Sermons and Treatises of Meister Eckhart

What then, I ask, is the object of absolute detachment ? I answer, that the object of absolute detachment is neither this nor that. It is absolu^ v nothing, for it is the culminating point where God can do preciscIylS^hc will.^ God cannot have his way in every Tteaft, for though God is alriugnty yet he cannot work except where he finds readiness or makes it. I add, or makes it, by reason of St Paul in whom he found no readiness but whom he did make ready by infusion of his grace ; wherefore I affirm, God works according to the aptitude^ he %ds. He works differently in man and in a stone, and for this we have a natural analogy. If you heat a baker’s oven and place in it the dough, some made of barley, some of oats and some of wheat and some of rye, then albeit in the oven the heat is all the same it does not tell alike on all the doughs, but one yields a fine bread, another one more coarse and a third a coarser still. The heat is not to blame : it is the material which differs. Nor does God tell alike on every heart but according to the readiness and the capacity he finds. In any heart containing this or that there is something to hinder God’s highest operation. For a hear^toj^i^perfectly r^a^it^feas to be perfectly empty, this T5?mg[lts^ndijdon p To take

anotlier common illustration. Suppose I want to write on a white tablet, then anything already written there, however excellent it be, will interfere and hinder me from writing ; ere I can write I must erase completely whatever is already on the tablet which is never better fitted for me to write upon than when there is nothing there at all. And so for God to write his very best within , my heart everything dubbed this or that must be ousted from my j heart leaving it quite without attachment. God is free to work his sovran will when the object of this solitary heart is neither this nor that. Then again I ask, What is the prayer of the solitary heart ? I answer, that detachment and emptiness cannot pray at all, for whoso prays desires of God somcthirig : something added to him or something taken from him. Ilut the heart detached has no j desire for anything nor has it anything to be delivered from. So it has no prayers at all ; its only prayer consists in being uniform with God. In this sense we may take St Dionysius’ comment on the saying of St Paul, ‘ Many there be that run but one receiveth the prize.’ All the powers of the soul competing for the crown which^alls to the essence alone. According to Dionysius this running is none other than the flight from creature to union with uncreated nature. Attaining this the soul loses her name ; God absorbs her in himself so that as self she comes to naught, just as the sunlight swallows up the dawn and naughts it. To this pass nothing brings the soul but absolute detachment. And here it is germane to quote St Augustine’s dictum : ‘ The soul has a private door into divine nature at the point where for her things all come to naught.’ This door on earth is none other than absolute detachment. At the height of her detachment she is ignorant with knowing, loveless with loving, 4a^k

Here too we might cite a master’s word§*^^ iessed are the spiritual poor who have abandoned unto God all things as he possessed them when we existed not. This none can do but a heart wholly without attachment. That God would sooner be in a solitary heart than any other, I argue in this fashion. Starting from thy question. What does God seek in all things ? I answer in his words out of the Book of Wisdom, ‘ In alj^thhiigs I seek rest.’ Now there is nowhere perfect rest save in a heart detached. Ergo, God is happier there than in any other thing or virtue. Know that the more we are disposed to receive the inflowing God, the more happy we shall be ; perfect receptivity gives perfect felicity. Now one makes oneself re'ceptfvc to the influence of God only by dint of uniformity with God ; as a man’s uniformity with God so is his sense of the inflow of God. Uniformity comes of subjection to God, and the more one is subject to creature the less one is uniform with God. But the heart which is (juite detached and all devoid of creatures, being utterly subject to God and uniform with God in the highest measure, is wholly receptive of his divine inflow. Hence St Paul’s exhortation to ‘ Put on Christ,’ i.^ Uiiiforinity with Christ. For know, when Christ was^^made man it was not a certain man that he assumed, he assumed human nature. Do thou go out of all things, then there remains alone what Christ put on and thou hast put on Christ.

Whoso has a mind to know the excellence and use of absolute detachment let him lay to heart Christ’s words to his disciples touching his manhood : ‘ It is good, for you, that I. go away j if I go iiqL .away the xaLunfprt^ cannot come tin to you ’ ; as though to say, yc have too much love for riiy visible forTn for the perfect love of the Holy Ghost to be yours. Wherefore discard the form and unite with the formless essence, for God’s ghostly comfort is intangible and is not offered save to those alone who despise all mortal consolations. List ye, good people all : there is none happier than he who stands in uttermost detachment. No temporal, carnal i^easurc but brings some ghostly mischief in its train, for the flesh lusts after things that run counter to the spirit and spirit lusts for things that are repugnant to the flesh. He who sows the tares of love in flesh reaps death but he who sows good love-seed in the spirit reaps of the spirit eternal life. The more man flees from creatures the faster hastens to him their creator. Consider, all yc thoughtful souls ! If even the love which it is given us to feel for the bodily form of Christ can keep us from receiving the Holy Ghost then how much more must we be kept from getting God by inordinate love of creature comforts ? Detachment is the best of all, for it cleanses the soul, clarifies the mind, kindles the heart and wakes the spirit ; it quickens desire and enhances virtue giving intuition of God ; it detaches creature and makes her one with God ; for love disjoined from God is as water in the fire, but love in union is like the honeycomb in honey. Harkee, all rational souls ! The swiftest steed to bear you to your goal is suffering ; none shall ever taste eternal bliss but those who stand with Christ in depths of bitterness.

Nothing is more gall-bitter than suffering, nothing so honey-sweet as to have suffered. The most sure foundation for this perfection is humility, for he whose nature here creeps in deepest depths shall soar in spirit to highest height of Deity ; for joy brings sorrow and sorrow brings joy. Men’s ways are manifold : one lives thus, another thus. He who would attain unto the highest life while here in time, let him take in a few words culled out of all the scriptures the summary philosophy which I will now set down. Keep thyself detached from all mankind ; keep thyself devoid of all incoming images ; emancipate thyself from everything which entails addition, attachment or encumbrance, and address thy mind at all times to a saving contemplation wherein thou bearest God fixed within thy heart as the object from which its eyes do never waver ; any other discipline, fasts, vigils, prayers, or whatever it may be, subordinate to this as to its end, using thereof no more than shall answer for this purpose, so shalt thou win the goal of all perfections. Here someone may object. But who can persist in unwavering contemplation of the divine object ? I answer, no one living here in time. This is told thee merely so that thou mayst know the highest, that whereon thy aspirations and desires should be set. But when this vision is withheld from thee, thou, being a good man, shalt think to have been robbed of thy eternal bliss and then do thou forthwith return into the same that it may come to thee again ; and withal it does behove thee to keep strict watch upon thy thoughts at all times, there letting, as far as possible, their goal and refuge be. Lord God, glory be to thee eternally. Amen.

Beati pauper es spiritu etc. Let us be eternally as poor as we were when we eternally were not. Abiding in him in our essence we shall be that we are. We shall abound in all things, but in their creator. Wc shall know God without any sort of likeness and love without matter and enjoy without possession. We shall conceive all things in perfection as the eternal wisdom shows them planned out in itself. The poor in spirit go out of themselves and all creatures : they are nothing, they have nothing, they do nothing, and these poor are not save that by grace they are God with God : which they are not aware of. St Augustine says, all things are God. St Dionysius says, things are not God. St Augustine says, God is all of them. But Dionysius : God is nothing we can say or think, yet God is the hope of all the saints, their intuition of him wherein he is himself. He (Dionysius) finds him more in naught ; God is naught, he says. In naught all is suspended. All that has being is in suspension in naught, this naught being itself an incomprehensible aught that all the minds in heaven and on earth cannot either fathom or conceive. Hence it remains unknown to creatures. When the soul attains to the perfection of hanging to (being suspended from) naught she will find herself without sin. This is due to the freedom she is poised in. Then on coming to the body and awareness of herself, and again finding sin as before, she becomes bound and then she returns into herself and bethinks her of what she has found yonder. Thus she raises herself up above herself and crosses over to the seat of all her happiness and all her satisfaction. St Bernard says the soul knows very well that her beloved cannot come to her till everything is out of her. St Augustine says. Well and truly loves the man who loves where he well knows he is not loved ; that is the best of all loving. St Paul, We know right well that all things work together for good to them that love God. And Christ said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, God’s kingdom is theirs.

They tell of various kinds of poverty of spirit. There are four. What he refers to here is the first poverty of spirit the soul knows when, illumined by the spirit of truth, things that are not God weigh with her not a jot ; as St Paul tells us, ‘ All things arc as dung to me.’ In this indigence she finds all creatures irksome. In the second poverty she considers the merit of her excm})lar Christ and her own demerits and finds her own works worthless, though they be the sum of men’s achievements. Hcitfce she laments her in the Book of Love, crying, ‘ The form of my beloved passed me by and I cannot follow him.’ To this passing she is self-condemned, following the spoor of her quarry, Christ. So sweet his scent, she swoons away into forgetfulness of outward pain. As St Augustine says. The soul is where she loves rather than where she is giving life, and St Peter tells us that our dwelling is in heaven. The third poverty of spirit is that of the soul wherein her own nature is slain ; her own natural life is stone dead and there is living in her nothing but the spirit of God. As St Paul declares, ‘ I am dead nevertheless I live ; yet my life Christ liveth in me.’ In this spiritual death she is grown poor, for all she has to leave or give has been taken from her ; moreover she is poor of her free will, for he is doing with it what he will.

The fourth poverty is the incomprehensibility of God in her mind, her inability to compass him whether with knowledge or with works. But the deeper she gets the more the incompre- hensible splendour of the Deity is reflected in her poverty^ ^ For as far as with her inner man she has gotten intuition of divinity so far she follows with her outer man the willing poverty of her pattern Jesus Christ ; or in other words, the power of God having deprived her of all selfhood, she uses all creatures as she needs them, always without attachment, and if she has them not she can do as well without them and with the same detachment. She knows of nothing more that she can do but she rejoices in his incomprehensible truth and that created things arc all as naught to him and that his love has taken to itself her naught which is cleaving to him like a tiny spark. It was this poverty St Paul was in the time that he declared ‘ he heard in God unspeakable things which it is not lawful for a man to utter.’ On that occasion he was knit to God so that neither life nor death could separate him from his love. Thus it befalls the perfectly lost soul in God, lost, not to creatures merely but to herself as well and aware of nothing but the pure unclouded radiance of God’s essence. Behold her lost in him, her heavenly joy, and all incapable of any real wrongdoing. The saints invariably say that nothing whatever can disturb the fixity they have in God. Real sin is any disobedience to the law of divine love, any departure from the life of .Tesus Christ. He is the form and essence of all things. What then is real virtue ? Anything wrought in the soul by divine love alone, for that effects naught but its like.

Such is the doctrine of spiritual poverty. Into this true poverty lead us, O superfull goodness of God. Amen.

We read in the gospel that our Lord fed the multitude with five loaves and two fishes. The first loaf was, the duty of knowing ourselves : what we have always been to God and what we are now in relation to God. The second was, the duty of compassion towards our evenchristian in his blindness ; his misfortune ought to touch us wellnigh as keenly as our own. The third was, that it behoves us to study the life of our Lord Jesus Christ and copy it exactly so far as that is possible. The fourth, that it behoves us to recognise the justness of God. All accounts of hell-torment are true. St Dionysius has explained that absence from God is hell and God’s presence is heaven. The fifth is, that it is for us to have intuition of the deity flowing into the Father and filling him with power and flowing into the Son filling him with wisdom, ^ See also Spamer*s Texte, B. 4. they be^g one in nature. Christ himself declared, ‘ Where I am there my Father is and where my Father is there I am.’ And they flow into the Holy Ghost filling him with goodwill. As Christ said, ‘ I and my Father have one Spirit ’ ; and the Holy Ghost flows into the soul.

The soul by nature has received two powers. One power is understanding which can conceive the Holy Trinity and all its works, enclosing it, as one would fill and close a cask. The full cask comprehends its contents : it is in union with what it comprehends, what it is full of. And so is understanding in union with what it understands, what it conceives. It is one therewith by grace as the Son is one with the Father by nature. The second power is will. It is the nobler in that by nature it can reach to the unknown, God namel}/. Will seizes God above knowledge, and in grasping what he wills the impress of the unknown God is sealed and stamped into the will so that the will contains God and becomes one with God, and will brings memory and all the soul-powers in its train, therefore the soul is one with God by grace as the Holy Ghost is one with the Father and the Son by nature. She is really in God more' than in her own person. As St Augustine says, ‘ The soul is where she loves rather than where she is giving life.’ To rest in this union were better than to do all the works of all creatures, for so her higher power absorbs her lower ones and the soul can do nothing but divine work. But since this may not be, therefore the highest power, seeing her stability in God, communicates it to the lower ones so that they may discern good and evil. In this union Adam dwelt, and while the union lasted he had all the power of creatures (i,&, all cr(^turcs in posse) in his highest power. When a lodestonc spends its force upon a needle and attracts it to itself, the needle gets sufficient power to pass on to the needles underneath, which it raises and attaches to the lodestone. Part the top needle and all the rest drop off. It was like this with Adam : when his highest power parted from God, down fell all his powders. Creatures are disjoined through failing to agree among themselves, one wanting one thing, one another. The powers decay through creatures right down to the lowest. The power of gold, for example, cannot give gold but gives silver, and this degradation goes on in silver, from which we get iron. Even so man’s powers peter out to nothing. This accounts for the various creatures.

