Knowing by not knowing

Knowing by not knowing is Meister Eckhart’s name for a receptive, image-free approach to divine knowledge. Rather than accumulating ideas about God, the seeker lets go of what the senses and imagination supply, making room for God to work in the soul’s deepest ground. The expression brings together a central paradox of Christian mysticism: that God may be encountered directly, yet cannot be adequately captured in human language or concepts.

The meaning of unknowing

In Eckhart’s account, divine birth in the soul occurs in its purest and most secret part, which he calls the ground and which some call the spark of the soul. This birth belongs to a person who lives nobly, gathers inwardly, and turns toward that inner ground. It does not arise from pursuing created things through the five senses. The expression therefore does not praise mere ignorance; it marks the limits of ordinary ways of knowing and the need for a different kind of receptivity.

Eckhart’s answer to whether seekers should form images of God is no. They should become free of thoughts, words, deeds, and images, and allow God to act within them. This is apophatic theology: approaching God without images, concepts, or symbols. It stands in contrast to cataphatic theology, which understands God through images and created things. The contrast is not between religious seriousness and indifference, but between seeking to grasp God through representations and becoming still enough not to impose them.

The ground is beyond the entry of creatures and, in Eckhart’s account, beyond ordinary activity and understanding. When the soul is free of images, God can unite with it and give birth to the Son there. The image of a familiar God seated on a golden throne, or of a more abstract deity imagined somewhere in the sky, remains an image all the same. Eckhart directs the seeker instead toward silence and darkness, where what is hidden may be revealed as the true light.

A discipline of attention and release

Eckhart’s emphasis differs from the rigorous bodily asceticism practiced by some mystics, who fasted, went without sleep, punished their bodies, or endured winter cold. He was more concerned with self-denial within the soul: relinquishing images, setting aside knowledge derived from the senses, and purifying one’s attitudes. Such inward discipline, rather than the mere performance of hardship, creates the conditions for awareness of God. Unknowing is thus an active relinquishment of the usual means of control, not a claim that nothing can be known.

The phrase also belongs to a broader account of mystical experience. Mysticism is presented as direct awareness of God’s presence, an experience that may exceed both the five senses and rational thought. Bernard McGinn describes Christian mysticism through religion, a process or way of life, and an attempt to express direct consciousness of God’s presence. William James’s characteristics of mystical experience clarify the paradox: it is ineffable because language cannot report its contents, and noetic because it yields knowledge that reason alone cannot generate. It is also transient and passive: it may be brief, and it comes as an unearned gift rather than something the seeker can make happen.

The difference between sensory spectacle and direct presence is important here. Some claims of mystical experience involve visions, voices, or transport to another realm, but Rufus Jones was wary of expecting secret messages from sociable angels. Hildegard of Bingen had visions; Bernard of Clairvaux reported no sensory experience in his encounter with God; and Thomas Merton described being convinced of God’s immediate presence in Cuba without a sensory experience. These accounts do not all describe Eckhart’s method, but they show why mystical knowledge cannot be identified simply with unusual sights or sounds. The desired reality is God, not the spectacle surrounding a claim of revelation.

Boundaries and ethical context

Eckhart’s teaching about self-emptying could be misread as permission to disregard moral obligations. He cited Jesus Christ’s demand that disciples give up even their closest attachments and take up the cross; in that context, he said that a person united with God could not be separated from God. His statement that such a person could not commit a mortal sin helped bring him into trouble. The book distinguishes his meaning from the radical teaching associated with the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who held that union with God freed them from accepted moral norms. Eckhart, by contrast, maintained that Christ born in the soul would lead a person to avoid sinful activity. Unknowing is not a license to abandon ethical responsibility.

The book’s wider portraits also place religious understanding amid concrete social conditions, without identifying those experiences as instances of Eckhart’s doctrine. Howard Thurman’s grandmother, a former slave who could not read, had him read the Bible aloud but would not listen to Paul because he had told slaves to obey their masters. In Ceylon, a college principal challenged Thurman over Christianity’s complicity in slavery and racial oppression; Thurman distinguished Christianity from the religion of Jesus and defended the freedom, liberty, and justice that a minority in the United States found in Jesus’s spirit. The episode shows how religious claims must be examined against the histories and lives they affect, rather than accepted as abstractions.

Other examples likewise test ideas against lived circumstances. Simone Weil took a factory job in 1934–35 to experience workers’ conditions directly, recording repeated failures to meet the production quota and the toll of fatigue and humiliation. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s newspaper addressed unemployment, labor, racism, child labor, and poverty, while their hospitality houses offered food and shelter. For Day, Christ was present in poor people and in shared bread, including guests whose behavior could make care difficult. These accounts do not define knowing by not knowing; they establish a related boundary for reading the book’s mystical language: inwardness does not, by itself, excuse turning away from other people’s suffering.