The soul receives four things from God in her power of under- standing. First, the entire certainty of freedom, of riddance, from all creatures, which God objects to in her. Next, the full enjoyment of God while she abides in the power of love. Third, the complete protection of God against all harm from creatures. Fourthly, victory in this power over all her foes. For as the Son of God, so also is the soul, and the promise of the Son is the promise of the soul, only she is not suspended from where the Son issues from the Father. Fire and heat are one; taste and tasted are one, albeit far asunder. The Word God speaks eternally lies hidden in the soul so that one neither knows of it nor hears it. Dionysius says the soul resembles the procession in the Godhead since the higher powers of the soul have her nature common to them and each power flows into the rest. For the soul to rise
292 Meister Eckhart
to spirit she must betake herself to her eternal part, never failing to remember that, by the grace of God, hers is an imperishable nature and capable of eternal bliss. Her spirit is suspended from the unchanging God, so neither life nor death nor height nor depth nor angel nor man nor any creature can loose her steadfast hold on God: the soul who dies in God is also buried in him and beyond the ken of creatures just as much as God is beyond their ken. As Dionysius says, when the soul considers the greatness of God’s might beside her littleness she casts herself out of herself and out of every creature and thus reduced to naked nothingness, God keeping her in his power, she persists simply'in the grace of God. God is concerned solely with himself; he is to each thing absolutely whole. And the soul should be the same: what God is by nature she must be by grace: detached and free from creatures, abandoning all things to God as though they were not. In a soul like this all that survives is God: his uncreated Breath is what the soul draws in inspiration, and she is spirit to all things and all things spirit to her, the eternal spiration of the Holy Ghost. Vicentius the philosopher observes, ‘ The spirit detached is of such perfection that what it sees is real, what it wills comes true and its commands must be obeyed.’
It must be remembered that when the free spirit stands in perfect isolation it constrains God to itself, and if it could subsist as form devoid of accident it would have all the character of God. But this God grants to none beside himself; the utmost God can do is to give himself to him, and such an one is so far raised up to eternity that nothing temporal can move him, nothing material affect him ; he is dead to the world, as St Paul says, ‘I live not: Christ liveth in me.’
According to Dionysius, death in God is nothing but the un- created life, that is, God himself, not now called the soul but the sovran power of God, because with it he performs his will. What the five senses get from such a soul she gives the whole of to her inner man whenever he embarks upon some high adventure, and such an one is then nonsensical (or senseless), his object being the rational, a-sensible idea. Dionysius comments on the dictum of St Paul, ‘ There be many that run for the crown but it falls to none but the wise.’ This race, he says, is nothing else than the flight from creatures to union with their uncreated God. The soul, in hot pursuit of God, becomes absorbed in him, and she herself is “ reduced to naught, just as the sun will swallow up and put out the dawn. St Augustine says, ‘The soul has a private door into divine nature, where for her all things amount to naught.’ And, ‘The flavour of the spirit spoils the taste for flesh ° ; and, ‘ The soul at her summit is ignorant with knowing, for in the oneness of
Tractates 293
the spirit those that have abandoned everything to God are as he had them when we existed not.’ The Lord Jesus stands before the soul as the perfeet pattern for our human conduct. But the subjective aspect of the three Persons— Godhead, mind—no crea- ture ever saw, not soul nor angel nor the humanity of Christ, in its own nature. Yet it is held by some, and Meister Eckhart of Paris notably, maintains in the teeth of all objections: As surely as you know me for a man so surely God gives birth to his own nature in the ground of my soul as in his heaven, and I am not happy till I return to God discarding every means of sin and all its brood together with all creatures. For in the selfsame ground wherein the Father bears his Son in his own nature therein am I born. In the soul that has trodden underfoot all the ills of time _ the Father naturally will beget his Son as surely as my father gat me a living man. In the very ground wherein the Father gets his Son therein does he get me and all whom the Father draws to him by grace. And as God in himself is absolutely free from things so I am there by grace what God is by nature. God destines all of us to such a glorious lot as few indeed can credit who have not gone out of themselves. If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself : he is the very highest uncreated heaven of all the heavens in God’s nature. That the soul in us is deathless is not our doing but God’s: it is the nature of her. But union comes by grace, the highest stooping down to inform the lowest, and therein lies our hope of future sight.
The soul ascends from corporal things and, being caught up above herself, abides within herself, first, for the sake of the delights she finds in God. For the divine perfection invests her in him with his likeness. His fullness is poured forth without stint : angels more in number than the sands and grass and water- drops and every single angel with his own distinctive nature, not one the same as any other.—Secondly, the soul ascends for the sake of the purity she finds in God; things in him are all quite pure and noble, but once they issue forth from him into the nearest creatures there is all the difference between aught and naught.—Thirdly, the soul ascends for the recollection she enjoys in God. In order to grasp God she must have a wont that is higher than herself; though God had made a thousand earths and a thousand heavens the soul could comprehend them all in her one power, the active power’s reflection. But she cannot conceive God in the act of making her in his own image.—Fourthly, the soul ascends for the sake of the infinite good things she enjoys in God: all things in him are ever new in his Son who to-day is being born the same as though his Father had never given him
294 Meister Eckhart
birth. And as God is flowing into the soul she is flowing back into God.
The soul takes four steps into God. On turning to God, at first she feels afraid of his magnificence. Her next step is to overcome this fear and conceive the hope of God’s affection. Her third step brings the vehement desire, she hails it as the promise, of the infinite embrace wherein she is embraced by God.— At the fourth step she falls into such deep oblivion she never thinks of leaving what she has found in God. God made the soul for his only Son to be born in her. And when and where soever there befalls this birth it gives God greater pleasure than the creation of the heavens and earth because the soul is nobler and bigger than the heavens. As there is wedlock between a man and wife so there is wedlock between God and the soul. The head power in the soul is the man and the lowest is his wife. The man in the soul always stands bareheaded and the woman veiled, the lower power being caught up to the highest of the soul. First God begets his likeness in the soul and afterwards himself as he is in eternity. God’s Son is the soul’s Son: in him God and the soul have the same Son, that is, God. Once this birth has happened in the soul she is fit for God, and the oftener this birth befalls the more at home the soul will be in God, in his paternal heart.
The soul has two feet, understanding and love. And the more she knows the more she loves. Who shall cause her to fall, she being upheld by the sustainer of all creatures? Grace lending wings to desire she is borne out of herself, and by grace and in grace she is borne into grace and past grace into God her first cause where in blissful union her lot is good beyond compare. There every sense is dumb; the soul’s will and God’s will are confused with one another, the two wills love-locked in the true atonement. Now the soul does neither more nor less than the work of God, for there no longer lives in her anything but God. As the soul cries in the Book of Love, ‘ I have run the whole world round and have found no end to it. Wherefore I have cast myself into the solitary point of my one God who has wounded me with his glance.’ Whom this glance did never wound, his soul was never pierced with the love of God. St Bernard says, ‘ To the spirit that feels this glance it is ineffable ; to him that feels it not it is incredible.’ ’”Tis an arrow sped without anger and received without pain; thence starts the pure and limpid stream of healing grace which opens the inner eye to perceive in blissful beholding the delights of this divine affliction wherein we enjoy unheard-of spiritual favours, things never told nor preached of nor yet described in any book.
The soul must give up idle thoughts and worldly cares and corporal pleasures and find her way into his hiding-place whom the