But now all creatures which came forth from God must strive with all their powers to make one man who shall return into the union wherein Adam was before he fell and who shall raise all creatures up again into the selfsame power wherein they were, in human nature. This is accomplished in Christ, as he himself declared, ‘ When I am lifted up I will draw all men to me.’ He meant that when he was risen in our mind he would recollect us to himself. In this sense all creatures are one man and that man is God. Human nature has not ever been as such. God is from himself eternally and the Father made all things from nothing. That he is in himself he is by his own nature, which is free from becoming and becomes not any thing, and all things’ becoming ends in not-becoming. The Son is the same as the Father except that he receives from the Father all that he has and of all becoming he is the form. Withal he is one in the not-becoming. The Holy Ghost is the tie between the Father and the Son and is one with them in the not-becoming ; he is the author and agent of becoming in eternity and in time. This temporal becoming ends in eternal not-becoming, and the eternal not-becoming is the work of the eternal nature and has neither end nor beginning.

God is his own form and matter ; his form emerges from his matter and according to this form does he form all things that become. But his simple nature is in form formless, in mode modeless, cause uncaused, being without becoming which transcends all things becoming and all that becomes comes to an end therein. God is eternal and all things have been in him eternally. They were not in themselves. Ere God created creatures he was nothing whatever to creatures, in their understanding, though in himself he was to them eternally the same as he is now and always shall be. No Creature could say God what time itself was not. What minds ignore they count for naught. Creature did not know God when ‘ she herself was not, therefore she could not speak him. This is denied by heretics who state that Christ brought human nature with him out of heaven, but that is not true. He got his manhood from our Lady Saint Mary, withal abiding as before in the Godhead ; and the Almighty knew in his eternal wisdom the ordering of all things, to wit, the Iloly Ghost. This Trinity poured forth into time into the naught of human nature. Thenceforward human nature was changeable in time and God donned human nature. In him human nature was God and human nature knew it with the three powers she has gotten from the blessed Trinity and gave God thanks therefor and loved him with infinite love. By this God sets such store that he loves human nature back with a love so great, any man who knows it possesses heaven incarnate. I charge you, my brothers and my sisters, that ye wax in knowledge and give thanks to Gk)d while ye are still in time for having made you from naught aught, and unite yourselves with his divine nature. Once out of time and your chance is gone. But if so be ye cannot apprehend God’s nature then believe in Christ and

follow his example steadfastly ; Jews, heathens, evil Christians, all who fail to exercise their God-consciousness, are lost, barring infants not arrived at knowledge of themselves and who are properly baptized into his name : in the enjoyment of Christ’s name they are holding fast the knowledge wherewith he knows the Father eternally. Rejoice, all ye powers of my soul, at being joined to God so that none can part you. But I can neither glorify God nor love him to the full therein ; so, dying to the virtues I plunge me in the naught of the naked Godhead where, sinking eternally from naught to aught I pass with naught to aught. Though I should live here in the flesh until the judgment day bearing the pangs of hell it would be small matter by reason of my Lord Jesus Christ, since I have received from him the certainty of never being parted from him. While I am here he is in me : after this life I am in him. All things are possible to me united as I am with, him to whom all things are possible. Before that I was at a loss to know if we are God by nature or by grace. Then came Jesus with the light of his own nature and then I spied my memory under my understanding issuing from the essence of my soul and my understanding flowing out of memory and will out of them both. Essence is revealed by the powers and the powers by their works. What my knowledge gave me that I loved ; what I did not know I could not love, and to will all things were possible. At one time I was sore perplexed as to whether we are God by nature or by grace. Fear led me to Christ who in truth knows the answer. He gave me light of grace whereby I saw in the divine nature three Persons, his Father J>eing the begetter of all things. According to the words of St James,

‘ Every perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights.’ The Father is the light itself, self-luminous in Person and in essence. In the unborn essence he is essential, essence without personality : essence self-manifest as impersonal being. The Father is that same being essentially. In the essence the Father loses his fatherhood completely ; nor is he Father there at all. The Father’s knowledge of himself in himself, essential and personal, he draws from his unborn essence through the exalted root of his personality. So far as he takes in his unborn essence he is paternal. Father essentially. This exalted light has been for ever flowing in his heart and it is flowing out of him into his Son, as essence and as Person, and it is flowing from them both into their Holy Ghost, in essence and in Person, and these three shed one light essential and personal. The Father she^s on both the light of his essence and his Person ; and the Father and the Son shed on the Holy Ghost the light of both essence and Person. The unborn essence being the oneness of the three Persons and the bom essence is God as begetter so far as it flows into the Persons and so far as»it emanates with the Persons. Not that the essence begets ; essence begets not. The Son and the Holy Ghost are twin lights of the Godbearing essence in the paternal source where the Father is drawing his born being out of his unborn essence. The Father knows himself with his Son, perceiving himself in himself. For this the Son is the light ; and he wills himself in himself and for this the Holy Ghost is the light. Father and Son have one will and that is the Holy Ghost : it graces the soul, this divine nature, and so suffuses the powers of the soul that the soul can do nothing except divine work. Just as a spring in its bed at the roots of the flowers gives them itself and the flowers grow verdant and coloured on the spring water, so deity giving itself to the powers of the soul makes them grow in the likeness of God. His image appears in her powers, his likeness in her virtues. The more divine nature the soul receives the liker she grows to the nature of God and the closer becomes her union with God. Her union may become so strait that God on a sudden absorbs her in himself and that without remainder whether vice or virtue, nor can the soul distinguish aught that might be taken for herself. God takes her for a creature. Be not deluded by the light of nature. To a soul on the ascent to higher knowledge in the light of grace, dimmer and dimmer glows the light of nature. If she would know the very truth itself she must make certain whether she is detached from things ; whether she is dead to self ; whether she loves God with his own love and without self-intent and has nothing to hold her backend keep her from him ; and whether God alone is alive in her. If so then she has lost herself as Mary lost Christ. Three days she sought him knowing all the while that she would find him. And Christ, meanwhile, was af his Father’s school of higher learnin)? all unheeding of his mother^a quest. The noble soul which goes, to school in God learns to knoiy what God is in the Godhead and what Gqd is in the Trinity and what God is in humanity and gets to know his will.

God in, the Godhead is spiritual substance, so elemental that we can say nothing about it excepting that it is naught. To say it is aught were more lying than true. God in the Trinity is the living light in its radiant splendour, a comjjlex of one nature with distinct Persons, The (light) that is life is not this light. Though one might predicate three natures to these (Persons or) distinctions there is but one nature to their union for they all act together exactly like one, working all at once in all creatures. According to St Augustine, the precision (or justice) of God in the Godhead, in the Trinity and in all creatures is the chief delight there is in heaven. God in human nature is a lamp of living light and this light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehends not this light. Darkness ever flees from light as night does from the day. Thence comes her knowledge of God’s will. Now St Paul says, ‘ It is God’s will that we be sanctified.’ And our sanctification lies in this, in knowing what we were before time, what we are in time and what we shall be after time. Lost during these three days, soul pays no heed to body till it joins her in the temple and is subject to her without murmuring.

The Trinity is the heart of divine and human nature and human nature flows into the Trinity in a steady stream of love. Supposing the soul crosses over, then she sinks down and down in the abysm of the Godhead nor ever finds a footing unless it be that she has taken with her some temporal thing : resting on temporal things brings her back into the Trinity. Things fashioned in time have a ground of their own whereon they can rest ; they light on no ground in the Godhead, lly this same token the soul knows that she is creature, for all she has she has received in time from the three Persons. She flows out and in in the three Persons, 'fhe reason why Christ’s soul did never plumb the deeps of Godhead is that she too is creature made in time. God is indeed the matter of the soul, of her energies but not of her creation. Tier energies are eternal because he is eternal. This matter never fails her. When fire lacks fuel it goes back to its own land. So would the soul eome to naught were her matter to fail. When all her work is done she with her powers remains in God her matter ; she casts herself in her impartible essence into the passive, immaterial Godhead ; that is her native land. Then the Godhead is to her all things in a single passive power, and she withal all things to it, just as the heart of the sea gives forth in the bowels of the earth the waters which circulate back to the heart of the sea on the face of the earth. Suppose one dropped a millstone from the siin tp earth, the earth being pierced straight through the centre, the millstone would stop falling at the centre of the earth. Here is tiie heart of yie earth, the stopping-place of everything on earth. §o is the Trinity the stopping -place of creatures as a whole, all the. Godhead has being gotten impartible and eternal from itself. The Father is the manifestation of the Godhead, the Son is the image and countenance of the Faither and the Holy Ghost is the light of his countenance and the love of them both ; all they have have they gotten eternally from their own selves. But the three Persons stooped in compassion towards human nature and the Son was made man and in this world was more despised than any man on earth, suffering want and pain from creatures himself had made in conjunction with his Father, by whose will he became man.

Christ lived in time down to his death and then, arising from the dead, this most despised of men is seen united with the Godhead in the Person of the Christ who came on earth. Human nature wedded with the divine nature ; her eternal portion, fellowship with divine nature in the same Person. This is God’s good will, that we should know ourselves and that we should know God, and our salvation lies in putting our knowledge into practice and loving in God all that we know. He who knows God in very truth is bound to love and will nothing but what God loves and wills. As St Paul says, ‘ I do good and doing naught but good to me all things are possible. Many a thing is lawful for me which I do not lest I sin.’ Our Lord commands us to be without sin. To whom all things are possible it is also possible to keep this commandment. The saints declare that all things are in God as they have been in God eternally ; not that we were in God in the gross nature we have here : we were in God eternalwise, like art in the artist. God saw himself and saw all things. God was not therefore manifold as things are here in separation. Though creatures here are manifold they are but one idea in God. God in himself is just the one alone. When creature goes back to her first cause she knows God simply as one in form and essence and threefold in operation. What intellect knows is knowledge and knowledge stops at what is known, with what is known becoming one. Into the simple idea no knowledge ever entered, for this impartible exemplar after which God created all creatures towers God-high above creatures. Creature in pursuing God to his eternal heights must mount above all creatures, nay, beyond her very self, her own wont and uses, and follow agnosia into the desolate Godhead. St Dionysius says, ‘ God’s desert is God’s simple nature.’ A creature’s desert is her simple nature. In the desert of herself she is robbed of her own form and in Gk)d’s desert, leading out of hers, she is bereft of name ; there she is no more called soul, she is called God with God.

Peradventure ye will say, ‘ Being in this exalted state why does the soul not raise the body above necessity of earthly things ? ’ To which I answer, at this stage the soul has a body of perfection which uses all things to the glory of God, there being now betwixt God and the soul no barrier nor hindrance. So far as the soul has followed God into the desert of his Godhead so far the body follows Christ into his desert of willing poverty and is one with ^ See also Jostes, No. 37 ; Qreith, p. 195 efjseg.^ JBtittner, vol. i, No. 17. God. Well may the Father say, ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased : follow ye him.* All creatures are with God : the being that they have God gives them with his presence. Saith the bride in the Book of Love, ‘ I have run round the circle and have found no end to it, so I cast myself into the centre.’ This circle which the loving soul ran round is all the Trinity has ever wrought. Why is the work of the Trinity called a circle ? Because the three Persons have wrought their own likeness in all creatures which are rational. The Trinity is the origin of all things and all things return into their origin. This is the circle the soul runs. When does she run in this circle ? She does so when she muses : All this that he has made he could make again a thousand times if he were so minded. So she goes round in endless chain. The least of all his creatures she can find no end to nor can she approfound its worth. Spent with her quest she casts herself into the centre. This point is the power of the Trinity wherein unmoved it is doing all its work. Therein the soul becomes omnipotent.

The three Persons are one omnipotence. This is the motionless point and the unity of the Trinity. The circumference is the incomprehensible work of the three Persons. The point is fixed. The union of the Persons is the essence of the point. In this point God runs through change without otherness, involving into unity of essence, and the soul as one with this fixed point is capable of all things. But her powers, wherein she imitates the Trinity, with them she cannot apprehend its unity. The work of the Trinity has proved the undoing of many Paris theologians : engrossed in the working of the Trinity they have never gotten at their unity. The centre is equally near to all ends, like time in all lands. Now is the time here and now is the same time in Rome. Saith the bride in the Book of Love, ‘ He has wounded me with a glance of his eye.’ This refers to the unitive force which streams down from the point, isolating the soul from creatures and changing things and gathering her up again into the point therewith to be united and therein to be eternally established. One is conscious of this glance within the confines of the soul when she is quite unoccupied, innocent of the practice whether of vice or virtue. During this quiet state intuitive perception is most vivid, so it is then he stabs her with his glance to make her really feel how he has known and loved her while she herself was not. This serves as a piercing reminder to the soul to go out of herself. Whom this glance wounds not is not nor ever has been wounded by love. [Concerning it St Bernard says, ‘ To him whose spirit has felt this glance it is unutterable ; to him who knows it

not it is incredible.’ ’Tis an arrow shot without anger and felt without pain. Thence starts the clear and limpid stream of healing grace which enlightens the inner eye to perceive in blissful beholding the delight of the divine affliction wherein we share unheard of spiritual graces, favours untold, not preached nor written down in any book.] (Saith the soul), ‘ Lord, thou thyself declarest that thou hast made me like thyself. That passes the ingenuity of man, for no philosopher is sage enough to fabricate the double of himself. Lord,’ she cries, ‘if thou hast made me like to thee, grant me to see thee seized of the power wherein thou hast created me, to know thee in the wisdom wherein thou hast known me, to conceive thee as thou conceivest me ; and grant me Lord that by thy grace 1 be made one with thee in nature as thy Son is one with thy nature eternally, and that thy grace may be my nature ; for, Lord, thy grace becomes thy nature and in thy nature we become God, as the Father in his nature is God by nature.’ Christ exhorts us to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect in his nature. He says, ‘ God is more near to you than yc are to yourselves.’ And in the same sense St Augustine says the soul has private entry to the divine nature, where things for her all come to naught. Then she is ignorant with knowing, loveless with loving, dark with enlightenment. Then to know God would be an imperfection ; to know herself in God would be an imperfection or to know God in her would be an imperfection. The incomprehensible essence she absorbs above all knowledge by grace, as the Father does by nature ; and the born essence being gotten in her understanding as the Father has gotten it in him, she steals out of herself and pierces the naked essence there to retain no more of things than when she issued forth from God. She comes so utterly to naught that there is nothing left but God ; God outshines her as the sun the moon, and she in God’s own subtile nature flows into all that God is flowing in eternally.

