The first power receives, the second sees, the third love s. What time the soul is occupied in entertaining God, in seTfrecollection and intellectual contemplation, the love of her will transports her right into God. Then occurs that movement of the heavens, in the act of fecundation, which is latent in eternity. For the end of all motion is rest. As saith Isaiah the prophet, ‘ The heavens are moved and the earth withal and after the motion comes rest.’ Now there is not perfect rest in intellectual vision, for in mental operations there is a certain motion of external things towards the soul, in virtue of which movement the forms of these same things are drawn into and pictured in the soul, starting a psychic motion in the isness of the soul and the real being of the things appearing in the picture; and this motion extends to the will which is not at rest any more.
Hence we see that in the starry heavens, the revolving heavens, God is none other than the mover, the starter, the source of energy whence the heavens get their power and their spin. And so too in this life he is present in the soul as the mover of our free will towards himself and towards good works, he being the fount of grace, which, from his godly heart, flows down into the soul.
Beyond this heaven there is the motionless heaven, and this firmament is the abode of th(^ blest. In this heaven God is in all his felicity, engaged in the personal act of his eternal divinity. For the Father goes on begetting his Son in himself without ceasing, and Father and Son breathe forth with equal power their holy Breath, both Son and Holy Ghost abiding with the Father in the essence, and in the vision of this Trinity of Persons lies the whole happiness of creatures which are able to participate in his divine felicity. So the soul, having conquered the multiple heavens and possessed herself of their mysterious power, is plunged into the unity of the motionless heaven, called fire or the empyrean, not because it is burning but because it is enlightening, all who are in this heaven being ablaze with the cherubic light of divine love. The soul becomes the heavenly habitation of the eternal Deity, and he performs his godly work in her, whence she receives the nectar which is denied to such as have not reached this fiery celestial mind. For her heavenly Sire begets in her his Son whom she lures out of bis Father’s heart, and Father and Son breathe into her their holy Breath, the Son never leaving his Father’s heart but proceeding forth from his Father in such fashion that he ever abides in i^is Father’s heart. Thus the Father dwells in the soul; he clasps the soul to his breast, and in this embrace of SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 171 the Father she conceives within her his Son as a proceeding Person and at the same time is aware of his presence with the Father in his essence. For thus saith the Father, ‘ I will lead her into the wilderness, into the solitude, and will speak into her heart.’ His leading her into the desert, into the solitude, means making her void, deserted of creatures; he empties her of corruptible things and says all he can to her heart. He can speak but one word, and that Word is eternal: it is his only-begotten Son. That is the Word he speaks to the soul, giving birth to his Son in her, and in this birth the Father and Son inspire her with their Holy Ghost which teaches her all things.
Thus the soul gets all things from the Father and has gotten all things in the Son and knows all things in the Holy Ghost and so, possessed of all things, she is resting in God without end.
LXIX THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS AT HAND Sciiate, quia prope est regnum dei {Luc, ‘ily^). Our Lord says. The kingdom of God is at hand. Yes, the kingdom of God is within us, and according to St Paul our salvation is nearer than we think. In what sense is the kingdom of God near at hand? Let us consider this carefully. Supposing 1 were king all unbeknowest to me, then I should be no king. But suppose I have the firm con- viction that I am the king and everyone maintains and insists upon it with me and I know for certain that all the world is of the same opinion, in that case I am king and all the king’s treasure is mine. Failing any one of these three things I can be no king. Even so our happiness depends on our knowledge, our awareness of the sovran good, which is God himself. I have one power in my soul fully sensible of God. I am as certain as I live that nothing is so close to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to my own self; my life depends upon God’s being near me, present in me. So is he also in a stone, a log of wood, only they do not know it. If the wood knew of God and realized his nearness like the highest angel does, then the log would be as blessed as the chief of all the angels. Man is more happy than a log of wood in that he knows and is aware of God, how near at hand God is. The better he knows it the happier he is and the worse he knows it the more unhappy he is. He is not happy because of God’s being in him and so near him or because of having God, but because he is aware of God, of his nearness to him; because he is God-knowing and God-loving, and such an one knows that God’s kingdom is at hand.
