182 MEISTER ECKHART True, thou mayst receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, the likeness of the Holy Ghost, but it abides not with thee; it is impermanent. Just as a man may blush for shame, or blench, it is an accident and passes. But one by nature fair and ruddy is so always. So with this man, as being the only Son his holy Breath is of the nature of him. As it is written in the Book of Wisdom, ‘ This day have I begotten thee in the reflection of my eternal light, in the fullness of the Godhead and the glory of all saints.’ He is begetting him now, to-day. There is childbed in the Godhead, there are they baptized in the Holy Ghost according to the promise of the Father. ‘ After these days which are not many,’ or a few, then comes the ‘ fullness of the Godhead,’ where there is neither day nor night; where things a thousand leagues away are as near me as the ground whereon I stand; that is the fulfilment, the full enjoyment of Godhood; that is oneness. While the soul secs any difference she is unjust; as long as aught looks out, looks in, there is no unanimity. Mary Magdalene sought our Lord within the tomb; seeking one dead man she found two living angels, but still was unconsolcd. Said the angel, ‘ Why art thou cast down? Whom seekest thou, woman? ’ As though to say, ‘ Thou dost seek one dead and hast found two living.’ Whereto she might have answered, ‘ That is the burden of my discontent, that I find two where 1 sought one alone.’
While anything created can make a clear impression on the soul she is disconsolate. I say, as I have often said before, so far as the soul’s created nature goes there is no such thing as truth. I declare that there is something beyond the soul’s created nature. But certain priests cannot understand how there can be anything so nearly kin to God, so much the same as he is. It has naught in common with naught. Anything made or created is naught, but this is alien and remote from the made and the created. It is something self-contained, taking nothing from outside. Our Lord departed to heaven, beyond all light, beyond all understanding, beyond all human ken. He who is thus translated beyond light of any kind dwells in the unity. As St Paul says, ‘ God dwells in the light that no man can approach unto,’ which is in itself the perfect one. A man then must be dead, must be dead indeed, devoid of any being of his own, wholly without likeness, like to none, to be really Godlike. For it is God’s character, his nature, to be peerless, incomparable. May we be the same in the oneness of God himself. So help us God. Amen.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS LXXVi ASCENSION DAY Expedit vobis etc. vado parare vobis locum etc. (Joh. I67, 142). When he was about to depart from this world to his heavenly Father, Christ said to his disciples, ‘ It is expedient for you, it is for your good, that I should go, for while I am with you the Holy Ghost the Comforter will not come unto you.’ With these words our Lord consoled his disciples knowing full well that they were troubled because he had warned them of his ascension. Our Lord will not suffer his lovers to be troubled, for fear is painful. And St John says, ‘ Love casteth out fear.’ Love is incompatible with fear and pain, for the waxing of love is the waning of fear, and when love is perfect all fear is gone. But at the beginning of the virtuous life fear is of use to man, providing him a thoroughfare for love. As the bodkin or the awl makes a passage for the thread and the shoe is stitched with thread, not with the iron; and as the bristle’s part towards the thread is to put it in as fastening while the bristle is withdrawn; so, to begin with, fear makes room for love and love binds to God, whereas fear passes out.
Leaving now this argument we turn to the words of my Latin quotation, the words of our Lord, ‘ I go to prepare a place for you.’ Here we notice two things taught and proved by our Lord in his ascension. The first one is that the soul is by nature heir to heaven. God is her lawful heritage, for no one generates the soul but God. God made her without any intervention. Some doctors will maintain, perhaps, that the divine light pouring into the angels, the whole creaturely idea that God reflects into the angels before it is exemplified in divers creatures, that this divine light, this image in the angels, is what makes the soul. Not so. The soul does not permit of any meddling, any interference in God’s activity towards her, but fresh and pure as this flows out of God in one unbroken stream, so docs the soul proceed from God. Most privily has God embarked and launched forth the soul, so that no one knows for certain what she is. One philosopher calls her a light, and that is well said; for like the light streaming out of the sun and shining into all creatures so is the soul sent straight from God. St Augustine says, Since the soul is emitted from God she is nowhere at rest except in God. Another master says she is a spirit, and this is true in a certain sense; God is a spirit, and the soul is made like to God, so she may well be called spirit, being to God as spirit to spirit. A third master dubs her a fire, speaking the truth in symbol, for fire is most lofty in its nature, ^ See also Wackemagel, No. 65.
