The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328), a Dominican theologian and preacher, developed a daring mystical theology in sermons and treatises delivered in the German-speaking lands in the early 14th century. He emphasized the soul’s “ground” (Seelengrund) and the possibility of a direct, interior union with God beyond images and concepts. Such language—especially claims that stress unity between God and the soul—became controversial and contributed to ecclesiastical scrutiny late in his life. The sentiment in this quotation reflects Eckhart’s recurring pastoral target: correcting a naïve, spatially imagined piety (“God over there, me over here”) in favor of an inward, non-dual knowing of God.

Eckhart is rejecting a subject–object model of religious knowledge in which God is an external thing to be observed. In the highest “knowing,” the distance between knower and known collapses: God is not grasped as an object among objects, but known through a transformation of the knower. The line “God and I…are one in knowledge” points to Eckhart’s theme that union with God is realized in the intellect’s deepest act, where creaturely selfhood is “let go” and God is present as the very light of knowing. It is not a claim that the human person becomes identical with God in essence, but that true knowledge of God is participatory and unitive rather than representational.