Consideravit domum etc. ‘ The good housewife looks well to the ways of her house, not eating the bread of idleness.’ This house represents the soul as a whole, and the ways of the house are the powers of the soul. An ancient philosopher says the soul is made in between one and two. The one is eternity, ever alone and without variation. The two is time, changing and given to multiplication. He means to convey that the soul in her higher powers touches eternity, God to wit, while her lower powers being in contact with time make her subject to change and biased towards bodily things, which degrade her. Could the soul know God as well as the angels do she would never have come into body. If she could know God without the world the world would not have been made for her sake. The world was contrived on her account for training and bracing the eye of the soul to endure divine light. The sunshine falling on the earth is dimmed first in the air and diffused on various things, for no human eye can support the sun. And even so the light of God is over strong and bright for the soul’s eye to bear, without being fixed and given up by matter and reflection which accustom it to dwelling in the light divine.
In her superior powers the soul is in contact with God; so she takes after God. God takes after himself; he has gotten his form from himself and from no one beside. Ilis form is that of perfect self-knowledge, absolute light. When the soul comes in contact with him in real understanding, then she is like him in form. Suppose you press a seal into green wax or red, or into cloth, just enough for the seal, the seal being stamped right into the wax so that none of the wax is left over unsealed, then it is one and the same with the seal. In just the same way the soul is wholly united with God in image and form when she is in contact with him in actual gnosis. St Augustine says the soul is of more noble build than any other creature, and that is why no mortal thing, destined to perish at the latter day, can hold communication with SERMONS AND COLLATIONS or eke affect the soul save from a distance and by messengers. Such are the eyes and ears and the five senses: these are the soul’s ways out into the world, and by these ways the world gets back into the soul. According to one master, the powers of the soul flow back into the soul laden with fruits; they never go out but they bring something back. So beware lest thine eyes bring back aught to hurt thy soul. My firm conviction is that everything a good man sees must better him. On seeing evil he thanks God for saving him therefrom and prays God to convert him to what he is. On seeing good his great desire will be to have it perfected in him.
This seeing serves two purposes: it scotches what is mischievous and makes us forthwith remedy our faults. Many a time I have laid it down that great workers, great fasters, great vigil-keepers, if they fail to mend their wicked ways, wherein true progress lies, do cheat themselves and are the devil’s laughing-stock. A man once had an arrow he grew rich on. lie was neighbour to a sower. When the arrow was in use a breeze from any quarter would catch it by the head and turn its tail into the wind. So this man approached the sower and quoth he, ‘ What will you give me to tell you the way of the wind? ’ Thus he sold his arrow and waxed rich thereby. And so might we become right rich in virtue by finding out our frailties, and then, in rue, setting ourselves to cure them.
This St Elizabeth did with much care. She looked well to the ways of her house. She had no fear for the winter for her house- hold was doubly clad. Probable ills she provided against. Any lack she worked hard to supply. So she ate not the bread of idleness. Withal her superior powers she kept oriented to God. The superior powers of the soul arc three. The first is intuition; the second irascibilis, i,e, the power of attack; the third is will. In the act of imbibing knowledge of the very truth into the impartible power whereby we apprehend God, the soul is a light. And God too is light, and when the divine light is flooding the soul, soul becomes merged into God just like a light into light. Then she is called the light of faith which is a divine virtue. And whither the soul is unable to go with her senses and powers thither faith takes her.
The second is the attacking force whose special function it is to progress. As the eye is for seeing colour and shape and the ear is for hearing sweet voices and sounds, so the soul with this power is ever advancing; if she glances aside to waver from him, that is sin. She cannot brook that aught should be above her. I trow she cannot brook God even being above her; unless he be within her and she has gotten as good as God himself, she MEISTER ECKHART MEISTER ECKHART never rests. With this power God is apprehended by the soul, as far as that is feasible to creature and so it is called hope, whieh is a divine virtue also. Herein the soul has such a clear prospect of God that she fondly imagines God in his whole being has not a thing withholdcn from her. King Solomon says, ‘ Stolen waters are sweet.’ And St Augustine tells us, ‘ The pears I stole were nicer than the ones my mother gave me, because they were forbidden and locked up.’ So is that grace far sweeter to the soul which she has won by special work and wisdom than that which is our common property.
