Sermon One: ALL CREATURES ARE WORDS OF GOD
“The Lord has stretched his hand out and has touched my mouth and has spoken to me.” (Jr. 1:9)a
When I preach, I try to speak of letting go and that human beings should become unwed from themselves and from all things. Second, I try to say that they should be conceived again in that simple good which is God. Third, I stress that people should reflect on that great nobility which God has put in their souls so that they might come to God in a wonderful manner. Fourth, I talk of the purity of the divine nature—that brightness of the divine nature which is ineffable. God is a Word but an unexpressed Word.
Augustine says: “The entire Scripture is vain. If you say that God is a Word, then it is thereby spoken; but if you say that God is unspoken, then God is also unspeakable.” But God is clearly something, so who can speak this Word? No one can except for one who is this Word. God is a Word which speaks itself. Wherever God is, there he speaks this Word; wherever he is not, there he does not speak. God is spoken and unspoken. The Father is a speaking action and the Son is an active speech. What is in me goes out from me; if I am only thinking it, then my word reveals it and yet remains inside me. It is in this way that the Father speaks the unspoken Son and yet the Son remains in the Father. I have often said that God’s exit is his entrance. As much as I am near God, to that extent God speaks himself in me. To the extent that all creatures who are gifted with reason go out from themselves in all that they do, to that same extent they go into themselves. With merely material creatures this is not the case; the more they do, the more they go out from themselves. All creatures want to express God in all their works; let them all speak, coming as close as they can, they still cannot speak him. Whether they want to or not, whether it is pleasing or painful to them, they all want to speak God and he still remains unspoken.
David says: ‘The Lord is his Name” (Ps. 68:4). “Lord” signifies the higher rank in authority; “servant” refers to the lower rank. Certain names belong properly to God and are disconnected with all other things—as, for example, the word God. This name God is the most proper name of God, as human being is the name of a human being. A human person is always human, whether he be foolish or wise. Seneca says: “It is a pitiable human being who does not come out more than a human being.” Certain names indicate relationships in God, as, for example, Fatherhood and Sonship. When you speak of a father, you think simultaneously of a son. You cannot first have a father who only later has a son nor a son who later has a father. But both carry in themselves an eternal being transcending time. There is a third category of divine names which suggests a relation to God but at the same time a reference to time. One also finds many names for God in the Bible. Yet despite all of this I maintain that whenever someone recognizes something in God and puts a name on it, then it is not God. God is higher than names or nature. We read about a good man who in his prayer pleaded to God and wanted to give him a name. Then a brother said: “Be still, you blaspheme God.” We can find no name which we dare to give God. Nevertheless, we are allowed those names with which the saints have named him and which God has dedicated in their hearts and which God has permeated with divine light. And this is where we first learn how we are to pray to God. We should say: “Lord, with that same Name which you have dedicated in the hearts of your saints and permeated with your light, we beseech you and praise you.” We should also learn that there is no name we can give to God such that we would seem to be implying that by means of it we had sufficiently praised and honored God, for God is elevated over all names and remains inexpressible.
The Father speaks the Son from his entire power and he speaks him in all things. All creatures are words of God. My mouth expresses and reveals God but the existence of a stone does the same and people often recognize more from actions than from words. That work which the highest nature does from its highest potential, that is something which the nature which is beneath that cannot grasp. If the latter were able to do the same thing as the former, it would not be beneath the former but equal to it. All creatures may echo God in all their activities. It is, of course, just a small bit which they can reveal.
Even someone who ascends beyond the highest angel and touches God is as unlike God by any comparison to that which God is as white compared to black. Even all creatures together, in all they have received, are totally unequal in any comparison to that which is in God, even though all creatures are gladly doing the best they can to express him. The prophet says: “Lord, you say one and I understand two” (Ps. 62:11). When God speaks in the soul, then the soul and God are one; as soon as this unity is decreased (by going outward from the inner center of the soul in the powers of the soul and from there through the senses outward to creatures), it is divided. And the more we climb inward with our knowing faculty, the more we are one in the Son. And so the Father speaks the Son eternally in oneness and pours out in the Son all creatures. They all cry out to come back there where they have flowed out. Their whole life and being is a crying and a hurrying to be back again whence they came out.
