Passion for Creation

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you . . .” (Jn. 13:34)^a

In the Holy Gospel written by John, we read that the Lord said to his disciples: “I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you, and this is how people shall know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another.”

We find here a threefold love which our Lord has and which we must imitate. The first is natural; the second, graced; the third, divine. There is, of course, nothing in God which is not identical with God, but it is from our perception that this love is threefold, for we have to advance from something good (natural love) to something better (graced love) and from something better to something even more perfect (divine love). But in God there is no smaller and greater; he is only the one, simple, pure essential Truth.

The first kind of love which God has and which we should learn is that which compelled his natural goodness to form all of creation, for in the images contained in his foreknowledge, God was pregnant with every creature from all eternity so that all creatures might enjoy with him his goodness. And among all these creatures he does not love any one more than any other. For insofar as creatures are open to receive him, to that extent God pours himself out into them. If my soul were as open and expansive as one of the seraphim, who have nothing in themselves because they are completely empty and receptive, then God would pour himself out as fully in me as in that seraphic soul. It is just like when one draws a circle with many points on the circumference and one point in the center. The central point is equally near and far from all the other points. If one of the little points is to come closer, it must leave its own position on the circumference, for the point in the middle remains where it is. It is the same with the divine being; it seeks nothing outside of itself, remaining constant in itself. If it is to be that a creature receive from this divine being, then it is necessary that the creature be moved from its own self-centeredness. Though we talk about human beings, we are speaking at the same time of all creatures, for Christ himself said to his disciples: “Go forth and preach the gospel to all creatures.” God poured his being in equal measure to all creatures, to each as much as it can receive. This is a good lesson for us that we should love all creatures equally with everything which we have received from God. If some are naturally closer to us through relationship or friendship, we should nonetheless respond from divine love with equal friendliness to all because we see all in relationship to that ultimate good which is God. Sometimes I seem to love one person more than another; but I promise, nevertheless, the other person, whom I have never seen, the same friendliness. The only difference is that some people ask for and call forth from me this friendliness more often and therefore I am more likely to give myself more to them. So God loves all creatures equally and fills them with his being. And we should lovingly meet all creatures in the same way. We find this attitude among the pagans, people who came to this sense of love-filled equanimity through the knowing faculties given them by their basic human nature. It is a pagan teacher who tells us that a human being is an animal which is naturally gentle.

The second kind of love is graced or spiritual and it is the love by which God flows into a human or angelic soul in such a way that this creature gifted with reason might be moved out of its own self-centeredness by the brightness of a light outshining all the lights of creation. If my eye, for example, were a light so strong that it could receive the light of the sun in its full strength and thereby be one with it, then my eye would be seeing not only with its own strength but with the light of the sun and the strength which belongs to it. Now it is the same with my reason. If I turn my reason—which is, after all, a light—away from all created things and focus it on God, then my reason, into which God uninterruptedly pours his grace, is enlightened and united with this divinely given love and thereby knows and loves God as he is in himself. Thus we are taught how God is poured out in creatures gifted with reason and how we with our reason draw close to his graced light and can ascend to that light which is God.

The third kind of love is divine and through it we come to know how God from all eternity has given birth to his only begotten Son and continues to give him birth now and into all future eternities—so teaches a master—and so God lies in the maternity bed, like a woman who has given birth, in every good soul which has abandoned its self-centeredness and received the indwelling God. This birth is God’s self-knowledge, which from all eternity has sprung from his fatherly heart, wherein lies all his joy. And everything which God desires to bring forth is consumed in his self-knowledge, which is its birth, and he seeks nothing outside of himself. He has all his pleasure in his Son and he loves nothing but his Son and everything which he finds in his Son. For the Son is a light which has burned from all eternity in God’s fatherly heart. If we want to come there, we must rise from natural light to the light of grace and thereby grow to that light which is the Son himself. There we will be loved in the Son by the Father with that love which is the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit is the love which has sprung up from eternity and blossomed in an eternal birth. This is the Trinity’s third Person, blossoming from the Son to the Father as their mutual love.

A master says that he thinks now and then on the words the angel spoke to Mary: “Hail, full of grace” (Lk. 8:21). What help is it to me that Mary is full of grace, if I am not also full of grace? And what help is it to me that the Father gives birth to his Son unless I too give birth to him? It is for this reason that God gives birth to his Son in a perfect soul and lies in the maternity bed so that he can give birth to him again in all his works. Thus a pagan girl says of Joseph, the son of the patriarch Jacob, “I don’t regard him as a human being but as a god, for God shines from his works” (cf. Gn. 39:23).

And so it is that we should be united with the love of the Holy Spirit in the Son, and with the Son we should know the Father and we should love ourselves in him and him in us with the love with which the Father and Son love each other.

