Sermon Twenty-two: OUR DIVINITY AND GOD’S DIVINITY: TO BE GOD IS TO GIVE BIRTH

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (Jn. 15:12)^a

I have spoken three verses in Latin which stand written in the Gospel. The first verse that our Lord speaks is this: “This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you” (Jn. 15:12). The second verse Christ speaks is: “I have called you my friends because everything which I have heard from my Father I have revealed to you” (Jn. 15:15). The third verse he speaks is: “I have chosen you that you might go and bear fruit and that the fruit might remain with you” (15:16).

Now notice the first verse where Jesus says, ‘This is my commandment.” I want to say something about this so that, as he has said, “the fruit might remain with you.” “This is my commandment, that you love.” What does Christ mean here when he says: “That you love”? He wants to say something that you should pay attention to: love is so pure, so simple, so detached in itself that the best teachers say that the love with which we love is the Holy Spirit. There were many who wanted to contradict this but this much remains true: every movement through which we are moved to love is a movement in which nothing other is moving us than the Holy Spirit. Love at its purest and most detached level is nothing else in itself than God. The teachers say: the goal of love, that toward which all the works of love are done, is goodness; and goodness is God. As little as my eyes can speak or my tongue recognize color, just as little can love tend toward anything else than goodness and God.

Now pay attention. What does he want to say that makes him so serious about this matter, that we love? He wants to say, the love with which we love should be so pure, so simple, so detached that it inclines neither to myself nor to my friend nor to anything else next to it. The teachers say that one can name no good work as a good work and no virtue as a virtue unless it has taken place in love. Virtue is so noble, so detached, so pure, so simple in itself that it recognizes nothing better than itself and God.

But now our Lord speaks: “This is my commandment.” When someone offers me what is pleasant and useful and in which my happiness lies, that is very nice for me. When Fm thirsty, drink offers itself to me. When Fm hungry, food offers itself to me. And God does the same thing. He offers something so beneficial that the whole world can offer nothing like it. And the human being who once tastes this sweetness can truly no more turn in his love from this goodness and from God than God can turn from his divinity. It’s much easier for such a person to let go of himself and his whole blessedness and then to remain with his love in the house of goodness and of God.

Now our Lord says: “Love one another.” Oh, that would be a noble life, that would be a blessed life! Would that not be a noble life when everyone was inclined to his neighbor’s peace as to his own and when his love was so pure and clear and simple in itself that it aimed at nothing but goodness and God? If you were to ask a good human being: Why do you love goodness? the answer would be: For the sake of goodness. Why, then, do you love God? For the sake of God. And if it is so that your love is so clear, so detached, so pure in itself that you love nothing else but goodness and God, then it is a sure truth that all the virtues which have ever been exercised by the whole human race belong to you as perfectly as if you had exercised them yourself—in fact, even clearer and better. For the fact that the Pope is Pope often causes him great sorrow, but you possess his virtue in a purer and more unconditional form and with greater peace and it belongs more to you than to him, insofar as your love is so clear, so pure in itself that you have nothing else in your mind nor love anything else than goodness and God.

Now our Lord speaks: “. . . as I have loved you.” How has God loved us? He loved us when we did not yet exist and when we were his enemies. So great a need had God for our friendship that he could not wait until we asked him. He comes to us and asks us that we be his friends, for he desires from us that we should want it. He likes to forgive us. This is why our Lord quite rightfully says: “It is my will that you pray for those who do eviï to you” (cf. Lk. 6:28). It should be an equally serious matter with us to pray for those who do us harm. Why? So that we might fulfill God’s will, that we should not wait until someone asks us. We should rather say: “Friend, forgive me that I have betrayed you!” And just as serious should be our concern for virtue. The more the effort, so much the more should be our serious striving for virtue. So unitary should our love be, for love will never be anywhere else than there where equality and unity are. Between a master and his servant there is no peace because there is no real equality. A wife and a husband are not alike, but in love they are equal. This is why the Scripture is quite right in saying that God has taken the woman from the rib and side of the man (Gn. 2:22)—neither, therefore, from the head nor from the feet, for where there are two, there we find deficiency. Why? Because the one is not the other, for this “not” that makes the difference is nothing other than bitterness, precisely because there no peace is available. If I hold an apple in my hand, it arouses desire in my eye but it withholds its sweetness from my mouth. On the other hand, when I eat it, then I rob my eyes of the desire which I have for it. So therefore two cannot stand with each other, for one of them must lose its being.

