Sermon Six: THE GREATNESS OF THE HUMAN PERSON

“Saint Paul says . . .”^a

Saint Paul says: “Take Christ inside yourselves”—that is to say, grasp him interiorly (cf. Rm. 13:14). As we are emptied of ourselves, we take within us Christ, God, bliss and holiness. When people come along telling unusual stories, you tend to believe them, but Paul makes great promises and you believe him with difficulty. He promises you (when you are stripped of your ego) God, bliss and holiness. This is astonishing—we strip away our egos, empty ourselves of our very selves, and then take in Christ, holiness and bliss—and we become greater than ever. Now the prophet is astonished over two things. First, he marvels over God’s activities with the stars, the moon and the sun. But, second, he marvels at something concerning the soul—namely, that God has done so many great things with it and on its behalf and still continues to do them, for God does what he wants for the soul’s sake. He does countless great things for the soul’s sake and is fully occupied with it and this because of the greatness in which the soul is made (see Ps. 8:2ff.). Note that the concern is with how great the soul is. I form a letter according to the image of that letter in me, in my soul, but not according to my soul itself. It is very much the same with God. God made everything according to the image that he had of all things, but not according to himself. He made some things in a very special way according to what flows from himself—like goodness, wisdom, and whatever qualities we attribute to God. But the soul is what God made, not only according to the image which is in him or even according to what flows from himself and what we humans can express of him. The soul is what is truly made in God’s own image, in the image of ail that he is according to his nature, according to his Being, and according to his outflowing, yet remaining within works, and according to the ground where he remains himself, where he gives birth to his only begotten Son and from which the Holy Spirit blossoms. It is according to this outflowing, yet remaining within works, that God has made the soul.

It is the rule of nature for everything that the higher always flows into the lower, so long as the lower is turned to the higher. For the higher never receives from the lower; it is always the other way around. Now since God is above the soul, God is always flowing into the soul and can never escape the soul. But the soul can easily escape God. As long, however, as a person remains under God, that person receives the unmediated divine influx purely from God and stands under nothing else, neither under fear nor love nor suffering nor under anything other than God. So cast yourself totally and completely under God and you will receive the divine influence in its total purity. How does the soul receive this from God? The soul receives from God not as a stranger, as, for example, the air receives light from the sun. The air receives as a stranger. But the soul does not receive God in the condition of a stranger still under God, for whatever is under something else has some strangeness with reference to it and some distance, too. But the masters say that the soul receives as a light from light, for in this way there is neither strangeness nor distance.

There is something in the soul which is only God and the masters say it is nameless, having no proper name of its own. It is and has no existence of its own since it is neither this nor that, neither here nor there. For it is what it is in another and that in this. For what it is, that is in that, and that in this, because that flows into this and this into that and herein (in this something in the soul) lies the meaning of Paul in saying that you should unite yourself to God in bliss. For herein the soul takes its whole life and being and from this source it draws its life and being, for this is totally in God. That other part of the soul, however, is here on the outside and therefore the soul is always in God according to this inner part, lest it carry it outward or quench it.

A master says that this is so present to God that it can never turn from God and God is always present and inward to it. I say that God was eternally in this without interruption and that the human person is one with God in this. Nor is this a matter of grace, for grace is a creature, but here there is no creature to make, for in the ground of the divine Being where the three Persons are one Being, there is the soul one with God, according to this ground. So you might say that all things and God too are yours. That is to say—empty yourself of your ego and of all things and of all that you are in yourself and consider yourself as what you are in God.

The masters say that human nature has nothing to do with time and is completely unmovable and much more inward and present to a person than the person is to himself or herself. And this is why God took on a human nature and united it with his Person. Thus the human nature became God, for God assumed the pure human nature and not a human person. So if you want to be this same Christ and God, empty yourself of everything which the eternal Word did not assume. The eternal Word did not assume a human being, so empty yourself of everything which is purely personal and peculiarly you and assume human nature purely, then you will be the same in the eternal Word as human nature is in him. For your human nature and that of the divine Word are no different—it’s one and the same. What it is in Christ, it is in you. Therefore, I said to my audience in Paris that in the just person there is fulfilled what the Holy Spirit and the prophets said about Christ. For if you are just, then everything which is in the Old and New Testaments will be fulfilled in you.

