An Esoteric Commentary on Meister Eckhart's Sermon 3: part 5

Icon by Chantal Heinigg

An Esoteric Commentary on Meister Eckhart's Sermon 3: part 5

You might ask, 'Since my intellect is divested of its natural activity and no longer has any image or action of its own, where is its support? For it must always find lodgment somewhere: the powers always seek to fasten on something and act on it, whether it be memory, intellect or will.' 

This question reminds one of Zen master Dogen’s term for Zen practitioners, “leavers of home.” In divesting itself of its natural activity, the intellect leaves home and seemingly has nowhere to find lodging. Its restless, grasping nature nonetheless remains.

According to Meister Eckhart, this divestment lies at the threshold of a quest for the discovery of essence:

Now note the explanation of this. Intellect's object and lodgment is essence—not accident, but pure unmixed Being in itself. When the intellect discerns true Being it descends on it, comes to rest on it, pronouncing its intellectual word about the object it has seized on. 

…And as part of its restless, prying, perpetually dissatisfied nature, the intellect persistently names that which has no name…

But, so long as the intellect does not find true Being and does not penetrate to the ground, so as to be able to say, 'this is this; it is such and not otherwise,' so long does it remain in a condition of questing and expectation; it does not settle down or rest, but labors on, seeking, expecting, and rejecting. And though it may perhaps spend a year or more investigating a natural truth, to see what it is, it still has to work long again to strip off what it is not. All this time it has nothing to go by and makes no pronouncement at all, as long as it has not penetrated to the ground of truth with full realization. Therefore, the intellect never rests in this life. 

In the last sentence we are well reminded of Christ’s admonition during the sermon on the Mount that the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head. 

What is engendered through intellect engages in the search to “penetrate to the ground of truth.” This also reminds one of Zen practice. To penetrate to the ground strips off everything that is not. It is a movement from “I am this” and “I am that” to nothing more than “I am.” 

“This is this; it is such and not otherwise,” advises Meister Eckhart; there can be no peace until the ‘ground of truth’ is discovered. Elsewhere, we’re told this ground consists of a stillness; and in this we are assured that it is where all things of Being may rest.

While Meister Eckhart uses a term that appears to inform Gurdjieff’s lexicon, that is, “essence,” he uses it in a somewhat different way, referring to it as “pure unmixed Being in itself.” This, he advises, is the natural residence of intellect. It also counts, in this passage, as the ground. In referring to the activities of resting and wandering, we can see that until all things are stripped of considering and identification, that is, comparative or dualistic thinking, ego, and the mistaken confusion of the external as self, there can be no peace.

However much God may reveal Himself in this life, yet it is still as nothing to what He really is. Though truth is there, in the ground, it is yet veiled and concealed from the intellect. All this while, the intellect has no support to rest on in the way of a changeless object. It still does not rest, but goes on expecting and preparing for something yet to become known, but so far hidden. 

Thus there is no way man can know what God is. But one thing he does know: what God is not. And this a man of intellect will reject. Meantime the intellect, finding no real object to support it, waits as matter awaits form. Just as matter will never rest until it is filled with all forms, so the intellect cannot rest except in the essential truth that embraces all things. Only the essence will satisfy it, and this God withdraws from it step by step, in order to arouse its zeal and lure it on to seek and grasp the true, groundless good, so that it may be content with nothing but ever clamor for the highest good of all. 

The way towards God which rests on the premise that God is defined by what he is not is referred to as apophatic theology. It’s the negation of the external, the rejections of all formatory conceptions of God. In Gurdjieff’s terminology, this is a form of Holy Denying.

Meister Eckhart comes down strongly on the side of this approach in this passage; and, interestingly, the passage suggests that the appreciation and understanding of the self involves a similar rejection of everything that the self thinks it is in order to reach what he calls the ground, the essence. 

We not only seek to know God by knowing what God is not; we equally seek to know self solely by knowing what self is not. 

As Gurdjieff put it, “question everything.”

The remark about “the true, groundless good” is interesting because it indicates that Meister Eckhart believed good, insofar as it consists of God’s will in action, lies beyond even the ground itself.

The way in which Meister Eckhart describes the situation is fascinating, drawing further parallels to Zen Buddhism: “only the essence will satisfy it, and this God withdraws from it step-by-step…” One of the fundamental tenets of Zen is to always go one step further. 

One begins to wonder, quite reasonably I think, whether Meister Eckhart was familiar with Zen practice; there was certainly a great deal more contact between the Orient and the West during the high and late Middle Ages than scholars and social historians have generally appreciated.

The “man of intellect” rejects that which is not God. An awakened intellect engages in relentless search for the essence which can satisfy it, because only there can rest.

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.