Sermon Twenty: HOW LETTING GO AND LETTING BE ARE TO BEAR FRUIT

“In the course of their journey he came to a castle, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house.” (Lk. 10:38)^a

I have recited a little passage from the Gospel, first in Latin. It runs as follows in the vernacular: “Jesus came to a certain castle, and was welcomed by a virgin who was also a wife.”

Now pay heed to what I have said. It had to be by a virgin that Jesus was received. The word virgin means a person who is free of all false images, and who is as detached as if he or she did not yet exist. Lo, we might now ask how a person who has been born and who has lived up to a state in life capable of reason could be so free of all images, as if he or she had not yet existed. All the same, he or she knows many things that are nothing but images. How then can this person be free of them?

Pay attention now to the instruction that I wish to give you. If I were possessed of such a comprehensive reason that all the images that all human beings have absorbed, as well as all the images within God himself, if all these images were within my reason, and if this were true in such a way that I were just as free of an ego attachment to those-images, as if I had not grasped one of them as mine—either in action or inaction, in coming or going—so that at this very moment I would be free and detached toward God’s dearest wish and ready to fulfill it unceasingly, then I would truly be a virgin without hindrance of all images. Certainly this would be as if I did not yet exist.

I add also that the fact that a person is a virgin does not remove him or her from all the deeds that that person has accomplished. All of this lets him or her be virginal and free without any hindrance toward the highest truth, just as Jesus is detached and free and virginal in himself. As the masters of the spiritual life state, two equals alone are the basis for a union. On that account, a person who is to receive the virginal Jesus has to be virginal and free.

Now pay attention and examine what I say carefully! If this person were always a virgin, no fruit would come from him or her. If this person is to become fruitful, then it is necessary for him or her to become a wife. The word wife is the noblest term that we can attribute to the soul; it is far nobler than virgin. It is good for a person to receive God into himself or herself, and in this receptivity he or she is a virgin. But it is better for God to become fruitful within the person. This is because becoming fruitful as a result of the gift is the only gratitude for the gift. The spirit is a wife through the continuously bearing gratitude in which it bears Jesus back into God’s fatherly heart.

Many good gifts are received in virginity, but they are not born back into God in wifely fruitfulness with thankful praise. These gifts spoil and come to nothing, so that the person will never become more blissful or better as a result. Therefore, that person’s virginity is of no use, for he or she does not become through it a wife in full fertility. The loss lies in this fact. Therefore, I have recited that “Jesus came to a certain castle, and was received by a virgin who was also a wife/’ It must of necessity be the way I have shown you.

Married people scarcely give rise to more than one fruit in a year. But I have in mind now another kind of “married peoples-all those who egotistically cling to prayer, fasting, vigils, and all kinds of external practices and mortification. Every ego attachment to any kind of deed robs you of your freedom to be free and ready at this very moment to be at God’s service and to follow him alone in the light through which he admonishes you to action and inaction, as if you had nothing else to do and wanted to do nothing else and could do nothing else. Every ego attachment and every intentional deed, which at all times rob you of this new freedom, are what I call now “a year.” For your soul in this connection bears no fruit of any kind, unless your soul renounces the deed that you have egotistically taken up. Moreover, you will have no trust in either God or yourself until you have accomplished the deed you have taken up with egotistical attachment; otherwise you will have no peace. This is what I establish as “a year,” and the fruit is small for all that, because it has emerged from the deed in ego attachment and not in freedom. I call such persons “married couples” because they are bound by ego attachment. Such persons bear little fruit, and what they bear is small, as I have already stated.

A virgin who is a wife, and who is free and liberated and without ego attachment, is always equally close to God and herself. She bears much fruit, and the fruit is of good size. It is no less nor more than God himself. This virgin who is a wife bears this fruit and this birth. Every day she bears fruit a hundred times or a thousand times or countless times, giving birth and becoming fruitful out of the most noble foundation of all. Let me put it in even a better way. Indeed, she bears out of the same foundation from which the Father begets his eternal Word and from which she becomes fruitfully pregnant. For Jesus, the light and reflection of the fatherly heart is united to her, and she to him, and she radiates and shines with him as a single unit and as a pure, clear light within the fatherly heart. (As Saint Paul says, Jesus is the glory and copy of the fatherly heart, and he radiates with power through the fatherly heart [cf. Heb. 1:3].)