MEISTER ECKHART most theurgic in its operation, and it never rests until it licks the heavens. It envelops all the elements for being much wider and higher than the air, or than water or the earth, it must be sur- rounding all the rest. It comes next of all to heaven and revolves therewith. The air goes with it, partially, because of being dense, while water, which is altogether grosser, is unable to keep pace and runs behind. The soul is called a fire because, in her desire, she does keep pace with God, like fire with the heavens, for the soul cannot rest except in God. Some souls which are rather dense follow haltingly, as air lags after fire. And some, again, being downright gross, are, like water, earth-bound and incapable ojf keeping up with God but run behind; for seeing or hearing some- thing good will stir them with desire to be good, so they do follow after; like water drifting to and fro without a change of level, so are these people moved while abiding of the same mind as before. A fourth doctor calls her a spark of God’s celestial nature, and this jumps with our theory of her heavenly origin. Where one clod falls, there, generally speaking, all earth would fall as well; a single clod reveals the ground to be its rcsting-placc. And whither one spark flics to from the fire, that place is revealed as the resting-place of fire.
Now we have sent one spark to heaven, the soul to wit of our Lord Jesus Christ, which shows the common resting-place of souls is nowhere but in heaven; and herein we have proof of the entire soul being heavenly. The body, on the other hand, is made of the four elements, so its habitat is naturally earth. But the soul is in intimate union with the body, and they must ever stay together despite that the body is of earth and the soul a denizen of heaven. God found a wise solution of this problem, himself becoming man and going in his proper power to heaven, so that in him wc have already sent one clod of earth to heaven. And the whole earth likewise must belong to heaven, for Christ’s resting- place is nowhere but in union with his Father; and as God is three in Person so is he one in nature, they having one being and one life. Thus our Lord Christ shows us that our being and our life are eternal in divine union.
The second thing oUr Lord has taught and proved by his ascen- sion is how we must prepare ourselves to follow after him in pursuance of his words, ‘ I go to prepare a place for you.’ Just as, on those four grounds, the soul is called light, spirit, fire or a spark of God’s celestial nature, even so man is lifted up or gotten ready also by four things finely symbolised of old in the prophet Moses, of whom we read that he gathered his flock together and drove it into the wilderness, ‘ into the backside of the desert,’ and there upon the mount of God he saw a bush burning but unconsumed.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS Moses wished to turn aside and see this wonder, the burning bush which would not burn away. But the Lord called to him out of the bush, and said, ‘ Draw not nigh; put off thy shoes,’ under which figure we are taught four precious lessons.
First, in the name Moses, for Moses being interpreted means, one taken from the water. So shall a man be rescued from instability, from out the tempests of this world.
Next, that man’s animal passions and desires must all be herded up into the highest power of his soul. Unless the soul is gathered up and lifted out of created things the Holy Ghost cannot enter in nor energise in her. All divine work done by God is wrought by him in spirit, above time and place, for mortal things arc fatal to the flow of God. Divine light shed on spiritual creature will engender life, but if it falls on mortal things it fades, either dimmed or extinguished altogether. That is why our Lord declared, ‘ It is expedient for you, it is for your good, that I should go away.’ For his disciples loved him as a man and mortal. Now there can be no doubt that our Lord was nobler than anything God ever made. If he then was a hindrance to his followers it is unquestionably true that other things we love, which are inferior to God, will hinder us much more. Ergo, the soul must transcend the world if she wants God to ply his godly work in her. And St Augustine says explicitly, we can transcend the world in love and knowledge, and that lacking love and knowledge we are nothing, i.e, in the world.
In the third place we learn, that man can see and know God’s work, but that while in this body he must needs stop short of actual attainment, just as Moses saw the burning bush but could not go right up to it; he wanted to, however: a case of the love which docs not consume the body and has no spiritual potency.
