The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one seeing, one knowing, and one loving.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328), a Dominican theologian and preacher, developed a daring mystical theology centered on the soul’s “ground” (Seelengrund) and the possibility of union with God beyond images and concepts. The saying about the “eye” belongs to this context of late medieval Rhineland mysticism and Eckhart’s vernacular preaching and Latin scholastic work, where he describes a reciprocal “seeing” between God and the purified soul. Such language was controversial in his lifetime and contributed to suspicions of heterodoxy culminating in posthumous condemnation of certain propositions (1329). The line is most often encountered today in modern anthologies and translations rather than as a stable, single-source quotation.

The “eye” is Eckhart’s metaphor for the deepest faculty of the soul—the point of interior awareness capable of receiving God when the self is emptied of possessiveness and images. To say that the eye with which the soul sees God is the same eye with which God sees the soul expresses non-dual union: in the highest contemplation, knowing and loving are not two acts (God’s and mine) but one shared act. This is not meant as a claim that the human becomes God by nature; rather, it dramatizes participation in divine life by grace, where the soul’s true knowing is God’s knowing in it. The line captures Eckhart’s emphasis on identity-in-union and the collapse of subject–object distance in mystical experience.

1) “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
2) “My eye and God’s eye are one and the same—one seeing, one knowing, one loving.”
3) “The eye by which I see God, that same eye by which God sees me.”