The Book of Divine Consolation

The Book of Divine Consolation is a treatise that was written by German Dominican theologian, philosopher, and mystic, Meister Eckhart, around the year 1308. The noun “consolation” is rooted in the verb “to console” which means “to soothe.” Life has always given people a need for soothing, and these days that need seems stronger than ever, what with the rampant conflict that characterizes our country (and so many other countries), the persistent threat of coronavirus, and the exponential escalation of climate change. Not to mention all the struggles that people endure as individuals, which have little or nothing to do with politics, pandemic, or polar ice caps. Homo sapiens is a species marked by suffering of all sorts. Even those humans born into a life of total privilege have their moments of suffering; they might experience chronic pain or mental anguish, or be plagued with any number of debilitating fears and compulsions. Yes, even rich white men get the blues. Meister Eckhart offers what he quantifies as “some thirty” reasons for people to feel less sad, less scared, less angry, etc. in his Book of Divine Consolation, which I will synthesize and distill for you.

Meister Eckhart was born Eckhart von Hochheim around the year 1260 in central Germany, near Gotha. Little is known about his family and early life. The Order of Preachers, whose members are known as Dominicans, is a mendicant order of the Catholic Church that was founded in Toulouse, France, in December of the year 1216, by the Spanish priest Saint Dominic. The order is famed for its intellectual tradition, having produced many leading theologians and philosophers, including Thomas Aquinas. Eckhart probably joined the Dominicans when he was about eighteen. As a preaching friar, he attempted to guide his flock, as well as monks and nuns under his jurisdiction, with practical sermons on spiritual/psychological transformation and New Testament metaphorical content related to disinterest, or detachment. The central theme of Eckhart's German sermons is the presence of God in the individual soul, and the dignity of the soul of the just man. Eckhart's most famous single quote is, "The Eye with which I see God is the same Eye with which God sees me.” He frequently preached in the vernacular or seemed to stray from the path of orthodoxy, which made him suspect to the Church during the tense years of the Avignon Papacy.

In 1325, Eckhart became a target of the Inquisition. It was actually The Book of Divine Consolation that gave Nicholas of Strasbourg, who was then in charge of the German Dominican friaries, reason to investigate Ekchart for possible heresy, or anything contrary to orthodox Christian doctrine. Despite Eckhart satisfying his immediate superiors with a lost treatise called Requisitus, the archbishop ordered a more extensive investigation. This process began in late 1326, and throughout the following year-plus, Eckhart fought various heresy accusations, asserting that he had always detested everything wrong, and should anything of the kind be found in his writings, he would retract it. The case against him continued to move forward even after he died, which scholars tend to agree happened on January 28th, 1328. Though he was not personally condemned as a heretic, in March of 1329, Pope John XXII issued an edict that characterized a series of statements from Eckhart as heretical, and another as suspected of heresy.

It wasn’t until the last decade of the 20th century that the Dominican Order pressed for Eckhart’s full rehabilitation and the confirmation of his theological orthodoxy. In 1992, Timothy Radcliffe, then Master of the Dominicans, received a letter—I guess from the Vatican?—which he summarized as follows: “We tried to have the censure lifted on Eckhart ... and were told that there was really no need since he had never been condemned by name, just some propositions which he was supposed to have held, and so we are perfectly free to say that he is a good and orthodox theologian.”

I don’t know how much this anticlimactic decision affected Eckhart’s influence on more modern theologians and philosophers. Though largely forgotten from the 16th to the 19th centuries, interest in his work was revived in the early 1800s, and this interest was bolstered when Franz Pfeiffer published Eckhart's German sermons and treatises in 1857. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, as well as Erich Fromm, Carl Jung, J.D. Salinger, and Eckhart Tolle, are among the notable thinkers that Meister Eckhart has influenced. Indeed, in his wildly popular 1997 book, The Power of Now, Tolle quotes his supposed namesake as saying: “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.”

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I first encountered the words of Meister Eckhart in a truly incredible book by Aldous Huxley, called The Perennial Philosophy, which I read in the spring of 2018, mostly while sitting on an upside-down bucket in my back yard, savoring every word. A comparative study of mysticism and an elucidation of the philosophical and spiritual perspective that views all of the world's religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin, The Perennial Philosophy was first published in 1945, right after World War II. The New York Times called it “the most needed book in the world” and “the masterpiece of all anthologies.” Of its twenty-seven chapters, some titles include: That Art Thou, The Nature of the Ground, Time and Eternity, Immortality and Survival, and God Is Not Mocked. Just looking at the Table of Contents gives me a transcendent feeling. The Perennial Philosophy is essentially a collection of short passages taken from traditional Eastern texts and the writings of Western mystics, organized by subject and topic, with short connecting commentaries. Meister Eckhart is the most quoted person in its pages.

