Here we learn three things. First, that they are dead. Man’s sufferings in this world have an end. St Augustine says pain and the work of pain is finite and the reward is infinite.—Secondly, that, seeing this life is mortal, we have no need to fear all the pain and travail falling to our lot, for it will end. Thirdly, that it behoves us to emulate the dead in dispassion towards good and ill and pain of every kind. The philosopher says heaven is immoveable. Referring to the soul as being the heavenly man who is imperturbable. One master enquires, If creatures are so vile, how comes+it they so easily distract the soul from God: is not the soul at her vilest better than heaven and all creatures? The Doctor says it comes of minding too little about God. Were we to pay due heed to God it would be nigh impossible to lapse. From which we draw the moral that we ought in this world
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to emulate the dead. According to St Gregory, no one gets so much of God as the man who is throughly dead. _
The fourth point is the weightiest. He speaks of their being dead. Death givesthem being. A philosopher says, ‘ Nature never breaks but to mend.’ Air to fire, for instance, is a change for the better ; but air to water were destruction and untowardness. If this is nature’s way much more is it God’s: he never destroys without providing something ‘better. The martyrs died: they lost their life and found their being. The philosopher says, ‘Most precious is being and life, and knowledge is higher than life and nobler than being, for in knowing we have life and being.’ Yet life is nobler than being in the sense that a tree has life whereas
_a stone has being. Again, take being pure and simple, as it is in itself, and being transcends both knowledge and life, for in that it is being it is both knowledge and life. They have, I say, lost
‚their natural life and have acquired being. The philosopher says |there is nothing so like God as being: in so far as it is real being it is the same thing as God. The philosopher says, Being is pure,
' exalted: all that God is is being. God knows nothing but being,
j he is conscious of nothing but being; being is his ring. God ‚loves naught save his being, he thinks of naught save his being. "I say, all creatures are being. One master says some creatures ‘are so nigh to God and so instinct with divine light that they give being to other creatures. That is not the case: being is too pure, too high, too much the same as God, for anyone but God to ‚be able to give being. God’s idiosyncrasy is being. The philo- ‚sopher says one creature is able to give another life. For in being, , mere being, lies all that is at all. Being is the first name. Defect means lack of being. Our whole life ought to be being. So far beta so far it is kin to God. There is no life so feeble but taking it as being it excels anything life can ever boast. I have ‚no doubt of this, that if the soul had the remotest notion of what being means she would never waver from it for an instant. The ‘most trivial thing perceived in God, a flower for example as espied in God, would be a thing more perfect than the universe.
| he vilest thing present in God as being is better than angelic knowledge. Sunes
When angels turn to creaturely knowledge, then it grows dark. St Augustine says, When angels know creatures in God, twilight falls ; when the soul knows God in creatures it is eventide. But knowledge of creatures in God is the dawn. And when she knows God in himself as pure essence, that is high noon. It should be
the soul’s desire to see, as ae in non- seer this most noble
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us up to being which is better than life: the being _our.life-subsists in, wherein-our life is. quickened.into- actuality. We ought to face death willingly and die in order to obtain a better resurrection.
I said on one occasion that a bit of wood is more precious than gold, a surprising statement. But a stone is nobler (having being) than God and his Godhead without being, if such a thing is possible as to abstract his being. That must be a vigorous life in which dead things revive, in which even death is changed to life. To God naught dies: .all.things-are-living-in-him. They being IeKTTESTthe seriotuires say about the martyrs) are quickened into life eternal, into the life where living is real being. We must be so throughly dead as to be moved by neither good nor . ill. What we know we must know in its cause. We never really know anything in itself till we know it in its cause. There is no understanding it until we apprehend it in its origin. Just as life is never perfected till it returns to its original source, wherein life is real being. The thing that keeps us from remaining there is, as the philosopher explains, our being in contact with time. What time can touch is temporal and mortal. The philosopher states that the heavenly progression is eternal; true, it gives rise to time, and that makes it mortal. In its course it is eternal, all unwitting of time; in other words, the soul obeys the laws of abstract being. Another thing is its being full of opposites. What are opposites ? Good and bad, white and black are in opposition, a thing which has no place in real being.
