I have spoken about one power in the soul ; in her first issue she lays hold of God not as being good nor yet as truth: delving deeper still she grasps him in his loneliness, in his solitude ; she finds him in his desert, in his actual ground. But being still unsatisfied, on she goes in quest of what it is that is in his Godhead, of the special property of his peculiar nature. They say no property (or, union) is closer than that of the three Persons being one God. And next they put the union of the soul with God. When the soul, being kissed by God, is in absolute perfection and in bliss, then at last she knows the embrace of unity, then at the touch of God she is made uncreaturely, then, with God’s motion, the soul is as noble as God is himself. God moves the soul afte his own fashion. God contemplating creature gives it life; crea- ture finds life in contemplating God. The soul has ra
Er
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noétic being, and therefore where God is there is the soul and where the soul is there is God.
Of this saint we say, ‘ he was found just.’ Just means equable, alike in joy and sorrow, in bitter and in sweet; one to whom nothing comes amiss, whom nothing keeps from feeling himself one in righteousness. Like to like. Love loves its like alway and God loves the just man like himself. May we find that we are in this case in the time, in the day of understanding, in the day of wisdom, in the day of beatitude. So help us O undivided Trinity. ‚ Amen.
LXXXIV! LIKE THE MORNING STAR
Quasi stella matutina in medio nebule etc, (Eccl. 50,). ‘ Like the morning star in the midst of a cloud and as the moon at the full and as the sun in his glory, so did he shine in the temple of God.’ These words are commonly applied to all the saints and teachers who in their virtuous lives and knowledge of God have been a shining light to worldly hearts which, caught with creatures in the fog and cloud of darkness or ignorance, are straying like blind men from the way of eternal liberation, but more especially do they apply to the holy father we celebrate to-day, St Dominic by name, a mainstay of Christendom and founder of the Preaching Order which he started and established to propagate God’s word and to help poor sinners. :
He shone like the morning star in the temple of God. What is God and what is the temple of God? Four and twenty doctors met together to settle what God is, and they could not doit. Thereafter at a time appointed again they came together bringing each his verdict. Of these I will pick out two or three. One says: God is something to which all changing, temporal things are nothing; all that has being is from him and is insignificant compared with him. Another says: God is somewhat that transcends being, that in itself needs none and that all things need. A third says: God is the intelligence which occupies itself solely in understanding itself.
Passing over the first and the third I will speak of the second : God transcends being. Nothing that has being, time or place is proper to God, he is above them ; his being in all creatures shows him superior to them, for that which is the same in many things must be prior to them. According to some doctors, the soul is in the heart alone. Not so; it is an error some eminent Scholas- tics make. The soul is whole and undivided at once in foot and _ eye and in each member of the body. Again, I take a span of 1 Sermon on St Dominic’s Day. See also Jostes, No, 31.
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time, which need not be to-day or yesterday. But if I take the now that includes all time. The now wherein God made the ' world is as near this time as the now I am speaking in this moment, and the last day is as near this now as was yesterday.
One of the doctors says : ‘ God is impartible, eternally energising in himself, immanent, unindigent of instrument or aid, in need of none but what all things need and to which all things tend as to their final goal.’ To this goal there is no way, it is beyond all ways, debouching in the open. St Bernard says, * Divine love is a wont without a way.’ The physician who sets out: to make a sick man whole has no particular mode of health in view ; he has a mode whereby he hopes to make him well, but how well he hopes to make him is not specified : he will make him as well as he can. How shall we love God then? As well as we can; without measure. Each thing works after its own fashion; things do not work in natures superior to their own; fire, for example, only works in wood. God works above all natures, in the uncondi- tioned ; wherever he can stir he is at work in modeless mode. Before ever there was being God was working: he wrought in non-existent being. Advanced theology lays down that God is abstract being: he is as much above being as an angel is above a fly. I hold it is as wrong for me to say that God is being as to . say the sun is black or white. God is neither this nor that. As St Dionysius says, ‘ He who thinks that he sees God, if he sees aught sees naught of God.’ But when I say God is not being, is superior to being, I do not with that deny him being: I dignify and exalt it in him. If I find some copper in the gold, as existing there it is in a nobler being than itself. St Augustine says ; God is mode-free mode, power-free power, good-free good.
