There is another power, immortal too: proceeding from the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, altogether spiritual. In this power God is fiery, aglow with all his riches, with all his sweetness and with all his bliss. Aye, in this power is such poignant joy, such vehement, immoderate delight as none can tell nor yet in truth reveal. I say, moreover, if once a man in intellectual vision did really glimpse the bliss and joy therein, then all his sufferings, all God intends that he should suffer, would be a trifle, a mere nothing to him; nay, I say more, it would be pure joy and pleasure.
Wouldst thou know for certain whether thy sufferings are thine. own or God’s? Tell by these tokens. Suffering for thyself, in whatever way, the suffering hurts thee and is hard to bear. But suffering for God and God alone thy suffering hurts thee not nor does it burden thee, for God bears the load. Believe me, if there were a man willing to suffer on account of God and of God alone, then though he fell a sudden prey to the collective sufferings of all the world it would not trouble him nor bow him down, for God would be the bearer of his burden. If the burden they put upon my neck is ‘forthwith shouldered by another I would as lief a hundred pounds as one, for not to me is it heavy and distressful. ‘In brief: man’s sufferings for God and God alone he makes both light and pleasant.
I prefaced this sermon with the words: ‘Jesus went up into a fastness and was received by a virgin who was wife.’ Why? She must needs be virgin and wife too. How Jesus was received I have explained. I have not told the meaning of this fastness and that I will now proceed to do. :
From time to time I tell of the one power in the soul which alone is free. Sometimes I have called it the tabernacle of the soul ; sometimes a spiritual light, anon I say it is a spark. But now I say : it is neither this nor that. Yet it is somewhat : somewhat more exalted over this and that than the heavens are above the earth. So now I name it in a nobler fashion than before as regard- ing rank and mode which it transcends. It is of all names free, of all forms void: exempt and free as God is in himself. It is one and simple as God is one and simple, and no man can in any wise
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behold it. This same power I am speaking of, herein God blooms and thrives in all his Godhood and the spirit in God; in this very power the Father bears his only Son no less than. in himself, for verily he liveth in this power, the spirit with the Father giving birth therein to his very Son, itself this selfsame Son, for in this light which is the light of truth, it is the Son himself. Could ye see with my heart ye would understand my words, but it is true, for truth itself has said it.
So one and simple is this fastness, frowning above all ways, of which I mind me and am telling you, within the soul, that this high faculty I speak of is not worthy even of a fleeting glance therein; nor’is that other power God glows and burns in, it durst not peer in either; so one and indivisible this refuge is, so way- and power-transcending this solitary one that never mode nor faculty has any insight there, not even God himself. Never for an instant, as God lives, does God see into this, nor did he ever look in his conditioned nature, in his guise of Person. Note well, this one alone is lacking in every mode and quality. It follows that for God to see therein would cost him all his divine names and personal properties: all these he must forgo to look therein: only as one and indivisible, having no jot of mode or quality, not Father nor Son nor Holy Ghost as such, can he do this; as some- what, yes, but not as this or that.
As one and impartible behold him entering this one that here I call the fastness of the soul, but in no different guise can he get in: thus only does he enter and subsist in it. In part the soul is the same as God but not altogether.—This that I tell you is true: truth is my witness and my soul the pledge. May we be as this fastness whereinto on ascending Jesus is received to abide eternally as I have said. So help us God. Amen.
The Eternal Birth!
To return to the subject of the eternalbirth. There is the ques- tion whether the soul brings forth the eternal Word in images or imageless? Remember this. When the soul resigns herself to God and is atoned with him and God undertakes her work, she is receptive merely and leaves God to act. Here the soul is pregnant without form or image, for anything conceived in form or image trenches upon time and place and is akin to creatures; whence it follows that the more the work is of the soul the less it is of God.
