Friday, January 27, 2006

Quote: Meister Eckhart

Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow and to love him as they love their cow - they love their cow for the milk and cheese and profit it makes them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God when they love him for their own advantage. Indeed, I tell you the truth, any object you have on your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost truth.

1 comment:

gasparutto said...

And this is Meister Eckhart:
"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love." (From German Sermon No. 12.)
Less mystically:
"The nearness of God and the soul makes no distinction in truth. The same knowing in which God knows Himself is the knowing of every detached spirit, and no other. The soul takes her being immediately from God. Therefore 'God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself,' and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead."

Job does emotional judo when confronted by God's inquiry, because the universe literally realizes the need of God for Job. There is no separation from the Godhead, there is only identity. The creator is the only creator, and is the creator of all. The Rumi and Mclachlan poems are the beloved and the lover speaking with the same voice; Eckhart posits that there is only one eye beholding the seat of being; and the Book of Job cuts through the theological questions synthesized in the Manichean heresy: the material and the spiritual are identical, and it is the supposition of the "opposer" that inserts evil into the apprehendable world. We doubt God as and when God doubts us. We are separated from God as and when God is separated from us. We have the power to love God, in the same eternal grace with which we beg God to love us.