It is for this reason that our Lord says: “Love one another”—in one another. The Scripture is quite clear on this. Saint John says: “God is love and whoever is in love is in God and God in him” (1 Jn. 4:16). He is speaking quite accurately here. For if God were in me but I was not in God or if I were in God and God was not in me, then everything would be divided. But when God is in me and I am in God, then I am not less and God is not higher. Now you can say: “Lord, you say I should love but I cannot love.” Our Lord has expressed himself very aptly on this point in what he said to Saint Peter: “Peter, do you love me?” “Lord, you know very well that I love you” (Jn. 21:15). If you have given it to me, Lord, then I love you; if you have not given it to me, then I do not love you.

Now pay attention to another verse, where he says: “I have called you my friends because I have revealed everything to you which I have heard from my Father” (Jn. 15:15). Notice that he says: “I have called you my friends.” In that same primal source in which the Son originates, where the Father gives expression to his eternal Word, and from the same heart, there arises and flows the Holy Spirit. And were the Holy Spirit not an outflowing from the Son, then no one would have recognized a difference between the Son and the Holy Spirit. When I spoke on the feast of the Holy Trinity, I said a little verse in Latin, that the Father had given to his only begotten Son all that he wanted to ask—his whole divinity, his entire blessedness—and that he held nothing back for himself. Then a question arose: Did the Father give to the Son that which is proper to himself? And I answered yes, for the property of the Father to give birth is nothing else than his being God, and I have already said that he held nothing back. And I further say that it is the very root of divinity which he fully speaks into his Son. This is why Saint Philip says: “Lord, show us the Father and it is enough for usl” (Jn. 14:8). A tree that bears fruit drops its fruit down and out from itself. Whoever gives me the fruit does not give me the tree at the same time. But whoever gives me the tree and the root and the fruit, that person has given me more. Now our Lord says: “I have called you my friends.” It is truly in the same birth where the Father bears his only begotten Son and gives him the root and his whole divinity and his entire blessedness and holds nothing back of himself, it is in this same birth that he calls us his friends. If you hear and understand nothing of this verse, still it gives a power in the soul—I spoke about this recently in one of my sermons—a power which is completely detached and entirely clear in itself and closely related to the divine nature, and it is in this power that the verse will be understood. And therefore he also says quite aptly: “Therefore I have revealed to you everything which I have heard from my Father” (Jn. 15:15).

Now Christ says: “What I have heard.” The Father’s speaking is his giving birth; the Son’s listening is his being born. Now he says: “Everything which I have heard from my Father.” Yes, everything which he has heard from his Father from eternity—that is what he has revealed to us and has hidden no part of it from us. I say that if he had heard a thousand times more, he would have revealed that to us too and not hidden any part of it from us. So we, too, should not hide anything from God; we should reveal everything to him which we would like to ask. For if you hold anything back for yourself, then you would be losing that much of your eternal blessedness, for God has hidden nothing of himself from us. This seems to be a heavy saying for many people. But no one should thereby doubt it The more you give yourself to God, the more does God give you of himself in return. The more you empty yourself of yourself, so much the greater is your eternal blessedness. It recently occurred to me as I was praying the Lord’s prayer that God himself has taught us: When we say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” (Mt. 6:10), then we are constantly asking God thereby to strip us of ourselves.

About the third verse I will at this point say nothing more than note that Christ says: “I have chosen you, placed you, set you, put you so that you might go and bear fruit and the fruit might remain with you” (Jn. 15:16). But no one knows this fruit but God alone. And may the eternal truth, of which I have spoken, help us to come to this fruit Amen.