The third power is interior will, turned ever face-like towards God in godly will, drawing from God his love into itself. God is drawn by the soul and the soul is drawn by God, and this is divine love, another divine virtue. Divine felicity lies in three things. In knowledge and in liberation from the bondage of creature: in having enough of, having finished with, self and all creatures. Further, the soul’s perfection lies in gnosis, in conception, in conceiving God and in union of perfect love. Do we want to know what sin means? Lapsing from felicity and virtue, that is the whole cause of sin. It behoves every soul to look to her ways. ‘ She had no fear for the winter with her household doubly clad,’ as the scriptures tell of her. She was clothed with strength to withstand imperfection and was adorned with the truth. To all appearance this woman was rich and had the world at her feet, but in secret she knelt at the shrine of true poverty. And when her outward comforts failed she fled to him to whom all creatures flee, setting at naught the world and self. In this way she trans- cended self, despising men’s despisery and not minding it, for all she had in mind was the tending of the sick and the cleansing of the foul, which she managed by dint of her pure heart. Even so let us look to the ways of our house and not cat the bread of idleness. So help us God. Amen.
LIII WHOSOEVER WOULD COME AFTER ME Dominus dicet: qui vult venire post me etc, {Matt, I624; Luc, 923). Our Lord says, ‘ Whosoever would come to me let him take up his cross and with willing martyrdom forsake himself and follow me.’ Everything by nature is pursuing God after its own fashion. Fire draws upwards, earth falls downwards, and similarly every creature here is searching out the place God has ordained it for. Origen says a man forsakes himself when he by striving rids himself of customary sins and denies himself those things SERMONS AND COLLATIONS he is addicted to; so doing he takes up his cross with willing pain and disciplines himself in virtuous uses. Basilius, the saint, once said that any man who leaves the things that are behind him and beneath him and which are not God, has left himself. And treating of this subject in the book wherein he speaks about the soul, St Augustine calls her nobler, mightier, grander than any other creature and in these respects most like to God of all, barring the angels, who arc nobler than her nature because they were the first to be poured forth and loosed from spirit although they keep a refuge in it. This the soul has not. She has to pour into the body.
Various people comment sagely upon this: If God is quite impartible why did he not create all things simply like the angels? That w^ould never do, theologians say. One sort of creature could not show forth God. He made many kinds of creatures for each one to show forth a modicum of God albeit no more of him that one drop of water reveals about the sea. Not but what a drop of water tells us more about the sea, and indeed the universe, than any creatures can reveal (of God). For out of drops we might get a sea, but not by means of any ercatures could we succeed in getting God. St (iregory observes that, The soul whom God shines into so that she sees him somewhat, to her creatures arc dwarfed or merely ciphers.
Thirdly, the text refers to one who dies a martyr’s death as forsaking self. Our Lord says, ‘ Moses, to me no man comes as himself.’ Now according to St Chrysostom, ‘ To be an other than I am I must abandon that I am.’ This is accom])lished by humility. * Nothing ’, says St Gregory, ‘ gives more power than does lowliness.’ We sec this well with Moses, who when he wanted to rest drove his flock of sheep into the valley. It was there he saw the bush burning but not consumed. ‘ I will go,’ said Moses, ‘ and look at this great sight.’ Then God called to him, ‘ Stay, Moses, go no further! Doff thy shoes.’ The feet arc symbols of desire. They must be bare: drawn out of everything temporal and mortal; then the soul can offer her whole self to her Lord. One of the saints has said that if the soul should rise and, being unillumined, offer herself to our Lord she would be rebuffed and come to grief; like an eye that likes trying to look at the sun finds it grows weaker and blinder.
LIV FROM HIM AND THROUGH HIM AND IN HIM Ex ipso et per ipsum et in ipso sunt omnia, ipsi gloria in scecula (Rom. II36). St Paul says, ‘ From him and through him and in him are all things, to whom be glory and honour.’ These words MEISTER ECKHART are said of the three Persons and the unity of their nature. From him applies to the Father, the origin of all things in eternity and in time. Through him applies to the Son, through whom all things proceeded forth. In him applies to the Holy Ghost, in whom all things are contained, made spirit and brought back to their end. From another point of view these words, again, betoken the three Persons by their from and through and in. As these words are distinct even so do they show the distinction of the Persons. Put from the word him (which is the same for all) we gather the oneness of their nature. He says, ‘ To him be glory and honour.’ Proclaiming the three Persons as one God, to whom alone be all honour.
