Passion for Creation

“God’s love was revealed and made visible in that he sent his only begotten Son into the world so that we live with the Son and in the Son and through the Son” (1 Jn. 4:9). For all who do not live here through the Son are not really living as they should.

If there were somewhere a rich king with a beautiful daughter, and if he gave her as a wife to the son of a poor man, all who belong to that family would as a result be raised up and ennobled. Now a master of the spiritual life says: “God became man, and as a result the whole human family has been raised up and ennobled. We can indeed rejoice because Christ, our brother, has ascended of his own power beyond all the choirs of the angels and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” This master has spoken correctly. But in truth I would not make too much of it. How would it avail me if I had a brother who was a rich man and I were a poor man? How would it avail me if I had a brother who was a wise man and I were a fool?

I make another, more penetrating statement: “God has not only become man, but even more, he has taken on human nature.” The masters of the spiritual life commonly state that all people are equally noble with respect to their nature. All the blessings possessed by all the saints, by Mary, the mother of God, and by Christ according to his humanity—all these blessings are my very own in my nature. Now you may ask me: “Since I have in my nature everything Christ can offer according to his humanity, why do we raise up Christ and revere him as our Lord and our God?” This is because he has been God’s messenger to us and has brought us our blessedness. The blessedness he brought us was our own. In the place where the Father generated his Son within his most spiritual foundation, this same human nature is suspended. This nature is one and onefold. Of course, something might peep out of it and adhere to it, but that has nothing to do with this unity.

I make a further, more difficult statement: People who wish to remain in the nakedness of this nature must have avoided all that is personal so that they can wish well to a person beyond the sea whom they have never seen with their own eyes just as much as they do to one who is near them and is a trusted friend. So long as you wish better things for the one near you than to the person you have never seen, you are not all right and you have not yet peeped even for a moment into that onefold foundation of God’s nature. Of course, you may have seen the truth in an abstract image as in a comparison. However, it was not the best you might have hoped for.

Second, you must be pure of heart, for that heart alone is pure that has put an end to all worldly things. Third, you must be free of nothingness. The question is asked as to whether hell burns. The masters of the spiritual life commonly say that willfulness is the cause of this. I say, however, quite truthfully that nothingness burns in hell. Understand this comparison. Let a burning coal be taken and placed on my hand. If I wished to say that the piece of coal was burning my hand, I would not be correct. If I were to state accurately, however, what is burning me, I would say that “nothingness” is doing it. For the piece of coal has something in it that my hand does not have. Beyond, this “nothingness” is burning me. If my hand, however, had in itself all that the coal is and can endure, it would have quite completely the nature of fire. If someone should take all the fire that ever burned and shake it out on my hand, it could not give me pain. Similarly I say: “Since God and all who are in God’s contemplation in happiness have something in themselves that those separated from God do not have, this ‘nothingness’ gives pain to the souls in hell more than willfulness or some kind of fire.” I say quite truly that, to the degree that you are grasped by “nothingness,” you are imperfect. Therefore, if you wish to be perfect, you must be free of “nothingness.”

In this connection the passage I proposed for you states: “God sent his only begotten Son into the world.” You ought not to understand this in connection with the external world, as, for example, that he ate and drank with us. You must understand it with respect to the spiritual world. As truly as the Father naturally in his onefold nature generates his Son, he generates him in the most spiritual part of his spirit, and this is the spiritual world. Here God’s foundation is my foundation, and my foundation is God’s. Here I am living from my very own, just as God is living from his very own. Whoever has peeped into this foundation for a moment regards a thousand gold marks as if they were only a false penny. From this most spiritual foundation you ought to accomplish all your deeds without a reason. I emphatically state that, so long as you accomplish your deeds for heaven’s sake or God’s sake or your eternal happiness from the outside, you are not doing things properly for yourself. You may be accepted, but this is not the best arrangement. If someone thinks of obtaining more by spirituality, devotion, sweet rapture, and the special grace of God, than in the fire of the hearth or in the stable, you are behaving no differently than if you took God, wrapped a coat around his head, and shoved him under a bench. For whoever seeks God in a definite mode accepts the mode and misses God, who is hidden in that mode. Whoever seeks God without a mode, however, grasps him as he is in himself. If anyone were to ask life over a thousand years, “Why are you alive?” the only reply could be: “I live so that I may live.” This happens because life lives from its own foundation and rises out of itself. Therefore it lives without a reason so that it lives for itself. Whoever asked a truthful person who accomplishes deeds from his or her own foundation, “Why do you accomplish your deeds?” that person, if he or she were to reply correctly, would say only: “I accomplish so that I can accomplish.”

