God is love: Eckhart on the soul's union with God

Deus charitas est et qui manet in charitate in deo manet et deus in eo (I John 4:16). "God is love, and he who dwells in love dwells in God and God in him." This is the epistle we read at Mass, and it is St John speaking.

Take the opening words: "God is love." That is so, in that all that can love, all that does love, he compels by his love to love him. God is love, secondly, in that every God-created and loving thing compels him by its love to love it, whether he wills it or not.

God is love, thirdly, in that his love drives all his lovers out of multiplicity. The love of God in multiplicity pursues the love which is himself right out of multiplicity into his very unity. God is love, fourthly, who by his love provides all creatures with their life and being, preserving them in his love. The colour of the cloth is preserved in the cloth: in the same way creatures are preserved in existence by love, that is, God. Take the colour from the cloth, and its being is gone: so creatures all lose their being if taken from love, that is, God. God is love, and so lovely is he that lovers all love him, whether they will or not. No creature is so base as to love what is bad. What we love must be good or must seem to be good. But creaturely good, all told, is thoroughly evil compared with God. St Augustine says, "Love, so that in meditating on love you may provide what will satisfy your soul." God is love.

My children, listen to me, I pray you. Know this: God loves my soul so much that his very life and being depend upon his loving me, whether he would or no. For God to stop loving me would be to rob him of his Godhood; for God is love no less than he is truth; as he is good, so is he love as well. This is the plain truth, as surely as God lives. There were certain theologians who claimed that the love within us is the Holy Spirit, but this is false. For the bodily food we take is changed into us, but the spiritual food we receive changes us into itself, and so divine love is not preserved in us as something separate, otherwise there would be two. Divine love preserves us in itself as one and the same.

"God is love, and he who dwells in love dwells in God and God in him." There is a difference between spiritual things and bodily things. One spiritual thing dwells in another; but no bodily thing dwells in another. There may be water in a tub, with the tub around it. But where the wood is, the water is not. In this sense no material thing dwells in another. But spiritual things dwell in each other: each angel with all his joy and happiness is in every other angel as well as in himself, and every angel with all his joy and happiness dwells in me, and God too with his whole blessedness, though I do not perceive it.

If anyone should ask me what God is, I would answer: God is love, and so altogether lovely that creatures all with one accord try to love his loveliness, whether they do so knowingly or unknowingly, in joy or in sorrow. Take the lowest angel in his pure nature: the smallest spark or flicker of love that ever fell from him would light up the whole world with love and joy. See his built-in perfection! Further, as I have explained on various occasions, the angels are numerous beyond number. But to leave love and come to knowledge. If only we knew God it would be easy to forsake the world. All that God has ever made or shall yet make,

all this, I say, if God should give it to my soul without himself, staying, so to speak, a hair's breadth away, it would not content my soul nor make me happy. I am happy when all things are in me and God, and where I am God is, and where God is I am.

"He who dwells in love dwells in God and God in him." Suppose I am in God, then where he is I am; and if God is in me, then, unless the scriptures lie, where I am God is. This is the plain truth, as surely as God is.

"Faithful servant, I will set you over all my goods," that is, the manifold goodness of God in creatures I will set you over. Secondly, "I will set you over all my goods" means: at the source of creature happiness, in the pure unity of God himself where he has his own blessedness. In other words: God being the good, in that sense he will set us above his manifold goodness. Thirdly, that he will set us over all his goods means: above all things that can be named, all that can be expressed, all so-called good things and all things that can be understood. In this way he sets us over all his goods.

"Father, I pray that they may be one as I and you are one." Where two become one, one loses its nature. Therefore, for God and the soul to be one, the soul has to lose her own life and nature. They are one with regard to what is left. But for them to be one, one must lose its identity and the other must keep its identity. Then they are the same. Now the Holy Spirit says: "I pray that they may be one as we are one. I pray that you may make them the same in us."

When I pray for something, my prayer comes to nothing; when I pray for nothing, I pray as I ought. When I am one with that in which are all things, past, present and to come, all the same distance and all exactly the same, then they are all in God and all in me. There is no thought of Henry or of Conrad. Praying for anything but God alone is idolatry and wrongdoing. They pray rightly who pray in spirit and in truth. When I pray for someone, for Henry or Conrad, I pray at my weakest. When I pray for no one I pray at my strongest, and when I want nothing and ask for nothing I am praying my best, for in God there is no Henry and no Conrad. To pray to God for anything but God is wrong and faithless, and, in a sense, a falling short. For to set up something beside God is, as I said a moment ago, only to make nothing of God and a god of nothing. Whoever is as far and estranged from himself as the chief angel of the Seraphim is far from him, that person owns that same angel just as God does and is God, and that is the plain truth, as surely as God is God. "God is love, and he that is in love is in God and God in him."

May all of us attain this love of which I speak. So help us our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.