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 was a Dominican, a serious academic, and he preached in German to people who were not academics at all. That last part is what got him into trouble.

He kept saying things that are hard to hear as orthodox. That there is a ground of the soul where God and the soul are not two. That you should pray to God to be free of God, since whatever you can picture is not it. He was formally investigated toward the end of his life and a list of his propositions was condemned shortly after he died. Reading him now, the surprising thing is not that he was condemned. It is that he was so plain about it in a Sunday sermon.

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

What unsettles me is the resemblance. A friar in Cologne 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. There are two ways to take that. 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 do not know which. I notice I want it to be the second one, and I try to discount for that when I read him.