I prize detachment more than mercy too, for mercy means naught else but a man’s going forth of self by reason of his fellow- creatures* lack, wheiuiby, his heajt is Detachment is '. exempt from this; it stays within itself permitting nothing to disturb it. In short, when I reflect on all the virtues I find not one. so wholly free from fault, so unitiye to Goci as is detach men t.
It was Avicenna the philosopher who said, ‘ The mind detached ; is of such nobility that what it sees is true, what it desires befalls and its behests must be obeyed.’ For you must know that jwhen TRACTATES the free mind is quite detached it constrains God to itself and could it femairi formless arid free from adventitiousness it would take on the nature of God. But God grants this to none beside himself; so God can do no more for the solitary soul than make it a present of himself. The man who is in absolute detachment is rapt away ;jinto eternity where nothing temporal affects him nor is he in the ( least aware of any mortal thing; he has the world well dead, he having no relish for aught earthly. St Paul meant this when he declared, ‘ I live and yet not I: Christ liveth in me.’
Perad venture thou will say, ~ What then is detachment that it should be so noble in itself? — True detachment means a mind as little moved by what befalls, by joy and sorrow, honour and dis- grace, as a broad mountain by a gentle breeze. • Such motionless detachment inakes a man superlatively Godlike. For that God is GodT is due to his motionless detachment, and it is from his detach- ^ ment that he gets his purity and his simplicity and his immuta- ’ bility. If then a man is going to be like God, so far as any creature can resemble God, it will be by detachment. This leads to purity and from purity to simplicity and from simplicity to immova- bility; and it is these three which constitute the likeness between man and God, which likeness is in grace, for it is grace which draws a man away from mortal things and purges him from things corruptible. I would have you know that to be empty of creatures '\ is to be full of God and to be full of creatures is to be empty of ■ God.
Now it must be remembered that in this immutable detachment God has stood for aye and does still stand. Know also, that when God created the heavens and the earth he might not ha^e been making anything at all for all that it affected his deta^ment. Nay, I say more: prayers and good works wrought by a man in time affect no more the diviiie detachment than if no prayers nor virtuous Avorks had come to pass in time; nor is God any kindlier disposed towards that wight than if his prayers and deeds had all V>een left undone. Further I declare, when the Son in his Godhead was pleased to be made man and was and suffered martyrdom, God’s motionless detachment was no more disturbed than if he had never been made man.
Haply thou wilt say, I gather then that prayers and virtuous deeds are all in vain; God takes too little interest in them to be affected by them. And yet they say God likes to be entreated upon all occasions.
.Now mark, and realize if possible, that in his first eternal glance (if a first glance may be assumed), God saw all things as they would happen and he saw in that same glance both when and how he would make creatures. He saw the humblest prayer that MEISTER ECKHART would be offered, the least good deed that anyone would do and saw withal which prayers and which devotions he would hear. He saw that to-morrow thou shalt call upon him earnestly, urgently entreating him; and not for the first time to-morrow will God grant thy supplication and thy prayer: he has granted it already in his eternity ere ever thou becamest man. Suppose thy prayer is foolish or lacking earnestness, God will deny it thee not then, he has denied it thee already in his eternity. Thus God, who has seen everything in that first eternal glance, in no wise acts from any why at all, for everything is a foregone conclusion.
And though God docs stay all the while in motionless detachment yet are men’s prayers and virtuous works not all in vain, he who does well being well rewarded. As Philippiis says, ‘ God creator holds all things in the course and order he has given them from the beginning.’ With him nothing is past and nothing future, who has loved all his saints even as he foresaw them ere ever the world became. Yet when there come to pass in time the things he speculated in eternity then people think that God has changed his mind, though whether he be wrathful or benignant it is wc who change and he remains the same; just as the sunshine hurts weak eyes and benefits the strong ones what time the light itself remains unchanged. God does not see in time nor is his outlook subject to renewal. Isodorus argues in this sense in his book on the Arch-Good. lie says, People arc always asking what God did before he created the heavens and the earth and whence there came to God the new will to make creatures? His answer is that no new will at all arose in God; for what though creature was not in itself as it is now yet it was from eternity in God and in his mmd. God did not make the heavens and the earth as we should say, man -fashion, ‘ Let them be! ’ but creatures arc all spoken in his eternal Word. Moses said to God, ‘ Lord, if Pharaoh ask me who thou art, what am I to say? ’ And God replied, ‘ Say, He-who-is hath sent me.’ Or in other words, He who is unchanging in himself, he it is hath sent me.
