Passion for Creation

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt. 5:3)^a

Blessedness opened its mouth of wisdom and spoke: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Every angel and every saint and everything that was ever born must remain silent when the wisdom of the Father speaks; for all the wisdom of the angels and of all creatures is sheer nothingness before the groundless wisdom of God. And this wisdom has declared that the poor are blessed.

Now there exist two kinds of poverty: an external poverty, which is good and is praiseworthy in a person willing to take it upon himself or herself through the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, because he was himself poor on earth. Of this poverty I do not want to speak any further. For there is still another kind of poverty, an inner poverty, by which our Lord’s word is to be understood when he says: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Now I beg you to be just so poor as to understand this speech. For I tell you by the eternal truth, if you are not equal to this truth of which we now want to speak, then you cannot understand me.

Various people have questioned me about what poverty is in itself and what a poor person is. That is what we want to answer.

Bishop Albrecht says that a poor person is one who takes no satisfaction in any of the things that God ever created—and that is well said. But we say it better still and take poverty in a yet higher understanding: he is a poor person who wills nothing and knows nothing and has nothing. Of these three points we are going to speak and I beseech you for the love of God that you understand this truth if you can. But if you do not understand it, do not worry yourselves because of it, for the truth I want to talk about is of such a kind that only a few good people will understand it.

First, we say that one is a poor person who wills nothing. What this means, many people do not correctly understand. These are the people who in penitential exercise and external practices, of which they make a great deal, cling 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 external appearance, but inwardly they are asses, for they do not grasp the real meaning of divine truth. Indeed, these individuals too say that one is a poor person who wills nothing. However, they interpret this to mean that one should so live as to never fulfill one’s own will in any way, but rather strive to fulfill the ever-beloved will of God. These people are right in their way, for their intention is good and for that we want to praise them. May God in his mercy grant them the kingdom of heaven. But in all divine truth, I say that these people are not poor people, nor do they resemble poor people. They are highly considered only in the eyes of those who know no better. I, however, say that they are asses who understand nothing of divine truth. Because of their good intentions, they may receive the kingdom of heaven. But of that poverty of which I now want to speak, they know nothing.

These days, if someone asks me what a poor person is who wills nothing, I answer and say: So long as a person has his own wish in him to fulfill even the ever-beloved will of God, if that is still a matter of his will, then this person does not yet possess the poverty of which we want to speak. Indeed, this person then still has a will with which he or she wants to satisfy God’s will, and that is not the right poverty. For a human being to possess true poverty, he or she must be as free of his or her created will as they were when they did not yet exist. Thus I say to you in the name of divine truth, as long as you have the will, even the will to fulfill God’s will, and as long as you have the desire for eternity and for God, to this very extent you are not properly poor, for the only one who is a poor person is one who wills nothing and desires nothing.

When I still stood in my first cause, there I had no God and was cause of myself. There I willed nothing, I desired nothing, for I was a pure being and a knower of myself in delight of the truth. There I willed myself and nothing else. What I willed, that I was; and what I was, that I willed. There I stood, free of God and of all things. But when I took leave from this state of free will and received my created being, then I had a God. Indeed, before creatures were, God was not yet “God”; rather, he was what he was. But when creatures came to be and when they received their created being, then God was no longer “God” in himself; rather, he was “God” in the creatures.

Now we say that God, insofar as he is “God,” is not a perfect goal for creatures. Indeed, even the lowliest creature in God possesses as high a rank. And if a fly possessed reason and could consciously seek the eternal abyss of divine being out of which it has come, then we would say that God, with all he is as God, would still be incapable of fulfilling and satisfying this fly. Therefore we pray God to rid us of “God” so that we may grasp and eternally enjoy the truth where the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal. There is where I stood and willed what I was, and I was what I willed. So then we say, if people are to be poor in will, they must will and desire as little as they willed and desired when they were not yet. And in this way is a person poor who wills nothing.

Second, a poor person is one who knows nothing. We have said on other occasions that a person should live a life neither for himself, nor for the truth, nor for God. But now we say it differently and want to go further and say: Whoever achieves this poverty must so live that they not even know themselves to live, either for oneself or for truth or for God. One must be so free of all knowledge that he or she does not know or recognize or perceive that God lives in him or her; even more, one should be free of all knowledge that lives in him or her. For, when people still stood in God’s eternal being, nothing else lived in them. What lived there was themselves. Hence we say that people should be as free of their own knowledge as when they were not yet, letting God accomplish whatever God wills. People should stand empty.