I have often stated that there is a power in the soul that touches neither time nor flesh. It flows out of the spirit and remains in the spirit, and is totally and utterly spiritual. In this power God is as totally verdant and flourishing in all joy and in all honor as he is in himself. So cordial is the joy and so unimaginably great is the rapture that no one could announce it fully. For in this power the eternal Father unceasingly begets his eternal Son in such a way that this power engenders at the same time the Son of the Father and itself as the same Son in the inner power of the Father. If someone were to possess a whole kingdom or all the wealth of the earth, and were to give up all this purely for God’s sake, and if the same person would become one of the poorest human beings living anywhere on earth, and if God were to give this person as much suffering as he has ever given anyone, and if this person were to endure all this up to his or her own death, and if God were to allow the person to see with one glance how God is in this power, then the joy of the person would be so great that all the suffering and all the poverty would be too little. Indeed, even if God afterward were to give him or her the kingdom of heaven, this person would already have received all too great a reward for everything that he or she had suffered. For God is in this power as in the eternal now. If the spirit were always united to God in this power, the person could never grow old. For the now in which God created the first human being and the now in which the last human being will fade away, and the now in which I am speaking—all these nows are alike in God and are only one now. Understand now that this person dwells in one light with God. For this reason there is in him or her neither suffering nor chronological order, but rather an eternity of equal duration. In truth, all wonder is removed from this person, and all things are essential in him or her. For this reason, the person receives nothing new from future things nor from any kind of chance, for he or she dwells in one now, which is always new, and which is unceasing. Such is the divine loftiness in this power.

There is another power that is also incorporeal. It flows out of the spirit and remains in the spirit and is totally and utterly spiritual. In this power God is unceasingly glowing and burning with all his wealth, with all his sweetness, and with all his bliss. Indeed, in this power there is such great joy and such great, immeasurable bliss that no one could express and reveal it fully. I say again that if there were any person who looked with his or her reason according to truth into the bliss and joy that is within this power, then everything that he or she could suffer or that God might wish to have this person suffer would be for him or her insignificant, or, indeed, a nothing. I say even that it would be totally a joy and a pleasure.

If you wish to know definitely whether your suffering is yours or God’s, you can judge the situation in the following way. If you are suffering for your own sake, no matter what its form may be, this suffering will hurt you and will be hard to carry. If you are suffering for God and for his sake, the suffering will not hurt you and will also not be hard for you because God will be carrying the burden. In all truth, if a person were willing to suffer for God’s sake and purely for his sake, and if all the suffering that all human beings had ever suffered and that the whole world had ever borne at one time were to fall on him or her, all this would not hurt the person, and it would also not be hard for him or her because God would be carrying the burden. If anyone were to lay a heavy burden on my neck, and if the person were then to place another weight on my neck, I might just as soon laden myself with a hundred such burdens as with only one. For the burden would not be heavy for me, and would also not do me any harm. To put the matter briefly, God will make whatever we suffer for him and his sake alone easy and sweet. Thus at the beginning, at the point where we began this sermon, I said that “Jesus came to a certain castle, and was welcomed by a virgin who was a wife.” Why did this happen? It had to be that she was a virgin and in addition a wife. Now I have told you how Jesus was welcomed, but I have not yet told you what the “castle” was. I will now speak about this matter.

