God only loves himself
Meister Eckhart says that we should survey ourselves, and wherever we find ourselves, take leave of ourselves so that God alone can love himself in us.1 This is a perplexing notion so I would like to explore what it could mean. It obviously concerns a supremely esoteric topic so it will be impossible to do very much more than stammer around the crux of the issue in a desultory way, especially in a single essay. But I would like to press on nevertheless. People will be scandalized by the title of the essay unless they read it and thereby come to understand what it means.
We read the in the First Epistle of John that:
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.2
Meister Eckhart corroborates this statement: “What is God’s love?” he asks, “His essence and his being—that is his love.”3
All love is love for the Good, as Diotima says.4 That’s what “good” means—something that is worthy of our love. Many people may wish to debate this point but it’s axiomatic, as when we say that 3 is greater than 2. Moreover, our desire and our love is an expression of the assent of our will.5 “Love resides essentially in the will alone, so whoever has more will, has more love,” Meister Eckhart declares.6 The connection between love and will is also axiomatic given what the words mean. David Bentley Hart sums up all of these relations:
No one can freely will the evil as evil; one can take the evil for the good, but that does not alter the prior transcendental orientation that wakens all desire. To see the good truly is to desire it insatiably; not to desire it is not to have known it, and so never to have been free to choose it.7
Even if we love bad things, it’s not the bad in them we love but the good—or, crucially, the perceived good.
And there’s the rub, because our perceptions can be distorted, leading us to love and hence desire after things that seem good but are not. The mind should be “the mirror of nature,” but to begin with, it is more akin to a fun-house mirror than a faithful one. This is likely the result of accumulated trauma, Original Sin, ignorance, and a host of other causes working on the soul through time. Again, we never love things because they’re bad, but only because they seem—parts of them, anyway—good to us. The distortions in our perceptions reveal reason we need philosophy. Philosophy can be technically defined as the attempt to refine and perfect our ideas of the Good, and thereby “order our loves,” as Augustine wrote,8 towards the true Good and not its illegitimate likenesses.9 Philosophy, then, is best defined as “the pursuit of wisdom,” and wisdom is best defined as “an adequate Idea of the Good.” So philosophy is the project of refining and perfecting our ideas of the Good so that wisdom comes to dwell in us and we thereby become more perfect in love.
It might seem unattainable to achieve the perfect vision of the Good. But even if that’s true, it’s no reason in itself to despair of trying. For most people, the observation that perfect love is either unattainable or attainable only for fleeting moments does not lead them to throw up their hands and say, “therefore I can’t love at all.” Ideals don’t need to be achieved to provide value; instead they unselfishly overflow their virtue and bestow it onto anyone who seeks them. Of course, to quote Schiller “he must already be wise in order to love wisdom.”10 In other words, the fly in the ointment is that we already need wisdom in order to perceive these relations, which are otherwise as insignificant to us as a mirror to a blindman. And, alas, wisdom is not easily got, for it is, proverbially, “more precious than rubies.”11 But nevertheless, we should waste no time in turning what little wisdom we have into more, as in the “Parable of the Talents”12:
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
We can do this foremost through study, contemplation, and attempting to learn from life. That is to say, we should be seeking for wisdom if we have it not and yet desire it, or praying to desire it if we don’t even have that.
In the Book of Wisdom it says
For God loveth none but him that dwelleth with wisdom.13
Meister Eckhart explains that God’s love for wisdom is his love for Christ:
The masters are agreed that God’s wisdom is His only-begotten Son…therefore He Loves those who pursue Him, for He loves us only insofar as he finds us in Him.14
Christ is the Son, which is to say that he shares the same nature as the Father. Unlike creatures which are created, the Son is begotten. The nature of the Father just is the Good, and its this same nature that he loves in his Son. But we should not imagine the relationship between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity is between two persons external to us:
“Where is he who is born king of the Jews?” Now observe, as regards this birth, where it takes place: “Where is he who is born?” Now I say as I have often said before, that this eternal birth occurs in the soul precisely as it does in eternity, no more and no less, for it is one birth, and this birth occurs in the essence and ground of the soul.
In other words, “the Son” is a title or a station and not a single person. In order for our love to be perfect, we must become the Son, or give birth to him in us, which is the same thing. Meister Eckhart summarizes all of the points above to conclude:
What does God love? God loves nothing but Himself and what is like Himself, insofar as He finds it in me and me in Him.
In other words, whereas human love is dative, as it were, or ordered towards the perceived good embodied in some object, God just is the essence of that good as such. Christ is an image and embodiment of God’s own substance, and hence for the Father to love the Son is to love himself. His love is reflexive, or rather, identity. God’s love and God’s being are the same.
