He who knows one matter in all things remains unmoved. For matter is the subject of form and there can be no matter without form nor form devoid of matter. Form without matter is nothing at all; but matter ever cleaves to form and is one undivided whole in every single part of it. Now since form in itself is naught, therefore it moves nothing. And since matter is perfectly impartible, therefore it is unmoved. This man then is unmoved by form or matter and is therefore objectless in time.
Man’s other object is to possess his proper self, to identify himself with all perfection, with that most precious treasure his own aught: that is his quest. Now when a thing has gotten its own form, no more nor less, that thing is all its own and no one else’s. He who conceives this really is perfect in the sense that he is wholly objectless to eternity, etc.
XLVII THIS IS LIFE ETERNAL Hcec est vita ceterna ut cognoscant te solum deum verum etc, (Joh. 173). Here beginneth a discourse on a gospel saying, Christ’s dictum, ‘ This is life eternal, to know thee the only true God and thy Son whom thou hast sent.’
Now no one knows the Father except his only Son, for he says himself, ‘ No man knows the Father save the Son and no man knows the Son save the Father.’ Ergo, if man is to know God, and therein consists his eternal bliss, he must be, with Christ, the only Son of the Father. If ye would be blest ye must be the only Son; not many sons; one Son. True, ye are many in your carnal birth, but ye shall be one in the eternal birth, for in God there is no more than the one natural spring with its single natural outlet of the Son; not twain but one. And hence if ye are one with Christ ye are the sole issue with the eternal Word.
MEISTER ECKHART How does man come to be the only Son of the eternal Father? I answer. The eternal Word did not take upon itself this man or that, it took upon itself one indivisible free nature, human nature, bare and formless, for the impartible form of manhood is wholly without form; and since in this union the eternal Word took human nature formless, therefore the Father’s image, his eternal Son, became the form of human nature. Here it is just as true to say that man became God as that God became man. For human nature was transformed by taking the divine form which is the image of the Father. It follows that to be the Son ye must depart from and discard whatever makes for division in you. Man is an accident of nature. Do away with accidents and take yourselves in the freedom of your impartible humanity. But this very nature wherein ye take yourselves is become the Son of the eternal Father by union with the eternal Word, and therefore ye with Christ become the Son of the eternal Father by reason of enjoying the same nature which was there made God. Beware lest ye take yourselves as either this or that: realize yourselves in the liberation of your undivided manhood. If ye would be one ye must be rid of not, for noVs pride is division. How so? Well, suppose I say, Thou art not the man. This not puts a division between thee and this man. To be undivided ye must be free from not There is one power in the soul which is immune from not, which has not aught in common with any mortal thing: there is nothing in this power; only God is seen there face to face.
A man being thus the Son, his motion, his energy, whatever he enjoys, he has gotten of his own. Now the Son of the Father is the eternal Son as being descended from the Father. Further, all he has he has within himself since he is one in essence and in nature with the Father; his essence and his quiddity, he has both in himself and in this sense he prays, ‘ Father, as I and thou are one even so I would they should be the same.’ And just as the Son is one with the Father in his essence, so thou being one with him in essence and in nature, hast got it all in thee as the Father has in him. Thou hast it not on loan from God, because God is thine own: all thou hast gotten thou hast gotten of thine own and such works as are not produce of thine own are dead works in the sight of God. These thou art moved to by extraneous things and they are not living: they are dead, for anything alive is endowed with a motion of its own. If man’s works are to live they must be indigenous: not foreign things nor outside but within him.
