Giving Birth to God: Meister Eckhart and Symeon the New Theologian on Spiritual Maternity

Abstract

In his film Best Intentions Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director, presents his parents' life before his own birth and gives us a real-life opportunity to reflect upon the theme we are going to deal with here, by presenting us with a dialogue between his father, Pastor Henrik Bergman, a pastor in an old Swedish village somewhere in the north of the country's industrial area, and a factory boss who was suppressing the workers there. The factory boss had engaged in argument with Pastor Bergman as to whether there was a need for a priest at all in an industrial village like that The pastor tried to explain that he was there, in that industrial area, in order to help nourish the spiritual life of the workers. The factory boss, at a loss to understand anything, asked: "And what is spiritual life?" The pastor, without hesitation, gave him a very short definition: "What is spiritual life? It is the life that has nothing to do with the body." Then silence fell between the two ... What is "spiritual" life? This is still our question today. We are faced with this same attitude Pastor Bergman's attitude by Meister Eckhart in his famous Sermon I (Pf 1, QT 57) on giving birth to God, which concentrates exclusively on the soul and the life of the soul and its contact with God. We are also considering an alternative viewpoint from the East, in Symoon the New Theologian, the 11th-century ascetic writer and saint, who, in Chapter 10 of his First Ethical Sermon, concentrates on the same question but deals with it in a quite different manner, focusing on the body the human body, and especially Christ's body, the human nature assumed by the Son of God. The perennial issue from the very beginning, ever since Christianity emerged in this world, was: is it at all possible for human beings to establish a permanent and real contact with ·God Himself? If the Christian claim about human destiny is true, then there should be a real contact with the Creator and human beings should be destined to bear and. accommodate God within themselves. In other words, they should be in a position to offer maternal service to Him, for the sake of their own salvation and all the more so for the fulfilment of His own Will. But is it at all possible to make real and permanent contact with God Himself? Meister Eckhart provides an answer in his Sermon I~ by