Taking up the cross: Eckhart on forsaking the self

Dominus dicet: qui vult venire post me, etc. (Matthew 16:24; Luke 9:23), the Lord will say: whoever wants to come after me. Our Lord says, 'Whoever wants to come to me must take up his cross, give himself up to willing martyrdom, deny himself, and follow me.' Everything by nature pursues God in its own way. Fire rises upward, earth falls downward, and in the same way every creature here searches out the place God has set for it. Origen says a person denies himself when, through effort, he rids himself of his habitual sins and refuses himself those things

he is attached to; doing so, he takes up his cross with willing pain and trains himself in the practice of virtue. Saint Basil once said that anyone who leaves behind the things beneath him, the things that are not God, has left himself. Saint Augustine, writing on this subject in the book where he speaks about the soul, calls her nobler, mightier, and grander than any other creature, and in these respects most like God of all creatures except the angels, who are nobler than her nature because they were the first to be poured forth and set free from spirit, though they keep a dwelling place within it. The soul does not have this. She must pour herself into the body.

Various people comment wisely on this. If God is entirely without parts, why did he not create everything simply, as he made the angels? That would never work, theologians say. One kind of creature could not show forth God fully. He made many kinds of creatures so that each could show forth a small portion of him, though no more of him than a single drop of water reveals about the sea. And yet a drop of water tells us more about the sea, and indeed about the universe, than any creatures can tell us about God. For out of drops we could gather a sea, but by means of creatures we could never arrive at God. Saint Gregory observes that the soul God shines into, so that she sees him in some measure, finds that creatures become small to her, mere ciphers.

Thirdly, the text speaks of one who dies a martyr's death as forsaking himself. Our Lord says, 'Moses, no one comes to me as himself.' According to Saint Chrysostom, 'To become other than I am, I must give up what I am.' This is achieved through humility. 'Nothing,' says Saint Gregory, 'gives more power than lowliness.' We see this clearly with Moses, who, wanting to rest, drove his flock of sheep into the valley. It was there he saw the bush burning yet not consumed. 'I will go,' said Moses, 'and look at this great sight.' Then God called to him, 'Stay, Moses, come no closer! Take off your shoes.' The feet are symbols of desire. They must be bare, drawn out of everything temporal and mortal; only then can the soul offer her whole self to her Lord. One of the saints has said that if the soul should rise and offer herself to our Lord while still unillumined, she would be turned back and come to harm, like an eye that tries to look straight at the sun and only grows weaker and more blind.