God begins where the creature comes to an end. Now God longs for nothing from you more than that you should emerge from yourself in accord with your being as a creature, and that you should admit God within yourself. The smallest image of a creature that is formed in you is as big as God. Why? Because it prevents you from forming a whole God. For just where this image is formed in you, God and his whole Godhood must yield. Wherever this image emerges, however, God can go in. God longs as much for you to emerge from yourself in accord with your being as a creature as if his whole happiness depended on it. Now then, my fellow human being, what harm does it do you if you let God be God within you? If you emerge completely from yourself, for God’s sake, God will emerge completely from himself for your sake. If both of these beings emerge, what is left behind is a onefold unity. In this unity the Father generates his Son in his most spiritual source. The Holy Spirit comes to flower there, and a will that belongs to the soul originates there in God. As long as this will remains undisturbed by all creatures and all creation, it is free. Christ says: “No one goes up to heaven except the one who comes down from heaven” (Jn. 3:13). All things are created from nothing. For this reason their true source is nothing, and to the extent that this noble will is inclined to creatures, it flows with the creatures into nothing.

Now the question is raised whether this noble will flows so far away that it can never return. The masters of the spiritual life commonly say that it never returns to the extent that it has flowed with time. I say, however, that if this will returns to its original source from itself and from all creation even for a moment, this will is again in its true nature and is free. And in this moment all the lost time will be regained.

People often say to me: “Pray for me!” Then I think: “Why do you go out of yourselves? Why don’t you stay within yourselves and grasp your own blessings? After all, you bear essentially all truth within yourselves.”

May God help us to be able to remain truly within ourselves in this way, and may he help us to possess all truth immediately and without any distinction! Amen.

COMMENTARY: Loving God Without a Why/Living Without a Why/ Two Additional Meanings of Nothingness/Being Free of Nothingness/Distrusting Methods for Attaining God/ Finding God as Much in the Stable as in Church

In this sermon Eckhart is commenting on the First Epistle of John, which reads as follows:

My dear people,

let us love one another

since love comes from God

and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.

Anyone who fails to love can never have known God,

because God is love.

God’s love for us was revealed

when God sent into the world his only Son

so that we could have life through him;

this is the love I mean:

not our love for God,

but God’s love for us when he sent his Son . . . (1 Jn. 4:7–10)

Eckhart develops the theme of what it means not only to be in God, but also in God’s love. Here God’s foundation is my foundation, and my foundation is God’s. What does it mean to share a foundation with God? It means, among other things, that we experience our original freedom once again. If this will returns to its original source from itself and all creation even for a moment, this will is again in its truly free nature and is free. Part and parcel of the freedom enjoyed in a return to our original source, the wellspring of the Creator’s love that gave us existence, is that we learn to live and to love as God lives and loves. How is that? Without a why. Without goals, without needs for self-justification; without everything a means to an end. We must learn to live a life of ends and not just means. Living without a why relates to our having experienced God as nothing. Elsewhere Eckhart relates a story to illustrate this point:

I shall tell you a little story. A cardinal asked Saint Bernard, “Why should I love God, and how?” Saint Bernard said, “This I shall tell you, that God himself is the reason we should love him. The way of this love is without a way.” For God is nothing . . . Therefore the way in which we must love him has to be without a way.¹

This wayless way is also without a why, a wherefore, or a reason. From this spiritual foundation you ought to accomplish all your deeds without a reason. This doing away with goals for loving God extends to religious goals such as heaven or eternal happiness, however well intentioned, because to operate from such goals from outside oneself is to act out of dualism. It is to forget that heaven and eternal life are already here. It is to forget that we are already living the divine life. What kind of life is this divine life? How does God live? It is a life without a why. The life of God is “without a why.”²

If anyone were to ask life over a thousand years, “Why are you alive?” the only reply could be: “I live so that I may live.” This happens because life lives from its own foundation and rises out of itself. Therefore it lives without a reason so that it lives for itself.

Eckhart repeats his explanation of living without a why on another occasion. He imagines a dialogue dedicated to the subject:

“Why do you love God?” “I do not know . . . because of God.”

“Why do you love the truth?” “Because of the truth” . . .

“Why do you love goodness?” “Because of goodness.”

