Further, my text says: ‘God sent his only-begotten Son into the world,’ by which ye are to understand not the external world: it must be taken of the inner world. As surely as the Father by his simple nature begets the Son innately, so surely he begets him in the innermost recesses of the mind, which is the inner world. Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground God’s ground. Here I live in my own as God lives in his own. To one who even for an instant has seen into this ground, a thousand ducats of red beaten gold are worth no more than a false farthing. Out of this innermost ground thy works should be wrought without why. Indeed, I hold that as long as thou doest thy works because of the kingdom of heaven, or God, or thine own eternal happiness, from without (that is to say), all is not well with thee. It may be tolerable but it is not the best. He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts, prayers, pious offices and so forth, than by the fireside or in the stall: in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle his head in a cloak and hide him under the table. For he who seeks God under settled forms lays hold of the form while missing the God concealed in it. But he who seeks God in no special guise lays hold of him as he is in himself, and such an one ‘lives with the Son’ and is the life itself. We might question life for a thousand years: ‘Why dost thou live!’ ' It would only say, if it replied at all, ‘ I live because I live.’ For life lives in.a ground of its own, wells up out of its own. It lives without a cause for it lives itself. And if anyone asked a proper man, one who works his own ground, ‘ Why dost thou work ?’ he too would say, if he told the truth: ‘I work because I work.’
Where creature stops, there God begins. All God wants of thee is for thee to go out of thyself in respect of thy creatureliness and let God be God in thee. The smallest of creaturely images that ever takes shape in thee is as big as God.—‘ How so?’
—lIt shuts out the whole of God. As soon as this image appears God disappears with all his Godhood. As this image fades out God comes in. [No temporal image is so godly but thrice harms the soul. First, it vexes spirituality ; next, it tarnishes her purity ; and thirdly, it disturbs detachment.
—‘ What does God do to my mind ?’
— Transcend thyself and repress creatures: God does that to thy mind.] 4
50 Meister Eckhart
God longs as urgently for thee to go out of thyself in respect of thy creaturely nature as though his whole felicity depended on it. - Why, man, what is the harm of letting God be God in thee ? Go clean out of thy self for God’s sake, and God will go clean out of his for thy sake. Both being gone out, what remains is simply the - one. In this one the Father gives birth to his Son, in his inner- most source. Thence blossoms forth the Holy Ghost and thence originates in God the will belonging to the soul. The while this will remains unmoved by creatures and by creaturehood, the will is free. Christ says: ‘ None goes to heaven but he who came from heaven.’ Things are all made from nothing ; hence their true source is nothing. This noble will, as far as it inclines to creatures, with them elapses into nothing.
The question is, Does the will lapse so far that it is never able to return ? Doctors reply with one accord that it does not return so far as it has lapsed with time.. But I maintain that if this will turns back, even for an instant, from its own self and things created and rallies to its source, there in its own free origin the will is free and in this instant time lost is all recovered.
People often say to me: ‘Pray for me.’ And I think to my- self: Why ever do ye go out? Why not stop at home and mine your own treasure ? For indeed the whole truth is native in you.
May we be apt to stay thus in ourselves and to possess the entire truth immediately, impartibly, in real happiness. So help us God! Amen.
Like a Vase of Gold
Quasi vas auri solidum ornatum omni lapide pretioso (Eccl. 50,9). My quotation will apply to St Augustine or to any virtuous soul, such being likened to ‘ a golden vessel, massive and firm, adorned with every precious stone.’ Because of the perfection of the saints we have no likeness to express them, and we therefore symbolise them by the trees, the sun, or moon. So here St Augustine is compared with a chalice of gold, solid and firm, all set with precious stones. Indeed the same thing may be said of any saintly virtuous soul who, leaving all things here, enjoys them yonder where they are eternal. Whoso renounces things in their contingent sense possesses them as absolute and eternal.
Every cup has two things : it receives and holds. The spiritual vessel differs from the physical. The wine is in the cup, not the cup in the wine, though the wine is not in the cup as it is in the body ; if it were in the cup as it is in the body we should not be able to drink it. It is different with the spiritual vessel. Every-
Sermons and Collations 51
thing received in this is in the cup and the cup in it and is the cup itself. All this ghostly cup receives is its own nature. It is God’s nature to give himself to every virtuous soul, and it is the soul’s nature to receive God, and this we say referring to the soul in her loftiest capacity. There the soul bears the image of God and is godlike. No image can be without likeness, but likeness can be without image. Two eggs may be both alike white, but one is not the image of the other: for one to be the image of the other it must proceed out of its nature and be born of it and be like it.