If thou hast apprehended me, there are two points to notice in these words. First, the soul knowing she was made from naught desires to see who made her. And secondly, her words, ‘ Grant me to see thee as creating me,’ mean that she wants to feel the faith and love wherein she was created. For then the soul sees God though she does not see through him. She knows God although she cannot fathom him ; she apprehends God but cannot comprehend him as he comprehends himself. St Paul says, ‘ Then we shall know as we are known.’ Stripped of her own being, with God her only being, the soul sees God with God, knows and conceives God with God. One high authority declares that the soul sees, knows, apprehends God with his very own essence which is the very essence of the soul. The soul sees, knows, conceives God as she is herself conceived in the pure intellect of the Deity. Then soul is comprehender as well as comprehended. But no man in this body and after the mode of his own mind can understand how soul is both conceiver and conceived be he not wholly sunk into himself, into pure knowledge of his own God-nature where no created thought did ever enter.

Now mark. The naught whereby soul comes to naught is the turning from images and forms to stay at none of them, for the divine nature is neither form nor image. And soul divorced from images and forms is like to the formless nature of God. This is the secret passage of the soul into divine nature. The soul which has nowhere to turn is ready to turn to the image of God. In other words, she goes with naught to naught : to the divine nature whereto none may attain be he not stripped of all mental matter. Alas ! how sorely they obstruct this secret passage, those who so lightly stay at temporal things ! Dionysius exhorted his disciples in this sense, saying, ‘ Wouldst know the hidden mystery of God ? then transcend whatever hinders thy pure perception, whatever thou caust grasp with thy understanding. God has nothing so hid as to be beyond the ken of a soul that has the wit to seek it right diligently and with prudence.’ A hard saying this, there is nothing in him so hidden as to be beyond her ken. Yet mark these facts. The power of things resides in essence. Now the soul is capable of knowing all things in her highest power, she being all closeted ill her secret chamber. To the soul thus freed from things there is disclosed his secret essence. She is able to receive his arcane power. As St Paul says, ‘ 1 can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.’ Up, noble soul ! seek thee no other place than this unneccssitous naught that did create thee, the same in its immovableness shall be thy place ; there shalt thou be more motionless than naught. — But this is traversed by some learned men who hold it is impossible. Naught, say they, is motionless, so how can the soul be more motionless than naught ? The soul is a created aught which can be moved : she is a variable ; naught is a constant. The soul, for instance, goes from light to light until she finds the sovran truth where all things end. So too the soul is moved in that she is aware of things other than herself. Naught has no awareness. Therefore aught is more movable than naught. So runs the argument against our thesis. Now to prove that the soul is more motionless than naught.

The arch-good, God, is more motionless than naught. And the most perfect likeness of this motionless arch-good is also most immovable. Haply thou wilt object : Naught is the same as Gk>d for both of them are non-existent. Not so. For naught is nothing to itself or any creature. But God is to himself his aught and naught to the mind of any creature. Withal the creature aught tells forth God’s aught by nature rather than its own. God’s aught is intellectual being. Dionysius says, ‘The intellectual light that God is, gat its own image in the rational soul.’ Now if God is more motionless than naught, it follows that the soul as reflected into her motionless aught, God namely, is more motionless than naught. Naught is movable out of itself when naught becomes aught and always is moved when aught is produced out of naught. Not so the soul : she always is aught and can never be naught. Behold the soul more motionless than naught, God having set her free, free to assert her own free will. Her motion is the quest of him who has never loved nor was ever loved. Which may be interpreted thus. The soul, uplifting with all her might and main herself above herself to love the sovran good, sees clearly she can never reach the divine aught accompanied by any of her powers. So down she goes again into herself, and the motionless aught bides unbeloved of her and of all that is not its very self. Thus the divine aught is never loved by her nor by anything that is not itself, nor has it ever loved. You can put it like this. He loves nothing but himself or his image in all things. But since he is not love nor anything named, therefore he loves not neither is he loved. This is the meaning of St Dionysius’ words, ‘ God dwells in motionless calm.’ And the bride says in the Book of Love, ‘ I have crossed all the mountains, aye, even my own powers, and have reached the dark power of the Father. There heard I without sound, there saw I without light, there breathed I without motion ; there did I taste what savoured not, there did I touch what touched not back. Then my heart was bottomless, my soul loveless, my mind formless and my nature natureless.’

Now what does the soul mean by ‘ crossing all the mountains ? ’ She means she has transcended her own rational powers and gotten ‘ to the dark power of the Father * where all rational distinctions end. ‘ There heard I without sound.’ Hearing without sound means intuition, direct apprehension. ‘ There saw I without light.’ Seeing without light means undefined, vague perception in the naught. ‘ There breathed I without stir ’ : the inspiration of unity wherein all things are still. ‘ There tasted I what savoured not ’ : over all sensible things hangs the motionless haze of unity. * There did I touch what touched not back ’ : alien, unalloyed essence of all creatures : the substance of all things substantial. ‘ Then my heart was bottomless ’ : the overwhelming wonder of my powers. ‘ And my soul loveless ’ : powers and senses blotted out. ‘ And my spirit formless ’ : the sealing of the mind in the unformed form and image of God. ‘ And my nature natureless ’ : my own nature withered away till nothing is left but the one unique is. This is-ness is the unity, the being of itself and of all things. St Dionysius says, ‘ The one alone is the life of lives, being of beings, reason of reasons, nature of natures, light of lights and yet not light, not life, not nature.’ Of it St James declares, ‘ The most perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights.’ Again St Dionysius says, ‘ The First Cause is above all names and transcends love ; it is superessential, superintelligible, super-rational and supernatural. The First Cause is neither light nor darkness.’ Behold how different from all caused things.

Saith the soul in the Book of Love, ‘ No one is God to me and I am soul to none.’ By ‘ no one is God to me ’ she means merely that no entity, nothing nameable, is her God. Again the words, ‘ I am soul to none ’ mean that she is so void of self she has not got it in her to be aught to anyone. This is the state in which the soul should be : in utter destitution. The soul cries in the Book of Love, ‘ He is mine and I am his.’ It were better she had said, ‘ He is not mine nor am I his,’ for God who is in all is therein all his own. She can lay claim to naught : she has lost every whit whereto any wight could in anywise be aught or she withal be aught to any wight. No one is her God and she is no one’s soul, wherefore she cries in the Book of Love, ‘Fly from me, beloved, on the feathers of the wind.’ What is the meaning of these feathers of the wind whereon the soul rides ? The feathers are the choirs of Seraphim. Th^ wind of their feathers is their clear seraphic knowledge. Above this dwells the soul. But not till she has left behind all images and forms, not harbouring any, not resting upon any. She must have lost her individual motion. And thus divested of her creaturehood, having no hold on anything at all, she sinks into downright nothingness ; there she is concealed from every creature. To this same naught no Seraph’s understanding can attain ; in this naught dwells the soul, super-seraphic, above all such knowing. Thus the soul rides on the feathers of the wind.

But what a perfect life this man must lead I How dead his soul to every kind of motion ! St John declares, ‘ Blessed are the dead that die in God.’ To this end, O man, do thou free thyself from every sort of sensible affection. God is exempt from such, and it behoves thee, man, to be the same if thou wouldst solve his hidden mystery. For this, look you, soul must be stripped of all her senses. St Dionysius spoke of this to Timothy, one of his disciples, when talk arose about St Paul who had been put to death. ‘ Alas ! my friend ’ (said Timothy), ‘ and shall we never hear again the loved voice of our master ? * The saint replied, ‘ Friend Timothy, my counsel is to leave behind us corporal things and go to God. But this we cannot do save with blind eyes and alien senses ; not that we ought to have misleading senses : we must transcend sense and knowledge to get to his mysterious unity.’ Anent which St Augustine says, * The soul has a private door into divinity where for her all things amount to naught.’ There she is ignorant with knowing, will-less with willing, dark with enlightenment. To wot of self would mean her imperfection ; to wot of God would mean her imperfection ; to wot of self in God or God in her would mean her imperfection : self is reduced to utter naught and there is nothing left but God, for God outshines her as the sun the moon and she with God’s all-penetrativeness streams into the eternal Godhead where God keeps ever flowing into God.

Nothing is without beginning, and since nothing is without beginning God could make us from nothing better than nothing, like himself. Alone God’s power did make the soul, so she like him is free from matter. And soul could have no homelier road into divinity than by way of nothing to nothing, for nothing unites like natural affinity. But St John Chrysostom declares that none can take it till his outward and his inward senses are focussed to clear vision of the Deity. The naught we were before we were created was indigent of naught.. Moreover of itself it could do absolutely naught and naught withstood creatures ; all but the power of God ; it was this caused naught to stir when God made all things from naught. Now we have got to be more motionless than naught. — ‘ But how ? ’ Mark how. God gat the soul the mistress of herself, not overriding her free will nor once exacting from her aught that she will not ; so whatever in this body she elects of her free will she is free to carry through. Say she chooses to need nothing and to be more motionless than naught, then assembling all her powers into her free will so as not to be hindered by herself or any thing, she centres herself in the motionless God who was n’er moved by any act done by the blessed Trinity nor is not indigent of any thing the blessed Trinity has ever wrought. To reach this point of needing naught and being more immutable than naught, soul must be sunk so deep in the bottomless well of the divine naught that nothing can draw her thereout to spend herself on mortal things, but there she steadfastly abides ; as the heavenly Father is everabiding in his nature without let or hindrance so the soul abides therein without let or hindrance, as far as that is possible to creature.

— ‘ Pray, Sir, how should it be impossible seeing that the soul was created to that end ? ’ — ^Because, you see, if she does stoop to baser things to let herself be satisfied with these, then that which is above her is beyond her reach, whereas God keeps no secrets from the soul whose lofty nature is equal to the quest. Up, noble Soul ! Out of thyself so far thou never comest in again and enter into God so deep thou never comcst out again : there stay nor ever deign to stoop to creature ; and burden not thyself with things made clear to thee, nor wander among objects presented to thy mind, nor be not hindered from achievement by any service. Steadfastly pursue thy simple nature and the unnecessitous nothingness, seeking no other place than this unnecessitous naught. God who made thee out of nothing, he in his unnecessitous nothingness and immovableness shall hiipsclf be thy place. There thou shalt be more immovable than nothing. They that serve God for gain with outward works reap their reward in creatures, such as heaven and heavenly things. But they that serve God by interior acts are rewarded with the uncreated, namely, the works of the blessed Trinity.

Mark this. No fire no light, no earth no life, no air no love, no water no place. Ergo, God is not light nor life nor love nor nature nor spirit nor semblance nor anything we can put into words. God flows into (iod and God flows out of God and God knows himself God in himself and knows himself God in his creatures in general and he knows himself God in the nobte soul in particular. The Father is almighty in the soul, the Son allwise, the Holy Ghost all-loving, loving all creatures with the same love. But he manifests as different and the soul is destined to know things as they are and conceive things as they are when, seized thereof, she plunges into the bottomless well of the divine nature and becomes so one with God that she herself would say that she is God. The soul withdrawn into herself till nothing made or named takes shape in her and she is bare as God of any name, gathers herself up above herself into her (iod and takes herself cum God for God. God is not black nor white, nor large nor small, he has no place nor any past nor future time, and the soul is like him only in so far as she can project herself above all creatures.

The soul is a creature receptive to everything named, but the nameless she cannot receive until she is gotten so deep into God that she is nameless herself. And then none can tell if it is she that has gotten God or God has gotten her. Dionysius says, ‘ God has conceived himself in her, so utterly absorbing her that she is now no longer self but God.’ And the soul’s inferior powers have distinction of person, love uniting the persons not the essence. The soul is destined to this knowledge when, on the ebb-tide of God’s glory, she is borne back into the bottomless ground of the fount whence she flowed forth and finds she is not from herself. The highest boon, the chief good of the soul, is not from herself. Christ himself declared he was not from himself. The truest thing we have is our intuition of not being from ourselves and that we ourselves are not of ourselves. God has done all things for himself and he has made the soul like to himself, over all things, under all things, in all things, out of all things and withal abiding in herself impartibly. But she is noblest keeping to the desert wherein she is naught and there is nothing doing. St Dionysius prays, ‘ Lord, lead me into the desert where thou art formless that in thy solitude I may lose all form.’ The soul is in all things in her subtile nature wherein she inhabits all things without affecting them or being affected by them. Thus transcending things she cries, ‘ Lord, fetch me into thy Godhead where thou art naught, for what is aught I deem to be not God.’ The soul is over all things in her freedom ; she knows none can compel her, not even God himself. Surrendering her free will to God she plunges into her own emptiness, beseeching, ‘ Lord, take me into the gloom of thy Godhead that in thy dark I may lose all my light, for nothing that can be revealed do I account as light.’ She is out of all things in her power of understanding, whichp makes her so elastic she is able to hold God as well as all his creatures. Embodying God thus she is more God than her own self. This is hers by grace. Aught of God is God entire and aught of him holds his whole being. This he is in the lowliest as much as in the loftiest nature. A small bung stops the barrel no less well than the biggest.

