Like the morning star: Eckhart on God beyond being

Quasi stella matutina in medio nebulae, etc. (Ecclesiasticus 50): 'Like the morning star in the midst of a cloud, and like the moon at the full, and like the sun shining in its glory, so did he shine in the temple of God.' These words are usually applied to all the saints and teachers who, through their virtuous lives and their knowledge of God, have been a shining light to worldly hearts. Such hearts, caught up with creatures in the fog and cloud of darkness or ignorance, wander like blind people from the way of eternal freedom. But the words apply above all to the holy father we celebrate today, Saint Dominic, a pillar of Christendom and founder of the Order of Preachers, which he started and built up to spread God's word and to help poor sinners.

He shone like the morning star in the temple of God. What is God, and what is the temple of God? Twenty-four doctors once met to settle what God is, and they could not do it. Later, at an appointed time, they came together again, each bringing his verdict. Of these I will pick out two or three. One says: God is something compared to which all changing, temporal things are nothing; everything that has being comes from him and is insignificant next to him. Another says: God is something that goes beyond being, that needs nothing in itself and that all things need. A third says: God is the intelligence that occupies itself solely with understanding itself.

Setting aside the first and the third, I will speak of the second: God goes beyond being. Nothing that has being, time, or place belongs properly to God; he is above all these. His presence in all creatures shows that he is superior to them, for what is the same in many things must come before them. According to some doctors, the soul is in the heart alone. This is a mistake made by some eminent Scholastics. The soul is whole and undivided at once in the foot, in the eye, and in every member of the body. [Sermon on St Dominic's Day. See also Jostes, No. 31.] Again, I take a stretch of time, which does not have to be today or yesterday. But if I take the now that holds all time within it: the now in which God made the world is as close to this present moment as the now in which I am speaking right now, and the last day is as close to this now as yesterday was.

One of the doctors says: God is undivided, eternally active within himself, immanent, in need of no tool or help, needing nothing but what all things need, and the goal all things move toward as their final end. To this goal there is no way; it lies beyond all ways, opening out into the open. Saint Bernard says, 'Divine love is a practice without a way.' A physician who sets out to heal a sick man has no single, fixed picture of health in mind. He has a method by which he hopes to make the man well, but exactly how well he will make him is not fixed in advance: he will make him as well as he can. How then should we love God? As well as we can, without measure. Each thing works in its own way; things do not work in natures higher than their own. Fire, for example, only works on wood. God works above every nature, in the unconditioned. Wherever he can act, he is at work in a mode beyond mode. Before there was being at all, God was at work: he worked in non-existent being. Advanced theology teaches that God is being set apart from all other being: he is as far above being as an angel is above a fly. I hold that it is as wrong for me to say God is being as to say the sun is black or white. God is neither this nor that. As Saint Dionysius says, 'Whoever thinks he sees God, if he sees anything, sees nothing of God.' But when I say God is not being, that he is above being, I am not denying him being by that. I am honoring and raising it up in him. If I find copper mixed into gold, it has, as it exists there, a nobler being than it has on its own. Saint Augustine says: God is mode free of mode, power free of power, good free of good.

In the basic teaching of the Scholastics, being is divided into ten modes, or categories, and all of them are denied to God. God is not under any of these modes, nor does he fall short in any of them. The first, which has the most being of all and in which all things have their being, is substance. The last, which has the least being, is called relation, and in God it is the same as the first, which has the most being. In God all things share the same form or idea, even though this is the form of very different things. The highest angel, the soul, and the fly all have the same pattern in God. God is not being, nor is he goodness. Goodness clings to being and does not go beyond it: if there were no being there would be no goodness. Being is purer than good. In God there is no good, no better, no best. To say God is good is to wrong him, as much as saying the sun is black. Yet our Lord himself says, 'No one is good but God alone.' What is good? What gives of itself. We call a man good when he gives himself and is of use to others. Hence the saying of a pagan teacher: 'A hermit is neither good nor bad,' meaning in the sense of giving himself and helping other people. God, above all, gives himself. Nothing gives from its own being, because creatures are not their own source. What they give, they have received from another. Nor do they give themselves. The sun gives light and nothing more; fire gives heat, but the fire itself stays where it is. But God gives what is his own, because he exists from himself, and in all the gifts he gives, he gives himself first and above all. In all his gifts he gives himself, God as he is, as far as the one receiving can take him in. Saint James says, 'Every good and perfect gift comes down from above, from the Father of lights.'

When we take God in terms of his being, we take him in the outer court of his dwelling, for quiddity, or mode, is only the way into his temple. So where is God in his temple? Intellect is the temple of God, where he shines in his glory. Nowhere does God dwell more truly than in the temple of his intellectual nature, where he rests in stillness by himself, entirely undisturbed. As one of the doctors says, God in perceiving himself is perceiving himself within himself.

