Passion for Creation

“It is all that is good, everything that is perfect, which is given us from above.” (Jm. 1:17)^a

Saint James says in his Epistle: “The best gift and perfection come from on high from the Father of lights” ( Jm. 1:17).

Now pay attention! Concerning people who give themselves up to God and in all industry seek only his will, whatever God gives to such people is the best. Be as certain as you are of the fact that God lives that this must be the best way of all, and that there is no way that could be better. However, it may be that something else seems better that would still not be so good for you. This is because God wishes just this way and no other, and this way must of necessity be the best way for you. No matter what sickness or poverty or hunger or thirst God inflicts or does not inflict upon you, and no matter what God gives or does not give, all of this is best for you. It may be that you have neither devotion nor inwardness. Whatever you have or do not have, focus carefully on the fact that you have God’s honor in all things before your eyes, and whatever he then does to you is best.

Now you might ask: “How do I know whether or not it is God’s will?” If it were not God’s will, it would not come to pass. You have neither illness nor anything else unless God wishes it. And since you know that it is God’s will, you should have so much satisfaction and gratification from this that you will regard no suffering as suffering. Indeed, even if the most extreme suffering were to occur and you were to feel some pain or suffering, it would still be completely turned around. For you would have to accept it as the best thing from God, since it must of necessity be the best way of all. This is because God’s being requires him to wish what is best. For this reason, I too must wish it, and nothing else should suit me better. If I wished to please someone and knew for certain that I would please that person by wearing gray clothing more than any other color, there is no doubt that the gray clothing would be more satisfactory and precious than any other. If I wished to please someone, and if I knew that that person took pleasure in certain words and deeds, I would conduct myself in that way, and in no other way. All right! Now examine yourselves to see how your love is constituted. If you love your God, nothing could give you more pleasure than whatever pleases him best and the thought that his will should be carried out to the greatest degree with respect to us. However heavy the suffering or hardship may seem, if you do not find an equal amount of satisfaction in connection with it, something is not in order.

I am accustomed to use often an expression that is also true. We call out every day and cry loudly in the Our Father: “Lord your will be done” (Mt. 6:10). And then if his will is done, we wish to get angry, and his will does not satisfy us. Meanwhile, whatever he does should please us most. Those who accept it as what is best remain in all circumstances in complete peace. Now it seems not to be so to you from time to time, and you say: “Oh, if it had been different, it would have been better,” or “If it did not happen in that way, it would perhaps have been better.” So long as it seems so to you, you will never attain peace. You should accept it as the best of all things. This is the first meaning of this expression.

There is also another meaning. Think about it carefully. Saint James speaks of “every gift.” Now the best of all and the highest of all are really gifts in the most proper meaning of the term. God gives away nothing so happily as big gifts. I stated once in this place that God prefers to forgive big sins rather than small ones. And the bigger they are, the more happily and quickly does he forgive them. This is quite the way it is with grace and gifts and virtues: the bigger they are, the more happily does he give them. For it is his nature to give big gifts. And for this reason, the more valuable the gifts are, the more does he give of them. The most noble creatures are the angels, who are purely spiritual and have nothing corporeal about them. There are a very great many of them, and there are more of them than the sum total of all corporeal things. Big things are called quite properly “gifts” and belong to God in the truest and most spiritual way.

I once said that whatever can be truly expressed in its proper meaning must emerge from inside a person and pass through the inner form. It cannot come from outside to inside of a person but must emerge from within. It lives truly in the most spiritual part of the soul. There all things are present, living and seeking within the soul what is spiritual, where they are in their best and highest meaning. Why don’t you notice anything of this? Because you are not at home there. The more noble something is, the commoner it is. I have my senses in common with the animals, and my life in common with the trees. My being, which is more inward, is held in common with all creatures. Heaven is more encompassing than all that is under it, and for this reason it is more noble. Love is noble because it is all-encompassing.

