Four Variations on Love

‘Branch of apple blossoms’ – Gustave Courbet, 1871 – WikiArt

.

“God is love, and he who dwells in love
dwells in God and God in him.”
~ The Bible (1 John, 4:16)

.

I have been reading Meister Eckhart’s sermon n°5 lately, in the translation by Clare de B. Evans, from an old publication named simply ‘Meister Eckhart’. It’s a sermon dedicated to love and its many aspects. At the very beginning, Meister Eckhart sums up the nature of love in four magistral sentences that had a deep effect on me. So I decided to write down some of my take and understanding on each of these quotes by the Meister and present them to you. I hope they will be of interest…

.

“‘God is love’. That is so, inasmuch as all that can love,
all that does love, he compels by his love to love him.”
~ Meister Eckhart

It is greatly convincing to think that we can love someone or something. That there is something inside us, a quality or emotion, that can spring out of our mind and body and direct itself towards an object, a someone loved, a something loved, and that this love is a personal affair. Well now the question arises: What is it in us that can love, and what is this other that is loved? Notice first that there is nothing in you that can love but love itself. Our mind is in no capacity to love. Rather love happens, shows up naturally, when our mind is set aside for a while — for our thoughts, most of our thoughts, have the power to defeat love, to render it unfelt, dormant, as if inexistent. So if you love anything, anyone, it is not because of him, or her, or it. It is because you have been freed from yourself as a private, separate self or mind, and that in this freedom, love can arise, unfettered, can stretch its dormant limbs, and shine in all directions. After all, have you ever been in love with someone without at the same time loving everyone, everything, around that one? Love is an awakening, an opening. And in that opening, in that crack, reality shows its profound nature. Love is the profound, intimate nature of everything. So when you love someone, there is nothing there, and nobody, no other, that can be loved, except the essence that this one is. Therefore you can only ever love the essence. And you could not love the essence of anything if you were not yourself the essence of everything. That’s how you are compelled, when you love anything, to love god first, which is the essence of both the lover and the loved.

.

“‘God is love’, secondly, inasmuch as every God-created and loving thing
compels him by its love to love it, willy-nilly.”
~ Meister Eckhart

Have you noticed how much you love yourself? Everybody is in love with himself or herself. You would do anything for yourself. Anything at all — the good and the bad. Actually most of our evil, inconsiderate deeds are in fact done out of our love of ourself. We want to be happy and our unhappiness drives us mad, leaves us irritated, resentful, in a fit of pique. So we act out of this offense, this deep sense of lack or suffering. And on the brighter side of it, all of our hard work, of our sacrifices, of our patient, one-pointed deeds, are also done out of our love of ourself. So you love yourself. You want the best for yourself. You want yourself to be good, to feel good. You want yourself to be loved and to love. And in so loving yourself, you find all the necessary incentive to go through the travails of life. So if you love dancing, or playing music, or doing anything, this deep love will provoke the one essence hidden behind it into giving itself out through an act of creation, which is nothing but love in action. So god is not just god, far and away from yourself, distant from who you are. You are made of that gorgeous essence, from which you draw your impeccable willingness to live, and your loveliness to love. For the love with which you love yourself, or what you do, is not yours. Love is a universal tool which you borrow from the most gorgeous fabric of the divine. So when you love yourself, you compel the essence of what you are to show its benevolence towards yourself as a person. Therefore you too are in capacity to compel god to love you. That’s the extent of the power you have been given.

.

“‘God is love’, thirdly, inasmuch as his love
drives all his lovers out of multiplicity.“
~ Meister Eckhart

It is convenient and easy to believe that love is a private affair. Believe me, it is not. Love is out in the open, sheltering us all under its vault. Dependence may be private, as are jealousy, desire, hope, mind, body, but love is the calibre of everything. It is the one constituent of our lives and of our relationships. Love wasn’t meant for ownership. If you want to possess love, or to make it personal, love will then retire and leave you separate from it. Its absence will create an entity inside you. Love will then become something that you have to strive for, and this longing for love will be your suffering. You will lose this intimate connection that life is. You will make yourself your own, private, isolated one being, placed amongst many other such beings. You will fragment the world and bring separation amongst your living companions. You will live insecure amongst others. So don’t deprive yourself of this one love, for love is nothing short of being who you are. That’s why the Sufis have compared seekers to a company of drunkards in a tavern, inebriated by love. Because love is not a quality that flows amongst and between us poor and penniless people. Love is the essence of the tavern itself, our very one home and warm being from which we get to know the soothing taste of friendship and peace. Not because we are all loving each other, but because everyone of us is recognising his or her being as being the one being shared by all, and the one love that we all are in the deepest sense. Love is the absence of separation. That’s how god or love can drive us out of our miserable and illusory multiplicity.

.

“‘God is love’, fourthly, who by his love provides all creatures
with their life and being, preserving them in his love.“
~ Meister Eckhart

There is a tendency amongst us to believe that we can be ourself by ourself. That we are self-contained in our body, a material structure with its own panoply of thoughts, feelings, and sense perceptions. And that we are a separate entity with its own private life and being. And that I don’t owe anyone anything. Well you in fact owe something everything and I’ll tell you what precisely. You owe the illusion of your independence to the formidable force and influence of love. So observe now how your true and only independence as a human being lies in being knowingly dependent on God’s being. What is the being of god but its ultimate capacity of lending its being as the being of everyone and everything, which is an act of love? God pampers everything and everyone that springs out of its loving womb. So love is what ultimately holds the universe together. Notice that there cannot be love without the quality of being aware which goes with it. Love knows itself to be, and through this knowing, can infuse its love and being to everyone and everything in existence. So if you love, and if you are, and if you live at all, and have senses, feelings, the ability to think, and a world to live in, all that, the whole of it, is generated and preserved by the creative power of love. That’s how some have said the world to be the creation of god. Because the only way for a world to be is to be manifested or to exist, through something that is creative. And the only creative power in existence that I know of is love, which is nothing but the perfume or the emanation of god as ultimate, primary being or essence.

.

~~~

Quotes by Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

Additional text by Alain Joly

Painting by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)

~~~

.

Bibliography:
– ‘Meister Eckhart’ – Translated by Clare de B. Evans – (Franz Pfeiffer, 1924)
– ‘The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart’ – Translated by Maurice O’C. Walshe – (Crossroad Publishing Co ,U.S.)
– ‘Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings’ – Translated by Oliver Davies – (Penguin Classics)

Websites:
– Meister Eckhart (Wikipedia)
– Gustave Courbet (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Read this homage to Meister Eckhart on the blog: ‘This is Meister Eckhart’

.

– Back to Pages

.