--- title: "Sermons, Collations and Tractates" author: "Meister Eckhart" translator: "C. de B. Evans" languages: [en] shelf: "Mystics" section: 72 of 132 url: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/72/ cite: "Meister Eckhart, tr. C. de B. Evans, Sermons, Collations and Tractates, section 72. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/72/" --- # 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. ## 72. Sermon 72 · The Prophet Says: Lord be Merciful Source: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/72/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/72/#p-N [¶0] The prophet said, ‘ Lord be merciful to the people that is in thee.’ The Lord replied, ‘ All that enter in will I make whole and love much.’ [¶1] I take the words of the Pharisee who besought our Lord to dine with him and our Lord’s injunction to the woman, vade in pace ! It is good to pass from restlessness to calm : praiseworthy but imperfect. ‘ Go in peace,’ be not disquieted : God implies that we ought to enter into peace and continue in peace and end in peace. God said, ‘ In me ye have peace.’ So far in God so far in peace. Is aught in God, it is in peace ; is aught out of God, it is without peace. St John says, ‘ Whatever is born of God overcometh the world.’ What is born of God seeks peace and ensues it. He that pursues the even tenor of his way and is at peace is a heavenly man. Heaven constantly rotates, in its motion seeking rest. [¶2] 1 See also Jostes, No. 10. [¶3] The Pharisee besought our Lord that he would dine with him. The food a man eats is changed in him into his body, like the body by the soul. Body and soul are one in being, not in act, thus my soul is united with my eye in one mode, that of seeing. Even so the food a man consumes mingles with his nature as regards its essence but not its activity ; and the great atonement we are destined to with God shall be of essence not of operation. Hence the Pharisee’s request that God would eat with him. [¶4] Pharisee signifies a solitary, one who knows no end to detachment of soul. The more noble the powers the more they liberate. Some powers are far higher than the body and sufficiently aloof to shell off and detach completely. As the philosopher well says, What once moves mortal things never enters into them. Again, by being free and unattached the unlettered man may in love and longing receive wisdom and impart it. And thirdly, having no end means having no finality, no ultimate security until one is at rest and all unwitting of disquiet : until the soul-powers being fixed on God are wholly unattached. As the prophet cries, ‘ Lord be merciful to the people that are in thee.’ [¶5] One master says, ‘ Of all the exalted works God has ever wrought in creatures mercy is the most familiar and the most mysterious, his work in the angels not excepted.’ In it the work of mercy is exalted to mercy as it is in itself and as it is in God. Of God’s activity the first outcome is mercy ; not in the sense of his forgiving man’s sins nor of one man’s forgiving another ; his highest work is mercy in the sense that he initiates the soul into the highest and most perfect thing she can conceive in this world. In his bottomless ocean God is productive of mercy. [¶6] The prophet said, ‘ Lord be merciful to the people that is in thee.’ What people is in God ? St John says, ' He that dwellcth in love dwellcth in God and God in him.’ St John says, ‘ Love unites, love initiates into God.’ Haply it is accessory. Love does not unite, not in any wise. Satisfaction (or, enough) is not what holds together, binds together. Love unites iq act uudnot in es§.without n Neither •'knowledge nor love unites aught. Love takes God only as being good and God escapes from name. Good, love goes no further than that. Love takes God under a veil, under a garment. Not so understanding : understanding takes God as he is known in itself; it can never comprehend him in the sea of his own unfathomable nature, Above biQtb jWiese pereeptwns iaf God energises as mercy at the summit and perfection of his activity. [¶7] A philosopher says, There is something in the soul, intimate, mysterious, far higher than tiie soul herself, whence emanate her / powers of intellect and will. St Augustine says : Just as that is ineffable out of which the Son leaps from the Father in the first p'f6cessi5n,''scrthefe exists some occiiTt thing behind the first procession of . intellect and will. According to the philosopher who is our chief authority upon the soul, no human wisdom ever can attain to what the soul is. That requires supernatural wisdom. What the powers of the soul issue from into act, we do not know : about it haply we do know a little, but what the soul is in her ground no man knows. Any knowledge thereof that may be permitted to us must be supernatural ; it must be by grace : God’s agent of mercy.