An Esoteric Commentary on Meister Eckhart's Sermon 3: part 6

Icon by Chantal Heinigg

An Esoteric Commentary on Meister Eckhart's Sermon 3: part 6

Now you might say, 'Oh sir, you said so much about how all our faculties should be quiet, and now you go setting up a great clamor of yearning in this quietness. That would be a great moaning and outcry for something we haven't got, and that would be the end of this peace and quiet. Whether it were desire or purpose or praise or thanksgiving, or whatever else the mind might beget or imagine—it would not be perfect peace or absolute stillness.' 

Let me explain. When you have completely stripped yourself of your own self, and all things and every kind of attachment, and have transferred, made over, and abandoned yourself to God in utter faith and perfect love, then whatever is born in you or touches you, within or without, joyful or sorrowful, sour or sweet, that is no longer yours, it is altogether your God's to whom you have abandoned yourself. 

Here the questioner reveals his confusion about the nature of an inner wish to discover God. He conflates it with the seemingly unavoidable clamor and ambition of the ordinary self and one’s outer parts. 

Even more tellingly, perhaps, he assigns it an active and male nature, rather than the passive and receptive womanhood of the soul, which Meister Eckhart almost always describes as female. This usurpation of the active is an inner movement that attempts to take on the role of the Father, the true active male principal, and marks it as a movement of ego.

In an irony one needs to pause for a moment and consider in order to appreciate its fullness, the questioner understands that that very action itself is “the end of this peace and quiet.” They understand that everything the ordinary mind begets and imagines is superfluous, even as they insist on its unavoidable primacy.

Meister Eckhart sets this straight by penetrating into the ground of the mind itself and attempting to help us discern its nature. 

In doing so, he touches on the origin of the logos, as expounded in John 1:1:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

The nature of the following text suggests that Meister Eckhart’s subsequent commentary on light is based on this passage. His response begins:

Tell me, whom does the spoken word belong to ? To the speaker or the hearer? Though it falls to the hearer, it really belongs to the speaker who gave it birth.

Here he explains the difference between the male principle to whom the word belongs, our heavenly Father, and the female principal (the soul) to which it falls. This is the passive or receiving principal, which he goes on to specifically explain in the next passage:

Here is an example. The sun casts its light into the air; the air receives the light and gives it to the earth, thus enabling us to distinguish different colors. 

In this remark, he likens the action of the word of the father to the action of light as a power of discrimination that allows us  “to distinguish different colors.” In other words, the word of the Father, if rightly received, awakens the power of discrimination in us and allows us to see ‘colors,’ that is, the essential nature of other things as they reflect the word, and the subtlety and beauty of that nature. 

In this sense, the use of color in religious practice is a celebration of the action of the word of the father. The interior of Gothic cathedrals in the middle ages was a bright, extraordinarily lively and beautifully painted environment, not the drab, austere stone we are accustomed to in the faint remnants of today’s cathedrals. Some few still remain as a testament to that practice, which was a physical illustration of the receiving of the word: the plain stone, a single passive color in its nature, receives the word of God and becomes a celebration of light.

Now, though the light is formally in the air, essentially it is in the sun: the light actually comes from the sun, where it originates, and not in the air. It is received by the air which passes it on to anything that is receptive to light. It is just the same with the soul. God bears the Word in the soul, and the soul conceives it and passes it on to her powers in varied guise: now as desire, now as good intent, now as charity, now as gratitude, or however it may affect you. 

The passage reveals a medieval conception of the sun as a representative of God within our own world, and brings us to the threshold of an understanding of the deep astrological and cosmological connections between Christian religion and the universe as understood in the Middle Ages: a rich and largely forgotten conception of astronomy and the cosmos.

The quality of these universal forces is received by the air, that which sustains life, and passed on to “anything that is receptive to light.” The passive soul becomes the mediator between the word of God and of the ordinary world. In that mediation, it becomes the emotive force of Being; and Meister Eckhart iterates some of the higher emotions that ensue when the word is active: desire, good intent, charity, and gratitude. All of these higher impulses do not belong to us.

Lest we forget where this comes from — because already, in the first instant of this beatific realization, we forget what we are, who we are, and where we are —immediately we are called to attention with an admonition: “It is all His, and not yours at all.”

What God thus does, you must accept all that as His and not as your own, just as it is written, 'The Holy Ghost makes intercession with countless mighty sighs' (Rom. 8:26 ) . He prays within us, not we ourselves. 

Here he has managed to bring us around to the fullness of his answer: the quality of our prayer and supplication depends wholly on help we receive from above, and is not a product of our ordinary mind and its misconceptions about the nature of spiritual activity:

St. Paul says, "No man can say 'Lord Jesus Christ' but in the Holy Ghost" ( 1 Cor. 12:3 ) . This above all else is needful: you must lay claim to nothing! 

How much more clearly can he say it? We must lay claim to nothing.

Yet this remark is rather interesting, because it does not just mean that the ego is forbidden from claiming that which does not belong to it, the higher ground of the soul and of spiritual enlightenment; it also means that there must be an inward action to make nothingness our own. This is deeply reminiscent of Gurdjieff’s insistent and ubiquitous advice that a man must become aware of and understand his own nothingness. The two ideas are identical.

In this act of abandonment, the soul empties itself of all assumptions; and in this action, a void is created into which only God himself can enter:

Let go of yourself and let God act with you and in you as He will. This work is His, this Word is His, this birth is His, in fact every single thing that you are. For you have abandoned self and have gone out of your (soul's) powers and their activities, and your personal nature. Therefore God must enter into your Being and powers, because you have bereft yourself of all possessions, and become as a desert, as it is written, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness" ( Matt. 3:3 ) . Let this eternal voice cry out in you as it listeth, and be as a desert in respect of yourself and all things. 

The quotations from Meister Eckhart's Sermons 3 are reprinted with the kind permission of The Sangha Trust, and are taken from The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart.

 May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.