TRACTATES 887 he possessed them when we were not. God’s kingdom means the soul being full of God and nothing of herself. In this nothing God dwells and the soul dwells in the same nothing. There she changes not and thereinto no creature can get in its own right, and creature can rise no higher. St Dionysius says, ‘ God dwells in the nothing.’ O Dionysius, that is not enough! God dwells in the nothing-at- all that was prior to nothing, in the hidden Godhead of pure gnosis whereof no man durst speak. Unity is of God alone. As St Dionysius says: ‘ Did God not dwell in the naught things would all perish.’ St Dionysius, that is not enough I Did God not dwell in the nothing-at-all sustaining creatures with his might, they would all come to nothing for they by nature pass away into the nothingness from which they were created. There- fore God dwells in the nothing-at-all that was prior to nothing.
Creature has access to God, who is her being, energising in the power which moves her to rise from naught to aught. Now St Paul asks, and Augustine too, ‘ How did I get from naught to aught, from worm to God, from creature to creator? ’ The soul shall be so one with God she weens that nothing is save God alone and that God made no creature save herself alone. The soul that makes this transcendental passage enters the universal peace. She is God as he is in himself. Christ says, ‘ I have been man for you and if ye are not God for me ye wrong me.’ God became man that we might become God. God in his God-nature lay hid in human nature so that we saw naught but man. And so this soul shall hide her in God’s nature until we can see naught but God; not putting on a Person as Christ did but wholly immersed in the divine nature. God is not a nature like a creature is ^hich has some quality another lacks. The brewer who is also baker we cannot simply call a brewer for he is baker too. God is the nature of each nature: he is all natures’ nature undivided. He is the light of lights, the life of lives, the being of beings, the reason of reasons. He is all natures’ common nature. As Dionysius says: ‘ We cannot say he is a nature seeing that he is impartible and there is nothing like him.’ And again St Dionysius says: ‘ We know God only in unknowing.’
When God enters the soul he comes in with all things. Although in God there is but one thing simply, the soul possesses it as separate notions, angels and devils and all. The soul is able to conceive all things in God and to discern what God is in them and what they are in God by soaring up to the supernal simplicity, into unknowing. St Dionysius says, ‘ That is Lordship, tran- scending earthly things and the likes of them and raising them to the heights.’ Christ says, ‘ Them that follow me I will raise to where I am.’ The Father speaks himself into the soul in his Son.
MEISTER ECKHART Now the Son is the Word of the Father, so the Father reveals to the soul in this wise that he is shapeless in his divine nature. The soul, speaking herself back to the Father in the selfsame Word, says she has no shape either in her naught, so she abandons her naught in the Word and plunges shapeless into the unshapen.
The Godhead is an abstract simple thing, omnipotent above all Person as well as having the power of the inseparate three Persons: giving to none, receiving from none, save as therein subsisting. St Dionysius says, ‘ The Godhead has gotten all things.’ The three Persons are in the Godhead; they reveal of it to creatures and each other as much as they are able to receive. The Father reveals the Godhead to himself and to his Son and Father and Son reveal it to the Holy Ghost and the three Persons reveal it to creatures and the Godhead wantons with the Word and before the Word and above the Word and the Word cannot comprehend it. Were the three Persons undistinguished in the Godhead, the Godhead would not be revealed at all and creatures would not have been created. The eternal activities are the cause of creatures. The Father reveals the Godhead, the Son reveals the Father, the Holy Ghost reveals them both: This revelation the Godhead gets from things beneath it. The supreme perfection is indigent of creatures. So it befalls from time to time that when the moon, shooting below the sun, mono})olises all the sunlight and the sun is said to be eclipsed, that then a star exerts its force upon the moon and drawn it off the sun; thus the sun owes its light to things beneath it.