How can righteousness be yours? There are two ways of understanding that, according to the prophet’s word, which says: “In the fullness of time was the Son sent” (Ga. 4:4). There are two meanings to this “fullness of time.” For a thing is full when it is at its end, as each day is full in its evening. Therefore, the time is full when all time falls from you. The second meaning of fullness of time is when time comes to its end—that is, in eternity. For in eternity all time has its end and there is neither before nor after. There everything is present and new, everything which is there. And there you have in a present vision everything which ever happened or ever will happen. There is no before or after, there in eternity; everything is present and in this ever-present vision I possess everything. That is the “fullness of time” and that means that I am just and so I am truly the proper Son and Christ. God help us that we come to this “fullness of time.” Amen.

COMMENTARY! The Human Soul Is So Truly Made in God’s Image That God Cannot Escape It/Where We Are Totally in God—the Spark of the Soul/How the Fullness of Time Is Experienced Now Where Eternity Is Newness and Nowness

Eckhart has marveled at the greatness of creation, at its grace-filledness, at the equality of all being in God, at the fact that all beings are words—indeed books—about God. In this sermon he turns more specifically to the human creation. He marvels at the greatness in which the soul is made by God, as does the psalmist, who sang this hymn to the God of creation:

I look up at your heavens, made by your fingers,

at the moon and stars you set in place—

ah, what is man that you should spare a thought for him,

the son of man that you should care for him?

Yet you have made him little less than a god,

you have crowned him with glory and splendor,

made him lord over the work of your hands,

set all things under his feet,

sheep and oxen, all these;

yes, wild animals too,

birds in the air, fish in the sea

traveling the paths of the ocean.

Yahweh, our Lord,

how great your name throughout the earthl (Ps. 8:3–9)

While all creation has flowed out from God according to the image that God held of things in the creative mind and while wisdom and goodness have been created in a very special way according to what flows from himself, still the soul is yet greater and more God-like. For it alone is what is truly made in God’s own image, in the image of all that he is according to his nature, according to his Being and according to his outflowing yet remaining within works, and according to the ground where he remains in himself. Eckhart is nearly beside himself with the implications of our having been made in the image of God and not only according to the image God had. Why is the soul so God-like? Because it is truly made in God’s own image, it shares the divine nature according to his Being, to his works, to the ground where he remains himself and where he gives birth and where the Holy Spirit blossoms. This theme of the Godliness of human creation in particular—”you have made him little less than a god”—is returned to time and again in Eckhart’s sermons:

From the very moment of its creation God has endowed the soul, out of the kindness and love he feels for it, with a divine light inasmuch as he could accomplish things with pleasure in the likeness of himself.¹

When God made creatures, they were so small and narrow that he could not operate in any of them. He made the soul, however, so like and similar in appearance to himself that he could give himself to the soul.²

Our Lord teaches us . . . how noble people have been created in their nature, how divine is the state to which they can rise through grace and, in addition, how people are to reach that point. A large part of the Holy Scripture touches upon these words.³

People are created in the image of God . . . they are of God’s lineage and God’s family.⁴

People are the new temple:

This temple, which God wished to rule over powerfully according to his own will, is the soul of a person. God has formed and created the soul very like himself, for we read that our Lord said: “Let us make human beings in our own image” (Gn. 1:26). And this is what he did. So like to himself did he make the soul of a person that neither in the kingdom of heaven nor on earth among all the splendid creatures that God created in such a wonderful way is there any creature that resembles God as much as does the soul of a human being alone.⁵

Humanity, then, is the Creator’s masterpiece, a likeness of the divinity that has no parallel.

The soul is destined for such a great and noble good . . . The soul must always hurry to this goal, that it can by every available means come to the eternal good that is God—for it is for that the soul was created.⁶

Rather than concentrating on original sin, Eckhart, in true creation theology tradition, waxes ecstatic about the divine likeness that the human person bears, as he said above, “from the very moment of its creation.” He explains that an image is recognizable by four elements.

