The truest thing that man can predicate of God is word-and- truth. God calls himself a word. And St John says, ‘In the _ beginning was the Word,’ meaning that man is a word with the eternal Word. Like Venus, Fria’s star, which Friday is named after and which has many names. When it is earlier than the sun and is up before it then it is called the morning star; when it rises later than the sun and the sun sets first then it is called the evening star. Now it is above and now below the sun, but of all the stars it best keeps its distance from the sun, never going far away, and the moral of this is thatany man who would attain to God must stay by, in the presence of, God the whole time and refuse to let God be put out of his mind by fortune or misfortune or by any creature whatsoever.
And he says, ‘ like the moon at the full in his days.’ The moon is the ruler of moist nature. The moon is never nearer to the sun than at the full, and then it gets its light at first-hand from the sun, but owing to the fact that of all the stars it is the nearest to the earth, it suffers from two drawbacks: being pale and mottled and also being liable to lose its light. It is never so potent as when it is furthest from the earth, and in that position it tells most upon the sea; when it is on the wane its effect gets less and less. And the higher the soul rises above earthly things the
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more powerful she grows. Merely creature-lore will place a man beyond the need of sermons. For every single creature is a book. But anyone who means to get to that whereof we speak, to where — my arguments all tend, must be as the morning star: a man in the presence of God, always with him, equally near him and exalted above mundane things : a word by the Word.
There is one word both thought and spoken: angels, the soul and all creatures. Another Word, thought but unspoken, I can conceive. And there is still another Word unthought of and unspoken which never proceeds forth but is eternally in him who speaks it: in the Father, for it is he who speaks it, it is eternally proceeding and abiding. Intellect is intrinsically active and more and more outwardly effective in proportion as it is directed inwards. God’s happiness consists in its operation. And here again the soul should be an ad-verb. As the intellect of the soul turns more inwards, the more closely, more minutely is it identified with what it knows. The more powerful it is the more clearly it reflects and is atoned with God. That is not the case with corporal things: the stronger they are the more external is their action. God’s happiness lies in the subjective working of the intellect wherein his Word abides. It is this eternal Word the soul should be a word with and, doing one work with God, she will find her happiness in self-perception: in the very thing that God is happy in. May we ever be a word with this Word, So help us the Father and this same Word and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
LXXXV? A NEW COMMANDMENT I GIVE UNTO YOU
Mandatum novum do vobis etc. (Joh. 13,4). In the Gospel of St John we find our Lord’s words to his disciples, ‘A new com- mandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all know that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another.’
We know of three kinds of love that our Lord had, and in this we must be like him. One is natural, the second gracious and the third divine. In God there is nothing not God; in ourselves, however, we may consider them as an ascending scale, from good to better and from better to perfection. But in God is neither more nor less, he is just the simple, pure, essential truth.
The first love God has, in this we learn how his divine goodness has constrained him to create all creatures, wherewith he has been _ big eternally in his ideal preconception, intending them to enjoy 1 See also Wackernagel, No. 66.
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his goodness with him. And among all his creatures he bears no more love to one than to another: as each is able to receive he pours his love therein. Were my soul as capacious, as roomy, as a Seraph’s, who has nothing in him, God would pour out into me the same as he does into that angel. If you describe a circle, a ring of dots with one point in the middle, from this point all the dots will be equidistant ; for one dot to get nearer it will have to be displaced, for the middle point is constant at the centre. So with divine being: it is not questing round about but abiding altogether in itself. In order to receive from it a creature must infallibly be moved out of itself. And when we talk of man we are talking of all creatures; Christ himself exhorted his dis- ciples, “Go forth and preach the gospel to all creatures,’ for crea- tures all culminate in man. Not but what, as being, God is pouring himself out into all creatures, to each as much as it can take. Which is a lesson to us to love all creatures equally with what we have received from God (though some are nearer to us by kinship or by natural friendship), as we are favoured equally with the boon of divine love. I sometimes seem to like one better than another, and yet I have the same goodwill towards that other person’ whom I have never seen, only, by asking more of - me, this one enables me to give him myself more. God loves crea- tures all alike and fills them with his being. And we too should pour forth ourselves in love upon all creatures. We often find the heathen arriving at this amiable state in virtue of their natural understanding. As the heathen philosopher observes, man is by nature a kindly animal.
