God has done all things for himself and he has made the soul like to himself, over all things, under all things, in all things, out of all things and withal abiding in herself impartibly. But she is noblest keeping to the desert wherein she is naught and there is nothing doing. St Dionysius prays, ‘ Lord, lead me into the desert where thou art formless that in thy solitude I may lose all form.’ The soul is in all things in her subtile nature wherein she inhabits all things without affecting them or being affected by them. Thus transcending things she cries, ‘ Lord, fetch me into thy Godhead where thou art naught, for what is aught I deem to be not God.’ The soul is over all things in her freedom; she knows none can compel her, not even God himself. Surrendering her free will to God she plunges into her own emptiness, beseeching, ‘ Lord, take me into the gloom of thy Godhead that in thy dark I may lose all my light, for nothing that can be revealed do I account as light.’ She is out of all things in her power of understanding, whichp makes her so elastic she is able to hold God as well as all his creatures. Embodying God thus she is more God than her own self. This is hers by grace. Aught of God is God entire and aught of him holds his whole being. This he is in the lowliest as much as in the loftiest nature. A small bung stops the barrel no less well than the biggest.
Comprehension belongs to his paternal power. He grasps him- self in himself in all creatures and grasps himself in his countenance whereto he admits no creature and whereinto no creature can get. And this comprehension he veils in a cloud of distortion so that no creature can grasp him as he grasps himself. What the soul grasps in the light she loses in the darkness. Yet she makes for the cloud, deeming his darkness better than her light. There she suddenly loses her light and herself in his darkness.
The soul cries in the Book of Love, ‘ No one is my God and I am no one’s soul, and nothing manifest to me do I take for God. I flee from God for God’s sake.’ St John says, ‘ God is love.’ But theologians argue that if he means the love wherewith the soul loves TRACTATES God, this is not true. Were that love God, wherewith the soul can love, it would not fail her as it does. This is a natural love, the virtue. But suppose her will is turned toward God, then Gk)d draws love from nothing and pours it into the virtue, so her love is both nature and grace. In grace God gives himself to the soul and the Holy Ghost unites with her love, and the love which is the Holy Ghost is God, and the love which is grace is the nature which unites the soul with God, and in this union the soul is absorbed into God and loves God with his own love in God, which in herself she cannot do.
The Father is the revelation of all things and the Son is the image of all things and the Holy Ghost is the fulfilling of that order. Philosophers say that things in contact with God are not God but his works. The soul is self-motive before she is moved and her being moved is the work of God, the soul being the agent while the work itself is creature. The power whieh perfects the soul, which sweeps her out of herself without her aid or abetting, is God. I can touch the minster, not carry it off. That we attribute to God matter and fonn and work is due to our gross senses. Theologians tell of the light which gives no light, which has no form nor matter and is yet a creature. To know God as he is we must be absolutely free from knowledge. Thus St Augus- tine says, ‘ Lord, I know not what I love in thee if it be not light.’ As God is timeless and modeless so he is also nameless. St Paul says, ‘ There be many that run but one receiveth the prize.’ All the soul-powers run but pure nature alone receives the crown, for, according to Dionysius, this race is nothing else than the flight from creatures to unite with their creator. Atoned wilji her creator the soul has lost her name for she herself does not exist: God has absorbed her into him just as the sunlight swallows up the dawn till it is gone.
Tell me, where is the soul’s abode? — Upon the pinions of the wind. The pinions are the powers of divine nature. The wind is the waging of the powers of the soul’s divine nature. When he thrusts her sins under her eyes she sinks down into him like a fish in the sea. All creatures lose their names on entering human nature. Hence Christ’s exhortation, ‘ Preach the gospel to all creatures/ He meant only human beings.
Observe when a man is all creatures. When he has the power of them all. When a man, knowing with his outward senses all corporal things, detaches himself from them and abides therein without attachment; when, knowing with his interior senses all spiritual things, he detaches himself from these and abides therein without attachment, then at length that man is all creatures; then, not till then, that man has come to his own nature and is 866 MEISTEB ECKHART ready to go into God. If we fail to find. God it is because we seek in semblance what has no resemblance. The scriptures tell us more of his unlikeness than his likeness. Origen says the soul’s quest of God comes by self-observation. If she knew herself she would know God also. If she pictures herself or pictures her God that comes of over-defining. On merging into the Godhead all definition is lost.