When having dinner at a friend’s house last year, I noticed an Eckhart anthology on his bookshelf. It was The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense. I was not at all shy about asking to borrow it, as I’d been wanting to read more of Eckhart since my exquisite communion with Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy a couple years prior and because I’d seen him quoted in other spiritual texts since then. Many thanks to that friend for lending me said book. I did not read the whole thing, which got a bit too in the Biblical weeds for my tastes and attention span, but The Book of Divine Consolation—which is really more like a book chapter—made a lasting impression.

One of the first consolations that Eckhart provides in his treatise reminds me of Amy Hempel’s short story, “The Harvest.” Hempel ends the first section of that story with the following sentence: “What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.” That last part, “nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be,” has stuck with me since I first read it as a graduate student at NC State in 2006. I realize it isn’t all that profound, at least not on the surface. It’s just another way of saying, “Well, things could be worse.” But for some reason, in the context of that story, the words resonated and reverberated, and they have consoled me many times over the past fifteen years. They consoled Meister Eckhart, too, seven hundred thirteen years ago.

Things could always be worse. As I’m writing this, for instance, I have a constellation of poison ivy rash snaking its way around my right forearm. It’s tempting to despair about being thusly afflicted yet again this summer—my least favorite season for this very reason, among others—but the rash I had back in June was much, much worse than this one, and compared to the many other afflictions that could befall a person—brain injury, cancer, certain strains of COVID—I’d opt for poison ivy in a heartbeat.

One must be careful, though, not to use this consolation in a way that invalidates one’s own pain. It’s easy to twist the idea of “things could be worse” into “quit your complaining and stop feeling sorry for yourself. Children are starving in Africa and you’re whining about a rash?” That kind of tone would be counterproductive to the whole soothing agenda, and would only turn pain into suffering. It would create internal conflict, the feeling that we shouldn’t be upset or bothered by a given inconvenience, injury, disappointment, what have you. But feeling like we shouldn’t be upset just makes us upset that we’re upset. So it’s a matter of letting ourselves be upset and recognizing that there are still things to be grateful for.

In the poison ivy example, I’m grateful to have some strong steroid cream leftover from June, and that I had easy access to a doctor to prescribe it in the first place. I’m grateful that the poison ivy itch seems to come in waves, so I get periodic breaks from it. I’m grateful that it’s on my arm and not…elsewhere. Nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be. Some other misery could always be added to the mix. It’s a brutal sort of comfort, I suppose. But it can be administered in a loving way that not only soothes, but also fortifies.

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In his Book of Divine Consolation, Eckhart provides another balm via the proclamation, “There is no affliction and harm that is without consolation, nor is there any harm that is nothing but harm.” When I first read these words, I immediately thought of my friend Mike, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a motorcycle accident almost six years ago. To expect him to see any silver linings in a harm that rendered him incapable of most movement and completely reliant on others to feed him, dress him, bathe him, and so much more, seems absurd and even cruel.

“How is any of this suffering not harmful to me?” Mike could rightly ask.

If Meister Eckhart were around, he’d say that the harm of quadriplegia is not complete—that is, not made of nothing but harm—because it contains the promise of God’s presence. Because just as a friend would be, God is with a good man in his sufferings. This conceit is actually at the heart of The Book of Divine Consolation. Eckhart even expounds upon seven sub-consolations meant to bolster it. In a nutshell, he says that if a friend’s compassion can console me, then God’s should console me even more, given His inherently comforting attribute, namely “that he is the purely one…that everything that is in him is God himself.” Given, then, that suffering implies God is with us, then we should actually choose such suffering because “God himself is willing to suffer…[and]…if I think rightly, I want what God wants.” Saint Augustine said that suffering for the sake of God is “better, dearer, higher, nobler than everything men can take away from man against his will.” In such suffering, God is closer to your heart than your suffering is. Indeed, everything you suffer for God’s sake becomes “wholly sweet in God’s sweetness.” So what else could you want? If God is with you in our suffering, then you should make like Saint Bernard and ask for suffering always.

Wow. That’s a lot of God talk.

