himself and in himself; of time and in time and timely, and no soul can get into God without first being God as she was before she was made into God. Nothing but God finds its way into TRACTATES 289 God, and once the soul is in God she is God, borne into God on his eternal Word. Soul is the mean ’twixt God and creature; she is placed at the beginning and end of the supreme, in touch with common knowledge and with the consolation the angels bring to her from God. If she prefers the inferior powers of her live senses to her higher ones whence comes her knowledge of celestial things, then she grows ignoble and base. The creature pleasures of the soul God has no stomach for, and when she realizes this she discards the joys in which God has no share.
While the soul is still here, in sleep, she drives away the angels, and refusing any longer to serve creature she conceives herself all one with God. St Augustine says the soul is nobler, mightier, grander than any creature, but the angels are by nature of still higher rank, for they are the first issue of the breath of God which gives life to them. Gregory, again, observes that ‘ The soul God has appeared to, who has some inkling of him, hnds creatures all so narrow and so vain.’ — While the higher powers of the soul are holding fast to God she actuates her lower powers so that what occurs in these comes to the knowledge of the higher ones. The highest power of the soul is called an inextinguishable light because of the vision the soul has in this power. However far away her power is from God she can discern God always. Her power is never so much out but that it still burns somewhat, enough to be a danger-signal to the soul and, even were she spiritually dead in sin, a beacon showing her the way to come alive again and arise in true sorrow and repentance.
Here comes the question. Can the soul with her owff powers comprehend her highest happiness? The answer given to this question by the four doctors, Thomas, Egidius, Henricus and Albertus is, that if the soul had her knowledge of herself, as she has her being, image-free, then she would be able to take in her highest happiness, she being an infinite capacity which God cannot fill excepting with himself. St Augustine says. If her own perfect nature were immediately present to the soul she would be her proper self rather than creature in her nature, as she is classified. For God is spirit and he en-spirits the soul who, in her spiritual nature, belongs to an order above creatures; she finishes with creature in the perfect image of the eternal birth which is directly formed in her.
Another question is. How does God enter the soul? Is he innate in her, sustaining her with his intrinsic energy and pro- viding her with life and being? One theory is that God enters the soul in three ways. First in his grace whereby a man being gratified is filled with the desire of perfecting virtue as a whole, mingled with alarm lest any creature ever filch it from him.
19 MEISTER ECKHART 19 MEISTER ECKHART Secondly, God enters the soul in pure perception wherein a man beholds himself and learns to know himself and answer any call God may make upon him, be it suffering or trials, bodily or mental. Thirdly, God enters the soul in true freedom, liberating man from all the cares of life. Let the soul bid him welcome, refusing to be satisfied save with him alone. At the highest point of his inner self, his soul, man is more God than creature: however much he is the same as creature in his nature, in mind he is like God more than any creature. To the soul at rest in God in her potential, her essential, intellectual nature, everything comes natural as though she were created not at the will of something else but solely at her own. In this point creatures are her subjects, all submitting to her as though they were her handiwork. It was in this power the birds obeyed St Francis and listened to his preaching. And Daniel took refuge in this power, trusting himself to God alone, when he sat among the lions. Moreover, in this power it has been the custom of the saints to offer up their suffer- ings which, in the greatness of their love, arc to them no suffering.
Dionysius says the soul has got to purify herself till in her perfect clarity she is like the angels and receives by grace what the angels have by nature. For the soul will not be able to fulfil her destiny till she is like the angels in whom is no sin. But the soul is from heaven (that is to say, from God who is the heaven of the soul) and body from the earth, s© they are ever opposed to one another. And that is why the soul, wanting to get back to God whence she issued forth, absconds and leaves behind her all the thfli^s which are not God and do not lead to God. All form and likeness, Dionysius says, God in the first instance imprinted in the lesser angels so that they should inform the soul with divine light and consolation and enable her to enter into her own solitude, God namely, wherein no creature can ever look and sec.