I have occasionally said that there is a power in the spirit that alone is free. Occasionally I’ve said that there is a shelter of the spirit. Occasionally I’ve said that there is a light of the spirit. Occasionally I’ve said that there is a little spark. Now, however, I say that it is neither this nor that. All the same, it is a something, which is more elevated above this and that than heaven is over earth. For this reason I name it now in a more noble way than I have ever named it in the past. Yet it mocks both such nobility as well as my way of naming it, and is elevated above them. It is free of all names and bare of all forms, totally free and void just as God is void and free in himself. It is totally one and simple, just as God is one and simple, so that we can in no manner gaze into it. For that very power of which I have spoken in which God is verdant and blooming with his whole Godhood as well as the Spirit in God—it is in the same power that the Father begets his only begotten Son as truly as in himself. For the Father really lives in this power, and the Spirit gives rise along with the Father to the same only begotten Son and to itself as the only begotten Son, and the Spirit is the same Son in this light, and he is the Truth. If you could have knowledge with my heart, you would understand very well what I am saying. For it is true, and the Truth itself says it.

Lo, now pay attention! So one and so simple in the soul is this “castle” of which I am speaking and which I have in mind, and so elevated is it above all ways, that the noble power of which I have spoken is not worthy to gaze even once into this castle. In addition, the other power of which I have spoken—the power in which God glows and burns with all his wealth and all his bliss-does not ever dare gaze into this castle. So totally one and simple is this castle, and so elevated above all modes and all powers is this unique way and power that a power or a way can never gaze into it—not even God himself. In all truth and as truly as God lives, even God himself will never gaze into it even for a moment. And he has never gazed into it insofar as he exists in the way and “attributes” of his person. This is easy to perceive, for this single way and power is without a way and without attributes. Therefore, if God should ever gaze into it, this would cost him all his divine names and his personal attributes. He must leave all this quite outside if he is ever to gaze into it. Rather, just as he is a simple One, without all ways and attributes, he is likewise neither Father nor Son nor Holy Spirit in this sense. Yet he is still something that is neither this nor that.

Lo, just as God is One and simple, he comes to this one thing, which I here call a castle in the soul. In no other way does he come to it. Only in this way, however, does he come to it and be in it. With this part of itself the soul is equal to God and nothing else. What I have told you is true. On this I pledge to you the Truth as well as my soul as witnesses.

May God help us to be such a “castle” to which Jesus will come and where he will be received and where he will remain eternally in the way I have said! Amen.

COMMENTARY:  What a True Vine Really Does/How Bearing Fruit—Not Contemplation—Is the Fulfillment of Eckhart’s Spirituality/How True Fruitfulness Takes Trust, Confidence, and Self-love/The Fruits of the Spirit That Come with Letting Go and Letting Be/How the Ultimate Letting Go Includes Letting Go of Letting Go

In this sermon Eckhart weaves together two biblical texts, borrowing from them images and issues that combine to form a powerful summation of his Second Path, the path of letting go and letting be. These are the story of Martha and Mary, as found in Luke’s Gospel, and the parable of the vine that bears fruit, as found in John’s Gospel. In Luke’s Gospel we read:

In the course of their journey Jesus came to a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. She had a sister called Mary, who sat down at the Lord’s feet and listened to him speaking. Now Martha who was distracted with all the serving said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister is leaving me to do the serving all by myself? Please tell her to help me.” But the Lord answered: “Martha, Martha,” he said, “you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one. It is Mary who has chosen the better part. . .” (Lk. 10:38–42)

So taken was Eckhart by this story in Luke’s Gospel that he builds another sermon around it—number Thirty-four, which we will consider in Path Four. In the present sermon Eckhart is particularly taken with the words “distracted with all the serving,” as he addresses how one can be busy in the world while not being distracted overly much. The text he takes for this sermon is an altered text, one that is interpreted more in the allegorical tradition of mystical writers than is usually the case in Eckhart’s use of Scripture. He offers us the following translation: Jesus came to a certain castle and was welcomed by a virgin who was also a wife. Following a long exegesis of this passage in Christian tradition, Eckhart has translated the name “Martha” as “wife” and also as “virgin.”¹ It was not uncommon to attempt rather elaborate translations of proper names in allegorical exegesis.

