One master says, likeness means birth. Further he states that like is not met with in nature unless it is born. Doctors declare that fire, however fierce, would never burn had it no hope of propagation. However dry the wood supplied it would never catch (if fire) lacked power to generate its kind. What fire wants is to be born in wood, for all to be one fire, living and lasting. Extinguished and dead it were fire no more, so it wants to keep in. The nature of the soul would never have gotten its kind were it not for her wanting to have God begotten in her ; she would not have proceeded into her nature, would never have wanted to enter therein, except in the hope of this birth; nor would God ever have brought it to pass had he not meant the soul to be born into him. God does and the soul desires. God has the energy and the soul has the will and the power to have God born into her and her- self into God. This God contrives with intent that the soul shall be like him. She must needs wait for God to be gotten in her and for her treasure to grow into God, desiring union and the safe- keeping of God. God’s nature pours into the light of the soul and therein she is preserved. God purposes thus to be born into her, united with her, contained in her.—How can that be? Do we * not say that God contains himself ?—When he draws in the soul she finds that God is self-contained and there she stays abiding nowhere else. Augustine says: ‘As thou lovest so thou art :) loving earth thou art earthly, loving God thou shalt be divine.” | If I love God then, shall [be God? It is not I who say so ; search; — ‘i the scriptures. In the Prophets God says: ‘ Ye are gods and the: children of the Most High.’ I say that it is in his likes that God gives this birth. Had she no expectation of this the soul would not want to attain it. She wants to be preserved in him, he is her life. God has a preserve, a safe place in himself, which man can know nothing about until he pares off and is rid of all that belongs to the soul—her life, her powers, her nature, all must go. And that means standing in that perfect light where she and God are one form, where she finds herself God. It is characteristic of God to have nothing alien in him, nor on him nor added to him. And likewise it behoves the soul to have no outside impressions, nothing put on, nothing annexed. So much for the first (word).
‘And behold’: ecce. This word ecce has all the meaning of logos (or word) and it could be given no greater. Word, i.e. God. God is a word, God’s Son is a word. It conveys the idea of our life and all our desire being centred in and dependent upon and oriented to God. As St Paul says, ‘ By the grace of out I am
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that Iam.’ And again, ‘I live, yet not I but God liveth in me.’ What more ? Homo erat. He says, ‘ Behold, a man.” We use the word homo for women as well as for men, but the Latins refused it to ' woman because of her weakness. Homo denotes something whole, nothing lacking. Homo, a man, a mortal, means one pertaining to earth, implying humility. Earth is the basest of the elements and placed in the midst with the heavens all round, it lies open to every celestial emanation. All the work and waste of heaven Is caught midway in the sink of earth. Homo in yet another sense means moisture; as much as to say, one who is watered with grace ; referring to those humble souls who receive the immediate influx of grace. In this inflowing grace there forthwith arises that light of the mind into which God is sending a ray of his unclouded splendour. In this powerful light a mortal is as far above his fellows as a live man is above his shadow on the wall. This light is vastly potent, not merely being in itself exempt from _ time and place, but anything it falls upon it robs of time and place and bodily semblance and everything extraneous thereto. As I have often said before, were there no time nor place nor aught \S beside it would be all one being. The man who is in this sense “i one and casts himself into the ground of humility, there will be watered with grace.
Concerning the third point: this light deprives of time and place. ‘There was a man.’ Who gave him this light? The light did. This word erat belongs expressly to God. In the
_.,- Latin tongue there is no word so proper to God as erat. John in rv .wvhis gospel comes to using erat as a synonym for pure being. Things } are all extras: but addition is possible only in thought ; not by mental addition but by mental abstraction. Goodness and truth
Hine: additions, in theory at least, but the abstract essence without anything to it is what is meant by erat. Again, erat implies birth,
|an end of becoming. I was coming to-day, now I have come;
) and if we eliminate time from my coming and having arrived, then
| coming and come close up into one. Where coming and come indde, there we are born and re-made and re-formed into his
| primitive form./ I have often said that all the while a thing’s \äught is a matter of concrete existence it never will be re-created ; _refurbished it may be.and coloured. afresh, ‚even as a seal that is old: that is restamped and renewed. A heathen doctor says, Things yonder no time can stale; there is the blessed life in the evermore: faultless, care-free, unalloyed being. Solomon says: ‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ though this is seldom taken
in its proper sense. Everything under the sun grows old and dies,
but yonder is nothing but new. Time brings two things : age and
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decay. What the sun shines on is present in time. Creatures are here and are from God, but yonder where they are in God they are not at all the same as they are here ; they are as different as the sun is from the moon, far more so. Erat in eo, he says: ‘the Holy Ghost was in him,’ wherein is being ‚and.becoming. ‘There was a man.’ Where was he? In Jerusalem. Jerusalem meaning vision of peace ; it stands, in short, for man’s peace and prosperity. It possibly signifies more. Paul says, ‘The peace that passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds.’ Pray God we may be such as to enter into this peace, which is himself. So help us God. Amen.
