Ecce mitto angelum meum (Malach. 8,, Luc. 7,,). It is written in the gospel, ‘ Behold, I send my angel.’ Angels are within our ken for the evangelists declare, ‘we shall be like the angels.’ One authority says, an angel is an image of God. Another one says he is fashioned like God. A third one describes him as a clear mirror wherein is reflected the goodness of God, the absolute stillness and mystery of God, as far as that is possible. Angels, again, have been defined to be pure intellectual light free from material things. We shall be like the angels. Perception here means seeing in the light that is in time, for anything I think of I think of in the light that is in time and temporal. But angels perceive in the light that is beyond time and eternal. They know in the eternal now. Men know in the now of time. The now of time is infinitely short. Yet take away this now of time and thou art everywhere and hast the whole of time. This thing or that thing is not all things ; as long as I am this or that, have this or that, I am not all things nor I have not all things. Purify till thou nor art nor hast not either this or that, then thou art omni- present, and being neither this nor that thou art all things. An angel is and acts as an intelligence in his degree, beholding God without ceasing and his object is intelligible essence. Hence he is far removed from things. Remote from time and tempor- alities.
Mark the prophet’s words, he says, ‘I send my angel.’ The evangelist, however, omits the pronoun I. This points, in the first place, to God’s elemental nature: to the fact that God is unnameable, transcending speech in the abstraction of his essence where, without word or utterance, God is ineffable to creatures. It shows next, that the soul is ineffable and wordless; in her proper cause she is inarticulate, nameless and mute. The I is suppressed because there she has neither word nor utterance. Thirdly, it suggests that God and the soul are so entirely one that
God has not a single thing to tell him from the soul, nor is he any
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other than the soul. The J is silent because he and the soul are every whit the same ; he has no property apart from soul nor does any other nature come within his ken. In the other reference, the text says I to indicate God’s is-ness: that God simply is. All things are in God ; out of him, without him, is naught. All creatures are infernal and of no account compared with God. What they are in truth that they are in God, for it is God alone who is the truth; the word / stands for the actuality of divine truth for it is the glyph of one-existence. It proclaims that God alone is. Secondly, it means that God is inseparate from things ; that he is more innate in them than they are in themselves. And man should be inseparate from things: not as cleaving to self but as wholly detached from himself; thus he is inseparate from all things, and he is all things. So far as thou art nothing to thy- self so far thou art all things and inseparate from all things ; and so far as thou art not divorced from all things so far thou art God and all things, for God’s deity consists in his being present in all things. Wherefore the man who is inseparate from all things enjoys divinity as God himself enjoys it. Thirdly, the word I is in a sense the end of name for it is no proper name: it signifies the perfection of name and means immutability, dispassion : that God is immoveable, intangible, eternal stability.
Fourthly, it points to the absolute purity of the divine being which is entirely without admixture. Goodness, wisdom and anything else that we can attribute to God are impurities with God’s abstract essence ; coexistence is foreign to essence, but the word I denotes God’s pure essence, his being in itself without anything alien and strange. The angels are the image, the mirror of God, which contains the reflection of the Godhead, of the glory, the stillness and the mystery of God. Let us like the angels imitate God. According to philosophers, to make a portrait of a man one must not copy Conrad nor yet Henry. For if it be like Conrad or like Henry it will not recall the man, but will remind one of Conrad or of Henry. Moreover, Conrad’s portrait will not be like Henry for, given the knowledge and the art, one could do Conrad to the life, the very image of him: Now, God both will and can: he made thee like unto himself, the very image of himself. But like him argues something foreign and aloof. Now there is nothing foreign nor aloof betwixt God and the soul, therefore the soul is not like God: she is identical with him, the very same as he is.
More I do not know and cannot tell, so here my argument must end. But I was thinking on the way, that we ought to be utterly detached in our intention, having no one, nothing, in view but the Godhead as such: not happiness nor this nor that,
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just God and Godhead in itself. Aught beside that thou intendest
is a divine impurity. Seize the actual Gödhead itself. God help us so to do. Amen.
I Came Forth From the Father
Exivi a patre et veni in mundum (Joh. 16,,). I quote from the Gospel of St John. Our Lord says, ‘I came forth from the Father and am come into the world and again I leave the world and return to my Father.’ Another of his sayings is, ‘ Amen, Verily I say unto you whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name the same shall be yours.” Scholars say the word amen is an expression for stability. Our Lord says, ‘ Heaven and earth shall pass away before my word shall pass away,’ which never changes. The heavens which are manifold and the unnumbered , stars are all self-coloured. The moon alone is pied, thick and clear, dark and light. That is due to the neighbourhood of earth. And our doctors teach that in God there is no yesterday nor morrow, it is to-day and now all the time in God. Augustine observes that the architect who builds a house therein displays his art ; though it may fall to ruin the art within his soul neither ages nor decays. And again Augustine says, All things are immutable in the eternal Word, nor do they wear away albeit in themselves they are corruptible, apt to be in some sort or not to be at all.
