“Sermon” Thirty-six: EVERYONE AN ARISTOCRAT, EVERYONE A ROYAL PERSON
“On the Aristocrat”a
Our Lord says in the Gospel: “A man of royal birth went to a distant country to be appointed king, and afterward he returned” (Lk. 19:12). Our Lord teaches us in these words how royal people have been created in their nature, how divine is the state to which they can rise through grace and, in addition, how people are to reach that point. In addition, a large part of the Holy Scripture touches upon these words.
We must first realize, as is also clearly apparent, that a person has two natures: body and spirit. For this reason a passage of Scripture says that those who know themselves know all creatures. For all creatures are either body or spirit. For this reason the Scripture says of human beings that there exists in us an exterior person and another or inner person.
The exterior person possesses all that adheres to the soul but is surrounded by and mixed up with the flesh. In each and every member the person possesses bodily cooperation, as with the eye, ear, tongue, hand, and so forth. The Scripture calls all this the old person, the earthly person, the exterior person, the hostile person, and a menial person.
The other person, who is hidden within us, is the inner person. Scripture calls this person a new person, a heavenly person, a young person, a friend, and a royal person. This person is meant when our Lord says that “a man of royal birth went to a distant country to be appointed king, and afterward he returned.”
In addition, we should know that Saint Jerome as well as the masters of the spiritual life generally say that every person possesses from the beginning of his or her human existence a good spirit, which is an angel, as well as a bad spirit, which is a devil. The good angel counsels and constantly inspires toward what is good, what is divine, what is virtue, and toward what is heavenly and eternal. The bad spirit counsels and inspires the person at all times to what is temporal and fleeting, toward what is vice, and toward what is bad and devilish. The same evil spirit is in constant dialogue with the exterior person, and in this way constantly lays traps for the inner person, just as the serpent chatted with the woman Eve and through her with the man Adam (cf. Gn. 3:1ft). The inner person is Adam. The man in the soul is the good tree that unceasingly bears good fruit and that our Lord speaks of (cf. ML 7:17). He is also the soil in which God has sown his likeness and image and in which he sows the good seed, the roots of all wisdom, all skills, all virtues, all goodness—the seed of the divine nature (2 P. 1:4). The seed of the divine nature is God’s Son, the Word of God (Lk. 8:11).
The exterior person is the hostile and bad person who has sown and scattered weeds among the good seed (cf. Mt. 13:245.). Concerning this person Saint Paul says: “I find in myself something that hinders me and is against what God requests and what God counsels and what God has said and is still saying in the height and in the depth of my soul” (cf. Rm. 7:23). And elsewhere he speaks out and complains: “What a wretched man am I! Who will rescue me from this mortal flesh and body?” (Rm. 7:24). Elsewhere he says that a person’s spirit and flesh constantly struggle against each other. The flesh is vice and evil; the spirit counsels love of God, joy, peace, and every virtue (cf. Ga. 5:17ff.). Whoever follows the spirit and lives according to it and its advice possesses eternal life (cf. Ga. 6:8). The inner person is the one of whom our Lord says that “a man of royal birth went to a distant country to be appointed king.” This is the good tree of which our Lord says that it always bears good fruit and never evil fruit. For it desires goodness and is inclined to goodness—to the goodness that rises up within itself undisturbed by the things of this world. The exterior person is the evil tree that can never bear good fruit (cf. Mt. 7:18).
Concerning the royalty of the inner person and the spirit, and concerning the unworthiness of the exterior person and the flesh, the pagan authors Cicero (Tully) and Seneca also say that no soul gifted with reason is without God. The seed of God is in us. If the seed had a good, wise, and industrious cultivator, it would thrive all the more and grow up to God whose seed it is, and the fruit would be equal to the nature of God. Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree, a hazel seed into a hazel tree, the seed of God into God (cf. Jn. 3:9). If it happens, however, that the good seed has a foolish and evil soil, it grows to a weed, and it overshadows and crowds the good seed to such an extent that the good seed cannot grow up to the light. Origen, one of the great masters of the spiritual life, says, however, that God himself has sown this seed, and inserted it and borne it. Thus while this seed may be crowded, hidden away, and never cultivated, it will still never be obliterated. It glows and shines, gives off light, burns, and is unceasingly inclined toward God.
The first stage of the inner and new person, says Saint Augustine, is when the person lives according to the model of good and holy people, even though he or she still walks by leaning on chairs, depends on walls for support, and is still nourished by milk.
