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WorkMeister Eckhart

Counsels on Discernment

Evening answers to young friars in Erfurt: stop wishing yourself into a holier place, because the restlessness is your own will.

by Meister Eckhart101 passages held

  • Middle High German, the original language
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Original title
Reden der Unterweisung
First published
(aged 38)
Original language
Middle High German

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Overview

In the evenings at the Dominican house in Erfurt the friars sat together for collationes, talk after the day's reading, and the young men among them put questions to their prior. Meister Eckhart, then in his mid-thirties, held that office and was also vicar of the order's houses in Thuringia, and between about 1294 and 1298 his answers were written down as the Reden der underscheidunge, the talks on discernment. They are the earliest of his works in German, and the plainest. The questions are practical: whether to pray alone or with others, how often to take communion, what to do when God seems to have gone, how to live with one's own sins. Beneath every answer lies one claim: the trouble is the self that wants things its own way. Novices wished themselves elsewhere — in a hermitage, a stricter house, a more devout mood — and Eckhart told them that all their unrest came from their own will, and that whoever truly has God has him in the street and among people as fully as in church or cell. What matters at the altar is not how much devotion one feels but what one loves and intends. Here, in a teacher's voice, are the themes he would never leave: gelâzenheit, releasement, the letting go of oneself, and abegescheidenheit, detachment from everything that is not God. Thirty years later his German sermons and his consolation book supplied many of the articles in the Cologne heresy inquiry; these talks, copied as a handbook of the inner life, became the most widely circulated of all his works.

Key concepts

What does Eckhart mean by 'own will' in these talks?

The self that wants things its own way, usually without noticing. Novices say they would be at peace somewhere else, in a hermitage or a stricter house, or if they felt as devout as others. Eckhart answers that all of this is their own will in disguise. The remedy is not a better place but letting oneself go: wherever a person finds themselves, there they should let themselves go.

What is an 'unoccupied mind'?

A mind tangled in nothing and bound to nothing, which seeks its own in no thing and rests wholly in God's will. Eckhart's term is ledic gemüete, a free or empty mind. The emptier it is, he says, the stronger and more fruitful its prayer and its work. It is not a blank mind but an unbound one: it can work hard without clinging to the work.

What are the two kinds of repentance?

One is temporal and of the senses: it drags a person ever further down into grief, as though they must despair, and stays there without going anywhere. The other is divine: the moment someone is displeased with their sin, they lift themselves to God, and the sins vanish faster than they came. The difference is not how bad a person feels but which way the sorrow turns.

What are inner and outer works in the talks?

Inner work is the turning of will and mind toward God; outer work is what hands and body do. Eckhart refuses to set them against each other. Someone who withdraws into themselves and finds there neither image nor work should check whether they are only drawing into themselves, and if so break out into some work, inward or outward. A person, he says, should never rest content in nothing.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Obedience and one's own will

Where does a restless person's unrest really come from? Eckhart tells young friars it is not the place, the house or the mood but their own will, and that obedience is the way out.

Eckhart opens the talks with obedience and calls it the virtue before all virtues, but he does not mean doing as one is told. Whoever goes out of their own will, he argues, leaves a space God must fill: where a person wants nothing for themselves, God wants for them. Against novices who dreamed of a hermitage or a stricter house, he answers that the trouble travels with them, since it is their own will, unnoticed. The best prayer follows from this and asks only that God give what he wills.

  • obedience
  • will
  • divine will
  • humility
  • inner peace
  • trust
  • prayer
  • poverty
  • detachment

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God in the street and at work

Can God be had as fully in the street and among people as in church? The talks answer yes, but only for someone who has learned to carry him into every task.

Holiness, Eckhart tells the friars, rests on being rather than doing: people should think less about what they do and more about what they are, because a just person's works are just. Fasting, going barefoot and vigils are worth only the love and intention put into them, and should be dropped freely when they hinder. At the altar what counts is not felt devotion but what one loves and intends. Finding God in all things is learned like writing, by long and stubborn practice, until it runs without thought.

  • spiritual practice
  • divine presence
  • attention
  • action
  • habit
  • intention
  • devotion
  • eucharist
  • asceticism
  • contemplation

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Sin, dryness and a God of the present

What should someone do when God seems gone, or when their own sins weigh on them? Eckhart counsels neither despair nor waiting for feelings, because God takes a person as he finds them now.

The talks treat sin and spiritual dryness as practical problems, not verdicts. When the feeling of God vanishes, Eckhart advises doing exactly what one did in the greatest consolation, since God's good will cannot go missing even when the mind's sense of it does. Temptation to anger or vanity, met with the soul's higher powers, becomes a gain. He separates a repentance that sinks into misery from one that rises at once to God, and points out that every apostle had once fallen into mortal sin.

  • sin
  • repentance
  • faith
  • grace
  • suffering
  • divine providence
  • love
  • divine love
  • virtue

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Within this work

passages held
101
distinct concepts
141
by passages held, corpus-wide
#499

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “divine presence” and “spiritual practice”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine presencespiritual practice8
detachmentwill6
detachmentspiritual practice5
virtuewill4
detachmentintention3
divine willspiritual practice3
divine willwill3
intentionspiritual practice3
intentionvirtue3
intentionwill3
detachmentdivine presence2
detachmentvirtue2
divine presenceintention2
spiritual practicevirtue2
spiritual practicewill2
detachmentdivine will1
divine willintention1
eucharistwill1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1298 Counsels on Discernment (Reden der Unterweisung) you are here GMH
  2. 1308 The Book of Divine Consolation (Das Buch der göttlichen Tröstung)

    Eckhart's one book of consolation, written in German for a grieving reader, probably the widowed queen Agnes of Hungary; its date is disputed, and it pairs with the sermon Of the Noble Man as the Liber Benedictus.

     GMH
  3. 1310 Traktate

    The prose treatises, as against the sermons — among them the early "Talks of Instruction," "On Detachment," and the "Book of Divine Consolation" whose lay-directed teaching helped trigger the 1325 proceedings at Cologne.

     DE
  4. 1320 Deutsche Predigten

    Not a book he issued but his vernacular preaching as it survives: in his own Middle High German, partly through a fourteenth-century Erfurt collection, and in Gustav Landauer's modern German. It is the most-read part of his work and the chief source of the propositions condemned in 1329.

     GMHDE
  5. 1320 Fragmente und Sprüche

    Short sayings and sermon fragments carrying Eckhart's name, of uncertain date and, in part, uncertain authenticity; the marginalia of a body of work that lived by being spoken and remembered rather than published.

     DE
  6. 1326 Eckhart's Defence (Responsio ad articulos sibi impositos de scriptis et dictis suis)

    A legal document rather than a treatise: Eckhart's own Latin answer to the charges at Cologne, and the nearest thing he left to a commentary on his own German sermons, written two years before his death.

     LA
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