One master says that in this crossing over time into the now, each power of the soul will surpass itself. The five powers must pass into her collective power (or common sense), and common sense will vanish into the formless power wherein nothing forms. Intellect and will are transcended. True, grace is a creature, but by no means altogether. The soul has no inherent grace excepting in her ground, and above this ground of the soul grace is indigenous. Therein grace does nothing, although it is effective in the uses of her powers; but in the ground of the soul grace, happiness and God’s ground are one and the same life wherein God is living. There the power behind the eye is as noble as the understanding ; there foot and eye rank equal. What the soul is in her ground has never been determined. But Paul says, ‘The grace of God is eternal life.’ Paul also says, ‘The wages of sin is death.’ The‘ deaths men die are all of them as nothing to the death of the soul who is divorced from God, from which may God preserve us. Amen.
The Soul
St Paul says, ‘ Put off self, put on Christ.” In abandoning our- self we initiate Christ and holiness and happiness and are ennobled.
Sermons and Collations 235
The prophet marvelled at two things. First, at God’s doings with the sun and moon and stars. And secondly he marvelled at the soul, at the prodigious things God does and has done with her and for her sake, yet do what prodigies he may she still preserves the absolute dispassion which befits one of her noble lineage. Mark the nobility of her descent. I make a letter of the alphabet like
the image of that letter in my mind, not like my mind itself. And so with God. God makes things in general like the universal image of them in himself, not like himself. Certain things he has specially made like emanations of his own, such as goodness, wisdom and other so-called attributes of God. But the soul he has made not merely like the image in himself nor like anything proceeding from himself that is predicated of him, but he made her like himself, nay, like he is, all told: like his nature, his essence, his emanating-immanent activity, his ground wherein he is subsisting in himself, wherein he is begetting his alone-begotten Son and where the Holy Ghost comes into flower : in the likeness of his in-dwelling out-going work did God make the soul.
It is a law of nature that fluids run downhill into anything adapted to receive them ; the higher not receiving from the lower but the lower from the higher. Now God is higher than the soul, and hence there is a constant flow of God into the soul, which cannot miss her. The soul may well miss it, but as long as a man- keeps right under God he immediately catches this divine influence straight out of God. Nor is he subject to aught else, not fear nor pain nor pleasure nor anything that is not God. Put thyself therefore right under God and thou shalt receive his inflowing divinity wholly and solely. The soul does not receive from God as from a stranger, as the air does the light of the sun, which it takes as a foreign intrusion. The soul receives her God not as a stranger nor as inferior to God, for inferior is both different and distant.
Philosophers say the soul receives as a light from the light, wherein is nothing foreign or remote. There is something in the soul wherein God simply is, and according to philosophers this is a nameless thing and has no proper name. It neither has nor is a definite entity, for it is not this or that nor here nor there; what it is it is from another wherewith it is the same ; the one streams into it and it into the one. Hence the exhortation ‘ Enter into God in holiness,’ for here is the source of the soul’s whole life and being. This (light) is wholly in God and her other without him, so in this one the soul is ever in God, provided she smother it not and extinguish it in her.
Philosophers say this (light) is present in God and never goes out in him and God is ever in it. I say, God has ever been in it
236 Meister Eckhart
and of it eternally. The union of man and God is not a matter of grace (for grace is creature and creature has nothing to do with it), except in the ground of divinity, where the three Persons are one in nature and it (grace) is that nature itself. Wherefore an thou wilt, God and the universe are thine. That is, if thou wilt put off self and things : doff the habit of thy personality and take thyself in thy divinity.
The philosophers say that human nature has nothing to do with time ; that it is deeper-seated and more firmly rooted in a man than he is in himself. God took on human nature and united it with his own Person. Thus human nature was God who donned man’s nature only, not any individual man. Would’st thou be very Christ and God ? Put off, then, whatever the eternal Word did not put on. The eternal Word never put on a person. So do thou strip thyself of everything personal and selfish and keep just thy bare humanity; thus thou shalt be to the eternal Word exactly what his human nature is to him. Thy human nature is no different from his: they are identical: what it is in him it is in thee. And hence I said at Paris that every prophecy of holy scripture is fulfilled in the just man; for being perfect, the whole promise of the old and new testaments is accomplished in thee.
How to be perfect ? There are two aspects of the question. The prophet says, ‘ In the fullness of time the Son was sent.’ Now fullness of time is of two kinds. In the first place a thing is ful- filled when it is done, as day is done at eventide. So when time drops from thee thy time is fulfilled. Again, time is fulfilled when it is finished, that is, in eternity. Time ends when there is no before and after: when all that is is here and now and thou seest at a glance all that has ever happened and shall ever happen. Here there is no before nor after; everything is present, and in this immediate vision I possess all things. This is the perfection of time, and I am perfect and I am truly the only Son and Christ. May we attain to this fullness of time. So help us God. Amen.
