Moreover I maintain: as long as we work at all for gain, while we desire aught God may have given or may give, we rank with these merchants. Wouldst thou be free from any taint of trade ? then do what good thou canst and do it solely to God’s glory, as exempt from it thyself as#though thou wert not. Ask nothing whatever in return. So done thy works are ghostly and godly ; the merchants are driven from the temple and God is there alone when one has no intention but God. Behold thy temple cleared of merchants. The man who is intent on God alone and on God’s glory, verily he is free from any taint of commerce in his deeds, nor is he in any wise self-seeking.
I have related further how Jesus said to them that sold doves : ‘Take these things hence!’ These people he did not drive forth nor rebuked them harshly: he said quite mildly: ‘ Take these things away!’ Asthough to say, it is not wrong albeit a hindrance to the pure and simple truth. These are virtuous folk, working for God impersonally though subject to personal limitations, to time and number, to before and after. Their activities keep them from the highest truth, from being absolutely free like our Lord Jesus Christ who is receiving himself afresh incessantly and a-temporally from his heavenly Father and in that same now is borne back again unceasingly with praise and thanksgiving into the Father, perfect, vieing with him in his majesty. Even so, to. be receptive to the sovran truth, a man must be without before and after, without the hindrance of any acts or images that are within his ken, but freely receiving the divine gift in the perennial now and bearing it back unhindered in the light of the same with praise and thanksgiving in our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the doves are gone, to wit, the obstacle of ownership in actions, good in themselves, wherein one has any self-interest at all. ‘Take these things hence!’ said our Lord, as though to say, they are blameless but they are in the way.
When the temple is free from obstructions (possessions and strangers to wit), it looks right beautiful, shining out bright and clear above everything God has created and through everything God has created, so that none can compare with it but the uncreated God alone. In very truth, there is none like this temple but the uncreated God himself. Nothing below the angels is the least like this temple. The very highest angels are the same as this
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temple of the human soul in many ways, but not entirely. This partial likeness with the soul they have in love and knowledge. But there is a limit set them which they cannot pass. The soul goes on beyond. Suppose the soul to be identical with the highest human being here in time, natheless that man has the potential freedom to soar to untold heights above the angels in the now of each, new without number, that is, without mode: above the angelic mode and every created intelligence. God who alone is uncreated is her sole peer in freedom, though not in uncreated- ness, for the soul is created. Emerging into the unclouded light she in her naught leaps so far into his naught that she is helpless to regain the state of her created aught. God with his uncreatedness supports her nothing-at-all, preserving the soul in his all-in-all. The soul has dared to come to naught and, failing by herself to reach herself, she swoons away ere God comes to her rescue. It must needs be so.
Jesus, as I said, went into the temple and cast out them that bought and sold and he began to command the rest, ‘ Take these things hence!’ The words I have here read, ‘ Jesus went in and began to say, “ Take these things hence!”’ Observe, there was no one there but Jesus when he began to speak in the temple of the soul. Be sure of this : while anyone else is speaking in the temple (i.e. the soul) but Jesus, Jesus is silent, as though he were away, nor is he at home in the soul while she has strange guests to talk to. For Jesus to speak in the soul she must be all alone, and she has to be quiet to hear what he says. Well then, he comes in and starts speaking. What is it he says ? He says what he is. What is he, then? He is the Word of the Father. In this same Word the Father speaks himself, all his divine nature, all that God is, just as he knows it, and he knows it as it is, for he is perfect in knowledge and power. It follows that he is perfect in speech too. In pronouncing the Word he utters himself and all things in another Person to whom he gives the nature that he has himself, and speaks all intelligences in echo of the actual Word, accord- ing to the indwelling image ; like the sun-rays shining forth, so each (intelligence) is a word in itself, not the same in all respects as the Word, but: they have the power to receive by grace the same nature -as the actual Word, and this Word as it is in itself the Father spoke entire by the Word and everything in that Word.
If this is what the Father said, then what is Jesus saying in the soul? As I have told: the Father speaks his Word ; he speaks in this Word and no otherwhere, and Jesus speaks in the soul. His manner of speaking is to reveal himself and what the Father said in him, so far as the soul is able to receive it. He reveals the
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Father in the soul in infinite power. Experiencing this power in the Son the soul waxes powerful in like emanation till she is the ‘ same in might and virtue and every perfection, so that neither joy nor sorrow nor aught that God has made in time avails to destroy that soul, she standing staunch as it were in this divine power against which all else is insignificant and futile.