What our Lord has commanded seems difficult—that we should love our fellow Christian like ourselves (Mk. 12:31; Mt. 22:39). Coarse people commonly say that the meaning of this is that we should love our fellow Christians with a view to the same benefit for the sake of which we love ourselves. No, this is not the case. We should love them just as much as ourselves, and that is not difficult. If you wish to think correctly on this matter, love is more of a reward than a command. A command sounds difficult but a reward is something to long for. All of us who love God as we should and must love him, whether willingly or not, and the way all creatures love him, must love our fellow human beings like ourselves. We must rejoice in their joys as much as in our own joys, we must long for their honor as much as for our own honor, and we must love a stranger as our own relatives. In this way, people are constantly in joy and honor, and a good situation, just as if they were in the kingdom of heaven. Thus they have more frequent joys than if they only had joy in their own benefits. And know for certain that, if your own honor causes more happiness than the honor of another, something is wrong.

Know that, whenever you are seeking your own interest, you will never find God, since you are not seeking God alone. You are looking for something along with God, and you are behaving exactly as if you were making of God a candle so that you could look for something. When we find the things we are looking for, we throw the candle away. Whatever you are seeking along with God is nothing. It does not matter what it is—be it an advantage or a reward or a kind of spirituality or whatever else—you are seeking a nothingness, and for this reason you find a nothingness. The reason that you find a nothingness is that you are seeking a nothingness. All creatures are a pure nothingness. I do not say that they are of little value or that they are something at all—they are a pure nothingness. Whatever has no being is nothing. All creatures lack being, for their being depends on the presence of God. If God were to turn away from all creatures only for a moment, they would come to nothing. I have from time to time made a statement that is also true: whoever added the whole world to God would have nothing more than if he had taken God by himself. All creatures have, without God, no more being than a gnat would possess without God—just exactly as much and not less or more.

All right, now listen to a true statement! If a person gave a thousand gold marks so that churches and monasteries could be built, this would be a fine thing. All the same, if another person who regarded a thousand marks as nothing gave much more, the second donor would have done more than the first one. When God created all the creatures, they were so unimportant and narrow that he could not move about in them. He made the soul, however, so like and similar in appearance to himself that he could give himself to the soul. For what he gave to the soul in addition is regarded by the soul as nothing. God must give himself to me just as much as he belongs to himself, or there will be no advantage to me at all, and nothing will agree with me. Any people who are to receive him so completely must give themselves up completely and be completely divested of themselves. Such people receive from God all God has and as much as our Lady and all those in heaven have. All of this belongs to these people in a similar and quite personal way. Those who have divested themselves of themselves to the same degree and have surrendered themselves will receive the same from God and no less.

And now let us consider the third part of our text from the Scripture: “from the Father of the light” The word “Father” makes us think of sonship or daughtership; 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 exactly 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 flourished in the Holy Spirit. When 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 weir’ (Rm. 8:17). Whoever rightly knows the truth understands well that the word “Father” implies a pure generation and a production of children. For this reason we are here as a child, and are the same Son.

Now note also the expression: “They come from above.” I recently told you that whoever wishes to receive something from above must of necessity be below in proper humility. And know in the truth that whoever is not fully below will receive nothing, however insignificant it might ever be. If you have ever perceived this with respect to yourself or something else or someone else, then you are not down below and you will receive nothing. If you are really below, you will receive fully and completely. It is God’s nature to make gifts, and his being depends on making gifts to us if we are down below. If we are not here, and if we receive nothing, we act violently toward him and we kill him. If we cannot do this to him, we are still doing it to ourselves and being violent as far as we are concerned. See to it that you give everything to him as his own, and that you humble yourself beneath God in proper humility, and that you raise up God in your heart and your perception. “God, our Lord, sent his Son into the world” (Ga. 4:4). I said once at this point that God sent his Son in the fullness of time—to our soul, if it has moved beyond all time. If the soul is unencumbered by time and space, the Father sends his Son into the soul. Now this is the meaning of the declaration: “The best gift and perfection come from on high from the Father of lights.”