Everything that ever came out of God once stood in pure activity. But the activity proper to people is to love and to know. It is a moot question, though, in which of these happiness primarily consists. Some authorities have said that it lies in knowing, some say it lies in loving, still others say that it lies in knowing and in loving. These are closer to the truth. We say, however, that it lies neither in knowing nor in loving. Rather, there is a something in the soul from which knowing and loving flow. It does not itself know and love as do the forces of the soul. Whoever comes to know this something knows what happiness consists in. It has neither before nor after, and it is in need of nothing additional, for it can neither gain nor lose. For this very reason it is deprived of understanding that God is acting within it. Moreover, it is that identical self which enjoys itself just as God does. Thus we say that people shall keep themselves free and void so that they neither understand nor know that God works in them. Only thus can people possess poverty. The masters say that God is a being, an intelligent being, and that he knows all things. We say, however: God is neither being nor intelligent nor does he know this or that. Thus God is free of all things, and therefore he is all things. Whoever is to be poor in spirit, then, must be poor of all his own understanding so that he knows nothing about God or creatures or himself. Therefore it is necessary that people desire not to understand or know anything at all of the works of God. In this way is a person able to be poor of one’s own understanding.

Third, one is a poor person who has nothing. Many people have said that perfection consists in people possessing none of the material things of the earth. And indeed, that is certainly true in one sense: when one holds to it intentionally. But this is not the sense that I mean.

I have said before that one is a poor person who does not even will to fulfill God’s will, that is, who so lives that he or she is empty both of his own will and of God’s will, just as they were when they were not yet. About this poverty we say that it is the highest poverty. Second, we have said one is a poor person who himself understands nothing of God’s activity in him or her. When one stands as free of understanding and knowing [as God stands void of all things], then that is the purest poverty. But the third kind of poverty of which we are now going to speak is the most difficult: that people have nothing.

Now give me your undivided attention. I have often said, and great masters say this too: People must be so empty of all things and all works, whether inward or outward, that they can become a proper home for God, wherein God may operate. But now we say it differently. If people stand free of all things, of all creatures, of God and of themselves, but if it still happens that God can find a place for acting in them, then we say: So long as that is so, these persons are not poor in the strictest poverty. For God does not desire that people reserve a place for him to work in. Rather, true poverty of spirit consists in keeping oneself so free of God and of all one’s works that if God wants to act in the soul, God himself becomes the place wherein he wants to act—and this God likes to do. For when God finds a person as poor as this, God operates his own work and a person sustains God in him, and God is himself the place of his operation, since God is an agent who acts within himself. Here, in this poverty, people attain the eternal being that they once were, now are, and will eternally remain.

There is a saying of Saint Paul’s which reads: “But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Co. 15:10). My own saying, in contrast, seems to hold itself above grace and above being and above knowing and above willing and above desiring. How then can Saint Paul’s word be true? To this one must respond that Saint Paul’s words are true. God’s grace was necessarily in him, and the grace of God accomplished in him the growth from accidental into essential being. When grace finished and had completed its work, Paul remained what he was [that is, what he had been before he was].

Thus we say that a person must be so poor that he or she is no place and has no place wherein God could act. Where people still preserve some place in themselves, they preserve distinction. This is why I pray God to rid me of God; for my essential being is above God insofar as we consider God as the origin of creatures. Indeed, in God’s own being, where God is raised above all being and all distinctions, there I was myself, there I willed myself, and I knew myself to create this person that I am. Therefore I am cause of myself according to my being, which is eternal, but not according to my becoming, which is temporal. Therefore also I am unborn, and following the way of my unborn being I can never die. Following the way of my unborn being I have always been, I am now, and shall remain eternally. What I am by my [temporal] birth is destined to die and be annihilated, for it is mortal; therefore it must with time pass away. In my [eternal] birth all things were born, and I was cause of myself and of all things. If I had willed it, neither I nor any things would have come to be. And if I myself were not, God would not be either. That God is “God,” of this I am the cause. If I were not, God would not be “God.” It is not necessary, however, to understand this.

A great master says that his breakthrough is nobler than his flowing out, and this is true. When I flowed out from God, all things spoke: God is. But this cannot make me happy, for it makes me understand that I am a creature. In the breakthrough, on the other hand, where I stand free of my own will and of the will of God and of all his works and of God himself, there I am above all creatures and am neither God nor creature. Rather, I am what I was and what I shall remain now and forever. Then I receive an impulse which shall bring me above all the angels. In this impulse I receive wealth so vast that God cannot be enough for me in all that makes him God, and with all his divine works. For in this breakthrough I discover that I and God are one. There I am what I was, and I grow neither smaller nor bigger, for there I am an immovable cause that moves all things. Here, then, God finds no place in people, for people achieve with this poverty what they were in eternity and will remain forever. Here God is one with the spirit, and that is the strictest poverty one can find.