The soul gets from the Trinity those finite things commensurate with her powers. Out of the naked Godhead there shines into the simple being of the soul a single light invisible to her powers, both high and low. For though the Godhead has in it all things, it has them all in one, not piecemeal. It begets not, so it is not Father; it receives not, so it is not Son nor Holy Ghost. The three Persons are God in person and in nature Godhead. The Godhead shines through the distinction of Persons and through separate creatures down to the very lowest, illuminating them and illuminating itself in itself. And when the soul in her naked essence enters into the Godhead, all things are within her ken even the meanest creature; then she illuminates herself and everything in her and discerns in the Godhead the divine nature and in the variety of Persons she loses her name and the Persons lose their names in the unity and everything the unity compre- hends loses its name in the unity. And here the soul, as good now as her naught, both draw together to their close in the God- head’s naught, where her powers are useless. As St Diony- sius observes, ‘ God passes away.’ By which he signifies that the TRACTATES TRACTATES soul in her naked essence has escaped her powers. Her powers have lost their deity, and the pure substance of their deity as well, to the Persons and their powers, which powers react upon the essence by hindering the swing-back of the Three to unity. Here love loses her name and all things in the Godhead’s naught, now the soul has flowed into her aught. In the Godhead’s naught, the Father has his consummation and the three Persons their one nature wherein they give to creatures the perfection of their created aught and the soul in her aught in the Godhead’s naught courses through all things all undisturbed in her being’s aught. As St Dionysius says, ‘ The soul is not moved in her naught in the Godhead’s naught neither does the soul move the Godhead in its naught. There she is so great..., she flows to him as it were in a light.’ St Dionysius says, ‘ The Godhead has come to naught for the powers of the soul cannot comprehend it.’
Blessed and praised be the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the unity of their divine nature. Blessed and praised be Jesus Christ the Son of the living God, one Person of divine nature and human nature.
XVI THE SOUL’S RAGE The soul is furious for self-knowledge. Her face is lit with passion, red with rage for the arrears withheld from her in God, because she is not all God is by nature, because she has not all God has by nature.
The masters say there is no fiercer appetite than a fjiiend’s desire to possess his friend and all that he possesses. The soul proclaims her rage so boundless she cannot be appeased by him. The bonds of love are all too cruel for her. Alas! she cries, who shall console me? My misery is too deep. Were I the one creator, beginningless and endless, and had I made creatures and were he soul like me, then I would go straight out of my estate and let her enter in and be God while I was creature; and if it were an obstacle to God to get his being from me, he would be welcome to efface me for I would perish sooner than be a hindrance to him. But seeing it is common to everything created to have somewhat of the eternal in man’s nature ever present in it, therefore I know not where to turn to find a place. So I take refuge in myself and there I find the lowest place, aye, one more base than hell for even thence do my shortcomings hound me. It seems I cannot then escape myself. Here I sit me down and herein will I stay. And I beseech thee, Lord, that thou never callest me to mind and forbiddest any creature ever 890 MEISTER ECKHART 890 MEISTER ECKHART to console me and deniest to my powers that ever any one of them should come before thy face, lest I offend thee. So I go out and let the soul go in.
The third rage of the soul is that she should be God and that there should not be a single creature, like when God was in his eternity ere he created creature, so that she may enjoy God- nature in its simplicity as he did before. But then his love were lacking to him, for it is the nature of good things to communicate themselves.
Fourthly, she rages to be absolutely nothing but the naked essence, there being neither God nor creature. She asks. What is the good of the three Persons in the Godhead and what is the use of creatures? But hold, she cries, except for them there would be no creatures. That must be the reason why there are three Persons in the Godhead: they are the cause of creatures. God is God-exalted: the creatures he has made cannot exalt him. All that creatures do to God is themselves: such glory as they can give to God is the same as they are.
XVII THE TWOFOLD WAY ^ Ego sum via, veritas et vita, ‘ I am the way, the truth and the life,’ says our Lord Jesus Christ. Mark specially the words, ‘ I am the way.’ In a twofold sense we take Christ as the way: according to his manhood and according to his Godhead. His manhood was the way of our own manhood. This we have to folloi'^ both the counsel of perfection as a whole and also in its parts. If but one of our members leaves the way of his example we are thereby deformed. St Paul declares we ought to live so that God may find in us the perfect reflection of all his divine works, i,e. we must copy the exemplar he has set before us. That is true spiritual life. But this is greatly hampered by numerous defects; mainly numerous interior shortcomings due to the powers of our soul being disorderly. The joy of the soul should be so set upon its proper work that no created things can gladden her but only the fact that her consciousness is clear. As Christ said to his disciples, ‘ Rejoice not in anything except in this, that your names are written in the book of life.’ And the fear of the soul should be so well controlled that she fears nothing under God either for person or possessions, nor aught that may be inflicted upon her whether by God or creature. And similarly with the ^ See Pfeiffer, Zt,f, dtsch, Alt,, Bd. 8 (2), 1850, and Preger, Zit.J. hist, TheoL, Bd. 34, 1864 (two versions). Also Jostes, Nos. 18 and 19. For authorship see Preger’s Oeschichte, vol. i, p. 318.