XXI! HE THAT HATETH HIS SOUL
Qui odit animam suam in hoc mundo in vitam eternum custodiat eam (Joh. 12,,). I quote in Latin the gospel saying of our Lord, * He that hateth his soul in this world shall keep it in eternal life.’ Now mark what it is our Lord means when he speaks of a man hating his soul. He that loveth his soul in this mortal life and as she exists in this world shall lose her in eternal life ; but he that hateth her mortal guise shall keep her unto life eternal.
There are two reasons for his using here the word soul. Accord- ing to one authority soul is a name for the ground (or soil) and has nothing to do with the nature (or ground) of the soul. As a master has said, Whoso discourses of moveable things trenches not on the nature or ground of the soul. Try to name the soul as she is in herself, in her pure and abstract nature, and not a name can we find. They call her soul as they call a carpenter, neither a human being nor after any being at all but after his work. What our Lord means is this: he that loveth his soul in her nakedness,
_her impartible soul-nature, to wit, will hate and despise her in this dress. She hates and detests and rues being so far from the pure light she is in herself. Our doctors say the soul is called fire because of the force and because of the heat and because of the light that is in her. Others declare she is a spark of the celestial nature. A third school calls her a light. A fourth calls her a breath. A fifth dubs her a number. They are trying to describe the soul by something pure and luminous. Number exists in the angels and in light there is number as well, but to name her after the highest and after the brightest is still to fall short of the ground of the soul. God who is nameless is ineffable and in her ground the soul too is
1 See also Spamer’s Texte, etc., A.5. One Latin and two German versions. Nu
need ye
f Ox
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ineffable as he is ineffable. There is another reason for his saying that she hates. This term we apply to the soul is the name of the soul as she is in the prison of the body, so he means the soul in her individual state, still at the stage of taking thought, still in her prison-house. By taking thought for these nether things, by taking them in by her senses at all, she is confined : words cannot name any higher nature within her.
There are three reasons why my soul should hate herself. The first, that in so far as she is mine she is not God’s. The second, because my soul is not wholly imbedded and set and re-cast into God. Augustine says, To have God for one’s own one must needs first be God’s. The third reason is: the soul’s enjoying herself as the soul while enjoying God with the soul, which is wrong. She should be enjoying God in herself since he is entirely hers. As Christ says, ‘ he that loveth his soul shall lose it.’ What the soul is in this world or beholds in this world: things comprehended, apparent at all, she shall hate. A master declares that the soul at her highest and purest transcends the whole world, nothing attach- ing the soul to the world but affection. Sometimes she has a natural love of the body. Sometimes she has a will inclined towards creatures. Another says the soul has no natural concern with the ‘things of this world any more than the ear has with colour or the eye has with song. Our natural philosophers teach that the body ‘is much rather in the soul than the soul isin the body. Even as the cask contains the wine and not the wine the cask, so does the soul keep the body in her rather than the body the soul. What the soul loves in this world she is pure from by nature. According to one philosopher, it is the soul’s nature and her natural end to achieve within herself a feat of understanding, God informing her with the general idea. He that can say he has attained his nature finds all things within himself, fashioned in light as they are in God ; not as they are in nature but as they are in God. Neither spirit nor angel touches the ground or nature of the soul. In it she comes into the first, into the beginning, whence God breaks out in goodness into all creatures. There she loves all things in God, not pure as they are in her uncompounded nature, but merely impartible as they are in God. God has made this whole world as it were out of coal. Its pattern in gold is more lasting than this one in coal. Likewise the things in the soul are purer and nobler than they are in this world. The material which God made things out of is (to its exemplar in God) baser than coal is to gold. For the purpose of making a crock a man takes a handful of clay ; that is the medium he works in. He gives it a form he has in him, nobler than his material. And the moral of this is that the things in the intelligible world, the soul, to wit, are infinitely nobler