The following is excerpted from Meister Eckhart: A Mystical Warrior for Our Times, published by New World Library.
When Passion for Creation, my book of sermons by Meister Eckhart, appeared in 1980, the very first response I received was not from a Christian theologian or preacher but from a Sufi. His correspondence was long, and it surprised me, pleasantly so. At that time, like most in our culture, I was less aware of Sufism. Today, the West is much more familiar with it, thanks to the dissemination of Rumi’s stunning poetry, to Hafiz’s amazing work, and to the Dances of Universal Peace inspired by Samuel L. Lewis, which has moved (literally and spiritually) so many people around the world.
Here is the portion of Eckhart’s sermon that so moved the Sufi. Eckhart says:
Love is nothing other than God. God loves himself and his nature, his being, and his divinity. In the same love, however, in which God loves himself, he also loves all creatures, not as creatures but he loves the creatures as God. In the same love in which God loves himself, he loves all things. Now I shall say something I have never said before. God enjoys himself. In the same enjoyment in which God enjoys himself, he enjoys all creatures. With the same enjoyment with which God enjoys himself, he enjoys all creatures, not as creatures, but he enjoys the creatures as God. In the same enjoyment in which God enjoys himself, he enjoys all things.
This brief passage, out of a book of 580 pages, so inspired this Sufi that he immediately sat down, composed a ten-page “Sufi exegesis” working from his tradition, mailed it to me, and in his accompanying letter declared, “Eckhart is a Sufi.”
What Is a Sufi?
What is a Sufi? Who are the Sufis? Sufis represent the mystical tradition of Islam, and for centuries they have practiced their faith, sometimes amid considerable opposition. As mystics, they seek to taste God and not just pronounce about God or think about God. Sufis want to do the deep inner work of the soul and not settle for the outer trappings of religion. They do not want to jettison religion so much as to explore the deeper and multiple meanings of doctrine and dogma, rites and rituals, life, death, and resurrection.
Idries Shah (1924–1996) was an eminent historian of Sufism, a Grand Sheikh of the Sufis, and eldest son of the Nawab of Sardana, near Delhi in India. In his book The Sufis, he asks:“Exactly how old is the word ‘Sufism’? There were Sufis at all times and in all countries, says the tradition. Sufis existed as such and under this name before Islam.” Sufis themselves call it “a science, an art, a knowledge, a Way, a tribe — but they do not call it Sufism.” Shah likes the term “the Path of the Sufi.” In addition, “the Sufi is known as the Seeker, the Drunken man, the enlightened one, the good, the Friend, the Near One, the dervish, a Fakir (humble, poor in spirit), or Kalandar, knower (gnostic), wise, lover, esoterist.” The Sufi tradition is not monastic — it does not propose leaving the world or taking vows of celibacy. Sufis like to consider themselves “a leaven (Sufism is yeast) within all human society.” Sufism is “an adventure in living, a necessary adventure,” according to the tradition.
Rumi (1207–1273) died when Eckhart was thirteen years old, and Rumi’s spiritual genius, as expressed in his prodigious output of poetry, is without parallel. Thanks to people like Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Andrew Harvey, and others, he has become the best-known Sufi in our time. Rumi offers this simple poem about Sufihood.
Destroy your house, and with the treasure hidden in it
You will be able to build thousands of houses.
The treasure lies under it; there is no help for it;
Hesitate not to pull it down; do not tarry!
In these four lines, Rumi distills the central imperative of Sufism, using language that echoes that of many thinkers in this book. The message to seek and find a treasure is also Jesus’s message (and Eckhart’s); for them, it is seeking the Kingdom of God. Yet the treasure is hidden below, under our house. It takes work to uncover, and it is in the ground. This recalls Eckhart’s “ground,” Mother Earth, the lower chakras, Jung’s unconscious, and even Rank’s “beyond.” To “destroy” and “pull down” our house is the via negativa, the letting go and the rupture that lead to Eckhart’s “breakthrough,” to the via creativa and via transformativa. Eckhart says: “If you want the kernel, you must break the shell,” and the kernel is the realization that “God and I are one.” Is this not a treasure that could build “thousands,” and infinite thousands, of houses?
What is this “house” that needs to be torn down? Idries Shah describes Rumi’s “house” this way: “Within mankind is a ‘treasure,’ and this can be found only by looking for it. The treasure is, as it were, inside a house (fixed thinking-patterns) which has to be broken down before it can be found….Man sees only pieces of things because his mind is fixed in a pattern designed to see things piecemeal.” It is our “fixed thinking-patterns” that need to be let go of, our idols, our frozen mind-sets, which include seeing the world only through anthropocentric, not cosmic, glasses. This sounds very close to Father Bede Griffiths’s teaching as well.
The Sufi way puts experience first. Says Rumi: “He who tastes not, knows not.” Wisdom comes from tasting, even from “sucking,” as the Kabbalah speaks about it. As this book shows, direct experience of God is key to any religious or spiritual awakening. This was certainly Eckhart’s consistent purpose — to wake people up to their capacity for the Divine, to the inner reality of their being a “son of God, a daughter of God.” This direct experience is distinct from knowledge alone. Historically, Sufism has struggled with those theologians, scholars, and academics who live more in their left brains than their right brains, for whom “tasting” is less important than conceptualizing. Ghazali (1058–1111) lived in Central Asia and wrote a book called Destruction of the Philosophers in which he took on the powerful scholastics (also called “schoolmen”) of his day. Ghazali says: “Apart from incapacity itself, other shortcomings prevent the reaching of inner truth. One such is knowledge acquired by external means.” Knowledge is not wisdom; and knowledge by external means does not lead to the hidden treasure, the meaning of life.