The prophet says: “The Lord has stretched forth his hand” (Jr. 1:9). And he means by that the Holy Spirit. Now he goes on to say: “He has touched my mouth” and means by this that “he has spoken to me” (Jr. 1:9). The mouth of the soul is the highest part of the soul and this is meant by saying “He has put his word in my mouth” (Jr. 1:9). That is the kiss of the soul: there mouth comes to mouth; there the Father gives birth to the Son in the soul, and there is where the soul is addressed. Now God speaks: “It is true that I have chosen you today and placed you over all peoples and over kingdoms” (Jr. 1:10). God has chosen us in a “today”—there where nothing is, there will now be for an eternity a “today.” “And I have placed you over people”—that is, over the whole world; and you must be unmarried from all things, for “over kingdoms” means: everything which is more than one and is therefore too much for you who must die to all things in order to have them all restored to you again in the heights where we live in the Holy Spirit.
May God the Holy Spirit help us to this end. Amen.
COMMENTARY: Eckhart’s Theology of the Creative Word of God/How All Creatures Are Words of God, Echoes of God, Gladly Doing Their Best to Express God/Creation Is a Flowing Out and a Flowing Back/The Creative Word as the Prophetic Word
All of Meister Eckhart’s theology can be understood as an exegesis of or development of the biblical concept of Dabhar or Word. This is the Word with which Genesis begins the Scriptures—it is the dynamic, active word that, when spoken, creates. God said, “Let there be light” and there was light, we are told. God’s Word gets things done. Thus Eckhart can say that the Father or Creator is a speaking action—who truly creates and does not merely cogitate about truth or about creating. So full of mystery and power is this creative Word who is God that we humans are left dumb and speechless by the beauty of creation. Creation is almost too holy for us, surely too holy for mere human words. “The entire created order is sacred,” says Eckhart.1 The only Word that comes close to saying the divine word is the Son of God who is God’s own “active speech.” Like all truthful and authentic words, this Word of God both left God and remained within God: God’s exit is his entrance, we are told. We must be on our guard, as the ancient Israelis were when they forbade the pronouncing of the divine name, against the blasphemy that is intrinsic to our imagining we can name God. We cannot name God who is higher than names or nature and when we try to put a name on God, then it is not God. God is bigger than we think, bigger than we speak. God is the God beyond God.
And yet God has spoken a divine word in creation itself. There is revelation in creation and natural things—the existence of a stone reveals God—and all creatures may indeed echo God. Creatures are an echo of the divine, they are a communication of the divine.
The perfection of God could not refrain from allowing creatures to flow out of himself, to whom he was able to communicate himself. They were able to receive equality with him—indeed, as much equality as if he had emptied himself. And the creatures flowed out so boundlessly that there are more angels than there are grains of sand or grass or leaves. Through all of them light and grace and gifts flow down to us.2
All creation is good and gift-giving. It is itself a blessing from God. Creatures—all of them—are a divine blessing and a word from God. It is in their activities and in expressing their fullest potential that creatures echo God most loudly. Moreover, the most successful of all God’s words, the word that is God’s Son, is intimate to creatures and the continual act of creation. As Eckhart puts it, The Father speaks the Son from his entire (creative) power and he speaks him in all things. Elsewhere Eckhart says: “God pours out in the Son all creatures.”3
Eckhart has said that all creatures are words of God and elsewhere he explains that “the purpose of a word is to reveal.”4 Thus again, all creation itself is forever going on. It is a process we can experience daily. “God created the world in such a way that he is still continually creating it.”5 The word is always being spoken and wanting to be spoken—which is also to say that it is never fully spoken and never satisfactorily expressed. God is spoken and unspoken at the same time: already today—and not yet—the kingdom to come.
Eckhart hints in this sermon at the powerful connection between the word and work, between creation and the new creation. Creatures reveal God best, he says, in their actions and in their richest activities. In their striving to bring about the not yet, creatures are bringing God to birth—yet the whole work is that of the Holy Spirit that made cosmos of chaos and gave birth from a state of hovering over the waters.
There are tensions in the word and the work of creation and new creation. First, there is tension between in and out. A true word goes out but remains within—God’s exit is his entrance. This in/out tension or dialectic Is a crucial one in all of Eckhart’s imaginings of the way God works and humans work spiritually. In/out and not up/down represents the basic dynamic of true living and true creating for Eckhart. Unlike Thomas à Kempis, who said that every time he went out of the monastery he came back less a man, Eckhart says that to the extent that all creatures who are gifted with reason go out from themselves in all they do, to that same extent they go into themselves. Inness is not in opposition to going out. In and out are related and interrelated. In fact, so eager are all creatures, these echoes of God, to flow back as well as to flow out, that they all cry out to come back there where they have flowed out Eckhart trusts creation to return to its source and origins. For the whole life and being of creatures is nothing but a crying and hurrying to be back again whence they came out.