Comprehension belongs to his paternal power. He grasps himself in himself in all creatures and grasps himself in his countenance whereto he admits no creature and whereinto no creature can get. And this comprehension he veils in a cloud of distortion so that no creature can grasp him as he grasps himself. What the soul grasps in the light she loses in the darkness. Yet she makes for the cloud, deeming his darkness better than her light. There she suddenly loses her light and herself in his darkness. The soul cries in the Book of Love, ‘ No one is my God and I am no one’s soul, and nothing manifest to me do I take for God. I flee from God for God’s sake.’ St John says, ‘ God is love.’ But theologians argue that if he means the love wherewith the soul loves God, this is not true. Were that love God, wherewith the soul can love, it would not fail her as it does. This is a natural love, the virtue. But suppose her will is turned toward God, then Gk)d draws love from nothing and pours it into the virtue, so her love is both nature and grace. In grace God gives himself to the soul and the Holy Ghost unites with her love, and the love which is the Holy Ghost is God, and the love which is grace is the nature which unites the soul with God, and in this union the soul is absorbed into God and loves God with his own love in God, which in herself she cannot do.

The Father is the revelation of all things and the Son is the image of all things and the Holy Ghost is the fulfilling of that order. Philosophers say that things in contact with God are not God but his works. The soul is self-motive before she is moved and her being moved is the work of God, the soul being the agent while the work itself is creature. The power whieh perfects the soul, which sweeps her out of herself without her aid or abetting, is God. I can touch the minster, not carry it off. That we attribute to God matter and fonn and work is due to our gross senses. Theologians tell of the light which gives no light, which has no form nor matter and is yet a creature. To know God as he is we must be absolutely free from knowledge. Thus St Augustine says, ‘ Lord, I know not what I love in thee if it be not light.’ As God is timeless and modeless so he is also nameless. St Paul says, ‘ There be many that run but one receiveth the prize.’ All the soul-powers run but pure nature alone receives the crown, for, according to Dionysius, this race is nothing else than the flight from creatures to unite with their creator. Atoned wilji her creator the soul has lost her name for she herself does not exist : God has absorbed her into him just as the sunlight swallows up the dawn till it is gone.

Tell me, where is the soul’s abode ? — Upon the pinions of the wind. The pinions are the powers of divine nature. The wind is the waging of the powers of the soul’s divine nature. When he thrusts her sins under her eyes she sinks down into him like a fish in the sea. All creatures lose their names on entering human nature. Hence Christ’s exhortation, ‘ Preach the gospel to all creatures/ He meant only human beings. Observe when a man is all creatures. When he has the power of them all. When a man, knowing with his outward senses all corporal things, detaches himself from them and abides therein without attachment ; when, knowing with his interior senses all spiritual things, he detaches himself from these and abides therein without attachment, then at length that man is all creatures ; then, not till then, that man has come to his own nature and is ready to go into God. If we fail to find. God it is because we seek in semblance what has no resemblance. The scriptures tell us more of his unlikeness than his likeness. Origen says the soul’s quest of God comes by self-observation. If she knew herself she would know God also. If she pictures herself or pictures her God that comes of over-defining. On merging into the Godhead all definition is lost.

Dionysius says to Timothy, ‘ Friend Timothy, if thou dost view the spirit of truth, pursue it not with mortal senses. It is so swift, it comes rushing.’ God must be sought in estrangement, forgetfulness and non-sense ; for the Godhead has in it all things in posse without the least likeness to anything. The supremely pure splendour of the impartible essence illumines all things at once. According to Dionysius, beauty is order : symmetry with supreme lucidity. In this sense the Godhead is the beauty of the three Persons. And it behoves the soul to order her lower powers to her higher and her higher ones to God ; the outer senses to the inner and the inner ones to reason ; thought servant to intelligence, intelligeiKie to will and her will to their unity, then the soul will be a unity with nothing flowing into her except pure deity as it is proceeding from itself. Concerning this St Dionysius says the soul has flung her faculties into her pure being and only her chief power remains at work. And one doctor says that when the chief power takes command the rest all enter into it losing their own activities, so now behold the soul in her proper order and in her pure nature, her pure nature being her exalted light-nature which is potentially all things.

Th^ Godhead flows into the Father, into the Son and the Holy Ghost, into itself in eternity and in time into creatures. It gives to each as much as it can hold : to stones existence, to the trees their growth, to birds their flight, to beasts their pleasures, to the angels reason and to man free nature. God was made man and took upon himself by grace the nature of all things in time even as in eternity he has them all by nature. St Paul says, ‘ Christ is to me all things.’ One Person with two natures. Each seems all things to each. It is a play of the light and reflection of his own nature. God’s being is first being, flowing being, fixed being, initial being and final being. From essence in general emanates power and work. The three Persons are in this respect the storehouse of divinity, and the three Persons descend into the essence of the soul by grace, and the Persons bring divine nature into the soul in their train, one nature coursing through the other. The higher powers of the soul flow out of the essence of the soul as the three Persons issue from the Godhead, And when God pours his grace into the soul he pours

it into the essence of the soul, for into the essence of the soul no fleck can fall let her powers do what they may. The higher powers of the soul draw their seeming from the essence of grace in the essence of the soul, and her chief power transcends the lower ones in nature. Mind big with the conception of God’s nature is the corollary of Christ’s Person in human nature. When the soul is absorbed into God’s nature her sins and shortcomings arc stripped off and she becomes God, divine in nature ; she enjoys divine nature in herself just as the Father does in him. She gets it not from her own nature : she takes divine nature from God into her nature. She receives perfection and power. Hence the words of St Paul, ‘ I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.’ Wisdom springs up in understanding ; it begins in understanding and ends in desire and has neither heart nor thought. As St Dionysius says, ‘ When the soul, finding this outlet, has a footing in eternity and in time in her own understanding, therein she shall return into the flow where God is flowing back into himself, and does not flow away.’

God is flowing back into himself, recking no more of creatures than he did when they were not. And the soul shall do the same. She shall with her humanity conceive the Person of the Son and with the Person of the Son she shall apprehend the Father and the Holy Ghost in both and them both in the Holy Ghost ; and with the Person of the Father she shall grasp his impartible nature and in his nature discerning the abyss she shall flow into the void bereft of matter and of form. Form, matter, mind and mode she loses in the unity for she herself has come to naught : God is^oing all her work, he preserves her in his being and leads her in his power into his naked Godhead. She flows with his deity into all that God is flowing in. She is all things’ place and has herself no place. This is the spirit of wisdom which has neither heart nor thought. Soul flowing in the Deity is so nearly God that in the power of the Father she receives divinity, (she) by grace as the Father does by nature. St Paul says, ‘ In one image shall we go from glory to glory.’ Meaning that we shall receive the impartible Godhead with all that flows therefrom and shall therein conceive the Deity as the Deity conceives itself. Her will and God’s will shall be one, and wherever God has gotten himself there she is with God. To this none may attain while in this body except God grant his best gift to the soul, namely, the vision of God which confirms the soul in the Trinity and in the image of the Godhead.

Though there be neither hell nor heaven yet will I love God ; thee Father and thy sovran nature wherein the Trinity abides in the unity whence it gets its power. — Now you desire to hear about this hidden and exalted nature of the Trinity. The Persons are God in their personality. Godhead by nature in their oneness. But you must know what God and Grodhead are. The former has distinctions ; which the soul of me explains by the reflection of the exalted unity. This shines in its own essence wholly indiscriminate. Therein is contained its unity entire, including the distinctions of lofty personality. The river is fontal wherein unity abides ; the one alone is unnecessitous, poised in itself in sable stillness. Incomprehensible and yet self-evident. Light is the first thing to appear ; it beguiles the mind into the unknown without itself, everlasting, in-drawn, plunged in gloom. There it is befooled, there it is bereft of light’s darkness, losing them both in the abyss ; there that mysterious thing the mind is estranged in the unity which is withal its life. O unfathomable sink, in thy depth thou art high and in thy height profound ! — How so ? — ^That is hidden from us in thy bottomless abysm. St Paul declares that it shall be made known to us. In this gnosis the mind transcends itself; it has been absorbed into the Trinity. There the mind dies all dying in the wonder of the Godhead, for with that unity it is confused ; the perscvial losing its name in sameness. There mind, atoned, is accounted naught ; there it loses the means of divinity. Light and darkness, it is rid of both, matter as well as form. The spark thus bare, made naught from its own naught, is s\^llowed up in its naught’s aught. This same naught is poverty in the Persons, which beguiles the mind and reduces it to unity. In the embrace of this sovran one which naughts the separated self of things, being is one without distinction although a thing created in its individual nature. The one I mean is wordless. One and one uniting, void shines into void. Where these two abysms hang, equally spirated, de-spirated, there is the supreme being ; where God gives up the ghost, darkness reigns in the unknown known unity. This is hidden from us in his motionless deep. Creatures cannot penetrate this aught.

Well that this aught transcends us. Even so loving it transcendently, Plunge in ; this is the drowning. It is true spiritual perfection to love God for his own sake regardless of hell or heaven. We must love the three Persons in their unity of nature and their one nature in the three Persons. The Trinity has its power in the unity and the unity has its dignity in the Trinity. It belongs, moreover, to the noble mind to perceive the distinction between God and Godhead ; how it is the three Persons in him have gotten his unity as their natural being. Each Person has for nature his unity entire, so each of the Persons is in himself God and in his nature Godhead. God is God in the Persons and Godhead in his nature : in his impartible nature. The unity shines forth in the Trinity as articulate speech. But the perfect reflection of the one is shining by itself in lonely silence, there safely pent as one and indivisible. Further, the three Persons in their utterance keep their distinctive properties. The Father is source of the Son and the Son is the river thereof eternally flowing out of the Father as Person, while abiding within him in essence. The Father and the Son give forth their breath (or spirit). Thus the originated river with its original source is the origin of the Holy Ghost. Unity which, logically speaking, is the condition of the original source is also the condition of the river which, together with its source, is source of the Holy Ghost. And as this oneness is the nature of them both so too it is the nature of the breath exhaled by both. This river then is fontal. The unity which is in them both is unnecessitous, it has no need of speech, but subsists alone in unbroken silence.* Not that the utterance dies, i.e. the spoken essence. But where speech beats into the silence of its nature both have one common character, the character of sameness. What is this ? It is the motionless dark that no one knows but he in whom it reigns : the one with its selfhood. First to arise in it is light. Lo, this is the originated river, and origin itself, which has the character of light as proceeding forth in its individual nature. And what here streams forth to view will reveal itself and that from which it springs. In its interior procession this originated river, which is also the origin itself, has the nature of obscure, unmanifest intelligence, but the light proceeding forth brings revelation to the mind, beguiling it out of itself into its mysterious indwelling cause. There it is shorn of light’s illusion. Of everything, that is, which has been revealed to it in the fonn of light. Thereof it is despoiled, but now it finds another and better than this light-like understanding. Light has mode without knowledge. Darkness is knowledge without mode, a thing, that is, we can in nowise have. The mind

is rid of light when it is rid of mode ; and it is rid of darkness when, letting go of all natural things, it sinks in nameless actuality. Then it loses both light and darkness in the abyss that creature in its own right never plumbs. Such is the estrangement in the one as foreshadowed in the ordinary mind, but the realization of unity which the blessed have lies in the exquisite consciousness of another than themselves. O unfathomable void, bottomless to creatures and to thine own self, in thy depth art thou exalted in thy impartible, imperishable actuality ; in the height of thy essential power thou art so deep thou dost engulf thy simple ground which is there concealed from all that thou art not ; yet those whom thou wouldst commune with shall know thee with thyself. As St Paul declares, ‘ Then shall we know as we are known.’ This knowledge the mind gets not from its individual nature ; the unity hales it in the Three into itself, that is, to its true and natural abode where it transcends itself in what inhales it ; where ‘ the spirit dies all dying in the wonder of the Godhead.’ This dying of the spirit means its confusion with the one essential nature though it remains discrete in the Persons of the Trinity. This shows the activity of spirit ; its having variety of Persons. But by their union is shed a single light, for the three Persons are aglow with one intrinsic nature, like three lights with one shine. According to St Augustine this essential light is cast by the Persons into the pure spirit. At its glance the spirit forfeits self and selfliood and the uses of its powers. Such is the effect of the shaft of pure impartible light of unity which this spirit is rather than itself when it is reduced to nothing but «fche same. We call the unity naught because mind has no notion what it is ; what the mind does know is that it is upheld by another than itself. Its upholder then is aught rather than naught, though mind has no idea what it can be. It is more real to him than his own self in that it belies his personal naught. For mind, as actually dwelling there, loses every means of divine nature, which to him is all things. He loses his individual nature and yet he does not die ; he wins the nature of divinity although not God by nature but by grace. Now remember, he is something created out of naught. Yet he, a mere created wight, is drawn by the power of God’s essence into his unity, a thing unknown in anywise to any creature. This unity which is in nowise creaturely is poverty, for it is poor of creatures, its content being that of simple actuality. This modeless creature-essence is the being of the Persons who alone contain it in its most primitive and simple form as their nature. This knowledge de-ments the mind. This spiritual dementia means the absolute modelessness of the unity which the Persons have in actual mode. The spirit broods in

sameness without light or darkness. Sans light, in its impenetrable actuality ; sans darkness in its lack of any special name. The spirit free from matter and from form has taken on the form of God. Thus the mind attains to its eternal image which is one in its essential nature and threefold as uttered in the Persons. Though the spirit in this image has an eternal nature of its own yet in itself it is a thing created. This created thing is mens ; by mens being meant the spark, the living principle of spiritr This is the spirit in itself. Its eternal image is another ; that is really God. When the spirit in itself turns from all things becoming into the not-becoming of its eternal object in the Persons, whence it comes, then the mind is said to return to its exemplar. Then void shines into void : the purified becomingness of mind turns to the pure not-becoming nature of its eternal idea. In this embrace is consummated that exalted union wherein at length the spirit at one with all its nature is in divine atonement. Where these two meet in one, equally spirit and not-spirit, there is beatitude.