The second stage is reached when people not only look to external models, including good human beings, but also run in haste to the teaching and advice of God and the divine wisdom, turn their backs to humanity and their countenances to God, creep out of their mothers’ wombs, and smile at the heavenly Father.
The third stage is reached when people more and more forsake their mothers and depart farther and farther from the womb, flee from care, and throw off fear so that, even though they might, without annoyance, do evil and wrong to all others, they have no desire to do so. For they are so devoutly connected by love to God that he places and leads them in joy and sweetness and happiness to where everything is repellent to them that is dissimilar or foreign to God.
The fourth stage is reached when people grow and become rooted in love and in God so that they are ready to take upon themselves every attack, temptation, vexation, and painful suffering willingly and gladly, eagerly and joyfully.
The fifth stage is reached when people everywhere live at peace within themselves, quietly resting in the richness and abundance of the highest inexpressible wisdom.
The sixth state is reached when people are formed from and beyond God’s eternity and attain a completely perfect forget-fulness of this temporary and passing life, when they are drawn and changed into the divine image, that is, when they have become children of God. Beyond this point there is no higher stage. Eternal rest and bliss are Acre, for the final goal of the inner persons and new persons is eternal life.
Origen, the great master of the spiritual life, proposes a comparison for the inner, royal person in whom God’s seed and God’s image have been inserted and sown in such a way that this image of the divine nature and existence—God’s Son—appears and becomes known, but is also occasionally hidden. God’s image, which is the Son of God, is like a living fountain in the depth of the soul. If someone throws dirt, that is, earthly desire, upon the fountain, it will hinder and conceal it so that nothing is known or suspected of it. All the same, the fountain remains inwardly alive, and if the dirt that has been thrown upon it from outside be removed, it will reappear and be known again. He says that this truth is intimated in the Book of Genesis where it is written that Abraham had dug living fountains on his soil but that evildoers filled them with earth. When the earth was removed, however, the fountains quickly appeared to be living again (Gn. 26:14ff.).
Another comparison exists in this case. The sun shines unceasingly. Yet if cloud or fog should come between the sun and ourselves, we will not be aware of the sunshine. In the same way, if our eye is inwardly afflicted and damaged or becomes veiled, it cannot know the sunshine. In addition, I have occasionally proposed the following distinct comparison. 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).
Saint Augustine says that when the soul of a person turns completely to eternity and God alone, God’s image shines and gives off light. If, however, the soul turns outwardly—even if it does so for the exterior practice of virtue—this image is completely covered over. This should be signified by the fact that women cover their heads while men go bareheaded, according to Saint Paul’s teaching (cf. 1 Co. n:4ff.). For this reason everything that is turned downward from the soul receives from the object to which it turns a covering or headpiece. By contrast, whatever is carried up from the soul is God’s pure image, the birth of God, which is purely exposed in the exposed soul. King David speaks in the Psalms of the royal person and of how God’s image—the Son of God, and the seed of the divine nature—is never destroyed in us even though it may be covered over. He says: “Although many kinds of destruction, sorrow, and pain may befall a person, he or she remains all the same in God’s image and the image remains within the person” (cf. Ps. 4:2ft.). “The true light shines in the darkness even though we are not aware of it” (cf. Jn. 1:5).
“Take no notice,” states the Book of Love, “that I am swarthy, for I am lovely and well formed. But the sun has burnt me” (Sg. 1:5). “The sun” is the light of this world and signifies that even the highest and best thing that has been created and made covers up and discolors the image of God within us. “Remove the blight from silver,” says Solomon, “and the purest vessel shines forth and gleams” (Pr. 25:4), namely, God’s image, or Son, in the soul. And this is what our Lord means when he says that “a man of royal birth went to a distant country.” For people must emerge from all images and themselves and become far removed and unlike all that if they really wish to take on the Son and become the Son and remain within the bosom and heart of the Father.
Every kind of mediation is alien to God. God says, “I am the First and the Last” (Rv. 22:13). There is no division either in God’s nature or in the Persons corresponding to the unity of this nature. The divine nature is one, and every Person is also one and the same thing as this nature. The difference between being and presence is grasped as one, and is one. Only where this one is no longer grasped within itself does it receive, possess, and show a difference. Therefore, we find God in one thing, and whoever is to find God must become one. Our Lord says: “A man went to a distant country.” In dissimilarity we find neither the one thing nor being nor God nor rest nor happiness nor pleasure. Be one, so that you can find God! In truth, if you were really one, you would still remain one thing in what is different, and what is different would become one thing for you and could in no way hinder you. The one remains just as much one in thousands and thousands of stones as in four stones, and a thousand times a thousand is just as certainly a simple number as four is a number.