The second love of God, the spiritual, he is flowing with into the soul and into the angels, and it is by this light which is super- natural that, as I was saying, creature is rapt away out of itself. Creatures are so enamoured of their own natural light, it needs a strong inducement to take them out of it into. the light of grace. In his natural light man enjoys himself, but the light of grace, which is unspeakably more powerful, robs him of his self-enjoy- ment and draws him into itself. As the soul says in the Book of Love, ‘ Draw me after thee in thy sweet savour.’
Now we cannot love God without first knowing him, but the essential point of God is in the centre, equally far from and near to all creatures, and the only way of getting closer to it is for my natural intellect to be displaced by a light more intense than itself. Supposing, for example, that my eye were a light and strong enough to bear the sunlight in its glory and unite therewith, its interior state would then be due not to itself alone but to the sunlight as well. So with the mind. The intellect is a light, and if I turn it right away from things and in the direction
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of God then, since God is perennially flowing with grace, my mind is illumined and united with love and therein knows and loves God as he is in himself. Here we have the explanation of how God is flowing out into rational creatures in his light of grace and how we with our intellect approaching this gracious light are rapt out of ourselves and ascend into the light of God himself.
The third love of God : in this it is granted us to learn how God has been begetting his one-begotten Son and is giving birth to him, as the Doctor says, now and eternally, he, like any woman, being brought to bed in every virtuous soul who has embarked on the interior life. This birth is his understanding, perennially up-springing in his paternal heart, wherein he has gotten all his bliss. All he has to give he expends on understanding : it is his progeny, his only pride. His entire happiness is centred in his Son ; he loves nothing but his Son and all he finds in him ; his Son is the light that has been for ever burning in his paternal heart.
To enter there we shall have to climb by way of natural light into the light of grace and therein wax into the light that is the Son himself. There in the Son we are loved by the Father with his love (his Holy Spirit) which has its eternal source in him and having blossomed forth to his eternal birth (namely the second Person) is wafted by the Son back to the Father as the love of both. The Doctor says, I sometimes think of what the angel said to Mary, ‘ Hail, full of grace!’ what is the good to me of Mary’s being full of grace if I am not full also? What does it profit me the Father’s giving his Son birth unless I bear him too ? God begets his Son in the perfect soul and is brought to bed therein that she may bring him forth in all her works. Thus we, by the love of the Holy Ghost, being unified into his Son, shall know the Father with the Son and love ourselves in him and him in us with their mutual love.
Whoever would achieve this triple love must needs have four things. The first is, real dispassion towards creatures. The second, the true life of Leah, that is to say, the active life which is set in motion in the ground of the soul by the action of the Holy Spirit. The third thing is, the true life of Rachel, the contempla- tive life. The fourth is, an aspiring soul. A master was once questioned by his pupil about the angelic order. He answered him and said, Go hence and withdraw into thyself until thou understandest : give thy whole self up to it, then look, refusing to see anything but what thou findest there. It will seem to thee at first as though thou art the angels with them and as thou dost surrender to their collective being thou shalt think thyself the angels as a whole with the whole company of angels. The pupil
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went away and withdrew into himself until he found all this in truth in his own ground. Then returning to his master he gave him thanks and said: It was as you foretold. On giving my whole mind to the subject of the angels and aspiring to their estate, at first it seemed to me that I was all the angels with the angels. You see then, said his master, that as you draw a little nearer to the source, wonder after wonder is wrought upon the soul ; for while a man is still on the ascent and receiving through the medium of creatures, he has not come to rest. But once he has climbed up into God, there in the Son he will be receiving with the Son the whole of what God has to give. May we, ascend- ing in this way from one love to another, be united into God and there in bliss abide eternally. So help us God. Amen.
LXXXVI! DETACHMENT HAS FOUR STEPS
Detachment has four steps. The first breaks in and makes away with all a man’s perishable things. The second one deprives him of them altogether. The third not only takes them but makes them all forgotten as though they had not been, and all about them. The fourth degree is right in God and is God himself. When we get to this stage the King is desirous of our beauty.
LXXXVII THE POOR IN SPIRIT