Sermon Seven: THE BIGNESS OF THE HUMAN PERSON

“The Spirit of the Lord fills the whole world.” (Ws. 17)^a

One scholar says: All creatures bear the imprint of God’s nature, from which they emanate, so that they might act according to it. Creatures flow out in two different ways. The first manner of emanation has to do with rootedness, as roots bring forth a tree. The second manner of emanation is created through a bond; it is a twofold emanation, as God’s is. First there is the emanation of the Son from the Father through birth. The second occurs through a bond with the Holy Spirit; it is a bond of love, and proceeds from Father and Son who love themselves in the Holy Spirit. All creatures manifest their flowing out from God’s nature through their actions. A Greek scholar remarks that God surrounds all of his creatures as with a fence, so that they might act according to his own image. That is why all of nature aspires continuously to that which is highest. Creation wishes not only to reflect the Son, but if it were possible, it would want to reflect the Father as well. And that is why, if all creatures were to act outside of time, without limit, creation would be without imperfections. A Greek scholar says: Because creation is immersed in time and place, creatures differ from the Father and the Son. Another scholar expresses it thus: Any builder of a house must build that house first in his mind, and if the building material were so in accord with the plan of the builder and wholly subject to the will of its maker, that house would exist as soon as the builder conceived it in his mind, because the internal and external plan would be distinct only as giving birth and being born are distinct. Thus it is with God: in him there is neither time nor space, and that is why Father and Son are one God, and they are not distinct except for the mode of emanation and being emanated.

“The Spirit of the Lord.” Why is his name “Lord”? So that he might impregnate us. Why is his name “Spirit”? That he may be united to us. “Power” is recognized in three ways. First, the Lord is rich: rich means to possess everything, not to suffer want. But no matter how rich a man is, he remains but one person. And if one could encompass all human beings, that would not make one an angel. And if one could be an angel and human being at the same time, one would only be one angel, not all angels. That is why in the true sense God alone is rich, because he alone contains all in himself. And that is the reason why he can give always; that is the second aspect of his wealth. A certain scholar said that God offers himself to all his creatures and it is up to them to accept as many of God’s gifts as they want. I say that God offers himself to me as to the highest angel, and if I were ready to receive as much as the angel accepts, I would receive as much as he from God’s plenty. I have said on many occasions that God from all eternity has acted thus: God acts as if he was occupied with how he could become pleasing to the soul. The third aspect of being rich is that one gives without expectation of any return, for if someone gives in order to get something in return, such a one is not rich in the true sense. The proof that God is truly rich lies in the fact that he gives disinterestedly. That is why the prophet remarks: “I said to my Lord, you are my Lord because you have no need of me” (Ps. 16:2). Only such a one is “Lord” and “Spirit” and our blessedness consists in his uniting himself to us. The most noble thing God works in his creature is existence. Though my earthly father passes on his nature, he does not give me existence; existence I receive solely from God. That is why all that exists rejoices in its existence. As I have said on different occasions—and frequently been misunderstood in the process—Judas does not want to be someone else, whether in heaven or in hell. Why? Because if he had to become another, he would have to abandon his existence, he would come to nothing. But that is impossible, because existence does not negate itself. The existence of the soul is sensitized to the influence of God’s radiance. However, since the soul is not wholly pure or transparent, it is not able to receive God’s light in its fullness; God’s light must enter the soul veiled. Though the sun’s rays are reflected on a tree and other objects, the sun itself cannot be seen by us—directly. So it is with God’s gifts: they have to be measured according to him who is to receive them and not according to the one who gives them.