Dionysius says to Timothy, ‘ Friend Timothy, if thou dost view the spirit of truth, pursue it not with mortal senses. It is so swift, it comes rushing.’ God must be sought in estrangement, forget- fulness and non-sense; for the Godhead has in it all things in posse without the least likeness to anything. The supremely pure splendour of the impartible essence illumines all things at once. According to Dionysius, beauty is order: symmetry with supreme lucidity. In this sense the Godhead is the beauty of the three Persons. And it behoves the soul to order her lower powers to her higher and her higher ones to God; the outer senses to the inner and the inner ones to reason; thought servant to intelligence, intelligeiKie to will and her will to their unity, then the soul will be a unity with nothing flowing into her except pure deity as it is proceeding from itself. Concerning this St Dionysius says the soul has flung her faculties into her pure being and only her chief power remains at work. And one doctor says that when the chief power takes command the rest all enter into it losing their own activities, so now behold the soul in her proper order and in her pure nature, her pure nature being her exalted light-nature which is potentially all things.
Th^ Godhead flows into the Father, into the Son and the Holy Ghost, into itself in eternity and in time into creatures. It gives to each as much as it can hold: to stones existence, to the trees their growth, to birds their flight, to beasts their pleasures, to the angels reason and to man free nature. God was made man and took upon himself by grace the nature of all things in time even as in eternity he has them all by nature. St Paul says, ‘ Christ is to me all things.’ One Person with two natures. Each seems all things to each. It is a play of the light and reflection of his own nature. God’s being is first being, flowing being, fixed being, initial being and final being.
From essence in general emanates power and work. The three Persons are in this respect the storehouse of divinity, and the three Persons descend into the essence of the soul by grace, and the Persons bring divine nature into the soul in their train, one nature coursing through the other. The higher powers of the soul flow out of the essence of the soul as the three Persons issue from the Godhead, And when God pours his grace into the soul he pours TRACTATES it into the essence of the soul, for into the essence of the soul no fleck can fall let her powers do what they may. The higher powers of the soul draw their seeming from the essence of grace in the essence of the soul, and her chief power transcends the lower ones in nature.
Mind big with the conception of God’s nature is the corollary of Christ’s Person in human nature. When the soul is absorbed into God’s nature her sins and shortcomings arc stripped off and she becomes God, divine in nature; she enjoys divine nature in herself just as the Father does in him. She gets it not from her own nature: she takes divine nature from God into her nature. She receives perfection and power. Hence the words of St Paul, ‘ I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.’ Wisdom springs up in understanding; it begins in understanding and ends in desire and has neither heart nor thought. As St Dionysius says, ‘ When the soul, finding this outlet, has a footing in eternity and in time in her own understanding, therein she shall return into the flow where God is flowing back into himself, and does not flow away.’
God is flowing back into himself, recking no more of creatures than he did when they were not. And the soul shall do the same. She shall with her humanity conceive the Person of the Son and with the Person of the Son she shall apprehend the Father and the Holy Ghost in both and them both in the Holy Ghost; and with the Person of the Father she shall grasp his impartible nature and in his nature discerning the abyss she shall flow into the void bereft of matter and of form. Form, matter, mind and mode she loses in the unity for she herself has come to naught: God is^oing all her work, he preserves her in his being and leads her in his power into his naked Godhead. She flows with his deity into all that God is flowing in. She is all things’ place and has herself no place. This is the spirit of wisdom which has neither heart nor thought.
Soul flowing in the Deity is so nearly God that in the power of the Father she receives divinity, (she) by grace as the Father does by nature. St Paul says, ‘ In one image shall we go from glory to glory.’ Meaning that we shall receive the impartible Godhead with all that flows therefrom and shall therein conceive the Deity as the Deity conceives itself. Her will and God’s will shall be one, and wherever God has gotten himself there she is with God. To this none may attain while in this body except God grant his best gift to the soul, namely, the vision of God which confirms the soul in the Trinity and in the image of the Godhead.
MEISTER ECKHART XII THE DROWNING Though there be neither hell nor heaven yet will I love God; thee Father and thy sovran nature wherein the Trinity abides in the unity whence it gets its power. — Now you desire to hear about this hidden and exalted nature of the Trinity. The Persons are God in their personality. Godhead by nature in their oneness. But you must know what God and Grodhead are. The former has distinctions; which the soul of me explains by the reflection of the exalted unity. This shines in its own essence wholly indiscriminate. Therein is contained its unity entire, including the distinctions of lofty personality. The river is fontal wherein unity abides; the one alone is unnecessitous, poised in itself in sable stillness. In- comprehensible and yet self-evident. Light is the first thing to appear; it beguiles the mind into the unknown without itself, everlasting, in-drawn, plunged in gloom. There it is befooled, there it is bereft of light’s darkness, losing them both in the abyss; there that mysterious thing the mind is estranged in the unity which is withal its life.
