Sermon Eleven: DIVINITY’S DARK SIDE

“This Word is written in the Gospel.”^a

We find in the Gospel the verse: “There was a noble man who went out into a strange land” far from himself “and came home again richer” (Lk. 19:12). Now we read in another gospel passage that Christ said: “No one can be my disciple unless he follow me” (Lk. 14:27) and has emptied himself of his ego, keeping nothing back for himself. Such a person has everything, for to have nothing is to have everything. This means to throw oneself completely under the will of God and always to put one’s own will in God’s, casting not even a glance at anything created. Those who thus go out from themselves will indeed be given back their true selves.

Goodness in itself, good things, these do not give rest to the soul. If God gave me anything without his will, I would pay no attention to it. But the least thing which God gives me with this will makes me happy.

All creatures have flowed out from God’s will. If I could desire only God’s goodness, then this will of mine would be so noble that the Holy Spirit would immediately flow out from it. All good things flow from the overflow of God’s goodness. But the will of God tastes good to me only in that unity where the peace of God is for the goodness of all creatures, wherein this goodness and everything that has being and life rest as in their final goal. There is where you should love the Holy Spirit, as he is there in unity, not in himself, but there where he tastes with the goodness of God alone in unity, where all goodness flows out from the overflow of the goodness of God. Such a person “comes home richer” than when he went out Those who go out from themselves in this way will be given themselves again in a more real sense. And every-thing which such persons leave in multiplicity will always be returned to them in simplicity, for they find both themselves and everything else in the present now of unity. And those who go out in this way come home much nobler than they went out. Such persons live now in bare freedom and complete emptiness, having no need to possess or acquire anything, whether little or much. For everything belonging to God belongs to them.

The sun is like God: the highest part of its unfathomable depths answers the lowest depth of humility. Yes, the humble need not beg God so much as bid him, for the heights of divinity can disregard everything else but the depths of humility, for the humble person and God are one and not two. Such humble people are powerful with God because they are so powerful with themselves. They possess all goodness in all the angels and saints, just as God does. God and such a humble person are totally one and not two. Whatever God does, the humble person does; whatever God wants, the humble person wants; and whatever God is, that the humble person is as well—one life and one being. Yes, by God, if such a person were in hell, God would be constrained to join that person there and hell itself would be for such a person like heaven.

God must do this of necessity; he would be constrained to do it. For this humble person is the divine being and the divine being is this person. For there takes place in the unity of God and in the humble person a kiss. For the virtue which is called humility is a root in the ground of divinity where it is planted so that it has its existence only in the eternal One and nowhere else. I said to those at the University of Paris that all things come to perfection in the truly humble person. And therefore I say that the truly humble can neither come to harm nor wander astray. For there is nothing which does not run away from whatever would destroy it. The humble run away from all created things because they are nothing in themselves. And thus the humble run away from everything which can make them wander from God in the same way that I flee hot coals because they could destroy me and rob me of my being.

And Christ said: “A man went out.” Aristotle began a book and wanted to talk about everything. Now pay attention to what Aristotle says about human beings. Homo is the same thing here as a human being to whom a substantial form is proper. This form gives a human person an existence and life in common with all creatures, both those with the faculty of reason and those without it—the former including all material creatures and the latter including the angels. And Aristotle says that all creatures with their ideas and forms are grasped intellectually by the angels. The angels intellectually understand each thing in itself. This affords great joy to the angels and it would be a miracle for them not to have received and enjoyed this intellectual vision. And Aristotle goes on to say that it is just in this way that human beings with their reasons know the ideas and forms of all creatures in their distinctions. Aristotle ascribes this to human beings as precisely that which makes them human. For Aristotle this is the highest meaning by which he can specify human existence.

Now I will give you my opinion about what it means to be human. Homo is the same thing here as a human being to whom a substance has been given, and this gives a human being existence and life, and it is an existence endowed with reason. The truly reasonable human beings are those who understand themselves with their reason and then free themselves from all material things as well as forms. The more people are free of all things and turn to themselves, the more they will know in themselves all things clearly with their reason, without any hindrance from outside. And the more they do this, the more they are truly human.

