Passion for Creation

The phrase which we read today and tomorrow for the feast of our master, Saint Dominic, comes from Saint Paul’s Letter. In the vernacular, it runs this way: Announce the word, pronounce it, produce it, give birth to the word (2 Tm. 4:2).

It is an amazing thing that something flows forth and nonetheless remains within. Words flow forth and yet remain within—that is certainly amazing! All creatures flow outward and nonetheless remain within—that is extremely amazing. What God has given and what God promises to give—that is amazing, inconceivable, and unbelievable. And that is as it should be, for if it were comprehensible and believable things would not be right. God is in all things. The more he is in things, the more he is outside of things. The more he is within, all the more he is without. I have often said God is creating this entire world full and entire in this present now. Everything God created six thousand years ago—and even more—as he made the world, God creates now all at once. God is in everything, but to the extent that God is godly and to the extent that he is intelligible, God is nowhere as much as he is in the soul and also, if you wish, in the angels. He dwells in the innermost dimension of the soul and in the highest aspect of the soul. And when I say “the innermost,” I mean the highest. When I say “the highest” I mean the innermost region of the soul. The innermost and the highest realms of the soul—these two are one. There where time never penetrates, where no image shines in, in the innermost and highest aspect of the soul God creates the entire cosmos. Everything which God created six thousand years ago and everything which will be created by God after thousands of years—if the world lasts that long—God is creating all of that in the innermost and highest realms of the soul. Everything which is past and everything which is present and everything which is future God creates in the innermost realms of the soul. Everything which God works in all of his saints, that God works in the innermost realms of the soul. The Father gives birth to his Son in the innermost part of the soul and gives birth to you with his only begotten Son as no less. If I am to be a son then I must be a son in the same being in which the Son exists and in no other being. If I am to be a human being, I cannot have the being of an animal and also be a human being. I must, rather, be a human being in the being of a human person. If I am to be this particular human person then I have to have the existence of this particular human person. Saint John says, “You are children of God” (Jn. 4:4).

“Announce the word, pronounce it, bring it forth, give birth to the word.” “Pronounce the word!” What is spoken forth externally and penetrates into you, that is something ordinary. But that word which is spoken inwardly is what we have been discussing. “Pronounce the word”—that means that you should become inwardly one with what is in you. The prophet says: “God spoke one and I heard two” (Ps. 62:11). That is true. God is constantly speaking only one thing. His speaking is one thing. In this one utterance he speaks his Son and at the same time the Holy Spirit and all creatures. And yet there is only one speech in God. The prophet says, “I heard two.” That means I heard God and the creature. There where God speaks the creatures, there God is. Here in space and time the creature is. People think God has only become a human being there—in his historical incarnation—but that is not so; for God is here—in this very place—just as much incarnate as in a human being long ago. And this is why he has become a human being: that he might give birth to you as his only begotten Son, and as no less.

Yesterday I was at a particular place and I spoke a phrase which is in the Our Father: “Let your will be done.” It would be better to express this in this way: “Become your will.” My will would become your will. I would become your will—that is what the Our Father means. This phrase has two meanings. First, “Be asleep to all things”: that means ignore time, creatures, images. The masters say that if a person who is sleeping soundly would sleep for a hundred years, she would forget all creatures, time, and images. And then you could perceive what God works in you. That is why the soul says in the Song of Songs, “I sleep but my heart watches” (Sg. 5:2). Therefore, if all creatures are asleep in you, you can perceive what God works in you.

Second, this phrase means: “Concern yourself with all things.” And this has three meanings. It means, “Take advantage of all things.” That means, first, seize God in all things, for God is in all things. Saint Augustine says God has created all things not that he would let them come into existence and then go their own way, but rather he remains in them. People think that they have an advantage if they bring things to God as if God didn’t have anything. That is incorrect, for all things added to God are no more than God alone. And if someone who has the Father and the Son with the Father says that he now has more than when he only had the Son without the Father, that would be incorrect. For the Father with the Son is no more than the Son alone. And again the Son with the Father is no more than the Father alone. Therefore, lay hold of God in all things and this will be a sign of your birth, a sign that God has given birth in you himself as his only begotten Son, and nothing less.

