The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328), a Dominican theologian and preacher, is a central figure in medieval German mysticism. The saying is associated with his sermons and treatises on the “ground” (Seelengrund) of the soul and the soul’s union with God, where knowing and being are transformed in contemplative detachment (Gelassenheit). In this tradition, the highest form of “seeing” God is not sensory vision but an interior, intellectual-spiritual act in which the soul is conformed to what it knows. The line is often cited in modern anthologies as a compact expression of Eckhart’s teaching that, at the deepest level, the divine and the soul meet in a single act of knowing.

The quote expresses Eckhart’s non-dual language of union: in the deepest contemplative awareness, the knower and the known are not two separate realities. To “see God” is to participate in God’s own self-knowing; the soul’s highest “eye” is not a private faculty but the point where divine light and human intellect coincide. This does not mean the human becomes God by nature, but that in grace and detachment the soul is so aligned with God that God’s knowing and the soul’s knowing are one act. The saying dramatizes reciprocity—God’s gaze is not merely upon the soul; it is the very condition by which the soul can see at all.

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