Now I ask how that can be, this freeing of our knowing from all form and images and yet knowing things in themselves without hindrance from outside or change in oneself? I answer that it comes from the simplicity which is ours as human beings. For the more purely human beings are free from themselves and in themselves, the more simply they know all diversity in themselves and remain unchangeable in themselves. Boethius says that God is an unmovable good, remaining in himself, undisturbed and unmoved and yet moving all things. A simple knowing 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 great joy in that. People might be willing to spend a thousand years in hell to be able to see an angel. This knowing is so simple and clear in itself that an angel would spring from everything seen in this light.

Now pay careful attention to the fact that Aristotle speaks of pure spirits in the book called Metaphysics. The chief among the teachers who have ever discussed the natural sciences talks about these pure spirits and says that they are not the form of anything but receive their existence as it flows out immediately from God. And so they also flow back in and receive the outflow from God without mediation, higher than the angels as they gaze at the pure existence of God without differentiation. This simple pure existence is called by Aristotle a something. That is the highest teaching Aristotle ever spoke about the natural sciences, and no teacher has ever cared to express anything higher unless he were speaking in the Holy Spirit. Now I say that the “noble man” in our gospel story was not satisfied with the being which the angels grasp without form and on which they hang without mediation. For the “noble man” of our gospel story nothing was enough but the only One.

I have spoken in other places of the first beginning and the last end. The Father is the beginning of the Godhead because he understands himself in himself. It is from the Father that the eternal Word, though always remaining within, nevertheless goes out, and the Father does not give birth to him, for he remains within and is the goal of the Godhead and all creatures, the One in whom there is pure peace and rest for everything which ever received being. The beginning is for the sake of the final goal, for in that final end everything rests which ever received existence endowed with reason. The final goal of being is the darkness or the unknowability of the hidden divinity, which is that light that shines “but the darkness has not comprehended it” (cf. Jn. 1:5). Therefore Moses said: “He who is there has sent me” (Ex. 3:14), he who is without name and is the denial of all names and who has never been given a name. And therefore the prophet said: “You are truly a hidden God” (Is. 45:15) in the ground of the soul where the ground of God and the ground of the soul are one ground. The more we seek you, the less we find you. You should seek him in such a way that you never find him. For it is when you do not seek him that you find him. May God help us to seek him in such a way that we may remain with him forever. Amen.

COMMENTARY:  Salvation as a Change in Consciousness/True Humility Is a Journeying into the Darkness of Oneself/The Tension Between Love and Sacrifice, Between the Via Positiva and the Via Negativa/Knowing the Unknown God/The Final Goal of Being Is the Darkness of Divinity

The reasons for Path Two, the way of letting go and letting be, are outlined in this sermon. For the reasons concern our way of seeing reality, which is very often obstructive of the truth of the wholeness and holiness of all things, and also the immense darkness that God is and the unknowability of God. Both of these journeys coincide, however, for we will know God as we know ourselves. We will journey into God as we journey into ourselves. If we can face the darkness within, we can face the darkness that is God.

Eckhart perceives a tension in our everyday experience of God that he wants all of us to share in. Creation is good—divinely good—but are we? “If we had divine love, God and all the works that God ever performed would delight us.”¹ Creatures are good but so often they do not give rest to the soul. Why not? Because we do not see with the divine goodness.

If I could desire only God’s goodness, then this will of mine would be so noble that the Holy Spirit would immediately flow out from it. All good things flow from the overflow of God’s goodness. But the will of God tastes good to me only in that unity where the peaces of God is for the goodness of all creatures, wherein this goodness and everything that has being and life rest as in their final goal.

The problem is the way we relate to creation. “You yourself are the very thing which hinders you. For you are related to things in a perverted way.”²

Some spiritual traditions emphasize the fall at the expense of the blessings of creation. Eckhart, being a creation-centered theologian, will have none of that rejection of creation or the labeling of creation as sinful. Spiritualities constructed on a fall-oriented theology will leap immediately into ascetic practices to mortify the human person and control impulse and emotional élan. Eckhart is not so simplistic. He knows how to live with the tension of the positive and the negative ways rather than merely controlling passions and calling such control sanctity. He derives his nuanced way of spiritual practice from the two Gospel stories he employs in the present sermon. The first of these represents the via positiva and the responsibility to develop one’s talents. It comes from the Gospel of Luke (19:11–26). This parable of the pounds in Luke is “in substance the same story” as that of the parable of the talents in Matthew’s Gospel (25:14–30), C. H. Dodd points out. It is a story of the need to develop the gifts that creation gives.