Remember. If ye love right as God ye love not right as right, therefore ye neither take it nor love it as a whole but as divided.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS But God is right, so ye are not taking him nor loving him in his entirety. Take right as right and ye take it as God. Then where right is at work ye will be working too, seeing that ye do right all the time. Though hell stood in the way of right ye would still do right and that not as a hardship but a pleasure, because being right itself yc must do right. The more a thing participates in a common nature, the more it is one with the impartibility of the common nature, the more impartible it is itself. To the whole truth, God help us. Amen, XLVIII BEHOLD, I SEND MY ANGEL Ecce ego mitto angelum 7neum etc. {Matt, ll^o, Luc. 737 ). ‘ Behold, 1 send my angel before my face to prepare my way before me. And he whom we seek shall suddenly come into his temple. Who knoweth the day of his coming? For he is as a fire that blazes up.’ Suddenly, he says, he shall come into his temple. The soul shall come with all of her possessions, be they sins or be they virtues, and offer them all up at once, lifting them up in the Son into the Father. As the love of the Father is the loveli- ness of the Son. The Father loves nothing at all but the Son and such things as he finds in the Son. Let the soul then rise up in her whole power and offer herself to the Father in his Son so that she with the Son may be loved by the Father.
He says, ‘ Behold, I send my angel.’ The word behold suggests three things. Something great or marvellous or rare. Behold, I send my angel to refine the soul and prepare her for divine light. Divine light is always in the angelic light and of the angelic light. The soul would be troubled and distressed if God’s light were not shaded therein. God, clouded by angelic light is always waiting to come out and shine upon the soul. I am wont to say, when I am asked what God is doing, that he is begetting his Son, bearing him ever fresh and new and with such delight that he does nothing else besides this work with his Holy Ghost and all things in it. Hence his words, ‘ Behold I.’ He who says I does the very best work. None but the Father can say this word right. The act is peculiar to him and there is no issue thereof but his Son. In this act God tells forth his all. When God does this work in the soul, that is his birth; his birth is his work and his work is his Son. God performs this operation in the innermost depths of the soul so secretly that neither saint nor angel knows, nor is the soul herself a party to it save that she is the patient; God does ^it by himself. It is really the Father who says, ‘ I send my angel.’
MEISTER ECKHART MEISTER ECKHART Now I maintain we cannot be content with this and will have none of him. It was Origen who said, ‘ Mary Magdalene sought our Lord; she sought for one dead man and was disappointed to find two living angels.’ She was right, for she expected God. Dionysius says of the august principalities of angels, that divine order reigns there and divine activity and divine likeness or divine truth, as far as that is possible. What is divine order but divine power and from them both springs love which is ardour and wisdom and truth and power. For love is burning in the realm of essence: transcendental, actual being, free from nature. It is its nature to be natureless. To think of goodness or wisdom or power dissembles the essence and dims it in thought. The mere thought obscures essence. Such is divine rule. And where God finds its like within the soul there docs the Father give his Son birth. The soul’s whole power bursts alight. Out of this power, out of this light, leaps the flame: love. The soul with all her might ascends to the order of God.
Now to speak of the order of the soul. According to a heathen doctor, the supernal light of the soul is very bright and clear and dearly loves itself, whereas the soul dislikes herself and never sheds this natural light upon herself unless her lower powers are ordered to her highest; her natural light being high enough to reach angelic nature, but all averse from her inferior powers, it will not pour therein nor will it drench the soul unless these lower powers will give way. When a lord rules over a peojfle the serf is under the knight and the knight is under the baron. They all desire peace and to that end they will all help each other. And even so each several power is subject to the others and helps to keep peace in the soul, perfect rest. Our doctors define perfect rest as absolute freedom from motion. In it the soul can rise above herself to the order of the gods. In this absolute rest the Father gives the soul his only Son. Now he ranks first in order of divinity.
The other members take somewhat lower rank as I was saying of the angels who have God’s likeness very strong in them and illumination. In this interior light they soar above themselves into the divine image, all face to face with God in his divine light and so much the same that they do God’s work. Angels illumined like this and who are so like God, absorb and suck in God. I often say that were I void and had this fiery inner love and likeness I should absorb God altogether. Light streams out and lights up what it falls on. To call a man enlightened as we sometimes do, means little. Where it comes in it is far better; where it breaks through into the soul and makes her Godlike, divine, as far as may be, and light inwardly. In this interior light she SERMONS ANI> COLLATIONS 127 towers above herself in the light of God. Now she has come home and is at one with him and is his fellow-worker. Nothing is wrought by creature, the Father works alone. The soul shall never stop until she works as well as God. Then she and the Father shall do his work together: she shall work as one with him, wisely and lovingly. That we may be in unity with him, God help us. Amen.
