by Meister Eckhart
Riddance is Sermon XCVI in C. de B. Evans's 1924 translation of Franz Pfeiffer's collected works of Meister Eckhart. Its scriptural text is from Ecclesiasticus 24:30 — "He that heareth me is not ashamed" — and the sermon turns on the word "heareth": to hear the eternal Word of the Father, the soul must be rid of three things: body, number, and time. From this deceptively practical opening the sermon builds toward one of the most celebrated utterances in all of Christian mysticism: "The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one vision, one knowing, one love."
Eckhart (c. 1260–1328) was a Dominican friar, theologian, and mystic, born in Hochheim in Thuringia. He studied and taught in Paris, held the chair of theology at Cologne, and rose to the rank of Vicar-General of the Bohemian province. In 1326 the Archbishop of Cologne brought heresy charges against him; Eckhart appealed directly to the Pope, died in 1328 before the verdict, and was posthumously condemned in the bull In Agro Dominico (1329). D.T. Suzuki declared him the one Western mystic who could speak the language of Zen — and the eye-passage is the reason: subject and object, seer and seen, dissolve into one act.
This archive presents the complete text of the sermon in the translation of C. de B. Evans, published in London by John M. Watkins, 1924, as Volume I of his edition of Meister Eckhart's works. Evans translated from Franz Pfeiffer's 1857 critical edition of the Middle High German text (Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. ii), where the work appears as Sermon XCVI. Source digitised at the Internet Archive (identifiers: meistereckhart0001eckh; in.ernet.dli.2015.31707). The sermon is reproduced here as a public-domain archival text.
Qui audit me non confundetur (Eccl. 24:30). The eternal wisdom of the Father says, 'He that heareth me is not ashamed. (If he is ashamed he is ashamed of his shame.) He that worketh in me does not sin. He that reveals me and fears me shall have everlasting life.' I will consider first these words of the eternal wisdom, 'He that heareth me is not ashamed (or, confounded).' To hear the eternal wisdom of the Father he must be within, at home and by himself.
Three things prevent our hearing the eternal Word. The first is body, the second number, and the third is time. If we were rid of these three things we should be living in eternity and in the spirit, solitaries in the desert listening to the eternal Word. But our Lord says, 'No man heareth my word or my teaching till he be free from self.' To hear God's Word demands absolute self-surrender. Hearer and heard are one in the eternal Word. The subject the eternal Father teaches is his essence, his nature, his whole godhood, which he divulges to us altogether in his Son, teaching us to be the Son himself.
A man who has gone out of himself and is the only-begotten Son owns what is proper to the only Son. God's work and teaching are all done in his Son. God works with the sole object of getting us to be his only Son. As soon as he perceives that we are his only Son, God makes for us impetuously; he comes wellnigh to shattering his essence, naughting his very self, in his rash haste to show us the whole abysm of his Godhead, the fullness of his essential nature. God flies to make this ours as it is his. Here God enjoys and delights in his plenitude. And this man who is within God's love and ken is none other than what God is himself. Loving thyself thou lovest all men as thyself. While thou lovest anyone less than thine own self thou dost not love thyself in truth: not till thou lovest all men as thyself, all men in one man who is both God and man. The man who loves himself and all men as himself is righteous, absolutely just.
Sometimes people say, 'I like my friends and benefactors better than other people.' But I say that is wrong, imperfect. True, we must make shift with it as we have to do with a side wind to cross the sea: it will take us over. Like our preference for one man above another, it is natural. To love another as myself means that I would as lief his fate for good and ill, for life and death, happened to me as him, which would amount to perfect understanding.
As bearing on this subject St Paul says, 'I would I were divorced from God for ever, for God and for my friends' sake.' And as you know, to leave God for an instant is to leave God eternally and to leave God at all is hell torment. What does St Paul mean then by wishing to be divorced from God? Doctors debate whether St Paul was upon the way to his perfection or whether he was perfect? I say he was perfect, otherwise he could not have said this.
