Meister Eckhart's Sermons (Field translation) · 23 of 23 · tr. Claud Field
VII-c
When a good work is done by a man, he is free of it, and through that freedom is liker and nearer to his Original than he was before.
The moral task of man is a process of spiritualization.
All creatures are go-betweens, and we are placed in time that by diligence in spiritual business we may grow liker and nearer to God.
The aim of man is beyond the temporal—in the serene region of the everlasting Present.
In this sense the New Birth of man is the focus towards which all creation strives, because man is the image of God after the likeness of which the world is created.
All time strives towards eternity or the timeless Now, out of which it issued at creation.
The merely temporal life in itself is a negation of real being, because it depends on itself and not on the deepest foundation of life; therefore also natural love is cramped finite and defective.
It must through grace be lifted to the highest sphere of existence, and attain to freedom outside the narrow confines of the natural.
Thereby love becomes real love, because only that is real which is comprehended and loved in its essence.
Only by grace man comes from the temporal and transitory to be one with God.
This lifting of manifoldness to unity is the supreme aim of ethics; by thus the divine birth is completed on the side of man.
This passage from nothingness to real being, this quitting of oneself is a birth accompanied by pain, for by it natural love is excluded.
All grief except grief for sin comes from love of the world.
In God is neither sorrow, nor grief, nor trouble.
Wouldst thou be free from all grief and trouble, abide and walk in God, and to God alone.
As long as love of the creature is in us, pain cannot cease.
This is the chief significance of the suffering of Christ for us, that we cast all our grief into the ocean of His suffering.
If thou sufferest only regarding thyself, from whatever cause it may be, that suffering causes grief to thee, and is hard to bear.
But if thou sufferest regarding God and Him alone, that suffering is not grievous, nor hard to bear, because God bears the load.
The love of the Cross must swallow up our personal grief.
Whoso does not suffer from love, for him sorrow is sorrow and grievous to bear; but whoso suffers from love he sorrows not, and his suffering is fruitful in God.
Therefore is sorrow so noble; he who sorrows most is the noblest.
Now no mortal’s sorrow was like the sorrow which Christ bore; therefore he is far nobler than any man.
Verily were there anything nobler than sorrow, God would have redeemed man thereby.
Sorrow is the root of all virtue.
Through the higher love the whole life of man is to be elevated from temporal selfishness to the spring of all love, to God: man will again be master over nature by abiding in God and lifting her up to God.
Eckhart's signature doctrine that the Father eternally begets the Son in the ground of the soul; the human interior as the actual site of the divine generative act, distinct from inner_light's static indwelling.
[auto] The text centers on the 'New Birth of man' and states that 'the divine birth is completed on the side of man,' reflecting Eckhart's signature doctrine.
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
The structure of creation reflects the likeness of man/God, implying a reflection between levels.
Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit/Gelassenheit — radical letting-go of will, image, and grasping that opens the soul to God; distinct from inner_silence (quietness) and from material renunciation, and adjacent to Sufi tark and Buddhist non-grasping as a practice rather than a metaphysical claim.
[auto] The passage explicitly describes 'quitting of oneself' and being 'free of it' as the path to God, aligning perfectly with Eckhart's doctrine of radical letting-go.
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.
Temporal life is described as a 'negation of real being' and natural love as 'defective,' aligning with evil as a lack of good.
Sufi self-effacement in God — the via by which the lover is unmade as a separate ego and recovered as God's act; specifies the practice/event rather than mystical_union's resulting state.
The 'quitting of oneself' and passage from 'nothingness to real being' mirrors the concept of self-effacement.
Diotima's staged ascent from love of beautiful bodies → beautiful souls → beautiful pursuits → beautiful knowledge → Beauty itself; the canonical scala amoris that grounds Plotinus's On the Beautiful and Bruno's Eroici Furori — distinct from generic spiritual_ascent in that eros is the specific motive force.
Love must be 'lifted to the highest sphere' through a process of elevation.
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.
Man is described as the 'image of God after the likeness of which the world is created.'
Eckhart's radical reading of Matthew 5:3 — the saint as one who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing, having emptied even the will and the self with which to receive God; distinct from renunciation_of_wealth (material poverty).
Being 'free of it' and the 'quitting of oneself' reflects the radical emptiness required for divine reception.
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.
Temporal life is characterized as depending on itself 'not on the deepest foundation of life,' indicating a state of exile.
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] The aim is described as becoming 'liker and nearer to his Original' and attaining unity with God through grace, which defines deification.