Signs of the True Ground

[Thomas]

This is a text from Meister Eckhart, whom most agree is someone who knew what he was talking about.

SIGNS OF THE TRUE GROUND

According to one master, many people arrive at specific understanding, at formal, notional knowledge, but yet there are few who get beyond the science and the theory; yet one man whose mind is free from notions and from forms is more dear to God than the hundred thousand who have the habit of discursive reason.

God cannot enter in and do his work in them owing to the restlessness of their imagination.

If they were free from pictures they could be caught and carried up beyond all rational concepts, as St Dionysius says, and also have the super-rational light of faith at its starting-point, where God find his rest and peace to dwell and work in as he will and when he will and what he will.

God is unhindered in his work in these so he can do in them his most precious work of all, working them up in faith into himself.

These people no one can make out; their life is an enigma, and their ways, to all who do not live the same.

To this truth and to this blessed life, to this high and perfect consummation no one can attain except in abstract knowledge and pure understanding.

Many a lofty intellect, angels not excepting (for in life and nature an angel is nothing but pure mind), has erred and lapsed eternally from the eternal truth and this may happen also to those who, like the angels, preserve their idiosyncrasy and find satisfaction in the exercise of their own intelligence.

Hence the masters urge, and saints as well, the use and the necessity of careful observation and close scrutiny to test the light which flashes in, the light of understanding and of vision which man has here in time, lest he be the subject of hallucination.

If you would know and recognize the really sane and genuine seers of God, whom nothing can deceive nor misinform, they can be detected by four and twenty signs.

The first sign is told to us by the chief exponent of knowledge and wisdom and transcendental understanding, who is himself the truth, our Lord Jesus Christ. He says, 'Thereby ye shall know that ye are my disciples, if you love one another and keep my commandment. What is my commandment? That ye love one another as I have loved you,' as though to say, ye may be my disciples in knowledge and in wisdom and high understanding but without true love it shall avail you little if nothing at all. Balaam was so clever he understood what God for many hundred years had been trying to reveal. This was but little help to him because he lacked true love. And Lucifer, the angel, who is in hell, had perfectly pure intellect and to this day knows much. He has the more hell pain and all because he failed to cleave with love and faith to what he know. --

The second sign is selflessness; they empty themselves out of themselves giving free furlough to things. ---

The third sign: they have wholly abandoned themselves to God: God works in them undisturbed. --

The fourth sign: wherever they still find themselves they leave themselves; sure method of advancement. --

The fifth sign: they are free from all self-seeking: this gives them a clear conscience. --

The sixth sign: they wait unceasingly upon God's will and do it to their utmost.

The seventh sign: they bend their will to God's will till their will coincide with God's. --

The eighth sign: so closely do they fit and bind themselves to God and God to them in the power of love, that God does nothing without them and they do nothing without God --

The ninth sign: they naught themselves and make use of God in all their works and in all places and all things. --

The tenth sign: they take no single thing from any creature, neither good nor bad, but from God alone, albeit God effect it through his creature. --

The eleventh sign: they are not snared by any pleasure or physical enjoyment or by any creature. --

The twelfth sign: they are not forced or driven by insubordination: they are steadfast for the truth. --

The thirteenth sign: they are not misled by any spurious light nor by the look of any creature: they go by the intrinsic merit. --

The fourteenth sign: armed and arrayed with all the virtues they emerge victorious from every flight of vice. --

The fifteenth sign: they see and know the naked truth and praise God without ceasing from this gnosis. --

The sixteenth sign: perfect and just, they hold themselves in poor esteem. --

The seventeenth sign: they are chary of words and prodigal of works. --

The eighteenth sign: they preach to the world by right practice.

The nineteenth sign: they are always seeking God's glory and nothing at all besides. --

The twentieth sign: if any man fight them they will not let him prevail before accepting help of any sort but God's. --

The twenty-first sign: they desire neither comfort nor possessions, of the least of which they deem themselves all undeserving. --

The twenty-second sign: they look upon themselves as the most unworthy of all mankind on earth; their humbleness is therefore never-failing. --

The twenty-third sign: they take the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ for the perfect exemplar of their lives and in the light of this are always examining themselves with the sole intention of removing all unlikeness to their high ideal. --

The twenty-fourth sign: to outward appearance they do little who are working all the time at the virtuous life, hence the disteem of many people, which, however, they prefer to vulgar approbation.