“Why do you live?” “My word, I do not know! But I am happy to be alive.”³

Eckhart elaborates on what this life is that lives for life’s sake. “Life means a sort of overflow by which a thing, welling up within itself, completely floods itself, each part of it interpenetrating every other part, until at last it pours itself out and boils over into something external.”⁴ Thus creation is God’s life that has welled up in God and then boiled over into creatures. One returns to the source of this welling up and boiling over for its own sake and not for any why or wherefore. Our work is to be like God’s work of creation: without a why or wherefore. Whoever asked a truthful person who accomplishes deeds from his or her own foundation, “Why do you accomplish these deeds?” that person, if he or she were to reply correctly, would say only: “I accomplish so that I can accomplish.” We are to let go of all whys in our working and living. Good works—including those with one’s eye on an eternal reward—are no substitute for letting go and living without a why.

Our Lord says: “Whoever gives up something for my sake and for my name will be repaid a hundred times over and will recerve in addition eternal life” (Mt. 19:29). If you give it up, however, for the hundred times over and eternal life, you have given up nothing. Indeed, if you give up something for a reward a thousand times over and for eternal life, you have given up nothing. You must abandon yourself, and do so completely. Then you’ve abandoned rightly.

Once a man came to me—it is not too long ago—and said that he had given away much landed property and many goods for his own sake so that he might save his soul. Then I thought: “How little and how insignificant is what you have let go of! It is blindness and foolishness for you to continue looking at all you’ve let go of. If, however, you’ve let go of yourself, then you’ve really let go.”⁵

For Eckhart, all deeds that are authentic imitate the original deed of creation and well out of life and love. Thus they are without why or wherefore. For what Eckhart interprets John’s phrase “God is love” to mean is that God loves without a why or wherefore.

God does not look for any “why” outside himself, but only for what is for his own sake. He loves and works all things for his own sake. Therefore, when people love him himself and all things and do all their works not for reward, for honor or happiness, but only for the sake of God and his glory, that is a sign that they are sons of God.

Furthermore, God loves for his own sake and does all things for his own sake, that is, he loves for the sake of love and he acts for the sake of action . . . Therefore, whoever is born of God as a son of God loves God for his sake, that is to say, he loves God for the sake of loving God and does all his work for the sake of working.⁶

To be called “children of God,” as John has called us in the scriptural text Eckhart is commenting on, means that we are to follow God’s way of living, loving, and working. They are wayless ways without a why or wherefore. Only this kind of living and working is powerful enough to be called prayer and it is powerful because it is so free.

The most powerful prayer and ultimately the most powerful to obtain all things, and the worthiest work of all, is what proceeds from a free mind . . . A free mind has power to perform all things. What is a free mind? A free mind is one that is not confused by anything or bound to anything. It has not attached its advantage to any way of life . . . However mean a work, man can never do it without its deriving from this source its strength and power.⁷

Living without a why means enjoying gifts but going beyond them and not clinging to them. God begins where the creature comes to an end.

People should learn to carry themselves out of themselves in all their gifts and not to retain anything whatever that is their own, nor to seek anything, either gain or pleasure, or devotion or sweetness, or reward or heaven or self-will. God never gave himself, nor does he ever give himself except in his own will.⁸

Creatures must go, not because creatures are bad, but because we have to learn to be empty if we are to be filled. This emptiness extends even to being empty of purposes, goals, and whys and wherefores. In this way we can learn to live our deep lives as an artist paints, without goals but as a flow and an overflow.

When one performs works of virtue without the preparation of the will, and without a special purpose of one’s own toward a just or great cause, and it works more for its own sake and from the love of virtue and has no “why,” then one possesses virtue perfectly and not before.⁹

Learning to love without a why means learning what love between friends is all about. Such a love “has no why.”

Whoever dwells in the goodness of his [God’s] nature dwells in God’s love. Love, however, has no why. If I had a friend and loved him because all the good I wished came to me through him, I would not love my friend but myself. I ought to love my friend for his own goodness and for his own virtue and for everything that he is in himself . . . This is exactly the way it is with people who are in God’s love and who do not seek their own interest either in God or in themselves or in things of any kind. They must love God alone for his goodness and for the goodness of his nature and all the things he has in himself. This is the right kind of love.¹⁰

Eckhart elaborates on the way we make a means of God by not loving without a why. Some people

want to love God in the same way as they love a cow. You love it for the milk and the cheese and for your own profit. So do all people who love God for the sake of outward riches or inward consolation. But they do not love God correctly, for they merely love their own advantage.¹¹