1 See Pfeiffer, Deut. Myst., vol. i, p. 26
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The soul conceives more truly without images than in them, for this birth is more by way of Godhood than of selfhood. But we may still enquire, in which image does the soul best succeed in giving birth to the eternal Word? There are three kinds of images. The first the soul takes in from without through the senses. The second the soul conjures up from within by thinking on the childhood of our Lord or on his martyrdom ; but all images so gotten are called divine births in the soul. The third kind of images is given to the soul by God direct. It is in these last that the soul conceives the best. According to another gloss : this happens when the mind engenders, feels and knows the eternal _ Word in its proper image as gotten by the Father in himself,
supposing the soul able to attain thereto; or, intellect failing her for this, when, faring forth in faith and love, he reaches out to this same image: for in this final image the eternal Word is born most perfectly of all.
Another question is, whether the birth of the eternal Word is fleeting or essential ? Now you must understand that it is this birth which unifies the soul, and in this respect it is intrinsic and passes not away unless a man should fall into mortal sin. But as happening in the sensible perceptions and in the discursive mind this birth is fugitive.
Further, it is asked, in what particular place does the soul bring forth or seek the eternal Word? Mark. It is in the Father as the intellectual image of his divine essence and is the reflection of his divine nature, so that it embodies both his essence and his nature. It is with the Father as the filial Person. It is in the Holy Ghost as the exuberance of their eternal satisfaction. It is in the soul as the likeness of God’s equal forms (or Persons). It is in all creatures as the preserver of their being. It is here the soul must seek the eternal Word, here in these places, and Christ says : ‘Seek and ye shall find.’ May we so seek as to find eternally. So help us almighty God. I will say no more at this collation. Pray God to fit me for this blessed moment. Amen.
MAN HAS TO SEEK GOD IN ERROR AND FORGETFULNESS !
Man has to seek God in error and forgetfulness and foolishness. For deity has in it the power of all things and no thing has the like. The sovran light of the impartible essence illumines all things.
1 Jostes, No. 3.
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St Dionysius says that beauty is good order with pre-eminent lucidity. Thus God is an arrangement of three Persons. And the soul’s lower powers should be ordered to her higher and her higher ones to God; her outward senses to her inward and her inward ones to reason; thought to intuition and intuition to the will and all to unity, so that the soul may be alone with nothing flowing into her but sheer divinity, flowing here into itself. As St Dionysius says, By purity she has discovered her capacity and only her superior powers are in operation.
It has been said by one philosopher that as soon as the chief power takes command the others all run into it, leaving their own work. Then the soul is in order and in her pure nature, 7.e. in her supernal light-nature wherein all things are potential. A heathen doctor says, If the soul knew herself she would know all things. Deity flowed into the Father and into the Son and into the Holy Ghost: in eternity into itself and in time into creatures, to each as much as it can hold: to the stone its being, to the tree its growth, to beasts sensation, to the angels reason and to mankind all these four natures. When God was made man he took upon himself by grace, in time, the nature of all things, which in eternity was his by nature. As St Paul says, ‘ To me Christ is all things.’ Here it was a matter of the light and reflection of his own nature. God’s being is fontal: flowing and fixed, final as well as the first. From being power flows out into work. In this sense the three Persons are the storehouse of divinity and the three Persons are poured forth into the essence of the soul as grace. God’s being in the essence of the soul is the imitation of the Persons and one being permeates the other. Her chief power flows from the essence of the soul just as the three Persons issue from the Godhead. And when God pours his grace into the soul it is into her essence that he pours it. For into the soul’s essence no speck can ever fall, do her powers what they may. The chief power of the soul draws its virtue from the grace existing in the essence of the soul and this highest power goes out into the lower ones, into their essence. The crescent soul, the spirit receptive of God’s nature, is the imitation of Christ’s Person and man’s nature. The soul when she reaches divine nature is deprived of all deficiency and imperfection; she suffers death in divine nature, getting God’s nature in herself as the Father does in him. She takes it not from her own nature, she receives it from God’s nature into her nature; she receives perfection and power according to the words of St Paul, ‘I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.’ The wisdom thence arising in her mind begins in under- standing and is perfected in will and it has neither heart nor thought. St Dionysius says, As the soul takes the outgoing tide