So, what if, like my friend Mike, you don’t believe in God? Eckhart would say that Mike’s harm and sorrow would then be “justly suffered,” because his lack of belief in God means that he loves “perishable things” above God, and everything but God is perishable — including our bodies and their functionality. If we depend on such things for succor, then we essentially seek “consolation in desolation” and have no one to blame but ourselves when we remain inconsolable. On the other hand, he who suffers without suffering (by trusting in God) is free from sin and does not “deserve” his suffering.

Uh-oh. Now we seem to be in “godless sinners deserve to suffer” territory. But I think that would be a crude interpretation of Eckhart’s words. I simply cannot believe that the same man who said that each of us is one with God would say that any of us deserve suffering, or would believe in a God that would punish us for not believing in Him. So I interpret Meister Eckhart’s use of the word “sin” in the same way that Eckhart Tolle discusses it in his book A New Earth. He says the original Greek definition of “to sin” means “to miss the mark.” Throwing darts comes to mind for me. If I’m aiming for the bull’s eye and don’t hit it, that doesn’t make me a bad person. It doesn’t mean I deserve to be punished for missing the bull’s eye. Analogously, if I’m trying my best to find my way through life, and if along that path I find reason to doubt the existence of God, that doesn’t mean I deserve to suffer. I think all Meister Eckhart is saying is that to not believe in God is to suffer. While some non-believers might say that the existence of suffering is a primary reason for denying God’s existence, Eckhart is saying that it’s actually the reason to believe, because said belief will ease our suffering more than anything else possibly can.

It’s a doozy of a paradox. And it’s also, I gotta say, a more mature attitude to have about God, and about life in general. It seems to suggest that God does not owe us anything. God’s function is not to prevent suffering from ever happening. If God believed that a pain-free life was in our best interests, He would have made life pain-free.

I want to point out here that referring to God as “He” doesn’t sit right with me personally. I myself do not identify as Christian and am not comforted by the concept of a God that exists outside of me, separate from me. I believe that God is in me, in everything, is the life force in everything, or, to quote Dylan Thomas, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” I believe it loves everything and accepts everything just as it is, and that it lives only in the present moment and is fearless and always knows how best to respond to whatever happens. I believe that all people contain this loving, trusting wisdom at their core, but most of us don’t know it. We’ve forgotten. And I believe the most valuable work we can do is the work of remembering what we’re made of. This is the lens through which I read Mesiter Eckhart’s Book of Divine Consolation, and I’m pretty sure Eckhart wrote it through this same lens. He did say, after all, that “the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one in the same.” And he said, “Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.” So when we don’t believe in this particular notion of God, we’re essentially not believing in our own goodness, love, wisdom, and ability. We’re also doubting nature itself, of which we are a part and which expresses itself in us, as us.

Eckhart himself uses this language in The Book of Divine Consolation, sounding very much like Marcus Aurelius when he says, “It is impossible to the whole of nature for it to break, spoil or even touch anything in which it does not intend something better for the thing it touches. It is not enough for it to make something just as good: always it wants to make something better.” So let that be another comfort for you when adversity strikes. Every hardship can be viewed as a necessary path toward self-improvement.

Now this sounds like “God has a plan” talk, which again reminds me of my friend Mike, who recently told me that sometimes people say his motorcycle accident and resulting quadriplegia are all part of God’s plan for him. “I hate that God,” Mike said, and I agreed. But when Eckhart says that God or nature always acts in the service of making someone or something better, I think that “better” can simply be defined as “closer to God,” or closer to that wise, calm, loving, courageous core of one’s being. Closer to “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” For this reason we should emulate another Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca, whom Eckhart quotes as saying, “A man [should] accept everything as if he had wished for it.”

That’s hardcore. But life is hardcore, and sometimes we must respond in kind.

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One source of solace for humans that Eckhart never mentions in The Book of Divine Consolation is other humans. He was solely focused on intra-personal, self-soothing techniques. But these days we know how important interpersonal connection is for getting through all kinds of emotional, psychological, and even physical difficulties. We know that people with secure attachments are less likely to develop PTSD after surviving traumatic experiences. And we know that a vibrant relational life is the number one predictor of longevity. But I still believe that if we cannot comfort ourselves through hard times, we’re doomed. A healthy dependency on others is good; we should be able to ask for help without feeling like a burden, and to also provide help without feeling resentful. But what makes that kind of interdependency healthy, is a firmly established independence—the reliable ability to access our own inner love, strength, and calm when the going gets rough.