Fourthly, putting off the shoes signifies the freeing of the soul’s desire, its withdrawal from all mortal and perishable things. To this and things still higher, O God help us. Amen.
LXXVI ASCENSION DAY SERMONS 1 Expedit vobis ut ego vordam etc. {Joh. I67). We read in the gospel how our Lord said to his disciples, ‘ It is expedient for you that I go away. For if I go not away ye cannot receive the Holy Ghost.’ And this by reason of three hindrances which beset three kinds of people. First, sinners who let creatures hinder them, using them 186 MEISTER ECKHART 186 MEISTER ECKHART ungodly for their pleasure. These people are wandering in God’s way, for creatures are a way of God. Hence St Augustine’s dictum, ‘ Cursed be they that wander in the way of God.’ I will say no more of these; following their animal passions they are divorced from God. Also, there are good people who are over- busy with their material wants and take too much pleasure in externals. Concerning them God said, ‘ He that loveth his soul shall lose it ’ (loveth carnally, that is: over-fondness, for it will lose a man his soul) ‘ and he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal.’ Meaning those that follow not their inordinate pleasures and desires.
A second hindrance blocks the path of other good and truly pious people. Namely, the seven sacraments. Sacr amentum means a sign. That man never gets to the underlying truth who stops at the enjoyment of its symbol; and the seven sacraments all point us to the same reality. Marriage (for example) is a symbol of divine and human nature and also of the union of the soul with God. To rest in the illusion means delay in the attain- ment of real oneness. Ye durst not think of marriage as the mating of a man and a woman with each other for the indulgence of their outward passions and for the leading of a life of pleasure. That is not real marriage. Marriage means obedience to the marriage rule with its seven times and its works of mercy. Again, some pious souls are hampered with scrupulosity in the matter of repentance and confession; they boggle at the symbol and neglect the thing itself. Our Lord says of these, ‘ He that has bathed needs but to wash his feet.’ Which is as good as saying, Once purged by heartfelt rue and throughly shriven, a man needs not to re-confess old sins though he must ‘ wash his feet,’ that is, his will and conscience: them let him cleanse by confessing daily faults.
Also, some of the devout hinder themselves by over-occupation, outwardly, with the blessed sacrament of God’s body, to the detri- ment of their receiving it; these cultivate the rites at the cost of the reality, for the thing itself is inside not in its outward show. Wherefore they receive not God’s body worthily. The sacra- ments all point us to the one and only truth, so we ought not to dally with the symbols but penetrate to the actuality. Those who follow the spirit of God’s truth will worship him in spirit and in truth. So said Christ himself to the woman drawing at the well at Samaria when she asked him where to pray, whether on the mountains where her fathers used to pray or where the Jews then worshipped. Quoth our Lord, ‘ The hour cometh and is now, when true worshippers shall worship not only on the mountains and in the Temple but in spirit, in the place of God.’ The moral of SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 187 which is that we ought to pray to God not only on the hill-tops and in churches, but we ought always to be praying, at all times and everywhere. St Paul says, ‘ Rejoice evermore; in everything give thanks; pray without ceasing.’ Even so pray they whose every deed is done like-mindedly for the love of God; who, careless of their personal pleasure, bow themselves humbly before God and leave him alone to act. The prayer of the lips was enjoined by holy Christendom for the recalling of the soul from her outward senses wherein she dissipates herself in a multiplicity of perishable things. Being recollected thence into her highest power {i.e, know- ledge and memory and will) she is turned to spirit, and when the spirit is joined to God in perfect unity of will, it is turned to God. Then, not till then, he is in true prayer, when he has reached the goal of his creation; for wc were created solely to be God, and that is the reason why we were fashioned like him. Whoso does not attain to being one with God in spirit is not a really spiritual man.