Theologians say the soul is more greatly blest when God begets himself in her without corporal union than the body of Christ is without his Godhood and without his soul. But any beatific soul is a nobler thing than Christ’s mortal body, for the interior birth of God within the soul is the final consummation of her happiness, a happiness more real to her than Christ’s becoming man since this profits the soul nothing without union with God. As Dionysius says, ‘ Beatitude means an in-dwelling with God such that he is more present to the soul than she is to herself, and the soul can apprehend him best when she approaches him with a tranquil mind.’ For in peace is his habitation and in peace he elected us his children. But as God is the mover in the starry and revolving heavens so here in the soul he is the mover of the freedom of our will towards himself and towards all good things: TRACTATES TRACTATES it is in his light that she sees the light and in his light she will be united with the light. Theologians say that in their own nature the angels in heaven are nobler than the soul of Christ or Mary because they are in essence nearer than the soul to God. But by merit Christ’s soul has more joy than all the angels and is nearer God than any angel. And the same with Mary’s soul. Not by nature though, for by nature Christ’s soul, and Mary’s too, is the same as mine or any other human soul. Further, theologians teach that the soul in man is more than thousandfold, for it is whole in every limb: in the fingers, in the eyes and in the heart and in every several portion of each member large and small. Just as in the eighth heaven, where there are so many stars, there is one angel who revolves that heaven and exists entire in each star. When God created man he safeguarded him against all ills; the golden (ihain of destiny coming from the Trinity to the highest power of the soul and running also through her lower powers subordinates them to the higher so that no fell disorder can attack either the body or the soul excepting he transgress this law. In her higher powers the soul is spirit and in her lower, soul; and betwixt soul and spirit is the bond of one common being.
Also you must know that in the soul there exists one power which rests not day or night; it is flowing from the Spirit and is altogether ghostly, and in this power God comes out in the full flower of his joy and glory, as he is in himself. Such intense delight, such supreme exaltation as no mind can conceive nor tongue express. Were he always recollected in this power a man would never age. Nay more I say: should he in this power catch but one fleeting glance of the joy and bliss therein, it would be happiness enough to make amends though he suffered all things.
The soul receives four things from God in her power of under- standing. First, the entire certainty of freedom, of riddance, from all creatures, which God object^ to in her. Next, the full enjoyment of God while she abides in the power of love. Third, the. complete protection of God against all harm from creatures. Fourthly, victory in this power over all her foes. For as the Son of God, so also is the soul, and the promise of the Son is the promise of the soul, only she is not suspended from where the Son issues from the Father. Fire and heat are one; taste and tasted are one, albeit far asunder. The Word God speaks eternally lies hidden in the soul so that one neither knows of it nor hears it. Dionysius says the soul resembles the procession in the Godhead since the higher powers of the soul have her nature common to them and each power flows into the rest. For the soul to rise MEISTER ECKHART MEISTER ECKHART to spirit she must betake herself to her eternal part, never failing to remember that, by the grace of Gk)d, hers is an imperishable nature and capable of eternal bliss. Her spirit is suspended from the unchanging God, so neither life nor death nor height nor depth nor angel nor man nor any creature can loose her steadfast hold on God: the soul who dies in God is also buried in him and beyond the ken of creatures just as much as God is beyond their ken. As Dionysius says, when the soul considers the greatness of God’s might beside her littleness she casts herself out of herself and out of every creature and thus reduced to naked nothingness, God keeping her in his power, she persists simply in the grace of God. God is concerned solely with himself; he is to each thing absolutely whole. And the soul should be the same: what God is by nature she must be by grace: detached and free from creatures, abandoning all things to God as though they were not. In a soul like this all that survives is God: his uncreated Breath is what the soul draws in inspiration, and she is spirit to all things and all things spirit to her, the eternal spiration of the Holy Ghost. Vicentius the philosopher observes, ‘ The spirit detached is of such perfection that what it sees is real, what it wills comes true and its commands must be obeyed.’
It must be remembered that when the free spirit stands in perfect isolation it constrains God to itself, and if it could subsist as form devoid of accident it would have all the character of God. But this God grants to none beside himself; the utmost God can do is to^gjyc himself to him, and such an one is so far raised up to eternity that nothing temporal can move him, nothing material affect him; he is dead to the world, as St Paul says, ‘ I live not; Christ Hveth in me.’
