Meister Eckhart's Sermons (Field translation) · 13 of 23 · tr. Claud Field
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THE SELF-COMMUNICATION OF GOD St John xiv.
23 .—“If a man love me, he will keep my words; and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” We read in the Gospels that Our Lord fed many people with five loaves and two fishes.
Speaking parabolically, we may say that the first loaf was—that we should know ourselves, what we have been everlastingly to God, and what we now are to Him.
The second—that we should pity our fellow Christian who is blinded; his loss should grieve us as much as our own.
The third—that we should know our Lord Jesus Christ’s life, and follow it to the utmost of our capacity.
The fourth—that we should know the judgments of God.
All that may be said of the pains of hell is true.
St Dionysius saith, “To be separated from God is hell, and the sight of God’s countenance is heaven.” The fifth is—that we should know the Godhead which has flowed into the Father and filled Him with joy, and which has flowed into the Son and filled Him with wisdom, and the Two are essentially one.
Therefore said Christ, “Where I am, there is My Father, and where My Father is, there am I” And They have flowed into the Holy Ghost and filled Him with good will.
Therefore said Christ, “I and My Father have one Spirit,” and the Holy Ghost has flowed into the soul.
The soul has by nature two capacities.
The one is intelligence, which may comprehend the Holy Trinity with all its works and be contained by It as water is by a vessel.
When the vessel is full, it has enclosed all that is contained in it, and is united with that which it has enclosed, and of which it is full.
Thus intelligence becomes one with that which it has understood and comprehended.
It is united therewith by grace, as the Son is one with the Father.
The second capacity is Will.
That is a nobler one, and its essential characteristic is to plunge into the Unknown which is God.
There the Will lays hold of God in a mysterious manner, and the Unknown God imparts His impress to the Will.
The Will draws thought and all the powers of the soul after it in its train, so that the soul becomes one with God by grace, as the Holy Ghost is one with the Father and with the Son by nature.
In God it is more worthy to be loved, than it is in itself.
Therefore St Augustine saith that the soul is greater by its love-giving power than by its life-giving power.
If man might only abide in this union, and do all the works which have ever been done by creatures, he would be no other than God, if his higher powers so brought his lower powers under control, that he could only work God-like works.
That however may not be, and man’s highest faculty therefore contemplates God as best it can, and so influences his lower faculties that they can discern between Good and Evil.
Adam possessed that union with God which we have spoken of, and while he had it, his capacity contained the capacities of all creatures.
The load-stone attracts the needle, and the needle receives the magnetic power, so that it can also attract other needles and draw them to the load-stone.
But if one draws the first needle away, all the other needles come with it.
Thus was it with Adam: when, in his highest capacity, he was separated from God all his capacities deteriorated.
Thence came also discord and the clashing of oppugnant wills among the lower creation, and deterioration of their powers down to the lowest.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
The text describes the Godhead flowing into the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and then into the soul.
Final, collective cosmic judgment as an event in which the wicked are sentenced and the cosmos restored; distinct from psychopomp_journey (individual passage at death) and emphasising verdict where Zoroastrian frashokereti emphasises restoration.
The fourth loaf instructs believers to know the judgments of God and the pains of hell.
Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness.
Hell is defined as separation from God, implying evil is the absence of divine presence rather than a positive substance.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
Adam's capacity is described as containing the capacities of all creatures, mirroring the cosmos within the human.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
The text defines hell as being separated from God and describes Adam's deterioration following separation.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
[auto] Eckhart explicitly states that if man abides in union, he would be no other than God, reflecting the doctrine of deification.