Predica verbum (2 Tim. 4,). St Dominic says, translating the words of St Paul, ‘ Publish, proclaim, bring forth and propagate the Word.’ It is remarkable that anything should come forth and at the same time stay within. That the Word should come forth and still remain within is very wonderful ; that all creatures should come forth and remain within is very wonderful; what God gives and promises to give is most wonderful, it is incomprehensible, incredible. That is as it should be ; if it were comprehensible and credible it would not be appropriate to him. God is in all things. The more he is in things the more he is out of things: the more he is;within the more he is without. I have often said, God is creating the whole world now this instant. Everything God made six thousand years ago and more when he made the world, God makes now all at once. God is in all things; but as God is divine and intelligible, therefore God is nowhere so much as in the soul, and the angels if you will, in the innermost soul, in the summit of the soul. And when I say the innermost I mean the highest and when I say the highest I mean the innermost. In the depths, at the summit of the soul, they are both the same. Where time has never entered and no form was ever seen, at the centre, the summit, of the soul, there God is creating the whole world. All God’s creation of six thousand years ago, all his creation of a thousand years to come, if the world lasts so long, is wrought by God in the innermost recesses, at the apex of the soul. All the past and future is con- trived by God at the summit of the soul. The Father bears his Son in the innermost recesses of the soul and begets thee with his only Son, no less. But if I am Son then I must be Son the same as he is Son, and in no other way. If I am a man I am a man man- fashion. If I am the Man I am the Man Man-fashion. As St John says, ‘ Ye are God’s sons.’
‘Speak the Word, tell it abroad, pronounce it, bring forth and propagate the Word.’ ‘Tell it forth!’ What is spoken in from without is a gross, objective thing. ‘Tell it forth!’ That implies that thou hast it in thee. The prophet says, ‘ God spake one and I heard two.’ True, God did speak but once. His utterance is but one. In his Word he speaks his Son and the Holy Ghost and the whole of creatures, all of which are but one utterance in God. But, ‘I heard two,’ the prophet says. Meaning, I understood it to be God and creature. Yonder where God speaks it it is God ; but here it is creature. People fondly think that God became man yonder. No; God was made man here as well as there, and he
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as made man for one purpose only : to beget thee his one-begotten on.
Yesterday I quoted from the Paternoster the words, ‘ thy will be done.’ Better his will than mine. That I should do it, is what the Paternoster means. First, by being (oblivious or) asleep to things, ignoring time and images and creatures. Philosophers will tell you that being in deep sleep a man might pass a hundred years oblivious of creatures, time and images and yet aware of God at work within him. As the soul says in the Book of Love, “I sleep, but my heart waketh.’ So when all creatures are asleep in thee thou durst be awake to God’s doings in thee.
* Labour in all things’ says our text, and this is open to three interpretations. It means, turn all to good account, or, see God in everything, for God is everywhere. St Augustine says, God created all things not that he might leave them and go on his own way : no, he is still in them. People imagine they have more if they have things plus God than if they have God without the things. They are mistaken. All things plus God amount to nothing more than God alone ; and he who fondly weens that if he has the Son and the Father with him he has more than if he had the Son without the Father, is mistaken too. The Father plus the Son is no more than the Son is by himself and the Son plus the Father is no more than the Father by himself. ‘To find God in all things is a sign that he has begotten thee his only Son, no less.
Again, turn everything to good account, means, love God the same in poverty as wealth, hold him as dear in sickness as in health ; as dear in trials and in sufferings as in immunity from sufferings. The heavier to bear the lighter to bear: like two buckets, the heavier the one the lighter the other, and so the more one gets rid the easier the riddance. The God-lover parts with the world as cheerfully as with an egg. The more he gives up the easier it grows.
Thirdly, ‘labour in all things’ means: where thou findest thyself about manifold things, at variance with pure and simple essence, let that be thy work: ‘ work in all things’ and ‘ fulfil thy destiny.’ It also means, lift up thy head, and this is twofold in its implication. The first meaning is: part with all that is thine and appropriate God ; then God will be thine as he is his own ; he will be God to thee as he is God to his very self, no less. What is mine I get from no one. If I get it from another it is not mine but his from whom I got it. The other meaning is, dedicate all thy acts to God. Many people cannot understand this, and I am not surprised ; to ‘know the meaning of it the soul must be in
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great detachment and uplifted over all these things. May we attain to this perfection, So help us God. Amen.