MEISTER ECKHART Thinking upon God’s kingdom, often I am dumbfounded at. its grandeur; for God’s kingdom is God’s self in all his fullness. God’s kingdom is no little thing: all imaginable worlds God might create, these make not up his kingdom. The soul God’s kingdom dawns in, who is conscious of God’s fullness, her none durst counsel nor instruct: she is by it instructed and assured of life eternal. He who knows, who is aware, how near God’s king- dom is can say with Jacob, God is in this place and I knew it not.
God is just as near in creatures. The wise man says, God has spread his nets and lines all over creatures, and we can find and know him in any one of them if only we will look.
A philosopher says, ‘ That man knows God aright who is equally aware of him in all things ’; and, ‘ To serve God in fear is good; to serve him in love is better, but he who is apt to behold love in f( ar does best of all.’ A life of rest and peace in God is good; a life of pain in patience is still better; but to have peace in a life of pain is best of all. One may go in the fields and say one’s prayers and be conscious of God or go to church and be conscious of God; if we arc more eonseious of God by being in a quiet place, that comes of our own imperfection and is not due to God, for God is the same in all things and all places and just as ready to vouchsafe himself so far as in him lies; and that man knows God aright who ever finds him the same.
St Bernard says, ‘ Why does my eye see sky, and not my foot? Because my eye is like the sky, more than my foot.’ For rny soul to see God then, she must be heavenly. What makes the soul alive to (lod in her, aware how close to her he is? I answer: Heaven permits no alien intrusion, no mortal lack can pene- trate therein to do it outrage. And the soul that knows God is so firmly established in God that nothing can reach her, not hope nor fear nor joy nor grief nor good nor ill nor nothing that would bring her down to earth.
Heaven is at all points equidistant from the earth. And likewise it behoves the soul to be equally remote from every earthly thing and no nearer to one than to another but equable i^y> hi grief, in having and in wanting; whatever it be she mUwSt be dead, dispassionate, superior to it. Heaven is clear and unsullied in its brightness, free from any taint of time and place. No corporal thing finds room therein. Not itself in time, incredible in swiftness is its revolution, its actual course being timeless though from its course comes time. Nothing hinders the soul from knowing God so much as time and place. Time and place are fractions, God is an integer. So if the soul knows God at all she must know him above time and space, for God is neither this nor that as these manifold things are: God is one.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS If the soul would see God she must not look at anything in time. While the soul is regarding time and place or any such idea she can never recognise God. Before the eye can see colour it has to be rid of all colour. Before the soul can see God it must have nothing in common with naught. The seer of God knows that creatures are naught. Comparing one with another, creature looks fair and is aught, but compare it with God, it is naught.
Further I declare: any soul that sees God must have forgotten herself and have lost her own self; while she secs and remembers herself she nor sees nor is conscious of God. But when for God’s sake she loses herself and abandons all things then in God does she re-find herself, for knowing God she is knowing herself and all things (which she rid herself of) in God in perfection. To know the sovran good and the eternal goodness, really, 1 must know them in the good itself, not in partial goodness. To know real being I must know it as subsisting in itself, that is, in God, not parcelled out in creatures.
In God alone exists the whole of godhood. Not in one man exists the whole of manhood, for in a single man exists not all mankind. But in God the soul finds perfect manhood and all things in their prime, for she knows them in their essential nature. The dweller in a richly furnished house must know far more about it than another person who, though full of information, has never been within. And by this same token I am as certain as I live, and as God lives, that the soul who knows God knows him above time and place. In this God -conscious state the soul perceives how near God’s kingdom is, namely, God in all his fullness. There is much discussion among doctors at the School as to the possibility of the soul knowing God. Not by reason of his harshness docs God exact so much from man but out of his great kindness, wanting the soul to be more capacious, big enough to hold the largesse he is anxious to bestow.
Let no one deem it difficult to arrive at this however hard may seem, and be, indeed, to start with, the parting from and dying to all things. Having once got into it no life is more easy, more delightful or more lovely. God is so very careful to be always with a man to guide him to himself in case of his taking the wrong way. No man ever wanted anything so much as God wants to make the soul aware of him. God is ever ready, but we are so unready. God is near to us, but we are far from him. God is in, we are out; God is at home, we are strangers. The prophet says, ‘ God leads the just by a narrow path to the high road out into the open,’ that is, to the true freedom of the spirit become one spirit with God. Ours to follow his lead and let him bring us to himself. So help us God. Amen.