A pagan scholar states that the one was born of the highest God. It is characteristic of this God to be one with what is one. People who seek this one below God are deceiving themselves. The same scholar states on four occasions that this one has no more intimate relationships except with young women or maidens, just as Saint Paul says: “I arranged for you to be married as chaste virgins to one husband” (2 Co. 11:2). A person should be quite like this, for our Lord says: “A person went to a distant country.”
“Person” in the correct meaning of the Latin word signifies one who humbles himself or herself with all that the person is and has before God, and accommodates all that he or she is and has to God. Such people look up to God and do not look at their own possessions, which they know to be behind, underneath, or beside them. This is complete and proper humility. They have this characteristic from the earth. I shall speak no more of this matter. When we say “person,” this word also means something raised up above nature, above time, and above everything that is inclined to time or that tastes of time. I make the same statement about space and corporality. Beyond this a “person” has in a certain way nothing in common with nothing, so that he or she is neither formed like nor made similar to this one or that one. Such people know nothing of nothingness, nor do we become aware of nothingness in them. Nothingness has been so completely removed from them that we can only discover pure life, being, truth, and goodness. People who are so characterized are “royal persons” indeed, no less and no more.
There exists also another form of explanation and instruction for what our Lord calls a royal person. We should also know that those who know God without disguise at the same time know other creatures with him. For knowledge is a light of the soul, and by their nature all people long for knowledge. Even the knowledge of evil things is good. The masters of the spiritual life say that when we know a creature in its own essence, this is called an evening knowledge. In this case, we see a creature in images of multiple difference. If, however, we know a creature in God, this is called, and is, a morning knowledge. In this way we see a creature without all differences, deprived of all images and stripped of all similarity in the one who is God himself. This is the royal person of whom our Lord says that “a royal person went to a distant land” because he or she is one, and recognizes God and a creature in one.
I wish to speak and explore still another meaning of what a royal person is. I say that when a person, a soul, a spirit sees God, that person knows and recognizes himself or herself as knowing. This means that the person sees God and knows him. Some people have thought that the flower and seed of happiness lie in that knowledge in which the spirit knows that it knows God. For if I had all bliss and knew nothing of it, what use would it be to me? What kind of bliss would that be for me? Yet I state with certitude that this is not the case. If it is equally true that the soul would not be truly blessed without it, blessedness still is not in this. For the first characteristic of blessedness is that the soul sees God without disguise. In this way the soul receives its whole being and life, and creates all that it is out of the depth of God. The soul knows nothing about knowledge or love or anything else. It wishes to be completely at rest and exclusively in God’s being. There it knows nothing but being and God. If the soul knows and realizes that it is seeing, knowing, and loving God, this means according to the natural order an interruption from this situation and a reversion to the first stage. For no one realizes that he or she is white except one who is really white. Therefore, people who recognize themselves as white are building and relying on the quality of being white. Such people do not take their realization indirectly and unwittingly directly from the color. Instead, they derive this realization of the color and knowledge of it from what is really white. They do not create this realization exclusively from the color itself but rather from realizing and knowing what is colored or white and realizes itself to be white. What is white is much smaller and more exterior than the quality of being white (or whiteness). For example, a wall is something quite different from the foundation on which the wall is built.
The masters of the spiritual life say that there is one power that helps the eye to see and another power through which it realizes the fact that it sets. The first fact—that the eye sees—it derives exclusively from the color and not from the object that is colored. For this reason it makes no difference if the colored object is a stone or a piece of wood, a person or an angel. Its essential quality lies in the fact that it has a color.
Thus, I say, a royal person derives and creates his or her whole being, life, and happiness only from God, through God, and in God—not from realizing God, seeing God, loving God, or similar actions. Therefore, our Lord says in noteworthy words that eternal life is knowing God alone as the one, true God (Jn. 17:3). He does not say that it is realizing that we know God. How can people who do not know themselves know themselves as knowing God? For surely people have no knowledge at all of themselves or of other things—not to speak of God alone—if they are happy in the root and depth of happiness. However, if the soul knows that it knows God, it gains at the same time a knowledge of God and of itself.
There is one power, as I indicated above, that enables people to see, and yet another power by means of which they know and realize the fact that they see. Of course, it is true that at present and here below the power within us through which we know and realize the fact that we see is more royal and higher than the power through which we see. For 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.
Thus I say to you that there is truly no blessedness unless people are aware and know well that they see and know God. But may God forbid that my blessedness should depend on this fact! If this suffices for other persons, let them keep it for themselves, but let it be spared for me! The heat of fire and the essence of fire are quite unlike and surprisingly distant from one another in nature, even though they are quite close to each other in time and space. God’s vision and our vision are completely unlike and distant from each other.
