Traktate

(lit.: Treatises)

Prose, not preaching: Eckhart's treatises — table-talk for young friars, a consolation for the grieving, a meditation on detachment — where the sermons' fire is set down at length.

by Meister Eckhart55 passages held

German, a translation held here

First published: 1310(aged 50)
Original language: Middle High German

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Overview

Where the sermons flash, the treatises argue. This gathering collects the handful of connected prose works Eckhart wrote in German rather than preached, and each has its own occasion. The Reden der Unterweisung — "Talks of Instruction" — are the earliest, informal counsels he gave as prior to the young Dominicans in his charge in the 1290s, on obedience, prayer and inward poverty, the plainest door into his thought. Von abegescheidenheit, "On Detachment," makes the case at full stretch that detachment stands above even love and humility, because the utterly detached heart, empty of every created thing, is the one God cannot help but enter. And the Buch der göttlichen Tröstung, the "Book of Divine Consolation," was written to console someone in grief — by tradition a royal widow — and consoles by the hardest possible route: that the good person should will nothing, refuse nothing, and find in God's will not resignation but their own. That last treatise cost him. When accusations were first drawn up against Eckhart at Cologne in 1325, passages from the Book of Divine Consolation — a book of comfort meant for lay readers — were among the evidence, because teaching such things to the unlearned looked, to his examiners, like scattering fire in dry grass. The treatises therefore sit closer to the trial than the sermons do, and they are also where a reader today meets his ideas set out steadily enough to weigh, rather than in the lightning of the pulpit.

Key concepts

What treatises make up this book?

The connected prose works Eckhart wrote in German rather than preached: the Talks of Instruction, his early counsels to young Dominicans; On Detachment, arguing detachment stands above every virtue; and the Book of Divine Consolation, written to comfort someone in grief. Unlike the sermons, which flash, the treatises argue, setting his ideas out steadily enough for a reader to weigh rather than only to catch.

What are the 'Talks of Instruction'?

The earliest of the treatises, informal counsels Eckhart gave as prior to the young Dominicans in his charge in the 1290s, on obedience, prayer and inward poverty. Plain and practical, they are the easiest way into his thought, the door before the harder rooms. Here his radical mysticism appears as concrete advice for a religious life rather than as the fierce metaphysics of the sermons.

What does 'On Detachment' argue?

That detachment, not love or humility, is the highest of all virtues. Love strains toward God, but detachment empties the soul so completely that God enters of necessity, as into a vacuum. Eckhart pushes the case to its edge: the perfectly detached heart wants nothing, not even its own salvation. It is the fullest, most systematic statement of the idea the sermons only flash.

What does 'willing nothing' mean in the Consolation?

The heart of Eckhart's comfort for the grieving. A soul that wills nothing and refuses nothing has handed its will wholly to God, and so makes God's will its own. Having no will apart from God's, it has nothing that can be taken from it, and cannot be robbed by loss. This is not passive resignation but a total identification that Eckhart offers as the only unshakable consolation.

How did the Consolation lead to Eckhart's trial?

It was aimed at lay readers, and its hardest teaching, that the good person should will nothing and find their own will in God's, struck his examiners as dangerous in untrained hands. When accusations were drawn up at Cologne in 1325, passages from this book of comfort were among the evidence. To teach such things to the unlearned looked to them like scattering fire in dry grass.

Themes of the book

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

Detachment above love itself

Which virtue stands highest? Not love, not humility, Eckhart argues, but detachment, because the heart emptied of every created thing is the one God cannot refuse to enter.

In On Detachment Eckhart makes the case at full stretch that detachment stands above even love and humility. His reasoning is exact: love strives toward God, but detachment simply empties the soul of every created thing and every want, and the utterly empty heart is the one God enters of necessity, drawn as into a vacuum. It is less a feeling than a subtraction, the removal of all clinging until nothing of the created self remains. Set out as argument rather than preached, the doctrine can be weighed, and it is unsparing: the highest thing a person can do is want nothing at all.

detachment
transcendence
self-transcendence
receptivity
asceticism
divine union
mysticism

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Consolation by willing nothing

How do you comfort someone in real grief? Eckhart refuses the easy routes for the hardest: the consoled soul wills nothing, refuses nothing, and finds in God's will not resignation but its own.

The Book of Divine Consolation was written for someone in grief, by tradition a royal widow, and it consoles by the steepest path. Its comfort is not that loss will be repaid but that a soul wholly given over to God's will has nothing left to lose: willing nothing and refusing nothing, it makes God's will its own and cannot be robbed. This is equanimity at its limit, and it cost Eckhart dearly. When accusations were drawn up at Cologne in 1325, passages from this book of comfort were among the evidence, since teaching such things to the unlearned looked, to his examiners, like scattering fire in dry grass.

equanimity
suffering
divine union
self-transcendence
negative theology
trinity

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Within this work

passages held: 55
distinct concepts: 116
by passages held, corpus-wide: #641

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: “mysticism” and “negative theology”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 54 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
mysticism	negative theology	11
divine union	mysticism	5
detachment	mysticism	4
divine union	negative theology	4
knowledge	negative theology	4
negative theology	trinity	4
divine simplicity	mysticism	3
divine simplicity	negative theology	3
divine simplicity	trinity	3
divine union	trinity	3
knowledge	mysticism	3
mysticism	trinity	3
soul	trinity	3
detachment	divine simplicity	1
detachment	divine union	1
detachment	knowledge	1
detachment	negative theology	1
divine simplicity	knowledge	1
divine union	knowledge	1
divine union	soul	1
knowledge	soul	1
mysticism	soul	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)
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
1310 Traktate you are here 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

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