If anyone cannot understand this discourse, let them not trouble their hearts about it. For, as long as people do not equal this truth, they will not understand this speech. For this is an unveiled truth that has come immediately from the heart of God.

COMMENTARY: How We Are to Become Free of All Things as God Is/Experiencing Our Preexistence in the Godhead by Entering into Nothingness/Why I Pray God to Rid Me of God/The Meaning of Letting Go and Letting Be/How Letting Go Becomes Letting Be and Reverencing All Things

This sermon is more than a sermon based on Jesus’ Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. One might even say that it represents Eckhart’s Sermon on the Mount. For he deliberately and consciously copies the style of Jesus’ sayings, as, for example, when Jesus says, “You have learned how it was said to our ancestors: You must not kill; and if anyone does kill he must answer for it before the court. But I say this to you . . .” This refrain of “You have learned . . . But I say to you” is repeated several times in this, Eckhart’s imitation of the Sermon on the Mount. It was clearly an important sermon in his own estimation since he claims that the truth of it has come immediately from the heart of God and that to grasp it one must have experienced it.

In this sermon Eckhart carries forward on his ideas of nothingness that we have considered in the last two sermons. He recalls to our minds what he has said elsewhere, that our origins are an eternal abyss of d/-vine being and that God stands empty of all things and that God is free of all things, and therefore he is all things. Eckhart desires that people too would become so God-like as to touch these states of nothingness that are God’s and ours because we are God’s images. We too should stand empty and should will nothing, desire nothing, and have nothing. He wants us to arrive at a point where God is one with the spirit and where it happens that I and God are one. For it is only this oneness that can give the human person full joy. Whoever comes to know this something knows what happiness consists in.

How does one arrive at such oneness and such happiness? It is not enough to travel the cataphatic road to God exclusively. Path One cannot stand by itself because even awareness of our own divinity does not make one happy to one’s roots. When I flowed out from God, all things spoke: God is. But this cannot make me happy, for it makes me understand that I am a creature. Eckhart seeks to experience our precreaturely state, a time when God was the Godhead and not yet God the Creator, a time before time, a space before place, an eternal youthfulness before aging, a wholeness before brokenness. Eckhart’s reflections on this mystical return to the womb before our womb, to our home before home and our God before God are borrowed from wisdom literature, where we read:

“Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded,

before the oldest of his works.

From everlasting I was firmly set,

from the beginning, before earth came into being.

The deep water was not, when I was born,

there were no springs to gush with water.

Before the mountains were settled,

before the hills, I came to birth . . .

I was by his side, a master craftsman,

delighting him day after day,

ever at play in his presence,

at play everywhere in the world,

delighting to be with the sons of men.” (Pr. 852–25, 30–31).

Eckhart applies these words to Jesus in this sermon, for he says, Blessedness opened its mouth of wisdom and spoke . . . And this wisdom has declared that the poor are blessed. Blessedness, as we have seen earlier, means a return to our origins and Eckhart takes the person of Jesus Christ, who was himself poor on earth, as a model of what our preexistence must have been back in the Godhead. If it is true, as Eckhart says often, that “Christ is our humanity,” and if Christ is an expression of preexisting wisdom, then we too who are called to be other Christs and sons and daughters of God also share in some way in an expression of preexisting wisdom. Indeed, we have seen this theme of humanity’s preexistence discussed in Sermon One, in the context of the prophet Jeremiah’s vocation. Back in the Godhead from which we came, when the wisdom of the Father speaks, all is silence. We are not then flowing out but only remaining within. It is the exquisite unity with Godhead—this remaining within—that Eckhart invites us to in this sermon. He answers the question: How do we, who are “other Christs” and therefore other wisdoms, set about to be “ever at play in God’s presence”? How is the interplay between God and people to happen?

His answer is in terms of poverty. It is poverty that renders us blessed as Jesus, who is Blessedness itself, and that renders the kingdom of heaven to happen in our time and where we live. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” But Eckhart has a very definite understanding of what he means by poverty. It is an inner poverty and a radical poverty. A poverty so radical and so in touch with our ground where Godhead and we are one, that such a poor person wills nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing. This kind of blessedness and poverty is in touch with nothingness. Previously we have seen Eckhart use nothingness in four ways: as God who is no-thing; as our intellects which, like God, are no-thing; as creatures insofar as they depend absolutely on God for being and without God are nonbeing or nothing; and as the transparent way in which we see through creatures who are nothing into God. All four of these experiences of nothingness are alluded to in this sermon and are integral to the truly poor, that is the truly blessed and happy person.

