In the late 1320s, Rome condemned Meister Eckhart’s teachings. The German preacher had spent his life telling ordinary congregations that God was not a king seated somewhere above the clouds, watching from a distance. Eckhart told them God lived in the ground of their own souls, closer to them than they were to themselves. The Church called this dangerous and opened proceedings against him.

Eckhart had committed the original heresy of the mystics. He moved God from the sky to the soul.

The peasants who listened to him had been handed the same God everyone inherits. A being apart from nature, who built the machine and walked away. Eckhart took that idol apart in plain language. He told them the eye through which they saw God was the same eye through which God saw them.