The second meaning of “take advantage of all things” is this: “Love God more than all things and your neighbor as yourself” (Lk. 10:27). This is the commandment of God, but, I tell you, it is not only a commandment. Rather, God has made us a gift here and has promised to make us a gift. If you prefer to keep a hundred dollars for yourself rather than giving it to another, that is wrong. If you love one human being more than another, that is wrong. If you love your father and mother and yourself more than another human being, that is wrong. And if you love your own happiness more than another’s, that is also wrong. “Good heavens! This can’t be right. Should I not love external happiness for myself more than for another?” There are many learned people who do not understand this and who find it too difficult. On the contrary, it is quite easy. I want to show you that it is not difficult. In each member of the human body with its particular function, nature perceives a double goal. The first goal which that member pursues in its operation is to serve the body in its totality. And second, each individual member serves itself and no less than itself. Within its operations, it doesn’t pay any more attention to itself than to another member. How much more must this be true in the realm of grace. God ought to be a rule and foundation for your love. The first intention of your love must be oriented purely toward God, and next toward one’s neighbor as toward oneself, and no less than toward oneself. If you love beatitude for yourself more than for another you are simply loving yourself. And when you love yourself God is not your pure love, and that is wrong. In effect, if you love the beatitude which is in Saint Peter or in Saint Paul as your own, you possess then the same beatitude which they have for themselves. If you love the happiness of angels as in yourself and if you love the beatitude of our Lady equally with yourself you would enjoy then the same happiness as she does. It belongs to you properly as to her. That is what it says in a book of wisdom: “He has made him equal to his saints” (Si. 45:2).

The third meaning of finding your advantage in all things is this: Love God in all things equally, that is to say, love God as freely in poverty as in riches and look for him in illness as well as in health. Look for him outside of temptation as well as in temptation, in suffering as well as without suffering. The more suffering is great, the more suffering is little, and the more it is like carrying two buckets. The heavier the one, the lighter is the other. The more a person abandons, the easier it will be to abandon. A person who loves God can renounce the entire earth as easily as renouncing an egg. The more one gives, the easier it is to give—as with the Apostles. The heavier their suffering, the easier they were able to support it.

“Apply yourself in all things” means finally that when you find yourself occupied with various things more than with the pure One, test your application. That means “occupy yourself in all things” in view of bringing fulfillment to your service. All of this refers also to the phrase “Lift up your head,” and this phrase has two meanings. The first is: Empty yourself of all that is yours and give yourself over to God. Make God to be your own as he is for himself his own, and he will be God for you as he is God for himself, and nothing less. What is truly mine I have received from no one. If I have it from someone else it is not mine, it is hers or his from whom I have it. The second sense of “Lift up your head” is: Direct all your works to God.

There are many people who do not understand this, and this astonishes me. Yet the person who is to understand this must be very detached and elevated above all worldly things. That we should come to this perfection—may God help us.

COMMENTARY: Eckhart’s Panentheistic Theology of Inness/Words and Creatures Flow Out But Remain Within/The Highest Region of the Soul Is the Innermost Part of the Soul and It Is Here That God Creates/The Inner and Outer Person/God and Creation Are One So We Are to Love All Things Equally

In this sermon Meister Eckhart continues his own amazement based on his observation of creation’s relation to the Creator. He develops the same simile he used in Sermon One of the word that flows out but remains within, comparing again all things that exist with the existence of a word. He is quite amazed that creatures and words both flow outside their origin and yet remain within that origin. He invites us to explore more in depth the mystery that amazes and which concerns the inness of things. For in the inness of things is God—God is in all things he repeats three times in this discourse, as if we had not up to now spent enough effort on communing with this truth of creation and Creator’s oneness. He urges us to alter our consciousness and way of seeing things in order to enter into this mystery, telling us to seize God in all things, for God is in all things. Elsewhere Eckhart urges us to alter our consciousness so as to “bring God down” to where God truly resides, which is within the inness of things.

I reflected tonight that God should be brought down, not absolutely, but only within, and so this means a God who is brought down. This pleased me so well that I wrote it in my book. It runs thus: A God who is brought down, not completely, but only within, that we may be raised up. That which was above came to be within. You shall be united and by yourself in yourself, so that He may be within you. Not that we take away anything from Him, who is above us. We should take into ourselves and should take from ourselves into ourselves.¹

Notice that for Eckhart “bringing God down” means taking God in. God is not up for Eckhart and we down. Rather, God is—and wants to be—in the innermost part of us and fully among us. Divinity dwells on the inside: When I say the “innermost” I mean the highest—the innermost becomes the sublime, and these two are one. The in/out dynamic that we saw in Sermon One as integral to the motion of creation also holds for the deepest levels of our spiritual experience. We can keep God outside by being too little in touch with our inside and for this reason Eckhart repeats as a constant refrain, and like a good preacher would, this forgotten but sacred place: the innermost part of the soul. Almost drugging us with this chant to the innermost part of the soul, Eckhart is insisting that we remember it. For it is here that God creates and that the new creation will be either born or aborted.

