A member of the Dominican order, theologian and professor of the university of Paris, Eckhart wrote highly influential sermons and meditations in vernacular German. His message is strikingly pantheistic in tone, talking of passing beyond God to a ‘simple ground,’ or ‘still desert’ without any distinctions, out of which all things were created. He stressed the scintilla animae or spark of the soul which enables us to know God. It was all too much for the fourteenth century, and the year after Eckhart’s death twenty-eight of his theses were condemned by Pope John XXII, seventeen being heretical, and eleven being merely ill-sounding, rash, and suspected of heresy. There are moves to have him reinstated.