Knowledge, love, and the ground where God and the soul meet

Meister Eckhart said: scholars debate which is nobler, knowledge or love. Some say love is better than knowledge. I say it is not. Our best authorities declare that knowledge is nobler than love. Love and will take God as being good. If God were not good, will would want nothing of him; if God were not

lovely, love would reject him. But understanding would not. Knowledge is not confined to good, or to love, or to wisdom, or to lordship. By putting names to God the soul only dresses him up and makes a figure of God; this is not the work of knowledge. Even if God were neither good nor wise, understanding would still take hold of him; it strips everything away, not stopping at wisdom or goodness, nor majesty nor power. It pierces through to naked being and grasps God bare, before he is clothed in thought with wisdom and goodness. Where the Son has his blessedness, there in the Father, understanding finds hers.

Now I am going to say something that has never been read or preached before.

At the college yesterday they admitted that there is a ground within the soul that corresponds to the nature of the Father. Just as the Father brings forth his Son in the Holy Spirit, and these three are one God, so this ground brings forth understanding and will, one power, as God is one Word. And yet this ground is free from any trace of created things. All the things we attribute to the soul form a screen around this ground, where God looks at the soul and the soul looks at God. As St Paul says, 'We, beholding the vision of God's splendor, are changed into that same image from glory to glory.' This image is joined to God too closely for creatures to pull apart, and God himself will not divide it. Alas, we think so little of this image, we do not keep it as bright as it was given to us by God. Whatever we do, God is never satisfied unless we remain there in utter destitution, so that God can at all times, without ceasing, bring his only-begotten Son to birth in this same ground. This birth happens not once a year, nor once a day, nor once an hour, but all the time, above time, in the moment that is neither here nor now. This is the ground I am speaking of. May we live in such a way that God can be at work in us. So help us God.

I have sometimes said that the soul is an imitation of God; now I say that she is his image, formed in the very same form the Father has eternally formed, the same form that Christ is formed in.

According to Meister Eckhart: all creatures contain one reflection, which is the denial of being anything else; the highest of the angels denies that it is the lowest. God is the denial of denials, the one that excludes all otherness. To call a tree a tree is not to name it, for all the species are mixed together in that word. If we name it in its first emergence, in its perfection, we do not call it a tree, we call it pure divine nature. Here is another notion of it, a better one. The divine nature is the great divider.

Meister Eckhart says: the Pharisee asked our Lord to eat with him. What does the Pharisee stand for? He stands for detachment; a Pharisee is one who is detached from everything and gathered into one. The prophet cries, 'Lord, have mercy on the work that is in you.' The highest work God ever did was done in mercy. Understanding goes in deep enough to take hold of being simply as being-in-itself, but where being is losing itself, drowned in itself, there understanding falls away.

Friar John says: it is a question among theologians whether it lies with the soul, or with God, for her to be God. I say the power lies in the soul. Suppose the soul is ready to be God: then God must work in that power and draw the power into himself. The energy is then in God, and the capacity is in the soul. If I were fully what I am, I would be God; there would be for me neither time nor place nor change. There is nothing so easy for me, so possible, as to be God. To stay still takes no work, whereas if I change into something else I must reduce myself to nothing. But I remain as I am.

I say, no creature is so lowly that it cannot claim being; in proportion to its being is its power to be God, for whatever has being is God.

Bishop Albertus says: man is divine above all else in receiving the inflowing Godhead without hindrance. In the words of the saint: 'The light of my soul is never put out, and my desire is always fixed on the vision of God.'