Here someone may object. But was Christ in motionless detach- ment when he cried, ‘ My soul is sorrowful even unto death! ’ Or Mary when she stood beneath his cross? yet much is said about her lamentations. How is all this compatible with motion- less detachment? — Know then, that according to philosophers there are in everyone two men: one, the outward man, is his objective nature; this man is served by the five senses, albeit he is energised by the power of the soul. The other one, the inner man, is man’s subjective nature. Now I would have you know that the Godly-minded man employs his soul-powers in his outward man no more than his five senses really need it; and his interior man TRACTATES only has recourse to the five senses so far as it is guide and keeper to these five senses and can stop them being put to bestial uses as they so often are by those who live according to the baser appetites, as do the mindless beasts, and who deserve the name of beast rather than that of man. What surplus energy she has beyond what she expends on her five senses the soul bestows upon her inner man, and supposing he has toward some right high endeavour she will call in all the powers she has loaned to the five senses and then the man is said to be senseless and rapt away, his object being either some unintelligible form or some formless intelligible. Remember, God requires every spiritual man to love him with all the powers of his soul. ‘ Thou shalt love the I^ord thy God with all thy heart,’ he says. Some squander all their soul-powers on their outward man. Namely, those whose thoughts and feelings hinge on temporal goods, all unwitting of an inner man. And even as the virtuous man will now and then deprive his outward self of all the powers of the soul what time he is embarking on some high adventure, so bestial man will rob his inner self of all its soul-powers to expend them on his outer man. Withal it must be realized that the outward man is able to be active and leave the inward man entirely passive and unmoved. Now in Christ too existed an outward and an inward man and also in our Lady, and what Christ and our Lady said concerning outward things was prompted by their outward man, the inner man remaining in motionless detachment. So was it when Christ said, ‘ My soul is sorrowful unto death.’ And despite her lamentations and various things she said. Our Lady, in her inner man, stood all the while in motionless detachment. Take an illustration. The d^r goes to and fro upon its hinges. Now the projecting door I liken to the outwafd^man and the hinge I liken to the inner man. As it shuts and opens the door swings to and fro while the hinge remains unmoved in the same place without undergoing any change. And likewise here.
What then, I ask, is the object of absolute detachment? I answer, that the object of absolute detachment is neither this nor that. It is absolu^ v nothing, for it is the culminating point where God can do preciscIylS^hc will.^ God cannot have his way in every Tteaft, for though God is alriugnty yet he cannot work except where he finds readiness or makes it. I add, or makes it, by reason of St Paul in whom he found no readiness but whom he did make ready by infusion of his grace; wherefore I affirm, God works according to the aptitude^ he %ds. He works differently in man and in a stone, and for this we have a natural analogy. If you heat a baker’s oven and place in it the dough, some made of barley, some of oats and some of wheat and some of rye, then albeit in 846 MEISTER ECKHART the oven the heat is all the same it does not tell alike on all the doughs, but one yields a fine bread, another one more coarse and a third a coarser still. The heat is not to blame: it is the material which differs. Nor does God tell alike on every heart but accord- ing to the readiness and the capacity he finds. In any heart containing this or that there is something to hinder God’s highest operation. For a hear^toj^i^perfectly r^a^it^feas to be perfectly empty, this T5?mg[lts^ndijdon p To take anotlier common illustration. Suppose I want to write on a white tablet, then anything already written there, however excellent it be, will interfere and hinder me from writing; ere I can write I must erase completely whatever is already on the tablet which is never better fitted for me to write upon than when there is nothing there at all. And so for God to write his very best within , my heart everything dubbed this or that must be ousted from my j heart leaving it quite without attachment. God is free to work his sovran will when the object of this solitary heart is neither this nor that.
Then again I ask, What is the prayer of the solitary heart? I answer, that detachment and emptiness cannot pray at all, for whoso prays desires of God somcthirig: something added to him or something taken from him. Ilut the heart detached has no j desire for anything nor has it anything to be delivered from. So it has no prayers at all; its only prayer consists in being uniform with God. In this sense we may take St Dionysius’ comment on the saying of St Paul, ‘ Many there be that run but one receiveth the prize.’ All the powers of the soul competing for the crown which^alls to the essence alone. According to Dionysius this running is none other than the flight from creature to union with uncreated nature. Attaining this the soul loses her name; God absorbs her in himself so that as self she comes to naught, just as the sunlight swallows up the dawn and naughts it. To this pass nothing brings the soul but absolute detachment. And here it is germane to quote St Augustine’s dictum: ‘ The soul has a private door into divine nature at the point where for her things all come to naught.’ This door on earth is none other than absolute detachment. At the height of her detachment she is ignorant with knowing, loveless with loving, 4a^k Here too we might cite a master’s word§*^^ iessed are the spiritual poor who have abandoned unto God all things as he possessed them when we existed not. This none can do but a heart wholly without attachment.