TRACTATES 891 other powers, desire and thought. The entire soul, in short, has to be gathered up into the impartible simplicity of her will and her will must fly at the highest good and fasten itself thereto. But St Paul says, ‘ He who is fastened to God becomes one spirit with him.’
Behold how rich is the spirit grown thus one spirit with God! No things can enrich it though it hold sway over them all. For things are necessaries whereas its riches consist in its dwelling in a nature superior to creaturely necessity. He who has nothing and needs nothing is richer than the man who possesses all things with necessity. St Paul says: ‘ Our sufliciency is in God alone whose able ministers we are.’
Nor do the virtues enrich the spirit. Doctors declare that it is not, properly speaking, the virtues which enrich the spirit but the fruit of virtues. The soul has virtues of necessity. But virtues being a necessity, the spirit is of necessity not enriched by them. The utmost a spirit can attain to in this body is to dwell in a condition beyond the necessity of virtues; where goodness as a whole comes natural to it so that not only is it possessed of virtues but virtue is part and parcel of it: it is virtuous not of necessity but of innate good nature. Arrived at this the soul has traversed and transcended all necessity for virtues: they are now intrinsic in her. Now she has reached the goal whither the virtues merely pointed her, to wit, the infusion of the Holy Ghost. This is the fruit of virtue; this alone serves to enrich the spirit. Concerning this St Paul says: ‘ Put on the new man, Christ,’ who was in this way our way.
The other way is the way of his Godhead. ^ — ^What way has the Godhead and where can it go seeing it is in all places; and wherewithal does it go seeing that it has no feet nor anything bodily?
— The way of the Godhead is the unity wherein the three Persons run together into one essence. The going of the Persons consists in their mutual knowing and loving, each knowing and loving itself in the others. Thus do the Persons walk together in unity.
The feet with which the Godhead enters the Persons and the Persons the essence are: the one foot of the Godhead is foresight of all things; the other, pleasure in the things eternally foreseen, for God enjoys eternal wise the contingency of things. This refers to the eternal image. He enjoys only good in all things: image of all things which is very God.
It may be questioned, What pleasure does God enjoy?
All things must needs please him for he who saw was God and what he saw was likewise God. In their eternal image which is God himself, God saw himself and saw things as a whole. God MEISTER ECKHART enjoyed himself, God being in himself the unique one. The soul sees her impartible idea in God^ which has never come out of him. This her multiform image does, and the consummation of her spirit lies in the reduction of its here created aught to the naught of its eternal prototype. God is the origin of the spirit and the spirit never rests till it returns into its origin, to its eternal proto- type. Essentially this prototype is God wherefore it aye eludes the spirit which is never able quite to apprehend it. Yet it divines how it has been in God eternalwise without itself; and the supremcst bliss the spirit knows is to relapse into its origin, to its eternal image, wherein, as self, it is lost altogether. There the spirit loses its uses not its essence. The essence of the Godhead sucks the spirit out of itself into itself, making it as itself, so that there seems now but one essence. As though I were to take blood of a serpent — which is very red — and pour it into a trans- parent glass; the glass would lose its seeming not its substance. So in this union the divine light illuminates and outshines the spirit which shines one light with it. The spirit loses its seeming not its substance for God has fetched the spirit out and united it with himself. Natheless the spirit in this union can never plumb the depths of Godhead. As St Paul discovered when, caught up to the third heaven, he saw things not permissible, nay, not possible to speak of, and cried out: ‘ O thou depth of the riches of wisdom and knowledge, how unsearchable are thy judgments and thy ways past finding out.’ God’s riches consist in having nothing and being nothing that can be clothed in words. His wisdom consists in the well-ordering of things. God’s knowledge is his concqption of himself in his supernal light. Concerning which St Dionysius says, ‘ The light God dwells in is his own nature which is known to none besides himself.’ This is the highway of the Godhead which no creature ever trod. Of it God spake by his prophet: ‘ As the heavens arc higher than the earth so arc my ways higher than thy ways.’ — St Augustine says. There is nothing more difficult and more exacting nor at the same time more useful and salutary to the soul than excursions in the science of the holy Trinity and unity.