One scholar says: God is the measure of all that exists, and to the degree that one person embraces God’s gifts more fully than another, to that degree he is wiser, nobler, and better than the other. To possess more of God than others means nothing else than to resemble God to a higher degree; the more we are an image of God, the more spiritual we are. One scholar observes: At that point where the lowest spiritual aspects end, the highest corporal things begin. That means: Since God is a spirit, that which is spirit in the lowest order is nobler than that which is corporal in the highest. Therefore, the soul is nobler than all things corporal, noble though they might be. The soul, as it were, was created at that point which divides time from eternity; it touches both of these points. With its highest faculties the soul touches eternity, with its lowest, however, it is in touch with time. That is why the soul acts in time, not according to time, but in accordance with eternity. That quality it has in common with the angels. One scholar says: The soul can be compared to a sleigh that can travel anywhere—the soul likewise “travels” into all parts of the body, and thus establishes a unity. Though the intellect is gifted with understanding, and though it directs and accomplishes all that finds expression in the body, one should not conclude, therefore, that the soul does this or that; rather, one should say: I do this or recognize that, because body and soul are one. If a stone could absorb fire into itself, it would act like fire. And though the air absorbs the light of the sun, it does not thereby take on the qualities of the sun. Because air is diffusive, light can shine through it. Thus it is that in a stretch of one mile more light is absorbed than in half a mile. If there exists an intimate unity between body and soul, the unity that binds two spirits must be more intimate still. The “Lord” and “Spirit” is in union with us so that we might reach blessedness.

A question that is difficult to answer is this: How can the soul endure to absorb God into itself without being annihilated? I respond: Every gift that God bestows on the soul is he himself. If God were to bestow upon the soul a gift that were outside him-self, the soul would reject it. Because God gives himself, the soul is immersed in him, it lives in him. Because the soul proceeds from God, all that “belongs” to the soul is really his, and that is the reason why the soul is not crushed when God unites himself to it. This is “the spirit of the Lord, who fills the whole world.”

Why the soul is called “world” and how the soul reaches blessedness, I did not discuss. But remember this: As he is “Lord” and “Spirit,” in the same way are we to be spiritual “soil” and a “domain” that can be penetrated with the breath of life, which is “Lord” and “Spirit.” Amen.

COMMENTARY:  The Continual Growth of the Soul/Spirituality Is About Growing Without Limit/The Oneness of Soul and Body/The Nearness of God and the Human Soul

In the previous sermon Eckhart brought to our attention how rooted in divinity we are. Our souls, he insists, contain God’s very image in them. In this sermon Eckhart develops this theme of the beauty of human creation in greater depth, for he discusses how spirituality is a growth into our truest nature. Our truest nature is like God’s.

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 him as much as does the soul of a human being alone.¹

There are degrees to getting in touch with our divine depths. We can possess more and less of God. To possess more of God than others means nothing else than to resemble God to a higher degree; the more we are an image of God, the more spiritual we are. This, then, is what it means to be spiritual: to develop the image of God in us. But this development is a process, a growth process. We are to be spiritual “soil” where the seed of God can grow to life and which the breath of life can penetrate. After all, we all receive this breath of life at creation—but is it allowed to grow in us? Eckhart develops this theme of soil, of seeds, and of roots on several occasions. In us

God has sowed his image and his likeness, and . . . he sows the good seed, the roots of all wisdom, all knowledge, all virtues, all goodness—the seed of the divine nature. The seed of divine nature is the Son of God, the Word of God.²

The divine seed is in us but it must maturate and grow, as does any seed.

The seed of God is in us. If the seed had a good, wise, and industrious cultivator, it would thrive all the more and grow up to God whose seed it is, and the fruit would be equal to the nature of God. Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree, a hazel seed into a hazel tree, the seed of God into God.³

This seed, a spark of God, burns like an unquenchable fire even when we try to ignore it or cover it up. Eckhart borrows the following image from Origen:

God himself has sown this seed, and inserted it and borne it. Thus while this seed may be crowded, hidden away, and never cultivated, it will still never be obliterated. It glows and shines, gives off light, burns, and is unceasingly inclined toward God.⁴

“The seed,” Eckhart repeats elsewhere, “is the Word of God.”⁵ It cannot be covered up, silenced, or forgotten for long. It will burn wherever it finds material to ignite. Seeds grow and need to grow. So do we; so does the divine seed in us.

