Even so do they who love God with an eye to outward riches or interior consolation, not rightly loving God but their own personal advantage. Itrow that any object thou shalt set before thy mind, except God in himself, how good soever it may be, is nothing but a barrier to the absolute truth. As I said just now that St _ Augustine is compared to a golden cup, closed on the underside and open to the sky, even so it behoves thee to be: if thou wouldst stand with St Augustine and in the communion of saints, then close thy heart to everything created and be open to God as he is in himself.
Men are compared with the higher faculties because they always go bareheaded, and women with the lower because the head is always veiled. The superior powers transcend time and space, springing straight out of the essence of the soul, and they resemble men in always going uncovered. Accordingly, their working is eternal. The philosopher says that all the powers of the soul, inasmuch as time and space affect them, have lost their virgin purity and can never be so thoroughly abstracted nor so finely sifted as to pass into the higher faculties. Albeit they are stamped with the same image.
Do thou be ‘ firm and steady,’ the same, that is to say, in weal and woe, in fortune and misfortune ; and ‘ set with all the precious stones,’ a treasury, to wit, of all the virtues which come naturally pouring out of thee. Traverse all the virtues and, transcending them, tap virtue only at its source, where it is one with the divine nature. And in so far as thou art more atoned than are the angels with God’s nature, to that extent they must receive through thee. May we be one, So help us God. Amen.
The Divine Being!
No man can tell of God exactly what he is. According to St Dionysius, God is not anything we can say or think. St Augustine cries: ‘I who have ever been in God and ever more shall be, would sooner I had never been and never more should be than that we found a single word that we could say of God. Were we compelled to speak of God, in that case I should say : Verily, in no sense is God comprehensible nor yet attainable. God is what thought cannot better.’ Nay, I declare God beggars human thought ; he transcends all human conception. No man knows what God is. Aught that a man could or would think of God, God is not at all. It is the nature of the soul not to be satisfied except
1 See Spamer’s Tezte, B. 1.
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with God. But all that heart can desire is small, is insignificant compared with God. Yet man’s thought may be never so rich or so rare but his desire outstrips it. So he transcends man’s desire as well as transcending human thought.
St Dionysius says, God is naught. Meaning that God is as incomprehensible as naught. St Bernard says, I know not what God is ; but what I know not that he is that same is he. A heathen philosopher maintains that what we know of the First Cause is rather what we are ourselves than what the First Cause is. For that passes understanding. And in this strain the heathen doctor argues in his book, The Light of Lights, that God is super-essential, super-rational, super-intelligible, 7.e. beyond the natural under- standing. I speak not of gracious understanding. By grace man may be carried to the length of understanding as St Paul understood who was caught up into the third heaven and saw unspeakable things. He saw, but was not able to express them. For what a man knows he knows in its cause or in its mode or in its effect. But in these respects God remains unknown, for he is the first. Further, he is modeless, 7.e. undetermined. And he is without effect, that is, in his mysterious stillness. Here he abides apart from the names that are given him. Moses asked his name. God answered, He-who-is hath sent thee. Otherwise he could not tell it. God as simply being, in that sense he could never give himself to be known to creatures. Not that he could not do it, but creature could not understand it.—I have often laid it down that God’s lordship does not lie merely in his lordship over creature ; his lordship consists in his power to create a thousand worlds and dominate them all in his abstract essence. Therein lies his lord- ship. Dionysius and Gregory both teach that the divine being is not comprehensible in any sense: not to any wit nor any under- standing, not even to angelic understanding. Its simplicity and triplicity is a thing not to be grasped by the human mind even at its best, nor by the angelic mind even at its clearest. It was said by a philosopher that whoso knows of God that he is unknown, that man knows God. For it is the height of gnosis and perception to know and understand in agnosia and a-perception. To know him really is to know him as unknowable. As the master puts it: If I must speak of God, then I will say, God is something which is in no sense to be reached or grasped; and I know nothing else about him. According to St Augustine, what we say about God is not true; what we say that God is he is not ; what we say he is not that he is rather than what we say that he is. Nothing we can say of God is true. God’s worth and God’s perfection cannot be put into words. When I say man, I have in my mind human nature. When I say grey, I have in my mind
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the greyness of grey. When I say God, I have in my mind neither God’s majesty nor his perfection. Dionysius insists that the more we can abstract from God the better we shall see him. God is such that we,apprehend him better by negation than by affirma- tion. Hence the dictum of one master that to argue about God from likeness is to argue falsely about him, but to argue by denials is to argue about him correctly. Dionysius says, writing about God, He is super-essential, he is super-luminous ; he attributes to him neither this nor that. For whatever he conceives, God far transcends it. There is no knowing him by likeness. Rather by attributing unlikeness may we make some approach to under-, standing him. Take an illustration. Supposing I describe a ship to someone who has never seen one, then on looking at a stone he will plainly see that it is not a ship. And the plainer he sees that it is not ship-like, the more he will know about a ship. It is the same with God. The more we can impute to him not-likeness, the nearer do we get to understanding him. Holy Scripture yields us merely privatives. That we should credit God with matter, form and work is due to our gross senses. We fail to find God one because we try to come at him by likeness. Dionysius cries, ‘Friend Timothy, if thou wouldst catch the spirit of truth pursue it not with the human senses. It is so swift, it comes rushing.’ God is to be sought in opposites ; in unknowing knowing shall we know God ; in forgetfulness of ourselves and all things even to the naked essence of the Godhead. Dionysius was exhorting one of his disciples. Friend,’ quoth he, ‘cease from all activity and empty thyself of self that thou. mayst commune with the Sovran Good, God namely.’ Pray God we may seek him so that we shall find him nevermore to lose him. \ Amen.
