Meister Eckhart

German Dominican preacher, theologian, and mystic, c. 1260–c. 1328. He held the same chair at the University of Paris that Aquinas had held a generation before. He preached in German, to ordinary lay people in market squares and to Beguine women in convents, and his German sermons — sharp, paradoxical, philosophically dense — are some of the most influential mystical writing ever produced. Late in life he was tried for heresy by the Inquisition. He defended himself vigorously, died before judgment, and twenty-eight propositions from his work were posthumously condemned in 1329. The condemnation drove his writing underground for centuries; modern Catholic theology has quietly rehabilitated him. Core teaching: detachment (*Abgeschiedenheit*) is the highest virtue. Let go of God for God's sake — let go even of your idea of God, so the real God can be born in you. There is something in the soul uncreated and uncreatable. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. Key works: his German and Latin sermons (especially Sermons 6, 22, 52, 86), *Counsels on Discernment*, *The Book of Divine Consolation*, the treatise *On Detachment*.