Sayings

THIS IS MEISTER ECKHART FROM WHOM GOD HID NOTHING

1. Meister Eckhart said, A man of godly love, godly fear and perfect faith may, and he will, receive God’s body every day at the priest's hands.

2. The question is what does God do in heaven? The answer given by the saint is this, He crowns his own work: the works God crowns his saints for he created in them himself.

3. Meister Eckhart says, I have been asked what God is doing in heaven. I answer; He has been giving his Son birth eternally, is giving him birth now and will go on giving him birth forever. The Father being in labor, as a woman giving birth to a child, in every virtuous soul. Blessed, three times blessed, is the person within whose soul the heavenly Father is brought to bed in this manner. All she surrenders to him here she shall enjoy from him in life eternal. God made the soul on purpose for her to bear his one-begotten Son. His birth in Mary through the Spirit was better pleasing to God than his nativity of her in flesh. When this birth happens nowadays in the good loving soul, it gives God greater pleasure than his creation of the heavens and earth.

4. Meister Eckhart says, He who is at home everywhere is God-worth; to him who is ever the same is God present, and in him in whom creatures are stilled, God bears his one-begotten son.

5. Meister Eckhart says, Holy Scripture cries aloud for freedom from self. Self-free is self-controlled, and self-controlled is self-possessed, and self-possession is God-possession and possession of everything that God ever made. I say to you, as true as God is God and I am a man, if you were quite free from self, free as the highest angel, then you would be as much like the highest angel as you would be yourself. This method gives self-mastery.

6. According to Meister Eckhart, Grace does not come except with the Holy Spirit. It bears the Holy Spirit upon its back. Grace is no stationary thing, it is ever becoming. It is flowing straight out of God’s heart. Grace does nothing but re-form and convey God. Grace makes the soul conformable to the will of God. God, the ground of the soul, and grace go together.

7. Question, does God pour his grace into a power of the soul or into her essence, for no creature is allowed in the essence of the soul? The answer is that grace is a matter of the soul and nothing else, and grace without soul is not grace at all. It is immaterial for it is not true creature, it is creaturely. Grace, to be grace, must have the soul for substance, for if God poured his grace into a power of the soul that power alone would benefit. Not so, he instills it into her essence, and essence works by grace in all her powers.

8. Meister Eckhart says, Practice is better than precept; but the practice and precept of eternal God is a counsel of perfection. If I wanted a teacher of theology, I should go for one to Paris, to its learned university. However, if I came to ask about the perfect life, why then he could not tell me. Where then am I to turn? To pure and abstract nature, nowhere else: that can solve your anxious questions. Why, good people, search among dead bones? Why not seek the living part that is directly connected with creation and that gives eternal life? The dead neither give nor take. An angel seeking God as God would not anywhere for him except in a quiet, solitary creature. The essence of perfection lies in bearing poverty, misery, scorn, adversity and every hardship that befalls, willingly, gladly, freely, eagerly, calm and unmoved and persisting until death without a why.

9. Meister Eckhart says, He who is ever along is Godworth and to him who is ever at home is God present and in him who stands ever in the present now does God the Father bear his Son unceasingly.

10.  God's every inflection is a lure. I give no thanks to God for loving me because he cannot help it, it is his nature to; what I do thank him for is that he cannot of his goodness leave off loving me.

11.  Meister Eckhart being questioned as to God's greatest gift to him answered, There are three. First, cessation of carnal desires and pleasures. Secondly, divine light enlightens me in everything I do. Thirdly, daily I grow and am renewed in virtue, grace, and happiness.

12.  Brother Eckhart said, Not all suffering is rewarded; only what is cheerfully consented to. A man hanged on the gallows, suffering unwillingly, were better pleased that it had been another. There is no reward for that. Other sufferings the same. It is not the suffering that counts, it is the virtue. -- I say, to him who suffers not for love to suffer is suffering and is hard to bear. But one who suffers for love suffers not and his suffering is fruitful in God's sight.

13.  Meister Eckhart says, we ought not to have to ask God for his grace, his divine goodness, we ought to contrive to take it ourselves without asking. God has gotten himself in his divine outflow just as the flowing ...

14.  Mind you, all our perfection, our whole happiness, depends on our traversing and transcending creature, time, and state; and entering the cause that is causeless.

15.  God being still sets everything going. So desirable a thing starts them all running back into that from whence they came: to that which stays unchanged in its own self; and the nobler the thing the more jubilantly it runs.

16.  What could be sweeter than to have a friend with whom, as with yourself, you can discuss all that is in your heart?

17.  Speaking of man we mean a person; speaking of manhood we mean human nature.

18.  Doctors define what nature is. It is the thing that essence can take on. God took on manhood and not man. I say: Christ was the first man. How so? What is first in intention is last in execution, as the roof is the finish of the house.