--- title: "Sermons, Collations and Tractates" author: "Meister Eckhart" translator: "C. de B. Evans" languages: [en] shelf: "Mystics" section: 84 of 132 url: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/84/ cite: "Meister Eckhart, tr. C. de B. Evans, Sermons, Collations and Tractates, section 84. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/84/" --- # 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. ## 84. Sermon 84 · Like the Morning Star Source: https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/84/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/eckhart-sermons-evans/84/#p-N [¶0] Quasi Stella matutina in medio nehulce etc, {EccL 50), ‘ Like the morning star in the midst of a cloud and as the moon at the full and as the sun in his glory, so did he shine in the temple of God.’ These words are commonly applied to aJl the saints and teachers who in their virtuous lives and knowledge of God have been a shining light to worldly hearts which, caught with creatures in the fog and cloud of darkness or ignorance, are straying like blind men from the way of eternal liberation, but more especially do they apply to the holy father we celebrate to-day, St Dominic by name, a mainstay of Christendom and founder of the Preaching Order which he started and established to propagate God’s word and to help poor sinners. [¶1] He shone like the morning star in the temple of God. What is God and what is the temple of God ? Four and twenty doctors met together to settle what God is, and they could not do it. Thereafter at a time appointed again they came together bringing each his verdict. Of these I will pick out two or three. One says : God is something to which all changing, temporal things are nothing ; all that has being is from him and is insignificant compared with him. Another says : God is somewhat that transcends being, that in itself needs none and that all things need. A third says : God is the intelligence which occupies itself solely in understanding itself. [¶2] Passing over the first and the third I will speak of the second ; God transcends being. Nothing that has being, time or place is proper to God, he is above them ; his being in all creatures shows him superior to them, for that which is the same in many things . must be prior to them. According to some doctors, the soul is in the heart alone. Not so ; it is an error some eminent Scholastics make. The soul is whole and undivided at once in foot and eye and in each member of the body. Again, I take a span of Sermon on St Dominic’s Day. See also Jostes, No 31. [¶3] time, which need not be to-day ov yesterday. But if I take the now that includes all time. The now wherein God made the world is as near this time as the now I am speaking in this moment, and the last day is as near this now as was yesterday. [¶4] One of the doctors says : ‘ God is impartible, eternally energising in himself, immanent, uriindigent of instrument or aid, in need of none but what all things need and to which all things tend as to their final goal.’ To this goal there is no way, it is beyond all ways, debouching in the open. St Bernard says, ‘ Divine love is a wont without a way.’ I'he physi(‘ian who sets out to make a sick man whole has no particular mode of lu'altJi in view ; he has a mode whereby he hoj)cs to make him well, but how well he hopes to make him is not sjiccilied : he will make him as well as he can. How shall we love God then ? As well as we can ; without measure. Each thing works after its own fashion ; things do not work in natures superior to their own ; fire, for examjde, only works in wood. God works above all natures, in the unconditioned ; wherever he can stir he is at work in modeless mode. Before ever there was being God was working : he wrought in non-existent being. Advamted theology lays down that God is abstract being : he is as mucli above being as an angel is above a fly. I hold it is as wrong for me to say that God is being as to say the sun is black or white. God is neither this nor that. As St Dionysius says, He who thinks that he sees (iod, if he sees aught sees naught of God.’ But when I say God is not being, is superior to being, I do not witli that deny him being : I dignify and exalt it in him. If I find some copper in the gold, as existing there it is in a nobler being than itself. St Augustine says : God is mode-free mode, power-free power, good-free good. [¶5] In the elements of the Scholastic teaching, we find being divided into ten modes (or categories), all ol’ which are denied to God. God is subject to none of these mod(‘s nor is he deficient in any. The first, which has most being of them all, wherein all things have being, is substance ; and the last, which has least being, is called relatio, and in God it is the same as the first one is, which has most being. In God all things have the same form (idea), though this is the form of very different things. The most exalted angel, the soul, the fly, have all the same prototype in God. God is not being nor yet goodness. Goodness cleaves to being and does not go beyond it : if there were no being there would be no goodness. Being is purer than good. In God is no good nor better nor best. To say that God is good is to do him wrong ; as well say that the sun is black. But our Lord himself declares, ‘ None is good but God alone.’ What is good ? That which communicates itself. Him we call a good man who gives himself and is of use to people. And hence the dictum of a heathen doctor, A hermit is neither good nor bad, in the sense of giving himself and helping other people.’ God par excellence communicates himself. No thing gives of its own being, for creatures are not of themselves. What they give they have gotten from another. Nor do they give themselves. The sun gives light, no more ; the fire gives heat, the fire itself remains ; but God does give his own, for it is from himself he is and in all the gifts he gives he first and foremost gives himself. In all his gifts he gives himself: God, as he is, so far as the recipient will allow. St James says, ‘ Every good gift comes down from above from the Father ol‘ lights.’ [¶6] When we take God in his being we take him in the forecourt of his habitation, for quiddity or mode is the way into his temple. Then where is God in his temple ? Intellect is the temple of God wherein he is shining in his glory. Nowhere does God dwell more really than in the temple of his intellectual nature, where he is in his stillness by himself, all undisturbed. As one of the doctors says, God in his self-perception is perceiving himself in himself. [¶7] Now turning to the soul, she has a drop of intellectual nature, a spark, a ray, and she has sundry powers which function in the body. One is the power of digestion, more active by night than in the day, whereby man grows and thrives. And the soul has a power in the eyes which makes the eye so sensitive and delicate and too fastidious to accept things in the coarse-grained mode they have themselves, but they must first be filtered and refined by light and air, owing to the presence in it of the soul. Another power in the soul is that wherewith she thinks. This power is able to picture in itself things which are not there, so that I can see the things as well as I see them with my eyes, or even better. I can see a rose in winter when there are no roses, therefore with this power the soul produces things from the non-existent, like God who creates things out of nothing. [¶8] A heathen philosopher observes that the soul who loves God takes him under the veil of goodness ; and so far I have quoted mainly from the heathen doctors who know in the light of nature merely. I have yet to come to the sayings of the saints who see in a light far more exalted. He says then, that the soul in loving God is taking him under the veil of goodness. Intellect draws this veil from God and takes him bare, stripped of goodness, of being and of every name. [¶9] At the School [the College of St Jacob] I used to teach that intellect is higher than the will, both as belonging to this light. Another theologian at the other School put will before the intellect on the ground that will enjoys things as they are in themselves, whereas intellect enjoys them as they are in it. That is quite true. The eye in itself is a better thing than the eye as painted on the wall. Nevertheless, 1 still maintain that intellect is higher than the will. Will takes God under the garment of good. Intellect seizes him naked, divested of good and of being. Goodness is a garnxent under which God is concealed and will takes God in this garment of goodness. If God had no goodness my will would repudiate God. It would be unseemly to robe a king in drab on his coronation day. I am not hap])y by reason of God’s goodness. Never should I think of asking God to beatify me with his goodness, for he could not do it. Goodness is his vesture. My beatitude lies wholly and solely in the fact that God is knowable and in my knowing him. A philosopher says, The intellecit of God is what angelic being is suspended from. [¶10] It is a question where the image really has its being : in the mirror or the object it proceeds from ? My image is in me, of me, mine. While the mirror faces me, it is my image in it; if the mirror falls it is my image which has been destroyed. Angelic being likewise depends upon the presence of God’s intellectual nature wherein he secs himself like a morning star enveloped in the mist. I always have before my mind this little word quasi, like : indeed, it is the burden of my entire teaching. What at school the children call a mock, a by-word. [¶11] The truest thing that man can predicate of God is word-andtruth. God calls himself a word. And St John says, ‘ In the beginning was the Word,’ meaning that man is a word with the eternal Word. Like Venus, Fria’s star, which Friday is named after and which has many names. When it is earlier than the sun and is uj) before it then it is called the morning star ; when it rises later than the sun and the sun sets lirst then it is called the evening star. Now it is above and now IxJow the sun, hut of all the stars it best keeps its distance from the sun, never going far away, and the moral of this is that any man who would attain to God must stay by, in the presence of, God the whole time and refuse to let God be put out of his mind by fortune or misfortune or by any creature whatsoever. [¶12] And he says, ‘ like the moon at the full in his days.’ The moon is the ruler of moist nature. The moon is never nearer to the sun than at the full, and then it gets its light at first-hand from the sun, but owing to the fact that of all the stars it is the nearest to the earth, it suffers from two drawbacks : being pale and mottled and also being liable to lose its light. It is never so potent as when it is furthest from the earth, and in that position it tells most upon the sea ; when it is on the wane its effect gets less and less. And the higher the soul rises above earthly things the more powerful she grows. Merely creature-lore will place a man beyond the need of sermons. For every single creature is a book. But anyone who means to get to that whereof we speak, to where my arguments all tend, must be as the morning star : a man in the presence of God, always with him, equally near him and exalted above mundane things : a word by the Word. [¶13] There is one word both thought and spoken : angels, the soul and all creatures. Another Word, thought but unspoken, I can conceive. And there is still another Word unthought of and unspoken which never proceeds forth but is eternally in him who speaks it : in the Fatlier, for it is he who speaks it, it is eternally proceeding and abiding. Intellect is intrinsically active and more and more outwardly effective in proportion as it is directed inwards. God’s ha])piness consists in its operation. And here again the soul should be an ad -verb. As the intellect of the soul turns more inwards, the more closely, more minutely is it identified with what it knows. The more powerful it is the more clearly it reflects and is atoned with God. That is not the case with corporal things : the stronger they are the more external is their action. God’s happiness lies in the subjective working of the intellect wherein his Word abides. It is this eternal Word the soul should be a word with and, doing one work with God, she will find her happiness in self-perception : in the very thing that God is happy in. May we ever be a word with this Word, So help us the Father and this same Word and the Holy Ghost. Amen.