He says, ‘ Verily’ (i.e. without fail or invariably), ‘ whatsoever ye ask of my Father in my name the same shall be yours,” Accord- ing to St Augustine, ‘To pray to God for aught save God is not to pray at all.’ John Damascene declares that ‘seeing herself the soul sees spirit; seeing an angel she sees spirit, yet, beholding God, she and the angel are but corporal things compared with him.’ Their mind is as matter to God. Angelic light is darkness as compared with him. Our Lord says, ‘ Verily, I say unto you, whatsoever ye ask in my name the same shall be yours,’ meaning, what is in man’s name is man; what is in light’s name is light ; what is in God’s name is fixed and immutable. The name of God belongs to none but him who stands in this light. No man can say Father‘except he be Son and none is called Son unless he be one with the one-begotten Word. Whoso asks in God’s name may demand of the Father whatever he will. Words have enormous power and have gotten it from the emanation of the eternal Word. f
Our Lord says, ‘ I am come into the world.” The Father comes into his Son with all he is, he comes into his Son with a has,
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he comes into his Son with all that he affords and, fourthly, he comes in an intellectual act. It is proper to the Son to dwell in the Father and it is proper to the Father to dwell in his Son and in the Holy Ghost. The full promise of the Father is brought forth in the Son to the end that the Son may transmit it to the soul. To use a favourite simile of mine. When a stone is thrown into a pond the impact starts a circle, small but energetic, which sets up other circles, the second being larger than the first albeit not so potent and the third one bigger still; one is gotten from another without stopping; and if the throw was hard enough the water’s edge is reached before the ripples are exhausted. One unique throw with the world a sheet of water and the water would fail ere the circles died away.
Now mark the application. First, out of the Father there leaps forth the Son, small, but so puissant in his godly strength that it is he who causes the whole emanation. The second sally is the premier angel, following hard upon the first event. It speeds apace, and though less energetic than the first and fully small, it is endowed with so much force that its superfluous energy supplies the lower angels while its successors, yet more widely flung, are bigger in circumference than the second or the ‘first. They keep on brimming out the one behind the other, all busy pouring themselves forth from the highest to the lowest of the angels; but however far it be from the initial sally of the eternal Word to the first angel, this latter is too high to be affected by any corporal thing. Further. Our master claims for the lowest of the angels that in view of his energy projecting into God, the very basest of the inferior angels has so much of God’s might that the smallest fraction (a chip as it were from the carpenter’s axe), the minutest trace, of his activity makes all things grow and flourish. If this chip does not fall from his work, everything instantly perishes. They spread far and wide, reproducing so far as they may the first welling out of the Son from the Father; but this first emanation was so charged with power that given a thousand or more worlds they would be wanting in capacity ere the first issue had been spent, just as the water’s edge was reached before the ripples were exhausted that arose from the impact of the stone.
Our Lord says, ‘I came forth from the Father and am come into the world.’ World meaning pure or virgin. He is referring to the soul. Boéthius says the world of the soul is called pure because she is fashioned like the fair and virgin world in God. And God is that soul which has gotten her into the perfect image of the divine world and wholly there abides, not peering forth but, all aloof from the outside world, standing still in the light-world
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in God. Into this soul comes the Son, begotten there in all the panoply of God: Father, Son and Holy Ghost, all together in one perfect being. The soul that has gotten in her the Son, has in one perfect entity the entire promise of the Godhead. One thing more. Creatures communicate themselves so far as they are good. It is peculiar to God as being wholly good that into whomsoever does partake of him he empties himself wholly in his Son. Which is another argument for the soul who has gotten the Son receiving the Godhead altogether. Thirdly, the Father is performing, in his Son, an intellectual operation. According to the philosophers, man’s highest happiness consists in thé mental exercise of wisdom. And the Father’s whole delight, his perfect bliss, is this intellectual wont which is the birth of his
Son. This birth he so enjoys that he puts his whole might into ‘it and his entire nature. Accordingly the soul having gotten the Son by a feat of understanding, in him possesses all that God can give, in one perfect joy and bliss.