Whoever will be perfect in this threefold love must of necessity have four things. First, a real ability to let go of everything created. Second, a true Lea’s life, which means an active life which is stirred in the very depth of the soul by the movement of the Holy Spirit. Third, a true Rachel’s life—that is, an inward, meditative disposition. Fourth, an upward-soaring spirit. A student once asked his teacher about the status of an angel. He instructed him, saying: “Go away and sink deeply into yourself until you understand the angel and give yourself up to that with all your being and realize that you consist of nothing else than what you find in that angel. Then you will realize that you are one with the angels. And when you give yourself to this realization with all your being, then it will dawn on you that you are all angel and with all the angels.” The student went away and lived deeply and inwardly in himself until he found the truth of all of this. Then he went again to his teacher and thanked him and said: “Everything happened just as you said. As I gave myself over to the essence of the angel and soared into its being, I realized that I was all angel with all the angels.” Then the teacher said: “And now, if you would advance even further into the primordial source of being, then miracle upon miracle will be performed in your soul.” For as long as souls soar and still receive everything through creatures, they have not yet come to rest. But when souls soar to God, then they receive in the Son and with the Son from the Father everything which God desires to offer. May God help us to soar from one love to the other and finally to be united with him and remain so for all eternity. Amen.

COMMENTARY: Creation as Grace/The Equality of Being/Preaching the Gospel to All Creatures of the Cosmos/Soaring into the Primordial Source of Being/Cosmic Consciousness/Loving All Creatures Equally

Meister Eckhart has confessed that he finds the world “amazing.” He is amazed by the grace-filledness of creation. Indeed, he calls creation “the first grace” “the grace of creation” “the gift of creation” and even “gratia gratis data” or grace gratuitously given.¹ He is amazed by the beauty and fullness of creation and above all by the ever-present law of creation, that what flows out remains within. Eckhart does not counsel those seeking a deeper spiritual consciousness to put down creation or to separate themselves violently from it, for he is aware that human beings are very much a part of the circle that being and all creation is. Rather, he advises us to alter our way of seeing creation, to alter our consciousness. Previously, in Sermon Three, he spoke of the person who tastes food and wine merely as food and wine; and the person who tastes food and wine as a gift of God; and of the person who tastes food and wine as intimations of eternity. Here too he speaks of a threefold path of consciousness. Only here he compares our love of creatures to that of God. God, he says, loves creatures first in a natural way. We cannot afford to skip over this path of spirituality as so many ascetic and fundamentalist spiritualists would have us do. The first kind of love which God has and which we should learn is that which compelled his natural goodness to form all creation. We need, as Eckhart insists, to learn this love of nature and creatures for our own stodginess or cynicism or our culture’s ill-treatment of creation or even our bad theologies all may have contributed to our being tainted in our love of what is. Creation, after all, flows very much from the goodness that God is, for God created so that all creatures might enjoy with him his goodness.

The second kind of love with which God loves creation and with which we can learn to love creation is graced love. This is a new dimension of union between Creator and creature that takes place with those beings who have the fullest potential for consciousness, namely humans and angels. This kind of love goes beyond “self-centeredness” and receives enlightenment from a divinely given love. In such an experience we know and love God as he is in himself.

The third kind of love is divine and is less our going out to know God than it is God’s indwelling being accepted by us. Here God gives birth within us. Through this kind of love we come to know how God from all eternity has given birth to his only begotten Son and continues to give him birth now and into all future eternities . . . in every good soul which has abandoned its self-centeredness and received the indwelling God. It is a divine love because it is creative and birth-oriented and because it is God’s self-knowledge. It alone gives God full joy and it is shareable with us. This is the way God loves, namely, all creatures within the circle of being of which the Creator is the center point. For beings to participate more fully in the divine love and energy, they must, like points on a circumference, be moved from their own self-centeredness. Creatures are invited to travel deeper and deeper toward the center or vortex of this circle where the divine love radiates. This traveling, however, is not a climbing but a sinking. Go away and sink deeply into yourself, we are urged. Where does the journey of sinking stop? Not short of the primordial source of being, says Eckhart. Our sinking into the center is a sinking into the divine source of all being. It is a panentheistic plunge.

Eckhart reminds us of another characteristic of God’s love for creatures that ought to be ours as well. That is the equality of love that God shares with each and every being. Among all these creatures God does not love any one more than any other. Elsewhere he declares that “in God no creature is more noble than another.”² Why is it that God is so scrupulously egalitarian in the love for creatures? It is because God is truly in all creatures on an equal basis with the differences being attributable solely to the creature’s capacity to receive. God poured his being in equal measure to all creatures, to each as much as it can receive. Divine love is a cosmic love that extends to all creatures equally. This law of equality of love Eckhart applies to ourselves when he urges that this is a good lesson for us that we should love all creatures equally with everything which we have received from God. True love demands equality, Eckhart points out elsewhere. “There can be no love, however, where love does not find equality or does not create equality.”³ Coercion is the relationship between unequals but love is the relationship among equals.

