natures confluent in her where she stands in the midst and, seeing straight into them both, has at that point pure intuition of her wont and how what she enjoys there is withdrawn from her and how, though borne along with and by grace, she is still unable to apprehend God’s nature. She clearly sees that she is God’s and not her own at all. She is acutely sensible that enjoying and suffering are identical. That Christ should have action and passion both in one, bodily, that was the wonder. His soul must have suffered in all her powers. Her highest power suffering as much more than the rest as it was more capable of suffering. One wise doctor says, ‘In this intuition the soul has perfect joy, for perfect joy is perfect knowledge.’ Christ says, ‘They that know thee Father and thy Son whom thou hast sent, have life eternal.’ Also he says, ‘ Pray, that your joy may be full.’ St Dionysius says, fullness of joy is perfect consciousness, a balanced interchange of nature, whereby the soul beholds herself in the mirror of the Godhead. God is the mirror, unveiled to whom he will and veiled from whom he will. St Peter says, ‘ God fashioned his nature and the Persons in that nature and chose the nature not the Persons.’ St Dionysius says the soul has a light that lights her to work. By the light God casts on the angels next him they cast themselves back into God with all they are. As St Bernard observes, ‘Minds do not flow back into God in their natural light ; the Godhead absorbs them in its own light without _ their seeing.” Now St John says, ‘God is love, and he who dwells in love dwells in God and God in him.’ When God reveals himself to the soul and the soul loves God, she is in God and God is in her. When the sun shines and the eye sees it, the eye is in the sun and the sun is in the eye. Well then, friend mine, here you have the notion, which it defies me to express in words, for the divine nature in the Persons is a mirror, beyond the reach of any word. In so far as the soul can project herself beyond words so far she approaches that mirror. In that mirror the union is simply one of likeness.
When, Lord, I was in thee I was unnecessitous in my nothing- ness ; it was thy look, thy notice of me, that made me indigent. If it be death for the soul to part from God, then it is death to her to emanate from God. All change is a dying. Wherefore we die from time to time and the soul dies all-dying in the wonder of the Godhead, impotently grasping at the divine nature. In the naught she is undone and comes to nothing. In this not-being she is buried, in un-knowing she is merged in the unknown, in unthinking merged in the unthought-of, in un-love one with the unloved. Death’s grip none can unloose: it severs life from limb and the soul from God and casts her into the Godhead
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wherein, sepultured, she is ignored by every creature. She is forgotten-as one changed within the tomb nor is she held in any man’s embrace. She like God is incomprehensible. For the dead who have died in the Godhead are beyond our ken, like the dead are who die here to the body. That death is the soul’s eternal quest. Slain in the three Persons she loses her naught and is hurled into the Godhead. Where she discovers the face of her naught. ‘Thou art all fair my love, there is no spot in thee,’ says our Lord ; and of his incomprehensible beauty she declares, “ Thou art more fair.’ There she sees the secret art of God: how marvellously God contrived that nothing should be indigent, yet without detriment thereto. St Dionysius says: ‘ No wonder God made the soul indigent with a look, when the sun, unbidden, gives life to mites and worms in rotten wood.’ The soul, perceiving God’s immensity and her own insignificance, casts herself out of God’s heart and out of all creatures and rests upon her naked nothingness: the divine power has her in its keeping. As St Dionysius says: ‘ All things are naught at the command of God.’ Again he says: ‘ The look which goes from God into the soul is the beginning of faith whereby I believe things not revealed to me.’ So far as the soul sinks down in faith into the unknown good, so far she is one with the unknown good and is unknown to self or any creature. She well knows that she is but knows not what she is. Not till she knows all that there is to know does she cross over to the unknown good. This crossing is obscure to many a religious.
The nature of the soul is such that where she is at all there she is altogether. She is entire in every limb, for where her nature is at all there it is wholly. So is the Godhead in all places and in all creatures and in each wholly.
Unnatured nature is natured only so far as it is natureable. It natures not itself but the Father natures his Son in natured nature, for the Father is as much natured as unnatured nature, seeing that it is one with him. The Father is alone in unnatured nature and is the first in natured nature. And in natured nature the Son is naturing with the Father, for (Father) and Son nature the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost exists with the Father and the Son in natured nature and natures not. In (un)-natured nature they are one, natured nature distinguishing the Persons; and the Persons are as eternal in their Persons as the unnatured nature in its nature and their natured nature is as eternal in them as their unnatured nature, and this is nothing else than one God in three Persons, who nature creatures, each in its own nature, and give them the power and activity that is best suited to them. So dear each creature holds its nature that it would have no other.
386 ‘ Meister Eckhart
A master says, ‘ If sorrow could befall the Father he would rue his inability to make all things divine by nature.’ When the soul in her simple nature turns into God’s nature forthwith she is made one with God, but to heed discrete powers and persons and virtues hampers the soul’s divine unity. Her common sense endows the other senses with sight, hearing, touch and savour, albeit in itself no more than one. And the perceptions of the outward senses are all referred to common sense. Discursive reason sorts out what is good and, leaving out the animal and gross, presents it to the memory for union with the soul. Her highest power introduces it to her understanding which has intuition of God’s will, and so it is conveyed into the soul who harmonises all with God’s good will.
God in himself is simple good and undivided. The names the soul gives God are taken from herself. Albeit threefold in his Person, God is the one and only good by nature. He is omni- potent good in the Father, clear wisdom in the Son and pure goodness in the Holy Ghost. He is threefold and he is one in creatures generally ; and of those burning spirits who are con- sumed in the fire and brought to naught in him he is the impartible substance. When, having harmonised all things in herself, the soul is reduced to her impartible substance, then she inhales the powers of the divine nature and exhales them from her being into the being of the divine nature which permeates her throughly, the two beings meeting in one point which is common to the soul and God and the variety of Persons hinders not their unity nor does their nature interfere with the variety of Persons. He is threefold and one in every Person in his born and unborn natures severally and the Persons are not admitted to the essence. To receive one Person is to receive the divine nature threefold in its unity. For one Person in essence is as good as three distinct.
Happy the soul who, taking this transcendental flight, receives all things in the naked Godhead. That soul is buried in the face of God ; she is rapt into heaven wherein the three Persons dwell in the oneness of their nature. This is the hidden Godhead whereof no man can speak. Blessed are they who make this passover: all things are known to them in truth and they themselves unknown to any creature. So far as they are above creatures they are God and super-creaturely, owing to their unity with God. God’s face conceals them, every shadow of them, in itself. Where two unite, the stronger draws the weaker to it. Christ says, ‘ Ye have not chosen me but I have chosen you.’ Blessed are the chosen, they bear God’s image. Christ says, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.’ The poor in spirit are those who have abandoned all to God as
Tractates 387
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! 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 which 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 lam.’ The Father speaks himself into the soul in his Son,
388 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.