The Book of Divine Consolation

A book of comfort for loss, grief and pain that tells the sufferer to want what God wants and to stop clinging.

Middle High German, the original language

Original title: Das Buch der göttlichen Tröstung
First published: 1308(aged 48)
Original language: Middle High German

Overview

The German king Albrecht I was murdered in 1308, and the book is usually thought to have been written for his daughter Agnes, widow of King Andrew III of Hungary. When heresy charges against Meister Eckhart were drawn up in Cologne in 1326, the list called it the little work in German that he had sent to the queen of Hungary. Scholars do not agree on the occasion: proposals run from about 1305 to the 1320s, and some doubt that the book was meant for her at all, since it never addresses her. It opens with Paul's blessing of the God of all comfort, which begins in Latin Benedictus; the word gave it and its companion sermon, Of the Noble Man, the name Liber Benedictus. Eckhart names three sorrows: the loss of goods, the loss of family and friends, and harm to oneself in shame, sickness and pain of heart. He promises three parts — the truths from which comfort follows, some thirty shorter reasons for consolation, and the deeds and words of the wise. His comfort is severe. The good person, insofar as they are good, is one with goodness itself, which is God; grief comes from loving created things, and whoever wants exactly what God wants has nothing left to lose. Near the end Eckhart answers a critic who said such teaching was false and should not be given to the unlearned, and he sets aside Seneca's advice to keep high matters for high minds: if the unlearned are never taught, nobody will ever learn. The Cologne commission extracted articles from the book all the same, and Eckhart had to answer for them one by one in his Latin defence.

Key concepts

What does it mean that the good person is born of goodness?

Insofar as someone is good, their goodness is not of their own making: goodness itself, which is God, gives birth to them as a father to a son and pours into them all its being, knowing, loving and acting. The good person and goodness are therefore one in what makes them good. Every later comfort in the book rests on this, because what is one with God cannot finally be lost.

What does it mean to be 'unformed' from creatures?

To have no created thing stamped on the heart, so that a person is formed instead into goodness itself. Eckhart's words are entbildet and îngebildet: un-imaged and in-imaged. Grief, on this account, shows how much of the heart a lost thing still shapes. That is why a sufferer should lament less the loss than that comfort cannot reach them, as sweet wine has no taste for the sick.

Why is no loss ever pure loss in this book?

Because, as Eckhart reports from saints and pagan teachers alike, neither God nor nature allows anything to be purely evil or purely sorrow. Every misfortune comes with something to hold on to, and God always gives some comfort with it. Consolation therefore begins not by denying the loss but by turning toward what the loss did not take, and away from what it did.

What does 'suffering in God' mean?

Whatever a good person suffers for God's sake, Eckhart argues, they suffer in God, and God suffers with them. Since God is goodness and truth, a sorrow that lies in God loses its bitterness and becomes, in his bold phrase, God himself. Patience thus becomes more than endurance: the sufferer is not left alone with the pain, which is shared by the one for whom it is borne.

Themes of the book

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

Comfort in loss and pain

What can honestly be said to someone who has lost goods, friends or health? Eckhart offers a severe comfort: look at what remains, and want what God wants.

Eckhart names three sorrows, the loss of outward goods, the loss of family and friends, and harm to oneself in shame, sickness and pain of heart, and he answers them with reasons rather than sympathy. Someone who has lost forty marks of a hundred should turn to the sixty kept; a sick man with doctors and friends should think of the poor who beg bread in the snow. Beneath the arithmetic lies the claim that grief comes from clinging, and that whoever wants exactly what God wants has nothing left to lose.

consolation
suffering
loss
patience
gratitude
divine will
divine providence
desire
sacrifice
will

Enter a dialogue

Suffering in God

If a good person is one with goodness itself, where does their suffering go? Eckhart answers that it is borne in God, and that God bears it with them.

Before any comfort, the book lays down a doctrine: the good person, insofar as good, is born of goodness as a son of his father and receives from it all their being, knowing, loving and acting. From that union Eckhart draws his boldest consolation. Whatever the good person suffers for God they suffer in God, and God suffers with them, so that sorrow loses its bitterness once it lies in God. God and the angels rejoice in such patience, as a friend rejoices in a gift.

divine sonship
divine goodness
divine union
unity
justice
virtue
truth
divine love
divine presence
joy
eternity
detachment

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 85
distinct concepts: 142
by passages held, corpus-wide: #539

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: “consolation” and “suffering”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 79 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
consolation	suffering	23
divine love	suffering	7
divine will	suffering	7
consolation	detachment	6
detachment	divine love	5
detachment	suffering	5
suffering	virtue	5
consolation	divine love	4
divine love	divine sonship	4
consolation	divine will	3
desire	detachment	3
detachment	divine will	3
divine sonship	suffering	3
consolation	desire	2
consolation	divine sonship	2
desire	divine love	2
desire	suffering	2
desire	divine will	1
detachment	virtue	1
divine love	divine will	1
divine love	virtue	1

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.

1298 Counsels on Discernment (Reden der Unterweisung)
Talks to novices, written down from evening conversations in his own priory: the earliest of Eckhart's German works, from his years as prior of Erfurt, and the practical seed of the detachment his later sermons pushed much further.
GMH
1308 The Book of Divine Consolation (Das Buch der göttlichen Tröstung) you are here GMH
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
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
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
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

— or open another of their works