Meister Eckhart and Christian Non-Duality
Meister Eckhart stands as the most profound and daring voice of non dual awareness within the Christian mystical tradition. Living in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Eckhart was a Dominican friar, university trained theologian, preacher to lay audiences, and speculative mystic. His work unfolds at the intersection of scholastic theology and lived contemplative experience. In him Christianity articulates a vision of divine unity that rivals the depth of non dual insight found in Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and later Sufi metaphysics, while remaining rooted in Christian language of God, Christ, and the soul.
At the heart of Eckhart’s thought is the conviction that God is not merely an object of belief or devotion but the very ground of being itself. He distinguishes between God as known through names, images, and attributes, and the Godhead, which is beyond all names, concepts, and distinctions. This Godhead is pure unity, pure being, or even beyond being. In this deepest sense God is not a being among beings but the source from which all being flows. Eckhart insists that to encounter God truly one must pass beyond conceptual knowledge into a direct experiential awareness of this divine ground.
This movement toward non dual awareness is expressed most powerfully in Eckhart’s teaching on the birth of God in the soul. He claims that the same Word or Logos that is eternally begotten by the Father is also born in the depth of the human soul. This is not a metaphor alone but a real spiritual event. When the soul is emptied of all attachments, images, and self centered striving, it becomes the place where God gives birth to God. In this state the distinction between God and soul is not erased in a crude or literal sense, but it is transcended at the level of experience. The soul knows God by being united with God, not as an observer but as a participant in divine life.
Eckhart’s insistence on detachment is central to this vision. Detachment for him does not mean withdrawal from the world or emotional coldness. It means freedom from clinging to any created thing, including one’s own religious experiences, virtues, or ideas about God. Even devotion and piety can become obstacles if they reinforce the illusion of separation. True detachment opens the soul to radical openness, allowing God to act freely within it. In this openness the soul discovers that God is nearer than the soul is to itself.
This teaching leads Eckhart to some of his most provocative statements. He famously declares that the eye with which he sees God is the same eye with which God sees him. Such language expresses a non dual awareness in which knowing and being, subject and object, divine and human are no longer experienced as separate realities. The soul rests in what Eckhart calls the breakthrough, a moment beyond time and distinction where the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one ground. Here there is no this and that, no God over there and soul over here, but a simple unity beyond multiplicity.
Christ plays a decisive role in Eckhart’s non dual Christianity. Christ is not only the historical Jesus but the eternal pattern of divine human unity. To be a Christian in the deepest sense is to allow Christ to be born in the soul and to live from the same divine ground from which Christ lived. Eckhart can therefore say that the soul must become what Christ is by nature. This is not an abandonment of Christian faith but an intensification of it, pushing doctrines of incarnation and grace to their experiential core.
Such radical language brought Eckhart under suspicion. Some of his propositions were condemned after his death, largely because they appeared to blur the distinction between Creator and creature. Yet Eckhart himself consistently affirmed orthodox Christian teaching, insisting that union with God occurs by grace and does not abolish the soul’s created status. The tension in his work reflects the difficulty of expressing non dual awareness within a theological framework shaped by dualistic language.
Within a broader Christian context, Eckhart represents a stream of mysticism that runs from the early Greek Fathers through Pseudo Dionysius and later into figures such as John of the Cross, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and modern contemplatives. His emphasis on inner transformation, direct awareness, and the primacy of experience over conceptual belief anticipates contemporary conversations between Christianity and Eastern non dual traditions.
In modern discussions of Christianity and non dual awareness, Eckhart has become a bridge figure. He shows that non dual insight is not foreign to Christianity but emerges naturally when its mystical core is allowed to speak. His vision challenges purely moralistic, institutional, or belief centered forms of Christianity and calls believers toward a deeper realization of divine unity. In Eckhart’s teaching Christianity is not merely about salvation from sin or future reward but about awakening here and now to the divine ground in which God and soul meet without separation.