Mark well, therefore, the meaning of the Persons and the essence.
— ^What is a Person in the Trinity?
— ^A Person is that which preserves its own rational individuality apart from any other distinct Person. One Person is not another. The work of the Persons consists in the genesis and output oi* things. Genesis belongs to the Father alone; outputting of things to the Trinity jointly.
— ^What is the essence of the three Persons in the Trinity?
TRACTATES 898 — ^That which, impartible, contains all things impartibly while of itself as essence it neither generates nor produces things. That is done by the three Persons which activate the essence or it could do nothing. Nevertheless the Persons do not act as three; they work as one God.
— What is the potentiality of the essence?
— The potentiality of the essence lies in not being a rational Person: in persisting in its essential unity. Not that it differs from the Persons; this same essence is the essential nature of the Persons and the being of all things. Existence of all existing things, life of all living things, the light of lights and nature of natures: all this it is in its impartibility. Not so with the Persons; they are not the personality of things as essence is the essence of all things. The Father is not able to be anybody’s person but his own. lie gat another Person out of his Person not out of his essence: with his nature in his nature. That the Father was able to produce a Son so rarely, so consummately his like, a God as perfect as himself, is due to his essential nature. When he begets the Son the Father gives him another Person than his own Person but not another nature nor another essence than his own. It follows that the essence is revealed in the procession of the Persons. The Persons are able to reveal the essence which cannot of itself reveal itself, seeing that of itself, as essence, it neither gets nor bears. This impotence of the essence is its chief potentiality; nevertheless it is revealed to itself.
The Persons know and comprehend the essence equally. The essence bears the same relation to all the Persons. Now i^ is a question among theologians whether or no the personality has basic knowledge and comprehension of the essence, seeing that the essence is comprehended only by the essence?
The Persons have basic knowledge and comprehension of the essence because this is the Persons’ own essential nature; more- over, the essence is not comprehended wholly save by the three Persons, whose nature it is. The Persons comprehend the essence wholly, they being God in Person by reason of their comprehension of his essence which is their own essential nature. And so far as the soul comprehends this essence she too is divine. Though what she comprehends of it is no bigger than a drop compared with all the boundless ocean. Still it is God whole. The surplus good which is ever baffling her apprehension, that is the shadowy abyss wherein, self-lost, she sinks eternally.
It may be questioned. Why is there not one Person like one essence? — I answer that, existing things exist not from themselves but in eternity are descended from an origin which is the origin MEISTER ECKHART of its own self and in time have been created out of nothing by the blessed Trinity. Their eternal origin is the Father and the universal image in him is the Son; love to this same image is the Holy Ghost. Had not this archetype of all things been always in the Father, the Father could never have wrought anything at all. That is, in his modeless essence. There must be more than one Person, for it was in the eternal procession (that is, in the begetting of) the Son that things as a whole emanated from the Father and not from themselves. This eternal procession is the cause of things on their eternal side, but in time they were created from nothing and in this sense they are creatures. In the eternal procession wherein they flowed without themselves, they are God in God. For as St Dionysius says, the Prime Cause generates all things in the likeness of itself.
Now mark the difference of this emanation in eternity and time. What is the (temporal) emanation? It is the indulgence of his love of clear discrimination. So we come forth into time by constraint of his love. The eternal procession is the revelation of himself to himself. The knower being that which is known. This is the eternal flow no drop of which did ever fall into any created intelligence; it is the Son from the Father. In the temporal emanation things flowed forth finite. In the eternal emanation they remain infinite. The flow goes flowing on in itself. As St Dionysius hath it, ‘ God is a fountain flowing into itself.’