Now we proceed to speak of the things of God, of Persons and of essence, which we hardly understand. Those that cannot follow this discourse can take refuge in the dogma I have ta ight before, that the three Persons arc in one essence and one essence in the three Persons. Remember we are speaking of Father and paternity, and you must understand that these two are not apart in two hypostases, but they are one hypostasis, and moreover they arc one and three rationally speaking. Consider the meaning of paternity. It means the power of father-kind. A father is known by the fact that he begets, but we recognise paternity in a potential father. Take, for example, the maid who is a virgin. By nature she is maternal though not actually mother. The same thing with a father; in his power to beget he is paternal, but the fact of his begetting makes him father. Mark this difference between father and paternity when the Word is gotten ghostly in the soul. This we take to be the case when the soul, sublimed and in the proper state, grows pregnant with God’s light and divine by nature: by the unique power of God grown big with Deity. You sec, in this immanent power, soul too is paternal. But radiant with revelation, she with the F'athcr begets and is then with the Father called father. This father and fatherhood differ as applied to the soul. Mark, too, that Son differs from filiation, remembering that these two are not separate in two hypostases: they arc the same hypostasis. We find filiation in potential father-nature, unborn. If he were not unborn in his potential nature the Father could not beget him, for a thing that comes out must first have been in. So much for filiation. But the Son we explain as the Father’s begetting of his own Word, whereby the Father is Father. The Son, moreover, is God in himself, not God of himself but of the Father alone. Were he God of himself he would not be one with the Father so there would be two without any beginning. Which is impossible. We postulate three distinct properties, the Father’s property is that SERMONS AND COLLATIONS he comes from none but himself. The Son’s property is that he does not come from himself: he descends from the Father by way of nativity. The Holy Ghost’s property is that he comes from the Father not as being born: he proceeds from them twain, both Father and Son, not as a birth but as love. For two who are sundered in Person cannot together bear one but they can bear mutual love. The Holy Ghost is not born because he proceeds out of two and not merely out of the Father, albeit certain doctors do maintain that the Holy Ghost comes from the Father alone and not from the Son at all. This is false; for when the Father gat the Son he gave him his whole nature as well as all perfection, which goes with being of that nature, the Father withholding nothing from his Son. It follows that the Father cannot alone bring forth the Holy Ghost as he alone did get the Son. Had these doctors envisaged it aright, they would no doubt have said the same. They were speaking without understanding. So it is wrong to say the Son is God from himself and not from the Father. The Son may be said to bring forth the Spirit yet not from himself: from the Father whence he comes himself. Thus the Holy Ghost comes from them twain and not from one; but not as being twain, as being one. So much for the Son and filiation.
It may be asked concerning Spirit and spiration, Can we use these terms or not? Is there some objection, which makes it inad- missible? Filiation is found latent in the nature of the Father, that is plain, seeing he is not merely brought forth out of him. Herein lies the objection to speaking of Spirit and spiration. Let us see if we can find precisely the right meaning of Spirit and spiration. We have here two and one. That is the difference between Spirit and spiration. In the first, wlicn we predicate two we mean Father and Son. But by saying in one we refer to spiration. This same in one is formless: the mark of spiration. Again, when we say in another that signifies Spirit, who is another than Father and Son in his Person.
LVi GOD MADE THE POOR FOR THE RICH God made the poor for the rich and the rich for the poor. Lend to God, he will repay you. Some say they believe in God who believe not God. It is a greater thing to believe in God than to believe God. I may trust a man to pay me back five shillings ^ See also Wackernagol, No. lix, from which the last sentence ia added.
MEISTER ECKHART I have lent him yet not trust in the man. So if a man believes in God why will he not trust him to repay what he lends his poor? He who gives up all things gets back an hundredfold. If he expects his hundredfold he shall get nothing: he is not giving up the things but getting more, an hundredfold. Our Lord repays an hundredfold the man who leaves all things. Letting go all things he gets an hundredfold return and eternal life. If it happens to a man in the course of riddance to get again the very same he gave, then, not giving all, he shall get nothing. Anyone who looks to find anything in God, knowledge, understanding or devotion or whatever it may be, even if he find it will not be finding God but knowledge, understanding or devotion: all things I heartily commend; but to him not lasting.