Good, pious souls are hindered too from their proper object by lingering with holy joy over the human form of our Lord Jesus Christ; and by the same token, over-reliance upon visions is a pitfall to some people; they see things pictured in the mind, it may be man or angel or the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and give credence to their ghostly messages. They hear, perhaps, that they are best-beloved or about the faults or virtues of another; or they may hear that God is doing something for them. In this they are deceived. God never does a single thing for creature but only by reason of his kindness, for he is the end of every Christian prayer: ‘Do this, O Lord, for the sake of thy only Son Christ Jesus.’ He himself said to his disciples, ‘ It is expedient for you that I should go away.’ Here he was addressing not alone his then disciples but all his disciples of the future who purpose to follow him to high achievement. To them his manhood is a hindrance so long as they still cling to it with mortal pleasure; they ought to follow God in all his ways and not keep solely to his way of manhood who reveals to us the way of Godhood; for verily Christ said, ‘ I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by me, and he who would enter by any other door the same is a murderer and deserves eternal death.’ Such are those who claim that they themselves arc capable of good or that God docs things for them, whereas Christ even, stated he was not from himself: the Eternal Wisdom said about itself, ‘ He that created me reposes in my tent,’ who withal is uncreated for God is unborn wisdom. We may take this as referring to eternal wisdom’s birth, for the Son proceeded forth by way of birth, where birth is the same thing as creation. The eternal wisdom was born of the power of the Father. He and the MEISTER ECKHART Son, his wisdom, and the Holy Ghost, his goodness and their mutual love, these (three) are one in nature and distinct in Person. And what is this tent that Wisdom talks of? That is the manhood of Christ Jesus, wherein the Father reposes with his Son, they being of one nature, God in their Person as well as God by nature. This tent of humanity let us adore only in its oneness with the Godhead: for man is truly God and God is truly man. Let us not encumber ourselves with any creature excepting Jesus Christ, who only is our help and the way to his Father. When, taking leave of creatures, we enter the true path, which is.Jesus Christ, we are not wholly blest albeit within sight of the divine reality; for while we are in sight of, we are not yet one with, what we see. While we notice any thing we are not one with it. Where there is no more than one no more than one is seen: God is not seen except by blindness, nor known except by ignorance, nor understood except by fools. According to St Augustine, no soul can get to God who goes not without creature and seeks not God without likeness. And that is the meaning of Christ’s words, ‘ Cast out first the beam out of thine own eye and then wash the mote out of another’s eye.’ For you must understand that anything created is likened to a beam in the eye of the soul, preventing divine oneness by the fact of being creature. And because the soul is creature she has to cast herself out of herself; she must east out all the saints and eke our Lady, for all of them are creatures. She must be quite naked and wholly unnecessitous. Thus the soul enters the union of the Holy Trinity. She is further blest by becoming one with the naked Godhead whereof the blessed Trinity is the self-revelation. In the abstract Godhead there is no activity: the soul is not perfectly beatified until she casts herself into the desolate Deity where neither act nor form exists and there, merged in the void, loses herself: as self she perishes, and has no more to do with things than she had when she was not. Now, dead to self, she is alive in God and the dead perish (in the tomb). Even so is naughted the soul entombed in God.
Some people fondly ween that they have gotten into the Holy Trinity who have never got beyond themselves. Loath to leave themselves, they keep their selfish interests and pleasures and interior sweetness, all of which they have forsworn, just the same in thought and will. These are no disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ who never looked for sweetness in anything he did; on the contrary, he said, ‘My soul is sorrowful even unto death.’ Meaning his most -lofty soul, and he was thinking also of his bodily life. This was ‘ sorrowful even unto death,’ until a term was put to the conditions of our exile, until our death was dead. And our soul too is ‘ troubled even unto death,’ until there dies within us SERMONS AND COLLATIONS whatever is alive there of own will, own interests and multitudi- nous will. When the soul is dead as to the life of her desires and selfish interests and is buried in God, then, hidden and unknown to any creature, she can never be troubled any more.
