Hidden in God: Eckhart on suffering without complaint

A master cries out, 'Dear God, how well my love has borne fruit for me!'

Our Lord says to every loving soul, 'I became man for you, and if you are not God for me you wrong me. I, in my God-nature, dwelled in your human nature, so that no one guessed my godly power, seeing me walk like any other man. And in the same way you shall hide your humanity in my divinity, and no one shall guess your human weakness: your life being wholly divine, they shall see nothing in you but God.' This does not mean soft words or a pious manner or a great show of holiness, so that our name, carried far and wide, is highly honored by the friends of God; nor does it mean that, as cherished and chosen by God, we fondly imagine God has forgotten every other creature but ourselves, and that whatever we ask of God is granted at once. No, not at all! That is not what God wants from us: it is the complete opposite.

He wants us to be found wholly unmoved when people call us cheats and liars or whatever else it may be that strips us of our good name, through evil speech and through evil deeds as well: denying us our animal necessities, and affecting our temporal needs as well as causing bodily harm. He wants our sickness, or whatever illness it may be, to help us in our bodily work, so that we always do our best even when people turn it to the worst account. Further, he wants us to suffer in this way from people as well as from God, who, withholding his present consolation from us, builds something like a wall between us, so that when we bring our work to him seeking his help and comfort, he acts as though he has shut his eyes and refuses to see or hear. He leaves us standing in our need to fight alone, like Christ forsaken by his Father. Then, hiding us in his divinity, he lets us stand unbowed by sorrow, with no help but the words Christ spoke, 'Father, your will be done.'

Such is the nature of God that we come to know it by nothing better than by nothing itself. How, by nothing? By getting rid of all means, not merely by giving up the world and the possession of virtue. I must let virtue go if I want to see God face to face. Virtue is innate in me, and I honor it even as I pass beyond it. When a person's mind has lost touch with everything, then, and not until then, it comes into touch with God. A pagan philosopher said that nature cannot go beyond nature. Therefore no creature can see God. If he is seen, it must be in a light that is beyond nature. Theologians raise a question: when God lifts the soul above himself and above all creatures and leads her home into himself, why does he not also raise up the body, so that it has no earthly needs? One of the masters, I think Saint Augustine, answers this as follows. When the soul reaches union with God, then at last the body enjoys all things to God's glory. All creatures have flowed forth through man, and the body's reasonable use of creatures brings the soul an added dignity, for creatures can find no better way back to their source than through the righteous person who can say that even for an instant their soul has been absorbed in union with God. For then there is nothing standing between God and the soul, and as far as the soul follows God into the desert of his Godhead, so far the body follows the bodily Christ into the desert of his willing poverty. As the soul is united with his divinity, so the body is reconciled in Christ through the working of true virtue. Then the heavenly Father may well say, 'This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,' for he has found his only Son present in the soul, and has begotten her as his only Son.

From the very bottom of my heart I say: how can anything afflict you or be hard to bear, when you consider that he who existed yonder in the form of God, in the day of his eternity and in the glory of the saints, who was before born as the splendor and substance of God, entered the prison, the trap of your sense-nature, which is so unclean that anything, however pure, is stained and fouled by coming near it, and yet he dwelled there for your sake? What is there you would not gladly suffer, reading of the bitterness of your Lord and God, thinking over the afflictions, all the sorrows that befell him? The scorn and contempt he bore from king and soldier, from rogues and passersby at his cross? How the glory of the eternal light was mocked and scorned and tortured? See what innocence, compassion and true love, shown to me nowhere more clearly than where the power of love pierced his heart. Make then a bundle of the sorrows of your Lord God and let it rest between your breasts. Consider and take to heart his virtues, how all his works serve your good, and pay him back in his own coin for his shameful and disgraceful death and his suffering nature, in which he, sinless, suffered for your sin as though it had been his own, as he says in the Prophets concerning his afflictions, 'Look, I suffer for my sins,' and speaking of the fruits of all his labors, 'By your works you shall possess this kingdom,' calling our sins his sins and his works our works. He has answered for our sins as though he had committed them, while we profit from his works as though they were our own. This should make our labor light, for the good knight does not lament his own wounds when he sees his king wounded alongside him. He offers us the drink he drank himself. He asks nothing of us but what he has already done or suffered. We ought to suffer gladly, for God did nothing else while he lived on earth. May we so pass beyond and lose our human nature, with all its weakness, in God's nature, that nothing is found in us but good alone. So help us God. Amen.