LXVII! THE POWERS OF HEAVEN SHALL BE MOVED
Virtutes celorum movebantur (Luc. 21,,). This is a gospel- saying of our Lord, and the translation runs, ‘The powers of heaven shall be moved.’ Heaven is suggestive of some mysterious or hidden thing, God being so mysteriously concealed by the light of his divine splendour that no man may by dint of his own intellect attain to the beatific vision of his godly countenance. As Job exclaims, ‘ Who can by searching find out the things in heaven?’ As though to say, no one in the world. The sage laments this, crying, ‘ Alas! O Lord, thou art a hidden God!’ According to St Augustine, ‘ God hides in the recesses of the soul, disguised in the workings of grace wherein he shows himself to the soul covertly, so that none may know except the soul wherein he is thus privily concealed.’ And St Paul says, ‘ Everything, which is in the soul, is hidden.’ The soul then is the godly heaven and ghostly where in unbroken stillness God does his perfect work. As God spake by the prophets, ‘ Behold, I create in you a new heaven.’ -
It is the stirring of the powers of these incarnate heavens by the light of God’s glory shining on them which Christ refers to when he says, * The powers of heaven are shaken.’ These words betoken to us the good works of the soul whereto she is wont what time God being hid in her makes her the heaven of his incomprehensible divinity. For every act proceeds from power and power proceeds from essence. So from these words we learn three things about the noble nature of the soul. First, her transcendent being. (Thus he speaks of heaven.) Next, her powerful faculties. (Hence the word powers.) Thirdly, her fruitful operation. (Hence the word moved.)
Now to begin with let us note that if the soul has got a heavenly being she must possess three heavenly properties. First, the innate eternity of heaven. Secondly, its motion in a circle. Thirdly, its overflowing into creatures underneath. These three things I demonstrate as follows: The first, that heaven is eternal, Texplain in this way. The heavens have an incorporeal, immaterial nature in corporeal guise. No outside semblance is admitted. Colour is excluded, and no variable force can ply therein, hence its state is one of fixed abiding. Then the circular motion of the
1 See also Spamer’s Teste, A. 6, for a longer version.
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heavens is argued thus. Anything that travels in a circle comes back to its start; and anything that comes back to its start travels in a circle. Now the philosopher says the mover of the heavens is in the East where the sun rises. We see with our own eyes that every day the sun dawns in the East and sets into the West to rise again next day at the place where, the philosopher says, the mover resides. It returns each day to its start. Ergo, the sun goes round. This is not to be confused with the sun’s own period of revolution. The starting-point of its own path is not reached in one day: it takes it a whole year, three hundred and sixty-five days, that is to say. Rather we must take this as referring to the heavens altogether, with the sun in their train. The sun doing yearly what they accomplish daily. Thirdly, the heavenly downpour into creatures I argue from the fact that everything subject to birth and decay is unstable and lacking in celestial power. As the philosopher observes in the book of The Celestial Nature, ‘ Heaven is to all inferior things the influx of being and of life.’
Now for the soul to be this ghostly heaven she must return to her eternal being, to the circular motion of her cause and to her highest nature streaming down into her lower powers. First and foremost let me say that as she goes it does behove the soul to turn to her eternal being and diligently note how by God’s grace she is immortal in her nature which he has rendered meet to share in his eternal bliss. She is an incorporeal nature in corporeal guise, spirit not following body in its fleshly birth, so no extrane- ous semblance can invade her, provided she is ever on her guard against the fading of her own exemplar wherein she is reflecting and manifesting God in his own proper nature. Nor may she brook the entrance of any naughtiness to oust her from her heavenly perfection and cast her into suffering, for she suffers without suffering in the power of God whereby she is fortified in suffering. Withal no other power can ply in her; she is so secure in God who is immutable stability that neither death nor life nor ‘depth nor height nor any creature can part her from his fixed and changeless deity. So with King David she may say, ‘In cleaving to God lies the gift of immortal felicity.’
Secondly, the soul progresses in a circle, for she rises with the rising sun, in her eternal nature, to wit, in her heavenly Father’s heart, where there is ever dawning the true Son, his self-begotten Son, the light and shine of his eternal sufficiency. And she returns into the Father’s mind where she is spoken in celestial wise, as the prophet ‚hath it, ‘God fashioned the heavens in his understanding.’ This intelligible heaven means the soul returned intact to God as to her source. For he speaks into her his eternal
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Word, and confirms her in all heavenly perfection ; as the prophet cries on becoming the heaven of the Deity, ‘ By God’s Word are the heavens fixed and established.’