Commentaries on Meister Eckhart Sermons

Extract from Commentaries on Meister Eckhart Sermons

Meister Eckhart’s words are given in bold.

Many people do not reach this understanding of the light, but because there is nothing sinful in the obstructions that they have, therefore the light is still enlightening them, it is not impeded. We do not have to be aware of it but we do have to be aware of our own nothingness. There is no reason why we should have to reach that point in this life, but we taste in this life and it is a foretaste. This tasting of God is something which is not incurnbent on people because it is what goes on for ever and ever, in a deeper and deeper way, throughout the next life. For some people it is possible to have this foretaste in this life, but for those who are not sinful then it is that light which shines out in their deeds. Therefore, you can never separate the zahir (exterior) from the batin (interior); you cannot have the outside of a teacup on one table and the inside of the same teacup on another table. And again, Ibn ‘Arabi is so very strong when he speaks against what he calls the ‘deviated esotericists’ who think you can only have an inside and do not need an outside.

… and they are greatly exercised as to how the soul can become receptive to it. How does the light corne into the soul? Well it is in the mind. We say it is the presence of God but He is present as us. He actualises the possibilities, which is a dis­tinct, unique possibility for each of us and as possibilities we have been those true possibilities for all eternity. We are not just suddenly invented. From all eternity we exist in the mind of God and are known by God knowing His truth, and so when He actualises us by the gift of Himself, we find it difficult to say whether the light, the deifying Light as St Benedict calls it, the light by which we become like God, whether it is God or whether it is us; whether it is natural light or divine Light. It becomes divine as we understand what it is and we realise that it always has been divine and yet it is difficult in the grammar of thinking, of logic and logical deduction that goes on in the mind, which is the field of psychology and psychiatry. But all that is quite irrelevant to this awareness at the centre of mind, which is awareness of the mere possibility of all that goes on in psychology or in psychiatry.

I say – this is Eckhart’s answer to this particular point. He is always trying to reformulate what he says here in the next three lines; he reformulates it again and again because it is so diffi­cult to put it into words, especially if you are addressing a group of people – that His divinity depends on His being able to communicate Himself to whatever is receptive to Him: and if He did not communicate Himself, He would not be God. He says in another place: ‘God is not God to the possibilities whose truth God is’ but God is only God to possibilities that are actualised by the self-gift of God and God is received according to the receptivity. God gives the whole of Himself. Of course, that is just what the orthodox doctrine of creation says, that this gift of God is the giving of the whole of God to everything that is by way of becoming and immediate gift. Once He gives Himself and is received, then God becomes God because then God can be conceived as inconceivable by the human mind; that is the highest concept we can have of God.