The philosopher says the soul is given to the body for her perfecting. Soul apart from body possesses neither intellect nor will: she is one with no attendant power of speech ; true, she‘has it in her ground, in its root as it were, but not in fact. The soul is purified in body by collecting things scattered and dispersed. The resultant of the five senses, when these are recollected, gives her a common sense wherein everything sums up to one. In the second place, she is purified by a saving habit, that namely of ascending into the unitive life. The soul’s perfection consists in liberation from the life which is in part and admission to the
‘life which is whole. All that is scattered in nether things is gathered together when the soul climbs up into the life where there are no opposites. The soul knows no opposition when she enters the light of intellect. Anything short of this light falls into death and dies. Perfection of soul consists, thirdly, in absence of | sensible affection. What is prone to aught other shall die, it cannot last. We beseech thee Lord God to help us escape from the life that is divided into the life that is united. So help us God. Amen.
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St Germanus’ Day
In diebus suis placuit deo et inventus est justus (Ecel. 44,,). In these words which I quote in Latin we celebrate the saint, Ger- manus by name, whose virtuous life so much is written of and whose festival is kept to-day in holy Christendom.
“In his days,’ that means there is more than one day. There is the soul’s day and God’s day. Days here, all that have passed for seven thousand years, are as near God’s day, to-day, as is yesterday. Why? Because time yonder is in the present now. The heavens revolve, hence time; day started when the heavens began to spin. Yonder the soul’s day is passing in the present, in her natural light where all things are, where there is perfect day, God’s day, day and night in one. Yonder in the day of eternity the soul is in the essential now; there the Father is be- getting his (one-begotten Son) in the here and now, there the soul is being reborn in God. As often as this birth takes place she is giving birth to the only Son. Full many are the sons of virgins born who travail in eternity, superior to time. But however many sons the soul gives birth to in eternity she has no more than the one Son, for it is supertemporal: it comes to pass in the eternal day.
Just indeed is he who lives in virtue and in virtuous deeds; who seeketh not his own in any thing, neither in God nor creature. That man dwells in God and God in him. He takes delight in flouting and getting rid of things, in being done with things as far as that is possible. St John says, ‘God is love and love is God and he who dwells in love dwells in God.’ Doubtless he is well lodged as heir to God, and he in whom God dwells has a good lodger. One of the masters says, God gives the soul a gift which moves her to interior things. And it has been explained that the soul is moved directly by the Holy Ghost, for in the love wherein God loves himself, in that same love he is loving me, and the soul loves God in the same love wherein he loves himself; and were there not this love wherein God loves himself there would be no Holy Ghost at all. It is the heat, the blowing of his holy Breath that the soul loves God in.
In one of the Evangelists we read, ‘ This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’ In another we read, ‘This is my beloved Son in whom all things please me.’ And in a third we find, * This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleasing to myself” Whatever pleases God is pleasing to him in his only: Son: whatever God loves he is loving in his only Son. So it
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behoves a man to live so that he is one with his only Son, so that he is his only Son. Between the only Son and the soul there is no difference. Between the servant and his lord there is no like love. As long as I am servant I remain unlike, remote from his only Son. If I could see God with my eyes the same as I see colours, that would not be right, for that which is visible is temporal. The temporal taken according to time is taken at its lowest value. Now is time and place in itself. While man has time and place, number and quantity, he is not as he should be, is not just, and God is remote and not his own. Our Lord says, ‘ Whosoever would be my disciple let him forsake himself,’ as though to say, no one can hearken to my teaching till he is rid of his own self. All creatures in themselves are naught, and that is why I counsel you to abandon naught and enjoy the perfect state where the will is just. His own will once relinquished man relishes my doctrine and can listen to my word. One master says, All creatures have their being straight from God, therefore by nature God must love them better than they do themselves. Did the soul know its own detachment it would not stoop to any thing.
We say about this bishop, ‘ He was well-pleasing to him in his days.” The soul’s day and God’s day are different. In her natural day the soul knows all things above time and place; nothing is far or near. And that is why I say, this day all things are of equal rank. To talk about the world as being made by God to-morrow, yesterday, would be talking nonsense. God makes the world and all things in this present now. Time gone a thousand years ago is now as present and as near to God as this - very instant. The soul who is in the here and now, in her the Father bears his one-begotten Son and in that same birth the soul is born back into God. It is one birth; as fast as she is reborn into God the Father is begetting his only Son in her.