Meister Eckhart and C.G. Jung

"Meister Eckhart and C.G. Jung: On the Vocation of the Self" is a project I began 44 years ago at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC). Here is a description from the back of the book:

"Most Christian readers today have been taught by Church theologians of many different creeds that one must have faith in Christ above everything else. Meister Eckhart and C.G. Jung taught us to have trust in ourselves, in our own inner images of God, or the Self first. Eckhart was a man of the earth who came after Christ. By birth of the Holy Spirit in humanity, Herrmann means in this book the birth of the Self in Eckhart and Jung and also in you, the reader. We are all after Christs and are therefore incarnating the Holy Spirit through our callings to individuate from the Imprinter, which is beyond God, not the traditional God of theology. One of the good things that comes with being a postmodern Jungian analyst, and not a member of the Catholic Church as an institution, is the freedom and liberty granted to spiritually democratic people who can speak their own truths from conscience. Herrmann's book adds something new and significant to the gendered language in theology: God is beyond gender. The book remains true to what Eckhart said about God and Sophia, or Wisdom; for as everyone knows today who has made a deep reading of the Master's works, he was in essence talking about men and women, about all people. God could be a she or an it in postmodernity. In fact, for Eckhart and Jung, the origin of God is the feminine Godhead, or primal Ground of all metaphysical and empirical being. Both theologically and psychologically speaking, the Self, or Holy Spirit is essentially trans-dual, above all duality of male or female. For Eckhart and Jung, the vocation of the Self includes the archetypal feminine, the soul or anima and animus, above all categories of thought, transcendent of time and above gender."

From the Foreword:

"Steven Herrmann has written a most impressive thesis on the relationship between spirituality and psychology as exemplified in the writings of Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century mystical theologian, whose work was condemned after his death, but survived underground to reemerge in this century as the link between East and West... Steven’s distinction, his insight that takes his contribution beyond the mere tracing of the correlation of Jung to Eckhart, important as that is, lies in his emphasis on the crucial factor of vocation as the essential ingredient in the answer to the summons, the element that brings both masters into focus."

-- William Everson (“Brother Antoninus”), University of California Santa Cruz.

"Meister Eckhart and C.G. Jung: On the Vocation of the Self" by Jungian analyst Steven Herrmann represents an important contribution to the literature on the intersection of spirituality and psychology. Blending poetry and scholarship, the book provides in-depth analysis of Meister Eckhart’s mystical theology and its influence on the work of Carl Jung. Examining this material from the perspective of spiritual vocation, Herrmann articulates a psychological theology that is relevant to contemporary individuals while remaining faithful to the conceptual complexity of these two seminal figures. The author’s account of his own spiritual journey, which is deeply rooted in the natural world and his work as a practicing analyst, grounds the discussion in lived experience. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this pivotal but challenging Dominican teacher and preacher and his influence on Jung’s life and thought. 

-- John Ensign, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and author of "Depth Calls to Depth: Jungian Psychology and Spiritual Direction in Dialogue."  

Fifteen was a transformative year for Jung! He discovered a volume of Eckhart’s sermons on his father’s library shelf as well as books on the Grail Quest, the Parzival legend, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. These imaginative and intellectual discoveries all led to a re-awakening of his nuclear symbol of vocation as a born healer of humanity. Never once did Jung disparage Eckhart. He turned to him for spiritual assistance in clarifying his ideas during his lectures in the Psychology of Yoga and Meditation. There Jung said on June 9, 1939, about Eckhart: “He is expressing in Western medieval language what is, in fact, the essential idea of eastern yoga.”

Eckhart filled Jung with the breath of the Holy Spirit because he had spoken God’s Word in his own unique incarnation and was not just parroting Abraham, Moses, or Jesus. To Jung he was the greatest of all preachers because Eckhart erected a bridge between East and West that made equality of religious ideas possible six hundred years before there was a Parliament of World Religions, which was held in Chicago in 1893. Eckhart, as I see it, was the link between East and West, Hindu and Buddhist, Christian and Islamic and Jewish spiritualities. 

My book may be ordered at Amazon books: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1663263523