But how does this happen? Not by a lot of ascetic practices, not by penitences and external practices which cling to the selfish I. Rather, it happens by our learning to let go. Eckhart invented the words for letting go and letting be. The two words are Abgeschiedenheit and Gelas-senheit respectively and while some people translate the former as “detachment,” that word has borne too heavy a burden from dualistic and ascetic spiritualists since Eckhart’s day to do justice to his meaning. Letting go is what Eckhart means. As Schürmann puts it, speaking of Abgeschiedenheit: This evokes “a mind that is on the way to dispossession from all exteriority which might spoil its serenity.”¹ The letting go of all things is the act by which we enter into nothingness. “If a person wants to become like God, insofar as a creature can have any likeness to God, then this can only happen through letting go.”² Letting go allows us to touch nothingness. “Letting go is so near to nothingness, that nothing but God is subtle and rare enough to be contained in letting go.”³ As Caputo puts it, “the object of detachment is ‘nothing,’ the nothing; indeed, he [Eckhart] says, ‘it aims at a pure nothingness.’ “⁴ Letting go is the virtue behind virtue, the purity behind purity. “Letting go is the best of all, for it purifies the soul and cleans the conscience and inflames the heart and awakens the spirit and enlivens the desires and lets God be known.”⁵ It is this radical letting go of willing, of knowing, and of having that allows God to enter. “To be empty of all creatures is to be full of God; and to be full of creatures is to be empty of God.”⁶ The person who has learned to let go is one without objects in his or her life, even life itself is no longer an object. There is true Irving without why or wherefore. Such a person must so live that they not even know them* selves to live, either for oneself or for truth or for God.

Furthermore, there are no limits to this kind of poverty, no depths, one might say, to the vortex that is our spirit and our potential for letting go and for nothingness. One might say that nothing is the limit to letting go or, if you will, God is the limit. For so radical is Eckhart’s invitation to let go that he confesses twice in this sermon that he prays to God to rid us of God. Why does he do this? This is why I pray God to rid me of God; for my essential being is above God insofar as we comprehend God as the origin of creatures. In other words, believing he is capable of the Godhead and not only of God, he prays to let go of our images for God—even for the Creator God. And of our will for God. To experience the true Godhead where all creation exists now as earlier and now as in the future, it is necessary to be rid of all—including our names for God. We need to let go of all our works as well in order that God might work. We are to keep ourselves so free of God and of oil one’s works thot if God wants to act in the soul, God himself becomes the place wherein he wants to act—and this God likes to do. Full emptiness is required, or true poverty. He alludes to this same letting go of God on other occasions:

The highest and loftiest thing that a person can let go of is to let go of God for the sake of God. When Saint Paul let God go for the sake of God, he let everything go that he could get from God, and he let everything go that God could give him and he let everything go that he could receive from God. When he let go of all this, he let God go for the sake of God and then God remained with him where God is most truly in himself . . . He did not give anything to God, nor did he receive anything from God, for he and God were one unity and one pure union.⁷

The allusion to Saint Paul is from Romans, where we read:

What I want to say now is no pretense; I say it in union with Christ—it is the truth—my conscience in union with the Holy Spirit assures me of it too. What I want to say is this; my sorrow is so great, my mental anguish so endless, I would willingly be condemned and be cut off from Christ if it could help my brothers of Israel, my own flesh and blood. (Rm. 9:1–4)

It is here—in Paul’s willingness to be “cut off from Christ”—that Eckhart derived his concept of Abgeschiedenheit (from the word “to cut off”) and letting go even of God. He explains this elsewhere: “Saint Paul says that he would like to renounce God for the sake of God, in order that the glory of God might be extended.”⁸ It is significant that Eckhart invokes Paul in the present sermon as an example of someone whom God favored. Paul’s words are true. God’s grace was necessarily in him, and the grace of God accomplished in him the growth from accidental into essential being. In Eckhart’s scriptural text for this verse from Romans, the word Paul uses that expresses his being cut off even from Christ is geschieden. This, then, is a major biblical text for Eckhart’s teaching of a path of letting go.

