Sermon Three: HOW CREATURES ARE GOD AND HOW GOD BECOMES WHERE CREATURES EXPRESS HIM

“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” (Mt. 10:28)^a

“Do not fear those who wish to kill you according to the body” for a spirit does not kill a spirit (Mt. 10:28). A spirit gives life to the spirit. Blood and flesh are what wish to kill you. However, what flesh and blood are dies together. The most noble thing about a person is the blood when it is well disposed. At the same time, the worst thing about a person is the blood when it is ill-disposed. If blood triumphs over the flesh, a person is humble, patient, and chaste, and has all the virtues. If, however, flesh triumphs over the blood, a person becomes arrogant, angry, and unchaste, and has all the vices. In this respect Saint John is praised. I cannot praise him more than God has.

Now pay attention! I will now say something that I have never said before. When God created heaven, earth, and all the creatures, he was not accomplishing anything. He had nothing to accomplish, and there was no action within him. Then God said: “We wish to make an image like to ourselves” (Gn. 1:27). Creating is something easy; we do it when and as we wish. But whatever I make, I make myself and with and in myself, and press my image completely into it. “We wish to make an image like to ourselves.” This means not you the Father, or you the Son, or you the Holy Spirit, but rather we in the deliberation of the Holy Trinity—we wish to make an image like to ourselves! When God made human beings, he accomplished a deed like to himself in the soul—his masterful deed and his everlasting deed. This deed was so great that it was nothing other than the soul, and the soul, in turn, was nothing other than God’s deed. God’s nature, his being, and his Godhead depend on the fact that he must be efficacious in the soul. May God be twice blessed! When God is efficacious in the soul, he loves his deed. Now wherever the soul is in which God accomplishes his deed, the deed is so great that this deed is nothing other than love. Again, love is nothing other than God. God loves himself and his nature, his being, and his divinity. In the same love, however, in which God loves himself, he also loves all creatures, not as creatures but he loves the creatures as God. In the same love in which God loves himself, he loves all things.

Now I shall say something I have never said before. God enjoys himself. In the same enjoyment in which God enjoys himself, he enjoys all creatures. With the same enjoyment with which God enjoys himself, he enjoys all creatures, not as creatures, but he enjoys the creatures as God. In the same enjoyment in which God enjoys himself, he enjoys all things.

Now pay attention! All creatures set their course on their highest perfection. Please now perceive what I am about to say, which I swear by my soul is the everlasting truth: I shall repeat what I have never said before: God and his Godhead are as different as heaven and earth. I will go still further: The inner and the outer person are as different as heaven and earth. But God’s distance from the Godhead is many thousand miles greater still. God becomes and ceases to become, God waxes and wanes.

Now I shall return to my statement that God enjoys himself in all things. The sun casts its bright light upon all creatures. Whatever the sun casts its light upon draws the sun up into itself; yet as a result the sun does not lose any of its power of illumination.

All creatures want to divest themselves of their lives for the sake of their being. All creatures are brought into my understanding in that they are spiritually within me. I alone bring all creatures back to God. Look to see how all of you are doing!

Now I shall return to my inner and outer person. I look at the lilies of the field—their bright splendor and their color and all their petals. But I do not see their fragrance. Why is this so? Because the fragrance is in myself. On the other hand, what I say is in myself, and I utter it from within myself. To my outer person all creatures taste like creatures only—like wine and bread and meat. My inner person does not taste things as a creature but rather as a gift of God. My innermost person, however, does not taste a creature as God’s gift but rather as something eternal.

I take a basin of water, place a mirror in it, and set it under the sun’s orb. The sun then casts its brightness out of its disk and out of its core, and still is not diminished. The reflection of the mirror in the sun is like a sun within the sun, and yet the minor is what it is. This is the way it is with God. God is in the soul with his nature, his being, and his Godhead, and yet he is not the soul. The reflection of the soul is God in God, and yet the soul is what it is.

God becomes God where all creatures express God: There he becomes “God.” When I was still in the core, the soil, the stream, and the source of the Godhead, no one asked me where I wanted to go or what I was doing. There was no one there who might have put such a question to me. But when I flowed out from there, all creatures called out: “God!” I was asked, “Brother Eckhart, when did you go out of the house?” For I had been inside. In this way all creatures speak about “God.” And why don’t they speak about the Godhead? Everything within the Godhead is unity, and we cannot speak about it. God accomplishes, but the Godhead does not do so and there is no deed within the Godhead. The Godhead never goes searching for a deed. God and the Godhead are distinguished through deeds and a lack of deeds. When I return to “God” and then do not remain there, my breakthrough is more noble than my flowing out. I alone bring all creatures out of their spiritual being into my understanding so that they are one within myself. When I come into the core, the soil, the stream, and the source of the Godhead, no one asks me where I’m coming from or where I’ve been. No one has missed me in the place where “God” ceases to become.

