heaven of heavens is not able to contain. God’s comfort is only for that soul who scorns all temporal consolations ; and the more she runs from creatures the faster their creator comes and makes her one with him. Dionysius says, love takes the soul out of herself and identifies her with the object of her love, making her insensible and reckless of herself so long as she can do the will of her best-beloved. The powers of the soul, those of her spiritual mind, are celestial in the sense that they do celestial work ; thus the first power receives, the second one perceives and the third one loves. When the soul, conceiving God, is using in recollection her mnemonic power and, in beholding, her intelligence, then love transports her’into the midst of God, the point at which there is eternal rest. The Father abiding in the soul clasps her to his heart, and in this fatherly embrace she conceives the Son in his personal procession and hence divines his presence with the Father in his essence ; as saith the Lord, ‘ I will lead her into the desert,’ meaning, he will lead the soul away from vanity and say his say, his only Son, in her. And in this same begetting of his Son they pour their holy Breath into the soul, informing her of all things. Any act of soul that is to share in the eternal meed must be wrought in God. However good an act is in itself, excepting it be wrought in God, it meets with no reward from him who does not pay by length or size or multitude of works but for their being done in God, soul being the material God works in. In this divine alliance she is highly honoured, for what God is by nature she is made by grace. But if a soul presents herself before her bridegroom Jesus Christ without the ordinary virtues, forgetting to prepare herself in this respect for heaven, her shall he cast out into the pit of hell, there to realize his justice just as much in suffering as St Peter did in heaven his eternal joy. Her true‘ bridegroom Jesus Christ comes to the soul and shows her in his visible humanity his divine affection in order that all creatures may do homage to our nature which has been exalted higher than the angels. We cannot imagine him creating any creature nobler than ourselves. His manhood satisfies our sense as his Godhood does our soul. As St Augustine says, we shall end with our soul in the Godhead, and our bodily senses in the humanity of Christ which is exalted above the saints and angels to where, in its unchanging nature, no creature can attain. When the watching soul is warned by various signs of the coming of her king, everything in her rejoices, and it is his royal right to use his sovran power to fulfil the expectation of the soul who longs for him to buttress her against her outward senses lest by yielding to them in the least she should bring about in any creature something counter to the will of God. The surest way to friendship with the king is for the soul blindly to
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follow where God leads. If the soul, which rather than the body constitutes us man, if the soul, I say, would only obey all God’s intimations she would overcome every obstacle with ease and rejoice in the burdens borne for him. And when she finds herself with nothing to correct she will be free with perfect freedom from opinion. It is the mark of the God-loving soul that from the moment she goes into his service she never follows her own will as distinct from his. God is the one thing that needs nothing and that all things need. And when the soul, beholding herself from within, perceives herself by grace omnipotent she stays in her own ideal nature.
The soul observes concerning God, first, that she has intuition of him who is to come to her. Next, she is in essential union with him who is operating in her. Thirdly, she enjoys him who so richly entertains her at his table. Fourthly, he provides her with a refuge where she is at peace. Dionysius says, ‘ When the soul returns to God her idea of herself in God is that, except for self- awareness, nothing survives in her but God.’ When the soul does this she still keeps in touch with her outward man whom she supplies with his natural life. By speaking himself into the soul God unites himself with her and makes the soul into himself, giving her such great ability, it seems to her that being here in time is her only obstacle to good. In the virtuous uses of her examplar mind, all things being present to the soul in this interior Word of God, her spirit converses with God freely in proportion to the clearness of the Father’s inspiration. It is important then for the soul to know what behaviour to adopt towards God so that she may discover the practices that draw from God his intimations. For this the loving soul must love God more than anything, who, descending into her and energising in her with his spirit, gives her to understand that the interior love she has from him she ought to have and show towards all mankind; and the soul should submit herself to God as though he suffered death for her alone. So doing she will wax in truth and fit herself to receive the universal gift of God whereby she will arrive at the truth of the humanity of Christ. But if she does not do her best she puts herself on a material level with the brutes, that must be spurred to great exertion ; yet the sorriest of men, who are always bound to fall short of God, Christ wrought more deeds of love for than all the saints have ever done for love of him. Though all creatures were to speak they could never tell the perfection God confers on man, especially the soul, than which he neither could nor would make any nobler creature. This he proves in his own Person, with its common boundary between his divine and human natures. It follows that the soul ought to shun all creatures as things unworthy
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of her whereby she may be lured from the things she is destined to by God, and she ought to be ashamed if, being within reach of his eternal good, she should fail to grasp it.