Now consider what the spirit of God means. The most significant and subtile word that creature can employ is spirit (breath or ghost) and that is why we call God spirit. But creature has no proper name for the nameless God and therefore to our mind God is not spirit. Mark too the meaning of spirituality of soul. It means that, aloof from the coil of nether things, she is living at her summit in thought and love. Here she is one spirit with God. Spirituality of soul, besides, means that in her aught she is no more material than in her naught wherefrom she was created. Such is the spiritual nature of the soul. But she is de-spirited (de-mented) when, at her absorption, she is what is his rather than lier own, and this is the perfection of her sanity. The interior spiration of God, again, is his hidden nature, the quarry of the mind which it escapes ; for tjiis mysterious and silent one lies hid in depths of stillness that no creature ever plumbs. This being is beyond our grasp, whereat, rejoicing greatly, let us hasten to seize it with itself ; this is our highest happiness. So be it, by thy help, O divine Trinity. Amen.

Concerning the flow into the Father, note as follows. The Godhead is contained in the Father as nature, wherefore ' See Spamor’s Texte, B. 2, from which the words in brackets are taken. he is omnipotent and receives naught from aught that he is not himself in his divine potentiality, seeing that he has it in him in essence, as his own. Nevertheless, speaking of the Father we mean the Person of the Father, and speaking of the Godhead we mean his nature, his impartible substance, that is to say. Now since this nature stays brooding in settled immoveable stillness, moving all things which have proceeded in eternity in the word of his power (or potential Word), it follows that, as power, it has ever been flowing into the Father making him able to beget a Son like unto himself. We can prove it thus. The Persons are impotent as Persons ; anything they do is done in virtue of their nature which is their real being. So much for the flow into the Father which he has of his own nature wherein he is omnipotent. Now mark* The soul has received two powers by nature. The first of these powers is understanding. This comprehends the Trinity, although it is incomprehensible, and all its works. Observe how understanding comprehends the Trinity, and all its works, despite its being incomprehensible. The soul in her understanding is the image of the Son and the Son is the Father’s understanding. So when the soul is empty of her own understanding, and only the Son is her understanding, she understands with the Son the Son and the Father and their common Spirit. That is how the soul comprehends the Trinity and all its works.

Her other power is will. It is its nature to cast itself into the unknown which is God. God is said to be unknown because no creature knows him as he knows himself ; as known to himself he is unknowing to all creatures. Hence we call God agnosia. Now the chief power of the soul is too fastidious to dally with temporal, known things, so free will boldly disregards the known and cleaves to what it knows not. As St Paul says, ‘ I know not; God knoweth.’ Christ says, ‘ When I am ascended I will draw all things to me.’ He means that when he dawns upon our heart artd understanding he gathers us up into himself. In this sense all creatures are one man and that man is God. [In this sense man is all things. For he has the nature of all creatures, and souls joined to Christ are in this sense one man with him. He is the head and they are his members, who are in his charity.] In Christ his all was assembled into one. His higher and his lower faculties, and the senses of his outward and his inward man were in harmonious union with his highest power, conceived there by divine conception, which was united with him in one Person. And so with the man in whom all creatures end, in whom all multitudinous things have been reduced to one in Christ : man is then one in God with Christ’s humanity. Thus all creatures are one man and that man is God

in Christ’s Person. As one master says : With Gk)d one spirit and with Christ one body, that is unity indeed. With the powers received from the Trinity the soul knows the ordering of all things ordained by God in such exalted fashion. But those that turn away their eyes from God relapse into the selfsame naught wherein they were before they had received the likeness of the Trinity, this likeness of the Trinity aye informing them of the dark nothing back to which they wend. In this darkness gather all the pangs of hell. The dark enwraps them and hides the sight of God ; it burns them past soothing by their created aught. This is bitter to their conscience which damns them to all time. In this pit of nothingness they sink for evermore, powerless to grasp the naught they were before they had the likeness of the Trinity. And now, my children, let us examine these dark sayings carefully. You will see the obvious meaning of these damned. But another, ghostly, sense lies hid therein, which it behoves you to note specially. This applies to the elect who turn away their mind from God and How back into that same naught, for when the soul is carried by her understanding above all things and beyond the scope of her own understanding to the understanding of the sovran good she secs that to all creatures this is unintelligible. So down she goes with her own understanding.

The fastidious soul can rest her understanding on nothing that has name. She escapes from every name into the nameless nothingness. Escaping her own nature she falls clear of her own aught. The naught she falls into is the unknowing, which is called the dark. ‘ In this dark gather the pangs of hell,’ where the soul is plynged sheer into the void. This only happens when she is perfectly devoid of knowledge. The slightest trace of knowledge or understanding of the naught that she is plunged in would be helltorment to her. All sense and knowledge of the naught ends in this darkness. ‘ The darkness burns them past salving by any of their kind. Bitter is this conscience which damns them to all time. In this abyss of nothingness they sink for evermore, failing to grasp the naught they were before they took the likeness of the Trinity.’ By virtue whereof they have their being. To approfound the naught wherein they drown they are as helpless as they were when they were not. All sense and knowledge end in the darkness of their naught. For this darkness is the incomprehensible nature of God. She sinks for evermore in the depths of this naught. She sinks and drowns ; she drowns to her own aught. Her aught, surviving, sinks as naught to naught. But the naught that sinks can never comprehend the naught it sinks in. Every virtue mastered and transcended, the soul cries ; ‘ Even

so I cannot glorify and love God to the full. I die then to the virtues casting me into the naught of the Godhead to sink eternally from naught to aught,’ The highest meed of love and praise the soul can lavish on the sovran good is given in the knowledge that all her love and praise fall short of God. So down she goes through the little she can call her own and dying to her virtues is cast into the naught of her own self. Two points mark here. She casts herself with the naught of herself when, self-bereft of her exalted power she ever regards her own insignificance. The other naught she plunges in is the naught of the Godhead. Seeing that she herself is naught and not disposed to stay at aught, the soul casts herself into the naught of the Godhead and so comes with naught to naught. She wants the aught she recognises in herself to perish in the naught which is its very aught and so subsist in unity. She sees we cannot love and glorify God better than by recognising how inadequate all love and glory are. Wherefore she holds her peace. St Dionysius being bent on lauding Mary’s virtues found them so inconceivable he held his tongue. By his dumbness the worthy Dionysius did Mary highest honour. Thus it befalls the soul on being ravished into God’s incomprehensibility. Her lips struck dumb, ‘ O groundless Truth,’ she cries, ‘ how paltry is our praise ! ’ So she attains to union close enough for God to pour himself into her every whit and snatch her every whit into himself, leaving no trace of either vice or virtue ; nor does the soul know any difference.

Fo^ you must know that to the soul in her perfection goodness would con\e quite natural ; she would not merely practise virtues, but virtue as a whole would be her life and she would radiate it naturally. We seem to be vicious or virtuous from being now the one and now the other. This should not be : we ought to be always in a state of perfection. That is one thing to note. Further, God absorbs the soul, leaving no trace. This means that the soul ravished by God into the peace and quiet of his secret self makes little show save to her kind. There the soul knows no separation, for he who has absorbed her has merged her in himself. She well knows that she is but knows not what she is. — The sun in certain countries is too hot for fruits to flourish on the surface of earth, but, on the other hand, the sun produces gold in plenty in the bowels of earth. And .so with the soul in whom the bright sun of the divine nature shines : it produces its like there, scattering the darkness and bringing about perfect unity. Look you,* it behoves us to be very merciful to these, for, withdrawn into his hiding, they are out of touch with the profane.

St Chrysostom says, ‘ It is not yet manifest what we are, but when we are changed into him we shall show what we are.’ Whatever she may take herself for, to God she is creature. The Godhead is a spiritual substance, so impenetrable that none can say what manner of thing it is. They say ; God in the Trinity is the living light in its visible radiance. In other words, the three Persons are but one in nature though distinct in Person in the same sense that the source of light is not the light nor is the source its shine. Applying this to the three Persons, the source is the Father, the Son is the light and the Holy Ghost is the shine. The Father is the living source in whom all things have lived eternally without themselves as in their cause. The light is the Son in whom all things appear eternally as in their idea. The shine is the Holy Ghost in whom all things are one eternally as in their naught. Not that one Person is the life and another the light : the three Persons are one life, one light. The Trinity is the heart of the divine nature. As you may prove. For in human life it is the heart which beats in all the limbs, energising, co-ordinating them. Because the limbs receive from it, therefore it is called the heart. Now touching the Godhead, this is not active in its nature, but anything it does it does with the Persons, and the Trinity is called the heart of divine nature because this works by means of it, and because it (the Trinity) is the origin of all things and all things flow back into it and end. This heart’s heart, again, is the paramount power of the unity wherein and whereby it is omnipotent. Human nature Hows in love into the Trinity as into its universal origin. The unity of the Trinity is bottomless and nothing is contained therein. In the embrace of unity the naked soul sinks down for aye nor ever touches bottom. Her temporalities (i.e. the created natures of her powers) stop at the Persons, whereas her pure essence is received by the pure unity of God without return.

Behold the soul divorced from every aught. For he who stoops to aught that is not God can never be received into God’s unity. This unity is causeless ; it is self-caused. Of bottomless depth the floor, of endless height the roof, of boundless space the rim. I refer to the Trinity of Persons : the unity underlies it, holding it together ; it overtops it, energising it ; it surrounds it, ending its distinctions. Thus the Trinity is in the unity and the unity in the Trinity. As saith the psalm Quicumque vult. That we should know ourselves and God so far as we are able, that is God’s will. If we would know ourselves we have to recognise that we are nothing but the raw material of God for the blessed Trinity to work in. It behoves us therefore to be vastly careful not to hamper in any way the work which the exalted workman designs to carry out in us to his glory, but so to maintain ourselves that the material is always ready for the workman to do his work in us. St Paul says, ‘ The spirit of the Lord descends from on high in secret, working in whom it will and when and where and how it will in him in whom it meets no hindrance.’ In the children of God. They are led by this spirit. — It is thus ye shall know yourselves. Next, we have to know God. To this St Dionysius exhorted one of his disciples, saying, ‘ Up, friend, divest thyself of things and put off thyself that thou mayst understand the Sovran Good.’ Of it three things are predicated. First, it is a unique force entire in everything ; next, a unique good embracing everything. (Thirdly) to know God really ye must know him as the unknown. So Dionysius says.

God’s will is our 'welfare, and our welfare eonsists in knowing God and doing accordingly. Here timorousness mutters in the soul, both she will and she will not. And hard on this comes rage of soul. When she divines that it remains for her to be somewhat that he is not, she is transported with ire. She would sooner come to naught than have or take aught that belongs to him. ‘ Lord,’ she cries, ‘ my welfare lies in thy never calling me to mind ; and forbid, I pray thee, any creature ever to console me. I rejoice that my powers never come before thy face.’ See what the soul means by her strange words : ‘ my welfare lies in thy never calling me to mind.’ She wots right well that she has never been one instant out of his mind and that is her felicity. She begs not to be comforted by any creature, because she is in indigence right comfortless where her disconsolateness is her one consolation. And when she says her powers come not before his face ? Observe what God’s face is. We sec ourselves best in what is called our face. So too where God is manifest to himself in the mysterious stillness of his own essence. This revelation is called the face of the Godhead. The soul is well aware that, accompanied by her powers, she can never enter the absolute stillness where he is manifest to himself. Hence she desires her pdwers not to come before his face, t.e. his self-revelation. See, her powers halt at its reflection in the Trinity and only the pure essence of her spirit is flashed from the stillness of her own power straight into this perfect revelation. As a master says : ‘ Where pure and purified are one the powers of the soul are at an end.’ Meaning that in the one perfect nature the pure nature of the spirit transcends all its powers. St Paul says, ‘ He who is joined to God is one spirit with him.’ Amen.