The Martha/Mary story that inspires this sermon is the traditional text for spiritual writers to expound on the relationship between contemplation and action, between being in God and in the world. Eckhart resists the more traditional explanation both in this sermon and in Sermon Thirty-four—namely, that Mary is a contemplative and has chosen the “better part” and Martha is an activist who has chosen a lesser part. Instead of following this rather simplistic exegesis—which in fact exegetes no longer subscribe to today²—Eckhart uses the text to substantiate his spiritual way of letting go and letting be as a profound way of being in the world and in God all at once. To assist him in this effort, he borrows images and insights from the Gospel of John and the parable there of the true vine. The text reads as follows:

“I am the true vine,

and my Father is the vinedresser.

Every branch in me that bears no fruit

he cuts away,

and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes

to make it bear even more.

You are pruned already,

by means of the word that I have spoken to you.

Make your home in me, as I make mine in you.

As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself,

but must remain part of the vine,

neither can you unless you remain in me.

I am the vine,

you are the branches.

Whoever remains in me, with me in him,

bears fruit in plenty;

for cut off from me you can do nothing.

Anyone who does not remain in me

is like a branch that has been thrown away

—he withers;

these branches are collected and thrown on the fire,

and they are burnt.

If you remain in me

and my words remain in you,

you may ask what you will

and you shall get it.

It is to the glory of my Father that you should bear much fruit,

and then you will be my disciples.

As the Father has loved me,

so I have loved you.

Remain in my love,

If you keep my commandments

you will remain in my love,

just as I have kept my Father’s commandments

and remain in his love.

I have told you this

so that my own joy may be in you

and your joy be complete.

This is my commandment:

love one another,

as I have loved you.

A man can have no greater love

than to lay down his life for his friends . . .

You did not choose me,

no, I chose you;

and I commissioned you

to go out and to bear fruit,

fruit that will last. . .” (Jn. 15:1–13, 16)

It is evident from the themes that Eckhart treats in this sermon and from rhe very language and images he employs that he had this text from John in front of him as well as that from Luke’s Gospel. His treatment of letting go may well parallel the references here to pruning and being pruned; his reflections on the little castle of the soul correspond to this text about making a home in one and about remaining in one. This theme is a development of Eckhart’s panentheism, which is reflected in John’s imagery of “remaining in me, with me in him,” a mutual inness theology. In translating the word “home” as castle, Eckhart may well be picking up on the biblical tradition of the vine as a symbol of the kingdom of God (see Mt. 20:1–8; 21:28–31, 33–41). A castle is the home within the kingdom; it is the royal home. And so in this sermon Eckhart weaves in biblical themes from the tradition of the royal person that are so important to the theologian of creation spirituality (see Sermon Thirty-six) as well as themes of the kingdom of God that we have considered in Sermon Nine. The letting go motif is also present in the test of the truest love of all: the letting go of life for the sake of someone else. The reference in John to the person who withers parallels Eckhart’s reference to growing old; the reference to the glory of the Father parallels those references in Eckhart to realized eschatology and to our deification; the reference to a full joy parallels Eckhart’s to the same motif. And, above all, the imperative to bear fruit, “every branch in me that bears no fruit he cuts away,” gives Eckhart the basic imagery for his entire sermon. Indeed, like John, he analyzes this fruit as big, neither more nor less than God himself. It must be a total fruitfulness, Eckhart warns. John has said that one will “bear much fruit” and that it will be a “fruit that lasts.” Thus we can see that if we want to understand Eckhart’s teaching on letting go and letting be in this sermon, it is wise to read it with John 15 in front of us. One might call this Eckhart’s exegesis of what a true vine really is. And really does. A true vine bears fruit.

In applying this motif to our spiritual journeying, Eckhart insists that it is better to bear fruit than merely to receive God. It is good for a person to receive God into himself or herself, and in this receptivity he or she is a virgin. But it is better for God to become fruitful within the person, Schürmann points out that Eckhart is playing with a word in this passage: empfagen can mean both to receive and to conceive.³ Thus for Eckhart, our receptivity must also be an experience of giving birth. We are not here merely to respond passively to a God experience but to respond fruitfully or creatively. To bear fruit. “In the supreme emptiness of detachment [our letting go], man and God are united in fertility; one sole determination joins them together: that of giving birth.”⁴ Eckhart, in insisting that bearing fruit or being o wife is better than being receptive or being a virgin, is making a very strong statement about the contemplative as distinct from the active vocation. As Schürmann insists, Eckhart’s spirituality is not built around contemplation:

The context of the expressions of union in Meister Eckhart differs considerably from a mystique of the vision, in which one “contemplates” the divine sovereignty and, “forgetting all things, entirely ignores oneself and penetrates even into God” [Richard of Saint Victor]. Meister Eckhart does not teach such a mysticism of contemplation. Detachment [letting go] is not oriented toward contemplation. It produces a new birth. It is on this point that he [Eckhart] most profoundly modifies the views of Proclus. From a philosophy of the intellect in the cosmos, he enunciates a call for a certain type of existence among things. Such is Eckhart’s this-worldliness, which is opposed to the other-worldliness of the Neoplatonists . . . It is removed from the Platonic doctrines of the elevation of the soul by cosmic contemplation. The noetics of the cosmos itself has changed, “the world” has become “our world.”⁵

To remain a virgin or a mere contemplative gazer is of no use, for he or she does not become through it a wife in full fertility. Eckhart discards the traditional argument that was so bogged down in his day—as in our own—between contemplation vs. action.⁶ Instead, he prefers a new category to action, namely that of bearing fruit and of birthing. It is a refreshingly biblical category, as we have seen. It is a category of prayer as “thank you” for the blessings of creation, one of wifely fruit-fulness with thankful praise. Indeed, it is the only prayer that qualifies as “thank you”: Becoming fruitful as a result of the gift is the only gratitude for the gift The spirit is a wife when in gratitude it gives birth in return. Here Eckhart reiterates his spirituality of gratitude and thankfulness that we saw in Sermon Eight. We see how thoroughly this thanks for the blessing of creation permeates Eckhart’s theology. Eckhart advocates in language as strong as John’s—a fruitless branch will be torn down and thrown in the fire—the imperative to journey from virginity (contemplation that does not bear fruit) to wifery (a spirituality that does bear fruit). The word “wife” is the noblest term that we can attribute to the soul; it is far nobler than “virgin” A virgin has received God—and that is good; but it is better for God to become fruitful within the person. Eckhart is saying that extrovert meditation is better than introvert meditation.

In summarizing his meaning of the word “virgin,” Eckhart is summarizing the person who has learned Path Two, the path of letting go and letting be. We see in this definition many of the themes we have treated in previous sermons in this path. The word “virgin” means a person who is free of all false images, and who is as detached as if he or she did not yet exist.

Again, he cautions against interpreting this emptying of images in an anti-intellectual way or in a quietistic way. All the same, he or she knows many things that are nothing but images. The key is not that we bask in our ignorance—recall how in the previous sermon and commentary we were instructed in how knowledge must precede letting go. The key is our attitude toward what we know. If we are attached to it as to property (Eigenschaft), then we have not learned to let go and are not virginal. One could be the most intelligent person on earth and comprehend all human knowledge that ever was, and still be a person who lets go. If

I were just as free of an ego attachment to those images, as if I had not grasped one of them as mine-—either in action or inaction, in coming or going—so that at this very moment I would be free and detached toward God’s dearest wish and ready to fulfill it unceasingly, then I would truly be a virgin without hindrance of all images. Certainly this would be as if I did not yet exist.

Thus, Eckhart’s via negativa, unlike so many since his time, has nothing of anti-intellectualism to it whatsoever. You can know things—as much as there is to know—and still be free of your knowledge. That is true letting go. You can also do things, indeed we ought to do things, and as long as we do not relate to our work as to property, this too represents an authentic kind of letting go—indeed, it is the best kind, the “better part,” for it is our fruitfulness. The fact that a person is a virgin does not remove him or her from all the deeds that that person has accomplished. All of this lets him or her be virginal and free without any hindrance toward the highest truth. So long as our work too is accompanied by this consciousness of letting go and being free, it is authentically spiritual and thus “virginal,” as were the works of Jesus. A person who is to receive the virginal Jesus has to be virginal or free. Thus Caputo comments on Eckhart’s understanding of the Mary/Martha story. The person who lets go is, “like Martha, at home in the world of things, has a new relationship to creatures, understands them for what they are, lets them be.”⁷ Such a person does not lead “a life of passivity and withdrawal but of active and robust commerce with things. For Eckhart the depth of mystical union is completely compatible with the bustle of virtue and good works.”⁸ This subject of spirituality and work will be developed much further in Sermon Twenty-nine and in Path Four.