Now, turning to the soul: she has a drop of intellectual nature in her, a spark, a ray, and she has various powers that work through the body. One is the power of digestion, more active at night than during the day, by which a person grows and thrives. The soul also has a power in the eyes that makes the eye so sensitive and refined, too particular to take things in as coarse as they are in themselves, so that they first have to be filtered and refined by light and air, because the soul is present in it. Another power in the soul is the one by which she thinks. This power can picture within itself things that are not actually there, so that I can see things with it as well as I see them with my eyes, or even better. I can see a rose in winter when there are no roses, so with this power the soul brings things forth out of what does not exist, the way God creates things out of nothing.

A pagan philosopher observes that the soul who loves God takes hold of him under the veil of goodness. Up to this point I have mostly quoted the pagan doctors, who know only by the light of nature. I still have to come to the sayings of the saints, who see by a far higher light. He says, then, that the soul, in loving God, takes him under the veil of goodness. Intellect pulls this veil away from God and takes him bare, stripped of goodness, of being, and of every name.

At the school [the College of Saint Jacques] I used to teach that intellect is higher than the will, both belonging to this same light. Another theologian, at the other school, put the will before the intellect, on the ground that the will enjoys things as they are in themselves, while the intellect enjoys them as they are within it. That is quite true. The eye itself is a better thing than the eye painted on a wall. Even so, I still hold that intellect is higher than the will. The will takes God under the garment of good. Intellect seizes him naked, stripped of good and of being. Goodness is a garment under which God is hidden, and the will takes God wrapped in this garment of goodness. If God had no goodness, my will would turn him away. It would be unseemly to dress a king in drab cloth on his coronation day. I am not made happy by God's goodness. It would never occur to me to ask God to bless me with his goodness, because he could not do it. Goodness is his clothing. My blessedness lies wholly and solely in the fact that God is knowable, and in my knowing him. A philosopher says, 'The intellect of God is what angelic being hangs from.'

It is a real question where an image actually has its being: in the mirror, or in the object it comes from. My image is in me, of me, mine. While the mirror faces me, my image is in it; if the mirror falls, my image in it is destroyed. In the same way, angelic being depends on the presence of God's intellectual nature, in which he sees himself like a morning star wrapped in mist. I always keep before my mind this small word 'like': it is, in fact, the whole burden of my teaching. What the children at school call a mock word, a stand-in.

The truest thing a person can say of God is word and truth. God calls himself a word. And Saint John says, 'In the beginning was the Word,' meaning that a person is a word alongside the eternal Word. Think of Venus, Freya's star, the one Friday is named after, which goes by many names. When it rises earlier than the sun and is up before it, it is called the morning star; when it rises later than the sun, with the sun setting first, it is called the evening star. Sometimes it is above the sun and sometimes below it, but of all the stars it keeps closest to the sun, never straying far from it. The lesson in this is that anyone who wants to reach God must stay close to him, in his presence, the whole time, and must not let God be pushed out of mind by good fortune or bad fortune or by any creature whatsoever.

And he says, 'like the moon at the full in its days.' The moon governs moist nature. The moon is never closer to the sun than when it is full, and at that time it takes its light directly from the sun. But because it is, of all the stars, closest to the earth, it suffers two drawbacks: it is pale and mottled, and it can also lose its light. It is never as strong as when it is furthest from the earth, and in that position it has the greatest effect on the sea. As it wanes, its effect grows weaker and weaker. In the same way, the higher the soul rises above earthly things, the more powerful she becomes. Knowledge of creatures alone can bring a person past the need for sermons, for every single creature is a book. But anyone who wants to reach what we are speaking of, where all my arguments are heading, must become like the morning star: a person in the presence of God, always with him, equally near him and raised above worldly things, a word beside the Word.

There is one word that is both thought and spoken: angels, the soul, and all creatures. There is another Word, thought but not spoken, which I can conceive of. And there is still another Word, neither thought nor spoken, which never goes forth but remains eternally within the one who speaks it, within the Father, for it is he who speaks it; it is eternally proceeding and eternally remaining. Intellect is active in its very nature, and the more it turns inward, the more it works outward. God's happiness consists in this activity. And here again the soul should be like an adverb. The more the soul's intellect turns inward, the more closely and intimately it becomes one with what it knows. The more powerful it becomes, the more clearly it reflects God and is united with him. It is not like this with physical things: the stronger they are, the more outward their action becomes. God's happiness lies in the inward working of the intellect, in which his Word remains. It is with this eternal Word that the soul should be a word, and, doing one work with God, she will find her happiness in self-perception, in the very thing that God himself is happy in. May we always be a word together with this Word. So help us the Father, and this same Word, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.