Passion for Creation

The prophet says: “Lord, have compassion on the people who are in you” (Ho. 14:4). Our Lord answered: “All who are sick I will heal, and I will love them freely.”

I will take for my text the words “The Pharisee asked the Lord to eat with him” and, further, “Our Lord said to the woman: Vade in pace, go in peace!” (Lk. 7:36, 50). It is good when someone goes from peace to peace. It is praiseworthy. However, it is not enough. One should run into peace, one should not begin in peace. God, our Lord, means: One should be grounded in peace and thrown into peace and should end up in peace. Our Lord says: “In me alone shall be your peace” (Jn. 16:33). Just so far as we are in God we are in peace. If any part of us is in God, it has peace; if any part of us is outside of God it has no peace. Saint John says: “Everything that is born of God overcomes the world” (1 Jn. 5:4). What is born of God seeks peace and runs into peace. Therefore he said: “Vade in pace, run into peace.” The person who runs and runs, continually running into peace, is a heavenly person. The heavens are continually running and in their running they seek peace.

Now pay attention! “The Pharisee asked our Lord to eat with him.” The food which I eat is united to my body as my body is united to my soul. My body and my soul are united in one being but not in one activity—as my soul is united in one work with the eye, that is to see; thus the food I eat is united in one being with my nature but not in one activity, and this signifies the great union that we will have with God in being but not in activity. Therefore the Pharisee asked our Lord to eat with him.

The word “Pharisee” means one who is set apart and does not know of any end. Everything belonging to the soul should be completely stripped off. The nobler the powers are, the more they strip off. Some powers are so high above the body and so detached that they peel away and separate off completely! A master says a beautiful word: “What has once touched corporal things never enters again.” The second meaning of Pharisee is that one should be stripped off and detached and gathered inward. From this one can conclude that an unlearned person can learn knowledge and teach others through love and desire. The third meaning of Pharisee is that one should have no end and should not be closed off and should cling to nothing and should be so fully grounded in peace that he or she knows nothing more of strife, when such a person is grounded in God through the powers that are entirely stripped off. Therefore the prophet said: “Lord, have compassion on the people who are in you.”

A master says: “The highest work that God has ever worked in all creatures is compassion.” The most secret and forbidden work that he ever worked on the angels was carrying them up into compassion; this is the work of compassion as it is in itself and as it is in God. Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion, and I do not mean that he forgives a person his sins or that a person takes compassion on another. The master means much more. He means that the highest work that God works is compassion. A master says: “The work of compassion is so close to God that although truth and riches and goodness name God, one of them names him better than the other.” The highest work of God is compassion and this means that God sets the soul in the highest and purest place which it can occupy: in space, in the sea, in a fathomless ocean; and there God works compassion. Therefore the prophet says: “Lord, have compassion on the people who are in you.”

What people are in God? Saint John says: “God is love and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him” ( 1 Jn. 4:16). Although Saint John says that love unites, love never establishes anything in God. Perhaps it connects something that is already united to him. Love does not unite, not in any way. What is already united it sticks together and binds. Love unites in works but not in being. The best masters say that reason peels entirely away and takes God unveiled, as he is, pure Being in himself. Knowledge breaks through truth and goodness and falls on pure Being and takes God naked, as he is without name. But I say: neither knowledge nor love unites. Love apprehends God himself insofar as he is good, and if God lost the name “Goodness” that would be the end of love. Love takes God under a skin, under a cloak. Reason does not do this. It takes God insofar as God is known to it. Reason can never comprehend him in the ocean of his unfathomableness. I say that beyond these two, beyond knowledge and love, there is compassion. In the highest and purest acts that God works, God works compassion.