COMMENTARY:  How Love Is God/How Love Is Between Equals/How the Essence of God Is to Give Birth/How God Gives His Whole Divinity to His Son and to Us Who Are God’s Children, Receptors of Divinity

The previous sermon ended with a prayer that “we might be born in God in a divine way.” Eckhart pursues this theme of our divine birth in the present sermon, in which he considers what it would be like to be human and divine at once. One thing it would mean is a much more beautiful existence for us all, were we truly to believe in our own rebirth as children of God, our own divinity. Oh, that would be a noble life, that would be a blessed Mel Would that not be a noble life when everyone was inclined to his neighbor’s peace as to his own? Such an existence would stretch out to other places and other times. It would break through all such barriers and would celebrate the communion of saints and the mystical body, where beauty would feed on beauty and would be shared bountifully. All the virtues which have ever been exercised by the whole human race belong to you as perfectly as if you had exercised them yourself—in fact, even clearer and better. In such an existence we ourselves would be giving birth to love and to the Holy Spirit as the Son does. The love with which we love is the Holy Spirit. In doing this, we are of course giving birth to God. For Eckhart does not only say that “God is love,” but that love is God. Love at its purest and most detached level is nothing else in itself than God. He does not distinguish dualistically between a love for creatures and a love for Creator, as many spiritualist theologians do. Instead, the difference in loves is within ourselves. If our love is truly one of letting go and letting be, then every act of love, toward friends and creatures alike, partakes of the Holy Spirit. Every movement through which we are moved to love is a movement in which nothing other is moving us than the Holy Spirit. Every movement of love is God-inspired, he is saying.

Eckhart is probing what love means in the phrase from Jesus in John’s Gospel, “that you love one another.” He has two things to say about the experience of human love that he in turn applies to our experience of divine love. The first of these is that love is between equals. Love will never be anything else than there where equality and unity are. Where there is no equality—as between a master and his servant—there can be no love. But where there is equality—as between a husband and wife—there can indeed be love. True love, he is saying, is true union. When one is not the other there can be no love, for then there are two and there we find deficiency. Love is the end of separations and dualisms. This lesson applies to our need to love our enemies, as suggested in the Sermon on the Mount (Lk. 6-.27ff.), and it also applies to God’s love for us. If, as Eckhart says, two cannot stand with each other, because in such a situation one of them would be forced to surrender his or her being, then the same holds between God and people. We are not two in our relation of love with God but one. We are no longer human but divine. Thus he has used the analogy of married love to describe how our love—like that of the vine and the branches—is with God. If God is a divine vine and we are the branches, then we too are divinized.

The theme of divinization is a common one in Meister Eckhart’s spiritual theology, repeated and amplified on many occasions. He writes elsewhere, for example, that

the soul so much loves itself in God as divine and is so uninterruptedly united with him that it enjoys nothing but him and rejoices in him. What more could a human being want or know when he or she is so blessed and united with God? It is for this very union that God made human beings.¹

He says:

God gives the righteous person a divine existence and names him with that same name which belongs to himself. Therefore he can say: “My Father who art in heaven.”²

Citing Saint Augustine’s remark that a person becomes by love that which he loves, Eckhart comments:

Should we now say that, if a person loves God, that person becomes God? That sounds like heresy. In the love a person gives there are no two but one and union, and in love I am more God than I am in myself. The prophet says: “Ye are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.” This sounds surprising that a person should be able in such a way to become God in love; yet it is true in eternal Truth. Our Lord Jesus Christ proves it.³

The theme of the deification of humanity is a familiar one in creation-centered theologians like Saint Irenaeus and in many Eastern thinkers, such as Clement of Alexandria, who writes:

The baptized, “in whom dwells the Word, possesses the beautiful form of the Word; such a person is assimilated to God as is beautiful himself or herself.” It is then rightly that Heraclitus said: “Men are gods and gods are men.” This mystery indeed is revealed in the Word: God in people and people in God.⁴

Eckhart develops at considerable length this important theme of the deification of humanity, a theme so regrettably lost in Western spirituality, almost since his condemnation. But he is careful to make the proper distinction, as, for example, in the following analogy:

A prophet says that all things are as small compared with God as a drop in comparison with the stormy sea (cf. Ws. 11:23). When you pour a drop into the stormy sea, the drop changes into the sea and not the sea into the drop. This is also how it happens to the soul. When God draws the soul to him-self, then the soul becomes divine, but not that God becomes the soul. Then the soul loses its name and its power but not its will and not its being. Then the soul remains in God as God remains in himself.⁵

