He was the most brilliant theologian of the Dominican order, master of the Paris faculty, provincial vicar of Saxony, a man whose sermons drew thousands in the great cathedrals of Cologne and Strasbourg. He preached in German — the language of the people, not the Latin of the scholars — because he wanted the mystical tradition available to everyone, not only to those who had been admitted to the schools.
And what he preached was not comfortable.
He said: the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. He said: God is not being. God is above being. He said: if I had a God I could understand, I would not consider him God. He said: there is something in the soul so close to God that it is God.
The Church's theologians found 26 of his propositions suspect or heretical. He was summoned before the Inquisition in 1327. He said in his defence: if I am in error, I am willing to be corrected. But I cannot be accused of heresy — because heresy requires the will to err, and I have never willed to depart from the truth.
He died before the verdict was rendered. The papal bull condemning 17 of his propositions was issued two years after his death. He had already gone where the bull could not follow.
What Eckhart was pointing at — what made the institution nervous and what has kept mystics and philosophers reading him for seven hundred years — is the recognition that the divine and the soul are not fundamentally separate. That the journey toward God is not a journey away from the self but into the deepest self. That what he called the Grunt — the ground of the soul, the desert, the wilderness of the Godhead where no image reaches — is simultaneously the deepest reality of the self and the deepest reality of the divine. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me is not heresy. It is the most precise statement available about the relationship between individual consciousness and universal Consciousness — the same insight that the Upanishadic tradition encoded as Tat Tvam Asi, the same recognition that the Kashmir Shaivism tradition described as the individual awareness being a contracted form of the universal awareness. Eckhart reached it through Christian mysticism. The destination is the same.
His sermons in German were preserved by the nuns of the Rhineland convents he had served as spiritual director. Women who had no access to the universities, no Latin, no official standing in the Church — they kept his words. They copied them. They passed them from convent to convent.
The institution condemned him. The women who could not enter the institution preserved him. He was declared free of heresy by the Dominican order in 1992 — six hundred and sixty-three years after the papal condemnation. He did not need the declaration. He had already disappeared into the desert of the Godhead.
The desert is still there. His description of it is still the most precise available in the Western tradition. The eye that sees it is the same eye that is reading these words.