A master says these beautiful words: “There is in the soul something very secret and hidden and far above it, from which the powers of reason and will break forth.” Saint Augustine says: “Where the Son breaks out from the Father in the first outpouring is ineffable; so too there is something very secret about the first outbreak, where reason and the will break forth.” A master who has spoken the best about the soul says that all human science can never fathom what the soul is in its ground. To know what the soul is, one needs supernatural knowledge. We do not know about what the powers of the soul do when they go out to do their work; we know a little about this, but not very much. What the soul is in its ground, no one knows. What one can know about it must be supernatural, it must be from grace. That is where God works compassion. Amen.

COMMENTARY: The Fullest of All God’s Works Is Compassion/ Compassion Is an Unfathomable Ocean Greater than Knowledge and Love/We Are in Compassion When We Are in God/How This Inness of Panentheism Destroys All Otherness and Creates Interdependence/ The Need to Run into Peace

In the previous sermon Eckhart presented an overview of his theology of compassion. Beginning with this sermon and extending throughout the remaining sermons of Path Four we examine compassion in more specific detail. In the present sermon, for example, Eckhart examines the mystical side to compassion, the side of consciousness itself. In the sermons to follow he will deal with the economic side of compassion (numbers 32 and 35), the theology of work that compassion presumes (numbers 33 and 34), the political side (numbers 35 and 36), and the celebrative side (number 37). For Eckhart, compassion is not merely a moral norm. It is a consciousness, a way of seeing the world and responding to the world. It is a way of living out the truth of our inness with God and with one another as discovered in Path One. Compassion presumes a certain mystical consciousness or way of seeing the world. What is that way?

Eckhart repeats his conviction expressed in the previous sermon, namely that God is compassion. His sermon is based on the prophet Hosea, who, in Eckhart’s translation of the Bible, said: “Lord, have compassion on the people who are In you” (Ho. 14:4), and who in a current translation says: “You are the one in whom orphans find compassion/’ In both translations the word In plays a prominent role and Eckhart, as we shall see shortly, develops his theology of compassion from his theology of inness or panentheism. But Eckhart says more about compassion and God in this sermon. Following Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas,¹ Eckhart declares that compass/on is the highest work that God has ever worked in all creatures. Compassion, Eckhart says, is the origin of all God’s creativity—God’s motivation and God’s goal. Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion. Compassion is the highest work that God works. Compassion is fuller and deeper than either love or knowledge. Beyond these two, beyond knowledge and love, there is compassion. Compassion is the best name there is for God. It alone comes close to naming the creative works of God, for in the highest and purest acts that God works, God works compassion. Compassion is therefore the one blessing and the one fruit that remains from creation through resurrection. It is the origin of all God’s creativity and the fullness of all fruitful birthing. “For it is indeed a blessing when something bears fruit and the fruit remains. The fruit, however, remains to the one who remains there in love.”² If we are to imitate God and to bear the fruit that God bears and to bear the Son of God and indeed to become the Son of God, then compassion is the ultimate way of our spiritual journeying. Where does this God-like way take us?

It takes us into God. The breakthrough that gave birth to the Son and the breakthrough that gives us a second birth both come from the same ground. We cannot name the ground for we cannot put our fingers on it—what the soul is in its ground, no one knows. It takes supernatural grace even to enter there. However, we can name the energy that goes on there, the fire that is burning by the blaze of the scintilla animae in the core of the soul. What goes on there is compassion—that is where God works compassion. In our very inner core, as innermost as we can get and as innermost as we are, God is busy working compassion. Eckhart hints that just as the best name for the unnameabie God is Compassion, so too the finest name for the unnameabie soul is Compassion. After all, the innermost part of the soul is the imago Dei. Where we create from our innermost being we are always creating compassion. In the text that Eckhart used for this sermon, Hosea announces:

I will love them with all my heart,

for my anger has turned from them.

I will fall like dew on Israel.

He shall bloom like the lily,

and thrust out roots like the poplar,

His shoots will spread far;

he will have the beauty of the olive

and the fragrance of Lebanon . . .

I am like a cypress ever green,

all your fruitfulness comes from me.

Let the wise man understand these words.

Let the intelligent man grasp their meaning.

