THIS IS MEISTER ECKHART
" SOMEONE complained to Meister Eckhart that no one could
understand his sermons. He said, to understand my sermons a man requires three things. He must have conquered strife and be in contemplation of his highest good and be satisfied to do God's bidding and be a beginner with beginners and naught himself and be so master of himself as to be incapable
of anger.-
Yet when Meister Eckhart was excommunicated by Pope John XXII. it was principally urged against him that he had preached to the people in the vulgar tongue and laid open the secrets of the Church. It was his endeavour in those sermons to be as plain as his subject would allow ; and, though he ranged in his joy through a thousand subtleties of faith, though he exercised an ingenuity of testimony that few can parallel, he was homely and forcible in illustration ; he was coherent in thought, and even if our intellect fails us, we shall find a contagion of meaning in his honesty and his love.
He made Christ his world ; is it strange, then, that his Christianity was wide and intricate in application ? And, as he saw himself, the one bar to an understanding of his teaching is a lack of Neff-mastery. For his counsel is so much the counsel of perfection that any man who would cheer himself with easy virtues cannot but misunderstand him : he will find Eckhart unintelligible because if he understood him he would find him disagreeable.
For the integrity of Eckhart's spirit made him see that even words of devotion; fasts, vigils, prayers, acts of charity, self-
sacrifices, are evil if the least trace of deliberate good remains in them, if they are done to pacify conscience or for some spiritual reward. " The man who is at one with God is per- fectly free in all his deeds ; he does them out of love and without why, just to glorify God, not seeking his own therein, God energizing in him." All others he compares to the merchants in the temple, and, mark me well, he says, I name none but the virtuous.
" I have related further how Jesus said to them that sold doves : ' Take these things hence ! "Mese people He did not drive forth nor rebuked them harshly : He said quite mildly : Take these things away ! ' As though to say, it is not wrong albeit a hindrance to the pure and simple truth. These are virtuous folk, working for God impersonally though subject to personal limitations, to time and munber, to before and after. Their activities keep them from the highest truth, from being absolutely free like our Lord Jesus Christ who is receiving Himself afresh incessantly and a-temporally from His heavenly Father, and in that same now is borne back again unceasingly with praise and thanksgiving into the Father, perfect, vieing with Him in His majesty. Even so, to be receptive to the sovran truth, a man must be without before and after, without the hindrance of any acts or images that are within his ken, but freely receiving the divine gift in the perennial now and bearing it back unhindered in the light of the same with praise and thanksgiving in our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the doves are gone, to wit, the obstacle of menership in actions, good in themselves, wherein one has any self-interest at all. ' Take these things hence ! ' said our Lord, as though to say, they are blameless but they are in our way."
Of a similar divine austerity is his warning upon prayer :--
" Praying for aught save God alone is idolatry and unrighteous- mess. They pray aright who pray in spirit and in truth. When praying for someone, for Henry or Conrad, I pray at my weakest. When praying for no one I pray at my strongest, and when I want nothing and make no request I am praying my best, for in God is no Henry nor no Conrad. To pray to God for aught save Cod is wrong and faithless, and, as it wore, an imperfection."
So, too, we learn " Meister Eckhart says, we ought not to ask God for His grace, His divine goodness, we ought to con- trive to take it without asking." -- Yet this austerity was not joyless. and did not Jpring from disharmony of soul ; for Eckhart condemned asceticism as a kind of selfishness and never advised withdrawal from the world, even for the sake of meditation upon God. The "- now " received from God is to be given back to Him ; and how can it 13-e given back except by being transferred into action among men ? But the ascetic and the self-mortifying saint turn in upon themselves and squander the impulses granted to them. And Eckhart, in truth, was himself open and unembarrassed before the influx of divinity. He gave baek all that he took. -
It is in the reader that Eckhart's obscurity inheres ; for he himself was simple and sure in knowledge : when he writes he is at play in the levels of his ecstatic consciousness. We may contrast with him Plotinus, who is obscure because of the vagueness of his mind. Plotinus had intuitions of truth, but by nature he was verbose, over-anxious to impress, sweet and thin in spirit. He would repeat an intuition twenty times over, and would not have made it clear to himself in the end. He had swallowed in so much from Plato, from the gnostics; from the mystery schools, that his intelligence was fogged. He felt the necessity to formulate a system of mythology, but he had received so much and clamoured for so much more that he was incapable of ridding himself of his knowledge. It is in Plotinus that obscurity inheres, not in his reader. Given the Hermetica, given Dionysius, we have no need of Plotinus his only virtue is that he expanded and applied the philosophic and artistic doctrines of Plato in the territory of religion ; and, though this had been done before him (notably by Plato him- self), no one had been so abundant in mystical parallels.
Eckhart is often taken for a mystic, but he is by no means typical of mystics. He has more delight in his reason than would suit with a true mystic ; he joins in his person, freely and happily, religion and philosophy. We place him among the mystics because he himself experienced ecstasies and reve- lations ; and because he consistently applied the story of the gospels to the individual, because he knew that Christ is born and suffers and is glorified within the spirit of every Christian. But the greatest of Christian mystics is Boehme, who speaks always in myths and visions. To Boehme belongs fierceness of inspiration and grandeur ; to Eckhart essential lucidity and penetration. To Boehme fire, to Eckhart light ; and truth to both.
Franz Pfeiffer's edition of the Sermons, Tractates, and Sayings has longebeen the best and most inclusive. Mr. Evans has made his translation more valuable than his original by the inclusion of new discoveries and the excision of works wrongly attributed to Eckhart. It would be hard to praise this trans- lation too highly : by some virtue of soul Mr. Evans has been able to turn excellent German into excellent English ; to keep the full dignity and humility of Eckhart ; to be archaic without offence, to be simple without monotony. It seems very much more than we deserve that in England we should possess an edition of Eckhart better than any other in the world.
A. P. '
Previous page