O unfathomable sink, in thy depth thou art high and in thy height profound! — How so? — ^That is hidden from us in thy bottomless abysm. St Paul declares that it shall be made known to us. In this gnosis the mind transcends itself; it has been absorbed into the Trinity. There the mind dies all dying in the wonder of the Godhead, for with that unity it is confused; the perscvial losing its name in sameness. There mind, atoned, is accounted naught; there it loses the means of divinity. Light and darkness, it is rid of both, matter as well as form. The spark thus bare, made naught from its own naught, is s\^llowed up in its naught’s aught. This same naught is poverty in the Persons, which beguiles the mind and reduces it to unity. In the embrace of this sovran one which naughts the separated self of things, being is one without distinction although a thing created in its individual nature. The one I mean is wordless. One and one uniting, void shines into void. Where these two abysms hang, equally spirated, de-spirated, there is the supreme being; where God gives up the ghost, darkness reigns in the unknown known unity. This is hidden from us in his motionless deep. Creatures cannot penetrate this aught.
Well that this aught transcends us.
Even so loving it transcendently, Plunge in; this is the drowning.
TRACTATES THIS IS THE GLOSS ON THE DROWNING It is true spiritual perfection to love God for his own sake regardless of hell or heaven. We must love the three Persons in their unity of nature and their one nature in the three Persons. The Trinity has its power in the unity and the unity has its dignity in the Trinity. It belongs, moreover, to the noble mind to perceive the distinction between God and Godhead; how it is the three Persons in him have gotten his unity as their natural being. Each Person has for nature his unity entire, so each of the Persons is in himself God and in his nature Godhead. God is God in the Persons and Godhead in his nature: in his impartible nature. The unity shines forth in the Trinity as articulate speech. But the perfect reflection of the one is shining by itself in lonely silence, there safely pent as one and indivisible. Further, the three Persons in their utterance keep their distinctive pro- perties. The Father is source of the Son and the Son is the river thereof eternally flowing out of the Father as Person, while abiding within him in essence. The Father and the Son give forth their breath (or spirit). Thus the originated river with its original source is the origin of the Holy Ghost. Unity which, logically speaking, is the condition of the original source is also the condition of the river which, together with its source, is source of the Holy Ghost. And as this oneness is the nature of them both so too it is the nature of the breath exhaled by both. This river then is fontal. The unity which is in them both is unnecessitous, it has no need of speech, but subsists alone in unbroken silence.* Not that the utterance dies, i.e. the spoken essence. But where speech beats into the silence of its nature both have one common character, the character of sameness. What is this? It is the motionless dark that no one knows but he in whom it reigns: the one with its selfhood. First to arise in it is light. Lo, this is the originated river, and origin itself, which has the character of light as proceed- ing forth in its individual nature. And what here streams forth to view will reveal itself and that from which it springs. In its interior procession this originated river, which is also the origin itself, has the nature of obscure, unmanifest intelligence, but the light proceeding forth brings revelation to the mind, beguiling it out of itself into its mysterious indwelling cause. There it is shorn of light’s illusion. Of everything, that is, which has been revealed to it in the fonn of light. Thereof it is despoiled, but now it finds another and better than this light-like understanding. Light has mode without knowledge. Darkness is knowledge without mode, a thing, that is, we can in nowise have. The mind 24 MEISTEII ECKHART is rid of light when it is rid of mode; and it is rid of darkness when, letting go of all natural things, it sinks in nameless actuality. Then it loses both light and darkness in the abyss that creature in its own right never plumbs. Such is the estrangement in the one as foreshadowed in the ordinary mind, but the realization of unity which the blessed have lies in the exquisite consciousness of another than themselves.