These are the signs of the true ground wherein lives the image of the perfect truth and he who does not find them in himself may account his knowledge vain and so may other people.

 

[wil]

Those first two steps...pretty high...

3-9 submission to Allah, quite Muslim

10 sounds like Jainism

11 oops... there are many creatures which have provided pleasure...

over all... quite the bar... I like it... something to strive for... Other than thinking our elder brother and wayshower provided a life and words to live by, no saviour/messiah stuff required.

no definition of G!d, pretty wide open interfaith stuff....

I don't understand number 24 at all... are they saying that others look down on monks and priests because they aren't out producing and working?

 

[Devils' Advocate]

As to 24. My translation as I understand it - they do not care about the distain of many people who look down on them; they prefer it to faint praise.

 

[Devils' Advocate]

Thomas, please forgive me if I say that I find what you have posted as the ideal of a person's life about as far from an ideal of a life as I can imagine. Basically sit on a hilltop, removed from any earthly existence, and bask in the praise of The Lord.

This is one of the things about the supposed 'true path' that I find most abhorrent. Basically don't live life. Ignore it and spend all your days preparing for the next life. What a waste of a life!

We are here to live. Here! Live in the here as if it were the only life one may ever have, as it is entirely possible that is the truth of it. But even if there is a life beyond, that does not mean that one should not partake of all this version of life has to offer. In balance of course. Extremes of anything is never good. Including an extreme of Godliness.

I'm not suggesting the alternate dimensions of existence should be ignored. Absolutely, it should be studied, experienced as best we can, from as many of the ways man has devised to view it. There are mysteries within mysteries within mysteries in our current existence. Many false, and many true.

Living this life comes first. Preparing for the next comes second.

 

[Thomas]

Those first two steps...pretty high...

Well this is Eckhart speaking. He, like all, praises detachment as the prince of virtues.

3-9 submission to Allah, quite Muslim.

Eckhart speaks from God's pov, but the God of whom he speaks is the God of the Bible, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

10 sounds like Jainism,

But absolutely differs in its view of God, creation and the soul. Jainism is a jiriki doctrine, of deliverance through one's own efforts. Eckhart is tariki, 'other power' or 'outside help' – theosis or Divine 'adoption' as sons. He follows the Paul and the Fathers in teaching the ascent of the soul by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who reveals the Son, and the Son who reveals the Father.

The disposition of man is the same in all religions, and that's why people make the common error of saying all religions say and point to the same thing. They clearly don't. It's what man disposes himself towards that pins the fundamental distinctions. Thus the a priori axioms on which religions are founded are different and quite distinct.

Popular opinion tried to make Eckhart a 'Zen Christian', but that doesn't quite work either. You can't separate Eckhart from his faith, and in that he follows in a long Catholic tradition. What it points to is the transcendent insight of Catholic metaphysics with regard to God. He was a Dominican monk, and although ill-informed popular 'escapism' like to present Eckhart as a 'rebel'. He was denounced as a heretic by a German bishop, although the charge was never formally ratified, the case never coming to court. But that conveniently ignores the fact he was a 'reformer' in bringing break-away German idealist movements back to the Catholic faith.

11 oops... there are many creatures which have provided pleasure...

Your oops, I think. See step ten.

over all... quite the bar... I like it... something to strive for... Other than thinking our elder brother and wayshower provided a life and words to live by, no saviour/messiah stuff required.

It seems so, if one takes no account of the faith axiomatic to his message. It all hinges on Divine Grace and the Trinity, on the Liturgy and the Eucharist.

Eckhart sees sin as the mis-direction (harmatia) of the will toward the finite and its pleasure therein – the self and the world. The vocation of the soul is to rest in God, nowhere else. The direction of the will misses that mark, and thus constitutes sin as an objective reality. The moral dimension of sin is that the choice to aim at the self and the world is a knowing choice.