Therefore, our Lord says quite correctly that “a person of royal birth went to a distant country to be appointed king, and afterward, he returned.” For a people must be one within themselves, and they must seek this in themselves, and in one thing, and they must receive it in one thing, namely, seeing God. “To return home” means to know and realize the fact that we know and realize God.
Everything explained here was announced in advance by the prophet Ezekiel when he said that “a large eagle, with huge wings and long wings covered with speckled feathers came to the purest mountain. It took hold of the core or heart of the highest tree, plucked off the top branch, and carried it off” (Ezk. 17:3–4). What our Lord calls a royal person is named by the prophet a large eagle. Who then is more royal than one who was born, on the one hand, from the highest and best that a creature possesses and, on the other hand, from the most intimate depths of the divine nature and its wilderness? Through the prophet Hosea our Lord says: “I am going to lure her and lead her out into the wilderness and speak to her heart” (Ho. 2:16). One with one, one from one, one in one, and eternally one in one. Amen.
COMMENTARY: The Nobility of Our Birth Makes Us All Kings/How All Are Called to Be Royal Persons/The Tradition of the Royal Person in Israel/Compassion: the Meaning of Being the Son or Daughter of God, a Royal Per-son/Eckharfs Democratic Political Philosophy
In the preceding sermon Eckhart has commented on the coming of the royal kingdom which is the divine kingdom. We have seen this theme that is so important in creation theology treated before by Meister Eckhart—for example, in Sermon Nine where Eckhart insists that we are kings but we must become conscious of this fact, and in Sermon Eighteen where he talks of experiencing the “newborn king.” In the present sermon Eckhart elaborates on how it is we are of royal blood, on who is of royal blood—it is all of us—and of what it means to be of royal blood—in one word, compassion.
The first point he makes is that, by our divine origin as images of God and as creatures of the Creator, we ourselves are already noble: aristocrats and of royal blood. Our Lord teaches us in these words how royal people have been created in their nature. In us God’s image shines and gives off light. Eckhart no doubt has the psalmist’s hymn to creation as a royal creation in mind:
You have made them little less than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor,
you have given them dominion over the works of your hands,
putting all things under their feet. (Ps. 8:5–6)
The images of being crowned, of having dominion over works, of things being placed under one’s feet, are images of kings. But this psalm refers to all humans. Thus, the psalmist—like Eckhart—sees all human beings as kings. All are created to be royal persons. Indeed, throughout the Hebrew Bible the Yahwist tradition “presents human beings as kings.”1 This is the tradition Eckhart knows so well and is drawing from in this treatise.
But there is a divine connection to our kingship according to the Scriptures. For in the last analysis only Yahweh is King. Only Yahweh performs perfectly the true functions of the perfect King: to lead and to order, that is, to liberate and to create.2 It is God who is “King of all the earth” and who “reigns over the nations” (Ps. 47:8f.). People who are born into this lineage, however, who are born sons of God and therefore heirs of this divine King have inherited such a kingship whose responsibilities include liberating and creating. And that we are born of such a royal and divine lineage is what Eckhart continually insists on. Borrowing from scriptural sources, he establishes that the seed of God is in us. Who has sown this seed? God who is King of the earth. God himself has sown this seed and inserted it and borne it. For this reason, while the seed can be neglected or forgotten or covered over, it will never be obliterated. No one can take our royal blood—which is God-given—from us. This seed is more than our link to royal blood, it is also our link to divinity. Eckhart’s conclusion from the fact of our possessing the divine seed in us is that we become divine. Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree, a hazel seed into a hazel tree, the seed of God into God. While Eckhart accredits the theologian Origen twice in this sermon with developing these themes, the source of both Origen’s theology and Eckhart’s is from biblical passages that Eckhart also refers to. For example:
No one who has been begotten by God sins;
because God’s seed remains inside him,
he cannot sin when he has been begotten by God. (1 Jn. 3:9)
The seed is a seed for our divinization.
By his divine power, he has given us all the things that we need for life and for true devotion, bringing us to know God himself, who has called us by his own glory and goodness. In making these gifts, he has given us the guarantee of something very great and wonderful to come: through them you will be able to share the divine nature . . . (2 P. 1:3–4)
Eckhart invokes the parables of Jesus which center around stories of sowing seeds and growing from seeds. In the parable of the sower, for example, we are told that “the seed is the word of God.” But the seed requires good soil, which in turn signifies those people “with a noble and generous heart who have heard the word and take it to themselves and yield a harvest through their perseverance” (Lk. 8:11, 15). And in Matthew’s Gospel we read of the wheat being separated from the chaff, a parable in which “the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field” (Mt. 13:24–30). In making the connection between the divine and ourselves, then, Eckhart is making the connection between the coming of the kingdom—the royal rule of God—and our own coming to birth.