But if God is in, we need to get to know the within. Indeed, if we understood how deeply within us God dwells, our lives would change. That is why Eckhart urges us in this sermon to become aware of what is in you—then we will be ready to announce it, pronounce it, produce it and give birth to it. Then our consciousness will change from thinking two words—God and creatures—to thinking one word: God. For the Creative Word has, in the act of creation, only uttered one word still one more time: God is constantly speaking only one thing. What is that one word? It is God and creation: In this one utterance he speaks his Son and at the same time the Holy Spirit and all creatures. The word of God appears as things created here below and so we imagine that we hear two distinct words—God and the creature. But we need to improve our hearing. We are to hear just one, we are to hear creation and listen to the Creator in one act. For God and creation are one utterance. Creation is an expression of divinity, indeed a kind of divinity, as we shall see in Sermons Three and Four. Were we more aware of the divinity of our own creation and of what is in us we would know the truth being spoken of. It would be less a surprise and more an experience of Good News.

This theology of inness and this God of the innermost requires a person who is not “out for a walk,” as Eckhart puts it. He distinguishes between the outward and the inward person.

The outward person is the old person, the earthly person, the person of this world, who grows old “from day to day.” His end is death . . . The inward man, on the other hand, is the new person, the heavenly person, in whom God shines.²

The deep word of God can only be spoken to a person with an inner self. And when it is spoken, unity takes place, for barriers of ego and time, competition and dualism, only exist at the level of superficiality or the outer person’s consciousness. There Time never penetrates and no image shines into the inner person: there God is free to play, to interplay, and to create. Or, as Freud put it, “in the id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time.”³ Here all creation takes place—God creates the entire cosmos and time is suspended so that the eternal is now. And there too the Father begets both the perfect Word and ourselves as the children or words of God. The new creation also takes place at this level of innermost sublimity, where all time stops.

The inward person is not at all in time or place but is purely and simply in eternity. It is there that God arises, there He is heard, there He is; there God, and God alone, speaks. “Blessed are they that hear the word of God” (Lk. 11:28) there.

Since place as well as time is suspended in this inner depth, the person experiences spacefulness and his or her own greatness.

There the inward person attains his full amplitude (spatiosissimus est) because he is great without magnitude. This is the person the apostle commends to us in Colossians (3:10f.): “Putting on the new person which is renewed in the knowledge of God after the image of him that created him; where there is neither male nor female, Gentile nor Jew . . . barbarian, Scythian, bond or free: but Christ is all and in all.”⁴

The word Eckhart uses, spatiosissimus, means literally: the most spacious. At this level of inner depth we are most spacious, more without limit, most spacy one might say. We are also most together—at one with the Creator and in the process of becoming a truer and truer image of God and at one with our neighbor irregardless of sex, race, or nation.

Eckhart has not only observed that God is in all things but also that, because of the amazing nature of all creativity, all things are also in their Creator. All creatures flow outward, and nonetheless remain within. He elaborates on this understanding of creation and creativity elsewhere:

When the Father begat all creatures, he begat me also, and I flowed out with all creatures and yet remained in the Father. In the same way, the words that I am now speaking first spring up in me, then secondly I reflect on the idea, and thirdly I express it and you all receive it; yet it really remains in me. In the same way, I have remained in the Father.⁵

Our “remaining in the Father” is an expression of the authentic and altogether orthodox doctrine of panentheism, which means, literally, that all is in God and God is in all. Such a doctrine differs from heterodox pantheism, which means literally “all is God and God is all” and thus disregards the beyondness of God. Indeed, Eckhart takes special pains in this sermon to demonstrate that he is not trafficking in pantheism (a charge that contributed most to his condemnation) when he indicates that creatures do not add to God. God is greater than the sum of creation’s parts: All things added to God are no more than God alone. Eckhart’s panentheistîc theology, which refuses to see God as a Subject or as an Object outside ourselves or outside creation, is developed time and time again. He invokes scriptural evidence for his doctrine: “All things are in God. ‘Having all things in thee alone’ (Tb. 10:5); ‘from him and through him and in him are all things’ (Rm. 11:36).”⁶ “In him we live, move, and have our being” (Ac. 17:28).