When we let go of this kind of living and loving and working, we emerge from the depth of the vortex that our spirits form and at the same time we allow God to emerge. /f you emerge completely from yourself, for God’s sake, God will emerge completely from himself for your sake. If both of these emerge, what is left behind is a onefold unity. This “onefold unity” is the love that we and God give birth to; the Holy Spirit comes to flower there. Living itself, so long as it is so deep that it is without a why or wherefore, becomes the ultimate prayer, the ultimate act of experiencing and giving birth to God.¹² Under these circumstances we are truly letting God be and thus letting God be God in us. We are refusing to manipulate God and allowing God to “boil over” as God the Creator once did and as even now God longs to do . . . as if his whole happiness depended on it.

Eckhart does not hesitate to apply this way without a way and this way without a why or a wherefore to the question of religious devotion and exercises. These can very easily reduce God to the mode in which we perceive them, forcing God into a kind of ascetical and willful Procrustean bed.

If someone thinks of obtaining more by spirituality, devotion, sweet rapture, and the special grace of God, than in the fire of the hearth or in the stable, you are behaving no differently than if you took God, wrapped a coat around his head, and shoved him under a bench. For whoever seeks God in a definite mode accepts the mode and misses God, who is hidden in that mode.

To shove God under a bench is really to dismiss God for the sake of our own self-made godly spectacles. We say we come to watch God perform, but in fact we wrap God up and put him under the bench, out of our way, so we can get on with our show. Eckhart abhors our using God, even for religious purposes.

You are looking for something along with God, and you are behaving exactly as if you were making of God a candle so that you could look for something. When we find the things we are looking for, we throw the candle away. Whatever you are seeking along with God is nothing. It does not matter what it is—be it an advantage or a reward or a kind of spirituality or whatever else—you are seeking a nothingness, and for this reason you find a nothingness.¹³

Commenting on the lines from the Song of Songs that read, “I passed by a little, and I found him whom my soul loves,” Eckhart remarks: “No matter how transparent, how subtle, a means may be by which I know God, it must go . . . One must take God as the mode without mode, and as being without being, for he has no mode. This is why Saint Bernard says: ‘Whoever, God, wishes to know you, must measure you without measure.’ “¹⁴ Eckhart elaborates on this theme of not overassociating our experience with God with any particular place:

If someone is well disposed, he or she is right In all places and in society. But if one has a wrong attitude, one is in the wrong place in all places and in society. If one is rightly disposed, one has God with one in actual fact, and if one really has God with one, one has him in all places, in the street and in the presence of everyone, just as well as in the church, or the desert, or in the cell.¹⁵

Eckhart is urging that we become the temple of God and not rely excessively on outside places or supports. “If God is not really within someone, but such a person must always receive God from outside in this and that. . . whether it be in works or people or places, such a person does not possess God.”¹⁶ The God we are called to union with is a God who “does not disappear” and therefore far outlasts any particular methods of piety.¹⁷

Just as we cannot expect external places to allow God to be God for us, so, too, external works or what has been called tactical ecstacies are not to be relied on excessively. Asceticism is “of no great importance,” he counsels.¹⁸

A person should not judge his participation in a really good life by how much he fasts or performs certain external works. A much better criterion is whether he cherishes more love for what is eternal and more disdain for whatever is only transient.¹⁹

We should be wary of tying our spiritual consciousness down to any one kind of method or exercise.

You should not restrict yourself to any method, for God is not in any one kind of devotion, neither in this nor in that. Those who receive God thus, do him wrong. They receive the method and not God . . . Those who wish to have many kinds of devotion thrust God under a bench. Whether it be weeping or sighing, however much there is of it, it is not God at all.²⁰

Eckhart calls people who confuse tactical ecstacies with the experience of God “asses.”

Those people who in penitential exercise and external practice, of which they make a great deal, hold fast to their selfish I. The Lord have pity upon such people who know so little of the divine truth. Such people are called holy on account of their external appearance, but internally they are asses, for they do not grasp the actual meaning of divine truth . . . They are highly considered only in the eyes of those who know no better. I, however, say that they are asses, understanding nothing of divine truth.²¹

What is this “divine truth” that such persons are so abysmally ignorant of and whose ignorance drives them to too much ascetic exercising? Eckhart names it in the present sermon: After all, you bear essentially all truth within yourselves. It is the truth that the kingdom of God is already among us, the truth that “first God has loved us.”