ST JOHN SAYS, ‘I SAW THE WORD IN GOD’ St John says, ‘ I saw the Word in God.’ God is abstract being, pure perception, which is perceiving itself in itself. St John means that the Son is in the Father, in his nature. ‘ I saw the Word with God.’ Here he is referring to the intellect which, flowing into God eternally, proceeded forth from God in distinction of Person, namely, the Son. * I saw the Word before God.’ This means that the Son is ever being born of the Father and that he is the image of the Father. ‘ In the Word there is only the Word,’ refers to the eternal emanation of creatures in the Word. ‘ I saw the Word under God ’ ; the Son become man, as God said, ‘ I have loved you in the reflection of my darkness.’ God’s darkness is his nature which is unknowable. Good people know it not and no creature can divine it ; therefore it is a darkness. While God was flowing in his own darkness the Son was not distinct from him. In the darkness of his nature the Father flowed as Person so far as he was pregnant. The Father gave his Son birth and gave him his own nature ; he gave him not his Person : his nature he can give away but he can give to none his Person for that is the product of his unborn essence. The Father spoke himself and all creatures in his Son ; the Father spoke himself to all creatures in his Son. The Father turning back into himself speaks himself in himself ; he flows back into himself with all creatures. As Dionysius says, ‘ God proceeded into himself,’ meaning that his hidden nature suffices him, which is concealeci from creatures. The soul cannot follow him into his nature, except he absorb her altogether, and then in him she is made dark of all created lights. The darkness of creatures is their incomprehensibility in their simple nature, that is, in the nothing from which they were created. In this uncreated light they discern his uncreatedness. Into his uncreatedness they flow in the reflection of his darkness.

— ‘ Tell me, good Sir, do Father, Son and Holy Ghost speak the same word in the Godhead or has each a different word ? ’ — In the Godhead there is but one word ; in it the Father in the Godhead speaks into his unborn essence and into his born essence, the Father flowing into his Son with all that he is and the Son speaks the same word, and the Father and the Son flow into the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost speaks the same word. They speak this one simple word in their essence and each speaks the same word in his own Person, and in their common nature they discourse the truth and the Persons receive the essence as it is essentially. Yet the Persons receive from one another. They bow down to the essence in praise, lauding the essence ; and the unborn essence pronounces its unborn word in the Persons, lauding the Persons^ and the Persons receive the essence every whit and pass it on to one another. This unborn essence is self-sufficient, without birth and without activity. Birth and activity are in the Persons^ The Persons say they are the truth and that creatures have none of the truth. When the soul attains to this divine speech she speaks this very truth and is the Deity to every creature as well as to herself. This comes of her indivisible nature and therein creatures are a matter of the will. The bad are bad and the good good, the Persons preserving justice in the Godhead. They give tjie bad their due and the good theirs.

St Dionysius says, ‘ God is the Prime Cause, and God has fashioned all things for himself who is the cause of all ; and his works arc all wrought in the likeness of the First Cause.’ Father and Son show forth the first cause, and the Son is playing in the Father with all things for he proceeded forth from him. The Son plays before Father with all things, the Son plays below the Father with all things. The Father begat the Son with his Godhead and with all things. The Father begat his Son in his Godhead with all things. The Father begat his Son into his Godhead with all things. The Godhead is the several Persons and the fullness of the Persons. The Godhead is not given to any thing. On coming to its knowledge the soul sees God and glancing back into herself she sees that the Godhead is in all things. Receiving into her the likeness of the creator she creates what she will but cannot give it essence : she gives it form and is herself its matter and its eternal activities are in her ; these are in the eternal birth. Its temporal activities are in time, where God gives his works essence, form and matter out of nothing, which the soul is unable to do ; God reduces his works to the unity of Christ and this order shall not pass away but shall be raised up to the glory of the one. Soul, transcending order, enters the naked Godhead where she is seen when God is seen in the soul as God. This soul has God as God in her, she has gotten in her the image of her creator.

Now mark the difference between the work of God and creature. God has done all things for himself, for he is the universal cause and all his works are wrought in the likeness of the first cause and creatures all work according to the likeness of the first cause. That is the intention they have towards God. v God made all things from nothing, infusing into them his Godhead so that all things are full of God. Were they not full of the Godhead they would all perish. The Trinity does all the work in things and creatures exploit the power of the Trinity, creatures working as creatures and God as God, while man mars the work so far as his intention is evil. When a man is at work his body and soul are united, for body cannot act without the soul. When the soul is united with God she does divine work, for God cannot work without the soul and the soul cannot work without God. God is the soul’s life just as the soul is the body’s, and the Godhead is the soul of the three Persons in that it unifies them and in that it has dwelt in them for ever. And since the Godhead is in all things it is all soul’s soul. But in spite of its being all soul’s soul, the Godhead is not creatures’ soul in the way it is the Trinity’s. God does one work with the soul ; in this work the soul is raised above herself. The work is creature, grace to wit, which bears the soul to God. It is nobler than the soul as admitting her to God ; but the soul is the nobler in her admissibility. This creature which has neither form nor matter nor any being of its own, translates the soul out of her natural state into the supernatural.

To his eternally elect God gives his spirit as it is, without means ; they cannot miss it. Creatures God is going to make at his good pleasure he has known eternally as creatures, for in God they arc creatures albeit nothing in themselves : they are uncreated creatures. Creatures are always more noble in God than they are in themselves. In God the soul shall see her own perfection without image and shall see the difference between things uncreated and created and she shall distinguish God from Godhead, nature from Person, form from matter. The Father is the beginning of the Godhead, he is the well-spring in the Godhead, overflowing into all things in eternity and time. The Godhead is a heaven of three Persons. The Father is God and a Person not born nor proceeding from any ; and the Son is God and a Iverson and born of the Father ; and the Holy Ghost is God and a Person proceeding from both. St Paul speaks of the uncreated spirit flowing into the created spirit (or mind). This meeting which befalls the created spirit is her saving revelation ; it happens in the soul who breaks through the boundaries of God to lose herself in his uncreated naught. The three Persons are one God, one in nature, and our nature is shadowing God’s nature in perpetual motion ; having followed him from naught to aught and into that which God is to himself, there she has no motion of her naught. Aught is suspended from the divine essence; its progression is matter, wherein the soul puts on new forms and puts off her old ones. The change from one into the other is her death : the one she doffs she dies to, and the one she dons she lives in.

St John says, ‘ Blessed arc the dead that die in God : they are buried where Christ is buried.’ Upon which St Dionysius comments thus : Burial in God is the passage into uncreated life. The power the soul goes in is her matter, which power the soul can never approfound for it is God and God is changeless, albeit the soul changes in his power. As St Dionysius says, ‘ God is the mover of the soul.’ Now form is a revelation of essence. St Dionysius says, ‘ Form is matter’s aught. Matter without form is naught.’ So the soul never rests till she is gotten into God who is her first form and creatures never rest till they have gotten into human nature : therein do they attain to their original form, God namely. As St Dionysius hath it, ‘ God is the beginning and the middle and the end of all things.’ Then up and spake the loving soul, ‘ Lord, when enjoyest thou thy creatures ? ’ — ‘ That do I at high noon when God is reposing in all creatures and all creatures in God.’ St Augustine says, ‘ All things are God,’ meaning, they have always been in God and shall return to God. So when St Dionysius says, ‘ All things are naught,’ he means they are not of themselves and that in their egress and their ingress they are as ineomprehensible as naught. When St Augustine says, ‘ God is all things,’ he means he has the power of all things, one more noble than he ever gave to creatures. And St Dionysius* dictum, ‘ God is naught,’ implies that God is as inconceivable as naught. As King David sings, ‘ God has assigned to everything its place : to fish the water, birds the air and beasts the field and to the soul the Godhead.’ The soul must die in every form save God : there at her journey’s end her matter rests and God absorbs the whole of the powers ol’ the soul, so now behold the soul a naked spirit. Then, as St Dionysius says, the soul is not called soul, she is the sovran power of God wherewith God’s will is done. It is at this point St Augustine cfies, ‘ Lord thou hast bereft me of my spirit ! ’ Whereupon Origen remarks, ‘ Thou art mistaken, O Augustine. It is not thy spirit, it is thy soul-powers that are taken from thee.’ The soul unites with God like food with man, which turns in eye to eye, in ear to ear. So does the soul in God turn into God ; combining with each divine power she is that power in God ; and God combines with the soul and is each power in the soul ; and the two natures flowing in one light, the soul comes utterly to naught. That she is she is in God. The divine powers swallow her up out of sight just as the sun draws up things out of sight.

What God is to himself no man may know. God is in all things, self-intent. God is all in all and to each thing all things at once. And the soul shall be the same. What God has by nature is the soul’s by grace. God is nothing at all to anything ; God is nothing at all to himself, God is nothing that we can express. In this sense Dionysius says, ‘ God is all things to himself for he bears the form of all things.’ He is big with himself in a naught : there all things are God, and are not, the same as we were. When we were not then God was heaven and hell and all things* St Dionysius says that ‘ God is not meaning that he bears himself in a not^ namely, the not-knowing of all creatures, and this not draws the soul through all things, over all things and out of all things into that superlative not where she is not-known to any creature. There she is not, has not, wills not, she has albandoned God and everything to God. Now God and heaven gone, the soul is finally cut off from every influx of divinity, so his spirit is no longer given to her. Arrived at this the soul belongs to the eternal life rather than creation ; her uncreated spirit lives rather than herself : the uncreated, eternally-existent which is no less than God. Wherewith being all-pervaded to the total loss of her own self, the soul at length returns without herself to eternal indigence, for what is left alive in her is nothing less than God. Thus she is poor of self. This is the point where soul and Godhead part and the losing of the Godhead is the finding of the soul, for the spirit which is uncreated drawing on the soul to its own knowledge she comes nearer to the not- being of the Godhead than by knowing all the Father ever gave. [The gift of the Father is the positive existence of all creatures in the Person of his Son and with the Son the Holy Ghost as well. For the Persons must be looked on as inseparate, albeit distinct illuminations of the understanding.] And so far as she attains this in the body she enjoys the eternal wont and escapes her own.

We ought to be eternally as poor as when we were not and then our kingdom shall not pass away, abiding as it does in God whose it is eternally. The Godhead gave all things up to God ; it is as poor, as naked and as idle as though it were not : it has not, wills not, wants not, works not, gets not. St Dionysius says, ‘ Be the soul never so bare the Godhead is barer ’ : a naught from which no shoot was ever lopped nor ever shall be. It is this counsel of perfection the soul is straining after more than after anything that God contains or anything she can conceive of God. Saith the bride in the Book of Love, ‘ The form of my beloved passed by me and I cannot overtake him.’ It is God who has the treasure and the bride in him, the Godhead is as void as though it were not. God has consumed the form of the soul and formed her with his form into his form. Now she gets all things free from matter, as their creator possesses them in him, and resigns the same to God.

Ours to contain all things in the same perfection wherein the eternal wisdom has eternally contained them. Ours to expire them as the Holy Ghost has expired them eternally. Ours to be all things’ spirit and all things’ spirit to us in the spirit. Ours to know all and deify ourselves with all. Ours to be God by grace as God is God by nature ; ours to resign the same to God and be as poor as when we were not. In this state we are as free as when we were not : free as the Godhead in its non-existence. Christ says, * Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ These same poor in spirit enjoy the Father without let or hindrance. The Father knows no difference between this soul and him save that he has by nature what she has by grace. For as Christ declares, ‘ Them that follow me I will bring to where I am.’ ‘ Blessed are the poor in spirit ; God’s kingdom is in them.’ These spiritual poor are those who have abandoned everything to God as he possessed them when we were not and the naught itself. In this naught dwells God and in God dwells this soul. There she has no dwelling and thereinto no creature can get in its own right and no creature can go higher.

The three Persons made creatures out of nothing to enjoy the uses of the blessed Trinity. There is difference of wont in the Persons and their powers ; for the essence being self-sufficient there is nothing in the essence to enjoy excepting unity, so the soul demands nothing, knows nothing, wills nothing. As to the Persons, the one knows the others so far as they are Persons, for one Person begets the others. Essence begets not. In the domain of Person, one is receiving from another. The Son receives all he possesses from the Father ; the Holy Ghost receives all he» possesses from the JFather and the Son, and each of the Persons receives from the ' others presence and well-being and co-operation and mutual delight. As to their activity, each one finds itself entire as essence in the others and each enjoys the others as Persons and itself in both the others. We speak of three creations. Birth is called creation, and being made from nothing, and being raised in grace to higher grace. The same applies especially to Christ. If birth is a creation then Christ was the creature of his Father in his eternal birth of Person and of nature. Christ himself declared, ‘ Wisdom created wisdom.’ The creation of the Son has ever been to him his whole existence, who is still being born of the Father eternally with all that he is, and this birth remains in the Father eternally. St Dionysius says, ^God created a God as good as God.’ Inasmuch as the Father conceives himself of himself he is his own creation. As St Dionysius says, ‘ God is his own self-begotten Son.’ In eternity, that is. Creatures abide in eternity as being in the God-bearing Godhead. The Son knows all things essentially in the

essence of the Father who, essentially, has the potentiality of all things that shall happen and shall not happen. He has in his Person the universal image, so that he knows all things in common with the Father and wields joint power over what has happened, what is happening and what is still to happen, as well as over what God could do an he would that never happens. As the Father stretches his will to things that are to happen so the Son stretches his wisdom to effect their happening ; and as the Father directs his will towards things that shall not happen, the Son directs his wisdom to prevent them happening. The second creation is that of all the three Persons at once who are one in their work of making all things from nothing. This applies pre-eminently to Christ’s soul, for she was created from nothing in time. The images existing in the middle Person are imprinted in his soul’s potentiality so that she knows ideally, all things past, present and to come. But things that are not going to happen, things which God in his omnipotence could do but which will not take place, albeit possible essentially, these his soul does not know for that belongs to God alone. This light is creature, created from nothing and is supernatural to the soul. His soul has one light in common with the angels. This is the image impressed in her wherein she perceives in herself things that have happened and are happening ; but in this image she sees nothing of those things which are going to happen except God grant her knowledge of them. And this is supernatural to the soul.