There are no limits to this growth. God is the limit. The ambition of the soul to expand into its divine dimensions is a starting point for spiritual growth. Our discontent ought to be recognized.

You should never be content with what you have of God, for you can never have enough of God. The more you have of God, the more you want of him. If you, in fact, could have enough of God, so that there came about a satiety of God in you, then God would not be God.⁶

The soul will not rest content with anything smaller than God. “Everything God has a mind to give is still too little for the soul unless God gives himself among his gifts.”⁷ Our souls are boundless in their eagerness and capacity for the gifts of God.

Every divine gift increases our receptivity and longing to receive what is higher and greater. For this reason many masters of the spiritual life say that in this the soul is equal in birth to God. For to the extent that God is boundless in his giving, the soul is equally boundless in taking and receiving. Just as God is omnipotent in his deeds, the soul is just as profound in its capacity to receive. For this reason it is transformed—with and in God.⁸

Eckhart is touching on a theme here of the divinization of the human person that we will develop more fully in Sermons Twenty-five and Twenty-six. The only rest that the human person can know is a rest in its own divine origins, roots or seed. “Because the soul has the capacity to know everything, it is never at rest until it comes to the original image, where all things are one. And there it comes to its rest which is in God.”⁹ This capacity of the soul to know everything is a cosmic capacity that the human has in common with the Creator of the cosmos. As Schürmann puts it:

The intellect is capable of receiving the universe; this is why and how it is naturally like God. Man’s similarity with God consists in his openness to the totality of what is; tradition attaches the label of intellect to this capacity of total openness . . . the intellect is naturally connected with the universe.¹⁰

This boundless openness to all that is invites us to ever greater expansion of soul and consciousness. It is God who does the expanding: “If God so changes little things, what do you think he will do with the soul, which he has already fashioned so gloriously in his own image?”¹¹ Once again, we are admonished not to flee from dissatisfaction but to recognize it as the proper starting point for a divine adventure. The human spirit

does not allow itself to be satisfied with that light (which is come down from heaven). It storms the firmament, and scales the heavens until it reaches the spirit that drives the heavens. As a result of heaven’s revolution, everything in the world flourishes and bursts into leaf. The spirit, however, is never satisfied; it presses on ever further into the vortex (or whirlpool) and primary source in which the spirit has its origin.¹²

By calling the source a vortex, Eckhart conjures up his previous images of sinking into God. He is suggesting that the inside of the inside, the core of the seed as well as the core of our origins, which means the core of the Godhead, may well be understood as a vortex. This falling into the vortex and sinking into our divine origin knows no limit. So deep is God that we could fall—and grow—forever. “If people lived a thousand years or even longer, they might still grow in love.”¹³ Neither God nor we have any limits, so great is our likeness to God. To test and fill these limits we must be on the move, “running to heavenly peace,” as Eckhart puts it. “We should not rest satisfied with anything, and never remain standing still. In this world there can be no standing still in any way of life, and there never was for any man, however far he traveled.”¹⁴ This development of the soul includes a development of our talents and gifts. “We should not destroy any good, however small, in ourselves, nor any small way for the sake of a greater one, but we should perfect them all in the highest possible manner.”¹⁵ Another way to run to our divine capacities is to be receptive and to develop our receptive capacities. God offers himself to me as to the highest angel, and if I were ready to receive as much as the angel accepts, I would receive as much as he from God’s plenty. To receive we must be alert, awake and prepared to receive. “Above all, persons should at all times be prepared for the gifts of God and always prepare themselves anew.” For God “is a thousand times more eager to give than we are to receive. But we do him violence and wrong if we impede him in his natural activity by our unpreparedness.”¹⁶ Growth is intrinsic to spiritual experience because, after all, “the ‘being’ is only found in the ‘becoming.’”¹⁷ This becoming knows no boundaries.