For he insists, as Jesus does in his parables, that a noble seed requires a noble soil to grow in. Only in this way do we bear the fruit that is within us, the fruit that distinguishes the false prophet from the true prophet, as we are told in Matthew’s Gospel
“Beware of false prophets who come to you disguised as sheep but underneath are ravenous wolves. You will be able to tell them by their fruits. Can people pick grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, a sound tree produces good fruit but a rotten tree bad fruit. A sound tree cannot bear bad fruit, not a rotten tree bear good fruit.” (Mt. 7:15–18)
Says Eckhart: If the seed had a good, wise, and industrious tiller it would thrive all the more and grow up to God whose seed it is, and the fruit would be equal to the nature of God. “Equal to the nature of God”—there lies our fullness and our fruitfulness, that our works be worthy of our royal and divine lineage. Eckhart is so taken with this theme of our royalty and our divinity because, as he points out, the Scriptures are filled with it. A large part of the Holy Scripture touches upon these words.
Eckhart is in search of the royal person, the divine seed, among us. Is it restricted to those whom society calls aristocrats and nobles? By no means. Everyone is an aristocrat who lives a life from his or her inner self and not a life of superficial outwardness. Our true royal and divine personhood is hidden within us and is rightly called by Scripture a new person, a heavenly person, a young person, a friend, and a royal person. This is the person born of the seed and tree that unceasingly bears good fruit and that our lord speaks of. Eckhart applies the Gospel text for his sermon (Lk. 19:11–27) to this person. This Gospel text is a parable on the kingdom of God and its appearance.
Jesus went on to tell a parable, because he was near Jerusalem and they imagined that the kingdom of God was going to show itself then and there. Accordingly he said, “A man of noble birth went to a distant country to be appointed king and afterward return . . .” (Lk. 19:11–12)
Who then is the royal person? Anyone who lives a life from the core of his or her inner self, divine image or seed.
The inner person is the one of whom our Lord says that “a man of royal birth went to a distant country to be appointed king.” This is the good tree of which our Lord says that it always bears good fruit and never evil fruit. For it desires goodness and is inclined to goodness.
Interestingly enough, Luke’s parable that forms the basis for Eckhart’s discourse is also mixed with that of developing one’s talents. Eckhart picks up on this theme in his insistence on the preparation and nurturing that good soil demands for the growth of noble seedlings. Indeed, the inner person is the soil in which God has sown his likeness and image and in which he sows the good seed, the roots of all wisdom, all skills, all virtues, all goodness—the seed of the divine nature. Eckhart’s images in this sermon for the aristocrat in all of us are earthy images. Seed, soil, ground, are the pictures in his mind. Moreover, he says that humility is a characteristic we have from the earth. Here he is following a medieval etymological derivation of the word homo or “human person” from humus or “earth” or “soil.” The word humilis or “humble” comes from the same word, meaning “on the ground.” For Eckhart, a true aristocrat has his or her roots planted deeply in the soil—this is humility.
Good soil requires good cultivation and good development In order that the best fruit may be born. And what is this best of fruits? It is nothing less than the Son of God. Here Eckhart links Path Three, the birth of God in us, to Path Four, so that the breakthrough and birth that are ours are also the breakthrough into history that is the birth of the Son of God who bears the kingdom of God in our midst. The seed of the divine nature is God’s Son, the Word of God. For we are instructed by Christ not only in how noble we are by our creation as images of God, but also how noble is the state to which we can rise through grace. This resurrection has been accomplished at our rebirth and breakthrough, provided we are enlightened and not ignorant people. If we follow a consciousness of letting go and letting be, as discussed in Path Two, if we can let go of images in order that God be born, then an eternal birth will take place, a birth of a royal person in us.
As one would expect from his images of seed coming to fruition and from his Sermon Twenty-nine, Eckhart is very conscious of development and creativity in the present sermon. Indeed, he speaks of creating on several occasions in this talk. Thus Path Three finds a culmination in this sermon, since what it is we give birth to first in ourselves and then in society is the royal person. The royal seed in us is more than a seed, it is a living fountain that will not be turned off. The divine seed and the divine source cannot be extinguished or put out. The flame that ignites us, the spark of our soul, is an eternal flame.