The third creation is the raising of his body from grace to higher grace, that is, something extra to his animal nature, fei his animal nature he cannot see into peoples’ consciousness ; in his animal nature he could give no sign nor know about the future unless God granted it. Christ was so foolish as a child he did not know his father or his mother. St Ambrose says ; ‘ He was created from grace to higher grace when he rose from death to immortality.’ Christ sees in heaven, with his fleshly eyes, only what is before him ; he must turn round to see what is behind him. So the Son has never known the Father in that fundamental mode wherein the Three are united in one nature. That mode Christ’s soul was sharing when, at the moment of her creation she was bereft of it and prevented from seeing her divine nature, Christ’s soul enjoys divine nature by grace as God does by nature. This is so far removed from creature that never a drop has ever leaked into any creature. The furthest limit of man’s knowledge is an intuition of how the three Persons enjoy their divine nature. To this none can attain unless his soul is plunged into the consciousness of the created and uncreated

natures confluent in her where she stands in the midst and, seeing straight into them both, has at that point pure intuition of her wont and how what she enjoys there is withdrawn from her and how, though borne along with and by grace, she is still unable to apprehend God’s nature. She clearly sees that she is God’s and not her own at all. She is acutely sensible that enjoying and suffering are identical. That Christ should have action and passion both in one, bodily, that was the wonder. His soul must have suffered in all her powers. Her highest power suffering as much more than the rest as it was more capable of suffering. One wise doctor says, ‘ In this intuition the soul has perfect joy, for perfect joy is perfect knowledge.* Christ says, ‘ They that know thee Father and thy Son whom thou hast sent, have life eternal.’ Also he says, * Pray, that your joy may be full.’ St Dionysius says, fullness of joy is perfect consciousness, a balanced interchange of nature, whereby the soul beholds herself in the mirror of the Godhead. God is the mirror, unveiled to whom he will and veiled from whom he will. St Peter says, ‘ God fashioned his nature and the Persons in that nature and chose the nature not the Persons.’ St Dionysius says the soul has a light that lights her to work. By the light God casts on the angels next him they cast themselves back into God with all they are. As St Bernard observes, ‘ Minds do not flow back into God in their natural light ; the Godhead absorbs them in its own light without their seeing.* Now St John says, ‘ God is love, and he who dwells in love dwells in God and God in him.’ When God reveals himself to the soul and the soul loves God, she is in God and God is incher. When the sun shines and the eye sees it, the eye is in the sun and the sun is in the eye. Well then, friend mine, here you have the notion, which it defies me to express in words, for the divine nature in the Persons is a mirror, beyond the reach of any word. In so far as the soul can project herself beyond words so far she approaches that mirror. In that mirror the union is simply onh of likeness.

When, Lord, I was in thee I was unnecessitous in my nothingness ; it was thy look, thy notice of me, that made me indigent. If it be death for the soul to part from God, then it is death to her to emanate from God. All change is a dying. Wherefore we die from time to time and the soul dies all-dying in the wonder of the Godhead, impotently grasping at the divine nature. In the naught she is undone and comes to nothing. In this not-being she is buried, in un-knowing she is merged in the unknown, in unthinking merged in the unthought-of, in un-love one with the unloved. Death’s grip none can unloose ; it severs life from limb and the soul from God and casts her into the Godhead wherein, sepultured, she is ignored by every creature. She is forgotten as one changed within the tomb nor is she held in any man’s embrace. She like God is incomprehensible. For the dead who have died in the Godhead are beyond our ken, like the dead are who die here to the body. That death is the soul’s eternal quest. Slain in the three Persons she loses her naught and is hurled into the Godhead. Where she discovers the face of her naught. ‘ Thou art all fair my love, there is no spot in thee,’ says our Lord ; and of his incomprehensible beauty she declares, ‘ Thou art more fair.’ There she sees the secret art of God : how marvelloiisly God contrived that nothing should be indigent, yet without detriment thereto. St Dionysius says : ‘ No wonder God made the soul indigent with a look, when tlie sun, unbidden, gives life to mites and worms in rotten wood.’ The soul, perceiving God’s immensity and her own insignificance, easts herself out of God’s heart and out of all creatures and rests upon her naked nothingness : the divine power has her in its keeping. As St Dionysius says : ‘ All things are naught at the command of God.’ Again he says : ‘ The look which goes from God into the soul is the beginning of faith whereby I believe things not revealed to me.’ So far as the soul sinks down in feith into the unknown good, so far she is one with the unknown good and is unknown to self or any creature. She well knows that she is but knows not what she is. Not till she knows all that there is to know does she cross over to the unknown good. This crossing is obscure to many a religious.

The nature of the soul is such that where she is at all there she is altogether. She is entire in every limb, for where her natpre is at all there it is wholly. So is the Godhead in all places and in all creatures and in each wholly. Unnatured nature is natured only so far as it is natureable. It natures not itself but the Father natures his Son in natured nature, for the Father is as much natured as unnatured nature, seeing that it is one with him. The Father is alone in unnatured nature and is the first in natured nature. And in natured nature the Son is naturing with the Father, for (Father) and Son nature the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost exists with the Father and the Son in natured nature and natures not. In (un)>natured nature they are one, natured nature distinguishing the Persons ; and the Persons are as eternal in their Persons as the unnatured nature in its nature and their natured nature is as eternal in them as their unnatured nature, and this is nothing else than one God in three Persons^ who nature creatures, each in its own nature, and give them the power and activity that is best suited to them. So dear each creature holds its nature that it would have no other.

A master says, ‘ If sorrow could befall the Father he would rue his inability to make all things divine by nature.’ When the soul in her simple nature turns into God’s nature forthwith she is made one with God, but to heed discrete powers and persons and virtues hampers the soul’s divine unity. Her common sense endows the other senses with sight, hearing, touch and savour, albeit in itself no more than one. And the perceptions of the outward senses are all referred to common sense. Discursive reason sorts out what is good and, leaving out the animal and gross, presents it to the memory for union with the soul. Her highest power introduces it to her understanding which has intuition of God’s will, and so it is conveyed into the soul who harmonises all with God’s good will. God in himself is simple good and undivided. The names the soul gives God are taken from herself. Albeit threefold in his Person, God is the one and only good by nature. He is omnipotent good in the Father, clear wisdom in the Son and pure goodness in the Holy Ghost. He is threefold and he is one in creatures generally ; and of those burning spirits who are consumed in the fire and brought to naught in him he is the impartible substance. When, having harmonised all things in herself, the soul is reduced to her impartible substance, then she inhales the powers of the divine nature and exhales them from her being into the being of the divine nature which permeates her throughly, the two beings meeting in one point which is common to the soul and God and the variety of Persons hinders not their unity nor does their nature interfere with the variety of Persons. He is threefold and one in every Person in his born and unborn natures severally and the Persons are not admitted to the essence. To receive one Person is to receive the divine nature threefold in its unity. For one Person in essence is as good as three distinct.

Happy the soul who, taking this transcendental flight, receives all things in the naked Godhead. That soul is buried in the face of God ; she is rapt into heaven wherein the three Persons dwell in the oneness of their nature. This is the hidden Godhead whereof no man can speak. Blessed are they who make this passover : all things are known to them in truth and they themselves unknown to any creature. So far as they are above creatures they are God and super-creaturely, owing to their unity with God. God’s face conceals them, every shadow of them, in itself. Where two unite, the stronger draws the weaker to it. Christ says, ‘ Ye have not chosen me but I have chosen you.’ Blessed are the chosen, they bear God’s image. Christ says, ‘ Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.’ The poor in spirit are those who have abandoned all to God as he possessed them when we were not. God’s kingdom means the soul being full of God and nothing of herself. In this nothing God dwells and the soul dwells in the same nothing. There she changes not and thereinto no creature can get in its own right, and creature can rise no higher. St Dionysius says, ‘ God dwells in the nothing.’ O Dionysius, that is not enough ! God dwells in the nothing-atall that was prior to nothing, in the hidden Godhead of pure gnosis whereof no man durst speak. Unity is of God alone. As St Dionysius says : ‘ Did God not dwell in the naught things would all perish.’ St Dionysius, that is not enough I Did God not dwell in the nothing-at-all sustaining creatures with his might, they would all come to nothing for they by nature pass away into the nothingness from which they were created. Therefore God dwells in the nothing-at-all that was prior to nothing.

Creature has access to God, who is her being, energising in the power which moves her to rise from naught to aught. Now St Paul asks, and Augustine too, ‘ How did I get from naught to aught, from worm to God, from creature to creator ? ’ The soul shall be so one with God she weens that nothing is save God alone and that God made no creature save herself alone. The soul that makes this transcendental passage enters the universal peace. She is God as he is in himself. Christ says, ‘ I have been man for you and if ye are not God for me ye wrong me.’ God became man that we might become God. God in his God-nature lay hid in human nature so that we saw naught but man. And so this soul shall hide her in God’s nature until we can see naught but God ; not putting on a Person as Christ did but wholly immersed in the divine nature. God is not a nature like a creature is ^hich has some quality another lacks. The brewer who is also baker we cannot simply call a brewer for he is baker too. God is the nature of each nature : he is all natures’ nature undivided. He is the light of lights, the life of lives, the being of beings, the reason of reasons. He is all natures’ common nature. As Dionysius says : ‘ We cannot say he is a nature seeing that he is impartible and there is nothing like him.’ And again St Dionysius says : ‘ We know God only in unknowing.’

When God enters the soul he comes in with all things. Although in God there is but one thing simply, the soul possesses it as separate notions, angels and devils and all. The soul is able to conceive all things in God and to discern what God is in them and what they are in God by soaring up to the supernal simplicity, into unknowing. St Dionysius says, ‘ That is Lordship, transcending earthly things and the likes of them and raising them to the heights.’ Christ says, ‘ Them that follow me I will raise to where I am.’ The Father speaks himself into the soul in his Son. Now the Son is the Word of the Father, so the Father reveals to the soul in this wise that he is shapeless in his divine nature. The soul, speaking herself back to the Father in the selfsame Word, says she has no shape either in her naught, so she abandons her naught in the Word and plunges shapeless into the unshapen. The Godhead is an abstract simple thing, omnipotent above all Person as well as having the power of the inseparate three Persons : giving to none, receiving from none, save as therein subsisting. St Dionysius says, ‘ The Godhead has gotten all things.’ The three Persons are in the Godhead ; they reveal of it to creatures and each other as much as they are able to receive. The Father reveals the Godhead to himself and to his Son and Father and Son reveal it to the Holy Ghost and the three Persons reveal it to creatures and the Godhead wantons with the Word and before the Word and above the Word and the Word cannot comprehend it. Were the three Persons undistinguished in the Godhead, the Godhead would not be revealed at all and creatures would not have been created. The eternal activities are the cause of creatures. The Father reveals the Godhead, the Son reveals the Father, the Holy Ghost reveals them both : This revelation the Godhead gets from things beneath it. The supreme perfection is indigent of creatures. So it befalls from time to time that when the moon, shooting below the sun, mono})olises all the sunlight and the sun is said to be eclipsed, that then a star exerts its force upon the moon and drawn it off the sun ; thus the sun owes its light to things beneath it.

The soul gets from the Trinity those finite things commensurate with her powers. Out of the naked Godhead there shines into the simple being of the soul a single light invisible to her powers, both high and low. For though the Godhead has in it all things, it has them all in one, not piecemeal. It begets not, so it is not Father ; it receives not, so it is not Son nor Holy Ghost. The three Persons are God in person and in nature Godhead. The Godhead shines through the distinction of Persons and through separate creatures down to the very lowest, illuminating them and illuminating itself in itself. And when the soul in her naked essence enters into the Godhead, all things are within her ken even the meanest creature ; then she illuminates herself and everything in her and discerns in the Godhead the divine nature and in the variety of Persons she loses her name and the Persons lose their names in the unity and everything the unity comprehends loses its name in the unity. And here the soul, as good now as her naught, both draw together to their close in the Godhead’s naught, where her powers are useless. As St Dionysius observes, ‘ God passes away.’ By which he signifies that the

soul in her naked essence has escaped her powers. Her powers have lost their deity, and the pure substance of their deity as well, to the Persons and their powers, which powers react upon the essence by hindering the swing-back of the Three to unity. Here love loses her name and all things in the Godhead’s naught, now the soul has flowed into her aught. In the Godhead’s naught, the Father has his consummation and the three Persons their one nature wherein they give to creatures the perfection of their created aught and the soul in her aught in the Godhead’s naught courses through all things all undisturbed in her being’s aught. As St Dionysius says, ‘ The soul is not moved in her naught in the Godhead’s naught neither does the soul move the Godhead in its naught. There she is so great . . ., she flows to him as it were in a light.’ St Dionysius says, ‘ The Godhead has come to naught for the powers of the soul cannot comprehend it.’ Blessed and praised be the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the unity of their divine nature. Blessed and praised be Jesus Christ the Son of the living God, one Person of divine nature and human nature.