Eckhart then views the result of sin, I think, much like Augustine. Not ending up in a dungeon, but simply 'going out' like a candle deprived of oxygen. This ties in with the Biblical metaphor of Gehenna, the trash heaps rotting away to nothing.

Redemption can only happen when the creature makes room in his soul for the 'abstract experience' (non-experience) of the work of God, as spoken of in the Beatitudes. Not by the experience of the world, not even of the virtues if they are seen as for the sake of the world.

What is the work God accomplishes in the soul? The birth of the Son. How does He do it? By the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit – as He did in the Theotokos. How does this happen? It's a mystery beyond our comprehension. We have no idea. All we have is faith. That's why we revere the Theotokos, because we echo what she said: "Let it be done according to thy will" (Luke 1:38). Her faith will always be greater than ours because she speaks from absolute ignorance, we speak in the light of the knowledge of Christ.

How does Eckhart know this? Because of the Incarnation.

No Incarnation, no birth of the Son, neither in the world, nor in the soul. If not real, then not metaphorically – because a metaphor compares like with like, not like with some imagined thing. Thus for me, it can never be a 'grok' thing, because that 'grok' always remains abstract and other, not matter how deep one's knowing, it can never match the depth of one's being, from which knowing arises. Theosis is being beyond gnosis.

True gnosis is a knowing of the mysteries; Theosis is being in the mysteries. The soul actually becomes what it was created to be by incorporation, not merely understands what it was created to be by intellection. "We know, that, when he shall appear, we shall be like to him: because we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2).

This is what people don't 'grok' about Jesus Christ. He didn't 'get it', He 'is it'.

The soul becomes by grace what Jesus is by nature.

On the Eucharist – what the Tradition sees in the Eucharist is a prolongation of the Incarnation. The Eucharist is made a sacrament by hypostatic union, the same union that brought the Son into the world.

The 'material' of the Eucharist is made a sacrament by God taking the world to Himself, a symbol of the soul's ascent to God. The Eucharist is process from the top down, as it were. The soul does not ascend of itself, it is drawn up into God, by God.

This was Our Lord's greatest gift, the ratification of the principle of transcendence, and in that Our Lord is the Eucharist, precisely because in Him God and man coincide in such a way that, as Eckhart would say, 'all distinctions disappear'. Eckhart also said that if God withdrew His Presence from the creature, the creature, unable to sustain itself, would disappear 'like a shadow when a cloud passes across the sun'.

no definition of G!d, pretty wide open interfaith stuff....

Eckhart is Catholic, so the God of which he speaks is a given – the God of the Bible, no other. Indeed, none of this works, for Eckhart, without the Trinity. Don't forget his metaphysics is taken from his sermons and letters of spiritual direction.

A profound explication of his Catholic metaphysics is found in Meister Eckhart of Divine Knowledge by C.F. Kelley.

I don't understand number 24 at all... are they saying that others look down on monks and priests because they aren't out producing and working?

Yep. The reverse is the case, actually. They live more real lives than many who surround themselves with the trappings of materialism. All 'they' can see are finite good. What the monk sees is theophany.

 

[wil]

which begs the question...what if the whole world were monks?

 

[Thomas]

Thomas, please forgive me if I say that I find what you have posted as the ideal of a person's life about as far from an ideal of a life as I can imagine. Basically sit on a hilltop, removed from any earthly existence, and bask in the praise of The Lord.

Taken at face value I can understand that, but it is exactly what Eckhart didn't do! He was busy 'in the world', constantly travelling and working. I agree there are those hermits against whom such a charge might be laid, but people like Eckhart, Aquinas, a whole host of others, worked in the world to a prodigous degree. Their travels alone are remarkable.

True, they weren't making furniture or farming or flying planes, but they hadn't retreated to some mountain fastness to live a life in silent contemplation ...

Living this life comes first. Preparing for the next comes second.

I agree, perhaps with the corollary of combining the two. This is the life we have, and we should engage in this life as if it were the next.

Peace on earth and goodwill to all men. All that good stuff.