Now mark the signs whereby a soul is known to have been taken into the Holy Trinity. First, it is vouchsafed to her that at the sight of the Holy Ghost her sins are blotted out and she forgets herself and things. In the next place, she has gotten a conception of the Godhead, namely the eternal wisdom of the Father, the knowledge and discernment of all things; and she is bereft of opinion, hypothesis, belief, for now she knows the truth; and whereas hitherto she has taken things on trust and learnt by wordy arguments and hearsay, now things presented to her, whether by men or angels, she need ask none about, like those with no notion of reality, who, when an abstract truth is revealed to them, will try to grasp it with their finite mind: a thing that is beyond angelic understanding. Whereupon they question others on the subject, propounding it in the material form in which they have conceived it, and these take it as they hear it, in a concrete sense, and so pronounce it wrong and contrary to the Christian faith. It is false to them, because they accept it at face-value, which they arc unable to see through. In this they are mistaken. Furthermore, the soul who is in truth translated into the Holy Trinity is immediately endowed by the Father’s power and strength with the ability to do all things. As St Paul says, ‘ I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.’ Now the soul works not, knows not, loves not; but God is working in her, perceiving himself in her. According to the words of Jeremiah, ‘ Verily ye are God’s in divine knowing and loving.’ God help us to this truth. Amen.
2 I GO TO HIM THAT SENT ME Vado ad eum qui misit me {J oh, IG^). ‘ I go to him that sent me.’ These words have a threefold meaning. In the first place, Christ went to his Father in his manhood. In the second place, the soul of Christ went in the light of grace. In the third place, the soul of Christ went in his Godhead.
About this saying, Thomas, Origen, Damascenus and Richardus hold the same opinion, and I hold it with them. What we say is, that Christ in his manhood went first through our manhood; he has known all the wants that flesh is heir to, for he has been through every creature and set creature lower than mankind: the humanity of Christ has carried our humanity beyond the realm of creature, exalting our nature above the angelic nature in the unity of God MEISTER ECKHART and man. The manhood of Christ went also by itself without impediment of creature, for he alone was ever perfect in virtue at every point of time.
In the second place, the soul of Christ went without means in the light of grace. In the light of grace the soul of Christ received four gifts which Mary his mother never did receive nor did any of the saints. The first gift of Christ’s soul was wisdom, the knowledge of his end. The second gift was understanding, which his soul received on achieving virtue as distinct from means. The third gift Christ’s soul received was that in all she did she remained unchanged. The fourth gift was that of doing nothing except in virtue of the love of God.
In the third place, the soul of Christ went in his godhood; he went, that is to say, in the personality of the eternal Word, for this eternal Person is essentially the vehicle of human nature. He also went the way of the three Persons of whom he is one Person. He went in his own nature to the Father-nature in the understanding of them both. And he went in the work of the Person of the Holy Ghost, who effects the union of human nature and divine Person. Touching Christ’s words, ‘ I go to him that sent me,’ Lincolniensis and Master Henry Augus- tiniensis tell us what he means by ‘ go.’ I hold with Thomas and Gilbertus that by this word he meant to say, ‘ I go to release you from the straits whereto ye have been brought by Adam’s transgression; I go to set you free from the bonds of creature; I go to him that sent me, in my understanding wherein I take you straight to him; I go the way of my own nature, the way of my lordship, wherein alone I keep unto myself what creature has no part nor lot in. He went in essence and in nature; he went to reveal in his own Person the essence and the life to creatures in separation; for the Persons are God in their personal divinity according to their nature’s unity.
Here arises the question. Is the Person of the nature or the nature of the Person? In answering this it must be borne in mind that it is the nature of the Persons to manifest the fruits of their own nature.