The purpose of letting go is not to renounce things as bad or immoral or even to forget things. If that were the case, then Eckhart’s admonition to let go of God would be tantamount to repressing God. The purpose of the via negativa and the experience of the apophatic God or God of nothingness is not to put down or to forget the God of creation. In Eckhart’s journey, Path Two does not stand by itself. Nor does it substitute for Path One. The purpose of letting go is to experience the divinity in all creation to an even greater depth. “He who has God essentially apprehends God in a godly manner, and to such a person God shines in all things, for all things have a divine savor for him, and God becomes visible for him in all things.” In fact, letting go lets us see the divinity behind the divinity of things. “This person is highly praised before God because he perceives all things in a godly manner and values them more than the things are worth in themselves.”⁹

Thus the ultimate experience of letting go is an experience of letting be. Letting God be God and letting the Godhead be the Godhead. Letting oneself be oneself and letting others be themselves. Letting things be things and letting God be God in things and things be God in God. Letting inness be and letting panentheism be and letting the circle of being that God surrounds be. Schürmann puts it this way: “As existence moves ahead on this road [of Abgeschiedenheif], all ascetic imperatives vanish. Thus detachment turns progressively into releasement, Gelassenheit, which, as has been said, is a broader concept.”¹⁰ Letting be or Gelassenheit comes from the word lassen, to let go, to relinquish or abandon. It also means to allow or permit. Thus, says Caputo, “it suggests openness and receptivity.”¹¹ It is a state of being open and sensitive. It means, says Eckhart, to be “receptive of all spirit.”

Our Lord speaks very clearly: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” He who has nothing is poor. “Poor in spirit” means that, as the eye is poor and bare of color and yet receptive of all colors, in the same way the person who is poor in spirit is receptive of all spirit, and the spirit of all spirits is God.¹²

Thus what letting go does is to develop sensitivity and openness to the spirit and this receptivity results in letting be. Schürmann describes letting be as an act of respecting the autonomy of things. “It designates the attitude of a human who no longer regards objects and events according to their usefulness, but who accepts them in their autonomy.”¹³ Thus a good synonym for letting be might be reverence. Letting be is an attitude of reverence for all things that allows them to be themselves and God’s selves. This represents one more reason why the path of letting go and letting be is not one of putting down anything or any event. It is rather to enter so fully into events and things that we reverence all that is there. This reverence is a gentle letting be. “What is being spoken of here is to meet with gentleness, in true humility and selflessness, everything which comes your way.”¹⁴ Such an attitude of reverence and letting be actually forbids our running away from things and requires our return to them to see them newly. As Caputo puts it:

the detached man in Meister Eckhart is not simply to be understood as one who has divested himself of all self-love, but also as one who, like Martha, is at home in the world of things, who has a new relationship to creatures, who understands them for what they are, who lets them be.¹⁵

Thus Meister Eckhart can say:

One cannot learn this [to perceive God in all things] by flight, by fleeing from things, and from externality to solitude, but one must learn to cultivate an inward solitude, wherever or with whomsoever one may be. One must learn to break through things and to grasp one’s God in them and to be able to picture him powerfully to oneself in an essential manner.¹⁶

Thus letting go and letting be are about a return to creation, not a flight from it. They are our way of seeing creation newly, which actually means the way it is and originally was and was always intended to be, namely, in God.

In this blessed and new creation, where letting go and letting be result in reverence even for nothingness in all its forms, the groundless wisdom of God is allowed to speak once again. It will speak with the word that no one has heard since before they were born. It will utter a word of silence and unity that only silence can shout of. It will not be an abstract or a distant silence, however, but one that accompanies all of our activities. This attitude of utter reverence and gentle receptivity we are to bring to all we do, advises Eckhart, even to the sermon that he speaks. If you are not equal to this truth of which we now want to speak, then you cannot understand me. This is the gentle and receptive silence that precedes all understanding. By traveling this path we shall return to the God before God, to the space and time where God was not yet “God,” that is, to the Godhead who was God before creation. And there we shall be free—as free as God is—to play “by his side . . . delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere in the world.” There we will come to know the something in the soul, the spark of our souls and our touch of divinity from which knowing and loving flow. And there, in the unity of our origins with God, joy will not cease. Whoever comes to know this something knows what happiness consists in. There all barriers will break down; we will no longer be a people who preserve distinctions. We will be one in God and God in us so that, like Paul, we will remain what we are and what we have been from all eternity. For when the distinction between God and us is let go of and allowed to break down, then too the distinction between existence and preexistence gives way. Time no longer holds power over us. We become, in the Godhead’s presence, eternally at play. Here God is one with the spirit.