An Image is not of itself, nor is it for itself. It rather springs from the thing whose reflection it is and belongs to it with all its being. It owes nothing to a thing other than that whose image it is; nothing else is at its origin. An image takes its being immediately from that of which it is the image and has one sole being with it, and it is that same being.⁷

This would mean that in the case of human beings, we are made not of ourselves but for God, of whom we are the image, and that we belong to God “with all our being”; that only God is at our origin; that our being comes immediately from God; and that we are “one sole being” with God. Thus Eckhart further elaborates in this sermon on how, between the soul and God, there is neither strangeness nor distance. Furthermore, though the soul can easily escape God, God is always flowing into the soul and can never escape the soul. We are to remain under God as in standing under a waterfall to receive the unmediated divine influx purely from God. For this reason, in the long run, “the person who hopes to escape God . . . cannot escape him. All hiding places reveal God; the person hoping to escape runs into his lap.”⁸ Our nearness to God is the nearness of light to light. To flee God is to kill God, who so loves the divine image in us.

Know now that God loves the soul so dearly that, if we took away from God his love for the soul, we would take away his life and his being. We would kill God insofar as we could say such a thing. For the love with which God loves the soul is the same love in which the Holy Spirit blows, and this same love is the Holy Spirit. Since God loves the soul so dearly, the soul must be also something just as great.⁹

Eckhart admits that the soul, like God, is ineffable. No one can name what the soul is. “God who is without name—he has no name—is ineffable; and the soul in its ground is likewise ineffable: just as ineffable as he is.”¹⁰ We ought to experience the soul “in its transparency” like we do God instead of trying to name it. “He who wants to name the soul such as it is in itself, in its simplicity, in its clarity, and in its nakedness, will find no name to fit.”¹¹ The soul, being divine, is unnameable. “When we speak of divine things, we have to stammer, because we have to express them in words.”¹²

And yet Eckhart finds two ways of identifying elements of the soul, if you will. The first is the power of the soul to reason. “Reason is the temple of God,” he declares. “God dwells nowhere more authentically than in his temple, in reason.”¹³ Human beings, Eckhart contends, have a “little spark” of this reason in the ground of their soul so that God can truly be at home in the temple which is human beings. “Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.”¹⁴ Eckhart often calls this “spark of the soul” a “something,” as in the sermon we are considering:

There is something in the soul which is only God and the masters say it is nameless, having no proper name of its own. It is and has no existence of its own since it is neither this nor that, neither here nor there. For it is what it is in another and that in this.

Thus, this spark of the soul exists in God. It overlaps the divine soul and the divine reason. It is where human spirit and divine spirit become one, for here is the union of the point in the circle of being and the circle’s center. Herein the soul takes its whole life and being and from this source it draws its life and being, for this is totally in God.

Here lies the inness of our being in God. It is here that we are most God-like and God is most imaged in us: “In this spark, as the higher part of the spirit, is located the image of God that the mind is.”¹⁵ In the soul, Eckhart maintains, there is “something like a spark of divine nature, a divine light, a ray, an imprinted picture of the divine nature.”¹⁶

It is important to point out that Eckhart was not a Cartesian or a rationalist. Reason as the temple of God does not mean one side of the brain that is analytical or the domain of academic footnotes and scholarship. As Schürmann puts it, what is meant by the Thomist concept of mens is “a fundamental disposition to know and to love, and the spiritual vestige of the divine life in man.”¹⁷ That is why a better word than reason, suggests Schürmann, might be “spirit.” The reason being spoken of here is an “interior knowledge by intuition.” It is intuitive reason, not discursive reason. Caputo puts it this way: “When Eckhart speaks of the ‘little spark’ of reason, he does not refer to the faculty of discursive reasoning, the power that moves from premises to conclusions and which uses concepts and representations.”¹⁸ Rather, Eckhart speaks of a “power that has nothing at all in common with anything else,” one that “is so high and noble that it grasps God in his own naked being.”¹⁹ This power is the “ground of freedom”²⁰ which “apprehends God naked, as he is, divested of goodness and being. Goodness is a garment under which God is hidden,”²¹ but intuitive reason needs no such intermediaries. It is in this ground of the mind that, at their root, people are divine. But we have to make contact with this divine spark by emptying ourselves or letting go. And then we will know the unity that already exists.

