Session Six
The Nobleman
Pages 91-103
Every person is an aristocrat, a noble person who possesses the seed of God’s divinity as all are made in the image of God infused with the ground of God.
The task before us is to wake up to the reality of our nobility.
We have an inner person and an outer person. Spirit and flesh. The inner person is inclined toward God and oneness. The outer person is inclined toward attachment.
One goes out to a far country to become rooted and grounded in one’s inner person, the soul, that we might live our lives from that inner depth.
No one is more noble or royal than another. All of us have royal blood, therefore ruling over other people is not a right that anyone has been granted by God. All are equal. One scholar has said that Eckhart drew this conclusion 450 years before Thomas Jefferson did. Matthew Fox writes, “Eckhart’s entire spirituality is a spirituality of the emergence of the royal person in us and among us.” It is noteworthy that Eckhart was very close to and preached to the Beguines who were of the peasant class. The Beguines were a lay religious order of women loosely structured and affiliated as they did not take official vows. They devoted themselves to simplicity, voluntary poverty, prayer, and care for the sick and poor.
The societal aristocrats of Eckhart’s day and other powerful people did not want him teaching the poor that they were noble. Eckhart preached in the vernacular of the people which further upset the people in power. They insisted that he preach in Latin so as not to upset the common people who did not understand Latin. Eckhart replied,”If one is not to teach the unlearned, then no one will ever be learned and no one will be able to teach or to write. One teaches the unlearned that they might become learned. If there were nothing new, nothing would ever become old.”
Eckhart lays out six stages of growth.
a. In stage one a person copies the actions and words of the good people around him/her.
b. In stage two one continues to look to good people, but also begins to turn toward God.
c. In stage three detachment begins. A person lets go of all that is not God and when he/she does bad things he/she does not worry too much because they did not intend to do so.
d. In stage four a person is rooted and grounded in love and welcomes all hardship as endured for love
e. In stage five inner peace breaks out like the dawn inside of a person
f. In stage six the separate self sense dies and union with God is realized. This person lives from the ground entirely with God.