Meister Eckhart and the “Eternal Birth”: The Heart of the Preacher

MEISTER ECKHART AND THE" ETERNAL BIRTH": THE HEART OF THE PREACHER W:HEN ONE HEARS the name of Meister Johann Eckhart, one thinks immediately of the mystic. But Eckhart was more than that. The Rhine mystic was also a German Scholastic, Dominican priest and prior, teacher and preacher. If one imagines Eckhart only rapt in mystical trance and lost to the world, then one perhaps underestimates his involvement with the people who constituted his parish and who gathered together each week to hear his homilies. Of the hundreds that Eckhart doubtless delivered in his lifetime , only a few of these sermons survive to our day.1 At the heart of the sermons that we do have, however, there emerges a singular theme which utterly absorbs this mystical preacher-what he calls the " Eternal Birth." It is clearly the focus for his own experience with God, and it serves·as well as the focal point for much of his homiletical work. The " Eternal Birth " is an exciting and profound concept for virtually any modern reader, made more difficult perhaps due to the absence in Eckhart's sermons of any systematic or comprehensive statement about it. If one is to gain some insight into this mystical thesis, then, one must immerse oneself in the extant homiletical material, lifting out relevant references to the Eternal Birth as they occur, bringing together these related statements into a meaningful and organized whole. This is the starting challenge behind the written 1 Only 28 of Eckhart's sermons are included in Raymond Blakney's classical translation of Eckhart's work (Meister Eckhart. New York: Harper and Row, 1941), which serves as the principal source for this article. All references that follow cite the number of the sermon per Blakney's arrangement, followed by the page number in the book. 238 MEISTER ECKHART AND THE" ETERNAL BIRTH" 239 work here, the result of which will hopefully be a clearer and more complete view of what Eckhart understood by this great, interior possibility. ECKHART'S STARTING POINT-TWO" GIVENS" Two fundamental facts, in Eckhart's view, constitute the background for understanding the occurrence of the Eternal Birth. The first has to do with the virtually insatiable hunger that human beings experience for God. Humans unavoidably, universally, find themselves in a lifelong search for the only food that will ultimately satisfy them, and that food is God. The second has to do with God's irresistible tendency, in turn, to give Himself freely and fully to His creatures. They that hunger for God will inevitably be fulfilled. And Eckhart is as certain of that as he is of the reality of his own firsthand experience of God. God gives Himself to human beings in a perfectly intimate manner. In the Eternal Birth, He bursts forth from within their inner life. Each of these two basic points merits some consideration. To begin, Eckhart identifies the pronounced human penchant for God as "irasc.ibilis ", defining this quality as the "upsurging agent" in the soul.2 Irascibilis inspires the human being on that perennial search for That Which will fill and fulfill . " As it is the property of the eye to see form and color and of the ear to hear sweet sounds and voices," Eckhart maintains , " it is the property of the soul ever to struggle upwards by means of this agent." 3 Once this irascibilis manifests itself within the personality, there is engendered within the self a driving restlessness, a restlessness that is concluded only when one has returned to the Origin of all. "So sweet is God's comz XIV, p. 163. Eckhart's choice of words is a bit baffling at first sight actually. The Latin word "irasci""bilis" has as its root the word "ira," denoting "wrath". It seems incongruous to associate a heated wrathfulness with the soul's inherent drive to seek out God. But consistent with this meaning Eckhart later speaks of the soul's determined struggling, crashing , and even stormin.Q of heaven itself in search of its Source. B[bid. 240 ROBERTS. STOUDT fort," Eckhart preaches, " that every creature is looking for it, hunting it.... Their very existence and life depend on their...