"In love I am more god": The centrality of love in Meister Eckhart's mysticism

In his German sermon 5a, Meister Eckhart (d. 1328), a Dominican teacher, preacher, and mystic, asks whether we can claim that the human being who loves God becomes God.1 Though he concedes that such a statement may appear impious, he asserts that in love only one exists, not two, because “in love I am more God than I am in myself.”2 “It sounds wondrous,” he admits, “that the human being is thus able to become God in love; however, it is true in the eternal truth.”3 Eckhart spools the metaphor of love into a supple descriptor that includes God, the human being, and the unifying force that transforms the relationship between human and divine. I contend that the multivalent signifier of love lies at the heart of Eckhart’s mysticism and constitutes a central topos that discloses the substance of his mystical theology. Such a perspective, however, is not widely shared, for Eckhart is commonly characterized as a speculative thinker—that is, as one who privileges the terms of being and knowledge in mapping the mystical journey— and as the father of German speculation. In this article, I want to challenge this characterization by retrieving the category of love as a
principal theme in Eckhart’s mystical theology.