The Reality of the Spirit: A Sermon of Meister Eckhart
on being here now
It is, in fact, the antithesis of such feats of devotion and willpower. True poverty is the absolute and passive emptiness realized in wanting nothing, knowing nothing, and having nothing. Of this poverty we declare that it is the highest poverty. Secondly, we have said he is a poor man who does not know of the working of God within him. He who stands as free of knowledge and understanding as God stands of all things, has the purest poverty.
But the third is the straitest poverty … that is when a man has nothing … not even a place within him for God to work in. True poverty demands freedom from even this the noblest of human desires.
Eckhart is referring here, not to the kind of knowledge we require to function in the world. He is not suggesting that ignorance is bliss! Rather, he is identifying a particular form of knowledge that, more than anything else, prevents us from experiencing the One.
The knowledge to which he is referring is the awareness of distinction. This has neither before nor after, nor is it expecting anything to come, for it can neither gain nor lose.
Sermons (Meister Eckhart)
And so it is deprived of the knowledge that God is at work in it: What could this dangerous-sounding statement mean? But we say that God is not a being and not intellectual and does not know this or that. Thus God is free of all things, and so He is all things. A person may be utterly free from all earthly possessions yet not be poor in the sense that Eckhart intends.
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- One For Sorrow.
- WITHIN ECKHART:.
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- The Case for Gold (LFB).
This extreme position begs the question of how one can possibly experience union with God without having a place for God deep within oneself wherein God may enter and do his work. For if he finds a man so poor, then God performs his own work, and the man is passive to God within him, and God is his own place of work, being a worker in himself. It is just here, in this poverty, that man enters into that eternal essence that once he was, that he is now and evermore shall remain.
Meister Eckhart
The Absolute is thus the common background of God and the Universe. Like as the Son does, so everything born of God tends to return to Him, and to lose itself in the unity of His Being. This theology is really Pantheism. This is really the Divine in man; to know God is to be one with the abstract Divine reality.
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This is the final end of all our activity, and the means of attaining thereto is complete quietism of the sensory self. Eckhart did not shrink from expressing his doctrines out to their practical and logical conclusion, for which he was severly criticised. After he was accused of heresy by the Inquisition his followers particularly Suso, Tauler and the lay group The Friends of God were more circumspect and careful in public. He is believed to have been the author of the anonymous treatise, Theologia Germanica, which was a favorite of Martin Luther.
Sermons by Meister Eckhart , translated by Claud Field. The text of this document is from a public domain resource first published around Jan 29, Crystal J. De la Cruz - Hopper rated it it was amazing.
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Meister Eckhart - What a magnificent spirit. A brief but powerful sermon; love Meister Eckhart. Resent the minimum number of words required for book ratings.
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