What is this play ? It is his eternal Son. There has always been this play going on in the Father-nature. Play and audience | are the same. The Father’s view of his own nature is his Son. The Father embraces his own nature in the quiet darkness of his eternal essence which is known to none except himself. The glance returned by his own nature is his eternal Son. So the Son embraces the Father in his nature for he is the same as his Father in his nature. Thus from the Father’s embrace of his own nature there comes this eternal playing of the Son. This play was played eternally before all creatures. As it is written in the Book of Wisdom, ‘Prior to creatures, in the eternal now, I have played before the Father in his eternal stillness.’ The Son has eternally been playing before the Father as the Father has before his Son. The playing of the twain is the Holy Ghost in whom they both disport themselves and he disports himself in both. Sport and players are the same. Their nature proceeding in itself. ‘God is a fountain flowing into itself,’ as St Dionysius says. The Father has eternally been loving himself in his Son just as the Son has been loving himself in the Father eternally. Their mutual love is the Holy Ghost: the third Person, who proceeds from the other two as love. The essence of the Godhead begets not. The Father’s Person begets the Person of the Son eternally and together they pour forth their Holy Ghost: their mutual love. Father and Son are the pouring-in and the Holy Breath is the thing inpoured, identical in nature with them both. Did the essence of the Deity beget there would be more than one essence; but there is not. There is one essence which gives all things life and being, for the Son is born out of the heart of the Father eternally and shall bring back into it again all things which issued forth therefrom in him. As Christ declares, ‘When I am exalted I will draw all things to me.’ The Holy Ghost proceeded forth as love to make our spirits one with him. The Son takes back with him all the things that issued forth in him and the Holy Ghost returns with all that he expired. St Dionysius says, ‘Son and Holy Spirit are the light of the God-bearing Godhead.’ St Philip cried, ‘ Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.’ Our Lord answered and said, ‘ Philip, he who seeth me seeth my Father.” The Son revealed the mysteries of the Father for he was like him in all things and of one nature with him. Nothing satisfies the soul except the Father who is altogether good and absolutely simple. The more simple the soul the more like God she is. God spake never a word but one: his simple understand- ing. If the soul is to be simple she must withdraw from multi-
plicity into his one conception. That can happen here only now and then.
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' The soul has three understandings. First, the understanding of things that are above her. Next, the understanding of herself. From this knowledge she passes to the third: the one alone. Therein she loses herself speaking never a word but possessing herself in silence for God has rapt her up above herself to him ; she is not and knows not by herself. What she understands she understands with him and even this she must forgo, must leave to that wherewith she understands it. As St Dionysius says, ‘Make thyself passive, void of definition. One single glimpse of the abstraction that God is, more unifies the soul with God than all the works of holy Christendom.’
Try diligently, therefore, to get some grasp of truth: in the conception of it thine own wont is altogether lost and thou dost live in truth. Those exalted ones who stand therein can never be disjoined from God. They are the blessed who know God in himself eternally. God is unchangeable, so these can never more be separated from him. It behoves us therefore to depart from all unlikeness to our highest good.
The Just Lives in Eternity
Justus in perpetuum vivet apud dominum est mersce ejus (Sap. 516). We read to-day in the epistle the wise man’s words, ‘ The just lives in eternity.’ I have defined elsewhere what a just man is, but here I say in another sense, that man is just (i.e. righteous) who is informed with and transformed into justice (righteousness). The just lives in God and God in him, for God is born in the just and the just in God: at every virtue of the just God is born and is rejoiced, and not only every virtue but every action of the just wrought out of the virtue of the just and in justice; thereat God is glad, aye, thrilled with joy, there is nothing in his ground that does not dance for joy. To unen- lightened people this is matter for belief but the illumined know
The just seeks nothing in his. work ; only thralls and hirelings ask anything for work, or work for any why. If thou wouldst be informed with, transformed into, righteousness, have no ulterior purpose in thy work; form no idea in thee in time or in eternity, not reward nor happiness nor this nor that, for verily all such works are dead. Believe me, the idea of God in thee, if thou dost work with that in view, means death to all thy works; they are good works spoilt and thou dost sin to boot, for thou doest like the gardener who first plants the garden and then roots up the trees but still expects a crop. So thou dost
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throw away good work. If thou wouldst live and have thy work live also thou must be dead to all things and reduced to naught. _ It belongs to creature to make aught from aught, but God’s | idiosyncrasy is making aught from naught, wherefore, if God is to make aught of thee or in thee, thou must first come to naught ; so enter thou into thine own ground and work ; works wrought by thee there are all living.
