--- title: "Sermons, Collations and Tractates" author: "Meister Eckhart" translator: "C. de B. Evans" languages: [en] shelf: "Mystics" section: 14 of 132 url: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/14/ cite: "Meister Eckhart, tr. C. de B. Evans, Sermons, Collations and Tractates, section 14. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/14/" --- # 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. ## 14. Sermon 14 · Like a Vase of Gold Source: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/14/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/14/#p-N [¶0] Quasi vas auri soliduni ornatuin omni lapide pretioso {EccL SOq), My quotation will apply to St Augustine or to any virtuous soul, such being likened to ‘ a golden vessel, massive and lirm, adorned with every precious stone.’ Because of the perfection of the saints we have no likeness to express them, and we therefore symbolise them by the trees, the sun, or moon. So here St Augustine is compared with a chalice of gold, solid and firm, all set with precious stones. Indeed I he same thing may be said of any saintly virtuous soul who, leaving all things here, enjoys them yonder where they are eternal. Whoso renounces things in their contingent sense possesses them as absolute and eternal. [¶1] Every cup has two things : it receives and holds. The spiritual vessel differs from the physical. The wine is in the cup, not the cup in the wine, though the wine is not in the cup as it is in the body ; if it were in the cup as it is in the body we should not be able to drink it. It is different with the spiritual vessel. Every- thing received in this is in the eup and the cup in it and is the cup itself. All this ghostly cup receives is its own nature. It is God’s nature to give himself to every virtuous soul, and it is the soul’s nature to receive God, and this we say referring to the soul in her loftiest capacity. There the soul bears the image of God and is godlike. No image can be without likeness, but likeness can be without image. Two eggs may be both alike white, but one is not the image of the other : for one to be the image of the other it must proceed out of its nature and be born of it and be like it. [¶2] An image has two properties. First, it rccciv es its being from the thing whose image it is, immediately and above will, for it is a natural product, sprouting out of its nature as a branch does out of a tree. Any face thrown on a mirror is, willy-nilly, imaged therein. But its nature does not appear in its looking-glass image : only the mouth, nose and eyes, just the features, are seen in the mirror. God reserves it to himself to display in his reflections, at once his nature, all In is and all he can, and this above his will. His image is prior to his will, will following the image, for out of his nature there leaps first his image, focussing into itself the whole promise of his nature and his essence, all his nature pouring out into his image the whih' it abides intact within itself. Now the masters locate this iiiiage not in flir Holy Ghost but in the middle Person, for the Son, being the earliest issue of his nature, is therefore called his Father’s express image, and not the Holy Ghost ; he is simply the flowering of the Father and the Son, and has one nature with them both. Will is not a mean between the nature and the image, nor, for that matter, can knowledge or perception, nay, nor wisdom, come betw’een, for this image of God is the immediate product of his fecund nature. If there is means of wisdom here it is the image itself. Thus the Son in the Godhead is called the Wisdom of the Father. [¶3] Know, this impartible image of God which is stamped in the soul is sealed direct in her innermost nature ; this most fundamental, most noble part of her nature, is really what takes this soul-pattern, and that not by means cither of will or of wisdom. As I remarked just now, if wisdom comes in here at all it is (as) the pattern itself. God exists in this image without any means and the image subsists without means in God. But (iod is much more noble in the image than the image is in God. The image receives God not as being the creator ; it conceives him in the guise of understanding, the summit of her nature actually taking on his form. This is the innate divine image which God has stamped in every soul by nature. I durst not give more to this image ; to give it more would make it God himself, which it is not, or God would not be God. [¶4] The second characteristic of an image we note in its likeness to its object. And here observe especially two things. First : an image is not itself, neither is it its own. So an image received into the eye is not the eye itself nor has it any real existence in the eye but is merely suspended from and tethered to the thing it is the image of, whereto it entirely belongs and wherefrom it gets its being and is being that same being. Note well my definition of an image. There are four points to bear in mind, and haply others will occur to you. An image is not itself, neither is it its own : it is solely that thing’s whose reflection it is, and it is due to this alone that it exists at all. Things apart from the thing whose image it is, it is not and does not belong to. The image takes its being direct from the thing whose image it is, having one nature therewith and being the very same being. This is not a subject for discussion in the schools, though one may well propound it from the professorial chair. [¶5] Ye are always asking how ye ought to live. Lay then to heart this answer: Just as the image is here said to do, even so it behoves thee to live. Be his and belonging to him, not thine own and belonging to thyself nor withal to anyone. Whoever has a well-beloved friend holds his belongings dear and anything against his friend he will object to. Take, for example, the dog, an irrational beast. So faithful is he to his master that he resents the things his master hates, while to his master’s friends he is most friendly. No count takes he of poverty or wealth ; were some blind beggar his master’s bosom friend, he would be more affectionate to him than to the king or emperor who was his master’s enemy. I trow if it were possible the dog should be half faithless to his master, its other half were bound to hate itself. But then some folks complain of having no interior life, no devotion, no sweetness nor any suchlike godly consolation. Marry, these folk are all unrighteous still, and though they suffer it is not the best. Verily I say, as long as any image forms in thee which is not the eternal Word nor any shadowing forth of the eternal Word, be it never so good, in sooth it is wrong. That man alone is righteous who, having naughted all created things, stands facing straight along the unswerving line into the eternal Word, where, in the right, he is idealised and transformed. That man is gotten where the Son is gotten and is the Son himself. . [¶6] According to the scriptures, ‘No man knoweth the Father but the Son,’ and hence, if ye desire to know God, ye have to be not merely like the Son, ye have to be the very Son himself. Some people think to see God with their eyes as they would see a cow, and they expect to love him as they would love a cow. This thou lovest for its milk and for its cheese : for its profit to thyself. [¶7] Even so do they who love God with an eye to outward riches or interior consolation, not rightly loving God but their own i)ersonal advantage. I trow that any object thou shalt set before thy mind, except God in himself, how good soever it may be, is nothing but a barrier to the absolute truth. As I said just now that St Augustine is compared to a golden cup, closed on the underside and open to the sky, even so it behoves thee to be : if thou wouldst stand with St Augustine and in the communion of saints, then close thy heart to everything created and be open to God as he is in himself. [¶8] Men are compared with the higher faculties because they always go bareheaded, and women with the lower because the head is always veiled. The superior powers transcend time and space, springing straight out of the essence of the soul, and they resemble men in always going uncovered. Accordingly, their working is eternal. The philosopher says that all the powers of the soul, inasmuch as time and space affect them, have lost their virgin purity and can never be so thoroughly abstracted nor so finely sifted as to pass into the higher faculties. Albeit they are stamped with the same image. [¶9] Do thou be ‘ firm and steady,’ the same, that is to say, in weal and woe, in fortune and misfortune ; and ‘ set with all the precious stones,’ a treasury, to wit, of all the virtues which come naturally pouring out of thee. Traverse all the virtues and, transcending them, tap virtue only at its source, where it is one with the divine nature. And in so far as thou art more atoned than are the angels with God’s nature, to that extent they must receive through thee. May we be one, So help us God. Amen.