MEISTER ECKHART LXX THIS IS A SERMON ABOUT OUR LORD’S BODY This is a sermon on our Lord’s body by Brother Eckhart. He says that the bread of our Lord’s body has many names, but three special ones are ^iven it in holy writ. In the first place it is called the heavenly bread, in the second it is called the bread of anprels, and thirdly the bread of lamentation. And whoso would worthily receive this bread of our Lord’s body must have these three things. First, none can enjoy the heavenly bread who is not a heavenly man. This means that as the heavens with the sun and moon and the entire system arc above all earthly, temy)oral things, so man iti his desires, his senses and his thoughts must be lifted up to celestial things. Secondly, no man can enjoy the bread of heaven except he be an angelic man, for no creature was ever so perfect as an angel. This man must be at all times perfectly pure in heart and body. Thirdly, it is called the bread of lamentation; this no man enjoys except he be a man of sorrow, one, that is to say, who pondering our Lord’s martyrdom shall rue the treatment meted out to our Lord on earth. Whoso has not this rue shall not enjoy the bread of sorrow. So, then, a man must have three things before he can approach this bread. First, having gotten to the excellent condition of knowing good and ill, he must choose the good and worthy and reject the foul and evil. Next, with his heart divorced from worldly loves, this man must go in godly love and all godly things. Thirdly, he must order all his activities.
LXXIi 2 LXXIi 2 BOETHIUS SAYS: HE WHO WANTS TO SEE TRUE Boethius says, ‘ He who wants to see true in this light I speak of let him relinquish four things,’ which are set down. He must relinquish the joys of ^ the- world and care..iuad>^wajit-iuij^ while these are in thee^ it is dark and clouded therein. St Paul says God dwells in light inaccessible. Anything approaching this light the light consumes and turns to its own divine nature, even as I said of the divine essence; what is taken into the essence is changed into essence. Speaking of understanding: as it is characteristic of God to subsist unmoved in his pure and virgin essence, his own being, so is this property imputed to understand- J^ing, which is so noble as to be selLsubsistent.
^ For No. 71 (1) see Jostes, No. 16, of which it forms a part.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS I have told how understanding has to break through the image of the Son; as he himself declares, ‘ I am the light of the world; no man cometh to the Father but through me.’ As the wise man explains in the Book of Wisdom, when the soul is borne into God by his divine wisdom, she is clarified and sublimed in light and in grace, all that is foreign to the soul being detached and shelled away together with a portion of herself. Further, I related how the soul, now throughly purged of soul accretions, is carried up and flows back into the Son as pure as she flowed out in him. The Father created the soul in the Son, so if wc are ever to get into the ground of God, into his innermost heart, we must take the lowest place in our own ground, in our own innermost self, in abject lowliness. When the soul enters into her ground, into the innej;: most recesses of her being, divine power suddenly pours into her, producing much activity, both' manifest and secret, and the soul s grows big and high in fiiydur with God. This is and must be in the soul who, rightly disposed in the ground of humility, ascends, borne aloft in the divine power: she never stops until she gets right into God and coming to absolute rest in him, abides wholly within without looking out, subsistent in his pure essence; for even therein is the soul. God is pure being. The philosopher says that nothing at all can get into God, who is pure being, but what is also pure being. Ergo, the soul is pure being who has gotten therein, soaring right up into God. Amen.
LXXII 1 THE PROPHET SAYS: LORD BE MERCIFUL The prophet said, ‘ Lord be merciful to the people that is in thee.’ The Lord replied, ‘ All that enter in will I make whole and love much.’
I take the words of the Pharisee who besought our Lord to dine with him and our Lord’s injunction to the woman, vade in pace! It is good to pass from restlessness to calm: praiseworthy but imperfect. ‘ Go in peace,’ be not disquieted: God implies that we ought to enter into peace and continue in peace and end in peace. God said, ‘ In me ye have peace.’ So far in God so far in peace. Is aught in God, it is in peace; is aught out of God, it is without peace. St John says, ‘ Whatever is born of God over- cometh the world.’ What is born of God seeks peace and ensues it. He that pursues the even tenor of his way and is at peace is a heavenly man. Heaven constantly rotates, in its motion seeking rest.
1 See also Jostes, No. 10.
MEISTER ECKHART The Pharisee besought our Lord that he would dine with him. The food a man eats is changed in him into his body, like the body by the soul. Body and soul are one in being, not in act, thus my soul is united with my eye in one mode, that of seeing. Even so the food a man consumes mingles with his nature as regards its essence but not its activity; and the great atonement we are destined to with God shall be of essence not of operation. Hence the Pharisee’s request that God would eat with him.
