rhetorical brilliance, Eckhart combines the neoplatonic concept of oneness - the idea that the ultimate principle of the universe is single and undivided - with his Christian belief in the Trinity, and considers the struggle to describe a perfect God through the imperfect medium of language. Fusing philosophy and religion with vivid originality and metaphysical passion, these works have intrigued and inspired philosophers and theologians from Hegel to Heidegger and beyond.

Though he lived in the thirteenth century, Meister Eckhart’s deeply ecumenical teachings were in many ways modern. He taught about what we call ecology, championed artistic creativity, and advocated for social, economic, and gender justice. All these elements have inspired spiritual maverick Matthew Fox and influenced his Creation Spirituality. Here, Fox creates metaphorical meetings between Eckhart and Teilhard de Chardin, Thich Nhat Hanh, Carl Jung, Black Elk, Rumi, Adrienne Rich, and other radical thinkers. The result is profoundly insightful, substantive, and inspiring.

"Meister Eckhart's complete mystical teachings together in one volume, for the first time! With a foreword by leading Eckhart scholar Bernard McGinn, and the elegant translation of Maurice O'C Walshe, this comprehensive and authoritative work is a treasure for every serious spiritual seeker, and the finest volume on Eckhart ever to appear in English."--Publisher's website.

This introduction to the writing and preaching of the greatest medieval European mystic contains selections from his sermons, treatises, and sayings, as well as Table Talk, the records of his informal advice to his spiritual children.

The thought of Meister Eckhart — the Dominican theologian, the preacher, the master of language, the mystic — exudes a remarkable fascination on the modern mind, not the least due to its characteristic interplay of scholastic-academic and vernacular terminology. This volume presents the only book-length study in English of Meister Eckhart the philosopher within the tradition in which his thought is embedded and from which it draws its authority. It shows that even as Eckhart may be justly regarded as a medieval precursor of a modern philosophy of subjectivity, the novelty and continuity of his thought can only be understood in its relation to that of Albert the Great, Aristotle, Dionysius Pseudo-Areopagita, the Liber de causis and the Neoplatonic heritage, Theodoric of Freiberg and Thomas Aquinas as well as Eckhart of Gründig, Jakob of Metz and Johannes Picardi of Lichtenberg. At its center lies the return of the soul, through its detachment from everything corporeal, manifold and temporal, into its ground or spark — into that “something” in the soul where, according to Eckhart, “the ground of God is my ground and my ground is God's ground”. The present translation not only revises the German-language original to take account of recent debates in Eckhart-scholarship, it moreover makes accessible to the non-specialist all Latin and Middle High German material, much of it previously not available in any translation at all. Meister Eckhart: Dominikanischer Theologe, Prediger, Sprachgenie, Mystiker — sein Denken fasziniert den modernen Menschen nicht zuletzt wegen der einprägsamen Wechselwirkung von scholastisch-akademischer Terminologie und deutscher Mundart. Der vorliegende Band ist die einzige englischsprachige Monographie über Meister Eckhart als Philosophen, die ihn im Zusammenhang der ihn maîgeblich bedingenden philosophischen Tradition interpretiert. Auch wenn Eckhart zurecht als Vordenker der modernen Subjektivität gilt, kann man ihn nur im bezug auf Albert den Groîen, Aristoteles, Dionysius Pseudo-Areopagita, den Liber de causis und die neuplatonische Tradition, Dietrich von Freiberg und Thomas von Aquin sowie Eckhart von Gründig, Jakob von Metz und Johannes Picardi von Lichtenberg adäquat verstehen. Im Mittelpunkt dieser Studie steht die Rückkehr der Seele — durch ihre Abgeschiedenheit vom Körperlichen, vom Mannigfaltigen und vom Zeitlichen — in ihren Grund bzw. in den Funken der Seele, wo nach Eckhart “gotes grunt mîn grunt und mîn grunt gotes grunt” ist. Der vorliegende Band revidiert nicht nur die deutschsprachige Original-Studie im Hinblick auf Debatten in der neueren Eckhart-Forschung: Auch dem Nicht-Spezialisten werden sämtliche lateinische und mittelhochdeutsche Quellen durch die Übersetzung ins Englische zugänglich gemacht.

This fresh translation of poetry by the fourteenth-century Christian mystic “sets the heart ablaze and the spirit soaring” (Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, author of The Artist’s Rule). Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) influenced a wide range of spiritual teachers and mystics both inside and outside the Christian tradition. Erich Fromm, Eckhart Tolle, Richard Rohr, D. T. Suzuki, and Rudolf Steiner have all credited Eckhart as being an important influence on their thought. In addition, his work has influenced the development of twentieth-century American Buddhism and the Theosophical tradition. Eckhart wrote at a time—much like our own—when society appeared to be coming apart at the seams. In the midst of all that chaos and uncertainty, he captured the many forms and stages of God’s love, the mystic path, and the journey of transformation. His writings were so startling that he was even accused of heresy. Now, seven centuries later, this fresh rendering of his work translates the essence of one of Christianity’s greatest poetic and spiritual voices, conveying the heart of his teachings about loving God and embarking on a spiritual journey characterized by mystery, paradox, and an embrace of the unknown.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) was a Dominican philosopher and spiritual master whose thought is among the most daring and difficult in the history of western mysticism. This volume contains his technical Latin writings and more popular German sermons.