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.
A similar, from some aspects even better, choice, would be Simon Parke’s Conversations with Meister Eckhart, a rather small book (about 100 pages) managing to gather from Eckhart’s sermons the most significant sayings, presenting them interlinked in a form of an imagined dialogue with Eckhart.
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).
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