The Father is the origin of his Son, in his eternal child-bearing; Father and Son originate their Spirit, in the eternal out-pouring. Butj^omeone may question, how about the Father-nature? Is it the cause (of the essence or is the essence cause) of the Paternity?
What follows needs clear thinking. Essence as essence neither gives nor takes. Now were the essence origin of the Father then the essence, being parent, would not be essence, it would be Person. But it is not; for essence in its unity is not Person. Again, were paternity the origin of essence the cause of this would be the paternal Person. But this is not so either. The Father in Person is a cause but not of essence; for paternity and essence have the same characteristic. That is why, in his paternity, he is the omnipotent cause. The essence cannot be apart from Person nor can Person be apart from nature, as ye can see. For nothing that exists can be without its nature, since it cannot take leave of itself; it must be what it is. Now the Father is a Person and he cannot be a Person without a nature nor can his nature be without a Person. Given his nature, there must be someone whose nature it is. Note then that the essence can in nowise TRACTATES 895 exist without distinction and hypostasis. Person and hypostasis can in nowise be without their nature, to wit, their essence.
Thus it is demonstrated that neither is the essence cause of paternity nor paternity cause of the essence, for neither can be without the other. The Son cannot be without the Father nor the Father without the Son nor the twain without the Holy Ghost albeit they have three properties to distinguish them apart. Not so with paternity and essence. Neither of these can be without the other. For albeit essence is not Person nor Person essence yet paternity and essence have the same nature so that neither can be said to be the origin of the other; for it is with one and the same nature that the Father originates his Son and these twain originate their Spirit which is of one nature with them both.
All hail to the exalted spirit that is received into this full, this naked knowledge which is unknown to those that are not naked of themselves. For the soul to be naked she must turn away from all the images and forms spread out before her and stop at none of them. For the divine nature is no form nor semblance that she can understand. Being turned away from these towards what transcends them — divorced, that is, from images and forms — ^the soul receives the likeness of the formless nature of God whose real form has never been revealed to any creature. This is the secret door into the divine nature, which the soul has in the image. For when the soul has naught to stay her, she is ready to pass into the image of God whereto none can attain be he not stripped of spiritual matter. Alas, how they obstruct this secret passage, those who so lightly stop in temporal things! Wherein also acknowledge my wretchedness. In this sense St Dionysius exhorted his disciples, saying, ‘ An thou wouldst know the hidden mystery of God, transcend whatever hinders thy pure perception,’ When with her pure intellect now illumined with divine light, the naked soul sees God, then she knows herself. And when she sees how apt she is to him, how she is his and how they arc both one, then, the burden of the body permitting, she remains thus always. This lofty intuition the soul has of the hidden mystery of God is that of which Job tells: ‘ In the horror of a vision by night he cometh and whispereth in the ears of men.’ What does he mean by the horror? Solicitude for this perception we arc speaking of. The nocturnal vision is the revelation of the hidden truth. And the whispering is the flowing union wherein kriower and known are one.
This book is diflieult and obscure to many people. Publish it not I pray you for God’s sake, for it was forbidden to me to do so. If any condemn it, forsooth it is the fault of his blindness for it is MEISTER ECKHART the absolute truth. But if there be in it things inaptly expressed, do not wilfully misunderstand it, for words fail in speaking of the divine nature. Its meaning is clear in the truth which is with Christ and in Christ. Wherefor may he be blessed and praised for ever. Amen.
XVIII COMMENTARY ON THE GOSPEL OF ST.JOHN The profound Gospel of St John begins: in principio erat verhum^ that is to say: ‘ In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ He who would grasp the interpretation of these abstruse writings of St John, which with God’s help I shall unfold, let him turn his mind from created things and from his own understanding, that being illumined by God’s spirit he may apprehend the meaning I shall give to these dark sayings.
