Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–before 1329), a German Dominican friar and theologian, draws on things his listeners could have found just outside their doors. A blade of grass, a piece of wood and a stone would be easy to tell apart, even for someone picking them up with closed eyes. In the sermon called On Nature, Eckhart makes a claim about these familiar things that neither touch nor sight could readily disclose.
Here all the little blades of grass and wood and stone and all things are one.
– Meister Eckhart, Mystische Schriften, 1903, p. 126.[1]
The sentence opens as though the listener had been given a place to look. The preceding lines trace a movement inwards, to what Eckhart calls the ground and the very heart of fatherhood. He asks how God the Father brings forth the Son and how the image of the Son abides in him. At this point the blades of grass appear. The smallest creatures are as fully present to the thought of their divine origin as anything grander. The affectionate diminutive in the German gives each little blade a moment of visibility in a sentence about what they all share.
Later in the sermon Eckhart turns to the senses. The eye can receive colour. However intently an ear might listen, it would never arrive at colour by that route. The example brings a difficulty of the sermon within reach. What can be known depends in part on the person doing the knowing. We can feel the hardness of the stone and the flexibility of the blade. To ask what they hold in common at their source calls for another kind of attention. In the opening word “here”, Eckhart invites his listeners to make that change of standpoint themselves.
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Here all the little blades of grass and wood and stone and all things are one.
Meister Eckhart (um 1260–vor 1329)
Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften. In unsere Sprache übertragen von Gustav Landauer · p. 126
Our translation from Gustav Landauer’s German rendering
The great mother is the earth. The stones in the earth’s body, I think, are what is meant by her bones. These are what we are told to throw behind our backs.
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE)
Metamorphoses · 1951 · p. 30–31
Our translation from the Latin
Perhaps this block of marble is only a heap of infinitely many living bodies, or like a lake full of fish, although the eye can ordinarily distinguish these animals only in bodies that have partly decayed.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
Brief an Antoine Arnauld vom 30. April 1687 · 1846 · p. 96–97
Our translation
When you bend down towards all this activity, it is almost as if you could overhear the hidden history of how plants grow and the quiet beating of the mountain’s heart.
Very little. One makes marble out of flesh, and flesh out of marble.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
Œuvres complètes de Diderot, tome II. Philosophie · p. 105
Our translation
The fleeting sunbeam has been captured and enclosed in your mysterious core.
Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863)
Excerpt. Our translation from the German edition of 1904
I thank you, silent stone, and bend down towards you: I owe you my life as a plant.
The precious stones which are the foundations denote truths Divine shining through in the ultimate of order.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)
Arcana Coelestia · 1938 · p. 318
Clause from the cited English edition. Initial capital supplied.
The finest artist has no conception that a single block of marble does not enclose within its excess. Only the hand that obeys the intellect can reach it.
And he the bard, a crystal soul Sphered and concentric with the whole.
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