Another tension in creation is that between expressing God and failing to express God.
All creatures want to express God in all their works; let them all speak, coming as close as they can, they still cannot speak him. Whether they want to or not, whether it is pleasing or painful to them, they all want to speak God and he still remains unspoken.
As much as creatures strive to reveal God, they are not in the long run up to that task, for the brightness of the divine nature is ineffable. God is a Word but an unexpressed Word. The Word retains something of the divine silence, the divine mystery. This silence can be painful to creatures and can be pleasant but it is always present, even in the fullest of revelations. But creation does not get discouraged and does not give up, nor does it operate in vain. In fact, creation is joyful in its efforts to express the divine: All creatures are gladly doing the best they can to express God. But in doing so the creatures do not lose touch with their origins or their innermost ground with the Creator. Instead, while they go out and flow out from God, they also seek to return. They seek the homeyness and warmth of their divine origins. They seek the wellspring of their creation which is the Spirit of creation.
God in creating all creatures instructs and enjoins, advises and commands them, by the very fact that he creates them, to follow him and conform themselves to him, to turn and hasten back to him as the first cause of their entire being, in accordance with the passage in Ecclesiastes (1:7): “Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” This is why the creature has a natural tendency to love God and loves him more even than he loves himself . . . Just as every created thing follows and pursues its end, so likewise it follows its beginning.6
The flowing out that creation is about is also a flowing back, a return. The exit is a return; the return an exit. Only in God are end and beginning identical, Just as in God only word and work, speaking and creating, creation and new creation are identical. For us creatures the dialectical journey must be made and remade—and that journey constitutes our journey of living in the Holy Spirit.
The flowing out and the hurrying back that all creatures are involved in comes about because, in fact, “all things love God.”7 Loving God, they seek God and they seek to be like God so that it can be said that all nature seeks God.
Know that all creatures are driven and take action by their nature for one end: to be like God. Heaven would never revolve if it did not search for God or a likeness of God. If God were not in all things, nature would not accomplish or yearn for anything in all kinds of things. For whether you wish it or not, and whether you know it or don’t know it, within its very self nature seeks and strives for God.8
The most dynamic of the words that nature speaks is that of the human person, the prophetic word of Jeremiah, for example, that tells of the nearness, the mouth-to-mouth nearness, of God and which challenges persons to make unity of the whole world and to begin eternity now. It is the human person or “soul” that is especially required to stand up and be heard.
But in the first outpouring, when the truth pours out and springs forth, in the gate of the house of God, the soul should stand and should express and bring forth the Word. Everything that is in the soul should speak and praise . . .9
In spite of the tensions, whether in season or out of season, we are to praise the creative Word that has no name but is the power behind every word.
The text for this sermon by Eckhart is taken from the prophet Jeremiah, the first chapter. There we read about the word of Yahweh and the word of the prophet:
The word of Yahweh was addressed to me, saying,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you;
before you came to birth I consecrated you;
I have appointed you as prophet to the nations.”
I said, “Ah, Lord Yahweh; look, I do not know how to speak: I am a child!”
But Yahweh replied,
“Do not say ‘I am a child.’
Go now to those to whom I send you
and say whatever I command you . . .”
Then Yahweh put out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me:
“There! I am putting my words into your mouth.
Look, today I am setting you
over nations and over kingdoms
to tear up and to knock down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.” (Jr. 1:4–7, 9–10)
The prophet in this passage has been invited to share in the Creator’s efficacious word—the word that when spoken makes things happen. The creative word becomes the prophetic word. But Jeremiah is reluctant to accept such a godly vocation and responsibility. The prophetic word will include a tearing up as well as a building up kind of message and commitment. “Because the word of a prophet is the word of Yahweh, it is more deadly than a sword, or It is like a consuming fire” (Jr. 5:14; 23:29).10 Word and deed go together In the biblical theology of the Word. It is noteworthy too that the concept of the preexistence of the prophet—as later the concept of the preexistence of wisdom—is found in this passage of Jeremiah since this notion of preexistence caught Eckhart’s imagination and too many commentators have jumped to the conclusion that he got the idea from Plato or Neoplatonism. In this sermon, then, Eckhart has brought together the efficacious and creative word of God with the demanding and disturbing word of the prophet. For we have been placed over the whole world to see that God’s word returns fulfilled and renewed to its source.