According to Dionysius, death in God is nothing but the un- created life, that is, God himself, not now called the soul but the sovran power of God, because with it he performs his will. What the five senses get from such a soul she gives the whole of to her inner man whenever he embarks upon some high adventure, and such an one is then nonsensical (or senseless), his object being the rational, a-sensible idea. Dionysius comments on the dictum of St Paul, ‘ There be many that run for the crown but it falls to none but the wise.’ This race, he says, is nothing else than the flight from creatures to union with their uncreated God. The soul, in hot pursuit of God, becomes absorbed in him, and she herself is reduced to naught, just as the sun will swallow up and put out the dawn. St Augustine says, ‘ The soul has a private door into divine nature, where for her all things amount to naught.’ And, ‘ The flavour of the spirit spoils the taste for flesh ’; and, ‘ The soul at her summit is ignorant with knowing, j5pj.tjb^.oneness of TRACTATES the spirit those that have abandoned everything to God are as he had them when we existed not.’ The Lord Jesus stands before the soul as the perfect pattern for our human conduct. But the subjective aspect of the three Persons — Godhead, mind — no crea- ture ever saw, not soul nor angel nor the humanity of Christ, in its own nature. Yet it is held by some, and Meister E(rkhart of Paris notably, maintains in the teeth of all objections: As surely as you know me for a man so surely God gives birth to his own nature in the ground of my soul as in his heaven, and I am not happy till I return to God discarding every means of sin and all its brood together with all creatures. For in th(^ selfsame ground wherein the Father bears his Son in his own nature therein am I born. In the soul that has trodden underfoot all the ills of time the Father naturally will beget his Son as surely as my father gat me a living man. In the very ground wherein the Father gets his Son therein does he get me and all whom the Fatlier draws to him by grace. And as God in himself is absolutely free from things so I am there by gratae what God is by nature. God destines all of us to such a glorious lot as few indeed can credit who have not gone out of themselves. If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be lillcd thereby but only with himself: he is the very highest uncreated heaven of all the heavens in God’s nature. That the soul in us is deathless is not our doing but God’s: it is the nature of her. But union comes by grace, the highest stooping down to inform the lowest, and therein lies our hope of future sight.
The soul ascends from corporal things and, being caught up above herself, abides within herself, lirst, for the sake of the delights she finds in God. For the divine perfection invests her in him with his likeness. His fullness is i)oured forth without stint: angels more in number than the sands and grass and water- drops and every single angel with his own distinctive nature, not one the same as any other,- Secondly, the soul ascends for the sake of the purity she finds in God; things in him arc all quite pure and noble, but once they issue forth from him into the nearest creatures there is all the difference between aught and naught. — Thirdly, the soul ascends for the recollection she enjoys in God. In order to grasp God she must have a wont that is higher than herself; though God had made a thousand earths and a thousand heavens the soul could comprehend them all in her one power, the active power’s reflection. But she cannot conceive God in the act of making her in his own image. — Fourthly, the soul ascends for the sake of the infinite good things she enjoys in God: all things in him are ever new in his Son who to-day is being born the same as though his Father had never given him 294 MEISTER ECKHART birth. And as God is flowing into the soul she is flowing back into God.
The soul takes four steps into God. On turning to God, at first she feels afraid of his magnificence. Her next step is to overcome this fear and conceive the hope of God’s affection. Her third step brings the vehement desire, she hails it as the promise, of the infinite embrace wherein she is embraced by God. — At the fourth step she falls into such deep oblivion she never thinks of leaving what she has found in God. God made the soul for his only Son to be born in her. And when and where soever there befalls this birth it gives God greater jdcasure than the creation of the heavens and earth because the soul is nobler and bigger than the heavens. As there is wedlock between a man and wife so there is wedlock between God and the soul. The head power in the soul is the man and the lowest is his wife. The man in the soul always stands Ijareheadcd and the woman veiled, the lower power being caught up to the highest of the soul. First God begets his likeness in the soul and afterwards himself as he is in eternity. God’s Son is the soul’s Son: in him God and the soul have the same Son, that is, God. Once this birth has happened in the soul she is fit for (iod, and the oftener this birth befalls the more at home the soul will be in God, in his paternal heart.
The soul has two feet, understanding and love. And the more she knows the more she loves. Who shall catise her to fall, she bdng uphold by the sustaincr of all creatures? Grace lending wings to desire^he is borne out of herself, and by grace and in grace she is borne into grace and past grace into (iod her first cause where in blissful union her lot is good beyond compare. There every sense is dumb; the soul’s will and God’s will are confused with one another, the two wills love-locked in the true atonement. Now the soul does neither more nor less than the work of God, for there no longer lives in her anything but God. As the soul cries in the Book of Love, ‘ I have nni the whole world round and have found no end to it. Wherefore I have east myself into the solitary point of my one God who has wounded me with his glance.’ Whom this glance did never wound, his soul was never pierced with the love of God. St Bernard says, ‘ To the spirit that feels this glance it is ineffable; to him that fe(;ls it not it is incredible.’ ’Tis an arrow sped without anger and received without pain; thence starts the pure and limpid stream of healing grace which opens the inner eye to perceive in blissful beholding the delights of this divine affliction wherein we enjoy unheard-of spiritual favours, things never told nor preached of nor yet described in any book.