In the elements of the Scholastic teaching, we find being divided into ten modes (or categories), all of which are denied to God. God is subject to none of these modes nor is he deficient in any. The first, which has most being of them all, wherein all things have being, is substance; and the last, which has least being, is called relatio, and in God it is the same as the first one is, which has most being. In God all things have the same form (idea), though this is the form of very different things. The most exalted angel, the soul, the fly, have all the same prototype in God. . God is not being nor yet goodness. Goodness cleaves to being and does not go beyond it: if there were no, being there would be no goodness. Being is purer than good. In God is
no good nor better nor best. To say that God is good is to do
him wrong ; as well say that the sun is black. But our Lord himself declares, ‘ None is good but God alone.’ What is good ? That which communicates itself. Him we call a good man who
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gives himself and is of use to people. And hence the dietum of a heathen doctor, ‘ A hermit is neither good nor bad, in the sense of giving himself and helping other people.’ God par excellence communicates himself. No thing gives of its own being, for creatures are not of themselves. What they give they have gotten from another. Nor do they give themselves. The sun gives light, no more; the fire gives heat, the fire itself remains ; but God does give his own, for it is from himself he is and in all the gifts he gives he first and foremost gives himself. In all his gifts he gives himself: God, as he is, so far as the recipient will allow. St James says, ‘Every good gift comes down from above from the Father of lights.’
When we take God in his being we take him in the forecourt of his habitation, for quiddity or mode is the way into his temple. Then where is God in his temple ? Intellect is the temple of God wherein he is shining in his glory. Nowhere does God dwell more really than in the temple of his intellectual nature, where he is in his stillness by himself, all undisturbed. As one of the doctors says, God in his self-perception is perceiving himself in himself.
Now turning to the soul, she has a drop of intellectual nature, a spark, a ray, and she has sundry powers which function in the body. One is the power of digestion, more active by night than in the day, whereby man grows and thrives. And the soul has a power in the eyes which makes the eye so sensitive and delicate and too fastidious to accept things in the coarse-grained mode they have themselves, but they must first be filtered and refined by light and air, owing to the presence in it of the soul. Another power in the soul is that wherewith she thinks. This power is able to picture in itself things which are not there, so that I can see the things as well as I see them with my eyes, or even better. I can see a rose in winter when there are no roses, there- fore with this power the soul produces things from the non-existent, like God who creates things out of nothing.
A heathen philosopher observes that the soul who loves God takes him under the veil of goodness; and so far I have quoted mainly from the heathen doctors who know in the light of nature merely. I have yet to come to the sayings of the saints who see in a light far more exalted. He says then, that the soul in loving God is taking him under the veil of goodness. Intellect draws this veil from God and takes him bare, stripped of goodness, of being and of every name.
At the School [the College of St Jacob] I used to teach that
-intellect is higher than the will, both as belonging to this light. Another theologian at the other School put will before the intellect on the ground that will enjoys things as they are in themselves,
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whereas intellect enjoys them as they are in it. That is quite true. The eye in itself is a better thing than the eye as painted on the wall. Nevertheless, I still maintain that intellect is higher than the will. Will takes God under the garment of good. Intel- lect seizes him naked, divested of good and of being. Goodness is a garment under which God is concealed and will takes God in this garment of goodness. If God had no goodness my will would repudiate God. It would be unseemly to robe a king in drab on his coronation day. I am not happy by reason of God’s goodness. Never should I think of asking God to beatify me with his goodness, for he could not do it. Goodness is his vesture. My beatitude lies wholly and solely in the fact that God is knowable and in my knowing him. A philosopher says, The intellect of God is what angelic being is suspended from.
It is a question where the image really has its being: in the mirror or the object it proceeds from ? My image is in me, of me, mine. While the mirror faces me, it is my image in it; if the mirror falls it is my image which has been destroyed. Angelic being likewise depends upon the presence of God’s intellectual nature wherein he sees himself like a morning star enveloped in the mist. I always have before my mind this little word quasi, like: indeed, it is the burden of my entire teaching. What at school the ‘children call a mock, a by-word.