Sermon Nineteen: WISDOM AND FIERY LOVE-NOT REPRESSION-ARE THE RESULTS OF LETTING GO
“Child, get up.” (Lk. 8:54)a
“Get up!”
Our Lord “placed his hand on the girl and said, ‘Get up!’” The “hand” of God is the Holy Spirit. All deeds are accomplished in passion. If the fiery love of God grows cold in the soul, it dies; and if God is to have an effect on the soul, God must be united to the soul. If the soul is to be united or become one with God, it must be removed from all things and must be alone just as God is alone. For a deed that God accomplishes in an unencumbered soul is more valuable than heaven and earth. For this reason God has created the soul, that it might be united with him. A saint says: “The soul has been created from nothing, and he alone has created it with the help of no one. If anyone had created the soul with him, God would be quite anxious lest the soul be inclined to that other person. The soul therefore must be alone as God is alone.”
Spiritual things and bodily things cannot be united. If divine perfection is to take action in the soul, the soul must be a spirit as God is a spirit. And if God were to endow the soul within the soul, he would have to do so with moderation. He therefore draws the soul into himself and to himself and in this way the soul is united with him. There is a comparison for this. Fire and a stone are united but still, because both are of a material nature, the stone, because of its materiality, inwardly remains cold. It is the same with air and light; everything you see in the air you see also in the sun. Because both air and light, however, are material, there is in a whole mile more light than in a half mile, and there is more in a half mile than in a house. However, the aptest comparison one can find is the one about the body and the soul. They are united in such a way that, just as the body cannot do anything without the soul, the soul cannot do anything without the body. As the soul is to the body, so is God to the soul, and if the soul is separated from the body, this means the death of the body. In a similar way, the soul dies if God departs from it.
Three obstacles cause the soul not to unite with God. The first is that the soul is too fragmented and, as a result, is not simple, for if the soul is inclined to creatures, it is not simple. The second is that the soul is mixed up with temporal things. The third obstacle is that the soul is inclined toward the body and thus cannot unite with God.
On the other hand, there are three favorable factors for the union of God and the soul. The first is that the soul is simple and unfragmented. The second is that it tarries above itself and above all temporary things and clings to God. The third is that it is separated from all bodily things and strives for the first purity [that is, for its divine origin]. Augustine says, concerning the free soul, “If you do not want me, I still want you. If I want you, you do not want me. If I hunt you, you fly from me. Pure spirits run back again along the same course toward the purity of God.”
COMMENTARY: All Deeds Are Accomplished in Passion/The Soul Needs to Be on Fire/Authentic Purity Means the Return to Our Divine Origins Where Wisdom Dwells
In this brief sermon Eckhart applies the miracle of the resurrection from the dead that Jesus performed on the daughter of the synagogue official to ourselves. As we saw in Sermon Eight, he took this same biblical passage and applied it to the theme of spirituality as waking up, a theme that fit well into Path One. Now he applies this same theme of waking up to Path Two, for his emphasis here is on our being removed from all things and being alone just as God Is alone. He is saying that just as the via affirmativa of Path One is a waking up, so too is the via negatlva meant to be a waking up. A rising from sleep, from the dead, from spiritlessness. “Taking her by the hand he called to her, ‘Child, get up.’ And her spirit returned and she got up at once” (Lk. 8:54–65). The Holy Spirit has roused her from sleepfulness, from unconsciousness, and has waked her.
The first thing we are waked up to is that God’s love is a fiery love and a passionate love. Either we are on fire or we are cold, and a cold heart is a dead heart. God, whose love is a fiery love, must be united to the soul. Without this union with God’s fiery love the soul dies. The soul dies if God departs from it. To be dead is to be cold; to be cold is to be dead. Rising from the death of unconsciousness is being warmed and made fiery once again. The Holy Spirit, the hand of God that touches cold hearts and bodies, came to the disciples in the form of tongues of fire. It too was a fiery love. Without being on fire and being like this flaming spirit, we can accomplish nothing. Our works will be as cold and as dead as we ourselves, for all deeds are accomplished in passion. Passion, for Eckhart, is not a bad word, as it is, for example, for Thomas à Kempis, who uses it exclusively in a pejorative sense in his Imitation of Christ. For Eckhart, a passionate person is a Godly person who does the works of the Father, works which are done out of a fiery love. The soul must be a spirit as God is a Spirit. We are to become as God is. Our spirit is to meet God’s Spirit. And this is possible, because we are truly God’s images and likenesses, provided we do not remain as cold as the stones are, provided we become heated as God is heated by fiery love. Fire can heat the stone only externally; the stone inwardly remains cold. Eckhart suggests that we too are often inwardly like stone—cold, apathetic, passionless, indifferent. God cannot work in such a person.
The result, then, of letting go and letting be is not more stony people, or more ice between people, or more hardness within people. It is fire and passion, a passion that leads to deeds that are born of deep, inward love that is the love of the Spirit. These deeds return life just as their source has received life in being raised from sleep and the land of death.
When God and the soul unite, the soul strives for the first purity, that is, for its divine origin. Eckhart cites Augustine, who says, “Pure spirits run back again along the same course toward the purity of God.” What is this “purity of God” that is also our purity? It is, in its most basic form, a return to our origins, a recovery of our roots, a waking up from forget-fulness, a remembering of who we are and in whose image we all have been fashioned. It is a reminder of our divinity, as Eckhart put it at the conclusion of the previous sermon; it is the birth of our God-likeness.