For Meister Eckhart, every hardship was actually an access point to that inner love, strength, and calm—a.k.a. God. In The Book of Divine Consolation, he considers the pain of loss, saying that the more you lose in the material plane—be it body parts, family members, money, or other possessions—the more God you’ll gain. He says, “Goods of any sort do not add anything to goodness, but they conceal and hide the goodness in us… All possessions and all created things are in comparison with God less than is a bean in comparison with all this physical world.” In a further elucidation of this concept, Eckhart states that being deprived of “created things” (the aforementioned perishable things) is to be freed from “sorrow, affliction, and loss.”

Buddhists might recognize this idea as congruent with the notion of non-attachment. If we are clinging to our possessions in fear of losing them, we are in their control, and therefore we are suffering. As Stephen Hayes, creator and co-developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, says, if you’re not willing to lose it, you’ve already lost it. Granted, he’s referring to “positive” emotions, but this concept applies to what Eckhart is saying, too, inasmuch as we equate losing “positive” emotions with losing someone or something dear to us. If we think we need some other person, place, job, ability, etc. to exist in order to be happy, then we will never be truly happy.  But if we are “naked of all created things,” as Eckhart says, then, like an empty cask, we can receive a wholly different type of substance—namely, God. “Everything that is to receive and be capable of receiving should and must be empty,” Eckhart says.

I see echoes of this philosophy in another of his passages, this one taken from a sermon he wrote on detachment:

“We can see that God would rather be in a heart with [pure] detachment than in all hearts. For if you ask me: ‘What is it God seeks in all things?’ then I answer you out of the Book of Wisdom, where he says: ‘In all things I seek rest’ (Si. 14:11). Nowhere is there complete rest, except only in the heart that has found detachment.”

If we are clinging—or overly attached to—created things, then we are not at rest, and God—and therefore we—cannot respond effectively to a given challenge. If you heard my episode a few weeks ago about Bernard Basset’s book, We Neurotics, these ideas might ring a bell. Remember The Little Nun? She said, “God is not at his best until we are relaxed.” And we’re not relaxed if we’re constantly fearful of loss.

One way to cultivate detachment—and Eckhart provides this as another point of consolation— is to recognize that nothing actually belongs to us. Not even our lives belong to us. As musician Ani Difranco says, “My body is borrowed, I got it on loan for the time in between my mom and some maggots.” Therefore, everything we lose was never ours to begin with. And according to Eckhart, we should actually be grateful for being loaned anything for any period of time, however long or short. And you know what happens when we don’t take things for granted, don’t assume they’ll be around forever? We appreciate them more while they’re here. This is the whole point of death, right? So we’ll appreciate life more? But instead of adopting that attitude as a species—or at the very least as a society—we’ve made it our mission to postpone death for as long possible. And look at us. Are we happy? Are we healthy? Do we live with ease? How many of us really appreciate life, are able to be fully present with it? How many of us could respond with unflappable equanimity if told we had a week to live, and say, “Okay, I’ve been ready all along. I’ve made the most of every moment because I’ve always known that each one could be my last”?

So few of us have actually, fully accepted our mortality, and this denial of death is always ultimately a denial of life. It seems that many of the most miserable people are those who fear death worst of all, despite having never really lived in the first place. Indeed, I guess that’s why their fear is so intense. Whereas the people who really live—creative people who take risks and embody their deepest values, always staying true to themselves and to what matters most to them—tend to be very accepting of death. I’m reminded of Jerry Seinfeld, who in the Jon Stewart episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, said that sometimes he likes to think about his death “just for fun.” And in another episode he encourages his friend Michael Richards (a.k.a. Kramer) to “free himself" by remembering that we’re all just “raindrops on a windshield.”

I’ve heard many people say that they’re not afraid of dying themselves, but their fear of loved ones dying is downright debilitating. I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post that a big challenge for me has been the fear of my dogs dying. But I’ve taken lots of comfort from Eckhart’s reminder that my dogs actually aren’t mine at all, and never were. They belong to life itself, or what some would call God. The same could be said of my dogs that Kahlil Gibran says about human children in his book The Prophet: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” So I can do my best to keep my dogs safe and healthy, but there will still come a day when they cease to exist as I know them, on the material plane, and the Ground of Being will reabsorb them both, and the Tyke-and-Tina chapter of my life will end. Keeping this in mind, I enjoy their presence now, each day, better than I ever could if I were constantly avoiding thoughts of their mortality, and I can therefore rest assured that I won’t have regrets about the kind of “parent" I was to them.