The soul must give up idle thoughts and worldly cares and corporal pleasures and find her way into his hiding-place whom the TRACTATES 295 heaven of heavens is not able to contain. Gk>d’s comfort is only for that soul who scorns all temporal consolations; and the more she runs from creatures the faster their creator comes and makes her one with him. Dionysius says, love takes the soul out of herself and identifies her with the object of her love, making her insensible and reckless of herself so long as she can do the will of her best-beloved. The powers of the soul, those of her spiritual mind, are celestial in the sense that they do celestial work; thus the first power receives, the second one perceives and the third one loves. When the soul, conceiving God, is using in recollection her mnemonic power and, in beholding, her intelligence, then love transports her into the midst of God, the point at which there is eternal rest. The Father abiding in the soul clasps her to his heart, and in this fatherly embrace she conceives the Son in his personal procession and hence divines his presence with the Father in his essence; as saith the Lord, ‘ 1 will lead her into the desert,’ meaning, he will lead the soul away from vanity and say his say, his only Son, in her. And in this same begetting of his Son they pour their holy Breath into the soul, informing her of all things. Any act of soul that is to share in the eternal meed must be wrought in God. However good an act is in itself, excepting it be wrought in God, it meets with no reward from hini who docs not pay by length or size or multitude of works but for their being done in God, soul being the material God works in. In this divine alliance she is highly honoured, for what God is by nature she is made by grace. But if a soul presents herself before her bridegroom Jesus Christ without the ordinary virtues, forgetting to prepare herself in this resja.'ct for heaven, her shall he cast out into the pit of hell, there to realize his justice just as much in suffering as St Peter did in heaven liis eternal joy. Her true bridegroom Jesus Christ comes to the soul and shows her in his visible humanity his divine affection in order that all creatures may do homage to our nature which has been exalted higher than the angels. We cannot imagine him creating any creature nobler than ourselves. His manhood satis lies our sense as his Godhood does our soul. As St Augustine says, we shall end with our soul in the Godhead, and our bodily senses in the humanity of Christ which is exalted above the saints and angels to where, in its unchanging nature, no (creature can attain. When the watching soul is warned by various signs of the coming of her king, everything in her rejoices, and it is his royal right to use his sovran power to fulfil the expectation of the soul who longs for him to buttress her against her outward senses lest by yielding to them in the least she should bring about in any creature something counter to the will of God. The surest way to friendship with the king is for the soul blindly to MEISTER ECKHART follow where God leads. If the soul, which rather than the body constitutes us man, if the soul, I say, would only obey all God’s intimations she would overcome every obstacle with ease and rejoice in the burdens borne for him. And when she finds herself with nothing to correct she will be free with perfect freedom from opinion. It is the mark of the God-loving soul that from the moment she goes into his service she never follows her own will as distinct from his. God is the one thing that needs nothing and that all things need. And when the soul, beholding herself from within, perceives herself by grace omnipotent she stays in her own ideal nature.
The soul observes concerning God, first, that she has intuition of him who is to come to her. Next, she is in essential union with him who is operating in her. Thirdly, she enjoys him who so richly entertains her at his table. Fourthly, he provides her with a refuge where she is at peace. Dionysius says, ‘ When the soul returns to God her idea of herself in God is that, except for self- awareness, nothing survives in her but God.* When the soul does this she still keeps in touch with her outward man whom she supplies with his natural life. By speaking himself into the soul God unites himself with her and makes the soul into himself, giving her such great ability, it seems to her that being hen; in time is her only obstacle to good. In the virtuous uses of her exaniplar mind, all things being present to the soul in this interior Word of God, her spirit converses with God freely in proportion to the clearness of the Father’s inspiration. It is important then for the soul to* Kliow what behaviour to adopt towards God so that she may discover the practices that draw from God his intimations. For this the loving soul must love God more than anything, who, descending into her and energising in her with his spirit, gives her to understand that the interior love she has from him she ought to have and show towards all mankind; and the soul should submit herself to God as though he suffered death for her alone. So doing she will wax in truth and fit herself to receive the universal gift of God whereby she will arrive at the truth of the humanity of Christ. But if she does not do her best she puts herself on a material level with the brutes, that must be spurred to great exertion; yet the sorriest of men, who are always bound to fall short of God, Christ wrought more deeds of love for than all the saints have ever done for love of him. Though all creatures were to speak they could never tell the perfection God confers on man, especially the soul, than which he neither could nor would make any nobler creature. 1’his he proves in his own Person, with its common boundary bi;twcen his divine and human natures. It follows that the soul ought to shun all creatures as things unworthy TRACTATES of her whereby she may be lured from the things she is destined to by God, and she ought to be ashamed if, being within reach of his eternal good, she should fail to grasp it.