COMMENTARY: The Creator as Artist, the Son as Art/Eckhart’s Theology of Creativity and the Artist/Because It Is God’s Nature to Give Gifts, It Is Ours Also/Our Best Gifts or Works of Art Come from Within and Thus Praise God/Our Divine Destiny and Glory Is to Receive Beauty and Birth Beauty—and This Is Salvation

It has been said that one can “extract an almost complete philosophy of art from Eckhart’s writings,”¹ and that is true. This would seem to be demonstrated by the journey we have taken thus far. Through Path One we experienced the divine isness of all creation, so full of divine beauty planted there by an Artist. Through Path Two we learned to let go in order to let the beauty be. Through Path Three we learned that we are to be parents of the Beauty behind beauty and the Artist behind artists and that the Holy Spirit, spirit of gift-giving, inspires us to birth gifts. In the present sermon Eckhart, drawing on scriptural passages from James and Paul, summarizes the culmination of Path Three in the spiritual journey as an experience of birthing and creativity. Each of these epistles speaks of our vocation as children of God and “first-fruits” of the Creator’s work. Thus the passage from James that forms the starting point for Eckhart’s sermon reads:

Make no mistake about this, my dear brothers: it is all that is good, everything that is perfect, which is given us from above; it comes down from the Father of all light; with him there is no such thing as alteration, no shadow of a change. By his own choice he made us his children by the message of the truth so that we should be a sort of first-fruits of all that he had created. (Jm. 1:16–18)

This reiteration of creation as a blessing and of the human race as the first-fruits of creation, a special blessing that makes us children of God, is a theme that Eckhart is pleased to treat once again. To explore more deeply the meaning of our son/daughtership to God, Eckhart invokes two passages from Paul’s epistles. Each talb of not only the gift of being divine children but also the responsibility. We are heirs as well as God’s sons and daughters, and we possess “the first-fruits of the spirit.”

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 . . . 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. (Rm. 8:14–17, 22,23)

Eckhart comments on this passage: When the Father generates his Son in me, I am that very same Son and no one else . . . We are here as a child, and are the same Son. He turns to Galatians to reinforce his point, emphasizing our passage from being heirs to being sons:

An heir, even if he has actually inherited everything, is no different from a slave for as long as he remains a child. He is under the control of guardians and administrators until he reaches the age fixed by his father. Now before we came of age we were as good as slaves to the elemental principles of this world, but when the appointed time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject of the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law and to enable us to be adopted as sons. The proof that you are sons is that God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: the Spirit that cries, “Abba, Father,” and it is this that makes you a son, you are not a slave anymore; and if God has made you son, then he has made you heir. (Ga. 4:1—7)

Eckhart interprets our coming of age as our receiving God in our souls. God sent his Son in the fullness of time—to our soul, If it has moved beyond all time. If the soul is unencumbered by time and space, the Father sends his Son into the soul. And this sending constitutes “the best gift and perfection come from on high from the Father of lights.” It also constitutes our motherhood of God and our becoming Creators as God the Father is.

Nevertheless, it does not suffice for the noble, humble person to be the only begotten Son, whom the Father has eternally begotten, unless he or she also wants to be a father and to enter this similitude of the eternal Fatherhood, and to beget him by whom I am eternally begotten.²

Eckhart devotes considerable energy in this sermon to exploring what “Abba, Father” might mean. Who is this God who is addressed as “Abba, Father”? God is a being driven to generate or give birth. God is pure generation and is the life of all things. The essence of God is to give birth. The word “Father” signifies a pure generation and means the same as “a life of all things” That which the Father most generates is his Son, and this birthing is a constant birthing process.

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 flourished in the Holy Spirit.

Birthing the Son is God’s constant activity. This is what is meant when we call out, “Abba, Father.” The word “Father” implies a pure generation and a production of children. This generating is not restricted to a far-off place called heaven. It actually takes place in ourselves. He generates his Son in the soul exactly as in his own nature. He generafes 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. But this generating that God does in us is also what the indwelling of God in us is about. “His generating is at the same time his indwelling, and his indwelling is his generating.”³ Thus for Eckhart the indwelling of God is meant to be fruitful and outward-oriented. It is not an inner symbol to gaze at so much as an inner dynamism that is to generate our own creativity and giving birth. Contemplation is not a rest in God but a flowing out from God into birthing. What God generates and gives birth to is ourselves as the Son of God. Where the Father generates his Son in me, I am that very same Son and no one else.