The soul too goes to the Father. First, in the fixed intention to cumber herself no more with creature unless with the objective form of Christ. Secondly, she goes in responding to whatever calls God may make upon her. Thirdly, she goes in the sweet savour of divine love wherein suffering is no suffering to her. Christ ascended into heaven; he ennobled his humanity by withdrawing it from time and establishing it in eternity. Lifting up his soul he gave her his essential self, the essence he is ever making manifest in his personal works. Further, the soul ascends flying with the feathers of the virtues, wisdom, prudence, strength SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 191 and justice namely, for on these four virtues the soul is able to wing her way past time and past all creatures which exist in time. And she flies as well in the three godly virtues of faith, hope and charity, resting in the love that is God, wherein we behold the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Now it must be remembered that three kinds of men see God. The first see him in faith; they know no more of him than what they can make out through a partition. The second behold God in the light of grace but only as the answer to their longings, as giving them sweetness, devotion, inwardness and other such-like things which are issuing from his gift. The third kind see him in the divine light. Christ’s disciples beheld God as the satisfaction of their longings, but they did not see him as one who longs to love. Philip said to Jesus, ‘ Lord, show us the Father and satisfy us,’ as though to say. Lord, show us thyself as transcending creature, as the immediate entry to the soul which thou dost nature in her proper nature. Jesus answered, ‘ He that seeth me seeth my Father,’ as though to say, Whoso seeth me unchanging, as well disposed towards them that would wound as towards them that show the wish to please me; whoso seeth me apart from my humanity as the door into the soul, the same beholds my Father as energising in his personal power and I in personal wisdom and the Holy Ghost in personal goodness: having God means having all these three in the one essence of their nature.
3 3 THE soul’s place * Our Lord said to his disciples, ‘ It is expedient for you that I should go away, for while I am with you the Holy Ghost will not come unto you.’ With these words our I^ord comforted his disciples after supper on the eve of his departure, knowing full well that they were sorrowful at finding he was going to leave them. Our Lord will not long suffer his lovers to be troubled. Fear is cruel and therefore incompatible with love. As a man gains in love he loses his fear. But at the beginning of conversion fear goes through the soul as the awl goes through the shoe in making a passage for the thread; and even so the heart is pierced with fear of sin which is then followed and chased out by love. Our Lord’s words to his disciples, ‘ I go to prepare a place for you,’ teach us two valuable lessons of which we have the proofs in his ascension.
The first one is, that the soul is by nature made for heaven and God is her lawful heritage. For God brought forth the soul ' A variant of LXXV. In PfoifEer’s text it is part of (2).
MEISTER ECKHART alone in lineal descent and no man knoweth what she is. They say she is a light, for as the sunlight is poured forth in beams upon all creatures, even so the soul is the immediate product of the light of God. St Augustine says, the soul proceeds from God and returns to God, so she is not at rest except in him. The soul is a spirit formed in the likeness of God and agreeable to him as one spirit is to another. Philosophers, again, compare the soul with fire, a thing most lofty in its nature, most theurgic in its operation, which never stops until it licks the heavens. Fire encircles all the elements; spreading much wider and higher than the air or than water or the earth it envelops all of them. It comes next to heaven and revolves therewith; the air goes rather slower because it is more dense, and water being denser still is unable to keep pace and runs behind. The soul is called a fire because in her desire she can keep up with God like fire with the heavens, nor has she any rest except in him. Also, the soul is called a spark of God’s celestial nature, and this jumps with our theory that the soul is intrinsically heavenly. For where one clod falls there earth in general would fall as well; and thus a single clod of earth will betray the resting-place of the earth itself; so too the spark which shoots out of the fire will indicate the resting-place of fire. Now we have scut a spark to heaven, namely the soul of our Lord Jesus Christ, which shows the resting-place of souls is nowhere else than heaven; yonder they belong. But the resting-place of body, made up as it is of the four elements, is by nature upon earth, and yet God joins these twain to one another and fates them to remain together: soul and body for their mutual uses. Of this God found a wise solution, himself becoming man and going in his proper power to heaven, the resting-place of Jesus Christ being in union with his Father. And since God is threefold in his Persons and simple in his nature, they having one common life and being, it follows that the place our Lord Jesus Christ prepares for our life and being is that of eternal union with God.
The other thing Christ taught by his ascension is what prepara- tions we must make for following him, pursuant to his words, ‘ I go to prepare a place for you.’ Just as it is upon four grounds that soul is called light, spirit, fire and a spark of God’s celestial nature, so wc must be prepared in four particulars. When Moses would have gone and looked at the burning bush upon Mt. Sinai God told him to put off his shoes, which teaches us four lessons.
The first is in the name Moses, which means, taken from the water, and so shall we be taken out of instability, rescued from the storm of the world-flow. Next, all our animal passions, with their agitations, must be herded up into the very topmost, the ghostly SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 198