Here there is the question, If the soul is of such high estate that time and place and nature are powerless to move or even touch her in her essential self, does God then work in her without any image of himself? To this theologists reply, Granting the soul ‚is creature and has a spiritual nature it follows of necessity that what God does in her is wrought essentially and free from all contingency ; for his works are all essential and eternal as they are in himself, and the soul participates them in her nature above grace. Grace is the outflowing light designed for the service of the spirit ; grace would not be a light had it no recognised spiritual mission. At the point where God enters the soul in love she is no more known than the highest angel is to her and loves all things God-fashion without any natural idiosyncrasy. God is abstract intellectual essence, eternal in itself, whereas the soul is made eternal. The soul is no more to be grasped in images and forms than God in words and names. The soul is one in nature with and subject to the laws of the authentic intellect of God, a monad so perfectly balanced in itself no creature can find room there.
The Lord Jesus said to his disciples, ‘ I go to prepare a place for you.’ These words teach us two important facts. First, that the soul is by nature made for heaven and God is her lawful heritage. . For God brought forth the soul alone in unbroken line and no man knoweth what she is. Every man has got a soul, but what she actually is there is no telling here in time. St Augustine says, the soul is sent from God and returns to God and she cannot rest except in him; for God is spirit and soul is also spirit and germane to God as one spirit to another. And they compare the soul with fire, most lofty in its nature, most mighty in its operation, which never rests until it licks the skies. Fire envelops all the elements, spreading further and wider and higher than the air, than water or the earth, so that it surrounds the rest and coming next the heavens turns round with them. The soul is called a fire because in her desire she keeps up with God, like fire with the heavens and can find no rest except in him. Again, the soul is dubbed a spark of celestial nature because one has already ascended into heaven, the soul, to wit, of Jesus Christ, which shows the common resting- place of souls is nowhere else than heaven. But unless the soul has turned from temporal to celestial things the Holy Ghost cannot enter in to do its work in her. All God’s work is wrought in spirit. God is high and man is low : to rise to him in prayer he has to hoist himself by putting under him God’s creatures, all of them, including the powers of the soul which end in the functions
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of the body, then she will have the love and knowledge to carry her above the world. For to know God I want no eyes or ears ; for union with God in love I want no hands or feet: I want to withdraw myself from all created things and let my spirit swoon into God’s spirit and be one spirit with God; withal it was the love God bears my soul that prevailed with him to create all creatures and therein reveal to her his glory. And albeit he made creatures: glad, he mixed therewith some sorrow, that anyone careless of his honour might be whipped and spurred with pain. Marvellous as the mind of man are the ways of God, drawing one to him with pleasure and another with the buffets’of ill-fortune ; witness the amazing conversion of St Paul on his way to persecute the Chris- tians, notwithstanding which his soul was caught up into the third heaven. And the very day St Augustine was converted he refused to be appeased with the extraordinary pleasure he felt in the security God sent into his soul to turn her to him.
Three things keep the soul from being content with creatures. In the first place they are partial. In the second, they are cor- poral : emblems of stagnation and corruption and unprogressive- ness. Thirdly, the gift of creatures is no largesse of him from whom she first came forth (i.e. from God), so they are not relished by souls who have been caught up into bliss ; but God the Lord lures souls to him just as the lambs are lured from one spot to another by green pasture. Though all psychic powers lay in a single soul she could not here receive the very least reward of the smallest act decreed by God in his eternal love without the soul melting and dying to the body. Not so, however, when she gets the whole reward, namely God himself. But for this the soul must transcend herself and creatures and enter into the divine estate, into her divine exemplar nature; for the soul contacts eternity with her higher powers and with her lower, creatures, which often lead her into evil. Could the soul see God as clearly as the angels do she would never have come into the body. God is formed in the image of himself, after a pattern of his own, and when she mingles with him in actual intuition, the soul resembles him in form, for he conforms her to him: divine light streams into the soul confusing her with God like one light with another and this is called the light of faith, the divine virtue. Where the soul with her powers and her passions is forbidden to go, there faith can take her; and when in this power God is apprehended in the soul she acquires the virtue of hope wherein the soul becomes so intimate with God she fancies there is nothing in God beyond her reach. St Augustine says, ‘The pears I stole, these were to me far sweeter than the ones my mother bought, because they were private and forbidden fruit.’ And so is that grace sweeter to the