light which more enriches her than all the knowledge of material things hitherto amassed by her own nature. St Augustine says, * As the sun shines through glass and makes its contents plain, so is the soul’s intelligence illumined by the light of God with the recog- nition of her divine abilities.’ Then the soul is seen in her poverty and God in his. purity. Indeed Dionysius says as much when he speaks of ‘the naked soul, one with her naked God, resting in the desert of the Godhead.’ It may well be called a desert, for crea- ture never looked therein by grace. Ignorance of these matters is just cause for shame. Yet if one of the chief angels should descend and, with creatures all as wise as he, discourse of human happiness, they might talk till doomsday and not tell the tale of all God has in store for every loving soul in life eternal. But the soul must not seek God for any reason except God himself. The emptier she keeps the more God fills her and the more perfectly,
. he does his work in her; besides, it is the safest way, for then
at any moment she will be prepared to quit the body at God’s instance rather than remain there at her own. And being so poor of self she will find naught but God both here and yonder. There is no call for such a soul to look outside herself : the Holy Ghost will teach her the elements of bliss in the school of her own heart. ° She cherishes the gift wherewith God has endowed his best beloved. And the better to fulfil God’s will in everything she does she trains herself never to be without pure consciousness so that the heavenly Father can go on ever giving birth in her to his eternal Word, Jesus Christ his Son. For at her highest point my soul is not in time and does not work in time and is just as near to things a thousand miles away as to this spot I stand on.
Theoretically speaking, nothing that takes shape or is touched
- by time can get into the soul, and not only time but likeness.
The head of the soul is her highest power, and from the moment she was made she has never for an instant been without the boon of this divine light, this power in which the time God made the world in and the judgment day are just as present to the soul as this time wherein I speak. Being in the power of her head the soul enjoys the benefit of participation in the grace and happiness common to all saints as though they were her own. It is certainly the fact that anyone actually in this head never commits sin and knows so much about eternal bliss and is so well informed that he needs no sermons. Wherefore erecting the head of the soul let us gather ourselves up into the breadth and freedom of a power like this and depart from temporal to eternal things when, in this samie power, God suddenly gives birth to all he is in might and truth and wisdom in the soul. Verily the soul in whom this grace is found is absolutely pure and every whit like God. For anything
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well-pleasing to the Father or which makes for our profit or our weal, must be well-pleasing to him in his Son, because apart from . him he has no likes whatever. This then is the nobility which God has implanted in the soul, her beatifie nature which is receptive to the grace of God, so that in this grace the light of God’s pure nature can shine into the soul and the Word of the Trinity be gpoken in her mind and the life of eternity energise in her. Theologians say the soul is a suspended force in the power of the Father and a reflected light in the wisdom of the Son and a circulation in the sweetness of the Holy Ghost. According to St Augustine, the soul comes from the heavenly land, out of the paternal heart ; the offspring of God’s love and scion of the noble house of the holy Trinity, she is the heir to heaven, the mistress of all creatures and the proprietor of all the joys God gives in his eternity. She is the image of God and the noblest creature, that ever God conceived. For God gripped in between his divine nature and his Godhood, into his eternal essence, and produced the soul from nothing, just as he made from nothing heaven and earth and all things. If you ask how big the soul is, know, she is too big for heaven and earth to fill, or even God himself whom the heavens cannot comprehend. To measure the soul you must gauge her with God. And she is so beautiful as long as she is in the grace of God and not deformed by sin, the highest angels, Seraphim and Cherubim and all the saints try in vain to copy her in form and likeness, for she is God’s image. As to her life in time, she is flowing back to her natural source whence she issued forth; and the freer she has kept herself from temporal forms and creatures the kinder her return to God, for God is absolutely free from matter, mode and form: For the soul to compare with the abstract spirit of God she must be free from the smallest trace of sensible affection and quite without attachment to anything not God. That such perfect freedom is not known to every spirit is due solely to our undiscovered life and our untaught senses. All the potential good in creatures the soul will find in God together with inestimable joy. St Augustine says, ‘When everything was still that existed in me God spake a silent Word within my soul, which no one understood but me.’ And to whatever soul this Word is said she will forget all modes and forms and become an in-dweller with God. Thus St Paul relates, ‘From the moment the eternal Word was revealed within my soul I no linger lived for flesh and blood.’ Inasmuch as she is selfless she is self-possessed and strong. The faithful, loving soul is like the bee, sipping from all kinds of flowers the sweets to make its honey. And even so the soul culls from the flowers of virtue somewhat of each one to heal and fortify her. It is a crying need for she has three mortal