Then you will be the same in the eternal Word as human nature is in him. For your human nature and that of the divine Word are no different—it’s one and the same . . . So if you want to be this same Christ and God, empty yourself . . .

If we fail to empty ourselves and thus sink into the truth of the divine image and its spark in us, then in this way too we can “kill God” insofar as we put the spark itself to death, quenching the divine flame.

There is in the soul a something in which the soul dwells in God. However, if the soul turns outward to other objects, it will die, and God will die for the soul. Of course, God does not die to himself, but he rather continues to live in himself.²²

God is a fire and we have within us, in our core, sparks of that fire. “This spark is so closely related to God that it is a unique indivisible unity, and bears within itself the images of all creatures, image without image, and image above image.”²³ Thus, at our core, we are as free as God is, free even of images or free to become all possible images, since “God is in the ground of the soul with all his divinity.”²⁴

Just as Schürmann has recommended the term spirit as preferable to intellect or reason for translating Eckhart’s term mens, I would suggest that imagination might be the best translation. First, because the term imaginatio did not mean in medieval psychology anything like its meaning today and so Eckhart could not use it then; and second, because in trying the impossible task of naming what is most God-like in humans, Eckhart does make clear that creativity and birthing are the essence of God. Thus, if imagination is the term we use today to name the womb of creativity where images are born and where images are let go of, then that term may come the closest to what Eckhart is trying to say. It is our capacity to give birth to images that parallels God’s capacity to create; this image-birthing is a source of our freedom, for in birthing images we must choose some and reject others; and the images we choose enkindle a kind of fire that enlightens self and society.

To be in touch with our own ground, then, is to be in touch with God. To touch the spark is to touch the fire. What does this kindling between the divine fire and our divine spark bring about? One of its fruits is a new sense of time. It is eternity, for “God is eternity.” It is, in theological terms, the new times, the Messianic times, the end times, the last times. It is realized eschatology. It is the sense of time that the Scriptures speak of in the two citations around which Eckhart has constructed his sermon.

Besides, you know “the time” has come: you must wake up now: our salvation is even nearer than it was when we were converted. The night is almost over, it will be daylight soon—let us give up all the things we prefer to do under cover of the dark; let us arm ourselves and appear in the light. . . Let your armor be the Lord Jesus Christ. (Rm. 13:11–12, 14)

This Pauline exhortation constitutes the text from which Eckhart first wrote this sermon. But he adds another:

When the appointed time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject of the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law and to enable us to be adopted as sons. The proof that you are sons is that God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: the Spirit that cries, “Abba, Father,” and it is this that makes you a son, you are not a slave any more. (Ga. 44–7)

It is evident that Eckhart gets his theme that traces our likeness to God, our likeness to Christ, from these scriptural passages—what it is in Christ it is in you—and the new sense of time based on the fullness of time.

Eckhart calls this “fullness of time” eternity. What most characterizes this eternity that we can now experience is newness and the presence of newness now.

There everything is present and new, everything which is there. And there you have in a present vision everything which ever happened or ever will happen. There is no before or after, there in eternity; everything is present and in this ever-present vision I possess everything.

This same theme of realized eschatology, of the fullness of time now, is developed at length by Eckhart elsewhere. To begin with, he defines what he means by eternity. “What is eternity? Pay attention. Eternity is the peculiarity that being and being young are one. For eternity would not be eternity if it could become new and were not continually the same.”²⁵ Eternity to Eckhart is the unending state of youthfulness, freshness, newness, and vitality. It belongs uniquely to God, though by God’s gratuitous gift-giving we too can share in eternity in this life. “Whatever God gives is always prepared. Its preparation is now new and fresh, and proceeds fully in an eternal now.”²⁶ For “both newness and life are proper to God.”²⁷ One reason why there is an eternal now is that such is God’s conception of time and creation.

