Eckhart asks God to rid him of God

A medieval Dominican, preaching in German to ordinary people, tried for heresy, and still the strangest thing I have read.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-11 · Nondual

Chapter 05 of 06 in The same room

Meister Eckhart preached that you should pray to God to be free of God, since whatever you can picture is not it. He said it plainly, in a Sunday sermon, in German, to people who were not academics at all.

He was a Dominican and a serious academic, and the preaching in German is what got him into trouble. He kept saying things that are hard to hear as orthodox, such as that there is a ground of the soul where God and the soul are not two. He was formally investigated toward the end of his life and a list of his propositions was condemned shortly after he died. The plainness surprises me more than the condemnation.

He also gave the tradition a word I keep coming back to, Gelassenheit, usually rendered as releasement or letting be. It is closer to putting down a grip you did not know you were holding than to resignation.

What unsettles me is the resemblance. A friar in Strasbourg around 1320, with no access to Sanskrit and no plausible route to Indian philosophy, ends up saying something that reads like a page of Advaita. Either the human nervous system has a limited number of things it can find when it looks inward, and mystics keep finding them, or there is something there and several traditions kept walking into it. I want it to be the second one, and I try to discount for that when I read him.