XLIX BEHOLD, I SEND MY ANGEL Ecce mitto angelum meum (Malach. 3j, Luc, 7^^), It is written in the gospel, ‘ Behold, I send my angel.* Angels are within our ken for the evangelists deelare, ‘we shall be like the angels.’ One authority says, an angel is an image of God. Another one says he is fashioned like God. A third one describes him as a clear mirror wherein is reflected the goodness of God, the absolute stillness and mystery of God, as far as that is possible. Angels, again, have been defined to be pure intellectual light free from material things. We shall be like the angels. Perception here means seeing in the light that is in time, for anything I think of I think of in the light that is in time and temporal. But angels perceive in the light that is beyond time and eternal. They know in the eternal now. Men know in the now of time. The now of time is infinitely short. Yet take away this now of time and thou art everywhere and hast the whole of time. This thing or that thing is not all things; as long as I am this or that, have this or that, I am not all things nor I have not all things. Purify till thou nor art nor hast not either this or that, then thou art omni- present, and being neither this nor that thou art all things. An angel is and acts as an intelligence in his degree, beholding God without ceasing and his object is intelligible essence. Hence he is far removed from things. Remote from time and tempor- alities.
Mark the prophet’s words, he says, ‘ I send my angel.’ The evangelist, however, omits the pronoun I. This points, in the first place, to God’s elemental nature; to the fact that God is uiinameable, transcending speech in the abstraction of his essence where, without word or utterance, God is ineffable to creatures. It shows next, that the soul is ineffable and wordless; in her proper cause she is inarticulate, nameless and mute. The I is suppressed because there she has neither word nor utterance. Thirdly, it suggests that God and the soul are so entirely one that God has not a single thing to tell him from the soul, nor is he any 128 MEISTER ECKHART 128 MEISTER ECKHART other than the soul. The I is silent because he and the soul are every whit the same; he has no property apart from soul nor does any other nature come within his ken. In the other reference, the text says 1 to indicate God’s is -ness: that God simply is. All things are in God; out of him, without him, is naught. All creatures are infernal and of no account compared with God. What they are in truth that they are in God, for it is God alone who is the truth; the word I stands for the actuality of divine truth for it is the glyph of one-existence. It proclaims that God alone is. Secondly, it means that God is inseparate from things; that he is more innate in them than they are in themselves. And man should be inseparate from things: not as cleaving to self but as wholly detached from himself; thus he is inseparate from all things, and he is all things. So far as thou art nothing to thy- self so far thou art all things and iriscparate from all things; and so far as thou art not divorced from all things so far thou art God and all things, for God’s deity consists in his being present in all things. Wherefore the man who is inseparate from all things enjoys divinity as God himself enjoys it. Thirdly, the word / is in a sense the end of name for it is no proper name: it signifies the perfection of name and means immutability, dispassion: that God is immoveable, intangible, eternal stability.
Fourthly, it points to the absolute purity of the divine being which is entirely without admixture. Goodness, wisdom and anything else that we can attribute to God are impurities with God’s abstract essence; coexistence is foreign to essence, but the word I denotes God’s pure essence, his being in itself without anything alien and strange. The angels arc the image, the mirror of God, which contains the reflection of the Godhead, of the glory, the stillness and the mystery of God. Let us like the angels imitate God. According to philosophers, to make a portrait of a man one must not copy Conrad nor yet Henry. For if it be like Conrad or like Henry it will not recall the man, but will remind one of Conrad or of Henry. Moreover, Conrad’s portrait will not be like Henry for, given the knowledge and the art, one could do Conrad to the life, the very image of him. Now, God both will and can: he made thee like unto himself, the very image of himself. But like him argues something foreign and aloof. Now there is nothing foreign nor aloof betwixt God and the soul, therefore the soul is not like God: she is identical with him, the very same as he is.
