107. Three kinds of people receive God. The first receive him for pleasure. God is sweet to them in anticipation so they enter- tain him selfishly and to their cost, with little genuine profit. The second receive him of necessity, in discarding sins, for without God they have no power to do it. The third lose desire and desiring naught receive him wisely and with real benefit. The benefit is this: they recognise each fault with rue and in true penitence contrive that he shall find in us the reflection of what we seek in him; thus getting him to dwell in us as we do in him we attain to angelic life: the upward flight, the simple glance into God’s nature, and at each ending of the act the steady reflection of God so that in multitudinous things like bodily necessity, she is not debarred from the eternal but in multiplicity is still united.
108. ‘ Pray Sir, is it possible for mere creature to partake of God’s nature ? ’—No, for as St Augustine argues, God is remote from matter and that which has no matter has no, parts and is indivisible. Creature can receive no part of God’s nature because God is impartible by nature.— I do not mean part, Sir, in the sense of fragment; I mean part in the sense of community of spirit with spirit in divine nature. That was my idea in asking.’— You must make allowance for the difference in creatures. One is united, another separated. See how one is united. The will of the Father and the obedience of the Son seized, with the power of their common Spirit, in the bare chamber of the virgin heart of
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their chosen vessel Mary, her most pure blood-stream and there- from, with all his members, wrought one faultless man and poured therein a soul complete with powers and this by the power of the Godhead. When, out of chaos (having brooded there for aye) a shining spiritual soul emerged, straightway all imperfection was removed and by the Spirit itself this soul was admitted to the rank of spirit and, sponsored by the soul, the body was received as well. Such is the mode of union of. united creatures.—‘ And how do separated creatures participate God’s nature ? ’—St Peter says that creatures according to their natures partake of God in three ways: as being, as life and as grace. As being, creatures all without exception. As life, receptive creatures, from angels and men downwards. Mark how the Father by his generative power created by the propagation of his Word. From his interior Word burst forth their common mind, by nature the one angel of all creatures. Him he commanded to pour his mobile power into the sun and from the solar energy there showered upon earth, increased and multiplied, trees, beasts and all mankind. As regards the soul, the heavenly Father.draws up with his power the lower powers of the soul; the Son lights up the middle ones
and the Holy Ghost impinging on the sharpness of her mind,
flashes it back to the absolute zero of the Tri-unity. I say to zero : to the boundary line between united and separated creatures. Christ namely, as he was in his first light, bereft of personality which the middle Person of the Trinity preserves therein, where in essential wisdom he is transfixed, confused with God’s all- perfection. Further, the soul gets light from God’s essential revelation. This is her aught and his causeless incomprehensibility. There her aught abides, graven in a point, mounted in the splendour of his eternal love-nature. In this sense mere creature receives and partakes of the divine nature.
109. * When do we lose God altogether ? ’—How do you mean, lose ? What is your idea in asking this ?—‘ I mean lose in the sense of knowing God one without other: free from matter and form and exempt from creatures, which are matter and form, one and other. So that creature conveys to her not one whit of God for all they say that God is in all creatures. How is this loss to be accounted for ? I answer : Three sorts of people are deprived of God. One in material creatures, another in spiritual substances, the third above creature and below God. In the first case there is loss in creatures of gross material nature. This happens when, her senses being sated with their objective forms, she escapes from their separateness to their perfect whole. Thus she loses the dense part of their nature and there remains to her only the sweetness of their innate nobility. In the second case, since no
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caused thing is superior to its cause and the aforesaid sweetness is derived from creatures whereas the soul proceeds from God, like though not of his same nature, therefore the soul being sated, not stinted, with this sweetness will acquire a fresh thirst, for ineffable sweetness, a longing for her first felieity. This finally detaches her from material nature and drives her to pure knowledge of herself and spiritual substances in general. Now she seeks delight in the enjoyments of her kind but finds it not for creatures are all dry and like no better than its like: abiding actuality is the only thing to quench her parching thirst.—In the third case she loses her activity. It happens thus. All spiritual substances act instantaneously though not at any instant of time. Losing instantaneously her materiality she loses each and every use of her separated nature. The thirst is followed by the loss of all variable activities and approach to the outskirts of eternity. Here she awaits the love-light wherein she sees the Trinity. This waiting is personified in Mary, Mary standing without at the sepulchre, waiting in her outward helplessness the embrace of the eternal nature. She saw two angels one at the feet and another at the head. Sight is light-perception. The angel at the head stands for the omnipotence of the majesty of God; the one at the feet, for his subtile nature. They asked her, ‘ Whom dost thou seek ? ’ For the incomprehensibility of God and her passionate desire- nature would form no satisfying union. The question is one of incapacity for his incomprehensible nature ; she wants to embrace the whole extent of him and is not able to. She said, ‘ Jesus of Nazareth!’ He is the keeper in this solitude. Turning, she sees him standing in the likeness of a gardener : in the in-graven nature of the Person imaged in the ground of unity. He questioned her, ‘Whom seekest thou?’ This is the blinding transcendental light, the glory in the midst of the Trinity, which eclipses her own dim understanding and the aforesaid light. “If thou hast borne him hence, tell me,’ she says. She has lost her wits in the overwhelming light of the immediate truth. He says, ‘ Mary !’ using her own name. When the Father, departing from his essential personality, begets out of himself in otherness of Person his Word, the perfect reproduction of himself, he grasps with his paternal hand his impartible, beatific nature and harking back in spirit to himself is with himself as Son well-nigh in otherness. This is her name of whose child David cries, ‘ Thou art my Son this day have I begotten thee.’ She would have touched him. Now behold and marvel at her love of God! Not satisfied with rising beyond all creaturely conception she desires to sink into the undifferentiated oneness of the essence of the Three, of God with God, nature with nature, and lose the creature-nature that is hers e’en though that would
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not be for her own highest happiness. For in oneness she would lose her knowledge, her love and her enjoyment, in other words, the actual goal of creatures. Hence his warning, ‘Touch me not !’ for this touching means the refunding into God of separated natures, whereas it is to creatures full of love and feeling that the consciousness of unbroken oneness brings supreme felicity. If she runs into God or God runs into her, either way hers is the loss because of the immensity of his essential nature and the insignificance of her creaturehood. As a dewdrop to the ocean are all creatures as compared with their creator. He bids her ‘ Go to Galilee to my disciples and tell them of my resurrection ; there they shall see me as I said.’ Truly a bitter blow! She, who was not satisfied with God in the likeness of the second Person, who wanted to merge into his oneness, and Jesus bids her go to Galilee to bring word of his presence to mere creatures : her, who was impatient of the universal Word in eternal unity ! She obeys him and goes thither. To Galilee, submissive to Jesus. Galilee means crossing (or transition). There is no temporal life. but has to yield to physical necessity. Her watchword then must be, ‘ I no longer live but Christ liveth in me.’ She came to Jesus’ brethren who are three. Uninterrupted union; perfect corre- spondence with the mirror of eternity, without any discrepancy whatever ; complete submission of the soul-powers and loss of all activity in the actual power of God in the essential nature of the body and the soul. Lo, she loses God in the limiting value of creature.
110. Love God with all thy soul. —‘ What do you mean by loving God with all one’s soul ? —Ascending naked to God with nothing. between, that I call whole-souled love. The soul’s life is love, the soul’s love is gnosis and her gnosis is her being. The soul’s real being is delight. The soul is never so near to God but God stands one side soul the other.. Being belies not itself. Augustine says, God is the soul’s soul and being.
114. ‘Pray Sir, can one be moved without sinning ?’—When the animal passions are stirred the movement comes from with- out, not from within. Like a tree blown about by the wind and not torn up from the ground because the roots hold. In a case of agitation allowance must be made both for the person and the cause.
115. ‘ Can one remain the same in good and ill ? — Your bodily nature must always be the sport of joy and sorrow; that it can never lose. But will remains the same in fortune and misfortune, without resentment in the depths of woe. The power of impatience is taken from the recipient of eternal light.
116. ‘How do you mean Sir, the power? Pray explain,’—I
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am using power here with reference to two things. On the one hand there is loss of the power of resentment. And on the other hand the power to be upset is removed from those who are vouch- safed eternal light. To lose their equanimity would be to them hell-torment and impossible. Joys and sorrows are not grown in the ground of eternal truth ; none of creatures’ nurslings are truth’s seedlings and that is the key to this matter of dispassion. |
117. * There is another thing that needs explanation. You say that power is withdrawn and they are not able for it. Is this inability of nature or of grace ? "—Nature acts differently. Were it a natural disability then effort would be vain, which it is not. It is an inability of grace ; the soul is caught in the blaze of divine light and held by the majesty of God in the reflection of the essential good of the third Person. There personal distinction disappears merged in the oneness of the Three. There she is lost to the multiplicity of creatures. That answers your inquiries about the loss of power-in pious souls and how they are impotent to lose their equanimity. Now, at last, they are omnipotent.
118. * For the love of God, Sir, expound to me one statement you are fond of making.”—What is that ?—‘ You say that inability to live up to one’s lights shows the absence of eternal light. The man who has eternal light can put his theories into practice. She only has to see a thing and lo, it is as though it had not been and she is free from it, which alarms me somewhat for I am never guilty of the most venial fault but first it is suggested to my mind and this does not prevent me from committing it.. Tell me, Sir, what is her essential power ? ’—Essential power is one. Her essential power is will-and-love and this is not a prey to images bodily or ghostly, so she is essentially potential and that is what I mean when I call her really free from (passive to) it.