At an early stage the parable of the money in trust was used to illustrate the maxim that a person who possesses spiritual capacity will enlarge that capacity by experience, while a person who has none will decline into a worse condition as time goes on . . .³

The individual in the parable is chastised for his lack of vision, of opportunism, and of self-assertiveness and his overly cautious attitude.

Eckhart consciously contrasts this via positiva kind of biblical parable with another saying of Jesus from Luke’s Gospel:

Great crowds accompanied him on his way and he turned and spoke to them. “If any man comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple. Anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” (Lk. 14:25–27)

Eckhart comments immediately on this passage that it means that a person empty himself of his ego, keeping nothing back for himself. But the tension still remains between the via positiva and the via negativa and Eckhart makes no effort to relieve the tension. Rather, he invites us to explore the tension in greater depth. For, on the one hand, God is love whom all creatures seek to love.

If anyone asked me what God is, I would say now that God is love. Indeed, God is so completely worthy of love that all creatures seek to love his amiability, regardless of whether they do so wittingly or unwittingly, whether they do so happily or unhappily. Thus God is love, and he is so worthy of love that everything that can love must love him, whether happily or unhappily.⁴

While we have seen in Path One that “being is God,” we read in Path Two that “nothing that has been created is God.”⁵ On the one hand, we can say that isness is God’s proper name.

Among all names of God, there is none more apt than “he who exists” . . . Fully detached and pared down and stripped so bare that nothing remains but a simple “is”—that is the proper nature of God’s name. That is why God said to Moses: “Tell the people that ‘he who is’ has sent you.”⁶

On the other hand, commenting on the very same passage from Exodus 3:14 in the present sermon, Eckhart declares: He who is without name and is the denial of all names and who has never been given a name. On the one hand we have called God being; but on the other, God is beyond being.

Before there was being, God acted. He accomplished being when there was as yet no being. Coarse-minded masters of the spiritual life say that God is a pure being. But he is as high above being as the highest angel is above a gnat. I would say something just as incorrect if I were to call God a being as if I were to call the sun light or dark. God is neither this nor the other.⁷

This tension between developing talents and carrying the cross, between naming God and not naming God, is also found in nature itself. That is why Eckhart does not overreact or want us to overreact to the tension. When we overreact, then “we are the cause of all our difficulties,”⁸ for we have misperceived and misconstrued what living is about. The parallel in nature is found in the seed that dies in order to give birth. The paradox of the spiritual life is the paradox of all life. “Life can never be complete unless it is brought to its manifest first cause in which life is a form of being that the soul receives when the soul dies to its very foundation. And this foundation is what we live on in that life in which life is a form of being.”⁹ Dying is part of nature and nature and grace go hand in hand. So does the development of talents and the shadow of the cross.

God is not a destroyer of any good thing, but he is a perfected God is not a destroyer of nature, but he is a perfecter. Moreover, grace does not destroy nature but rather perfects it. If God destroyed nature in this way at the outset, it would suffer violence and injustice. He does not do that. Man has a free will, with which he can choose or decide between good and evil . . . There is nothing in God that would destroy anything that has any kind of being, but he is a perfecter of all things. In the same way, 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.¹⁰

Eckhart advises that we accept all that comes our way, nature included, as grace. “Strive to accept everything equally from God’s hand as grace, gift, whatever it may be, whether inside or outside us.”¹¹

How do we do this? How do we live the holistic life of tension, being true to the nameable and unnameable God at once? By humility, Eckhart says. “The impediments are in” us and so self-knowledge is the way to freeing self of impediments.¹²

It is always you yourself that hinder yourself, because your attitude toward things is wrong. Therefore begin first with yourself and let yourself go. Truly, if you will not flee first from yourself, wherever else you may flee, there you will find impediments and restlessness, wherever it may be.¹³