Seek nothing at all, not understanding nor gnosis nor piety nor inwardness nor peace but only God’s will. The soul who is as she by rights should be, would not be satisfied even if God gave her his whole Godhead; it would no more console her than his giving her a fly. God-knowledge is vain apart from God-will. In God’s will are all things, eternal and perfect and pleasant to God; but out of God’s will things are all of them naught and not pleasant to God and not perfect. Never pray for any mortal thing; if thou must pray for anything at all, pray for God’s will and nothing else for therein thou hast all. To ask for aught beside means getting nothing. In him is naught but one and one is indivisible and aught save one is part, not one. God is one and anything extra that is sought or found is not God but a fraction. Peace, intuition or anything else than simply God’s will is for self-love and is naught; but if he seeks God’s naked will then whatever he may find or have revealed to him therein that man may take as a gift of God without ever thinking or looking to sec if it is of nature or of grace or from whence or in what wise it may be: he need have no anxiety whatever on that score; he is going the right way and while following the broad lines of the Christian life there is no need to scrutinize each detail. He can just take each thing from God, and whatever comes accept it as the best for him, and have no fear of meeting on his lonely road with anything, do what he may, that hinders his awareness of the love of God, which to him is all that matters.
People have a way of saying, when it falls to them to do or suffer something, ‘ If only I knew it was the will of God I would gladly suffer and put up with it.’ Dear God I what a question for a sick man to ask, docs God intend me to be ill? He ought to know it is the will of God by the very fact of being ill. And so with other things. Whatever comes accept it as God’s will, pure and simple. Some, when things prosper with them, inwardly SERMONS AND COLLATIONS or outwardly, praise God and have faith in him. They will say, for instance, ‘ I have gotten four quarters of corn this year and as many of wine: I put my trust in God.’ Nay, I say thou dost trust in the corn and the wine.
The soul is created for good so great, so high, that she cannot rest in any mode; all the time she is hastening past modes to the eternal good, to God who is her goal. This is not won in the heat of the assault, in the stress and strain of action or of passion, but by gentleness and true humility and self-abnegation in that and everything that may betide. A man should not dragoon himself: ‘ Thou shalt do this at whatever cost,’ that would be wrong for so he lends importance to himself. If anything should chance to grieve or trouble or disquiet him, again he would be wrong for that means giving way to self. When out of the depths of humilia- tion he calls on God for counsel and bending low before him accepts with quiet faith whatever he may send, then he is right. It all depends, in teaching and advising, if a man will listen, disregarding everything but God. Many and various are the ways of putting this, but it promotes the proper play of conscience to refuse attention to casual happenings and for a man when he is by himself to make an offering of his will to God and then proceed to take each thing alike from God, grace or whatever comes, inward or outward.
Whoso sees aught of God’s secs naught of God. The righteous man does not need God. What I have I am not in need of. He serves for naught, he cares for naught, he has God and that is all he needs. As God is higher than man so is he readier to give than man is to receive. Not by fasting and good works can we gauge our progress in the virtuous life, but a sure sign of growth is a waxing love for the eternal and a waning interest in temporal things. The man who owns an hundred crowns and gives them all in the name of God to found a cloister is doing a good work. And yet I say, it were a better to despise and naught himself for love of God. It behoves a man in all he docs to turn his will in God’s direction and keeping only God in view to forge ahead without a qualm, not wondering, am I right or am I doing something wrong? If the painter had to plan out every brush-mark before he made his first he would not paint at all. And if, going to some place, we had first to settle how to put the front foot down, we should never get there. Follow your principles and keep straight on; you will come to the right place, that is the way.
This is a collation of Meister Eckhart’s.