The soul is furious for self-knowledge. Her face is lit with passion, red with rage for the arrears withheld from her in God, because she is not all God is by nature, because she has not all God has by nature. The masters say there is no fiercer appetite than a fjiiend’s desire to possess his friend and all that he possesses. The soul proclaims her rage so boundless she cannot be appeased by him. The bonds of love are all too cruel for her. Alas ! she cries, who shall console me ? My misery is too deep. Were I the one creator, beginningless and endless, and had I made creatures and were he soul like me, then I would go straight out of my estate and let her enter in and be God while I was creature ; and if it were an obstacle to God to get his being from me, he would be welcome to efface me for I would perish sooner than be a hindrance to him. But seeing it is common to everything created to have somewhat of the eternal in man’s nature ever present in it, therefore I know not where to turn to find a place. So I take refuge in myself and there I find the lowest place, aye, one more base than hell for even thence do my shortcomings hound me. It seems I cannot then escape myself. Here I sit me down and herein will I stay. And I beseech thee, Lord, that thou never callest me to mind and forbiddest any creature ever

to console me and deniest to my powers that ever any one of them should come before thy face, lest I offend thee. So I go out and let the soul go in. The third rage of the soul is that she should be God and that there should not be a single creature, like when God was in his eternity ere he created creature, so that she may enjoy Godnature in its simplicity as he did before. But then his love were lacking to him, for it is the nature of good things to communicate themselves. Fourthly, she rages to be absolutely nothing but the naked essence, there being neither God nor creature. She asks. What is the good of the three Persons in the Godhead and what is the use of creatures ? But hold, she cries, except for them there would be no creatures. That must be the reason why there are three Persons in the Godhead : they are the cause of creatures. God is God-exalted : the creatures he has made cannot exalt him. All that creatures do to God is themselves : such glory as they can give to God is the same as they are.

Ego sum via, veritas et vita, ‘ I am the way, the truth and the life,’ says our Lord Jesus Christ. Mark specially the words, ‘ I am the way.’ In a twofold sense we take Christ as the way : according to his manhood and according to his Godhead. His manhood was the way of our own manhood. This we have to folloi'^ both the counsel of perfection as a whole and also in its parts. If but one of our members leaves the way of his example we are thereby deformed. St Paul declares we ought to live so that God may find in us the perfect reflection of all his divine works, i,e. we must copy the exemplar he has set before us. That is true spiritual life. But this is greatly hampered by numerous defects ; mainly numerous interior shortcomings due to the powers of our soul being disorderly. The joy of the soul should be so set upon its proper work that no created things can gladden her but only the fact that her consciousness is clear. As Christ said to his disciples, ‘ Rejoice not in anything except in this, that your names are written in the book of life.’ And the fear of the soul should be so well controlled that she fears nothing under God either for person or possessions, nor aught that may be inflicted upon her whether by God or creature. And similarly with the

^ See Pfeiffer, Zt,f, dtsch, Alt,, Bd. 8 (2), 1850, and Preger, Zit.J. hist, TheoL, Bd. 34, 1864 (two versions). Also Jostes, Nos. 18 and 19. For authorship see Preger’s Oeschichte, vol. i, p. 318. other powers, desire and thought. The entire soul, in short, has to be gathered up into the impartible simplicity of her will and her will must fly at the highest good and fasten itself thereto. But St Paul says, ‘ He who is fastened to God becomes one spirit with him.’ Behold how rich is the spirit grown thus one spirit with God ! No things can enrich it though it hold sway over them all. For things are necessaries whereas its riches consist in its dwelling in a nature superior to creaturely necessity. He who has nothing and needs nothing is richer than the man who possesses all things with necessity. St Paul says : ‘ Our sufliciency is in God alone whose able ministers we are.’ Nor do the virtues enrich the spirit. Doctors declare that it is not, properly speaking, the virtues which enrich the spirit but the fruit of virtues. The soul has virtues of necessity. But virtues being a necessity, the spirit is of necessity not enriched by them. The utmost a spirit can attain to in this body is to dwell in a condition beyond the necessity of virtues ; where goodness as a whole comes natural to it so that not only is it possessed of virtues but virtue is part and parcel of it : it is virtuous not of necessity but of innate good nature. Arrived at this the soul has traversed and transcended all necessity for virtues : they are now intrinsic in her. Now she has reached the goal whither the virtues merely pointed her, to wit, the infusion of the Holy Ghost. This is the fruit of virtue ; this alone serves to enrich the spirit. Concerning this St Paul says : ‘ Put on the new man, Christ,’ who was in this way our way.

The other way is the way of his Godhead. ^ — ^What way has the Godhead and where can it go seeing it is in all places ; and wherewithal does it go seeing that it has no feet nor anything bodily ? — The way of the Godhead is the unity wherein the three Persons run together into one essence. The going of the Persons consists in their mutual knowing and loving, each knowing and loving itself in the others. Thus do the Persons walk together in unity. The feet with which the Godhead enters the Persons and the Persons the essence are : the one foot of the Godhead is foresight of all things ; the other, pleasure in the things eternally foreseen, for God enjoys eternal wise the contingency of things. This refers to the eternal image. He enjoys only good in all things : image of all things which is very God. It may be questioned, What pleasure does God enjoy ? All things must needs please him for he who saw was God and what he saw was likewise God. In their eternal image which is God himself, God saw himself and saw things as a whole. God

enjoyed himself, God being in himself the unique one. The soul sees her impartible idea in God^ which has never come out of him. This her multiform image does, and the consummation of her spirit lies in the reduction of its here created aught to the naught of its eternal prototype. God is the origin of the spirit and the spirit never rests till it returns into its origin, to its eternal prototype. Essentially this prototype is God wherefore it aye eludes the spirit which is never able quite to apprehend it. Yet it divines how it has been in God eternalwise without itself ; and the supremcst bliss the spirit knows is to relapse into its origin, to its eternal image, wherein, as self, it is lost altogether. There the spirit loses its uses not its essence. The essence of the Godhead sucks the spirit out of itself into itself, making it as itself, so that there seems now but one essence. As though I were to take blood of a serpent — which is very red — and pour it into a transparent glass ; the glass would lose its seeming not its substance. So in this union the divine light illuminates and outshines the spirit which shines one light with it. The spirit loses its seeming not its substance for God has fetched the spirit out and united it with himself. Natheless the spirit in this union can never plumb the depths of Godhead. As St Paul discovered when, caught up to the third heaven, he saw things not permissible, nay, not possible to speak of, and cried out : ‘ O thou depth of the riches of wisdom and knowledge, how unsearchable are thy judgments and thy ways past finding out.’ God’s riches consist in having nothing and being nothing that can be clothed in words. His wisdom consists in the well-ordering of things. God’s knowledge is his concqption of himself in his supernal light. Concerning which St Dionysius says, ‘ The light God dwells in is his own nature which is known to none besides himself.’ This is the highway of the Godhead which no creature ever trod. Of it God spake by his prophet : ‘ As the heavens arc higher than the earth so arc my ways higher than thy ways.’ — St Augustine says. There is nothing more difficult and more exacting nor at the same time more useful and salutary to the soul than excursions in the science of the holy Trinity and unity.

Mark well, therefore, the meaning of the Persons and the essence. — ^What is a Person in the Trinity ? — ^A Person is that which preserves its own rational individuality apart from any other distinct Person. One Person is not another. The work of the Persons consists in the genesis and output oi* things. Genesis belongs to the Father alone ; outputting of things to the Trinity jointly. — ^What is the essence of the three Persons in the Trinity ? — ^That which, impartible, contains all things impartibly while of itself as essence it neither generates nor produces things. That is done by the three Persons which activate the essence or it could do nothing. Nevertheless the Persons do not act as three ; they work as one God. — What is the potentiality of the essence ? — The potentiality of the essence lies in not being a rational Person : in persisting in its essential unity. Not that it differs from the Persons ; this same essence is the essential nature of the Persons and the being of all things. Existence of all existing things, life of all living things, the light of lights and nature of natures : all this it is in its impartibility. Not so with the Persons ; they are not the personality of things as essence is the essence of all things. The Father is not able to be anybody’s person but his own. lie gat another Person out of his Person not out of his essence : with his nature in his nature. That the Father was able to produce a Son so rarely, so consummately his like, a God as perfect as himself, is due to his essential nature. When he begets the Son the Father gives him another Person than his own Person but not another nature nor another essence than his own. It follows that the essence is revealed in the procession of the Persons. The Persons are able to reveal the essence which cannot of itself reveal itself, seeing that of itself, as essence, it neither gets nor bears. This impotence of the essence is its chief potentiality ; nevertheless it is revealed to itself.

The Persons know and comprehend the essence equally. The essence bears the same relation to all the Persons. Now i^ is a question among theologians whether or no the personality has basic knowledge and comprehension of the essence, seeing that the essence is comprehended only by the essence ? The Persons have basic knowledge and comprehension of the essence because this is the Persons’ own essential nature ; moreover, the essence is not comprehended wholly save by the three Persons, whose nature it is. The Persons comprehend the essence wholly, they being God in Person by reason of their comprehension of his essence which is their own essential nature. And so far as the soul comprehends this essence she too is divine. Though what she comprehends of it is no bigger than a drop compared with all the boundless ocean. Still it is God whole. The surplus good which is ever baffling her apprehension, that is the shadowy abyss wherein, self-lost, she sinks eternally. It may be questioned. Why is there not one Person like one essence ? — I answer that, existing things exist not from themselves but in eternity are descended from an origin which is the origin

of its own self and in time have been created out of nothing by the blessed Trinity. Their eternal origin is the Father and the universal image in him is the Son ; love to this same image is the Holy Ghost. Had not this archetype of all things been always in the Father, the Father could never have wrought anything at all. That is, in his modeless essence. There must be more than one Person, for it was in the eternal procession (that is, in the begetting of) the Son that things as a whole emanated from the Father and not from themselves. This eternal procession is the cause of things on their eternal side, but in time they were created from nothing and in this sense they are creatures. In the eternal procession wherein they flowed without themselves, they are God in God. For as St Dionysius says, the Prime Cause generates all things in the likeness of itself. Now mark the difference of this emanation in eternity and time. What is the (temporal) emanation ? It is the indulgence of his love of clear discrimination. So we come forth into time by constraint of his love. The eternal procession is the revelation of himself to himself. The knower being that which is known. This is the eternal flow no drop of which did ever fall into any created intelligence ; it is the Son from the Father. In the temporal emanation things flowed forth finite. In the eternal emanation they remain infinite. The flow goes flowing on in itself. As St Dionysius hath it, ‘ God is a fountain flowing into itself.’

The Father is the origin of his Son, in his eternal child-bearing ; Father and Son originate their Spirit, in the eternal out-pouring. Butj^omeone may question, how about the Father-nature ? Is it the cause (of the essence or is the essence cause) of the Paternity ? What follows needs clear thinking. Essence as essence neither gives nor takes. Now were the essence origin of the Father then the essence, being parent, would not be essence, it would be Person. But it is not ; for essence in its unity is not Person. Again, were paternity the origin of essence the cause of this would be the paternal Person. But this is not so either. The Father in Person is a cause but not of essence ; for paternity and essence have the same characteristic. That is why, in his paternity, he is the omnipotent cause. The essence cannot be apart from Person nor can Person be apart from nature, as ye can see. For nothing that exists can be without its nature, since it cannot take leave of itself ; it must be what it is. Now the Father is a Person and he cannot be a Person without a nature nor can his nature be without a Person. Given his nature, there must be someone whose nature it is. Note then that the essence can in nowise

exist without distinction and hypostasis. Person and hypostasis can in nowise be without their nature, to wit, their essence. Thus it is demonstrated that neither is the essence cause of paternity nor paternity cause of the essence, for neither can be without the other. The Son cannot be without the Father nor the Father without the Son nor the twain without the Holy Ghost albeit they have three properties to distinguish them apart. Not so with paternity and essence. Neither of these can be without the other. For albeit essence is not Person nor Person essence yet paternity and essence have the same nature so that neither can be said to be the origin of the other ; for it is with one and the same nature that the Father originates his Son and these twain originate their Spirit which is of one nature with them both. All hail to the exalted spirit that is received into this full, this naked knowledge which is unknown to those that are not naked of themselves. For the soul to be naked she must turn away from all the images and forms spread out before her and stop at none of them. For the divine nature is no form nor semblance that she can understand. Being turned away from these towards what transcends them — divorced, that is, from images and forms — ^the soul receives the likeness of the formless nature of God whose real form has never been revealed to any creature. This is the secret door into the divine nature, which the soul has in the image. For when the soul has naught to stay her, she is ready to pass into the image of God whereto none can attain be he not stripped of spiritual matter. Alas, how they obstruct this secret passage, those who so lightly stop in temporal things ! Wherein also acknowledge my wretchedness. In this sense St Dionysius exhorted his disciples, saying, ‘ An thou wouldst know the hidden mystery of God, transcend whatever hinders thy pure perception,’ When with her pure intellect now illumined with divine light, the naked soul sees God, then she knows herself. And when she sees how apt she is to him, how she is his and how they arc both one, then, the burden of the body permitting, she remains thus always. This lofty intuition the soul has of the hidden mystery of God is that of which Job tells : ‘ In the horror of a vision by night he cometh and whispereth in the ears of men.’ What does he mean by the horror ? Solicitude for this perception we arc speaking of. The nocturnal vision is the revelation of the hidden truth. And the whispering is the flowing union wherein kriower and known are one.

This book is diflieult and obscure to many people. Publish it not I pray you for God’s sake, for it was forbidden to me to do so. If any condemn it, forsooth it is the fault of his blindness for it is the absolute truth. But if there be in it things inaptly expressed, do not wilfully misunderstand it, for words fail in speaking of the divine nature. Its meaning is clear in the truth which is with Christ and in Christ. Wherefor may he be blessed and praised for ever. Amen.