This truthful self-knowledge which is humility is “the root of all good, and follows the good.”¹⁴ In true humility, God who is truth becomes one with the truth of ourselves. The humble person and God are one and not two. There is no distance between God and us when we truly know our own depths. This humble person is the divine being and the divine being is this person . . . For the virtue which is called humility is a root in the ground of divinity, where it is planted so that it has its existence only in the eternal One and nowhere else. Humility is like a vacuum that sucks God into oneself. “The All-highest in his unfathomable Godhead yields to the very lowest in the depths of humility . . . If a person were truly humble, then God must either destroy all his Godhead and renounce it entirely, or he must pour himself out and must flow entirely into this person.”¹⁵ While one can say that “the heights of the Godhead are nothing else but the depths of humility,” still we should not conceive of humility as a putting down of self or anyone else. Indeed, a truly humble person would “despise being despised.”¹⁶ God does not come down to the humble person but rather within. The purpose of humility is to bring God in, not down. “That which was above came to be within. You shall be united and by yourself in yourself, so that he may be within you.”¹⁷ What is within, where we take God? Darkness is within. “The ground of the soul is dark,” says Eckhart.¹⁸ Eckhart urges us not to be afraid of the dark, not to flee from the truth of ourselves, which is that deep down we are dark and even in the dark. To admit this and to explore the darkness is the deepest kind of humility.

It is also the deepest kind of exploration into God. For God too is dark in the divine depths. The prophet said: “You are truly a hidden God” (Is. 45:15) in the ground of the soul where the ground of God and the ground of the soul are one ground. It is significant that this section of Isaiah is also ambivalent about the hidden vs. the clear God. The God who saves is hidden, but not the God who creates.

Truly, you are a hidden God,

the God of Israel, the saviour. . .

Yes, thus says Yahweh,

creator of the heavens,

who is God,

who formed the earth and made it,

who set it firm,

created it no chaos,

but a place to be lived in:

“I am Yahweh, unrivaled,

I have not spoken in secret

in some corner of a darkened land.

I have not said to Jacob’s descendants,

‘Seek me in chaos.’

I, Yahweh, speak with directness

I express myself with clarity.” (Is. 45:15, 18–19)

Thus the way to finding God is similarly paradoxical and two-sided. You should seek him in such a way that you never find him. For it is when you do not seek him that you find him. Humility, or the seeking after the truth of oneself, is necessary for us to seek anything as it is, and especially God as God is. We will project onto God as onto others whatever names we harbor within ourselves. “All the names which the soul gives God, it receives from the knowledge of itself.”¹⁹

By knowing our own darkness we can get to know God’s darkness. By knowing that our own soul is nameless, we can get to know the nameless side of God. Moreover, our truest rest will be in this darkness. The final goal of being is the darkness or the unknowability of the hidden divinity, which is that light that shines “but the darkness had not comprehended it” (Jn. 1:5). God’s light is a light that does not break the darkness. One might say that it is warm but not illuminating. There lies pure peace and rest for everything which ever received being. God’s darkness is a light: one more paradox at the root of all life, divine and creaturely.

What more can be said of the dark side of God? First, that God is utterly dark—the darkness behind darkness, the “superessential darkness” as Pseudo-Dionysius calls God.²⁰ The darkness of God is the darkness of mystery. “What is the final end? It is the mystery of the darkness of the eternal Godhead and it is unknown and was never known and never will be known.” So deep is this mystery of the Godhead that there God remains unknown to God. “God dwells therein, unknown to himself, and the light of the eternal Father has forever shone in there and the darkness does not comprehend the light.”²¹

Because God’s depths are so shrouded in mystery, God cannot be named. “No one can really say what God is . . . The ineffable One has no name.”²² God is “the Unnameable.”²³ While being revealed on the one hand as “being”—I am who am—God also remains hidden (esse absconditum).²⁴ Following the apophatic tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius that his brother Thomas Aquinas called “the peak of the human knowledge of God,” Eckhart emphasizes what we do not know of God. “Whatever one says that God is, he is not; he is what one does not say of him, rather than what one says he is.”²⁵ This God is he who is without name and is the denial of all names and who has never been given a name . . . a truly hidden God. In this way, by reverencing the hiddenness of God, we respect God’s transcendence. In this way of the via negativa we come to a union with the “naked God.” And in this kind of union, everything belonging to God belongs to us. And we come home much nobler than we went out. In this way our love of creation is enhanced—not forgotten—for there everything that has being and life rests as in its final goal and we with them.