Sister Catherine Treatise

The Sister Catherine Treatise (German: Daz ist Swester Katrei Meister Eckehartes Tohter von Straezburc) is a work of medieval Christian mysticism seen as representative of the Heresy of the Free Spirit of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe.

Here the treatise is careful to delineate the danger of those who interpret the Free Spirit ideals as carte blanche to commit sinful and/or immoral acts.

The Sister Catherine Treatise is often cited, along with Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls, as one of the representative literary expressions of the Heresy of the Free Spirit, which held that a divine union with God was possible to people in this life and, more controversially, independently of the ministrations of the Church.

Written in a heightened emotional prose which gives the Treatise a slightly hysterical, hallucinatory quality, the work espouses a highly feminine approach to the Christian Mystery, with lengthy discussions of the significance of Mary Magdalene as the true lover of Christ (an element which links it to Porete, some of the alleged beliefs of the Cathars and the speculations of Dan Brown) and the figure of Sister Catherine herself emerging as more initiated into the inner spirituality of Christianity than her male counterpart.

In it, many of the articles of faith of the Free Spirit movement are expressed: a neo-Platonic/panentheistic belief in God's immanence in Creation, the possibility of salvation and the Unio Mystica in this life, the limitations of Church teaching in terms of real mystical insight.