Tractates 805
foes : the world, the flesh and the devil, hanging all together like three cherries on one stem. Of these three foes the deadliest is the body, wherein the soul is clapt as into prison : not that she may pander to its vicious appetites but to say them nay and by this resistance daily to augment her reward in heaven and here the love inpoured. It was Seneca, the heathen philosopher, who said, “ Man is his own worst enemy.’ Death stands at the door of evil appetites, and the pursuit of vice leads into paths which seem all right to us but sometimes they debouch in the pit of hell. If the soul, the mistress of the body, indulges its base appetites and fails to check its sins she has herself to blame when either here or yonder she must pay for it to God. And that there may be no escaping from God’s justice for them that kill the soul with sin and end in fleshly lusts, he says in the prophet Amos, ‘ My wrath shall drive over you like a chariot, cracking with its weight ; my anger the swift shall not outrun nor the valiant turn aside nor yet the strong man conquer with his strength. Not one shall escape me, how fair or strong or mighty soever he may be.’ . And seeing that the soul has such a high and heavenly destiny, therefore Meister Eckhart of Paris, at the end of the aforesaid things, which are taken from his writings, sets the following prayer :
O Sovran Riches of Divine Nature, show me thy way which thou in thy wisdom hast ordained and open to me thy most precious treasure whereto thou hast called me: to know with supercreaturely intelligence, to love with the angels, to enjoy with thy only Son our Lord Jesus Christ and to be thine heir to eternal wisdom and by thy help to be preserved from evil. For thou hast exalted me above all creatures and hast sealed me with the seal of thine eternal image and put my soul beyond the grasp of creatures and hast made nothing liker to thyself than man is in his soul. Teach me to live so that I never want thee ; ‘so as never to hinder the working of thy love-stream in me; so as never to lend myself to any outward pleasure without thee nor occupy my mind more with any creature than with thee. Lord thou art spirit and incomprehensible to creature ; thou dost inspire the soul and raise her to an order above creature so that she can do thy will, O Eternal Wisdom, and in grace be free from inroad of unbidden images. Thou hast made the soul to suit thyself in her nature and her laws and she maintains she has no room for anyone but thee. O Almighty and Most Merciful Creator and dear Lord, have mercy upon me a sinner and help me to overcome all pitfalls with their lures to idle pleasure; to shun in thought and act what thou forbiddest and both to do and keep all thy commands ;
help me to believe, to hope, to love ; to live and feel iene as
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thou wilt and as much as thou wilt and what thou wilt. Lord, grant me the sorrow of the humble; a mind escaped from | mortal body ; to love, to laud and to behold thee and cherish every act and thought that is toward thee. Grant me a clear and sober and genuinely prayerful mind with real intuition of thy will, together with the love and joy which make it easy to perform. Lord, vouchsafe me always modest progress towards better things and never to backslide. And, O my Lord, condemn me not, as I deserve, to rely on my own powers or on human weak- ness and unwisdom but on thy good providence alone. Direct me Lord to The Good itself, my every thought and act to thine own liking, so that on my part, in me, thy will is always being done and I being saved from evil and brought to thy eternal life where thou art three in Person and one in the essence of thy divine nature : Father, Son and Holy Ghost and ever blest almighty God. Amen.
The Soul’S Perfection !
Speaking of the final perfection of the soul theologians ask, What is meant by saying that the spirit in its understanding has become the intellectual existence of the eternal essence in the perennial now with nothing between? That is the first question. The second question is, How can the spirit make good its intellectual return into the unchanging, and have the eternal image in perfect clearness and essential intimacy and in the interior freedom of the spirit ? The third question is about the highest flight of the spirit, its nearest approach of all to the divine presence and whether its own powers are equal to the task ?
First, we must remember how the divine being proceeded forth in the present now, with falling man, the gist of it, immediate in his spiritual prototype in virtue of its nearness and also by reason of the inherent now of its light of glory and intellectual image from which the intellect sees back quite clearly to the un-proceeded splendour of its eternally immanent spiritual exemplar wherein it is nameless and beyond all words which are creaturely. The word is in the eternal Word and one presence with it and God with his whole nature and the full range of his power can make out of his essence nothing more resembling the divine species in the ground . divine nature and reflecting him so well. He who receives the light of the spirit as it is the image of God, wherein is no part, that is the medium of perfection, for therein his spirit is one with divine nature. + ,
1 See also Jostes, No. 34, of which this tractate forms the middle portion.