O unfathomable void, bottomless to creatures and to thine own self, in thy depth art thou exalted in thy impartible, imperish- able actuality; in the height of thy essential power thou art so deep thou dost engulf thy simple ground which is there concealed from all that thou art not; yet those whom thou wouldst commune with shall know thee with thyself. As St Paul declares, ‘ Then shall we know as we are known.’ This knowledge the mind gets not from its individual nature; the unity hales it in the Three into itself, that is, to its true and natural abode where it transcends itself in what inhales it; where ‘ the spirit dies all dying in the wonder of the Godhead.’ This dying of the spirit means its con- fusion with the one essential nature though it remains discrete in the Persons of the Trinity. This shows the activity of spirit; its having variety of Persons. But by their union is shed a single light, for the three Persons are aglow with one intrinsic nature, like three lights with one shine. According to St Augustine this essential light is cast by the Persons into the pure spirit. At its glance the spirit forfeits self and selfliood and the uses of its powers. Such is the effect of the shaft of pure impartible light of unity which this spirit is rather than itself when it is reduced to nothing but «fche same. We call the unity naught because mind has no notion what it is; what the mind does know is that it is upheld by another than itself. Its upholder then is aught rather than naught, though mind has no idea what it can be. It is more real to him than his own self in that it belies his personal naught. For mind, as actually dwelling there, loses every means of divine nature, which to him is all things. He loses his individual nature and yet he does not die; he wins the nature of divinity although not God by nature but by grace. Now remember, he is something created out of naught. Yet he, a mere created wight, is drawn by the power of God’s essence into his unity, a thing unknown in anywise to any creature. This unity which is in nowise creaturely is poverty, for it is poor of creatures, its content being that of simple actuality. This modeless creature-essence is the being of the Persons who alone contain it in its most primitive and simple form as their nature. This knowledge de-ments the mind. This spiritual dementia means the absolute modelessness of the unity which the Persons have in actual mode. The spirit broods in TRACTATES sameness without light or darkness. Sans light, in its impene- trable actuality; sans darkness in its lack of any special name. The spirit free from matter and from form has taken on the form of God. Thus the mind attains to its eternal image which is one in its essential nature and threefold as uttered in the Persons. Though the spirit in this image has an eternal nature of its own yet in itself it is a thing created. This created thing is mens; by mens being meant the spark, the living principle of spiritr This is the spirit in itself. Its eternal image is another; that is really God. When the spirit in itself turns from all things becoming into the not-becoming of its eternal object in the Persons, whence it comes, then the mind is said to return to its exemplar. Then void shines into void: the purified becomingness of mind turns to the pure not-becoming nature of its eternal idea. In this embrace is consummated that exalted union wherein at length the spirit at one with all its nature is in divine atonement. Where these two meet in one, equally spirit and not-spirit, there is beatitude.
Now consider what the spirit of God means. The most signi- ficant and subtile word that creature can employ is spirit (breath or ghost) and that is why we call God spirit. But creature has no proper name for the nameless God and therefore to our mind God is not spirit.
Mark too the meaning of spirituality of soul. It means that, aloof from the coil of nether things, she is living at her summit in thought and love. Here she is one spirit with God. Spirituality of soul, besides, means that in her aught she is no more material than in her naught wherefrom she was created. Such is the spiritual nature of the soul. But she is de-spirited (de-mented) when, at her absorption, she is what is his rather than lier own, and this is the perfection of her sanity. The interior spiration of God, again, is his hidden nature, the quarry of the mind which it escapes; for tjiis mysterious and silent one lies hid in depths of stillness that no creature ever plumbs. This being is beyond our grasp, whereat, rejoicing greatly, let us hasten to seize it with itself; this is our highest happiness. So be it, by thy help, O divine Trinity. Amen.
XIII 1 THE FLOW INTO THE FATHER Concerning the flow into the Father, note as follows.
The Godhead is contained in the Father as nature, wherefore ' See Spamor’s Texte, B. 2, from which the words in brackets are taken.
MEISTER ECKHART he is omnipotent and receives naught from aught that he is not himself in his divine potentiality, seeing that he has it in him in essence, as his own. Nevertheless, speaking of the Father we mean the Person of the Father, and speaking of the Godhead we mean his nature, his impartible substance, that is to say. Now since this nature stays brooding in settled immoveable stillness, moving all things which have proceeded in eternity in the word of his power (or potential Word), it follows that, as power, it has ever been flowing into the Father making him able to beget a Son like unto himself. We can prove it thus. The Persons are impotent as Persons; anything they do is done in virtue of their nature which is their real being. So much for the flow into the Father which he has of his own nature wherein he is omnipotent.
Now mark* The soul has received two powers by nature. The first of these powers is understanding. This comprehends the Trinity, although it is incomprehensible, and all its works. Observe how understanding comprehends the Trinity, and all its works, despite its being incomprehensible. The soul in her understanding is the image of the Son and the Son is the Father’s understanding. So when the soul is empty of her own understanding, and only the Son is her understanding, she understands with the Son the Son and the Father and their common Spirit. That is how the soul comprehends the Trinity and all its works.
