“God’s ground and my ground is the same ground”

Meister Eckhart’s expression “God’s ground and my ground is the same ground” condenses his teaching that the deepest reality of the soul and the hidden depth of God meet in mystical experience. It describes an inward unity in which the human person becomes one with God, and it directs the search for God away from external signs toward the soul’s deepest ground.

Meaning of the Ground

Eckhart’s ground is described both as the hidden depths of God and as the innermost depth of the soul. The saying does not simply compare two places: it declares their underlying unity. One scholarly account characterizes this ground as the identity of the divine ground with the ground of the soul. In Eckhart’s account, mystical experience occurs when these depths come together.

The expression is linked to Jesus Christ’s prayer that his disciples may all be one, as the Father is in him and he is in the Father, and that they too may be in them. The phrase “in us” expresses the inward relation that Eckhart’s teaching seeks to articulate. He describes the Christian’s goal as a mystical unity in which there is no difference between a human being and God. This is not presented as a claim that human life and divine life are interchangeable in every respect; it is an account of union grounded in the relation between the soul and God.

The Word Born in the Soul

Eckhart connects the ground to the birth of the Word in the human soul. The pattern of descent and ascent gives this teaching its shape: the Word descends from God, while human beings ascend by becoming one with God. Because God took on human nature, Eckhart argues, those who possess human nature can become one with God.

He developed the theme in Sermon 101, apparently preached during the Christmas season early in the fourteenth century as the first of four sermons. A trained scholastic theologian seeking to relate faith and reason, Eckhart begins with a question-and-answer form; as the series proceeds, reason becomes less prominent. The sermon draws on the Wisdom of Solomon’s image of the all-powerful word leaping from heaven in the stillness of night. Eckhart turns the Christmas image inward: the subject is not only Christ’s birth in the world, but Christ’s birth in the soul’s ground. The perfected person who walks in God’s ways experiences this birth; an undisciplined person, in his account, does not know it.

Inward Search and Unknowing

Eckhart calls the ground of the soul his most important teaching. It is a part of the person untouched by anything other than God. Some interpreters describe it as a spark or divine flame, an image that suggests both its intimacy and its divinity. The task is to seek and nourish this ground while probing the mystery of God.

That search requires the soul’s self-denial: it must be freed from the images of God it has accumulated. Eckhart’s approach therefore joins inward attention to a discipline of unknowing. In the account of his teaching, God is known by unknowing inadequate images and ideas of God, rather than by treating any image as a sufficient definition. The question of where the newborn king is found is answered inwardly: in the depths of the soul. The expression thus offers both a theological claim about union and a direction for spiritual practice.

Mystical Presence and Its Limits

The phrase belongs to a broader account of Christian mysticism in which presence is a unifying theme. A mystic is defined as someone who has experienced God’s presence directly, yet mystics have repeatedly found the experience impossible to communicate adequately in language. William James’s account of mystical experience emphasizes its ineffability, its knowledge beyond ordinary reasoning, and its passive character as an unearned gift. These features help clarify why Eckhart’s expression works as a compressed statement rather than a full description: it points toward a reality his teaching presents as deeper than ordinary explanation.

The book’s examples also distinguish mystical presence from extraordinary sensory phenomena. Hildegard of Bingen had visions, whereas Bernard of Clairvaux reported no sensory experience in his encounter with God; Thomas Merton likewise described God as immediately present without a sensory experience. Against that wider background, Eckhart’s emphasis on the ground locates union in the soul’s inward depth, not in the necessity of a vision. The saying’s significance lies in joining divine presence to the soul’s deepest reality while acknowledging that this unity exceeds the language used to express it.