Likes love and unite: the soul's spark and the ground beyond God

LIKES LOVE AND UNITE Meister Eckhart says, like things love and unite with one another; unlike things hate and shun each other. According to one master, no two things are so unlike as earth and heaven. Earth knew itself by nature foreign and unlike to heaven. So it fled from heaven to the lowest place and still stays there, lest it should come anywhere near heaven. And the heavenly nature became aware that earth had fled and had taken possession of the lowest place. And that is how the heavens came to pour themselves out into the earth in a fruitful way, indeed the masters say that the whole expanse of heaven does not hold back so much as a needle's point, it brings itself forth entirely as fruitfulness on earth. So earth is the most fruitful of all mortal creatures.

I say the same about the person who has brought himself to nothing in himself, in God, and in all creatures. That person takes the lowest place, and God is bound to pour himself out completely into that soul, or else he would not be God. I promise you, by God's eternal truth, that into anyone who is brought low, God pours out his whole self with all his might, so completely that he holds back nothing of his life, his being, his nature, no, not even of his perfect Godhead, he pours out the whole of it as fruit into that person who, in giving himself up to God, takes the lowest place.

Today, as I went on my way thinking over what I would say and wondering how to make you understand, I came upon a comparison. If you can follow it, my meaning will be plain, and so will the drift of all my teaching. The comparison is between my eye and a piece of wood. My eye, when it is open, is an eye. It is the same eye when shut, and the wood is no more and no less for being seen. Now pay close attention. Suppose my eye, being one and single in itself, falls upon the wood in the act of seeing. Then, though each thing remains what it is, in the actual seeing they are so joined that we can say: my eye is the wood and the wood is my eye. Now if the wood were free of matter and wholly immaterial, as my sight is, then we could truly say that in my actual seeing, wood and eye are one in essence. If this is true of bodily things, how much more is it true of spiritual things. Remember, my eye is more one with the eye of some sheep across the ocean that I have never seen than it is with my own ear, even though with my ear it is joined by one body. The sheep's eye works as mine does, and so I credit it with more oneness of action than I can give to eye and ear, which serve different functions.

I have often spoken of the light within the soul, which is uncreated and not capable of being created. It is this light that I am so often pointing to in my preaching, it is the light which takes hold of God directly, bare and unveiled, as he is in himself, that is to say, it catches him in the very act of begetting himself. For this reason I can truly say that this light is more one with God than with any of my own powers, even though it is joined to them within one being. For understand, this light within my soul is no higher in its essence than the lowest, the coarsest of my powers, my sight or my hearing, say, or any other sense that is at the mercy of heat and cold, hunger or thirst, for in essence there are no parts to divide.

Now I say, if you turn away from your own self and from created things, then to the degree that you do this, you come to oneness and blessedness in the spark of the soul, a thing which is beyond time and space. This spark stands opposed to all creatures. It wants nothing but God, God as he is in himself. It is not satisfied with the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit, nor even with all three Persons, so far as each keeps its own distinct property. I believe this light would not be satisfied even with the single begotten fruit of the Godhead. More than that, and stranger still, I promise you this light is not content with the changeless, undivided essence of God, which neither gives nor takes, but wants to find where it comes from, it wants to enter into its own simple ground, into the silent desert into which no distinction has ever come, not Father, not Son, not Holy Spirit. At the centre, where no one dwells, there this light is swallowed up in a still greater light, where it becomes more one than it is in itself, for this ground is the undivided stillness, unmoved in itself, and by this stillness all things are moved, and all those have their life who, gathered into themselves, live the life of the mind. May we too live this life of the mind. So help us God. Amen.