Love will never be anything else than there where equality and unity are. Between a master and a servant he has there is no peace because there is no real equality. A wife and a husband are not alike but in love they are equal. This is why the Scripture is quite right in saying that God has taken the woman from the rib and side of the man—neither therefore from the head nor from the feet for where there are two, there we find deficiency. Why? Because the one is not the other, for this “not” that makes the difference is nothing other than bitterness, precisely because there no peace is available.⁴

It is because all things are equal in God that our love, like God’s, is to open to such friendship with all. When we talk about loving some people in our lives more than we do others, what we are really saying, says Eckhart, is that love is a twofold energy of both receiving and giving and that, in extending our love energy outward, some persons return it to us more readily than others. If some are naturally closer to us through relationship or friendship, we should nonetheless respond from divine love with equal friendliness to all because we see all in relationship to that ultimate good which is God.

Sometimes I seem to love one person more than another; but I promise, nevertheless, the other person, whom I have never seen, the same friendliness. The only difference is that some people ask for and call forth from me this friendliness more often and therefore I am more likely to give myself more to them.

It is the calling forth of friendliness that varies among people but not the equality with which we extend our friendship.

Eckhart does not rest content in urging us to a consciousness of equality with all people. He insists that our equality is not with humans alone but with all animals and indeed all beings of the cosmos. He urges us to a cosmic consciousness and a cosmic love. This outward orientation of Eckhart’s toward all of creation bathed in God’s grace is especially noteworthy since it is set in the context of a scriptural passage that many Christian mystics would reduce merely to a kind of divine tête-à-tête with the individual human soul. Ekhart will have none of such sentimentalism, however, and interprets the following passage in light of his cosmically reaching, creation-centered spirituality. Following is the scriptural passage which Eckhart was using for this sermon:

“My little children,

I shall not be with you much longer.

You will look for me,

and, as I told the Jews,

where I am going,

you cannot come.

I give you a new commandment:

love one another;

just as I have loved you,

you also must love one another.

By this love you have for one another,

everyone will know that you are my disciples.” (Jn. 13:33–35)

It is in preaching from this text that Eckhart examines this mode of love with which Jesus loved (“just as I have loved you”) and concludes that Jesus’ love is a cosmic one that extends equally to all creatures. Eckhart says: Though we talk about human beings, we are speaking at the same time of all creatures, for Christ himself said to his disciples: “Go forth and preach the gospel to all creatures.” For Eckhart, then, true love of creation means love of all creation equally, the way God loves all creation. “A flea, to the extent that it is in God, is nobler than the highest angel is himself. Now in God all things are equal and are God himself.”⁵ To be in God is to be God in an equal manner. “The highest angel, the mind, and the gnat have an equal model in God.”⁶ Only a consciousness of our equality with all things results in authentic gentleness and peace. “The greatest blessing in heaven and on earth is based on equality,” Eckhart tells us.⁷

It is because of this equality of being that we share with all creatures that we can learn from all creatures instead of lording it over them. Eckhart tells us, for example, to learn the following lesson from a dog. A dog can instruct humans how to love one another.

When I came to this convent yesterday, I saw sage and other plants on a tomb, and I thought to myself: here lies someone’s dear friend, that is why this parcel of ground is so dear to him. If someone has a friend whom he truly loves, he will also love everything that belongs to him; likewise, what is repugnant to his friend, he will not love. Take for example a dog, which is only an animal without intelligence. He is so faithful to his master that he hates everything that can harm his master, while to his master’s friends he extends friendliness without regard for wealth or poverty. Much more, if there were a poor blind man with great affection for the dog’s master, the dog would love him more than a king or an emperor who would dislike his master. The truth is that, if the dog could be unfaithful to his master with one half of his being, he would hate himself with the other half.⁸

Animals, Eckhart observes, do not love half-heartedly. Elsewhere he presents another example of learning from a dog and from a child but in this case the learning is at the deep level of shared energies and shared being.

If I was alone in a desert and feeling afraid, I would like to have a child with me, for then my fear would disappear and I would be strengthened—so noble, so full of pleasure, and so powerful is life itself. If I could not have a child with me, and if I had at least a live animal with me, I would be comforted. Therefore, let those who bring about great wonders in big, black books take an animal—perhaps a dog—to help them. The life within the animal will give them strength. For equality gives strength in all things.⁹

This excellent testimony to the “power of life in itself” and to the equality that “gives strength in all things” is Eckhart’s memorable way of underlining the importance of the equality of all creatures that derives from their all being in God and in the divine circle of being. I once shared this story of Eckhart’s with a young minister, who told me this story in return. He said that he and his wife bought a house very cheaply, since there had been a murder in it during its previous occupancy. Their first night in the house they could not sleep because of fear and bad vibes in the room. Finally, they went and got their little baby, placed it down between them in the bed, and slept soundly that night and thereafter. The baby blessed them and their new home—so noble, so full of pleasure, and so powerful is life in itself.