Her other power is will. It is its nature to cast itself into the unknown which is God. God is said to be unknown because no creature knows him as he knows himself; as known to himself he is unknowing to all creatures. Hence we call God agnosia. Now the chief power of the soul is too fastidious to dally with temporal, known things, so free will boldly disregards the known and cleaves to what it knows not. As St Paul says, ‘ I know not; God knoweth.’
Christ says, ‘ When I am ascended I will draw all things to me.’ He means that when he dawns upon our heart artd understanding he gathers us up into himself. In this sense all creatures are one man and that man is God. [In this sense man is all things. For he has the nature of all creatures, and souls joined to Christ are in this sense one man with him. He is the head and they are his members, who are in his charity.] In Christ his all was assembled into one. His higher and his lower faculties, and the senses of his outward and his inward man were in harmonious union with his highest power, conceived there by divine conception, which was united with him in one Person. And so with the man in whom all creatures end, in whom all multitudinous things have been reduced to one in Christ: man is then one in God with Christ’s humanity. Thus all creatures are one man and that man is God TRACTATES 878 in Christ’s Person. As one master says: With Gk)d one spirit and with Christ one body, that is unity indeed.
With the powers received from the Trinity the soul knows the ordering of all things ordained by God in such exalted fashion. But those that turn away their eyes from God relapse into the self- same naught wherein they were before they had received the likeness of the Trinity, this likeness of the Trinity aye informing them of the dark nothing back to which they wend. In this darkness gather all the pangs of hell. The dark enwraps them and hides the sight of God; it burns them past soothing by their created aught. This is bitter to their conscience which damns them to all time. In this pit of nothingness they sink for evermore, powerless to grasp the naught they were before they had the likeness of the Trinity.
And now, my children, let us examine these dark sayings carefully. You will see the obvious meaning of these damned. But another, ghostly, sense lies hid therein, which it behoves you to note specially. This applies to the elect who turn away their mind from God and How back into that same naught, for when the soul is carried by her understanding above all things and beyond the scope of her own understanding to the understanding of the sovran good she secs that to all creatures this is unintelligible. So down she goes with her own understanding.
The fastidious soul can rest her understanding on nothing that has name. She escapes from every name into the nameless nothing- ness. Escaping her own nature she falls clear of her own aught. The naught she falls into is the unknowing, which is called the dark. ‘ In this dark gather the pangs of hell,’ where the soul is plynged sheer into the void. This only happens when she is perfectly devoid of knowledge. The slightest trace of knowledge or under- standing of the naught that she is plunged in would be hell- torment to her. All sense and knowledge of the naught ends in this darkness. ‘ The darkness burns them past salving by any of their kind. Bitter is this conscience which damns them to all time. In this abyss of nothingness they sink for evermore, failing to grasp the naught they were before they took the likeness of the Trinity.’ By virtue whereof they have their being. To approfound the naught wherein they drown they are as helpless as they were when they were not. All sense and knowledge end in the darkness of their naught. For this darkness is the incom- prehensible nature of God. She sinks for evermore in the depths of this naught. She sinks and drowns; she drowns to her own aught. Her aught, surviving, sinks as naught to naught. But the naught that sinks can never comprehend the naught it sinks in. Every virtue mastered and transcended, the soul cries; ‘ Even MEISTER ECKHART MEISTER ECKHART so I cannot glorify and love God to the full. I die then to the virtues casting me into the naught of the Godhead to sink eternally from naught to aught,’ The highest meed of love and praise the soul can lavish on the sovran good is given in the knowledge that all her love and praise fall short of God. So down she goes through the little she can call her own and dying to her virtues is cast into the naught of her own self.
Two points mark here. She casts herself with the naught of herself when, self-bereft of her exalted power she ever regards her own insignificance.
The other naught she plunges in is the naught of the Godhead. Seeing that she herself is naught and not disposed to stay at aught, the soul casts herself into the naught of the Godhead and so comes with naught to naught. She wants the aught she recognises in herself to perish in the naught which is its very aught and so subsist in unity. She sees we cannot love and glorify God better than by recognising how inadequate all love and glory are. Wherefore she holds her peace. St Dionysius being bent on lauding Mary’s virtues found them so inconceivable he held his tongue. By his dumbness the worthy Dionysius did Mary highest honour. Thus it befalls the soul on being ravished into God’s incomprehensibility. Her lips struck dumb, ‘ O groundless Truth,’ she cries, ‘ how paltry is our praise! ’ So she attains to union close enough for God to pour himself into her every whit and snatch her every whit into himself, leaving no trace of either vice or virtue; nor does the soul know any difference.