Many months ago I watched a video of English comedian, actor, author and now spiritual guru of sorts, Russell Brand, talk about his approach to prayer. After pointing out that “worry is just praying for what you don’t want,” he said that his main form of prayer is the humble request to “be made ready.” He doesn’t pray for anything material, or to have more power or fame, or even to be basically safe and healthy. “Make me ready” is his prayer, and I’ve made it mine, too, since hearing it. There’s no fear in this prayer, no clinging to a version of life that’s trouble-free. This prayer assumes that adversity will strike. It’s not a matter of avoiding pain or suffering, but of accepting its inevitability, and of being ready for it. And how can one be ready? By panicking? By believing we’ll be destroyed by a particular loss or hardship? No. Readiness requires a calm sort of courage that’s rooted in gratitude for all that we’ve already been given, and a faith in our ability to respond with expertise to whatever hand Life deals us next.  

Sometimes I wonder if the worry and anxiety that characterize modern life actually a collective unconscious desire for things to be “darker,” as Leonard Cohen once sang, or more difficult. Maybe worry isn’t praying for what we don’t want, after all, but for what we actually do want, on some level. Endless advances in technology and medicine have made life very easy in many ways—maybe too easy. Maybe we know deep down, for instance, that grief is the most exquisite form of praise, and we want to experience how it feels, because that is how it feels to be really alive. Maybe we know that loss and hardship will bring us closer to our True Selves, from whom most of us are walking around in a constant state of separation anxiety… It’s just a theory.

And as for the notion of God being disinterested in our suffering: if that’s true, maybe it simply means that we should be disinterested, too, or that we should at least try not to take our suffering so personally.

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The last topic “that ought readily to console a rational man in his sorrow” that I’ll address is another that reminds me of Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Roman emperor-philosopher whose book Meditations was the focus of an earlier blog post. I mostly discussed Marcus’s perspective on death, which proved a great comfort to me during those first few months of COVID lockdown. If Nature deems it necessary that I die today, Marcus would say, so be it. Nature knows best. Regardless of Nature’s plan for me, I can continue to be a good person while I’m alive. Meister Eckhart would agree. In The Book of Divine Consolation he says that no person or circumstance can hinder your “interior working of virtue… This work is to love God, to want good and goodness.” In other words, no hardship in the material plane can keep you from trying to be your best Self. Or in the words of Marcus Aurelius, “No one can keep you from living as your nature requires… The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts.”

Neither Marcus nor Eckhart expected God to reward them with anything but God’s own presence within them, and they both believed that living a virtuous life was an end in itself—not a means to enter the kingdom of heaven at some future date, after they died, but a way to have heaven on earth, right now. Jesus Christ himself said, “The kingdom of God is within you.”

So to sum up, my key take-aways from Meister Eckhart’s Book of Divine Consolation are (1) things could always be worse, (2) in times of suffering we can feel God’s presence more than we can in times of ease, (3) every hardship ultimately functions to make us better people (i.e. closer to God), which is something I can attest to in my aforementioned experience of having a poison ivy rash, which, since writing the earlier portion of today’s episode, has indeed gotten worse, due to the id phenomenon, which means that other poison ivy rashes pop up all over one’s body, where actual poison ivy oils never touched it; new spots have been appearing every day on my legs, back, torso, neck, and left arm, and every time they do, I sigh, close my eyes, and turn inward to access my calm, loving, courageous center—the God within—and then I reach for the steroid cream; (4) we can approach loss or grief as an opportunity to detach more and more and more from “created” or “perishable” things (and thereby make more room for God to fill us), (5) we can also practice detachment by remembering that everything we consider to be “ours” is just with us on loan, including our bodies and our lives themselves—and, I should add, the planet as most of us have known it since birth, because human behavior is causing devastating change to happen at exponentially quicker rates—yes, behavior based in the belief that the planet is ours to do whatever we want with has ironically resulted in a planet that will soon be uninhabitable and therefore not ours at all, not even on loan—anyway—(6) instead of clinging to what we don’t want to lose, we can practice gratitude for what we’ve already been given, and we can recognize, with humility, that nothing is owed to us (not even on a species level—why shouldn’t we go extinct, too?), and (7) regardless of what happens, we can keep trying our best to be good people, which is basically the whole point of this life, anyway. Our minds and bodies are vessels through which God can know Itself better.

I’m sure not everyone will be consoled by all of these ideas, but hopefully at least one of them will provide some comfort to most. If you can’t get on board with any kind of God talk, a secular interpretation of Eckhart’s primary message could be that suffering and other forms of hardship are Life’s way of inviting us to be gentle with ourselves.