We are sons and daughters of the Father! But to be children of the Father who is pure generation means that we too are to generate, we too are to be birthers who are divinely fruitful. This is our praise of God, namely our creativity.

What praises God? That which is like him. Thus, everything in the soul which is like God praises God. Whatever is at all unlike God does not praise God. In the same way, a statue praises the artist who has imprinted on it all the art that he has in his mind, thus making it so very like his conception. The similarity of the work of art to the artist’s conception praises the master without words.⁴

By discovering how we are artists as God is, we praise God, who in fact intended that we be in his image and likeness and therefore creators also. Elsewhere Eckhart explains that the Father and the Son are related as is the artist to his or her art. Art stays with the artist like the Word stays with the Father. It flows out but remains within. Eckhart links in an explicit way his theology of creativity with his theology of the Word.

From the start, once he has become an artist and as long as he is an artist capable of creative work, art remains with the artist. This is the meaning of “The Word was in the beginning with God,” that is, the art with the artist, coeval with him, as the Son is with the Father in God.⁵

God’s Word is God’s work. It goes out but remains within. The same Is true of us. “What is in me goes out from me; if I am only thinking it, then my word reveals it and yet remains inside me. It is in this way that the Father speaks the unspoken Son and yet the Son remains in the Father” (Sermon One). Since we too are God’s children, it follows that we too are God’s works of art. But also, being heirs of God come of age, we too are artists as God is. To be a human being as well as to be a divine being means that we are artists, for “humankind lives by art and reason, that is to say, practically.”⁶ We are heirs of God, heirs of creativity. We are heirs of the “fearful creative power” of God, as Eckhart puts it in Sermon Thirty-two.

Psychologist Otto Rank has defined the artist as one who wants to leave behind a gift.⁷ Integral to an artist’s consciousness is a gift-consciousness, a thank you for creation that is expressed in one’s creativity. We have seen in Sermons Eight and Ten how Eckhart’s is a theology of thanksgiving. We have also seen how his theology of the Spirit is a theology of gift-giving, for the Spirit is a gift (Sermons Eighteen, Twenty-six). When God gives, God gives the best first, Eckhart explains in Sermon Thirty-six.

Nature begins its deeds on the smallest scale, but God begins his deeds on the most perfect scale. Nature produces an adult from a child and a hen from an egg. God, however, produces an adult before the child and a hen before the egg. Nature first causes wood to be warm and then hot; then it causes the essence of fire to be born. God, however, first gives to every creature its being, and afterward he gives every separate thing that belongs to this being in time and yet apart from time. God also gives the Holy Spirit before the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

In the present sermon Eckhart develops in a richer way how it is that God’s consciousness is a gift-consciousness and therefore, using Rank’s criterion, a consciousness of the artist. God needs to make gifts, Eckhart says. God is, as it were, compelled to be an artist. It is God’s nature to make gifts, and his being depends on making gifts to us if we are down below. So important is this gift-giving to God’s nature that if we refuse the gift, we act violently toward him and we kill him. In other words, a gift-giver requires a gift-receiver, as every artist requires an audience and a union with others. To refuse God that audience is to challenge the very core of God, for if it is his nature to give gifts, then truly his being depends on it. What kind of gifts does God like to give? The bigger, the better. God gives away nothing so happily as big gifts . . . It is his nature to give big gifts. Notice that this gift-giving is a giving away. It is not a giving for a return or a reward. It is a giving in order to give, it is gift for gift’s sake, it is giving without a why. As Eckhart puts it, we even make God into a means as we do a candle. Then, when we find the things we are looking for, we throw the candle away. God must be an end and a mystery, not merely a means or a problem-solver in our lives. So too, all our gift-giving and thank-you’s, all our art, are to be without a why like living and work. Art is without a why just like creation itself. In a previous sermon Eckhart had warned us that “those who give in order to receive something in return” are not giving gifts. “Such a gift does not deserve to be called a gift; it should be called a demand because nothing is really given” (Sermon Twenty-four). God is always ready with his gifts, but we often miss the opportunity. “As exalted as God is above human beings, to that same extent is God more prepared to give than human beings are to receive.”⁸ The most basic of the gifts we have received is of course being itself. This we have in common with all creatures and because of this gift all creatures love God (see Path One). So basic is being that even our art or gift-giving depends on it. “Each and every thing, whether produced by nature or by art, has its being or the fact that it is immediately from God alone.”⁹ The intimacy we share with God the giver of being is shared by all our art as well and all we give birth to. The greatest of the gifts we have received is the Son and we are driven to respond with what Schurmann calls a “supreme thankfulness”:

The reception of God . . . in us is a gift which must bear fruit: detachment is completed by fertility . . . one sole determination joins them [people and God] together: that of giving birth. United to God in begetting, man returns to God in an act of supreme thankfulness everything that he possesses.¹⁰

If it is God’s nature to give gifts—and preferably big ones—then it is our nature as sons of God to do the same. Our divinization requires our creativity. One cannot be divine without being creative and fruitful.

What does it mean to be creative and to be an artist for Eckhart? It means to give birth from the very depths of our insides. It means being in touch with and being ready to express the inner and not the outer person.

Whatever can be truly expressed In its proper meaning must emerge from inside a person and pass through the inner form. It cannot come from outside to inside of a person, but must emerge from within.

Introvert meditation—the taking in of a symbol given from the outside—Is not enough for Eckhart. We need extrovert meditation as well—one that expresses our own deepest insides.¹¹ As we saw in the previous sermon, our deepest insides unite being and action. Thus our act of creativity must flow from our act of being. The culmination of the birth of God and us will be a creativity that is itself born of being and action, the way God’s is. All creatures, Eckhart declares, “strive in their works toward what is like their own being.”¹² We are urged to “bear fruit that remains” (Jn. 15:16), but it is what is deepest in us that remains. “What is inborn in me remains.”¹³ What is deep within the artist are images that are more than images—they are life itself—flowing out but remaining within, as does a word.

The chest which issues or is produced externally into being nevertheless is and remains in the artist himself, just as it was from the beginning, before it became a chest. . . The chest in the mind and art of the artist is neither a chest nor is it made, but is art itself, is life, the living concept of the artist.¹⁴

Art, like life, is born from our deepest roots and centers. For art is life.

What is life? That which is moved by itself from within. What is moved from without does not live. Hence, if we live with him, we must also cooperate with him from within, so that we do not operate from outside; we should rather be moved from whence we live, that is, through him. Now we can and must act from our own, from within. If, therefore, we shall live in him or by him, he must be our own and we must act from our own . . .¹⁵

Eckhart is hopeful—we “can operate from within”—that we can all be artists and creative people in some way. Indeed, we must be, for this is the only route in which authentic pleasure lies. God’s being requires him to wish what is best . . . If you love your God, nothing could give you more pleasure than whatever pleases him best. Our greatest pleasure is in cooperating with the Creator, creator with Creator, artist with Artist. Every artist has experienced the ecstasy of “enchantment” that Eckhart speaks of for those who become instruments of the divine creativity. In the creative state, “the soul now no longer accomplishes things with grace but divinely in God. Thus the soul is in a wonderful way enchanted and loses itself.”¹⁶ To experience this ecstasy and pleasure that art brings, we need to trust our images as God does. The artist is driven to trusting his own images and concepts, to operating from within outward. True art is always from our depths to others’ depths, a gift or a spirit that touches other spirits and flows from within to within. So committed must the artist be to trusting his or her images that the artist must actually become one being with the image and live for the image. “An image receives its being immediately from that of which it is an image. It has one being with it and it is the same being.” Our life with our images—our artistic life—becomes a pattern for our spiritual lives. “You often ask how you should live. Note this carefully. See what has just been said of the image. In exactly the same way, you should live. You should be in him and for him, and not in yourself and for yourself.”¹⁷ The trust and spontaneity of the artist become models for our spiritual lives.