If anyone has understood this sermon, I wish him well. If no one had been here, I would have had to preach it to this offering box. There are some poor people who will return to their homes and say: “I shall sit down somewhere, eat my loaf of bread, and serve God!” I swear, however, that these people will have to remain in their errors, for they can never attain what these others attain who follow God in poverty and in exile.

COMMENTARY:  How God and Godhead Differ/How God Melts Out from the Godhead When Creation Occurs/How God Enjoys Creatures and We Are to Do the Same/How We Love Creatures as God/Three Ways of Enjoying Creatures

Meister Eckhart sets about exploring more deeply the creative word or the act of creation by God. First, he asks the question: What changes take place in the Creator in the act of creation? And his response calls upon a theological distinction in understanding the Deity that numerous theologians, including Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas, Gilbert of Porreta, and others, made before Eckhart. That is the distinction between God and the Godhead. From our perspective they are as different as the earth and the heavens, for one operates on earth and the other remains still in the heavens. The Godhead does not act—there are no deeds there. While God does act—this is God the Creator who becomes God where all creatures (who are the words of God) express him. God is relative to creation; the Godhead is not. God the Creator is busy in creating things but God the Godhead—who is end as well as beginning—is not busy. “God Himself does not rest where He is the beginning of all being. He rests where He is the end and the beginning of all being.”¹

The distinction between God and Godhead is an effort at the via negativa, the God beyond God. The Godhead tradition is an effort to restore the transcendence of the name God to an ineffable Deity. It is also noteworthy that the “Godhead” is feminine gender in both languages in which Eckhart thought. In German it is Gottheit and in Latin, Deitas. At the same time, the word for “God” is masculine in both languages (Gott and Deus, respectively). Thus “Godhead” is also an effort to undo an overly masculine gender that a culture and its language have projected onto God—an effort to go beyond the all-male God.

In striving for images of this God beyond God who is the Godhead, Eckhart talks of the deep “ground” out of which the Trinity with its Persons flows. But it is a “hidden” ground, an “abyss,” a divine “wasteland.” The Godhead is the “divine God” which is the “naked being” of God.² Eckhart is urging his listeners not to settle for what one’s culture—including one’s religious culture—takes for granted by the often overly familiar name of “God.” By letting go of this overly used name for “God” we let God be God and let the Godhead emerge. We also allow ourselves to experience the deep experience of the Godhead.

One might think that human creation would be capable only of God the Creator. Not so, says Eckhart. The human person is so much like God—Eckhart takes so literally the image of God theme within the human person—that even the Godhead finds a home there. The human person is capable of both God and Godhead. Like the mirror in water that the sun shines upon, God is in the soul with his nature, his being, and his Godhead. And yet Eckhart resists all temptations to confuse his teaching with pantheism, for he declares that Yet God is not the soul. The reflection of the soul is God in God, and yet the soul is what it is. The soul is a mirror of God’s beauty and light but it is no more God than is the mirror the sun. These images further delineate Eckhart’s panentheism and theology of inness.

Eckhart applies his theme of flowing out and remaining within and of exiting and entering to the human experience of the God and Godhead and also to the Creator’s experience. Of his own experience in exiting from his divine origins in the Godhead, Eckhart confesses that only silence preceded his birth. The Godhead is utterly ineffable and there is no talking, no words, in the Godhead: Everything within the Godhead is unity, and we cannot speak about it. But in leaving the Godhead and being born, or as Eckhart puts it, when he flowed out from there, all the creatures of the world could stand up and shout: “God!” Why? Because creatures, on seeing creatures, see God. In another sermon Eckhart repeats this same theme. “When I flowed out from God,” he says, “all things spoke: God is.”³ In this way all creatures speak about “God.” God, after all, is the Creator of creatures. And creatures know, however dimly it can be remembered, that they speak for God. Indeed, they are Bibles and revelations about God. “He who knew nothing other than creatures would have no need for thinking of sermons, for each creature is full of God and is a book” about God.⁴ Humans, too, actually need the world in order to know God. “If they could know God without the world, the world would never have been created for the soul’s sake.”⁵

But Eckhart also observes that we are destined to return not only to God but to the Godhead. And when we do, no one will ask any questions, for no one will have missed us. No one is missed in the Godhead, for everyone is there. This return will be even more wondrous, more noble, and more divine than his original flowing out or creation. The return will constitute a genuine breakthrough and we will explore this in greater detail in Sermon Twenty.