Fo^ you must know that to the soul in her perfection goodness would con\e quite natural; she would not merely practise virtues, but virtue as a whole would be her life and she would radiate it naturally. We seem to be vicious or virtuous from being now the one and now the other. This should not be: we ought to be always in a state of perfection. That is one thing to note.
Further, God absorbs the soul, leaving no trace. This means that the soul ravished by God into the peace and quiet of his secret self makes little show save to her kind. There the soul knows no separation, for he who has absorbed her has merged her in himself. She well knows that she is but knows not what she is. — The sun in certain countries is too hot for fruits to flourish on the surface of earth, but, on the other hand, the sun produces gold in plenty in the bowels of earth. And.so with the soul in whom the bright sun of the divine nature shines: it produces its like there, scattering the darkness and bringing about perfect unity. Look you,* it behoves us to be very merciful to these, for, withdrawn into his hiding, they are out of touch with the profane.
TRACTATES 875 St Chrysostom says, ‘ It is not yet manifest what we are, but when we are changed into him we shall show what we are.’ What- ever she may take herself for, to God she is creature.
The Godhead is a spiritual substance, so impenetrable that none can say what manner of thing it is. They say; God in the Trinity is the living light in its visible radiance. In other words, the three Persons are but one in nature though distinct in Person in the same sense that the source of light is not the light nor is the source its shine. Applying this to the three Persons, the source is the Father, the Son is the light and the Holy Ghost is the shine. The Father is the living source in whom all things have lived eternally without themselves as in their cause. The light is the Son in whom all things appear eternally as in their idea. The shine is the Holy Ghost in whom all things are one eternally as in their naught. Not that one Person is the life and another the light: the three Persons are one life, one light.
The Trinity is the heart of the divine nature. As you may prove. For in human life it is the heart which beats in all the limbs, energising, co-ordinating them. Because the limbs receive from it, therefore it is called the heart. Now touching the God- head, this is not active in its nature, but anything it does it does with the Persons, and the Trinity is called the heart of divine nature because this works by means of it, and because it (the Trinity) is the origin of all things and all things flow back into it and end. This heart’s heart, again, is the paramount power of the unity wherein and whereby it is omnipotent. Human nature Hows in love into the Trinity as into its universal origin. The unity of the Trinity is bottomless and nothing is contained therein. In the embrace of unity the naked soul sinks down for aye nor ever touches bottom. Her temporalities (i.e. the created natures of her powers) stop at the Persons, whereas her pure essence is received by the pure unity of God without return.
Behold the soul divorced from every aught. For he who stoops to aught that is not God can never be received into God’s unity. This unity is causeless; it is self-caused. Of bottomless depth the floor, of endless height the roof, of boundless space the rim. I refer to the Trinity of Persons: the unity underlies it, holding it together; it overtops it, energising it; it surrounds it, ending its distinctions. Thus the Trinity is in the unity and the unity in the Trinity. As saith the psalm Quicumque vult.
That we should know ourselves and God so far as we are able, that is God’s will. If we would know ourselves we have to recog- nise that we are nothing but the raw material of God for the blessed Trinity to work in. It behoves us therefore to be vastly careful not to hamper in any way the work which the exalted MEISTER ECKHART MEISTER ECKHART workman designs to carry out in us to his glory, but so to maintain ourselves that the material is always ready for the workman to do his work in us. St Paul says, ‘ The spirit of the Lord descends from on high in secret, working in whom it will and when and where and how it will in him in whom it meets no hindrance.’ In the children of God. They are led by this spirit. — It is thus ye shall know yourselves. Next, we have to know God. To this St Dionysius exhorted one of his disciples, saying, ‘ Up, friend, divest thyself of things and put off thyself that thou mayst under- stand the Sovran Good.’ Of it three things are predicated. First, it is a unique force entire in everything; next, a unique good embracing everything. (Thirdly) to know God really ye must know him as the unknown. So Dionysius says.
God’s will is our 'welfare, and our welfare eonsists in knowing God and doing accordingly. Here timorousness mutters in the soul, both she will and she will not. And hard on this comes rage of soul. When she divines that it remains for her to be somewhat that he is not, she is transported with ire. She would sooner come to naught than have or take aught that belongs to him. ‘ Lord,’ she cries, ‘ my welfare lies in thy never calling me to mind; and forbid, I pray thee, any creature ever to console me. I rejoice that my powers never come before thy face.’