God created all things, not that they might stand outside of himself or alongside of himself or beyond himself, the way other artifacts [made by humans] do, but he calls them from nothing, that is from nonbeing, so that they may come into and receive and dwell in himself. For he is being.⁷

We do not need to ascend to God but to open our hearts and persons to the truth of how “God is everywhere and always equally omnipresent.”⁸ We ought not to climb up to God, since God is all around and not up. “As long as we are still in the ascent we do not attain into him.”⁹ God, Eckhart declares, is “round-about us completely enveloping us”¹⁰ we are indeed bathed in God as fish who swim in the ocean are bathed in the ocean no less than the ocean bathes in them. “The light embraces all the powers of the soul. Accordingly he [a master] says: ‘The light of heaven bathed him.’”¹¹ For God “is a being that has in itself all being.”¹² Elsewhere, Eckhart describes creation as a panentheistic creation, namely as a divine birth within God:

He created all things in such a way that they are not outside himself, as ignorant people falsely imagine. Everything that God creates or does he does or creates in himself, sees or knows in himself, loves in himself. Outside himself he does nothing, knows or loves nothing; and this is peculiar to God himself.¹³

To be unaware of panentheism, of how all beings are in God, is to be “ignorant,” Eckhart insists. For things are in God and God is in things. For God this being in and out is no more difficult than it is for the sea that passes through the gills of a fish. God is in all things. The more he is in things, the more he is outside of things: the more he is within, all the more he is without. Inside and outside are not opposed for God. We can be inside God and God can be inside us at the same time.

Eckhart warns us not to underestimate what being in God implies. It is a far richer existence than merely being with God and in this sense being in God is deeper than mere friendship wherein friends are with one another. For there is implied in being with, a separation and a distance. But being in erases those differences, being in is union and unity. That is why Eckhart, following the Synod of the Council of Reims and Thomas Aquinas as well,¹⁴ can say that “to be in God is to be God.” The Word of God came to demonstrate to us how fully in God we were, so fully in God that we too are God’s only begotten Son and no less. Our becoming God is the very purpose of the Incarnation, which happened in order that he might give birth to you as his only begotten Son, and as no less. So like God are we that we become God’s will. I would become your will—that is what the Our Father means. Our goal is to become as God is—to “be all in all, as God is all in all,” as Eckhart puts it elsewhere.¹⁵ Thus we too are to become transparent and panentheistic, bathers and bathed, as God is. And in doing so we experience the same God that God experiences. God is for himself his own, and he will be God for you as he is God for himself, and nothing less.

How does this panentheism happen in the everyday world of our lives? It happens in the Mystical Body and in our working to breathe life into new creation. Direct all your works to God. It happens by the marriage of word and work: Announce the word, pronounce it, produce it, give birth to the word/ In the scriptural passage that Eckhart is preaching from we read the following admonition to the builders-up of the mystical body:

Proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, call to obedience—but do all with patience and with the intention of teaching . . . Be careful always to choose the right course; be brave under trials: make the preaching of the Good News your life’s work, in thoroughgoing service. (2 Tm. 4:2, 5)

Thus Eckhart addresses himself to the charism of teaching and service of one’s lifework, which is preaching the Good News. It is here that he cannot remain silent, even in the moment of his deepest mystical utterances of union of God and creatures, to admonish us to love our neighbor as ourself. Lest the mystically inclined get too carried away with Eckhart’s unitive vision and imagine that he is talking of a singular life privately passed with God, he includes the great commandment in this sermon and applies it to a way of living that vivifies the entire mystical body. For if all that is in God is God and if all of creation is in God, then surely we are to love God in all things equally. Christ’s admonition to love our neighbor as ourself is more than an ethic—it is a way of life that is not only a commandment but a gift and a way in which we see the world. If we still see self and others as objects or as subjects we still live by commandments only. But if we see the world and its inhabitants as they are—namely in the unity of panentheism—then our actions are ways of serving the body in its totality. We have a holistic way of viewing and responding to our neighbor’s pain and joy. We begin to act out the truth of what we have grasped: that we are one body, one sole word of God. Furthermore, in loving God we are loving neighbor and vice versa, for our neighbor is in God and God is in neighbor. Love God more than all things and your neighbor as yourself (Lk. 10:27). Truly, all creatures do flow outside their origin and yet remain within and this is certainly amazing.