Eckhart develops this theme of purity as return to our source on numerous occasions. It is significant that he does not define purity in terms of sexual abstinence or naïveté, as so many sentimental spiritualists since his time have done. His understanding of purity is a far more metaphysical and being-oriented one. When he does associate purity with children, it is not in terms of sexual innocence but in terms of their being nearer to their birth and therefore to their origins than are adults. We too need to be in touch with our youthfulness, and therefore our purity. Such purity is a transparency that carries us back to our divine origin. Eckhart says: “If Luke says a ‘child,’ this means something like a bit of pure air or something without flaws. And thus the soul should be pure and without stain, if the Holy Spirit is to have an effect on the soul.”1 Purity is that state of being that preceded original sin or the consciousness of dualisms and separations. It signifies our original freedom. Letting go means letting go even of the obstacles that have restricted us or our race from being in touch with this original freedom. As Schürmann puts it, a truly detached or letting-go person is one “who has retrieved his original liberty.”2
Philosophers have a tendency to interpret Eckhart’s search for origin and original purity as a Neoplatonic exercise. This is not the case, however, for he himself tells us that he got the idea from the prophetic and the wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible (see Sermons One and Fifteen). If he uses Neoplatonism, it is to assist his language and imagination in this search, but it is not his starting point. In the Book of Ecclesiasticus we read:
Before all other things wisdom was created,
shrewd understanding is everlasting.
For whom has the root of wisdom ever been uncovered?
Her resourceful ways, who knows them?
One only is wise, terrible indeed,
seated on his throne, the Lord.
He himself has created her, looked on her and assessed her,
and poured her out on all his works
to be with all mankind as his gift,
and he conveyed her to those who love him. (Si. 1:4—10)
This same theme of the preexistence of wisdom is developed in Proverbs 8, and in Baruch, where the author laments the distance that separates people from wisdom:
. . . more recent generations have seen the day
and peopled the earth in their turn:
but the way of knowledge is something they have not known,
they have not recognized the paths she treads.
Nor have their sons had any grasp of her,
remaining far from her way . . .
the tale-spinners and the philosophers
have none of them found the way to wisdom,
or discovered the paths she treads. (Ba. 320–21, 23)
What are we to do to regain wisdom and to close the gap between ourselves and wisdom? We must return to our source, says Meister Eckhart, citing the Book of Ecclesiastes as he does so:
Solomon says that all waters, that is, all creatures flow and return to their source. Therefore, it is necessarily true, as I have said, that similarity and fervent love draw up and lead and bring the soul into the first source of the One, who is the Father of all in heaven and on earth.3
This is the culmination work of letting go and letting be: To return to the fullness of Godhead where wisdom plays and has played from the beginning. The biblical reference Eckhart gives to support his search for origin as a search for wisdom is as follows:
Into the sea all the rivers go, and yet the sea is never filled, and still to their goal the rivers go. (Qo. 1:7)
The search for our origin, then, is a search for wisdom, according to the biblical model of wisdom for Eckhart.
Our origin is in the Creator, for we have flowed out of the Creator but remained within. We, like wisdom, were somehow there in the beginning.
“In the beginning.” This gives us to understand that the Father has eternally begotten us out of the hidden darkness of eternal mystery, remaining in the first beginning of the primal purity, which is the fullness of all purity. Here I rested and slept eternally in the hidden knowledge of the eternal Father, indwelling and unspoken.4
The “fullness of all purity” is the “primal purity” which is our primal origin. Our origin of origins is in God. We need to make contact with such a past as this. Indeed, this is possible because I could not have left home, Eckhart says, if I had not once dwelled there. “If someone were to ask me: ‘Brother Eckhart, when did you leave home?’ this would indicate that I must previously have been inside.”5 This origin that precedes all origins can be designated by the word nothingness. “All things have been drawn from nothingness; that is why their true origin is nothingness.”6 That is why letting go and letting be and sinking into nothingness are also sinking into our origin. “When this will turns for an instant away from itself, and returns to its first origin, then the will recovers its proper free fashion, and it is free.”7 In this way the return to our original liberty is accomplished.
In the sermon we are reflecting on, Eckhart says that the hand of God that raised the girl from the dead is the Holy Spirit. This is consistent with his teaching that it is the Holy Spirit who returns us to our origin. “If the soul were ready, the Holy Spirit would take it to the source from which it has flowed.” A person who has learned to let go has
a soul which has risen above all things and is lifted up by the Holy Spirit and raised to that source from which the Holy Spirit has flowed out. Yes, and the Holy Spirit brings the soul to that eternal image from which it has flowed out, that model in accord with which the Father has made everything, that picture in which all things are one, the breadth and the depth in which all things attain their end.8
Thus what is ultimately at stake in a return to our origins is a return to the Godhead in which all things are one. And this means a return to our own divinity that we share with the Godhead. And this in turn means a return to wholeness. And this return is what salvation is about: being whole again. “I have said frequently that the soul cannot be purged unless it returns to its original integrity and wholeness, as it was created by God.”9 Wholeness is holiness. This return constitutes our new creation. “God is the ‘beginning,’ and if we are united to him we become ‘new’ again.”10 The full return is the full waking up; indeed, it constitutes a resurrection from the dead. It is a return to our likeness and union with divinity. It is the imago Dei come back to life. Its sign is holistic instead of dualistic consciousness. We saw in discussing Sermon Twelve that purity there meant “separate from all twoness.” That is what it means here also. The twoness of the human and the divine, the twoness of life and death, the twoness of I vs. you are all laid aside when we wake from our sleep, when we truly “get up.”