Eckhart introduces a third meaning of nothingness in this sermon when he says that all things are created from nothing. For this reason their true source is nothing, and to the extent that this noble will is inclined to creatures, it flows with the creatures into nothing. For Eckhart, this third use of nothingness applies to all creatures not because creatures are bad or inferior (this would contradict his position in Path One wherein “being is God”) but because creatures have received all that they are one hundred per cent. Being is either all or nothing; creatures have being, but before they had being they were nothing. If you are thirty-five years old, Eckhart would suggest you meditate on thirty-six years ago. That would put one in touch with one’s true source which is nothing. Eckhart develops this experience of nothing on several occasions.

All creatures are a pure nothing; neither angels nor creatures are something. They defile, because they are made from nothing. They are and were nothing. What is disliked by all creatures and gives them trouble is the nothing. If I placed a burning coal on my hand it would give me pain. This is due only to the “nothing,” for if we were free from “nothing” we should not be impure.²²

In this example, Eckhart is saying two things. First, that we are born of nothing; and second, that the nothing we are born of is not like God’s nothingness or our intellect’s nothingness which makes us capable of receiving all things (such as a burning coal), but that we have a nothingness in us that separates us from other things and is thus able to be burned and wounded. Eckhart elaborates on the nothingness of our creaturely origins. Eckhart defines nothing in the following manner: “Nothing is that which can receive something from nothing; something, on the other hand, receives something from something.”²³ Eckhart invites us in this sermon to be free of nothingness by letting go of all things.

All creatures are a pure nothingness. I do not say that they are of little value or that they are something at all—they are a pure nothingness. Whatever has not being is nothing. All creatures lack being, for their being depends on the presence of God. If God were to turn away from all creatures even for a moment, they would come to nothing.²⁴

Thus our nothingness exists in relationship to God’s everythingness. Only God is being and has being; creatures all receive being and are therefore independently nothing. “As soon as creatures flow out of God into the nearest creature, however, they become as different as something and nothing. For in God is light and being, and in creatures there is darkness and nothing.²⁵ It is because we are in God that we are something. Outside of God “there is nothing but nothing.” “All creatures are in themselves a nothing, but when they are in that light in which they receive their existence, then they are a something.”²⁶ We are light and darkness, everything and nothing. “Every created thing is tainted with the shadow of nothingness.”²⁷ Commenting on Paul’s conversion in falling from his horse and being blinded, Eckhart says, “When he saw God, he saw all things as nothingness.” For it is in relation to God’s fullness that we are nothing. “He saw all creatures as a nothingness, for God has all creatures’ being in himself. He is a being that has in itself all being.”²⁸ Thus, outside of God, creatures have no being and are nothing. Eckhart gives an analogy for this radical dependence intrinsic to all creatures:

The color on the wall is preserved on the wall. Similarly, all creatures are preserved in their being through love, which is God. If we were to take away the color from the wall, it would then lose its being. In the same way all creatures would lose their being if we should remove them from love, which is God.²⁹

Eckhart draws an important conclusion from this insight about our metaphysical nothingness (he never tells persons to consider themselves psychologically nothing or to put themselves down or to deny their gifts). If we are, at a radical level of the source of our being, nothing, then a person immersed in “divine knowledge and love” would need to develop a way of seeing things transparently—of seeing through things to their divine source and origin. This is why he emphasized that we “see all things as nothingness”—because we see “God where we see all creatures are nothing.” Becoming “bathed in the light, we see nothing else.”³⁰ God’s light is so to flood us that we are washed in the truth of creatures’ origins of nothingness and that we can see through them to God, their origin. In this way, nothing stands in our way of seeing God. “If we are to know God, it must be without mediation . . . Only then do we have immediate knowledge of the eternal life.”³¹ In this experience of the transparency of things and the immediateness of the Creator, all the lost time will be regained. Eternal life is tasted. There the oneness of humanity shines, it is one and onefold. There too we remain in the nakedness of this nature and are able to love people beyond the sea as much as those next to us. Why? Because place, like time, is suspended in favor of a new experience of the communion of all saintly beings, those living and those dead. “If I ask for nothing, then I am asking rightly. If I am united in this, where all things are present—the past, the present, and the things to come—all of them are equally near and equally one.”³² All time is cut through in such a communion wherein all these blessings (of the saints before us) are my very own in my nature. There we dwell in the onefold foundation of God, who very truly is love. And in this dwelling place to which we have returned, we can shout with all being. Here “God’s love is revealed in us.” Just as John said (1 Jn. 4:9).