That God would sooner be in a solitary heart than any other, I argue in this fashion. Starting from thy question. What does God seek in all things? I answer in his words out of the Book of TRACTATES 347 Wisdom, ‘ In alj^thhiigs I seek rest.’ Now there is nowhere perfect rest save in a heart detached. Ergo, God is happier there than in any other thing or virtue. Know that the more we are disposed to receive the inflowing God, the more happy we shall be; perfect receptivity gives perfect felicity. Now one makes oneself re'ceptfvc to the influence of God only by dint of uniformity with God; as a man’s uniformity with God so is his sense of the inflow of God. Uniformity comes of subjection to God, and the more one is subject to creature the less one is uniform with God. But the heart which is (juite detached and all devoid of creatures, being utterly subject to God and uniform with God in the highest measure, is wholly receptive of his divine inflow. Hence St Paul’s exhorta- tion to ‘ Put on Christ,’ i.^ Uiiiforinity with Christ. For know, when Christ was^^made man it was not a certain man that he assumed, he assumed human nature. Do thou go out of all things, then there remains alone what Christ put on and thou hast put on Christ.
Whoso has a mind to know the excellence and use of absolute detachment let him lay to heart Christ’s words to his disciples touching his manhood: ‘ It is good, for you, that I. go away j if I go iiqL.away the xaLunfprt^ cannot come tin to you ’; as though to say, yc have too much love for riiy visible forTn for the perfect love of the Holy Ghost to be yours. Wherefore discard the form and unite with the formless essence, for God’s ghostly comfort is intangible and is not offered save to those alone who despise all mortal consolations.
List ye, good people all: there is none happier than he who stands in uttermost detachment. No temporal, carnal i^easurc but brings some ghostly mischief in its train, for the flesh lusts after things that run counter to the spirit and spirit lusts for things that are repugnant to the flesh. He who sows the tares of love in flesh reaps death but he who sows good love-seed in the spirit reaps of the spirit eternal life. The more man flees from creatures the faster hastens to him their creator. Consider, all yc thoughtful souls! If even the love which it is given us to feel for the bodily form of Christ can keep us from receiving the Holy Ghost then how much more must we be kept from getting God by inordinate love of creature comforts? Detachment is the best of all, for it cleanses the soul, clarifies the mind, kindles the heart and wakes the spirit; it quickens desire and enhances virtue giving intuition of God; it detaches creature and makes her one with God; for love dis- joined from God is as water in the fire, but love in union is like the honeycomb in honey. Harkee, all rational souls! The swiftest steed to bear you to your goal is suffering; none shall ever taste eternal bliss but those who stand with Christ in depths of bitterness.
MEISTER ECKHART MEISTER ECKHART Nothing is more gall-bitter than suffering, nothing so honey-sweet as to have suffered. The most sure foundation for this perfection is humility, for he whose nature here creeps in deepest depths shall soar in spirit to highest height of Deity; for joy brings sorrow and sorrow brings joy. Men’s ways are manifold: one lives thus, another thus. He who would attain unto the highest life while here in time, let him take in a few words culled out of all the scriptures the summary philosophy which I will now set down.
Keep thyself detached from all mankind; keep thyself devoid of all incoming images; emancipate thyself from everything which entails addition, attachment or encumbrance, and address thy mind at all times to a saving contemplation wherein thou bearest God fixed within thy heart as the object from which its eyes do never waver; any other discipline, fasts, vigils, prayers, or whatever it may be, subordinate to this as to its end, using thereof no more than shall answer for this purpose, so shalt thou win the goal of all perfections.
Here someone may object. But who can persist in unwavering contemplation of the divine object? I answer, no one living here in time. This is told thee merely so that thou mayst know the highest, that whereon thy aspirations and desires should be set. But when this vision is withheld from thee, thou, being a good man, shalt think to have been robbed of thy eternal bliss and then do thou forthwith return into the same that it may come to thee again; and withal it does behove thee to keep strict watch upon thy thoughts at all times, there letting, as far as possible, their goal and refuge be. Lord God, glory be to thee eternally. Amen.
X SPIRITUAL POVERTY Beati pauper es spiritu etc. Let us be eternally as poor as we were when we eternally were not. Abiding in him in our essence we shall be that we are. We shall abound in all things, but in their creator. Wc shall know God without any sort of likeness and love without matter and enjoy without possession. We shall conceive all things in perfection as the eternal wisdom shows them planned out in itself.