A person should in all things become a God-seeking and a God-finding person at all times and among all kinds of persons and in all ways. In this quest one can grow and increase without intermission, and never come to an end of the increasing.¹⁸

One should never expect an end to such expansion in this life for “spiritually, one never reaches satisfaction, because the more one feeds on spiritual food, the more one longs for it.”¹⁹

Having considered the theme of spiritual growth and limitlessness of the human potential for the divine, we can more readily grasp Eckhart’s exegesis of wisdom literature with which he began this sermon. His text was as follows:

The spirit of the Lord, indeed, fills the whole world,

and that which holds all things together knows every word that is said . . .

Death was not God’s doing,

he takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living.

To be—for this he created all;

the world’s created things have health in them,

in them no fatal poison can be found,

and Hades holds no power on earth;

for virtue is undying. (Ws. 1:7, 13–15)

Eckhart calls the soul that is filled with the Spirit who is the breath of life, the world. In so doing he urges humans to consider their beauty and divinity. He also takes delight in Wisdom’s declaration: “To be—for this God created all,” and he calls on. Psalm 16, a psalm of trust, in his exhilaration at the gift of existence: All that exists rejoices in its existence.

To Yahweh you say, “My Lord,

you are my fortune, nothing else but you” . . .

So my heart exults, my very soul rejoices,

my body, too, will rest securely,

for you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,

nor allow the one you love to see the Pit;

you will reveal the path of life to me,

give me unbounded joy in your presence,

and at your right hand everlasting pleasures. (Ps. 16:2, 9–11)

Another issue is at stake in our becoming like God and growing in spiritual consciousness. In Sermon Two, Eckhart introduced the subject of dualistic consciousness, saying that dualism can never touch God. In this present sermon he applies that principle to the subject so easily made dualistic by fundamentalists and spiritualists: the soul and the body’s relationship. Eckhart rejects the dualism of Neoplatonism in favor of a Jewish holism: “My heart exults, my very soul rejoices, my body, too, will rest securely,” the psalmist has sung. Augustine said that what is spiritual is “whatever is not a body” and that body and soul are related as slave and master.²⁰ Eckhart says that the soul travels into all parts of the body, and thus establishes a unity. The soul’s work is to heal and make whole, to make a harmonious unity of us. We are not divided, body against soul, but are one entity. One should not conclude that the soul does this or that; rather, one should say: I do this or recognize that, because body and soul are one. Not only are body and soul one for Eckhart, but they form an intimate unity. He takes the unity of body and soul and, using it as an analogy, suggests that two spirits will be bound in a similar though even greater unity. We have seen in this and the previous sermon how noble and divine the soul of the human person is, but the body too is noble. All things corporal are noble, he declares. After all, they all share in the grace of existence. Eckhart conceives of the relationship of soul and body as a relation of friends, not of objects at war. He says: “The soul loves the body.”²¹ This attitude of mutual interdependence between soul and body is much like Aquinas’ theory on the consubstantiality of soul and body and very much unlike Platonic theories about conflict that the Augustinian tradition presumes. The living body forms one substantial unity according to both Eckhart and Aquinas.²² The senses are not put down by Eckhart. Rather, he calls them the “ins and outs” of the world. They profit the soul. Senses

are the “ins and outs” through which the soul goes out into the world, and through these ins and outs the world, in turn, goes to the soul. A master of the spiritual life says that the powers of the soul are to run back to the soul to its good profit. When they emerge, they always bring something back again . . . I am certain that whatever good people see will improve them. If they see bad things, they will thank God for guarding them from such things and ask God to convert people in whom there is evil. If they see goodness, however, they will long to have it accomplished in themselves.²³

Thus the senses are vehicles for good persons who see, feel, taste, hear to their profit whether the objects of such senses be good or bad. A good person bears good fruit and has learned to trust his or her senses with the goodness that comes from one’s inside. For outside things can make one neither good nor bad. That is why he can say elsewhere that “we experience all things according to our own goodness.”²⁴ Knowledge of the world that comes through the senses “strengthens the soul so that the soul can endure the divine light.”²⁵ One reason people are dualists in thinking about body and soul is that they think in object terms instead of in energy terms. Eckhart turns any object thinking about body and soul inside out when he says that “my body is more in my soul than my soul is in my body.”²⁶ Thus, as we saw above, “soul” for Eckhart is not a private little motor that sits inside our body making it run until death. Rather, it is an energy that gives form and unity to our person and that far excels our physical place by its infinite capacity to grow.