Thus we are reminded that the soul, like a drop in the divine sea, becomes the sea or God, but the sea does not become the drop. God does not become the soul. At his trial Eckhart repeats this need to clarify the meaning of our deification. “To say that the deified person is nothing other than God is false and an error,”⁶ he insists. So that, while becoming God, we also remain ourselves—with will and being intact, as he said above. On many occasions Eckhart gives the reason for the Incarnation as our becoming divine and the child of the divine. In Sermon Two, he declared: “The reason why God has become a person is that he may beget you as his firstborn Son, and nothing less.” No wonder Schürmann can exclaim that for Eckhart “the glory of God is man deified: a man such as this God ‘must’ love. His love for him ‘cannot not be* since he gives to this man the₇ very Jove* with which he loves his own nature, that is, the Godhead.”⁷

Eckhart points out that when Christ says, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (Jn. 14:10), what is meant is that

not only is this in that, each in each, but this is that and each is each: “I and my Father are one” (Jn. 10:10). For the Father is what the Son is. Fatherhood is the same as sonship. The power whereby the Father begets and the Son is begotten is the same thing.⁸

It is evident, then, that the equality that Eckhart insists is necessary for all love to happen has indeed happened between God and humans. For humans are, by God’s graciousness, deified and divinized. Thus love between the vine and the branches can happen. God and people are, in a certain way, equal. There is not a case of the one not being the other and of two not being able to stand with each other. One has become one; we are equal to God and therefore able to love God.

A second analogy between human and divine love that sheds light on both is that of panentheistic love. True love is a being in another. “Love one another”—in one another, Eckhart says, quoting from John’s First Epistle. “Whoever is in love is in God and God in him” This inness is a necessary part of equality and oneness—without it everything would be divided. Equality is once again the result, for when God is in me and I am in God, then I am not less and God is not higher. The scriptural text Eckhart employs at this juncture is a text recalling to mind our deification:

We ourselves have known and put our faith in

God’s love toward ourselves.

God is love

and anyone who lives in love lives in God,

and God lives in him.

Love will come to its perfection in us

when we can face the day of Judgment without fear;

because even in this world

we have become as he is. (1 Jn. 4:16–17)

“Even in this world we have become as he is”—a significant statement for understanding our own divinity and our own divine son/daughtership and our equality with God. “Undoubtedly no one loves God sufficiently and purely unless he is God’s son. For love, the Holy Spirit, originates in and flows from the Son” to the Father.⁹ This equality is stated another way when he cites Jesus’ saying that “I have called you my friends.” Only equals can be friends: the divine can only befriend the divine.

Where are we friends of God? We are friends in the birth and breakthrough, where we are also sons and daughters of God and where the very root of divinity is bestowed on us.

Now our Lord says: “I have called you my friends.” It is truly in the same birth where the Father bears his only begotten Son and gives him the root and his whole divinity and his entire blessedness and holds nothing back of himself, it is in this same birth that he calls us his friends.

God bestows his whole divinity on his Son—but we are God’s sons and daughters! Eckhart has in mind the line from John’s Epistle: “Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God’s children; and that is what we are” (1 Jn. 3:1). “That is what we are”—here lies so much of Eckhart’s inspiration for developing the theme of our divine son/daughtership in God.

But who is this God to whom we are related as sons and daughters and as friends in a common birth? Eckhart’s God is a God who gives birth. The very root of his divinity is the property to give birth. It is also the meaning of Dabhar, the creative Word of God. God’s speech is a birth in itself. For God to express God is for God to give birth.

The property of the Father to give birth is nothing else than his being God, and I have already said that he held nothing back. And I further say that it is the very root of divinity which he fully speaks into his Son.

He repeats this understanding of God on another occasion: “God’s supreme purpose is to beget. He is never content unless he begets his Son in us.”¹⁰ Just as God bears his Son by nature all the time, so we too are born as the adopted sons and daughters without ceasing. “The Father bears his Son incessantly, and I say still more: he bears me as his Son, and as the same Son.”¹¹ Birthing and begetting are more intimate than mere similarity. That is why our union with the all-unitive Godhead is a union of birthing and not mere similarity. “Philip said: ‘Lord, show us the Father and it suffices for us,’ for ‘Father’ implies begetting and not similarity, and denotes the One in whom similarity is mute, and everything that has desire for being is silenced.”¹² Birth is in silence; mere similarity takes images and is therefore noisy.