The poor in spirit go out of themselves and all creatures: they are nothing, they have nothing, they do nothing, and these poor are not save that by grace they are God with God: which they are not aware of. St Augustine says, all things are God. St Diony- sius says, things are not God. St Augustine says, God is all of them. But Dionysius: God is nothing we can say or think, yet TRACTATES TRACTATES God is the hope of all the saints, their intuition of him wherein he is himself. He (Dionysius) finds him more in naught; God is naught, he says. In naught all is suspended. All that has being is in suspension in naught, this naught being itself an incompre- hensible aught that all the minds in heaven and on earth cannot either fathom or conceive. Hence it remains unknown to creatures. When the soul attains to the perfection of hanging to (being suspended from) naught she will find herself without sin. This is due to the freedom she is poised in. Then on coming to the body and awareness of herself, and again finding sin as before, she becomes bound and then she returns into herself and bethinks her of what she has found yonder. Thus she raises herself up above herself and crosses over to the seat of all her happiness and all her satisfaction. St Bernard says the soul knows very well that her beloved cannot come to her till everything is out of her. St Augustine says. Well and truly loves the man who loves where he well knows he is not loved; that is the best of all loving. St Paul, We know right well that all things work together for good to them that love God. And Christ said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, God’s kingdom is theirs.
They tell of various kinds of poverty of spirit. There are four. What he refers to here is the first poverty of spirit the soul knows when, illumined by the spirit of truth, things that are not God weigh with her not a jot; as St Paul tells us, ‘ All things arc as dung to me.’ In this indigence she finds all creatures irksome.
In the second poverty she considers the merit of her excm})lar Christ and her own demerits and finds her own works worthless, though they be the sum of men’s achievements. Hcitfce she laments her in the Book of Love, crying, ‘ The form of my beloved passed me by and I cannot follow him.’ To this passing she is self-condemned, following the spoor of her quarry, Christ. So sweet his scent, she swoons away into forgetfulness of outward pain. As St Augustine says. The soul is where she loves rather than where she is giving life, and St Peter tells us that our dwelling is in heaven.
The third poverty of spirit is that of the soul wherein her own nature is slain; her own natural life is stone dead and there is living in her nothing but the spirit of God. As St Paul declares, ‘ I am dead nevertheless I live; yet my life Christ liveth in me.’ In this spiritual death she is grown poor, for all she has to leave or give has been taken from her; moreover she is poor of her free will, for he is doing with it what he will.
The fourth poverty is the incomprehensibility of God in her mind, her inability to compass him whether with knowledge or with works. But the deeper she gets the more the incompre- MEISTER ECKHART hensible splendour of the Deity is reflected in her poverty^ ^ For as far as with her inner man she has gotten intuition of divinity so far she follows with her outer man the willing poverty of her pattern Jesus Christ; or in other words, the power of God having deprived her of all selfhood, she uses all creatures as she needs them, always without attachment, and if she has them not she can do as well without them and with the same detachment. She knows of nothing more that she can do but she rejoices in his incomprehensible truth and that created things arc all as naught to him and that his love has taken to itself her naught which is cleaving to him like a tiny spark. It was this poverty St Paul was in the time that he declared ‘ he heard in God unspeakable things which it is not lawful for a man to utter.’ On that occasion he was knit to God so that neither life nor death could separate him from his love. Thus it befalls the perfectly lost soul in God, lost, not to creatures merely but to herself as well and aware of nothing but the pure unclouded radiance of God’s essence. Behold her lost in him, her heavenly joy, and all incapable of any real wrong- doing. The saints invariably say that nothing whatever can dis- turb the fixity they have in God. Real sin is any disobedience to the law of divine love, any departure from the life of.Tesus Christ. He is the form and essence of all things. What then is real virtue? Anything wrought in the soul by divine love alone, for that effects naught but its like.
Such is the doctrine of spiritual poverty. Into this true poverty lead us, O superfull goodness of God. Amen.
XII 1 We read in the gospel that our Lord fed the multitude with five loaves and two fishes. The first loaf was, the duty of knowing ourselves: what we have always been to God and what we are now in relation to God. The second was, the duty of compassion towards our evenchristian in his blindness; his misfortune ought to touch us wellnigh as keenly as our own. The third was, that it behoves us to study the life of our Lord Jesus Christ and copy it exactly so far as that is possible. The fourth, that it behoves us to recognise the justness of God. All accounts of hell-torment are true. St Dionysius has explained that absence from God is hell and God’s presence is heaven. The fifth is, that it is for us to have intuition of the deity flowing into the Father and filling him with power and flowing into the Son filling him with wisdom, TRACTATES 851 they be^g one in nature. Christ himself declared, ‘ Where I am there my Father is and where my Father is there I am.’ And they flow into the Holy Ghost filling him with goodwill. As Christ said, ‘ I and my Father have one Spirit ’; and the Holy Ghost flows into the soul.
