I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee.
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Christian
Meister Eckhart
Christianc. 1260 – c. 1328Hochheim, Thuringia (modern-day Germany)159 quotes
Meister Eckhart was a 13th-century German Dominican friar, theologian, and Christian mystic whose sermons and treatises described a radical path of inner emptying (Abgeschiedenheit) through which the soul comes to know God directly in the ground of being. His ideas were declared partly heretical after his death, but he is now celebrated as one of the greatest mystical theologians in Christian history.
Born around 1260 in Thuringia, Eckhart joined the Dominican order and rose to become a distinguished theologian, teaching in Paris and serving in administrative roles across Germany. In his later years he turned his formidable philosophical training to the task of preaching mystical theology in the German vernacular — a radical move that made these ideas accessible to laypeople and religious women far beyond the Latin-literate clergy. His key teachings include the idea of the Gottheit (the Godhead beyond God), the spark of the soul (Funklein) that shares the divine nature, and the practice of Gelassenheit (letting go), through which the soul releases all attachment and enters the divine ground. In 1329, shortly after his death, Pope John XXII condemned 28 propositions drawn from his work as heretical or dangerous, though Eckhart himself had maintained his orthodoxy. His influence on later mysticism — including Tauler, Suso, and through them on Protestant spirituality and modern contemplative Christianity — is profound, and today he is widely studied alongside Sufi and Vedantic mystics.
Wisdom
Therefore He said, “I will also draw with My cords and My net.”
The man who abides in the will of God wills nothing else than what God is, and what He wills.
If he really abides in God’s will, all pain is to him a joy, all complication, simple: yea, even the pains of hell would be a joy to him.
The man who abides in God’s love must be dead to himself and all created things, and regard himself as a mere unit among a thousand million.
May God and the Eternal Wisdom grant us to remain equally immovable and unalterable with Himself. Amen.
Never did our Lord Jesus Christ display such great love as when He suffered the torture of the Cross when He gave His life for us, and washed our sins with His precious Blood.
Thus, with the heat of His love, from which nothing could be hidden, so intense was it—He drew the whole world to Himself.
Deadly sin is a breach of nature, a death of the soul, a disquiet of the heart, a weakening of power, a blindness of the sense, a sorrow of the spirit, a death of grace, a death of virtue, a death of good works, an aberration of the spirit, a fellowship with the devil, an expulsion of Christianity, a dungeon of hell, a banquet of hell, an eternity of hell.
Therefore, whosoever is to turn from sin and come to God in His heavenly kingdom, must be drawn by the heavenly Father with the might of His divine power.
The Father also draws the Son who comes to help us with His grace, by stimulating our free will to turn away from, and hate sin, which has drawn us aside from God, and from the immutable goodness of the Godhead.
To serve God with fear is good; to serve Him out of love is better; but to fear and love Him together is best of all.
The heavens are everywhere alike remote from earth, so should the soul be remote from all earthly things alike so as not to be nearer to one than another.
If the soul is to know God, it must know Him outside time and place, since God is neither in this or that, but One and above them.
If the soul is to see God, it must look at nothing in time; for while the soul is occupied with time or place or any image of the kind, it cannot recognize God.
Only he knows God who recognizes that all creatures are nothingness.
If the soul is to know God, it must forget itself and lose itself, for as long as it contemplates self, it cannot contemplate God.
God is always endeavouring to dwell with man, and teach him in order to bring him to Himself.
No man desires anything so eagerly as God desires to bring men to the knowledge of Himself.
God is near us, but we are far from Him. God is within, and we are without.