---
title: "Sermons, Collations and Tractates"
author: "Meister Eckhart"
translator: "C. de B. Evans"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Mystics"
section: 117 of 132
url: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/117/
cite: "Meister Eckhart, tr. C. de B. Evans, Sermons, Collations and Tractates, section 117. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/117/"
---

# Sermons, Collations and Tractates

*Meister Eckhart, tr. C. de B. Evans*

A hundred and four sermons, the tractates and the Sayings, in Evans's 1924 English of Pfeiffer's German.

## 117. Tractate · The Drowning

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/117/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/117/#p-N

[¶0] Though there be neither hell nor heaven yet will I love God ; thee Father and thy sovran nature wherein the Trinity abides in the unity whence it gets its power. — Now you desire to hear about this hidden and exalted nature of the Trinity. The Persons are God in their personality. Godhead by nature in their oneness. But you must know what God and Grodhead are. The former has distinctions ; which the soul of me explains by the reflection of the exalted unity. This shines in its own essence wholly indiscriminate. Therein is contained its unity entire, including the distinctions of lofty personality. The river is fontal wherein unity abides ; the one alone is unnecessitous, poised in itself in sable stillness. Incomprehensible and yet self-evident. Light is the first thing to appear ; it beguiles the mind into the unknown without itself, everlasting, in-drawn, plunged in gloom. There it is befooled, there it is bereft of light’s darkness, losing them both in the abyss ; there that mysterious thing the mind is estranged in the unity which is withal its life.

[¶1] O unfathomable sink, in thy depth thou art high and in thy height profound ! — How so ? — That is hidden from us in thy bottomless abysm. St Paul declares that it shall be made known to us. In this gnosis the mind transcends itself; it has been absorbed into the Trinity. There the mind dies all dying in the wonder of the Godhead, for with that unity it is confused ; the perscvial losing its name in sameness. There mind, atoned, is accounted naught ; there it loses the means of divinity. Light and darkness, it is rid of both, matter as well as form. The spark thus bare, made naught from its own naught, is s\llowed up in its naught’s aught. This same naught is poverty in the Persons, which beguiles the mind and reduces it to unity. In the embrace of this sovran one which naughts the separated self of things, being is one without distinction although a thing created in its individual nature. The one I mean is wordless. One and one uniting, void shines into void. Where these two abysms hang, equally spirated, de-spirated, there is the supreme being ; where God gives up the ghost, darkness reigns in the unknown known unity. This is hidden from us in his motionless deep. Creatures cannot penetrate this aught.

[¶2] Well that this aught transcends us.

[¶3] Even so loving it transcendently,

[¶4] Plunge in ; this is the drowning.