When Eckhart insists that every person is an aristocrat to the extent that he or she is in touch with his or her noble creation and divine rebirth, he is making a political statement. Eckhart is a democrat in his political philosophy four hundred and fifty years before Thomas Jefferson. Eckhart says we need to “practice equality in human society.”
Since then Christ’s whole nobility belongs equally to us all and is equally near to us, to him as much as to me, why do we not receive it equally? Well, you must understand that, if someone wants to come by this gift equally to receive this good and the common nature which is equally near to all people, you must needs practice the same equality in human society, being no nearer to yourself than to another, just as in human nature there is nothing alien, nothing farther or nearer.3
As we saw In the previous sermon, if we are all brothers and sisters in one God, then we are all equals. This is the insight of compassion. “You are to love, esteem, and consider all people like yourself; what happens to another, be it bad or good, should be for you as if it happened to you.”4 All love demands equality. “Love will never be anything else than there where equality and unity are. Between a master and his servant there is no peace because there is no real equality.” Peace and tranquillity among peoples demand their equality. The same is true of marriage. “A wife and a husband are not alike, but in love they are equal.”5 Love only exists, and with it peace and pleasure, where persons are living equality or dedicated to creating it. “Now there can be no love where love does not find equality or does not create equality.” This principle applies as well to our leadership roles in society.
People cannot accomplish things with pleasure unless they find equality with themselves in what they are accomplishing. If I were to lead people, they would never follow me with pleasure if they did not receive equality with me. For a movement or a deed is never accomplished with pleasure in the absence of equality.6
If we are all sons and daughters of the divine King, all royal with the royal seed in us, then we indeed share the equality of which Eckhart speaks. We can say with him that the “common nature is equally near to all people” and that each of us is a large eagle. In employing this image, Eckhart is playing on the German words Edler (noble) and Adler (eagle). But to be an eagle means we soar where we want to and that no one is above us.
Who then is more royal than one who was born, on the one hand, from the highest and best that a creature possesses and, on the other hand, from the most intimate depths of the divine nature and its wilderness?
If no one is more royal or more noble—which is what Eckhart is saying—then no one has the right to be lord over us.
This message and its political implications were not lost on Eckhart’s listeners. Especially is this the case with those aristocrats who heard Eckhart preach these egalitarian messages to the peasant classes. These aristocrats could not fail to hear Eckhart’s message that those whom society knighted “royal” or “aristocrat,” to the extent that they were only superficial people, were the furthest from nobility and royalty. Recall that the Beguines with whom Eckhart associated closely were of the lower and not the aristocratic classes.7 The aristocrats who banded together to get Eckhart condemned included the Archbishop of Cologne, who was von Virneberg, an aristocrat and a Franciscan. Since Eckhart was a Dominican who favored the Pope in his struggle with the Emperor and since the Franciscans at the time favored the Emperor in that dispute, we can see how Eckhart’s preaching was not without its deep political fallout. It is significant, for example, that Eckhart’s inquisitors raised the issue, on several occasions at his trial and elsewhere, that he was preaching to the peasant people in their vernacular, “confusing them” by telling them that they were, among other things, aristocrats. If he would only preach in Latin, he was told, the simple people would not be disturbed and neither would the guardians of the social order. Eckhart replied, however: “If one is not to teach the unlearned, then no one will ever be learned and no one will be able to teach or to write. For one teaches the unlearned to the end that from unlearned persons they may become learned ones. If there were nothing new, nothing would ever become old.”8
In pursuing the theme that all are royal persons, Eckhart is highlighting a biblical tradition found among the patriarchs, for example, who are types of the royal person. Jesus too is meant to be such a model for all his followers. Thus Professor Kenik writes:
In a very real sense every Christian is called to be a royal person. Like the kings, every person is created to have dominion in the world, that is, to be stewards of the world and builders of community within society.9
In this respect Eckhart’s entire spirituality is a spirituality of the emergence of the royal person in us and among us. Such a person is responsible for the gift of creation and its preservation and such a person is meant to create order that is just and fair. The preservation of order is an issue of justice. Justice is the means by which life is preserved and passed on. It is the ultimate test of the goodness of the king.
There is but one reason for the king’s sovereignty—that the life of God’s people may be preserved. The dominion of the king is meant to guarantee that each and every person receives justice, that the integrity of society is guarded because individuals gain an equal hearing.10
For in the royal tradition of the Bible, the royal household is responsible for justice. In the Book of Hosea, which is so important to Eckhart in the present sermon, we read:
Listen to this, priests,
attend, House of Israel,
listen, royal household,
you who are responsible for justice . . . (Ho. 5:1)
And in the prophet Micah we read:
Listen now, you princes of the House of Jacob,
rulers of the House of Israel.