More I do not know and cannot tell, so here my argument must end. But I was thinking on the way, that we ought to be utterly detached in our intention, having no one, nothing, in view but the Godhead as such: not happiness nor this nor that.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS just God and Godhead in itself. Aught beside that thou intendest is a divine impurity. Seize the actual Godhead itself. God help us so to do. Amen.
L I CAME FORTH FROM THE FATHER Exivi a patre et veni in mundum (Joh. ICgg)- I quote from the Gospel of St John. Our Lord says, ‘ I came forth from the Father and am come into the world and again I leave the world and return to my Father.’ Another of his sayings is, ‘ Amen, Verily I say unto you whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name the same shall be yours.’ Scholars say the word amen is an expression for stability. Our Lord says, ‘ Heaven and earth shall pass away before my word shall pass away,’ which never changes. The heavens which arc manifold and the unnumbered stars are all self-coloured. The moon alone is pied, thick and clear, dark and light. That is due to the neighbourhood of earth. And our doctors teach that in God there is no yesterday nor morrow, it is to-day and now all the time in God. Augustine observes that the architect who builds a house therein displays his art; though it may fall to ruin the art within his soul neither ages nor decays. And again Augustine says, All things are immutable in the eternal Word, nor do they wear away albeit in themselves they are corruptible, apt to be in some sort or not to be at all.
He says, ‘ Verily ’ {i.e, without fail or invariably), ‘ whatsoever ye ask of my Father in my name the same shall be yours.’ Accord- ing to St Augustine, ‘ To pray to God for aught save God is not to pray at all.’ John Damascene declares that ‘seeing herself the soul sees spirit; seeing an angel she sees spirit, yet, beholding God, she and the angel arc but corporal things compared with him.’ Their mind is as matter to God. Angelic light is darkness as compared with him. Our Lord says, ‘ Verily, I say unto you, whatsoever ye ask in my name the same shall be yours,’ meaning, what is in man’s name is man; what is in light’s name is light; what is in God’s name is fixed and immutable. The name of God belongs to none but him who stands in this light. No man can say Father except he be Son and none is called Son unless he be one with the one-begotten Word. Whoso asks in God’s name may demand of the Father whatever he will. Words have enormous power and have gotten it from the emanation of the eternal Word.
Our Lord says, ‘ I am come into the world.’ The Father comes into his Son with all he is, he comes into his Son with all he has, 9 MEISTER ECKHART he comes into his Son with all that he affords and, fourthly, he comes in an intellectual act. It is proper to the Son to dwell in the Father and it is proper to the Father to dwell in his Son and in the Holy Ghost. The full promise of the Father is brought forth in the Son to the end that the Son may transmit it to the soul. To use a favourite simile of mine. When a stone is thrown into a pond the impact starts a circle, small but energetic, which sets up other circles, the second being larger than the first albeit not so potent and the third one bigger still; one is gotten from another without stopping; and if the throw was hard enough the water’s edge is reached before the ripples are exhausted. One unique throw with the world a sheet of water and the water would fail ere the circles died away.
Now mark the application. First, out of the Father there leaps forth the Son, small, but so puissant in his godly strength that it is he who causes the whole emanation. The second sally is the premier angel, following hard upon the first event. It speeds apace, and though less energetic than the first and fully small, it is endowed with so much force that its superfluous energy supplies the lower angels while its successors, yet more widely flung, are bigger in circumference than the second or the first. They keep on brimming out the one behind the other, all busy pouring themselves forth from the highest to the lowest of the angels; but however far it be from the initial sally of the eternal Word to the first angel, this latter is too high to be affected by any eori)oral thing. Further. Our master claims for the lowest of the angels that in view of his energy projecting into God, the very basest of the inferior angels has so much of God’s might that the smallest fraction (a chip as it were from the carpenter’s axe), the minutest trace, of his activity makes all things grow and flourish. If this chip does not fall from his work, everything instantly perishes. They spread far and wide, reproducing so far as they may the first welling out of the Son from the Father; but this first emanation was so charged with power that given a thousand or more worlds they would be wanting in capacity ere the first issue had been spent, just as the water’s edge was reached before the ripples were exhausted that arose from the impact of the stone.