But what does it mean to say that we are children of God continually being born and reborn? It means that God is so generous with us that we are not received as only the tree or only the root or only the fruit of the divino vine. No, we are partakers of the tree and the root and the fruit of that divine vine whose essential property it is to give birth. If we are truly God’s sons and daughters, then we too are truly birthers and creators, for it is the property of the Father to give birth. “A good person born of goodness and in God,” Eckhart says, “enters into all the properties of the divine nature.”¹³ If this be the case, and if the essence of the divine nature is to give birth, and if God held nothing back in extending divinity to us, then our divinity too demands that we be creators. Like father, like son; like mother, like daughter. The Father gives birth; the Child is born. Our being born constitutes our very essence and our giving birth constitutes our adopted nature as sons and daughters of God. The Father’s speaking is his giving birth; the Son’s listening is his being born. Our response—our listening—to the Father’s Word is our being born. Our being born in human and divine fullness has no limit—no one knows this fruit but God alone. Who can tell what fruit will emerge from a vine as divine as this one?

Eckhart explains our divine sonship, which is that of graced heirs and not of nature, on another occasion. He says:

“Father” makes us think of sonship; the word “Father” signifies a pure generation and means the same as “a life of all things.” The Father generates his Son in eternal knowledge. He generates his Son in the soul as in his own nature. He generates him in the soul as his own, and his being is attached to the fact that he is generating his Son in the soul, whether for good or for woe. I was once asked what the Father did in heaven. And I said that he was generating his Son, and that this activity was so agreeable to him and pleased him so much that he does nothing other than generate his Son, and both of them flourish in the Holy Spirit. Where the Father generates his Son in me, I am that very same Son and no one else. “If we are sons, we are heirs as well” (Rm. 8:17). Whoever rightly knows the truth understands well that the word “Father” implies a pure generation and a production of sons. For this reason, we are here as a son, and are the same Son.¹⁴

In this passage Eckhart has identified the Father for us as “pure generation” and as the “life of all things.” He also identifies the Father’s constant activity as that of “generating his Son” and that this is all the Father does. But this generation of divine son/daughtership takes place all the time in all of us, so that we too are children, “sons and heirs as well,” as Paul puts it. Eckhart is driven to these conclusions from the full context of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which he is trying to understand. It reads as follows:

Everyone moved by the Spirit is a son of God. The spirit you received is not the spirit of slaves bringing fear into your lives again; it is the spirit of sons, and it makes us cry out, “Abba, Father!” The Spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness that we are children of God. And if we are children we are heirs as well: heirs of God and coheirs with Christ, sharing his sufferings so as to share his glory. (Rm. 8:14–17)

We see from this text how Eckhart was involved in exegeting the sense of “Abba, Father” in his comments on the Father as pure generation and the “life of all things.” Paul goes on to explain how our son/daughtership relates to the new creation and in doing so speaks of the “one great act of giving birth”—a topic that, as we have seen, constitutes so significant a theme in all of Eckhart’s spiritual theology. One might say that these observations of Paul in Romans constitute the true starting point for Eckhart’s Path Three or our breakthrough and giving birth to Self and God.

I think that what we suffer in this life can never be compared to the glory as yet unrevealed, which is waiting for us. The whole creation is eagerly waiting for God to reveal his sons. It was not for any fault on the part of creation that it was made unable to attain its purpose, it was made so by God; but creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God. From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free . . .

We know that by turning everything to their good God cooperates with all those who love him, with all those that he has called according to this purpose. They are the ones he chose specially long ago and intended to become true images of his Son, so that his Son might be the eldest of many brothers. (Rm. 8:18–23, 28–29)

With this emphasis on all of creation being reborn into the glory of God that we share, it is little wonder that one criterion Eckhart offers for evidence of the authentic birth of the Son in us is that of a return to creation to find God there. “Grasp God in all things, for God is in all things.” When you “grasp God in all things, that will be the sign for your new birth, by which you will have been begotten his firstborn Son, and not less.”¹⁵ Thus for Eckhart, the test for Path Three is a return to Path One, where we see creation anew. As great as our experience of breakthrough is, it is not meant to distract us from creation itself. Path Three is in no way isolated from Path One. In this way, we become what Paul says we are: “true images of his Son, so that this Son might be the eldest of many brothers [and sisters].”