Are you not the ones who should know what is right,
you, enemies of good and friends of evil?
When they have devoured the flesh of my people
and torn off their skin
and crushed their bones . . .
then they will cry out to Yahweh.
But he will not answer them. (Mi. 3:1–4)
It is especially on behalf of the poor that justice needs to be done. ‘The primary motivation for judgment can be expressed as justice: God’s concern is for the poor, the captives, the blind, the stranger—all those who become the objects of abuse.”11 These persons are Eckhart’s main concern also. He preached to them in their language about how noble, how royal, how divine they were. No wonder Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch could declare that Eckhart was a precursor of Karl Marx. Eckhart, Bloch contends, demystified economic and political facts of life for the “common people” whom he inspired
in the revolutions of the next two centuries, along with its predecessor, the mysticism of Joachim of Floris, Abbot of Calabrese—among the Hussites, and with Thomas Munzer in the German Peasant War; events, indeed, not notable ideologically for the rule of clarity, but ones in which the mystic fog was at least not of service to the ruling class . . . One thing is certain: Eckhart’s sermon does not intend to snuff man out for the sake of an Other-world beyond him: it does not intend religion to be an alienation of the self . . . A subject who thought himself to be in personal union with the Lord of Lords provided, when things got serious, a very poor example indeed of serfhood.12
No wonder, too, that Eckhart got himself in so much trouble. As prophets are wont to do. But he advises us in this sermon to expect that and to be able to let go even of that. When people grow and become rooted in love and in God, they are ready to take upon themselves every attack, temptation, vexation, and painful suffering willingly and gladly, eagerly and joyfully. Prophets arouse people’s anger, as Eckhart knew well. “People should not be sorry because people are angry with them,” he observed. “They should rather be sorry if they merited the anger.”13 Anger has its place in the work and life of the just person and such a person cannot be deterred by society’s opposition. As Dr. Kenik indicates, the role of the prophet vis-à-vis the king is to “remind” the king of the law of justice, to call the king back to his royal roots which are divine roots. Eckhart too would say that believers need sometimes to be kings and sometimes to be prophets to the king to remind even oneself to return to our divine origin. Indeed, Eckhart calls Christ the “great Reminder” for this very reason. Jesus has reminded all of us of our divinity and royalty. He is a prophet and a king in this sense. And we, reborn sons of God, are to be the same.
The prophet must be willing to step out from the security of the womb and even to leave mysticism behind at times.
Sometimes one must abandon ecstatic joy for the sake of something better out of love, and sometimes in order to do a work of charity when it is necessary, in the spiritual or the physical sphere. As I have already said, if a person was in an ecstasy as Saint Paul was and he knew of a sick man who needed a bowl of soup from him, I should think it far better to desist out of love for the poor person and to serve God with greater love.14
To do this we need to leave the confines of maternal love and affection, as Gregory Baum has suggested:
The longing desire for the warm and understanding total community is the search for the good mother, which is bound to end in disappointment and heartbreak. There are no good mothers and fathers, there is only the divine mystery summoning and freeing us to grow up.15
Eckhart, like Baum, instructs us to creep out of our mothers wombs and smile at the heavenly Father. This journey is a journey of courage and of trust. It is reached when people more and more forsake their mothers and depart farther and farther from the womb, flee from care, and throw off fear. The prophet within us and the prophet among us are to call the royal person back to the work of Justice, the work of Yahweh, the Creator and the Orderer. In other words, to call back—whatever the personal price—the royal person and the whole realm to Compassion, which is, as we have seen, both the origin and the goal of creation and the fullest expression of Justice.
What characterizes the royal person? Eckhart treats this important subject at considerable length in this sermon. Such a person possesses morning knowledge, which is not merely seeing creatures in their essences—that is evening knowledge—but is knowing creatures in God. In other words, the royal person possesses a consciousness of panentheism—of the whole world bathed in God—which is also a consciousness of the oneness of all things in God. The royal person sees everything insofar as it is in God and therefore interdependent. Whoever is to find God must become one . . . Be one, so that you can find God! To “be one” is to begin the journey of compassion, for differences and the emphasizing of differences is the origin of dualism, sin, and violence. In dissimilarity we find neither the one thing nor being nor God nor rest nor happiness nor pleasure. In short, we find nothing. But a true royal person will reject this nothingness that separatisms bring and will immerse himself or herself In the sea of compassionate wholeness where he or she can only discover pure life, being, truth, and goodness. The person who knows nothing of nothingness does know of oneness and compassion. So thorough and so intimate is this tasting of the salty sea of compassion that the royal person’s most complete definition would be: One with one, one from one, one in one, and externally one in one. All is one—there lies the vision of the royal person.
