---
title: "Sermons, Collations and Tractates"
author: "Meister Eckhart"
translator: "C. de B. Evans"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Mystics"
section: 74 of 132
url: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/74/
cite: "Meister Eckhart, tr. C. de B. Evans, Sermons, Collations and Tractates, section 74. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/74/"
---

# 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.

## 74. Sermon 74 · The Promise of the Father

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/74/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/74/#p-N

[¶0] Convescens prcecepit eisah Jerosolymis ne discederent etc. (Act. I4). This passage which I have quoted in Latin comes in the Mass for to-day. St Luke records how our Lord being about to depart to heaven was in company with his disciples whom he ‘ commanded that they should not leave Jerusalem but should wait for the promise of the Father which they had heard from his mouth for they should be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.’

[¶1] He speaks of the promise or pledge of the Father. To us as well was given this pledge of baptism in the Holy Ghost and of being received thereby to dwell above time in eternity. Not in the things of time is the Holy Ghost bestowed. When a man turns from temporal things and goes into himself he notices a heavenly light, a light that comes from heaven. Though heavendescended it is under heaven. There is no satisfaction in this light, for it is mortal, they say that it is matter. Now iron, which by nature falls, will rise, against its nature, and hang suspended to a loadstone in virtue of the master-force the stone receives from heaven. Wherever the stone turns there the iron goes with it. Even so the mind, unsatisfied witli this infernal light, will scale the firmament and search the heavens to find the breath that spins them, the heavens by their revolution causing all things on earth to grow and flourish. Its spirit never rests content until it pierces to the coil, into the primal origin where the breath has its source. This spirit knows no time nor number : number does not exist apart from the malady of time. Other root has none save in eternity, where there is no number except one. This spirit, transcending number, breaks through multiplicity and is transfixed by God, and by the fact of his piercing me I pierce him in return : God leads this spirit into the desert, into the solitude of its own self, where it is simply one and is welling up in itself. This spirit has no why, for if it had a why the unity would also have its why. This spirit is in unity and freedom.

[¶2] Doctors declare this will is free in the sense that none can bind it excepting God alone. God docs not bind the will, he sets it free, free to choose naught but God himself, and this is real freedom. For the spirit to be incapable of willing aught other than God’s will is not its bondage but its true liberation. Some people say. If I have God and the love of God then I am at liberty to follow my own will. They labour under a mistake. So long as thou art capable of anything against the will of God and against his law thou hast no love of God though thou cozen the world that thou hast it. One who is in God’s will and in God’s love is fain to do the things God likes and leave undone the things God hates, and he can no more leave undone a thing that God wants done than he can do a thing that God abhors ; just like a man whose legs are tied together, he cannot stray and neither can he err who is in the will of God. Someone once said, ‘ God may command me to do evil and shun virtue, but I am incapable of sin.’ No one loves virtue without being virtue. He who abandons himself and everything, who seeks not his own in any wise but does all he does for love and without why, that man being dead to all the world is alive in God and God in him.

[¶3] Here someone may object, It is all very well for you to tell us these things, but we ourselves know nothing of them. — That I also rue. This knowledge is so noble and so common, it is not to be purchased . for a farthing or a penny. A just mind and a free will, have but these, and it is thine. To abandon all things on this lower plane where they exist in mortal guise is to recapture them in God where they are reality. Everything that is dead here is life yonder and all that is dense matter here is spirit there in God. If you pour fresh water into a clean basin and, all being clear and bright, stand it in a quiet place, then, holding your face over it you see it at the bottom as it really is. That is V>ecause the water is free from impurity and still. It is the same with people who in a state of freedom and interior calm envisage God in peace and quiet, and when they are able to see him just as well in turmoil and disquiet there is perfect equanimity ; but if a man enjoys him less in trouble and unrest, that argues him not equable (unjust). St Augustine says, ‘ When the days are weary and the time is long a man should turn to God, where no such thing as long exists and things are all at rest.’ The lover of justice is possessed with justice, and he is this virtue.

[¶4] Our Lord said, ‘ I have called you not servants, I liave called you friends, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth.’ And so may my friend know something that I ignore, yet have no mind to tell me. But our Lord says, ‘ All that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.’ I marvel how some priests, and these with pretensions to eminence and learning, allow themselves to be misled into interpreting these words to mean that he shows us of the path only the bare minimum needful to our happiness. That is not what 1 hold ; there is no truth in it. Why was God born man ? That I might be born God himself. God died that I might die to the whole world and all created things. And it is in this sense that we must understand the saying of our Lord, ‘ All that I have heard of my Father I have revealed unto you.’ What does the Son hear of his Father ? The Father can only beget ; the Son can only be gotten. All the Father has and that he is, the whole basis of God’s essence and God’s nature, he brings forth once for all in his one-begotten Son. This the Son hears from his Father, this he makes known unto us, we being this same Son. All the Son has he has from his Father : essence and nature, we are this only Son. No one has the Holy Ghost except he be the only Son. Father and Son expire their holy Breath, and once this sacred breath inspires a man it remains iiv him, for he is essential and pneumatic.

[¶5] True, thou mayst receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, the likeness of the Holy Ghost, but it abides not with thee ; it is impermanent. Just as a man may blush for shame, or blench, it is an accident and passes. But one by nature fair and ruddy is so always. So with this man, as being the only Son his holy Breath is of the nature of him. As it is written in the Book of Wisdom, ‘ This day have I begotten thee in the reflection of my eternal light, in the fullness of the Godhead and the glory of all saints.’ He is begetting him now, to-day. There is childbed in the Godhead, there are they baptized in the Holy Ghost according to the promise of the Father. ‘ After these days which are not many,’ or a few, then comes the ‘ fullness of the Godhead,’ where there is neither day nor night ; where things a thousand leagues away are as near me as the ground whereon I stand ; that is the fulfilment, the full enjoyment of Godhood ; that is oneness. While the soul secs any difference she is unjust ; as long as aught looks out, looks in, there is no unanimity. Mary Magdalene sought our Lord within the tomb ; seeking one dead man she found two living angels, but still was unconsolcd. Said the angel, ‘ Why art thou cast down ? Whom seekest thou, woman ? ’ As though to say, ‘ Thou dost seek one dead and hast found two living.’ Whereto she might have answered, ‘ That is the burden of my discontent, that I find two where 1 sought one alone.’

[¶6] While anything created can make a clear impression on the soul she is disconsolate. I say, as I have often said before, so far as the soul’s created nature goes there is no such thing as truth. I declare that there is something beyond the soul’s created nature. But certain priests cannot understand how there can be anything so nearly kin to God, so much the same as he is. It has naught in common with naught. Anything made or created is naught, but this is alien and remote from the made and the created. It is something self-contained, taking nothing from outside. Our Lord departed to heaven, beyond all light, beyond all understanding, beyond all human ken. He who is thus translated beyond light of any kind dwells in the unity. As St Paul says, ‘ God dwells in the light that no man can approach unto,’ which is in itself the perfect one. A man then must be dead, must be dead indeed, devoid of any being of his own, wholly without likeness, like to none, to be really Godlike. For it is God’s character, his nature, to be peerless, incomparable. May we be the same in the oneness of God himself. So help us God. Amen.