For the ways of Yahweh are straight,

and virtuous men walk in them,

but sinners stumble. (Ho. 14:5–7, 9–10)

All our fruitfulness comes from God who is the Compassionate one. Thus Compassion is the source of all creativity and birthing. And of all the fruits we give birth to, none is more Godly than the way of walking that is Yahweh’s way, a way of walking in compassion.

Not only is compassion in us at our very core, where God energizes us and divinizes us into creators ourselves, but we are In compassion. For, as we learned in Path One, God is not only in us but we are in God. If God is Compassion, then our journeying into compassion is necessarily our journeying into God and vice versa. The deeper we go into God, the deeper we go into compassion. Eckhart calls on scriptural texts from John’s theology to substantiate his position. Jesus talb about being in him:

“I have told you all this

so that you may find peace in me.

In the world you will have trouble,

but be brave:

I have conquered the world.” (Jn. 16:33)

The peace we are to find is not apart from the world and the troubles the world gives us but in the midst of the world because we are always in God. Being in God we can also be in the world and sustain any vicissitudes that the world extends to us. The victory over the world has already happened for those who have broken through the consciousness that would tell us that we are outside God:

Anyone who has been begotten by God

has already overcome the world;

this is the victory over the world—

our faith. (1 Jn. 5:4)

Eckhart comments that if any part of us is in God, it has peace; if any part of us is outside of God it has no peace. For, as John has promised, “everything that is born of God overcomes the world.”

Eckhart gropes, searching and stretching his own imagination, for images of the panentheistic existence of being in God and in compassion that he finds in John’s Gospel and in the prophet Hosea. Already, in the previous sermon, we saw Eckhart call compassion an ocean. But in this sermon he develops that image more richly. Compassion is not only an ocean, it is a fathomless ocean, it is not only a sea, it is space itself. Eckhart is driven into cosmic language and driven to call on his cosmic experience in an effort to picture compassion. A compassionate consciousness presumes a cosmic consciousness.

Compassion means that God sets the soul in the highest and purest place which it can occupy: in space, in the sea, in a fathomless ocean; and there God works compassion. Therefore the prophet says: “Lord, have compassion on the people who are in you.”

This picture of God setting the soul in an ocean of compassion conjures up images of swimming and floating—yes, even skinny-dipping—in compassion. We are suspended, Eckhart is saying, in a sea of divine grace called compassion. We breathe compassion in and breathe compassion out daily if we are awake and aware. He turns to John’s imagery of our panentheistic swimming in compassion:

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)

Clearly, for Eckhart, a consciousness of our inness in God is a consciousness of our inness in compassion. If Compassion is God’s name and we have become as he is, then we have become compassion. A son or daughter of God is a son or daughter of compassion.

This sermon is an immensely maternal one. Eckhart’s images of the divine sea of compassion conjure up images of the divine, maternal womb. Eckhart is saying that we are born in a sea of compassion, a compassionate fluid of divinely maternal grace. In painting these images Eckhart recalls the biblical roots for the word compassion. In Hebrew the word for compassion and the word for womb come from the same stem, rehem and rahamim. Compassion is a return to our origin.

What are some consequences of this breakthrough in consciousness by which we are awakened to the fact of our swimming in a space and a sea of compassion? One consequence is the breakdown of all dualistic thinking. For we are not alone in this divine sea. All creatures have been born in the same holy fluid; we do not swim alone but in a common sea of oneness with others. This means that all beings are interdependent. “God’s peace prompts fraternal service, so that one creature sustains the other. One is enriching the other, that is why all creatures are interdependent.”³ Creatures in this common sea serve one another and sustain one another. Eckhart’s consciousness of interdependence is crucial to grasping what true compassion is about. Indeed, the late Thomas Merton defined compassion as a “keen awareness of the interdependence of all living beings which are all part of one another and all involved in one another.”⁴

Another consequence of our swimming together in a common sea of compassion is that all otherness is broken down. We truly see the oneness that is ours. “In God there can be nothing alien, nothing other,” warns Eckhart.⁵ We recall Eckhart’s explanation from Sermon Three about the threefold way we relate to creatures such as wine, bread, and meat: as creatures, as gifts, as “eternally not other.” This third level of consciousness is the way of compassion, a way of knowing that all is one. For when we traffic in a consciousness of otherness, we destroy compassion and reduce it to philanthropy, pity, or moralizing. As Angelus Silesius observed, drawing on Eckhart’s theology,

there are no objects of compassion

because there are no objects.