Human beings should turn their will to God in all their activities and keep their eyes on God alone, marching along without fear and without hesitancy about being right or not doing anything wrong. For if a painter wanted to consider every stroke of his brush when he made his first stroke, no picture would ever result . . . This is why we should follow the first suggestion and move forward.¹⁸

The reason the artist must plumb his or her inner life more than others is that there is where the action takes place. All things are present there. There all things are present, living and seeking within the soul what is spiritual, where they are in their best and highest meaning. The reason we do not grasp this is that we are strangers to our own capacity to give birth and to imagine images. Why don’t you notice anything of this? Because you are not at home there.

The work of finding the transcendent within is the work that the Holy Spirit accomplished in Mary’s birth of Jesus, Eckhart says. Every artist must make what is “above” be “within.”¹⁹

The work that is “with,” “outside,” and “above” the artist must become the work that is “in” him, taking form within him, in other words, to the end that he may produce a work of art, in accordance with the verse “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee” (Lk. 1:35), that is, so that the “above” may become

Once again Eckhart is relating his theology of creativity to his theology of the Spirit and to his theology of birthing. The fruit of our birthing from within, instead of merely from outside or even from above, will be God-with-us, Emmanuel, still another birth of God in our midst. In this sense, Mary was the first folk artist, the first one to birth God from within and not merely from without or above. Mary had the imagination, the courage, and the discipline to make the most sublime the innermost. To bring God in and to birth God outwardly. This is what is so noble and divine about the “intellect,” or what I prefer to call the imagination in us, the imago Dei. But imagination does not come from wishing or fantasizing alone. Eckhart distinguishes two kinds of willpower within us: that which is merely wishing and which is not born deeply from within, and that which is “determining and creative” and which is truly a will to create.²⁰ The latter is only tapped if we give birth from deep within us, as every true artist must. Art is not mere inspiration. It takes an act of the will and a willingness to discipline oneself. Thus it calls upon qualities of a person that mere wishing to be an artist does not; it calls upon inner discipline. “The artist does not find his nature sufficient for the practice of his art unless it is reinforced by the will to practice it, the capacity and the skill and so on, factors which are not, strictly speaking, the nature of the artist.”²¹ Clearly Eckhart prefers this kind of discipline to that of ascetic mortifications, for it is oriented toward bearing fruit and not just being a contemplative “virgin.”

The journey that the artist makes in turning inward to listen to and trust his or her images is a communal journey. Jungians say that there is a collective unconscious. Eckhart puts it in the following manner. My being, which is more inward, is held in common with all creatures. The more outward we look at things, the more separately we see them. We have senses in common with the animals, life in common with the trees. But that which is in common with all other creatures, our being, is more inward. Thus the artist who is truly birthing from the depths of the inside is birthing from the depths of commonality. Such a person is giving birth to the “we” and not just the I. In fact, Eckhart wants to do away with the word “I”:

The word ego, which means “I”, is appropriate only for God in his unity. The word vos’means approximately “you.” That fact that you are one in unity means that the words ego and vos (“I” and “you”) point to unity. May God help us to be this unity and to remain this unity!²²

Eckhart addresses himself to the second part of the Epistle of James that he read for the day. It is a lesson of doing the word and not merely taking it in, of working to make the seed grow.

Accept and submit to the word which has been planted in you and can save your souls. But you must do what the word tells you, and not just listen to it and deceive yourselves. To listen to the word and not obey is like looking at your own features in a mirror and then, after a quick look, going off and immediately forgetting what you looked like. But the person who looks steadily at the perfect law of freedom and makes that his habit—not just listening and then forgetting, but actively putting it into practice—will be happy in all that he does.

Nobody must imagine that he is religious while he still goes on deceiving himself and not keeping control over his tongue; anyone who does this has the wrong idea of religion. Pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father is this: coming to the help of orphans and widows when they need it, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world. (Jm. 151–27)

James urges us to summon all our discipline in order to “listen to the word and obey it” and to “actively put it into practice.” The artistic calling is a demanding one.