Our Lord says, ‘ I came forth from the Father and am come into the world.’ fV orld meaning pure or virgin. He is referring to the soul. Boethius says the world of the soul is called pure because she is fashioned like the fair and virgin world in God. And God is that soul which has gotten her into the perfect image of the divine world and wholly there abides, not peering forth but, all aloof from the outside world, standing still in the light-world SERMONS AND COLLATIONS in God. Into this soul comes the Son, begotten there in all the panoply of God: Father, Son and Holy Ghost, all together in one perfect being. The soul that has gotten in her the Son, has in one perfect entity the entire promise of the Godhead. One thing more. Creatures communicate themselves so far as they are good. It is peculiar to God as being wholly good that into whomsoever does partake of him he empties himself wholly in his Son. Which is another argument for the soul who has gotten the Son receiving the Godhead altogether. Thirdly, the Father is performing, in his Son, an intellectual operation. According to the philosophers, man’s highest happiness consists in the mental exercise of wisdom. And the Father’s whole delight, his perfect bliss, is this intellectual wont which is the birth of his Son. This birth he so enjoys that he puts his whole might into it and his entire nature. Accordingly the soul having gotten the Son by a feat of understanding, in him possesses all that God can give, in one perfect joy and bliss.
Our Lord says, ‘ I came forth from the Father and am come into this world,’ into the light-world, that is. The soul, true reflection of the divine world, into her enters the Son; just as he falls from the Father he is born in the soul. In this very same birth he is born in the world, in the soul, and bearing her up brings her to birth in the Father. As he says, ‘ again I leave the world,’ the outer world, ‘ and rc-ascend to my Father,’ with the light- world of the soul, copy of the world divine, made on the same last, in the same likeness. He carries her up to his Father, into the first, into the ground whence the Son comes out and strikes down from the Father.
There is another meaning in his words, ‘ I came forth from the Father,’ which is this: the Father goes into his Son in all his deity, for he is wholly intellectual. He goes clean into his Son. Had he more sons they would get naught; he could never have but one Son for he is none other than his understanding. Had he a thousand sons they must needs be all the same Son.
Our Lord says, ‘ I came forth from the Father and am come into the world. Again I leave the world and return to my Father.’ He implies that his going out is his going into the soul. But her going in is her going out. The soul goes out of her outermost into her innermost, out of her own into the Son’s. Her being caught up to the Father is his quitting the outer world and, with the soul, ascending once more to his Father. Mark tells of some- one addressing our Lord as ‘ Good Master.’ He replied, ‘ There is none good but God,’ for in coming forth he falls clean into the soul with all he is. No creature exists that can give itself whole; it goes out in kindness and work but itself stays at home. His 182 MEISTER ECKHART exit is his entrance. His passage out of the Father is his passage into the soul. Ilis emanation verily is God giving himself once for all in his Son. We say: the only-begotten Son who proceeds from the Father is the same as himself. From the moment the Father launches forth in all his might in the Son, he (the Father) reverts to pure essence. He has no other course seeing he has spent all his substance on his Son. Were there no time nor place nor matter, nothing left at all, the begetter would be as the begotten. It follows that the Son so called, must be the only Son and be one with the Father who utters in one single Word the whole of what he knows, the whole of what he can afford, in one single instant, and that instant is eternal.
Now our doctors say: natural acts make for unity. God vouchsafes himself, gives himself, as a whole to the soul in order that she may be one with him. Moreover, his first issue is his only Son. Again, our doctors teach that the highest of the angels is pure yet he forms a part of nature. But the only Son never entered any nature, he remained superior to nature: in pure being he went into the Father. The second eruption into nature, so our masters say, the highest spirit, remained by nature simplex, one in proportion to the nearness of his nature (to its origin). He broke in to let us out: his exit thence is his entrance here. TIcncc his words, ‘ Let...’