So, how do we enter God’s love, which is, to say, how do we enter God’s will? As indicated at the outset of this exploration, Meister Eckhart affirms Jesus’ statement that to become blessed we must be “poor in spirit,”15 which he interprets to mean “poor in will”16:
When we go out of ourselves through obedience and strip ourselves of what is ours, then God must enter into us, for when someone wills nothing for themselves, then God must will on their behalf just as he does for himself. Whenever I have taken leave of my own will, putting it into the hands of my superior, and no longer will anything for myself, then god must will on my behalf, and if he neglects me in this respect, then he neglects himself.17
Elsewhere, he affirms that “the lack of peace you feel can only come from your self-will, whether you are aware of this or not.”18 What is this “self-will”? It is love ordered to anything but God for his own sake. It might seem that we are giving up something by emptying ourselves of our self-will, but the self-will was actually taking away from us. If we give away a debt, we gain a credit. Similarly, by divesting ourselves of perversions of our will, our will is not diminished but magnified.
Meister Eckhart, Collected Works, 7.
John 1 4:8
Meister Eckhart, Collected Works, 139.
Plato’s Symposium, 206a-b:
…since what men love is simply and solely the good. Or is your view otherwise?’
‘Faith, no,’ I said.
‘Then we may state unreservedly that men love the good?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Sadly, this also entails that the extent to which someone’s will is depleted, they will also be unable to love so they should waste no time in praying that their will be restored and pursuing this repletion by the means available to them.
Meister Eckhart, Collected Works, 7.
David Bentley Hart, Radical Orthodoxy “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilho.”
Augustine sets forth the ordo amoris as “the definition of virtue.” Cf. Augustine, City of God, XV.22, trans. Marcus Dods:
And thus beauty, which is indeed God’s handiwork, but only a temporal, carnal, and lower kind of good, is not fitly loved in preference to God, the eternal, spiritual, and unchangeable good. . . . For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately. . . . But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if He Himself is loved and not another thing in His stead, He cannot be evilly loved; for love itself is to be ordinately loved, because we do well to love that which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously. So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love.
And finally, gratitude is the spontaneous reaction of the soul to the recognition of (1) its own existence and (2) the Good in the world and (3) the fact that it did nothing to deserve any of these things but that they were rather given as gifts from above.
Sie müßten schon weise sein, um die Weisheit zu lieben: eine Wahrheit, die Derjenige schon fühlte, der der Philosophie ihren Namen gab.
—Friedrich Schiller (1795)
She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her. (Proverbs 3:15)
14For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. 15And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey. 16Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents. 17And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two. 18But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.
19After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. 20And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more. 21His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
22He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them. 23His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
24Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: 25And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.
26His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: 27Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. 28Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.
29For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. 30And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Wisdom 7:28
Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, 139.
Matthew 5:3
Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, 7.
Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, 4.
Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, 5.
Thanks for sharing this! Interesting way of thinking about God’s Love and His Love for us. We exist only by His Love for sure and I think His Love for us is eternal so yes very very comforting
Meister Eckhart was the first of the so-called, "Rhineland Mystics", whose number was 11. Rudolf Steiner's very first lecture-course before the Berlin circle of theosophists in late 1900, was about these mystics, and not at all about philosophy.
https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA007/English/RSP1960/GA007_index.html
Meister Eckhart, in definite respects, has a very intimate relationship to God Himself, as you denote very well. In fact, it can be likened to the latter-day disciple of Christ, who would put his head on the breast of Christ at the Last Supper, and ask: "who is it"?
Of course, there is a story here. Surprisingly, it is rarely spoken of in anthroposophical circles today, and for many years in my experience. According to Steiner, the disciples of Christ were formerly the Maccabees of the Old Testament time of the Maccabean Revolt. This is described here, and why these 12 were chosen to be the direct followers of Christ. It is an intriguing story:
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA139/English/AP1986/19120916p01.html
Well, it would lead to the further occasion of the faithful disciples of Christ, numbering 11, after their deaths on earth, and sojourning together in the sphere of Venus, to experience the true meaning of what they experienced as the followers of Christ. Thus, it was in the mystical mood of Venus that they learned for the first time about Adam Kadmon. Adam Kadmon became the common denominator of the Rhineland Mystics. And the Eleven each individually showed a hierarchical progression, with Eckhart demonstrating the most direct kinship to God Himself. This is well documented by now in the scholarly work of people like Rufus M. Jones, who wrote particularly of Jakob Boehme.
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA184/English/RSP1985/19181005p02.html
Please consider the Venus Wisdom described here.