…man is God's instrument… and as I have often said, he has given her a divine light which is like him and as it were of his nature, and he has given it to the soul so much for her own that it is a part of the soul, so that he may work joyfully within her: just as we can see in the case of light, that it works according to the quality of the material it falls on. In wood it performs its own work, creating heat and fire; in trees and moist things it produces growth, not heat or its own work, but it makes them green and bear fruit. In living creatures it produces life from dead matter, as when a sheep eats grass and that is turned into an eye or an ear. But in man it promotes blessedness.
Meister Eckhart, sermon 62: on the effects of light upon matter. Sermon 61 also contains a soliloquy likening the growth of the soil to the growth of plants.
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