LI HE SOUGHT TO SEE...WHO HE WAS Et qumrehat videre Jemmy quis esset etc, {Luc. lOg). St Luke relates that when our Lord walked upon earth in human nature ‘ there was a rich man who sought to see him, and eould not for the press for he was small of stature.’ According to a holy man. Only he is rich who has plenty of God and virtue. To be well off for goods and stinted for God makes one poor and not rich, for things are as nothing to God. Hence the protest of that seigneur whom his retainers lauded for his power and his riches. Quoth he, ‘ I trow they laud not me one whit who have forgot my strongest claim to praise, my power over my body to demand of it what I will.’ This man who sought to see.lesus did outrun the crowd and climbed up into a tree in order to see him. And Jesus said, ‘Make haste and come down, for to-day I abide at thine house.’ Whoso would see Jesus must outrun all things. What does it show when a man does not hasten past things? It shows he has not tasted God. If he had tasted God he would hasten to pass by all things, and not pass by merely but break through all creatures. What his love is ready to leave he breaks SERMONS AND COLLATIONS through. If wc fail to see God that is due to our feeble desire no less than the concourse of creatures. Aim high, be high. To see God needs high aspiration. Know, ardent desire and abject humility work wonders. I vow God is omnipotent, but he is impotent to thwart the humble soul with towering aspiration. And where I cannot master God and bend him to my will it is because I fail either in will or meekness. I say, and I would stake my life upon it, that by will a man might pierce a wall of steel, and accordingly we read about St Peter that on catching sight of Jesus he walked upon the water in his eagerness to meet him.
Look you: a thing that grows in the filling will never get full. Take a vessel, a stoup; if you pour a stoup in and it stretches thereby then it will not be full. And so with the soul: the more she demands the more she is given; the more she receives the bigger she grows. Who is Jesus? lie has no name. Where do we sec God? Where there is no yesterday nor morrow: where it is now and to-day, there we sec God. What is God? One master says, If I were forced to tell of God then 1 should say, God is a thing no mind can reach or grasp and that is all 1 know about him. Another master says, lie who knows of God that he is unknown, that man knows God. Then comes St Augustine with his dictum, God is something sovran, supreme, which is common to all partakers. lie means that God is somewhat wherein every creature must be; for if he fall out of the hand of the mercy of God he will fall back into the hand of the justice of God. lie must ever be in him. Needs must a man have his being in God and have enjoyment in God withal, aye in God himself, an he will. But he who docs not lind eternal satisfaction and enjoyment in God himself must get it out of things, things that arc base, far lower than his footstool; yet creatures without exception get their being from God, even the damned in hell persist on somewhat of his being. Though they dwell not in God in felicity, still they must go on without him, against their will, in damnation. What folly it is to refuse to be with him wc cannot be without!
St Augustine says, ‘ What is God? lie is something we cannot conceive any better.’ But I say, God is better than anything we can conceive; 1 say, God is somewhat, I know not what, verily I know not. He is all that is being rather than not- being, existent more than non-existent; our highest aspirations arc but grovelling things falling hopelessly short of God. He transcends heart’s desire. When I preached at Paris I declared, and I durst now repeat, that not a man at Paris can conceive with all his learning what God is in the very meanest creature, not even in a fly. More- over, I now say that the whole world is powerless to conceive it MEISTER ECKHART What God is in himself no man can tell except he be ravished into the light that God is himself. What God is in the angels is very remote and nobody knows. What God is in the God-loving soul not a soul knows but the soul he is in. What God is in these nether things, I know to some extent but very little. What time God comes within our ken the natural faculties vanish. May we be rapt away into the light that is God himself and therein Be forever blest. So help us God. Amen.
LII THE GOOD HOUSEWIFE