What about God’s exit and return? Does God suffer a diminution by becoming a Creator who creates and continually creates and who becomes and not only rests? Eckhart applies the principle of the word that remains within but flows out to God’s relationship to the Godhead. God remains “entirely within himself, not at all outside himself. But when he melts, he melts outwards. His melting out is his goodness.”⁶ Thus Eckhart uses the image of melting to suggest how things can both go out but remain within and he explains that God’s exiting from the Godhead was a thousand-mile journey. God’s leave-taking is a melting. Creation is a melting of God’s goodness. “Goodness is present when God melts out and unites with all creatures.”⁷ The melting and molting that creation is about is thoroughly good. “All creatures have flowed out of God’s will . . . All good flows from the superabundance of God’s goodness.”⁸ The key to a worthy love of creatures is never to lose sight of the source of their beauty and goodness—which source is God. “All the good that can exist in creatures—all their honey—is gathered together in God.”⁹ Eckhart’s is not a repressive spiritual psychology but a pleasure-oriented one. He urges us to imbibe in the goodness and “honey-sweetness” of creation instead of standing back to judge it. However, he urges us to enter so fully into creation’s beauty, to dive so deep into it, that we get to the source of this goodness who is God. “Creation, and every work of God,” he declares, “is perfect as soon as it begins. As Deuteronomy 32 says, ‘The works of God are perfect.’”¹⁰ We have nothing to fear from creation. Only from our own shallowness or unwillingness to dive deep into creation where the Creator creates and is always creating. Eckhart’s is a spirituality of natural or creation ecstasies: God is truly present in the goodness and honey-sweetness of things and in the experiences of ecstasy we have in communion with such gifts.¹¹ For if God loves his own melting and therefore savors it in creation and creation in it, then we who are images of God are not forbidden such pleasure either.

Eckhart derives his trust in creation from the Scriptures. The text for the present sermon is as follows:

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell. Can you not buy two sparrows for a penny? And yet not one falls to the ground without your Father knowing. Why, every hair on your head has been counted. So there is no need to be afraid; you are worth more than hundreds of sparrows. (Mt. 1058–31)

The Father or Creator watches over the little things of creation as well as ourselves and there is a trust, a cosmic trust, between Creator and creature. Thus Eckhart reminds us that a spirit does not kill a spirit. A spirit gives life to the spirit. What is life-giving—and surely God’s Word called creation is such—is not to be feared but trusted, entered into and listened to.

Creation is more than good. Because it is in God, it is God in the sense that we have seen this expression in the previous sermon. The divine relationship between creatures and their Creator is one of intense love on the part of the Creator—love and joy. In the same love in which God loves himself he also loves all creatures, not as creatures but as God. God also enjoys all creatures not as creatures but as God. Creatures, the words of God, are not only good but divine.

But whether we experience the creatures as they are divine depends on us. We can be puny-minded and timid in our vision like those Eckhart says will return to their house, sit down somewhere, eat their loaf of bread, and serve God. Such persons are pitiful, for they settle for so little. They imagine their physical house to be their home whereas in fact God is their home—and not only God but even the Godhead. Why is it that some people settle for so little when there is so much divinity everywhere? It is because they live lives of entertainment of the outer person alone and never bother to explore the inner and then the innermost person. The outer person enjoys the loaf of bread, a glass of wine, and a slice of meat merely as bread, wine, and meat. This way lies boredom and, one might imagine, obesity. The inner person also enjoys bread, wine, and meat but in that enjoyment does not taste merely the food but also the gift that the food is. Thus the inner person nourishes a sense of gratitude and even wonder at the gift that the ecstacies of creation bless us with. But there is still a third way to experience the gifts of creation. That is the way of something eternal. In this tasting, the finiteness of human pleasure is overcome and the grace-filled satisfaction of divine beauty is imbibed. This beauty, the taster knows, will never die. It lasts forever and always tastes delicious.

This analysis of the three levels of consciousness that humans are capable of vis-à-vis creation reveals how for Eckhart the problem with our lives is not our lives but the way we respond to them. We need to pass from mere problem (eating the foods at hand for survival’s sake alone) to appreciation and to mystery. As Schürmann puts it, Eckhart “aims at an education of seeing.”¹² People who live superficial lives of the outer self alone will never taste eternity in this life—never know what it is to love or to live and thus will always kick at the coming of death, for they will have no firsthand experience that beauty does not die.

So powerful is the consciousness of a person in touch with his or her deepest self that such a person alone prepares all creatures again for God. Such a person is capable of a divine act—unifying creation, making cosmos of chaos. I alone bring all creatures out of their spiritual being into my reason so that they are one within myself. Such a person knows what God knows: that in God all is one and ought to be one.

Eckhart confesses that, were no one present, he would have been compelled to preach this sermon to the poor box that always stays in church. And, Eckhart confesses, there may be very few who have understood it. Eckhart’s humor and capacity to enjoy himself and his work and to laugh at his word, his creation, and his preaching, testify to how free a person he is. He seems to taste of some of the joy and rejoicing that he attributes to God at his creation. If it is true that God enjoys himself in all things then Eckhart is trying to practice what he—and God—preach. It is as if Eckhart is not overly attached even to his own work—he lets it flow without, while remaining within—and so, in the last analysis, humor best bespeaks God.