Meister Eckhart

Eckhart was a respected Dominican master at Paris and Cologne who, in German sermons of startling boldness, took mysticism to its edge. In the ground of the soul, he taught, there is a spark uncreated and uncreatable, where God and the soul are not two; to find it, one must let go of everything, even the desire for God, and become so poor in will that there is room for nothing but the divine. He spoke of detachment, of the birth of God in the soul, of a Godhead beyond even the name God. Tried for heresy near the end of his life, he was never forgotten, feeding centuries of mystical thought.