Godhead

Godhead is the usual English rendering of Meister Eckhart’s Middle High German gotheit, as distinct from got, God. In his German sermons Eckhart distinguishes God, who acts, creates and is known in three persons, from the Godhead, the silent, hidden ground of God in which there is no activity and no distinction. In the substance of a famous passage, God acts and the Godhead does not.

The Godhead is described in images of emptiness: a desert, a silent wilderness, a ground without ground. Eckhart says the soul must break through even God, as an object of thought and desire, into the Godhead, where the ground of God and the ground of the soul are one ground. He also speaks of a spark or castle in the soul that is uncreated, a teaching his critics found dangerous; several of his propositions were condemned after his death.

The idea has a background in Neoplatonism and in Pseudo-Dionysius’s God beyond being. Modern readers, beginning with nineteenth-century comparativists, have compared it with Brahman without attributes in Advaita Vedānta. Theologians debate whether Eckhart’s distinction places something above the Trinity or describes the Trinity’s own unity.