Pharisee signifies a solitary, one who knows no end to detach- ment of soul. The more noble the powers the more they liberate. Some powers are far higher than the body and sufficiently aloof to shell off and detach completely. As the philosopher well says, What once moves mortal things never enters into them. Again, by being free and unattached the unlettered man may in love and longing receive wisdom and impart it. And thirdly, having no end means having no finality, no ultimate security until one is at rest and all unwitting of disquiet: until the soul-powers being fixed on God are wholly unattached. As the prophet cries, ‘ Lord be merciful to the people that are in thee.’
One master says, ‘ Of all the exalted works God has ever wrought in creatures mercy is the most familiar and the most mysterious, his work in the angels not excepted.’ In it the work of mercy is exalted to mercy as it is in itself and as it is in God. Of God’s activity the first outcome is mercy; not in the sense of his for- giving man’s sins nor of one man’s forgiving another; his highest work is mercy in the sense that he initiates the soul into the highest and most perfect thing she can conceive in this world. In his bottomless ocean God is productive of mercy.
The prophet said, ‘ Lord be merciful to the people that is in thee.’ What people is in God? St John says, ' He that dwellcth in love dwellcth in God and God in him.’ St John says, ‘ Love unites, love initiates into God.’ Haply it is accessory. Love does not unite, not in any wise. Satisfaction (or, enough) is not what holds together, binds together. Love unites iq act uud^not in es§<?n.Qe.. The best authorities aver that intellect strips every- thing off and grasps God bare as pure being in itself. Intellect penetrates goodness and truth, and, lighting 6n virgin essence, it seizes God in the abstract as,. being..>.without n^^ Neither •'knowledge nor love unites aught. Love takes God only as being good and God escapes from name. Good, love goes no further than that. Love takes God under a veil, under a garment. Not so understanding: understanding takes God as he is known in itself; it can never comprehend him in the sea of his own un- fathomable nature, Above biQtb jWiese pereeptwns^ ia^f^^ God energises as mercy at the summit and perfection of his activity.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS A philosopher says, There is something in the soul, intimate, mysterious, far higher than tiie soul herself, whence emanate her / powers of intellect and will. St Augustine says: Just as that is ineffable out of which the Son leaps from the Father in the first p'f6cessi5n,'^'scrthefe exists some occiiTt thing behind the first procession of. intellect and will. According to the philosopher who is our chief authority upon the soul, no human wisdom ever can attain to what the soul is. That requires supernatural wisdom. What the powers of the soul issue from into act, we do not know: about it haply wc do know a little, but what the soul is in her ground no man knows. Any knowledge thereof that may be permitted to us must be supernatural; it must be by grace: God’s agent of mercy.
LXXIII ST BENEDICT’S DAY IHlectus deo et hominibus etc. ( Eccl. 45i). In this passage from the Book of Wisdom the wise man speaks of (Moses), ‘ the beloved of God and men, whose memory is in benediction. God made him like the saints in glory.’ And this may well be said of the saint whose festival wc keep to-day. Ilis name is Benedictus, blessed, so that to him are especially appropriate the words used here, cujus rnemoria in benedictione esty i.e. whose memory is in benediction, the more so as of him also we read that a glory was revealed to him wherein he saw the whole world gathered up as it were into a ball, and our text says, ‘ God made him like the saints in glory.’
As to this glory. St Gregory says that to a soul who is in this glory all things seem small and narrow. The natural light that God has poured into the soul is so splendid and so strong that God’s bodily creation is all poor and meagre to it. This light is more glorious than any corporal thing God ever made, withal the meanest, vilest corporal thing illumined by this light, which is intelligence, becomes exalted above mortal things. It is clearer and brighter than the sun and purifies things from both time and matter. This light' is so far-flung it vaults the boundaries of space. Wider than space, it transcends the great and good as God transcends wisdom and goodness; for God is not either wisdom or good, but from God come wisdom and goodness. Intel- lect comes not of wisdom, nor intellect is not the outcome of truth nor is not gotten thereof as will is of goodness. Will wants what is good and is engendered thereby an(d (truth) is the issue of intellect not intellect of the truth. This light which flows out of the intellect is intelligence, which is like an outburst, an outflow 12 178 MEISTER ECKHART or a stream as compared to what intellect is in itself. And this outburst is as far removed therefrom as heaven is from earth.