From this divine sea and divine source in the ocean of compassion, all the royal person’s consciousness, creativity, and work flow. The soul receives its whole being and life, and creates all that it is out of the depth of God. Grounded exclusively in God’s being . . . it knows nothing but being and God, And this knowledge is the very meaning of “eternal life” as put forth, for example, in John’s Gospel:
“And eternal life is this:
to know you,
the only true God . . .
May they all be one.
Father, may they be one in us,
as you are in me and I am in you,
so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.
I have given them the glory you gave to me,
that they may be one as we are one.
With me in them and you in me,
may they be so completely one
that the world will realize that it was you who sent me.” (Jn. 17:3, 21–23).
Eckhart identifies eternal life and the moment of our breakthrough as children of God. At such a moment
people are formed from and beyond God’s eternity . . . They are drawn and changed into the divine image, that is . . . they have become children of God. Beyond this point there is no higher stage. Eternal rest and bliss are there, for the final goal of the inner persons and new persons is eternal life.
Eckhart comments: Thus, I say, a royal person derives and creates his or her whole being, life, and happiness only from God, through God, and in God. This “knowledge,” which is, in fact, a consciousness that is drunk in like the salty sea itself, is so immediate and so intimate that there is no need or even possibility to reflect on it or to pause to name it. There is no standing back from it, only the full immersion of swimming in it. John does nor say that it [eternal life] is realizing that we know God, This knowing is a return home, “To return home” means to know and realize the fact that we know and realize God, Our return home is a return to the wilderness or desert where the Godhead dwells, a return to our origins. There we were birthed from the most intimate depth of the divine nature and its wilderness,
Eckhart admits that he derives this image from the prophet Hosea: “I am going to lure her and lead her out into the wilderness and speak to her heart” (Ho. 2:16). But Eckhart’s treatise on the royal person derives more than just this sentence from Hosea’s second chapter. That entire chapter depicts a court scene of a legal procedure between husband (standing for Yahweh) and wife (standing for the corporate people of Israel). The issue in this royal court scene is not divorce but reconciliation. Israel is accused of refusing to acknowledge where her blessings come from. Her punishment will be the withdrawal of these blessings.
She would not acknowledge, not she,
that I was the one who was giving her
the corn, the wine, the oil,
and who freely gave her that silver and gold
of which they have made Baals.
That is why, when the time comes, I mean to withdraw
my corn, and my wine, when the season for it comes . . .
I will lay her vines and fig trees waste . . .
I am going to make them into thickets
for the wild beasts to ravage. (Ho. 2:10, 11,14)
But hope is offered for the reconciliation between God and God’s people in the form of fruitful agricultural gifts. One thinks of Eckhart’s hazel tree and pear tree image.
That is why I am going to lure her
and lead her out into the wilderness
and speak to her heart.
I am going to give her back her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a gateway of hope. (Ho. 2:16, 17)
When will that new courtship, that second honeymoon commence? What will be its sign? It will be a time of compassion. When all people—all royal people—learn to coexist responsibly with all the creatures of the earth with whom they are in fact interdependent. The time of compassion will be marked by a betrothal to justice.
When that day comes I will make a treaty on her behalf
with the wild animals,
with the birds of heaven and the creeping things of the earth;
I will break bow, sword and battle in the country,
and make her sleep secure.
I will betroth you to myself for ever,
betroth you with integrity and justice,
with compassion and love;
I will betroth you to myself with faithfulness,
and you will come to know Yahweh. (Ho. 2:20–22)
It will be a day of cosmic celebration.
When that day comes—it is Yahweh who speaks—
the heavens will have their answer from me,
the earth its answer from them,
the grain, the wine, the oil, their answer from the earth,
and Jezreel his answer from them.
I will sow him in the country,
I will love Unloved;
I will say to No-People-of-Mine, “You are my people,”
and he will answer, “You are my God.” (Ho. 223–25)
It will be a day as glorious—as full of compassion, justice, and celebration—as was that first day of creation. For the Yahwist author of the original creation account “presents human beings as kings” responsible for ensuring God’s order in the world. The court scene of Hosea that Eckhart invokes parallels creation accounts.16 The new creation that all royal persons, meaning all awake persons, are called to is the one creation renewed.