The soul by nature has received two powers. One power is understanding which can conceive the Holy Trinity and all its works, enclosing it, as one would fill and close a cask. The full cask comprehends its contents: it is in union with what it compre- hends, what it is full of. And so is understanding in union with what it understands, what it conceives. It is one therewith by grace as the Son is one with the Father by nature.
The second power is will. It is the nobler in that by nature it can reach to the unknown, God namel}/. Will seizes God above knowledge, and in grasping what he wills the impress of the unknown God is sealed and stamped into the will so that the will contains God and becomes one with God, and will brings memory and all the soul-powers in its train, therefore the soul is one with God by grace as the Holy Ghost is one with the Father and the Son by nature. She is really in God more' than in her own person. As St Augustine says, ‘ The soul is where she loves rather than where she is giving life.’ To rest in this union were better than to do all the works of all creatures, for so her higher power absorbs her lower ones and the soul can do nothing but divine work. But since this may not be, therefore the highest power, seeing her stability in God, communicates it to the lower ones so that they may discern good and evil. In this union Adam dwelt, and while the union lasted he had all the power of creatures (i,&, all cr(^turcs in posse) in his highest power. When a lodestonc spends its force upon a needle and attracts it to itself, the needle gets sufficient power to pass on to the needles underneath, which it raises and attaches to the lodestone. Part the top needle and all the rest drop off. It was like this with Adam: when his highest power parted from God, down fell all his powders. Creatures are dis- joined through failing to agree among themselves, one wanting one thing, one another. The powers decay through creatures right down to the lowest. The power of gold, for example, cannot give gold but gives silver, and this degradation goes on in silver, from which we get iron. Even so man’s powers peter out to nothing. This accounts for the various creatures.
But now all creatures which came forth from God must strive with all their powers to make one man who shall return into the union wherein Adam was before he fell and who shall raise all creatures up again into the selfsame power wherein they were, in human nature. This is accomplished in Christ, as he himself MEISTER ECKHART declared, ‘ When I am lifted up I will draw all men to me.’ He meant that when he was risen in our mind he would recollect us to himself. In this sense all creatures are one man and that man is God. Human nature has not ever been as such. God is from himself eternally and the Father made all things from nothing. That he is in himself he is by his own nature, which is free from becoming and becomes not any thing, and all things’ becoming ends in not-becoming. The Son is the same as the Father except that he receives from the Father all that he has and of all becoming he is the form. Withal he is one in the not-becoming. The Holy Ghost is the tie between the Father and the Son and is one with them in the not-becoming; he is the author and agent of becoming in eternity and in time. This temporal becoming ends in eternal not-becoming, and the eternal not-becoming is the work of the eternal nature and has neither end nor beginning.
God is his own form and matter; his form emerges from his matter and according to this form does he form all things that become. But his simple nature is in form formless, in mode modeless, cause uncaused, being without becoming which trans- cends all things becoming and all that becomes comes to an end therein.
God is eternal and all things have been in him eternally. They were not in themselves. Ere God created creatures he was nothing whatever to creatures, in their understanding, though in himself he was to them eternally the same as he is now and always shall be. No Creature could say God what time itself was not. What minds ignore they count for naught. Creature did not know God when ‘ she herself was not, therefore she could not speak him. This is denied by heretics who state that Christ brought human nature with him out of heaven, but that is not true. He got his manhood from our Lady Saint Mary, withal abiding as before in the Godhead; and the Almighty knew in his eternal wisdom the ordering of all things, to wit, the Iloly Ghost. This Trinity poured forth into time into the naught of human nature. Thenceforward human nature was changeable in time and God donned human nature. In him human nature was God and human nature knew it with the three powers she has gotten from the blessed Trinity and gave God thanks therefor and loved him with infinite love. By this God sets such store that he loves human nature back with a love so great, any man who knows it possesses heaven incarnate. I charge you, my brothers and my sisters, that ye wax in knowledge and give thanks to Gk)d while ye are still in time for having made you from naught aught, and unite yourselves with his divine nature. Once out of time and your chance is gone. But if so be ye cannot apprehend God’s nature then believe in Christ and