Eckhart on Advent, Christmas, and Humanity’s Deification

Are Advent and Christmas meant to be reminders of Divinity and the Christ being born in us?  Meister Eckhart invokes Clement of Alexander who writes: “The baptized, ‘in whom dwells the Word, possesses that beautiful form of the Word; such a person is assimilated to God as is beautiful himself or herself.’  It is then rightly that Heraclitus said: ‘Men are gods and gods are men.’  This mystery indeed is revealed in the Word, God in people and people in God.”

Eckhart develops at considerable length this theme of the deification of humanity, a theme so regrettably lost in Western spirituality, almost since his condemnation.  But he is careful to make the proper distinction, as, for example, in the following analogy: 

When you pour a drop into the stormy sea, the drop changes into the sea and not the sea into the drop.  This is also how it happens to the soul.  When God draws the soul to himself, then the soul becomes divine, but God does not become the soul.  Then the soul loses its name and its power but not its will and not its being.  Then the soul remains in God as God remains in the Godself.

We are reminded that the soul, like a drop in the divine sea, becomes the sea or God, but the sea does not become the drop.  God does not become the soul.  At his trial Eckhart repeats this need to clarify the meaning of our deification.  “To say that the deified person is nothing other than God is false and an error,” he insists.  So, while becoming God, we also remain ourselves—with will and being intact.  

On many occasions Eckhart gives the reason for the Incarnation as our becoming divine and the child of the divine.  He says, “The reason why God has become a person is that he may beget you as his firstborn Son, and nothing less.”  

No wonder Eckhartian scholar Schurmann can exclaim that for Eckhart “the glory of God is man deified; a man such as this God ‘must’ love.  His love for him ‘cannot not be’ since he gives to this man the very love with which he loves his own nature, that is, the Godhead.”

God bestows his whole divinity on God’s sons and daughters! Eckhart has in mind the line from John’s Epistle: “Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God’s children; and that is what we are.” (1 Jn. 3.1)  ‘That is what we are’—here lies so much of Eckhart’s inspiration for developing the theme of our divine son/daughtership in God.

He repeats this understanding of God on another occasion: “God’s supreme purpose is to beget.  He is never content unless he begets his Son in us.”  Just as God bears his son by nature all the time, so we too are born as the adopted sons and daughters without ceasing.  Christmas becomes a daily thing.

Adapted from Matthew Fox, Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, pp. 318-322.
Banner image:  “Advents kranz” Image by Pete Jelliffe on Flickr

What examples can you point to that exhibit the deification in human beings?  Might Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. King, Sister Dorothy Stang and Abraham Lincoln, all saintly humans be such evidence?  And people in your own life you have known who may not have been public saints but deeply graced and beautiful?  And those serving on the front lines so generously and courageously in a time of pandemic?

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