There is another light, the light of grace, compared to which this natural light illumines a mere pin-point of the earth, nay rather a mere pin-point compared with the whole heavens which are incredibly more vast than all the earth. God’s presence in the soul by grace is instinct with more light than any intellect can give: the light of intellect is but a drop in the ocean of this light, nay less a thousandfold. Hence to the soul who is in God’s grace all things, and whatever her mind can grasp, will appear small and mean.
I was asked the reason why virtuous folk who are in the good graces of God are so zealous to serve him. I said it was because they had tasted God, and it were strange indeed if, onee tasting and enjoying God, the soul could stomach aught beside. As the saint hath it. Once the soul tries God she finds the things that are not God repugnant and distasteful.
Take the wise man’s words in another sense: ‘ Beloved of God and men.’ The verb is does not appear. He does not say: he is beloved of God and men, for he is not thinking of his changing and unstable temporal nature which the essence so far transcends. Essence is all-embracing and withal too transcendent ever to be touched by anything created. They that fondly think to have some knowledge of it know nothing whatsoever. As St Dionysius says, anything we know that we are able to impart or that we can define, that is not God; for in God is neither this nor that which we can abstract nor has he limitation. In him there is only one thing and that is himself. Hence for theologians there is the burn- ing question: how comes this motionless, this intangible, solitary essence to be common to the soul, to be within the purview of the soul? and they are greatly exercised as to how the soul receives it. I can only say that his divinity consists in the communication of himself to whatever is receptive of his goodness, and did he not communicate himself he would not be God.
The soul God loves and to whom he does communicate himself must be so wholly free from time and from all taint of creature that God in her smacks only of himself. ‘ In the middle of the night, when all things were asleep,’ the Scriptures say, ‘ thy word, O Lord, came down from thy royal throne.’ ‘ In the night ’ means when no creature peers into, appears in, the soul, and it is in this quiet, this inarticulateness of the soul that the word is spoken in her intellectual nature. This word is that of her own understanding: the expression of the Word as it is and abides in the intellect.
Often I feel afraid, in discoursing about God, at how utterly SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 179 detached the soul must be to attain to union with him. We durst not deem this unattainable: nothing is unattainable to the soul that possesses God’s grace. To none were things ever more easy to leave: to the soul that has gotten God’s grace things are all (easy) to eschew. Further I say, none ever had pleasanter task to perform: to the soul with God’s grace all things are (pleasant) to leave because creature can cause her no pain. St Paul says, ‘ I am persuaded that no creature can separate us from God; not fate nor life nor death.’
Look you. Nowhere is God so really God as in the soul. In every creature is somewhat of God, but in the soul God is divine, for she is his rest. According to one master, God loves nothing but himself: all his love is lavished on himself. Marry, a fool were he only to take a penny who at one stroke could seize an hundred pounds! God’s love in us is the blossoming forth of the Holy Ghost. One word more of this: God loves nothing in us but the good he does in us himself. In the words of the saint, ‘ Nothing is crowned by God excepting his own work that is wrought by him in us.’ Let no one be affrighted at my saying that God loves none beside himself; it is all to our advantage, for therein he has in view our highest happiness. He purposes to lure us to himself, to get us purged and take us to himself, so that with himself he may love himself in us and us in him. So he must needs, so far as our love goes, attract us to himself by every means he can, pleasant or disagreeable. God, despite himself, is ever hanging over us some bait to lure us into him. I never give God thanks for loving me, because he cannot help it; whether he would or no it is his nature to. What I do thank him for is for not being able of his goodness to leave off loving me. To know ourselves, to be installed in God, this is not hard, seeing that God himself must be working in us; for it is godly work, man acquiescing and making no resistance: he is passive while allowing God to act in him. Let us, waiting upon God, enable him to take us into him, so that becoming one with him he may be able to love us with himself. So help us God. Amen.
LXXIV THE PROMISE OF THE FATHER Convescens prcecepit eisah Jerosolymis ne discederent etc. (Act. I4). This passage which I have quoted in Latin comes in the Mass for to-day. St Luke records how our Lord being about to depart to heaven was in company with his disciples whom he ‘ commanded that they should not leave Jerusalem but should wait for the MEISTER ECKHART promise of the Father which they had heard from his mouth for they should be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.’