In this sermon Eckhart reaches the most radical position possible on the subject of letting go. He is saying that a person must even be able to let go of letting go! This is clear from the vocabulary he has chosen. We need to pass from virginity to wifery, he is saying. The virgin has to let go of her or his virginity in order to bear fruit. In our sinking from something to nothing, we even have to sink deeper than letting go and must resist all temptations to cling even to letting go. As Schürmann puts it, “Detachment proves powerless to procure happiness, hence it too is to be left. In this final letting be, detachment is abandoned insofar as it is still a ‘work’ of man.”⁹ When such a radical letting go and letting be occur, then truly God is allowed to be God and thus God is fully verdant and flowering. There the person who has passed from virginity to wifery becomes fruitful out of the most noble foundation of all. Let me put it in even a better way. Indeed, she bears out of the same foundation from which the Father begets his eternal Word. Here the person has truly entered the Godhead, where the names of God and Trinity no longer hold sway. Here the kingdom of the Godhead is known and knows. We remain in it and it is us, but fruitfully, not passively. Here we meet all creation in its proper setting, namely, in God, and we know it perhaps for the first time. “The things that he has ‘let be’ in their singular being, he now recovers in their primordial being.”¹⁰ Here we are, at last, at our origins. But we do not stay there. In spiral fashion, we move on and out. As Saint John said: “I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit.” Things cannot be an obstacle; knowledge is no obstacle; works are no obstacle. Enemies and suffering are no obstacle. The world is no obstacle. Our freedom is too radical, too deeply rooted, too closely a part of the vine to be distracting to our spiritual journey. Martha was too easily “distracted” by her duties; we need not be. The only thing that can interfere with the spirit and can kill it is our attitude of Eigenschaft or ownership: our inability to let go and let be. It alone threatens our freedom.

Eckhart now introduces two subjects that are so important to a spirituality of giving birth but which ascetic spiritualists ignore almost completely. They are the subjects of self-confidence and self-love. He observes that what forces people to remain virgins and not move on to bearing fruit is that you will have no trust in either God or yourself until you have accomplished the deed you have taken up with egotistical attachment. In other words, what makes us compulsive grabbers who are unable to let go and let be is lack of trust and confidence. This confidence is not merely a matter of faith in God but also of faith in ourselves. This is why you do not bear fruit. Eckhart is touching on a very important theme that contemporary psychologist William Eckhardt also develops in his study on compassion. “Compassion is a function of faith in human nature (the belief that man is basically good), while compulsion is a function of lack of faith in human nature (the belief that man is basically evil).”¹¹ We can see how an exclusively via negativa spirituality that is constructed on an exclusively fall/redemption theology would have little or nothing to say about giving birth, whether to compassion or anything else. Only persons who trust themselves and the universe can give birth. That is why only a creation-centered spirituality such as Eckhart’s includes a spirituality of compassion and of the artist (see Paths Three and Four).

The need for confidence in nature and in self and the need for self-love are developed by Eckhart on numerous occasions. They are the fruit of all letting be. “Love cannot distrust, it trustfully awaits only good.”¹² The person who has learned to let be has learned to let himself or herself be himself or herself. Let self be self and then God shall flow. “Man is naturally inhabited by God,” comments Schürmann, “under one condition only—that he let himself be.”¹³ Our confidence in the Creator is a supreme confidence and a basic attitude toward existence.