Here there is the question, If the soul is of such high estate that time and place and nature arc powerless to move or even touch her in her essential self, does God then work in her without any image of himself? To this theologists reply, Granting the soul is creature and has a spiritual nature it follows of neeessity that what God does in her is wrought essentially and free from all contingency; for his works arc all essential and eternal as they are in himself, and the soul participates them in her nature above grace. Grace is the outflowing light designed for the service of the spirit; grace would not be a light had it no recognised spiritual mission. At the point where God enters the soul in love she is no more known than the highest angel is to her and loves all things God -fashion without any natural idiosyjH*rasy. God is abstract intellectual essence, eternal in itself, whereas the soul is made eternal. The soul is no more to be grasped in images and forms than God in words and names. The soul is one in nature with and subject to the laws of the authentic intellect of God, a monad so perfectly balanced in itself no creature can And room there.
The Lord Jesus said to his disciples, ‘ 1 go to prepare a place for you.’ These words teach us two important facts. First, that the soul is by nature made for heaven and God is her lawful heritage. For God brought forth the soul alone in unbroken line and no man knoweth what she is. Every man has got a soul, but what she actually is there is no telling here in time. St Augustine says, the soul is sent from God and returns to God and she cannot rest except in him; for God is spirit and soul is also spirit and germane to God as one spirit to another. And they compare the soul with fire, most lofty in its nature, most mighty in its ojjcration, which never rests until it licks the skies. Fire envelops all the elements, spreading further and wider and higher than the air, than water or the earth, so that it surrounds the rest and coming next the heavens turns round with them. The soul is called a lire because in her desire she keeps up with God, like fire with the heavens and can find no rest except in him. Again, the soul is dubbed a spark of celestial nature because one has already ascended into heaven, the soul, to wit, of Jesus Christ, which shows the common resting- place of souls is nowhere else than heaven. But unless the soul has turned from temporal to celestial things the Holy Ghost cannot enter in to do its work in her. All God’s work is wrought in spirit. God is high and man is low: to rise to him in prayer he has to hoist himself by putting under him God’s creatures, all of them, including the powers of the soul which end in the functions MEISTER ECKHART of the body, then she will have the love and knowledge to carry her above the world. For to know God I want no eyes or ears; for union with God in love I want no hands or feet; I want to withdraw myself from all created things and let my spirit swoon into God’s spirit and be one spirit with Gk)d; withal it was the love God bears my soul that prevailed with him to create all creatures and therein reveal to her his glory. And albeit he made creatures glad, he mixed therewith some sorrow, that anyone careless of his honour might be whipped and spurred with pain. Marvellous as the mind of man are the ways of God, drawing one to him with pleasure and another with the buffets of ill-fortune; witness the amazing conversion of St Paul on his way to persecute the Chris- tians, notwithstanding which his soul was caught up into the third heaven. And the very day St Augustine was converted he refused to be appeased with the extraordinary pleasure he felt in the security God sent into his soul to turn her to him.
Three things keep the soul from being content with creatures. In the first place they are partial. In the second, they arc cor- poral: emblems of stagnation and corruption and unprogressive- ness. Thirdly, the gift of creatures is no largesse of him from whom she first came forth {Le, from God), so they are not relished by souls who have been caught up into bliss; but God the Jiord lures souls to him just as the lambs are lured from one spot to another by green pasture. Though all psychic powers lay in a single soul she could not here receive the very least reward of the smallest act decreed by God in his eternal love without the soul melting and dying to the body. Not so, however, when she gets the whole reward, namely God himself. But for this the soul must transcend herself and creatures and enter into the divine estate, into her divine exemjdar nature; for the soul contacts eternity with her higher powers and with her lower, creatures, whicli often lead her into evil. Could the soul see God as clearly as the angels do she would never have come into the body. God is formed in the image of himself, after a pattern of his own, and when she mingles with him in actual intuition, the soul resembles him in form, for he conforms her to him: divine light streams into the soul confusing her with God like one light with another and this is called the light of faith, the divine virtue. Where the soul with her powers and her passions is forbidden to go, there faith can take her; and when in this power God is apprehended in the soul she acquires the virtue of hope wherein the soul becomes so intimate with God she fancies there is nothing in God beyond her reach. St Augustine says, ‘ The pears I stole, these were to me far sweeter than the ones my mother bought, because they were private and forbidden fruit.’ And so is that grace sweeter to the