I will put into plain words what St Paul means by wishing to depart from God. Man's last and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God. St Paul left God for God: he left everything he could give or take of God, every concept of God. In leaving these he left God for God since God remained to him in his essential self; not as a concept of himself, nor yet as an acquired thing, but God in his essential actuality. This is no case of give and take between himself and God: it is the one and perfect union. Here man is the true man whom suffering can no more befall than it can befall the divine essence, for, as I have said before, there is something in the soul so nearly kin to God that it is one and not united. It is one; it has naught in common with naught and is naught to aught. Anything created is naught. It is remote and alien from creature. If man were wholly this he would be wholly uncreated and uncreaturely; if everything temporal were so, were comprehended in this one, it would be nothing else than the unity itself. Were I to find myself but for a single instant in this case, I should esteem myself of no more moment than a worm.
God gives to everything alike, and as flowing forth from God things are all equal; angels, man and creatures all proceed from God alike in their first emanation. To take things in their primal emanation is to take them all alike. If here in time they are alike, in God in eternity they are much more so. Any flea as it is in God is nobler than the highest of the angels in himself. Things are all the same in God: they are God himself.
God delights so in this likeness that he pours out his whole nature, his whole substance into it, in his own self. The joy and satisfaction of it are ineffable. It is like a horse turned loose in a lush meadow giving vent to his horse-nature by galloping full-tilt about the field: he enjoys it, and it is his nature. And just in the same way God's joy and satisfaction in his likes finds vent in his pouring out his entire nature and his being into this likeness, for he is this likeness himself.
It is a question whether those angels who are dwelling here with us to serve and guard us have less likeness in their joys than the ones abiding in eternity: is it in any sense a drawback to them to be serving and protecting us? No, not at all. Their joy is undiminished, so is too their likeness; for the work of the angels is the will of God and the will of God is the work of the angels. Neither in their joy, their likeness nor their work are these angels handicapped. If God should bid an angel go pick the caterpillars off a tree, the angel would obey him readily, nay, since it is God's will it would be his happiness.
Being established in God's will, a man will want what is God and what is God's will and nothing else. If he is sick he will not be wanting to be well. To him all pain is pleasure, multitude is pure and single, provided he is really in the will of God. Aye, though it were the pains of hell it would be joy and happiness to him. He has left himself and he is free, passive to all impressions. My eye can see colour because it is free to be coloured. When I see blue or white, my eye which is seeing the colour is taking the colour that it sees. The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one vision, one knowing, one love.
Man being thus in the love of God is dead to self and all created things, and no more mindful of himself than one a thousand miles away. This man abides in likeness, in unity, and there is no unlikeness in him. This man has left the world and himself as well. Supposing some man owned the world and for God's sake gave it up just as he had gotten it; then God would give him back the world and eternal life to boot. And if there were a second man possessing merely the good will, who thought; Lord were this whole world mine, nay two of them (or any number he may choose), I would resign it and myself as well, entire as I received it from thee: him would God recompense no less than if it had been given by his hand. Another man with nothing to resign, bodily or ghostly, would be the most resigned of all. He who for one instant wholly resigns self, to him shall all be given. To leave himself for twenty years and then to have self back again, an instant, is never to have left himself at all. He who both has and is resigned, nor ever casts one glance at what he has resigned but remains firm and unshaken and motionless in himself, that man is free. May we remain steadfast and immoveable, like the eternal Father. So help us God and his eternal Wisdom. Amen.
Colophon
Riddance (Sermon XCVI in the Pfeiffer edition) by Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328). This archive reproduces the translation of C. de B. Evans, published in The Works of Meister Eckhart, Volume I, London: John M. Watkins, 1924. Evans translated from the Middle High German text established by Franz Pfeiffer in Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. ii (Leipzig, 1857). The scriptural text is Ecclesiasticus 24:30. Source digitised at the Internet Archive (identifiers: meistereckhart0001eckh; in.ernet.dli.2015.31707). The sermon is reproduced here as a public-domain archival text.
Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
🌲