The long, ongoing struggle between the Sufi (or Love) dimension of Islam and the scholastic theologians sheds light, I think, on the tensions in medieval Europe between the Franciscans (who opt for love first) and Dominicans (who argue that knowledge comes first, since you can only love what you know). This battle waged in Eckhart’s time and in his consciousness. He brought the topic up often and sided with his Dominican lineage, prizing knowledge. However, in a sermon that I believe was delivered very near the end of his life, Eckhart comes to a surprising conclusion: He overthrows both God as love and God as knowledge in favor of…God as compassion! “I say that beyond these two, beyond knowledge and love, there is compassion. In the highest and purest acts that God works, God works compassion.” This major and original breakthrough led Eckhart, at the end of this sermon, to put forth compassion as the very meaning of soul: “The soul is where God works compassion. Amen.” He returns not to our knowledge of God but to our practice of God’s essence, which is compassion.
Hiding the Mystical Heart: A Survival Mechanism
Throughout Islamic history, as happened to mystics in Christian history as well, Sufis were often attacked and even persecuted by religious officials and political powers and academicians who were subservient to them. Thus, the early poetic expressions of Sufism often embodied a political strategy; they were an indirect way of talking about experienced truth within a controlled society and religion dominated by conceptual thought, much as how, during the slavery days in America, Negro spirituals were often coded messages about liberation. But the poetry, full of analogy and metaphor, was also meant to thwart easy understanding, which might reduce hard-won Sufi wisdom into a few facile “truths.”
Says Shah, “Writing often under threat of inquisitorial persecution, Sufis have prepared books reconciling their practices with orthodoxy and defending the use of fanciful imagery. In order to obscure the meanings of ritualistic factors, or for the necessary purpose of appearing mere compilers of Sufi compendiums, they have handed down manuscripts for which the Sufi essence is to be distilled only by those who have the necessary equipment.” Robert Graves makes a similar point: “The poets were the chief disseminators of Sufi thought, earned the same reverence as did the ollamhs, or master poets, of early medieval Ireland, and used a similar secret language of metaphorical reference and verbal cipher….This language was a protection both against the vulgarizing or institutionalizing of a habit of thought only proper to those that understand it, and against accusation of heresy or civil disobedience.” Graves describes how Ibn El-Arabi was once called before an Islamic inquisition at Aleppo. Graves says that, in his defense, El-Arabi “pleaded that his poems were metaphorical, the basic message being God’s perfection of man through divine love.” This is the same message as is found in the Bible’s “Song of Songs.”
Indeed, we can see the same techniques in Eckhart’s work — his playfulness with language, his humor, his oft-repeated phrase “Now pay attention,” his paradoxical statements, his surprising and even shocking sayings (“I pray God to rid me of God”). These were often spontaneous but they were also a way to put inquisitor types off his trail, and they worked for a number of decades during his preaching vocation. (I also followed a parallel strategy when I named my early books after dreams and nursery rhymes. It gave me breathing room from inquisitor types who tend to be quite underdeveloped in areas of humor and childlikeness.) Eventually, of course, the dominant powers caught up with Eckhart and sponsored two trials against him late in his life. Thus, as we can see, diverting inquisitorial attacks through poetic metaphor is another strategy he shares with Sufis.
Sufis like to say: “This is not a religion; it is religion,” or “Sufism is the essence of all religions,” which provides “a belief in an inner teaching beyond formalized religion.” In other words, Sufism puts spirituality first — getting to the heart of the matter, the lived experience of the Divine. Eckhart does the same; he tried to get deeper than the “formalized” version of Christianity. Sufism explicitly practices what I call Deep Ecumenism, honoring the essence of religious teaching and the lived experience of Divinity, found in all religious traditions.
Idries Shah points out that Ibn El-Arabi (1164–1240), called “the greatest Master” or Sheikh, “confused the scholars” because he practiced Islam as a “conformist in religion while remaining an esotericist in inner life.” This is not unlike the case with Father Bede Griffiths, who remained a Christian Benedictine monk while seriously critiquing the institutional church, or Eckhart, who stayed true to his Dominican vocation to the end. Shah says that Ibn El-Arabi, “like all Sufis,…claimed that there was a coherent, continuous and perfectly acceptable progression between formal religion of any kind and the inner understanding of that religion, leading to a personal enlightenment. This doctrine, naturally, could not be accepted by theologians, whose importance depended upon more or less static facts, historical material and the use of reasoning powers.”
Not too much changed between El-Arabi’s day and Eckhart’s, nor in my opinion has much changed between Eckhart’s day and ours. Still today we have academicians ignoring and mistranslating and belittling the mystics. The same was true in Jesus’s day. Jesus also developed art forms, stories, parables, and aphorisms to confound the legalistic and pharisaical minds of his day.
Robert Graves remarks that love and ecstasy are central to Sufi teaching, but that “whereas Christian mystics regard ecstasy as a union with God, and therefore the height of religious attainment, Sufis admit its value only if the devotee can afterward return to the world and live in a manner consonant with his experience.” Regarding this distinction, Meister Eckhart is perhaps one exception who proves the point (along with other Christians as well, including those committed to liberation theology, like Dorothy Day and many others). As we have seen, Eckhart teaches the same Sufi ideal about merging action and contemplation. To some degree, the Sufi teaching may have been integrated into the Dominican ideal that Eckhart lived and espoused, that of “sharing the fruits of one’s contemplation.” St. Dominic, after all, was a Spaniard and very much exposed to both the scholastic dimension to Islam and Sufi devotional practice. This may have expressed itself in the story of his having invented the rosary and in the Dominican devotion to Mary and the Divine Feminine.
©2014 by Matthew Fox. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com
Teaser image by Shawn Carpenter, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