The Sixth Beatitude
Beati qui esuriunt et sitiunt justitiam (Matt. 5). Jesus went up a mountain to a valley, into a field, and power went out of him preaching to the multitude: ‘ Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.’
Methinks this text is apt to my discourse. Blessed are they that hunger for righteousness and endure work and poverty here, for this is but a moment and will surely pass. They are blessed though not most blessed. Blessed are they that hunger not to be deprived of God, albeit the wonder is that man can be without him without whom he cannot be. St Augustine says it is amazing that anyone should live apart from him apart from whom he cannot;
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live at all. They are blessed and yet not most blessed. More blessed those who so hunger that they cannot live without God ; that is a fiery affection which transforms their nature. The while a man yet finds in his desire or in his hope or his affection anything impermanent, he is not most blessed. He is blessed but not most blessed. Blessed, supremely blessed, are they who are installed in the eternal now, transcending time and place and form and matter, unmoved by weal or woe or wealth or want, for in so far as things are motionless they are like eternity.
[The heaven adjoining the eternal now, wherein the angels are, is motionless, immoveable. But the heaven next to that which touches the eternal now, wherein the angels are, and betwixt (that and) the heaven where the sun is, is set in motion by angelic force, revolving once in every hundred years. The heaven the sun is in, moved by angelic force, goes round once a year. The heaven the moon is in, again, is driven by angelic force and goes round once amonth. The nearer the eternal now the more immoveable they are, and the further off and more unlike to the eternal now the easier to move. The heaven of the sun and moon and stars is moved by the impulse of their angel, so that they are spinning in this temporal now ; and the eternal now imparts their motion, that being so energetic that from the motion the eternal now imparts, all things derive their life and being. Now the lowest powers of the soul are nobler than the highest part of heaven, where it adjoins the angels and the eternal now. Moreover, all things get their life and being from the motion there imparted by the eternal now; and if that is so noble, then what would ye expect where the soul in her superior powers contacts the ground of God? How exalted, think ‘ye, that must be ?—Follow then after this now, and reach this now and possess this eternal now. May we stand next the eternal now and so be in possession of it. So help us O divine
' power. |
[One master says : Grace springs from the heart of the Father and flows into his Son and in the oneness of them twain it proceeds from the Wisdom of the Son into the Gift of the Holy Ghost and in the Holy Ghost is sent into the soul. Grace is the face of God which is clearly stamped in the soul without any means by the Spirit of God, giving the soul the form of God. St Dionysius says: The angels are the divine mind. Moreover St Paul declares concerning those who live the angelic life here in the flesh, that into them there flows the mind of God as it does into the angels. He also says the intellectual light, God namely, has given likeness to the rational soul. Quoth St Paul: He who cleaves unto God with his whole being becomes one spirit with God. So help us God. Amen.]
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In Principio Erat Verbum
In principio erat verbum (Joh. 1,). Theologians talk of the eternal Word. God never spoke but one word, and that is still unspoken. The explanation is this. The eternal Word is the logos of the Father which is his only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ. In him he pronounces all creatures without beginning and without end. This accounts for the Word remaining unborn, for it never came out of the Father. This Word is to be known in fourfold guise.
First, on the altar in the priest’s hands. There it is ours to know and love the eternal Word as we, in his eternal Word, appear to the heavenly Father. Secondly, we know the eternal Word as expounded by doctors from the chair. We receive it in their person ; like water flowing in a channel, so does the eternal Word flow through its teachers. We should pay no heed to any shortcomings in the doctor: we must fix our gaze on the eternal