Actually, Pope Francis bangs on about this a lot. True Christianity is not 'happy-clappy' self-congratulatory attendance at mass and parish functions. It's 'living on the edge', it is outreach ... and not in the airy-fairy speculation of mystical states, 'finding one's bliss' or what have you, but putting oneself on one side, and caring for one's neighbour in every sense of the word.

Stripped to its secular sense, that's what Jesus did. In the Gospels He's always sitting with the edge of society, with the outcast and the sick and the down-trodden. Tax collectors and wine-bibbers. Besides what I obviously believe, 'social justice' had to be part of the success of His message. He didn't talk about it in conference suites, university halls and society functions to the rich and the famous, He lived it out there on the road ... His message might have been God rather than revolution or the birth of socialism, but then He was talking to people who held God as a significant part of their lives.

He made people believe they mattered.

His message was not one of beneficence flowing down from above (spiritually, politically or otherwise), but of sharing.

The Early Church was remarkable in that princes rubbed shoulders with paupers ... OK ... OK ... a bit of hyperbole, but there is evidence that status in society was truly put to one side in the community of believers ... now we end up with nameplates on pews and the front rows reserved for the lord and lady of the manor, or special guests ... Penny to a pound says if you find Christ there, He'll be at the back with those who's breathe has the distinct whiff of alcohol ...

As you're a good-natured atheist, and give ACOT a nudge too, I'll tell you this.

People like to claim that the Church 'went wrong' when Constantine called Nicea. We invented Creeds, wrote the Bible, dreamed up the Trinity, blah, blah, blah ...

Nope.

Where we went astray is in taking on more than just the administrative brilliance of the Roman Empire. Like 'em or loathe 'em, the Romans were damned good administrators. No better model available at the time. No, we also took on their pomp and circumstance, we forgot we were pilgrims of the Way, and thought ourselves princes in procession ... this happened a couple of centuries later. It didn't change the doctrine, but it radically effected the way it was 'doctored' to a world in need of healing ... that's where the cause of all our troubles lie.

But don't tell anyone I told you that.

 

[Thomas]

which begs the question...what if the whole world were monks?

He's not saying everyone should be a monk, he's defending those who do not pursue material reward.

 

[Devils' Advocate]

Where oh where did you get the idea I was an atheist? I am good natured most of the time though, so one out of two is not so bad. In actuality I am more deistic than anything else. The Universe is God. We are all God. It is not a separate entity. It is us!

I enjoyed you last paragraph about where the Church might have gone astray. I've never thought of it like that before and it seems to me that there is a lot of common sense truth in what you suggest. Might it not have been inevitable though? Large organizations tend to eventually become administrators because the organizational mind thinks it knows best for all.

As for the rest of your thoughts, I'm not surprised I took the signs literally. They seem on the surface very self oriented. Inwards looking, rather than outwards. I will ponder this some from the point of view you describe and see how it fits.

 

[Thomas]

Might it not have been inevitable though? Large organizations tend to eventually become administrators because the organizational mind thinks it knows best for all.

Oh yeah ... a tutor once said to me the miracle wasn't that Christianity became the state religion, but that it survived becoming the state religion!

(Some, of course, would question that survival ... but then so would I)

I'm a trad! I'm all for administrative hierarchies, where I get uppity is when hierarchies decide it's better those below are kept in the dark. Bureaucracy and all that. The tendency to cover its errors.

That's what happened to Pope Benedict. JP II was 'a man of the people' and was well liked 'abroad' the Church. He ditched the 'red shoes' for a pair of Doc Martin boots! He was a great walker, was JP II ...

Pope Benedict knew he wasn't the man for the job and never wanted it; he is a brilliant theologian, but hasn't got the 'common touch' when it comes to dealing with the world and, more importantly, the Curia. He's like me, too idealist and outspoken, too much the rotweiller!

His shoes were hand-made by a master craftsman round the corner from the Vatican. Didn't do his trade any harm, with a picture of the Pope in every shop window ...

Pope Francis has got it in spades! (D'you know that saying over there?). He's as much a reformer as Benedict tried to be, but he had the people behind him from the get-go, so he's got the bureaucracy running scared...

In his first two days in the job, Francis wore an ordinary pair of black shoes, rejecting the smart red shoes made for him.