One reason we have so much in common with other creatures is that our origins are the same. “When the Father engendered all creatures, he brought me forth. I emanated together with all creatures and yet I remain within, in the Father.”¹⁰ To return to our roots or origins is to make contact with our common ancestry, thus with the sisterhood and brotherhood of all beings. “I have sensory perception in common with all creatures.”¹¹ In the circle that being is, the central point is equally near and far from all the other points. This is the primordial source of being into which we are invited to plunge. Eckhart resists all temptation to human chauvinism and even animate chauvinism. For him, all of creation partakes of divine equality. “Creatures were able to receive equality with God—indeed, as much equality as if he had emptied himself.”¹² Eckhart’s consciousness extends to the cosmos itself: “I, for my part, say that the heavens in their movement strive for the same end as matter. . . the end sought by the heavens in their movement is the existence of the universe, or the conservation of the universe.”¹³ For Eckhart, there are lessons in spirituality to be learned from the planets and stars:

There are various things we should know about the heavens above: that they are firm, pure, all-embracing, and fruitful. These same qualities should be found in human beings, for each of us should be a heaven in which God dwells. Thus if the heavens are firm, we should be firm. What happens to us should not change us.

The heavens teach us the vastness of our love and the creativity of our love.

The heavens . . . surround everything and contain everything in themselves. This too is something human beings can obtain in love, that they are able to contain everything in themselves—friends and foes alike. Friends are loved in God; enemies for the sake of God; and everything created is loved with reference to God, our Lord, insofar as it furthers our progress to him.

The heavens are fruitful for they are helpful to every endeavor. The heavens work more than a carpenter when he builds a house.¹⁴

As was typical of the medieval’s interest in the interrelationship of microcosm and macrocosm, Eckhart looks at the cosmic direction of nature. “Nature, looking after the good of the universe, intends the generation of everything and destruction in order to assist generation. Its first intention is the preservation of the universe.”¹⁵ Given this cosmic dimension to Eckhart’s spiritual consciousness, it is no wonder that Schürmann can declare that “Eckhart actually abolishes the methodological distinction between theology, anthropology, and cosmology.”¹⁶ Eckhart’s is not a piecemeal vision but a holistic one. This is because he believed that we are to love as God loves, and God loves holistically. So God loves all creatures equally and fills them with his being. And we should lovingly meet all creatures in the same way. Meet all creatures, he is urging us. Open up and wake up. Learn what it means to be in God with all other beings that are in God. In so doing we are exposed not only to what has been—our common origins—or to what is—our common isness—but also to what is to be. For the cosmos contains a future thrust to it as well for Eckhart. What is this future? It is an assimilation of all things to God. “Each being . . . of the created universe strives, in as much as it is, to cooperate in the assimilation of all things to God.”¹⁷ This assimilation of all things to God is similar to Teilhard de Chardin’s vision, and it means that we “become all things as God is.”¹⁸ We are destined to become what we already are. Truly, our flowing out is a remaining within.

This sermon is deeply feminist and might very likely have been preached to the Beguines and from ideas Eckhart derived from the Beguines and other women he listened to. In it he calls God a pregnant woman on three occasions, recalling the same image from the Scriptures (see Is. 42:14). God lies in the maternity bed, like a woman who has given birth, Eckhart observes. Because God wants to keep giving birth, God remains in the maternity bed so that he can give birth to him again in all his works. God is a mother as well as a father. Parent of all that is, birther of all being. God’s work is to give birth to being. He tells us to imitate Mary, Lea, and Rachel but he avoids all pedestal pieties and Mariolatry when it comes to invoking Mary’s example. He enlists Mary as the first of God’s creatures to demonstrate how literally we can all give birth to God. What help is it to me that Mary is full of grace, if I am not also full of grace? He drives the lesson of religious models or saints home to his listeners: Don’t pine after others who had God’s favor; find God’s favor yourself. How does one do this? By letting go and sinking deeply into yourself where awareness of the equality of all being will make itself known to you. Then it will dawn on you that you are all angel and with all the angels.

This marks the way in which we love one another as we have been loved. That is, we learn to love as God loves. And we move from one love to another because our perception demands it. However, in God there is only the one love that is natural, graced, and divine altogether. For in God there is no smaller and greater. There is only the best. There is only the one commandment, “that you love one another as I have loved you.”