Surrender · “Let Go to Receive”
Gelassenheit
To ‘let go and let be’ — releasing attachment to creatures, outcomes, self-will, and fixed God-concepts so the soul becomes empty and ‘virginal,’ a still ground in which (Eckhart says) God’s Word is eternally born.
In 5 lines: Loosen your inner grip — on things, outcomes, status, self-will, and even your fixed ideas of God. Act and love “without a why,” not to get anything. Grow still and empty, receptive rather than busy. Don’t grasp for results; just let go and let be — the birth happens in the silence, not by force. Then carry that free, detached heart into ordinary action.
What it is
Gelassenheit — usually rendered releasement, letting-be, or yielding — is Meister Eckhart’s name for the soul’s deep surrender.
It has two faces. The first is Abgeschiedenheit (detachment): releasing one’s grip on creatures, possessions, outcomes, self-will, and even one’s fixed images and concepts of God. Eckhart ranks detachment above love, humility, and mercy, picturing the detached heart as “immovable… like a mountain of lead” against the gusts of fortune.
The second is the positive movement: a quiet handing-over to the divine will, an open, “virginal,” empty receptivity. When the soul becomes truly empty and still, Eckhart says, God cannot but act in it — this is his famous image of the birth of the Word (the Son) in the ground of the soul.
Crucially, this is not a willed achievement but a letting: you do not grasp God; you release everything that crowds Him out, and the birth happens of itself in the silent ground. It is surrender as the deepest practice (its attention-anchor, The Inner Creates the Outer, read in the negative: attention is released from objects so the ground can be still).
The Method
Eckhart left no step-by-step protocol; the following distills the disposition he repeatedly counsels (faithfully described, not reproduced):
- Let go of the “why.” Eckhart’s hallmark: act and love “without a why” (sunder warumbe) — do good, pray, live, not in order to get anything (not even heaven), but freely. Releasing the transactional motive is the first detachment.
- Release attachment to creatures and outcomes. Loosen the inner grip on things, people, status, and preferred results — not by rejecting them outwardly, but by ceasing to cling. “He who would be this or that. wants to be something; but detachment wants to be nothing.”
- Empty even your God-concepts. Eckhart’s boldest move: “I pray God to rid me of God” — let go of your idea of God so the living God beyond concept can be present. Release fixed images, demands, and spiritual ambitions.
- Become still and “virginal.” Quiet the faculties; make the soul empty, open, and receptive — a silent ground rather than a busy stage. Stillness is the condition, not a result to seize.
- Let, don’t grasp. Do not strive to make anything happen. Gelassenheit is precisely the relaxation of grasping; the birth of the Word is God’s doing in the emptied ground, received, not produced.
- Carry it into action. Eckhart insists the detached interior is not idle: from the still ground, one acts freely and lovingly in the world (“Martha” is as high as “Mary”). Releasement is a way of living, not only of sitting.
Source & Lineage
Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), German Dominican theologian, preacher, and mystic of the Rhineland, taught in Paris, Strasbourg, and Cologne.
His German sermons and treatises — notably On Detachment and the Talks of Instruction — articulate an apophatic, ground-of-the-soul mysticism: the soul’s innermost “ground” (grunt) is where it is one with the divine “Godhead” beyond the named God.
Some propositions were condemned shortly after his death, but his influence ran deep through Tauler and Suso, the Theologia Germanica, later German thought (the term Gelassenheit reappears in Heidegger), and modern contemplatives.
Common refinements
Detachment as cold indifference. Gelassenheit is not numbness or not-caring; Eckhart’s detached person loves and acts more freely, “without a why,” not less.
- Spiritual bypassing. Using “letting go” to avoid feeling, responsibility, or relationship is a counterfeit. True releasement includes engaged action (“Martha”).
- Grasping at emptiness. Striving to achieve the empty ground or to make the birth happen is the very grasping to be released. The move is to stop grasping.
- Outward renunciation mistaken for the point. Eckhart locates detachment in the inner grip, not in how much you own; you can be poor and clinging, or have much and be free.