No person could ever trust God too much. Nothing else that one can do is so fitting as great trust in God. With all those who ever obtained great confidence in him, he never failed to work great things. He has known in the case of all such people that his confidence comes from love, for love has not only confidence, but it has also true knowledge and unquestioning security.¹⁴

Our trust in God grows from God’s trust in us. “People should not fear God, for those who fear him flee from him and fear is harmful . . . People should not fear him, but they should love him, for God loves people in the highest perfection.”¹⁵ Trust is the test of true love—”true and perfect love may be tested by asking whether one has great hope and confidence in God. For there is nothing by which one can better judge whether one has complete love than confidence.”¹⁶

This confidence applies to oneself as well as to God. Indeed, for Eckhart a confidence in God that does not apply to confidence in self is a pseudoreligious attitude. For if you trust God, you trust God’s creatures. And that means oneself. Indeed, it is lack of trust and confidence, Eckhart shrewdly observes, that drives people to too many tactical ecstasies in their spiritual lives. Concerning those who egotistically cling to prayer, fasting, vigils, and all kinds of external practices and mortification:

Every ego attachment to any kind of deed robs you of your freedom to be free and ready at this very moment to be at God’s service . . . For your soul in this connection bears no fruit of any kind, unless your soul renounces the deed that you have egotistically taken up. Moreover, you will have no trust in either God or yourself until you have accomplished the deed you have taken up with egotistical attachment; otherwise you will have no peace.

If we are truly God’s children, we are trustworthy. We are also loved as children and need to trust as children, but also to love as parents, as birthers of the God-child in us. Eckhart develops the theme of self-love frequently.

If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you do not love yourself rightly—if you do not love all people as you love yourself. You will love all people in one person: and that person is God and human. Thus all is right for such a person, who loves himself or herself and all others as himself or herself. And this is as it should be.¹⁷

We are expected to love ourselves and all parts of ourselves, body included.

Everyone loves himself to some degree. Those who imagine that they do not love their bodies, fool themselves. For if they hated themselves, they would cease to exist. We must love all things that lead us to God. That alone is love.¹⁸

Eckhart asks, “If you do not know how to love yourself, how is it possible that you will love God?”¹⁹ There can be no love of neighbor without love of self.

One should try to find out, therefore, if the person who Is to be entrusted with the care of his neighbors loves himself, so that he may be in a position to love them as he does himself . . . Love your neighbor as you love yourself—not as you hate yourself.²⁰

All creatures are to love themselves, for their existence is a blessing worthy of being loved.

So dearly does a creature love its own being, which it has received from God. If someone were to pour forth on a soul all the tortures of hell, it would still not wish not to be, so dearly does a creature love its own being, which it has received directly from God.²¹

Eckhart cites Aristotle’s observation in his Ethics that “friendly relations with another spring or come from friendly relations with oneself.” Eckhart comments that there exists a “complete equality or parity, or rather identity . . . between love of self and love of one’s neighbor . . . He who knows how to love himself loves God” (see Sermon Thirty-three). Such is the trust and confidence that is born of a true path of letting go and letting be. This path is not about putting down self or repressing anything that is in us or in nature. Indeed, integral to true letting go is letting go of lack of trust, lack of confidence, and lack of self-love. Only this kind of letting go will allow letting be to happen and ourselves to happen. Only this kind of letting go will allow God and God’s love to happen. It alone bears fruit There will be no fruit without it.

Eckhart plays with the concept of the fruits of the spirit in this sermon on bearing fruit. The fruits of the spirit he enunciates are joy, youth-fulness or eternity, and simplicity. About joy, he promises what was promised in the scriptural text from John’s Gospel: a divine joy. It comes to us from God, who flows forth totally verdant and flourishing in all joy and in all honor as he is in himself. The joy is ineffable: So cordial is the joy and so unimaginably great is the rapture that no one could announce it fully. This joy overcomes suffering—the joy of the person would be so great that all the suffering and all the poverty would be too little. For Eckhart, then, the via negativa culminates in joy. Schürmann calls Eckhart’s path a path of “errant joy” or wandering joy. It is a joy of heaven begun on earth, a joy of realized eschatology, a joy of the Messianic times begun. Such a person “dwells in joy.”²²

Another fruit of the spirit to which the virginal and wifely person is now sensitive and open is youthfulness, or a new sense of time. As we saw in Sermon Six, eternity to Eckhart means to be “eternally young.” And so youthfulness and timelessness are integral to the person who has allowed God to flow ever verdant, ever flowering. There happens an eternal now which, if a person were fully bathed in it, such a person could never grow old. When we live in God we begin to see things as God does. This is through the time of eternity or youthfulness. This person dwells in one now, which is always new, and which is unceasing.