He speaks of the promise or pledge of the Father. To us as well was given this pledge of baptism in the Holy Ghost and of being received thereby to dwell above time in eternity. Not in the things of time is the Holy Ghost bestowed. When a man turns from temporal things and goes into himself he notices a heavenly light, a light that comes from heaven. Though heaven- descended it is under heaven. There is no satisfaction in this light, for it is mortal, they say that it is matter. Now iron, which by nature falls, will rise, against its nature, and hang suspended to a loadstone in virtue of the master-force the stone receives from heaven. Wherever the stone turns there the iron goes with it. Even so the mind, unsatisfied witli this infernal light, will scale the firmament and search the heavens to find the breath that spins them, the heavens by their revolution causing all things on earth to grow and flourish. Its spirit never rests content until it pierces to the coil, into the primal origin where the breath has its source. This spirit knows no time nor number: number does not exist apart from the malady of time. Other root has none save in eternity, where there is no number except one. This spirit, transcending number, breaks through multiplicity and is trans- fixed by God, and by the fact of his piercing me I pierce him in return: God leads this spirit into the desert, into the solitude of its own self, where it is simply one and is welling up in itself. This spirit has no why, for if it had a why the unity would also have its why. This spirit is in unity and freedom.
Doctors declare this will is free in the sense that none can bind it excepting God alone. God docs not bind the will, he sets it free, free to choose naught but God himself, and this is real freedom. For the spirit to be incapable of willing aught other than God’s will is not its bondage but its true liberation. Some people say. If I have God and tlie love of God then I am at liberty to follow my own will. They labour under a mistake. So long as thou art capable of anything against the will of God and against his law thou hast no love of God though thou cozen the world that thou hast it. One who is in God’s will and in God’s love is fain to do the things God likes and leave undone the things God hates, and he can no more leave undone a thing that God wants done than he can do a thing that God abhors; just like a man whose legs are tied together, he cannot stray and neither can he err who is in the will of God. Someone once said, ‘ God may command me to do evil and shun virtue, but I am incapable of sin.’ No one loves virtue without being virtue. He who abandons himself and everything, who seeks not his own in any wise but does all he does SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 181 for love and without why, that man being dead to all the world is alive in God and God in him.
Here someone may object, It is all very well for you to tell us these things, but we ourselves know nothing of them. — That I also rue. This knowledge is so noble and so common, it is not to be purchased. for a farthing or a penny. A just mind and a free will, have but these, and it is thine. To abandon all things on this lower plane where they exist in mortal guise is to recapture them in God where they are reality. Everything that is dead here is life yonder and all that is dense matter here is spirit there in God. If you pour fresh water into a clean basin and, all being clear and bright, stand it in a quiet place, then, holding your face over it you see it at the bottom as it really is. That is V>ecause the water is free from impurity and still. It is the same with people who in a state of freedom and interior calm envisage God in peace and quiet, and when they are able to see him just as well in turmoil and disquiet there is perfect equanimity; but if a man enjoys him less in trouble and unrest, that argues him not equable (unjust). St Augustine says, ‘ When the days arc weary and the time is long a man should turn to God, where no such thing as long exists and things are all at rest.’ The lover of justice is possessed with justice, and he is this virtue.
Our Lord said, ‘ I have called you not servants, I liave called you friends, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth.’ And so may my friend know something that I ignore, yet have no mind to tell me. But our Lord says, ‘ All that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.’ I marvel how some priests, and these with pretensions to eminence and learning, allow themselves to be misled into interpreting these words to mean that he shows us of the path only the bare minimum needful to our happiness. That is not what 1 hold; there is no truth in it. Why was God born man? That I might be born God himself. God died that I might die to the whole world and all created things. And it is in this sense that w^e must understand the saying of our Lord, ‘ All that I have heard of my Father I have revealed unto you.’ What does the Son hear of his Father? The Father can only beget; the Son can only be gotten. All the Father has and that he is, the whole basis of God’s essence and God’s nature, he brings forth once for all in his one-begotten Son. This the Son hears from his Father, this he makes known unto us, we being this same Son. All the Son has he has from his Father: essence and nature, we are this only Son. No one has the Holy Ghost except he be the only Son. Father and Son expire their holy Breath, and once this sacred breath inspires a man it remains iiv him, for he is essential and pneumatic.
182 MEISTER ECKHART