Secondly : Jesus reveals himself in the soul in infinite wisdom, himself to wit, the wisdom wherein the Father knows himself in full paternal power. The very Word, which is wisdom itself, and - all that is therein, is, at the same time, one alone. When wisdom is in union with the soul, doubt, error and illusion are entirely removed, she is set in the bright pure light of God himself, as saith the prophet, ‘ Lord in thy light shall we see light.” Then God is _known by God in the soul; she discerns with his wisdom both herself and all things. She knows not this same wisdom with herself, but with this widsom she discerns the Father fruitful in travail and his real being in impartible oneness void of all distinctions.
Jesus manifests himself further in infinite suavity and fullness in all receptive hearts. When Jesus reveals himself in this plenitude of sweetness, uniting with the soul, then on this amiable tide the soul floats into herself and out of herself and beyond the + things of grace, back in unmitigated power into her first source. Thus the outward man is obedient, even unto death, to the inner man now established in peace in the service of God for ever.
May Jesus enter into us and clear out and cast away all hindrances of soul and body to the end that we are one with him here upon earth and there in heaven. So help us God. Amen.
The Sons of God
Videte, qualem charitatem dedit nobis pater, ut filii dei nominemur et simus (1 Joh. 3,). . It must be understood that this is all the same thing : knowing God and being known by God, and seeing God and being seen by God. We know God and see him because he makes us know and see. Even as the luminous air is not . distinguishable from its luminant, for it is luminous with what illumines it, so do we know by being known, by his making us conscious. Christ said, ‘ Again ye shall see me.’ That is to say: by making you see I make you see me, whereat ‘ your heart shall rejoice,’ rejoice in the vision and knowledge of God, and ‘ your joy no man taketh from you.’
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St John says : * Behold what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called and should be the sons
of God.’ He says not only ‘should be called’ but ‘should be.’
Now I maintain that we can no more be wise without wisdom than Son without the filial nature of God’s Son : without having the very same nature as the Son of God himself. Wouldst thou be the Son of God? Thou canst not, without having the same nature as the Son of God. But this is hidden from us here, as it is written, ‘ Beloved, now we are God’s sons (and it doth not yet ‘appear what we shall be), but we know that he is our exemplar and we shall be like him.’ That is, the same as he is: same life and enjoyment and understanding, exactly the same as he is, when we see him as God. I say, God cannot make me the Son of God without I have the nature of God’s Son, any more than God can make me wise without my having wisdom. Though we are God’s sons, we do not realize it yet: ‘it doth not yet appear ’ to us, but this much we do know, he says, ‘ we shall be like him.’ Sundry things in our souls overlay this knowledge and conceal it from us. +
The soul has something in her, a spark of intellect, that never dies ; and in this spark, as at the apex of the mind, we place the paradigm of the soul ; and there is also in our souls knowledge of externals, sensible and rational perception, present there as images and words which obscure it from us. How are we God’s sons ? By having one nature with him. But any realization of this, of being God’s sons, is subjective not objective knowledge. The inner consciousness strikes down to the very essence of the soul. Not that it is the soul itself, but it is rooted there and is in a measure the life of the soul, her intellectual life, the life, that is, wherein a man is born God’s Son, born into the eternal life, for this know- ledge is a-temporal, unextended, without here and without now. In this life all things are the same thing and all things common ; all things are all in all and all atoned.
I will give you an illustration. In the body the members are united so that eye belongs to foot and foot to eye. Could the foot speak, it would declare that the eye seems rather in the foot than in the head, and the eye would say the same the other way about. Accordingly, I trow that the grace which is in Mary is really more an angel’s and is more in him (yet being in Mary) than if it were in him or in the saints. For everything that Mary has belongs to every saint, so the grace in Mary is his own and he enjoys it more than if it really were in him.
But such a simile is too gross and carnal, depending as it does on
bodily imagery. I will give you another, therefére, more subtle, ‘
less material. I assert that in heaven all is in all and all one
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and all ours. The grace our Lady has exists in me (when I am yonder), not as welling up in and flowing out of Mary, but as in me as my own and not of foreign origin. I contend that there what one has another has, not as from another nor as in another, but in its own self, so that the grace in one is simultaneously in another as his own grace. Thus spirit is in spirit. And that is why I say I cannot be the son of God unless I have the very nature the Son of God has there; and that having this same nature makes us the same as he is, we seeing him as God. ‘But it doth not yet appear what we shall be.’ Meaning, I take it, that there is then no like nor different, but: wholly without distinction we are the same in essence and in substance and in nature as he is himself. This is not apparent now: it will be obvious when we see him as God.