MEISTER ECKHART LVI THE EMANATION AND RETURN Nolite timere eos qui corpus occidunt, animuni autem occidere non possunt {Matt. lOgg). ‘ Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul.’ Spirit does not kill spirit; spirit gives life to spirit. ‘ Them which kill you ’ are flesh and blood which die by one another. Man’s most precious possession is blood, when it is well-liking. The most mischievous thing in man is blood when it is ill-liking. When the blood rules the flesh, the person is humble and patient and chaste and has all the virtues. But where the flesh has the upper hand he is supercilious, hasty, and lascivious and has all the vices. Praised be St John the glorified of God himself.
Now mark. I will say something I never said before. When God created the heavens and the earth and all creatures, God did no work; he had no work to do; there was no activity in him. God said: ‘We will make a likeness.’ To create is easy: we do it when and as we will. But what I make, I make myself, with myself and in myself, imprinting my image clearly in it. ‘ We will make a likeness ’: not the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Ghost: we, the holy Trinity in concert, we will make a likeness.
When God made man he wrought in the soul his like work, his ever-cherished, his working work. This work was a great one, no less than the soul: she was the work of God. God’s nature, his being and his godhood depend upon his working in the soul. God be praised, God be praised! God works in the soul; he is in love with his work. The work is love and the love is God. God loves himself and his nature, his essence and his Godhead. In the love wherein he loves himself therein God loves all creatures. With the love wherewith God loves himself therewith he loves all creatures, not as creatures: creatures as God. In the love wherein God loves himself therein he loves all things.
Again I say what I have never said before. God enjoys him- self. In the joy wherein God enjoys himself therein he enjoys all creatures. With the joy wherewith God enjoys himself he enjoys all creatures, not as creatures: creatures as God. In the joy wherein God enjoys himself, therein he enjoys all things. And mark. All creatures tend towards their ultimate perfection. Apprehend me, I beseech you, by the eternal ever-valid truth and by my soul. For yet again I say a thing I never said before: God and Godhead are as different as earth is from heaven. More- over I declare: the outward and the inward man are as different, too, as earth and heaven. God is higher, many thousand miles.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS Yet God comes and goes. But to resume my argument: God enjoys himself in all things. The sun sheds his light upon all creatures, and anything he sheds his beams upon absorbs them, yet he loses nothing of his brightness. All creatures sacrifice their life for being. Creatures all come into my mind and are rational in me. I alone prepare all creatures to return to God. Beware, all of you, what ye do.
To return to my inner and my outer man. I see the lilies in the field, their gaiety, their colour, all their leaves. But I do not see their fragrance. Why? Because what I give out is in me. What I am saying is in me and I speak it forth of me. My outward man relishes creatures as creatures, as wine and bread and meat. But my inner man relishes things not as creature but as the gift of God. And again to my innermost man they savour not of God’s gift but of ever and aye. I take a bowl of water and place a mirror in it and set it in the sun. The sun sends forth his light-rays both from his disc and also from the bottom of the bowl, suffering thereby no diminution. The reflection of the mirror in the sun is in the sun. The sun and it are thus what it is. And so with God. God is in the soul with his nature, his essence and his Godhood, but he is not on that account the soul. The soul’s reflection is in God. God and she are thus what she is. There God is all creatures. There God’s utterance is God.
While I subsisted in the ground, in the bottom, in the river and fount of Godhead, no one asked me where I was going or what I was doing: there was no one to ask me. When I was flowing all creatures spake God. If I am asked. Brother Eckhart, when went ye out of your house? Then I must have been in. Even so do all creatures speak God. And why do they not speak the Godhead? Everything in the Godhead is one, and of that there is nothing to be said. God works, the Godhead does no work, there is nothing to do; in it is no activity. It never envisaged any work. God and Godhead are as different as active and inactive. On my return to God, where I am formless, my breaking through will be far nobler than my emanation. I alone take all creatures out of their sense into my mind and make them one in me. When I go back into the ground, into the depths, into the well-spring of the Godhead, no one will ask me whence I came or whither I went. No one missed me: God passes away.
All happiness to those who have listened to this sermon. Had there been no one here I must have preached it to the poor-box. Some poor souls will go back home and say, I shall settle down and eat my bread and serve God. Verily I say, they persist in error, and will never have the power to strive for or to win what those others do who follow Christ in poverty and exile. Amen.
MEISTER ECKHART LVII SUCH IS THE NATURE OF GOD A master cries, Dear God, how well for me did my love bear fruit!