But Now the Light in God
Eratis enim aliquando tenebre, nunc autem lux in domino (Ephes. 5,). St Paul says, ‘ For ye were sometimes darkness but now the light in God.’ The prophets walking in the light perceived and knew the truth umbraged in the procession of the Holy Ghost. Sometimes they were moved to return to the world and speak of things they knew to be conducive to our happiness, thinking
Sermons and Collations 287
to teach us to know God. Whereupon they would fall dumb, becoming tongue-tied and for three reasons.
First, because the good they knew by sight in God was too immense and too mysterious to take definite shape in their under- standing. Such ideas as formed were so unlike what they had seen in God, were such a travesty of the reality, that they held their peace for fear oflying. Another reason was, that what they had gotten in God rivalled God’s very self in its immensity and sublimity and yielded no idea nor any form for them to express. Thirdly, they were dumb because the hidden truth they saw in God, the mystery they found there, was ineffable. So it befell from time to time that, coming back and speaking of these things, they slipped, through lapses from the truth, into gross matter and tried to teach us to know God by means of infernal creature things.
Paul says, * but now the light in God.’ Aliquando, to those who are instructed, is the same as when and expresses time, which is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. He means not time alone but temporali- ties ; not only temporal things but temporal affections ; not only. temporal affections but the very taint and aroma of time; for as, where an apple has lain the smell lingers, so with the contact of time. According to our best authorities the visible heavens and the sun and stars have nothing to do with time beyond bare contact with it. This I cite as showing that the soul, which towers high above the heavens, has, at her very summit, no connection with time at all. Many times I have explained about the act in God, the birth wherein the Father bears his one-begotten Son whose procession causes the interior blossoming of the Holy Ghost, that the Spirit proceeds from both and that in this pro- cession the soul comes leaping forth, the image of the Godhead being sealed into the soul in this procession; and that in the return of the three Persons the soul goes back, re-informed into her primitive and formless form. Or as Paul puts it, “now the light in God.’ He does not say, ‘ Ye are the light’ but * now the light.’ Meaning, as I have often said, that to know things (really) we must know them in their cause. The philosophers tell us that things are suspended in their birth as in a look-out over their existence. The Father gives birth to his Son now. In this eternal birth wherein the Father generates his Son, the soul comes into her existence which is the image of the Godhead imprinted in her soul.
It was mooted in the schools and maintained by some of the professors, that God imprints his image in the soul as a picture is painted upon canvas, and it fades. This was refuted. Others suggested with more truth, that God leaves in the soul a permanent
238 Meister Eckhart
impression of the nature of an abiding intention, as thus : my wish of to-day is my purpose of to-morrow, the idea of which is kept alive by my actual thinking of it, just as, they said, God’s works are done. For if the carpenter were perfect at his work he would not need materials: he would no sooner think a house than, lo, it would be made. And so with works in God: he thinks them and behold they are.
Then came a third professor who spoke most truly of them all. He pointed out that yonder no work is done at all: it is the now, being without becoming, newness without renewing, and this existence is his essence. God’s content is too subtile for renewal. And also in the soul there is a subtile nature too fine and rare to be renewed. In God it is all the here and now ; unrenewable.
There are four points I had intended to discuss: the subtile nature of God, the subtile nature of the soul, the work of God and the work of the soul. These I must leave over for the present.
Riddance
Qui audit me non confundetur (Eccl. 2459). The eternal wisdom of the Father says, ‘ He that heareth me is not ashamed. (If he is ashamed he is ashamed of his shame.) He that worketh
-in me does not sin. He that reveals me and fears me shall have
everlasting life.’ I will consider first these words of the eternal wisdom, ‘He that heareth me is not ashamed (or, confounded).’ To hear the eternal wisdom of the Father he must be within, at home and by himself.
Three things prevent our hearing the eternal Word. The first is body, the second number, and the third is time. If we were rid of these three things we should be living in eternity and in the spirit, solitaries in the desert listening to the eternal Word. But our Lord says, “ No man heareth my word or my teaching till he be free from self.” To hear God’s Word demands absolute self- surrender. Hearer and heard are one in the eternal Word. The subject the eternal Father teaches is his essence, his nature, his whole godhood, which he divulges to us altogether in his Son, teaching us to be the Son himself.