Ground of the Soul

The concept of the Ground of the Soul (German: Seelengrund) is a term of late medieval philosophy and spirituality that also appears in early modern spiritual literature. The concept was coined by Meister Eckhart (d. 1327/1328) and refers in a figurative sense to a "place" in the human soul where, according to spiritual teachings, God or the divine is present and a union of divinity with the soul can come about.

From antiquity, philosophers and theologians proposed theories that later became prerequisites and components of medieval teachings on the ground of the soul. The relevant medieval terminology can also be traced back to the concepts of these thinkers. Ancient Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophers were convinced that there was a guiding authority in the human soul that was analogous or of the same nature as the divine power that governed the universe. This established the possibility of a connection between mortal and error-prone human beings and the realm of the eternal, divine and absolute truth. Church writers took up philosophical concepts of the relationship between God and the soul and reshaped them in a Christian sense. The church father Augustine assumed that there was a realm in the depths of the human mind, the abditum mentis, in which a hidden a priori knowledge lay.

In the 12th century, concepts were developed according to which it was possible to contemplate God in the innermost realm of the soul. However, it was not until the late Middle Ages that a fully formed doctrine of the unity of the soul with the divinity at the ground of the soul emerged. Its originator was Meister Eckhart, who referred to St Augustine but primarily proclaimed his own unconventional doctrine of the divine in the human soul, which was offensive at the time. He postulated the existence of an innermost divine quality in the soul, which he designated as the "ground." The ground of the soul was not a creation of God but rather existed above and beyond all created things. It was a simple and limitless entity, devoid of any limiting determinations, and was identical to the "Godhead," the supra-personal aspect of the divine. All created entities are devoid of access to the divine, whereas the uncreated, supra-temporal ground of the soul provides an experience of God, as the godhead is always present there. Eckhart described this experience as the "birth of God" in the ground of the soul. The prerequisite for this was "seclusion": the soul had to detach itself with the utmost consistency from everything that distracted it from the divine simplicity and undifferentiatedness in its innermost being.

Eckhart's doctrine of the ground of the soul was condemned by the Church as heretical shortly after his death. However, its content was sometimes accepted in a modified form by late medieval seekers of God. In modern times, it has often been regarded as an expression of mystical irrationalism. However, more recent historians of philosophy emphasise that Eckhart in no way devalued reason; rather, he sought to convince with a philosophical argument and understood the ground of the soul as intellect.

In the early modern period, the concept of the ground of the soul or soul centre as a place to experience God survived in spiritual literature. It was adopted by Catholic authors as well as in Protestant pietism. The Enlightenment thinkers gave a different meaning to the expression "soul ground". They used it to describe the place of a "dark" realisation from which clarity emerges.