God Beyond God: Meister Eckhart's Radical Vision of Freeing Faith

God beyond God: Meister Eckhart’s Radical Vision of Freeing Faith

February 4-25, 2025

Course Description: This is not a course for everyone. It is intended for those who want to risk going beyond the faith of settled “doctrine,” guided by the writings of a medieval mystic who reminds us that our journey into the mystery of God and self ultimately brings us not to language but to silence. If you find this concept intriguing, even alluring, this course might be the right one for you.

In one of his sermons, Eckhart (ca. 1260-1328) claims that we must “take leave of God for the sake of God.” What he meant by this points to the radical nature of his insistence that faith is not “thinking about” God or formulating an idea of God; this idea is what we must abandon to find the “God beyond God.” We come to know this through the deep experience of the radical, non-dualistic oneness of being. He also insists that we must abandon the constructed “self” to find this truth—which is to say, we must also learn to “take leave of our self for the sake of our self.” Our exploration will always begin with excerpts from Eckhart’s own paradoxical writings and then turn to poems from three books that Burrows co-wrote with Jon Sweeney.

Location: Online

With: Mark S. Burrows is a scholar of medieval history, poet, and translator. A past President of the Society of the Study of Christian Spirituality, he taught the history of Christianity/historical theology in graduate schools in the US for twenty-five years before being called to a professorship at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany. There, he taught courses in theology and history, poetry, and spirituality from 2012-2020. His academic work focuses on spirituality and mysticism and explores the intersection of theology and the arts, both historically and constructively. Burrows also is poetry editor for the journal Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality and for Wildhouse Publications. Among his recent publications: The Chance of Home: Poems (2018), Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light: Meditations on the Path of the Wayless Way (2023), a new translation of The Sonnets to Orpheus (2024), and You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke (2024). Burrows, who is well-known for his retreats, workshops and lectures, lives and writes in Camden, Maine.

Schedule: This is a synchronous course with a weekly session via video conferencing, prayer practices, community prayer and online discussion forums. Online meetings will be on Tuesday, February 4, 11, 18, and 25 from 7:00 – 9:00 PM ET. Meetings will not be recorded.

Program Fee: $210. Early bird discount of $30 through August 27.

Additional Information:

Required Reading

Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings by Oliver Davies