More evidence that Eckhart abolished dualistic thinking about soul and body is the care he took to distinguish soul from spirit. Like the Jewish thinkers who wrote the Bible, Eckhart distinguishes soul, spirit, and body and does not overly identify soul and spirit. Nor does he overly exaggerate a competition between soul and body. For all dualistic thinking about body and soul ultimately rests on the supposition that soul is spirit and body is not spirit.²⁷ Eckhart thinks otherwise. He distinguishes between spiritual being and soul being. “Saint Paul was drawn up and yet remained with his soul in his body. He was drawn up in his spiritual being; he remained with his soul being.”²⁸ The soul points in two directions: toward body and toward spirit. But these are not mutually exclusive directions by any means.

The word soul is used with reference to the fact that it gives life to the body and is the form of the body. Renewal pertains to the soul also insofar as it is called spirit. And the soul is called spirit because it is separated from the here and now and from everything natural. But in that respect in which the soul is an image of God and is, like God, nameless, there the soul knows no renewal but only eternity, like God.²⁹

Eckhart speaks of our need to grow into being “more truly human”³⁰ just as he spoke above, as we saw, about our growing into our divinity. Our divinity is not won at the price of sacrificing our humanity. Rather, it pertains to the very soul of a person to be human and divine. For no dualism reigns either between body and soul or between humanity and divinity. The intimacy of the union of the first pair presages the even more intimate union of the second.

How intimate is this intimate union of two spirits, the human and the divine? Eckhart elaborates: “God leads this [human] spirit into the desert and solitude of himself, where he is pure unity and gushes up only within himself . . . Here the spirit remains in unity and freedom.”³¹ The union is comparable to that of a seal on wax:

If the seal is pressed completely through the wax so that no wax remains without being impressed by the seal, then it becomes undistinguishably one with the seal. Similarly the soul becomes completely united with God in his image and likeness, if the soul touches him in proper knowledge.³²

This experience of God is a “simple knowing” that “is so pure in itself that it knows without mediation the pure, bare divine being. And in this influx of the divine being, it receives the divine nature just like the angels who take such joy in that.”³³ Here our divine origins are met up with at last.

If I am to know God in such an unmediated way, then I must simply become God and God must become me. I would express it more exactly by saying that God must simply become me and I must become God, so completely one that this “he” and this “I” share one “is” and in this “isness” do our work eternally. For this “he” and this “I”, that is, God and the soul, are very fruitful as we eternally do one work.³⁴

Thus our isness is reunited to God and so too Is our work. The word that is ourselves returns to its origins but continues to flow out while, of course, remaining within. The youthfulness, newness, or eternity of God sets the time for this union. And in this union God rediscovers God. “Only the infinite God who is in the soul, only he himself understands God, who is infinite. There in the soul God understands God and begets God himself in the soul and ‘shapes’ it after himself.”³⁵ Then it can indeed be said that “where the soul is, there is God . . . where I am, there is God” (see Sermon Twenty-eight). And in this way, through human transformation and expression of this transformation in work, the spirit of the Lord will indeed fill the whole world and establish unity there. When Eckhart says that the soul is called “world,” he is revealing what a cosmic and non-introverted kind of spirituality he is espousing—one where the “out” and the “in” so interpenetrate that their differences melt. So big is the potential of the soul that it is to become the world, take it in, and give a new birth to it. Indeed, it should not stop there. It should become a place big enough for God—heaven itself. “Each of us should be a heaven in which God dwells.”³⁶