Ellopos Blog

Here is a letter that I received from Brendan Bowman:

I am very happy to have found your site.  I have been intending to read a book to learn more about the ideas of Meister Eckhart.  I would appreciate it if someone could recommend a basic book that touches the surface of Meister Eckhart’s major sermons/thoughts/ideas.  Thank you very much for your time and help.

Dear Brendan, if I was to recommend just one book, this would be Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, by Edmund Colledge, Bernard McGinn. The book opens with a short but fair, dense and careful introduction to Meister Eckhart, followed by a superb selection of his works. This way you will have both what you ask for, and (more than) a glance to Eckhart himself. It is important that you will not limit yourself to second hand knowledge and meet Meister Eckhart himself, by his own works.

However, if you need only a book about Meister Eckhart, without any of his works, then get The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing, by Bernard McGinn.

A third (not in quality) recommendation, would be the Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy, by Reiner Schurmann. This is a masterful analysis of some of the most characteristic sermons of Meister Eckhart. It is a difficult and specialized book, but it offers a genuine philosophical approach (along with some of Eckhart’s own works, as is the case with the first recommendation above).

Cf. The Meister Eckhart Site

Related (automatic selection) :

• This Singing Ground
• Salvation and Culture
• Remembering Reiner Schurmann
• Meister Eckhart as quoted in blogs and sites
• The Old Church and our Christian intelligentsia