To start with, I premise from his words, ‘ in the beginning,’ a beginning without beginning. In God’s name I proceed. In the beginning was the Word: in the source of the effulgent formal light of rational creature and in the origin of its radiance the Word subsisted as the perfect Word, perfect in its wordless potentiality, and this wordless word was with God. This gives me a hint of some distinction, the word being with God. Now bring your best intelligence to bear on this. When the bound word of the Persons’ unity remained unuttered by the omnipotent intellect, then the Word, suspended in its divine origin tran- scended all words and names. When it was with God in the providential light dawning devoid of the created universe, then God was manifest to the world. Wherefore I, Meistcr Eekhart, do affirm: as soon as God was he created the world, the world being with God distinct in name. Whereas God in his motionless power was free from God and every name, God was the unspoken word in the bottomless abyss of his divine nature wherein the Word as such did never throughly understand itself. A thing that understands itself waxes and wanes in the act of understand- ing, but this word does not wax or wane, it is unchanging in itself, so it has never understood itself in itself albeit it is the intellect of the Father. It was in the beginning of the new procession of the Son that that the Son proceeded forth into the time of natural images united with the word ever-abiding in the paternal source. This same Word wrought its entire work of nature after the fashion of a person, humanly, and the bound Word itself energises in the Father in his characteristic nature, this same word being eternally immanent by nature. And. such TRACTATES 897 being the nature of the Word it is therefore permissible to say, ‘ In the beginning was the Word.* I will now give the psychic interpretation, which whosoever cannot understand let him go to the truth for enlightenment.
In the beginning of the divine nature the soul is seeking herself above the points of time. Cast into the abysmal naught of the divine nature, her receptivity all gone, her portion in her felicity is the perfect naught that distinguishes her from creatures generally. As our Lord says, ‘ Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ But were it that the soul could know God with his own peculiar nature she would be loving something above God. Accord- ingly I say, that this word subsisting in the essential activity of the divine nature is the soul wholly deprived of receptivity, for with this she would be loving herself and all she is with a personal nature. So she may properly aflirm herself to be the work of God in the beginning where, albeit she is formless, she is expressing form. But the form she gets from God is gotten by the sealing in the soul of God’s own nature. In the beginning of her nothing- ness was the word and the word was with God as Son and the Word was God.
He goes on to say, ‘ The same was in the beginning with God.* Mark, I have jxist said, ‘ In the beginning was the Word.’ Now 1 say, ‘ and the Word was in the beginning with God.’ From these cryptic statements it appears that the Word was with God in the beginning. Now 1 suggest an obvious rational meaning. ‘ The word was in the beginning with God.’ 1 say, in the principle of paternity this same principle is to the Father the source of his entire Godhead, personal and essential, of Son and Spirit. ^ St John says, ‘ The word was in the beginning with God.’ Since there is in the Father an outpouring of his causeless divinity into the Word of his Son, this must occur in the paternal mind when, looking upon himself in the light of his abiding intellect, he perceives himself in the answering reflection in his divine essence; or, in other words, the conception of the Word is God. Moreover by this reflection of his divine nature the intellect of the Father fashions or utters itself in imitation of his nature. So the Word is Son and it is in the divine substance, to wit, in the intellectual reflection of the Father, that occurs this birth of the Word proceeding, thus it is one in essence and distinct in Person. Hence we may say: ‘ The same was in the beginning with God ’; and because introspection and reflection of the divine nature are involved in its continuous thinking of itself, therefore this birth is eternal. For if once this reflection were to stop, if mental holiday, inertia, should once supervene, there would remain one God without distinction of Persons. Thus the Word of the MEISTER ECkHART MEISTER ECkHART Father subsists eternally in its parental origin. Thereby it is ever being conceived and being born and born. The same was in the father-principle with God as distinct Person. This may well stand in lieu of my forhier explanations of the passage, ‘ In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.’ This is now fully explained.
Next come the words, ‘ All things were made by him and without him was not anything made.’ Examine this carefully. Granting that all things were made by him and that without him nothing was made, then supposing someone asks me, ‘ Can God do anything without me seeing, that all things were made by him and without him was not anything made? ’ I answer. No. God made all things with me standing in the groundless ground of God; God made all things through me while I stood in him idle. While the Father was performing the act peculiar to his nature I was standing right in the gate through which all things return perfectly free to their supreme felicity. As our Lord said, ‘ Father, to know thee one true God and only Son, that is eternal life.’ If life eternal be aught beside the rational soul I have no knowledge of it.