He says, ‘ his reward is with the Lord.’ He says with, meaning that the reward of the just is where God is himself; that the happiness of the just and God’s happiness are one ; the righteous are in bliss where God is in bliss. St John says, ‘ The Word was with God.’ He says with because God is righteousness and the righteous are like him. Whoever is in righteousness is in God and is God.
Further, with regard to the word, just. He does not say, the just man or just angel, he simply says, the just. The Father begets his Son the just and the just his Son ; every virtue of the just, every act done by the just, is nothing but the Son being begotten by the Father. The Father never stops, he is always trying to beget his Son in me, according to the scriptures: ‘ For Sion’s sake will I not hold my peace and for Jerusalem I will not rest till the righteous is revealed and shineth like the lightning.’ Sion is the height of living, the contemplative life, and Jerusalem the profoundest calm. Not for the most exalted life nor for the deepest peace will God desist until the righteous is revealed. God and God alone works in the just. If thy works are prompted by anything external, then thy works are dead. For thy works to be living it must be God that prompts them in the innermost recesses of thy soul: that is thy life and that alone.
Further I declare : if it seems to thee that one virtue is greater than another, if thou dost cultivate it more and value it above . the rest, then thou art not loving it as it is in righteousness nor is it God who is working in thee. As long as a man prizes or leans to one virtue more than to another he neither takes nor feels it as it is by rights, and he is not righteous. The just man loves and practises virtue as a whole, in righteousness, as righteousness itself. It says in holy writ: ‘ Before the fabricated world, I am.’ He says, Iam before, above. Meaning that in eternity, exalted above time, man does one work with God. People sometimes ask how man can do the work that God was doing a thousand years ago and in a thousand years will be doing still. They cannot under- stand it. But in eternity is no before nor after; the happenings of the past millennium and the future one and now, in eternity are all the same. God’s doings of a thousand years ago and now and a thousand years to come are but one single act. It follows that
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the man who is exalted above time into eternity will do with God what he did in the past and also what he does in the next thousand years. This is matter of knowledge to the wise and of belief to fools.
St Paul says, ‘ We are eternally chosen in the Son and we should never rest until we get to be what we have been in him eternally.’ The Father ceaselessly endeavours to get us born in his Son so that we may be the same as his Son is. The Father is begetting his Son, and in his begetting the Father finds so much peace and pleasure that his entire nature is expended in it. That which is in God moves him to beget; by his ground, his nature and his’ essence the Father is moved to generation. And you must know, God is born in us as soon as all our soul-powers, which hitherto have been tied and bound, are absolutely free (and passive) and when the mind is stilled and sense troubles us no longer. Then the Father begets in us his Son. Then we keep as free from forms and images as God, and find ourselves as free from likeness as God is void and free in his very self. When the Father bears his Son in us we shall know the Father with the Son and the Holy Ghost in both of them and the holy Trinity, and therein all things as a mere naught in God. Then time and number are no more. God’s essence neither does nor suffers, nor does his nature suffer, but it works.
Sometimes a light is apparent in the soul and she fondly thinks it is the Son, whereas it is nothing but a light. When the Son reveals himself within the soul the love of the Holy Ghost is revealed at the same time. It is the nature of the Father to beget his Son, and it is of the nature of the Son for me to be begotten in him and in his nature ; it is of the nature of the Holy Breath for me to be consumed therein and melted and reduced entirely to love. One who is thus in love and altogether love, will think that God loves none but him and knows no love for anyone nor yet from anyone but him alone. |
Some doctors hold that the spirit finds its beatitude in love. Some make him find it in beholding God. I say he finds it not in love nor in gnosis nor in vision. But, it may be asked, has the spirit in eternal life no vision of God? Yes and no. Once born he neither sees nor pays heed to God. But in being born he does see God. The spirit is in bliss then, not in its begetting but as being begotten, for then it lives as the Father lives, impartible, in its abstract and essential nature. Wherefore do thou turn from things and realize thyself in thy naked essence, for outside essence all is accident and the accidental makes for why. Let us live in the eternal, So-help us God. Amen.