Before he left Buenos Aires for Rome, apparently he was wearing a pair of shoes so shabby that friends insisted on buying him a new pair.

"The day he was departing for the conclave, a couple of friends brought him a pair of shoes. He's always very humbly dressed and the shoes he was wearing were not in very good shape," a pair of South American priests told Vatican Radio.

You can tell a lot by a pair of shoes ...

 

[wil]

No, I didn't suggest he was saying everyone should be a monk....but if it is something to aspire to....it is following Jesus in the utmost way...

What would the world look like if everyone chose to strive for those 24? who would collect garbage? pick tomatoes? build roads... run the electrical plant?

 

[Thomas]

No, I didn't suggest he was saying everyone should be a monk....but if it is something to aspire to....it is following Jesus in the utmost way...

I really don't think Eckhart is saying the life of the monk is something to aspire to, but that disposition towards life, in whatever form it takes, is something to aspire to.

What would the world look like if everyone chose to strive for those 24? who would collect garbage? pick tomatoes? build roads... run the electrical plant?

I don't see any impediment to striving for those 24 while collect garbage, picking tomatoes, building roads or running the electrical plant? Unless, like Homer Simpson's boss Mr Burns, you're running the plant (etc., etc.) in pursuit of wealth, power, etc.

There are disproportionately more saints among the laity in the Catholic Church than among the priesthood, and if you are a saint you are a de facto mystic, you just don't show all the whoo-hoo trimmings that the world, in its wisdom, requires a mystic to display ... being a monk is not a prerequisite of being a mystic. Precious few monks are. Precious few enter a monastery for that reason.

As I think Pope Benedict said, the Church needs more saints, not theologians.

 

[BigJoeNobody]

I'll try to catch up on this some time, but from what I read the OP was a description of idealic (SP?) for most if not all religions. If not, I could have seen such a work from a Muslim, and not batted an eye in difference. Or maybe I'm too tired to see the blatantly unIslamic part.

 

[Thomas]

... but from what I read the OP was a description of idealic (SP?) for most if not all religions.

The most part is addressed to the man, not to what the man believes, so in that sense it is universal, because man is the same everywhere.

If not, I could have seen such a work from a Muslim, and not batted an eye in difference.

That's true, but that's always the case. I can read Rumi or Shankara and not see anything too distant from Christianity. It's when you get into the detail.

Or maybe I'm too tired to see the blatantly unIslamic part.

No, nothing blatantly unIslamic there. In fact quite the reverse, I would have thought.

Most of my 'religious' contentions – the dogmas of Christianity aside – are over tariki (other-power)-jiriki (self-power) debate. Tradition's dispute with the modern Christian doctrines is not so much a matter of heresy as ideology. 'Other-power' with its dependences and obligations goes against the grain of modern consumer society – and American ideology – so there is a large element seeking to reimagine Christianity as a jiriki methodology – and two ancient strands come to the fore:

Modern neo-Gnosticism (from the 2nd century models) is a romantic repackaging (I really think it's appeal is because it was made infamous by the Church, not to mention Stoicism and Platonism). Ancient gnosticism enshrined a nihilistic 'other-power' – the demiurge – the world being created and governed by a mad god, and the gnostic seeker – the psychic – is utterly dependent upon the gnostic pneumatic – in effect his guru – for his salvation).

Neo-Pelagianism again promotes the idea of working one's own salvation without the need for all the 'esotericism' of Gnosticism's cosmological shenanigans, but ignores the fact that Pelagius would have regarded the Signs listed above as the absolute base minimum requirement.

Both systems, Gnostic and Pelagian, make climbing Mount Everest look like a stroll in the park when compared to the spiritual path. The former because the seeker fundamentally screwed until the spark is kindled from outside, the latter because the most part of the human race lack the required 'ascetic athleticism' to attain its end.

Why I'm going on about all this is there is essentially no difference between the disposition of the traditional Jew, Christian and Muslim. In fact, the very words Islam and Muslim – from the same root – states it absolutely – submission to the will of God.

In that sense, I can accept the Prophet (PBUH) as the Seal of Prophecy – because what more is there to say?

 

[wil]

Some more...

Eckhart Tractates