To know that there are no objects but only interdependences and shared energies—this is the consciousness behind true compassion. This is the consciousness that heals, as Jesus promised in the scriptural text that began this sermon: “AH who are sick I will heal, and I will love them freely.” This healing and unitive consciousness is born of our letting go and letting be, as Kelley comments:

Without detachment [letting go] love is “a going out to some other,” humility is “an abasing of oneself before an other,” and “mercy means nothing else but a man’s going forth of self by reason of his fellow creature’s lack.” But in Principle there is no other.⁶

For we become as God is, that is, compassionate in our consciousness. “When a free intellect is really detached it takes God as its Self and were it to remain structureless and free from contingency it would take on the very knowledge that God is.” We would become immovable in our rootedness. We are like a hinge, grounded in compassion and unitive consciousness. “When the door swings open or closes, the outer boards move to and fro, but the hinge remains immovable in one place and it is not changed at all as a result. So it is here, if you only knew how to act rightly.” Bathing in one sea of compassion, “I become all things, as he is, and I am one and the same being with him.” When all otherness is broken through, then we may “be all in all, as God is all in all.”⁷ Our oneness is a oneness in one another but also in God. This is why the two commandments that Jesus left us are really only one commandment—which is a reward, not an order. For the reward is the pleasure of swimming in a divine sea, and loving creature and Creator in one act of love. Eckhart says: “He who loves God more than his neighbor loves him well, it is true, but not perfectly.” Why not? Ancelet comments:

Eckhart takes literally and In all its rigor the Gospel precept: to love God is “the first and greatest commandment,” but the second, to love one’s neighbor as oneself is “quite like” unto it. He understands by this that for him who loves his neighbor as he should be loved, that is to say, in God, there can only be one sole love.⁸

Our love of self is the same way. When we are grounded in God we become so fully grounded in peace that we know nothing more of strife. When we are truly in God and in compassion we are grounded in peace and thrown into peace and end up in peace.

But Eckhart makes an important point: we ought not to exaggerate the experience of our inness with God and compassion to the detriment of our need to develop compassion and to seek it out in our work and activities. Indeed, we need to run into peace. We are not yet fully there, even though compassion is the starting point of our creation and the goal of it. It is nof enough to go from peace to peace or to narcissistically meditate on our compassionate origins. We need to seek peace, to make peace, to run into peace. What is born of God seeks peace and runs into peace. Like the vast stars in the heavens, we must be on the move in this cosmic space that is peace. Indeed, a heavenly person will imitate the cosmos itself and will always be on the move toward peace. Such a person is a verb, not a noun, running and running continually into peace. Compassion too will be a verb and not a noun. After all, God’s work is continually in process. God is always giving birth and desiring to give birth and his birth is always from compassion and toward compassion. Our work needs to be the same. Our union with God as Compassion is a union of being but not yet a union of activity. Compassion as being, then, has already begun. But compassion as work needs to be done. One activity of compassion is that of forgiving others, as Jesus does in Luke’s Gospel (7:36–50) and which he links to compassion in his teaching in the previous chapter (Lk. 6:37). But that activity too must derive its full energy from the inness behind compassion before it is truly a compassionate work. For outside the sea of compassion, there is no compassion. Outside God there is nothing but nothing. But inside God there are all things so bathed in compassion that we can say with John: “Everything that is born of God overcomes the world.” Compassion, which had the first word, will eventually have the last.