An image has two properties. First, it receives its being from the thing whose image it is, immediately and above will, for it is a natural product, sprouting out of its nature as a branch does out of a tree. Any face thrown on a mirror is, willy-nilly, imaged therein. But its nature does not appear in its looking-glass image : only the mouth, nose and eyes, just the features, are seen in the mirror. God reserves it to himself to display in his reflec- tions, at once his nature, all he is and all he can, and this above his will. His image is prior to his will, will following the image, for out of his nature there leaps first his image, focussing into itself the whole promise of his nature and his essence, all his nature pouring out into his image the while it abides intact within itself. “Now the masters locate this image not in the Holy Ghost but in the middle Person, for the Son, being the earliest issue of his nature, is therefore called his Father’s express image, and not the Holy Ghost : he is simply the flowering of the Father and the Son, and has one nature with them both. Will is not a mean between the nature and the image, nor, for that matter, can knowledge or per- ception, nay, nor wisdom, come between, for this image of God is the immediate product of his fecund nature. If there is means of . wisdom here it is the image itself. Thus the Son in the Godhead is called the Wisdom of the Father.
Know, this impartible image of God which is stamped in the soul is sealed direct in her innermost nature ; this most funda- mental, most noble part of her nature, is really what takes this soul-pattern, and that not by means either of will or of wisdom. As I remarked just now, if wisdom comes in here at all it is (as) the | pattern itself. God exists in this image without any means and the image subsists without means in God. But God is much more noble in the image than the image is in God. The image receives God not as being the creator; it conceives him in the guise of understanding, the summit of her nature actually taking on his form. This is the innate divine image which God has stamped in every soul by nature. I durst not give more to this image: to give it more would make it God himself, which it is not, or God would
not be God.
52 Meister Eckhart
The second characteristic of an image we note in its likeness to its object. And here observe especially two things. First: an image is not itself, neither is it its own. So an image received into the eye is not the eye itself nor has it any real existence in the eye but is merely suspended from and tethered to the thing it is the image of, whereto it entirely belongs and wherefrom it gets its being and is being that same being. Note well my definition of an image. There are four points to bear in mind, and haply others will occur to you. An image is not itself, neither is it its own: it is solely that thing’s whose reflection it is, and it is due to this alone that it exists at all. Things apart from the thing whose image it is, it is not and does not belong to. The image takes its being direct from the thing whose image it is, having one nature therewith and being the very same being. This is not a subjeet for discussion in the schools, though one may well propound it from the professorial chair. ;
Ye are always asking how ye ought to live. Lay then to heart this answer: Just as the image is here said to do, even so it behoves thee to live. Be his and belonging to him, not thine own and belonging to thyself nor withal to anyone. Whoever has a well-beloved friend holds his belongings dear and anything against his friend he will object to. Take, for example, the dog, an irrational beast. So faithful is he to his.master that he resents the things his master hates, while to his master’s friends he is most friendly. No count takes he of poverty or wealth; were some blind beggar his master’s bosom friend, he would be more affectionate to him than to the king or emperor who was his master’s enemy. I trow if it were possible the dog should be half faithless to his master, its other half were bound to hate itself. But. then some folks complain of having no interior life, no devotion, no sweetness nor any suchlike godly consolation. Marry, these fulk are all unrighteous still, and though they suffer it is not the best. Verily I say, as long as any image forms in thee which is not the eternal Word nor any shadowing forth of the eternal Word, be it never so good, in sooth it is wrong. That man alone is righteous who, having naughted all created things, stands facing straight along the unswerving line into the eternal Word, where, in the right, he is idealised and transformed. That man is gotten where the Son is gotten and is the Son himself.
According to the scriptures, ‘No man knoweth the Father but the Son,’ and hence, if ye desire to know God, ye have to be not merely like the Son, ye have to be the very Son himself. Some people think to see God with their eyes as they would see a cow, and they expect to love him as they would love a cow. This thou lovest for its milk and for its cheese : for its profit to thyself.