Our Lord says to every loving soul, ‘ I was made man for you, and if ye are not God for me ye wrong me. I in my God-nature did dwell in your man’s nature, so that none guessed my godly might seeing me walk like any other man. And even so shall ye in your humanity hide you in my divinity, and none shall guess your human weakness: your life being all divine they shall see naught in you but God.’ This does not mean soft words or pious mien or much parade of holiness, so that our name borne far and and wide is highly honoured by the friends of God; nor that as cherished and elect of God we fondly think God has forgot all creatures but ourselves and anything we ask of God is straight- way done. No, not by any means! That is not what God wants of us: all the other way.
He would have us found wholly unmoved wheri people call us cheats and liars or whatever it may be whcrcl^y we are bereft of our fair name; and not only evil speaking but evil deeds as well: denying us our animal necessities; and not only temporal needs but bodily hurt. (He would that) our sickness, or whatever ill it be, should help us in our bodily work; that we should always do our best despite that people turn it to the worst account; further, that we should suffer in this sense not alone from people but from God as well, who, withholding from us his present con- solation, builds as it were a wall between us and when we bring our work to him seeking his help and comfort, he behaves towards us as if he shut his eyes and refused to sec or hear: he leaves us in our need to stand and fight alone, like Christ forsaken by his Father. Then hiding us in his divinity, behold us unbowed down by woe and with no other help than the words Christ uttered, ‘ Father, they will be done.’
Such is the nature of God that we know it by nothing better than naught. — How, by naught? — By getting rid of all means, not merely by spurning the world and the possession of virtue; I must let virtue go if I would see God face to face; not that I should flout virtue, but virtue being innate in me I transcend virtue. When a man’s mind has lost touch with every thing then, not till then, it comes in touch with God. A heathen philo- sopher has said, nature cannot transcend nature. Ergo, no creature can see God. If he is seen it must be in light that is supernatural. Theologians have a question, When God uplifts SERMONS AND COLLATIONS the soul above himself and above all creatures and leads her home into himself, why does he not raise up the body too so that it has no earthly needs? One of the masters — I think St Augus- tine — answers this as follows. When the soul attains to union with God then at last the body enjoys all things to God’s glory. Through man all creatures have flowed forth and the body’s rational use of creatures is not a drawback to the soul: it is an added dignity, for creatures can find no better way of returning to their source than in the righteous man who of his soul can say that even for an instant it has been absorbed in union with God. For then there is no obstacle between God and the soul, and as far as the soul follows God into the desert of his Godhead so far the body follows the bodily Christ into the desert of his willing poverty: as the soul is united with his deity so the body is atoned in Christ by the operation of true virtue. Well, then may the heavenly Father say, ‘ This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,’ for not only has he gotten in the soul his only Son: he has begotten her his only Son.
From the very bottom of my heart I say, Man, how can aught afflict thee or be hard to bear when thou considerest that he who yonder subsisted in the form of God and in the day of his eternity and in the glory of the saints, and who before was born the splendour and substance of God, did enter the prison, the trap of thy sense- nature which is so unclean that aught, however pure, is besmirched and fouled by coming near it, yet notwithstanding this he abode there for thy sake? What is there thou wouldst not gladly suffer, reading of the bitterness of thy Lord and God, pondering the afflictions, all the woes, that did befall him? The scorn and contumely he bore from king and soldier, from knaves and passers by his cross? How the glory of the eternal light was mocked and scorned and tortured? Behold, what innocence, compassion and true love, and nowhere shown to me more clearly than where the love-power pierced his heart. Make thee then a bundle of the woes of thy Lord God and let it lie between thy breasts. Regard and realize his virtues, how all his works make for thy weal, and see thou pay him back in his own coin his infamous and shameful death and his pain-bearing nature wherein he, sinless, suffered for thy sin as if it had been his; as he says in the Prophets concerning his afflictions, ‘ Lo, I suffer for my sins,’ and speaking of *the fruits of all his labours, ‘ By your works shall ye possess this kingdom I ’ calling our sins his sins and his works our works; and he has answered for our sins as though he had committed them, whereas we profit by his works as though they were our own. And this should make our labour light, for the good knight laments not his own. wounds, seeing his king who is wounded with