Eckhart invokes here the two commandments—love of God and of neighbor—that Jesus exhorts us to (Mk. 12:31; 22:39) and points out that what James is telling us we ought to have learned from our journey inward: that love is all-encompassing. To love oneself is to love one’s neighbor if we love ourselves correctly. For we are all one with each other in the sea of God. We should love them just as much as ourselves, and that is not difficult. True love, for the person who has made the spiritual journey that Eckhart has outlined in three paths, is not a moral imperative. It is more of a reward than a command, because it is something we long for. It is a pleasure to do the acts of love out of a flow and an artistry and a creativity and an overflow that is the basis of all true art. For to love God is to love those in God and to celebrate with them. It is like living in the kingdom of heaven to be able to rejoice in their joys as much as in our own joy and to long for their honor as much as for our own honor. For the kingdom of heaven consists of such a celebrative banquet of blessings shared. All those who are blessed with birthing possibilities come to this banquet to celebrate. “Wait only for this birth within yourself, and you will discover all blessing and all consolation, all bliss, all being, and all truth. If you neglect this, you will neglect all blessing and all happiness.”²³ We create from this blessedness: “In this same ground all of God’s friends will receive their blessedness and create from it. That is the ‘table in the kingdom of God.’ “²⁴ At this table the gifts of the Spirit flow like a rapid river and we do not become obstades to such flowing, but ourselves drink of it and pass on its ever-flowing energies.

This is the word that has been “planted in us and can save our souls” as James puts it—the word of our own creativity and rebirth as sons of the Creator and heirs of divine creativity. Because our salvation lies in our making contact with our divine origins, and it pertains to divinity to create, therefore our salvation lies in creativity. For in the work of the artist, subject/object distinctions are broken through and we experience the unity of all creation once again, the unity of the circle of being that resides in the Godhead. Healing now takes place. And this healing is salvation, a unity in what Schurmann calls an “operative identity.”²⁵ It is a healing between us and the Creator and between us and creation and between our deepest inner self and our outgoing self. From all these unions a saving child is born. And its name is Beauty or the glory (doxa) of the children of creation. The work of the artist is to carve out and unveil the glory that is hidden in creation.

If a skilled artist makes an image of wood or stone, he or she does not place that image within the wood but chisels away the pieces that have hidden and covered it up. The artist contributes nothing to the wood but rather takes away and removes the covering and takes away the blight; then what lay hidden underneath shines forth. This is the treasure that lay hidden in the soil, as our Lord says in the Gospel (Mt. 13:44).²⁶

This unveiling of a shining treasure brings about healing and salvation. “This, then, is salvation, when we marvel at the beauty of created things and praise the beautiful providence of their Creator or when we purchase heavenly goods by our compassion for the works of creation” (see Sermon Thirty).

There is another way of looking at Eckhart’s Three Paths of spiritual consciousness that have culminated in creativity and birthing. That would be to compare Eckhart’s analysis of the spiritual life with the stages of creativity as conceived by psychiatrist Silvano Arieti.²⁷ Dr. Arieti speaks of the first stage as the Primary Process, wherein there are no denials, no no’s, but images are allowed to appear and interact freely. The second stage is the Secondary Process, when images are consciously decided upon, by rejecting some and choosing others. The third stage, or Tertiary Process, constitutes the marriage of stages one and two and is greater than the sum of its parts. Eckhart has led us on a first stage, called the via positiva (creation), a second stage, called the via negativa (letting go and letting be), and now a third stage, which can rightly be called the via creativa (breakthrough and giving birth). The biggest difference between his analysis of the spiritual journey and Arieti’s analysis of the creative process would seem to be that stage two for Eckhart is more radical than it is for Arieti. Eckhart’s is more a spirituality that undergirds the creative process than an entire psychology of such a process. Stage four for Eckhart will simply be an elaboration of what might be the fullest fruit and the finest birthing that creative people are capable of. Having made this journey to the point of giving birth, as all artists and creators do, we are now ready to move on to Path Four, which delineates for us what the greatest art and the finest birth would look like.