God so created all things that he nevertheless always creates in the present. The act of creation does not fade into the past but is always in the beginning and in process and new.²⁸

To return to our source and our origins is to return to this beginning that is eternally young, eternally now. “New means inexperienced, close to some beginning. God is the beginning and if we are united with him, we become ‘new’ again . . . God’s works have to be understood as timeless, as being created without effort.”²⁹ Everything God does is new.

The Book of Wisdom says: “He created, so that all things might have being” (1:14). Now existence is the beginning, the first, and the source of all things. From this it is clear that every work of God is new. Wisdom says: “remaining in himself, he makes all things new” (2:27). Revelations says: “Behold, I make all things new” (21:5). So it is said in Isaiah: “I am the first and the last” (44:6). He so created, therefore, that he nevertheless always creates: for what is in the beginning, and whose end is the beginning, always arises, always is being born, always has been born.³⁰

Newness is integral to our creation and our re-creation. “All things . . . are timelessly new in God. Of this Saint John speaks in the Apocalypse: ‘The one who sat upon the throne said: “I shall make all things new” (Rv. 21:5). All things are new with the Son, for “he is born today from the Father just as if he had never been born.”³¹ God’s creation with its newness never stops. “Here the end is the beginning, the completed is always starting and the born is always being born. This is how God created all things: he does not stop creating, but he forever creates and begins to create.”³² God is new and all God does is new and we too in our godliness are new. “Every action of God is new and ‘he makes all things new’ (Ws. 727).”³³ Our contact with God renews us.

Existence . . . does not grow old, nor is it changed . . . The psalmist says: “Your youth will be renewed like an eagle’s” . . . Thus God, who always operates and always is new. Therefore every being is new insofar as it is from God and has newness from no other thing. By ascending to God, by drawing near to God, by running back to God, by returning to God—all things are made new, all things become good, are purged, cleansed, made holy. On the other hand, by receding from God they grow old, they perish, they sin as Paul says: “The wages of sin are death” (Rm. 6:23).³⁴

God is “novissimus,” or the “most new thing there is,” Eckhart declares, since God is the Alpha and Omega, the origin of all being and therefore of all newness. “Everything is made new when it receives being—through being itself and in being itself all things are made new.” When God bestows being, God bestows newness. To be renewed is to return to our Godly origins, which are resplendent in newness.³⁵

God is essentially young or eternal. But the soul, made so perfectly in God’s image, is of the same ilk.

The soul is as young as it was when it was created. Old age concerns only the soul’s use of the bodily senses . . . My soul is as young as it was when it was created. Yes, and much younger! I tell you, it would not surprise me if it were younger tomorrow than it is today!³⁶

Indeed, for Eckhart, one is worthy of shame if one is not younger every day. How does one grow in youthfulness? By letting go of everyday time and entering into the eternal now. “To follow and imitate God is eternity,” he advises.³⁷ God is always wanting to share the divine newness with us. “God gives himself ever new to the soul in a constant becoming. He does not say: ‘It has become’ or ‘It will become,’ but: it is always new and fresh in incessant becoming.”³⁸ Everyday time is shattered when the human soul, capable of the eternal now, meets God, who dwells in the eternal now.

God is in this power as in the eternal now. Were the spirit at every moment united with God in this power, people could never grow old . . . People dwell in the light of God; therefore there is in them neither suffering nor the sequence of time but an eternity which remains the same.³⁹

Thus Eckhart can indeed identify the Messianic times with the fullness of time that occurs when all time falls from you. Such a new time gives us new visions of the end time already begun. For those who are ready, all has been prepared.

There everything is present and new, everything which is there. And there you have in a present vision everything which ever happened or ever will happen . . . everything is present and in this ever-present vision I possess everything.

Possessing everything—there lies the magnificence and God-likeness of the human person. An amazing creation indeed, this word that flows out but remains within.