Another fruit of this union and this release of the divine spark in us is freedom and the simplicity and spontaneity that freedom brings. We become as free and transparent as God is. We become free of all names and bare of all forms, totally free and void, just as God is void and free in himself. We make contact with our own—and with God’s own—simplicity. It is totally one and simple just as God is one and simple. The truth of the unity of God and creation, the full panentheistic truth, becomes ours to behold in a direct way. No intermediaries behold such a truth. Not even God can steal a glance into this union. So totally one and simple is this castle, and so elevated above all modes and all powers is this unique way and power that a power or a mode can never gaze into it—not even God himself.

In this castle or divine spark, which has now been allowed air and space to burn, God glows and burns with all his wealth and all his bliss. The experience of God is now so thoroughly God that it is, like God, ineffable. Indeed, in this power there is such great joy and such great, immeasurable bliss that no one could express and reveal it fully. Here even suffering would become totally a joy and a pleasure. And we learn to give our sufferings to God to bear for us. We can, finally, let go even of our sufferings. Thus, Schürmann speaks of the realized eschatology that is so typical of Eckhart’s spirituality. Eckhart “transposes to the present life the unendingly growing union with God in which Thomas Aquinas had recognized the dynamism of the eternal vision.”²³ Here the spark of the soul becomes a light for the world.

Here, in this little castle, the kingdom of God is encountered. It is simple and one as God is. It is free of all names and bare of all forms, totally free and void, just as God is void and free in himself. Here is the space held in common by people and by God. Here lies our link with the unnameable Godhead. God will have to leave outside the divine names and Persons in order to enter. Here we realize our own divinity, the fulfillment of our being God’s image and likeness. With this part of itself the soul is equal to God and nothing else. Our equality with God is affirmed; our divinity is experienced. Eckhart calls upon Saint Paul to explain the origin of this teaching of how we are “the divine and deiform being”:

In the nakedness of his essence, which is above every name, God penetrates and falls into the naked essence of the mind, which is elevated above the intellect and the will, as the essence is above its faculties. This is the castle into which Jesus enters, in his being rather than in his acting, giving graciously to the mind the divine and deiform being. This regards the essence of being according to the words: “By the grace of God I am what I am.”²⁴

The scriptural text Eckhart refers to speaks of the fruitfulness of this divine union:

By God’s grace that is what I am, and the grace that he gave me has not been fruitless. On the contrary, I, or rather the grace of God that is with me, have worked harder than any of the others. (1 Co. 15:10)

Equally on Eckhart’s mind, no doubt, are Paul’s words in Galatians: “I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me” (Ga. 2:20). We now live, we who have let go and let be, the life of God in us, which is also a life in God. It is a fruitful life, not an introverted one. It is a life from the same foundation as the Father, Schürmann rightly points out that this tradition of our deification, so lacking in Western theology’s preoccupation with sin, law, and grace, was well developed long before Eckhart in Eastern theologians like Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, and Origen. This same tradition develops Eckhart’s theme of the birth of God in us.²⁵

In this sermon we have seen the inside of the person (the castle) and the outside (fruitful work as big as God) meet. We see the profoundly dialectical nature of Eckhart’s theology, where in leads to out and out to in. We have seen, at a new depth, his theology of the word where the word flows out but remains within. We have seen how letting go even of letting go can lead to letting happen and letting be born. We have learned that birth is the logical outcome of those who follow the path of letting go and letting be. There remain to be discussed—in Path Three—what constitutes this birth and—in Path Four—what it is above all else that we humans who are divinized give birth to.