The second power is will. It is the nobler in that by nature it can reach to the unknown, God namely. Will seizes God above knowledge, and in grasping what he wills the impress of the unknown God is sealed and stamped into the will so that the will contains God and becomes one with God, and will brings memory and all the soul-powers in its train, therefore the soul is one with God by grace as the Holy Ghost is one with the Father and the Son by nature. She is really in God more than in her own person. As St Augustine says, ‘ The soul is where she loves rather than where she is giving life.’ To rest in this union were better than to do all the works of all creatures, for so her higher power absorbs her lower ones and the soul can do nothing but divine work. But since this may not be, therefore the highest power, seeing her stability in God, communicates it to the lower ones so that they may discern good and evil. In this union Adam dwelt, and while the union lasted he had all the power of creatures (i.e. all creatures _ in posse) in his highest power. When a lodestone spends its force upon a needle and attracts it to itself, the needle gets sufficient power to pass on to the needles underneath, which it raises and attaches to the lodestone. Part the top needle and all the rest drop off. It was like this with Adam: when his highest power parted from God, down fell all his powers. Creatures are dis- joined through failing to agree among themselves, one wanting one thing, one another. The powers decay through creatures right down to the lowest. The power of gold, for example, cannot give gold but gives silver, and this degradation goes on in silver, from which we get iron. Even so man’s powers peter out to nothing. This accounts for the various creatures.
But now all creatures which came forth from God must strive with all their powers to make one man who shall return into the union wherein Adam was before he fell and who shall raise all creatures up again into the selfsame power wherein they were, in human nature. This is accomplished in Christ, as he himself
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declared, ‘When I am lifted up I will draw all men to me.’ He meant that when he was risen in our mind he would recollect us to himself. In this sense all creatures are one man and that man is God. Human nature has not ever been as such. God is from himself eternally and the Father made all things from nothing. That he is in himself he is by his own nature, which is free from becoming and becomes not any thing, and all things’ becoming ends in not-becoming. The Son is the same as the Father except that he receives from the Father all that he has and of all becoming he is the form. Withal he is one in the not-becoming. The Holy Ghost is the tie between the Father and the Son and is one. with them in the not-becoming ; he is the author and agent of becoming in eternity and in time. This temporal becoming ends in eternal not-becoming, and the eternal not-becoming is the work of the eternal nature and has neither end nor beginning. ,
God is his own form and matter; his form emerges from his matter and according to this form does he form all things that become. But his simple nature is in form formless, in mode modeless, cause uncaused, being without becoming which trans- cends all things becoming and all that becomes comes to an end therein.
God is eternal and all things have been in him eternally. They were not in themselves. Ere God created creatures he was nothing whatever to creatures, in their understanding, though in himself he was to them eternally the same as he is now and always shall be. No Creature could say God what time itself was not. What minds ignore they count for naught: Creature did not know God when she herself was not, therefore she could not speak him. This is denied by heretics who state that Christ brought human nature with him out of heaven, but that is not true. He got his manhood from our Lady Saint Mary, withal abiding as before in the Godhead ; and the Almighty knew in his eternal wisdom the ordering of all things, to wit, the Holy Ghost. This Trinity poured forth into time into the naught of human nature. Thenceforward human nature was changeable in time and God donned human nature. In him human nature was God and human nature knew it with the three powers she has gotten from the blessed Trinity and gave God thanks therefor and loved him with infinite love. By this God sets such store that he loves human nature back with a love so great, any man who knows it possesses heaven incarnate. I charge you, my brothers and my sisters, that ye wax in knowledge and give thanks to God while ye are still in time for having made you from naught aught, and unite yourselves with his divine nature. Once out of time and your chance is gone. But if so be ye cannot apprehend God’s nature then believe in Christ and
Tractates 358
follow his example steadfastly ; Jews, heathens, evil Christians, all who fail to exercise their God-consciousness, are lost, barring infants not arrived at knowledge of themselves and who are properly baptized into his name: in the enjoyment of Christ’s name they are holding fast the knowledge wherewith he knows the Father eternally.
Rejoice, all ye powers of my soul, at being joined to God so that none can part you. But I can neither glorify God nor love him to the full therein; so, dying to the virtues I plunge me in the naught of the naked Godhead where, sinking eternally from naught to aught I pass with naught to aught. 3
Though I should live here in the flesh until the judgment day bearing the pangs of hell it would be small matter by reason of my Lord Jesus Christ, since I have received from him the cer- tainty of never being parted from him. While I am here he is in me: after this life I am in him. All things are possible to me united as I am with him to whom all things are possible. Before ‚that I was at a loss to know if we are God by nature or by grace. Then came Jesus with the light of his own nature and then I spied my memory under my understanding issuing from the essence of my soul and my understanding flowing out of memory and will out of them both. Essence is revealed by the powers and the powers by their works. What my knowledge gave me that I loved ; what I did not know I could not love, and to will all things were possible. At one time I was sore perplexed as to whether we are God by nature or by grace. Fear led me to Christ who in truth knows the answer. He gave me light of grace whereby I saw in the divine nature three Persons, his Father being the begetter of all things. According to the words of St James, * Every perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights.’ The Father is the light itself, self-luminous in Person and in essence. In the unborn essence he is essential, essence without personality : essence self-manifest as impersonal being. The Father is that same being essentially. In the essence the Father loses his fatherhood completely ; nor is he Father there at all. The Father’s know- ledge of himself in himself, essential and personal, he draws from his unborn essence through the exalted root of his personality. So far as he takes in his unborn essence he is paternal, Father essentially. This exalted light has been for ever flowing in his heart and it is flowing out of him into his Son, as essence and as Person, and it is flowing from them both into their Holy Ghost, in essence and in Person, and these three shed one light essential and personal. The Father sheds on both the light of his essence and his Person ; and the Father and the Son shed on the Holy Ghost
the light of both essence and Person. The unborn eg being
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the oneness of the three Persons and the born essence is God as begetter so far as it flows into the Persons and so far as it emanates with the Persons. Not that the essence begets ; essence begets not. The Son and the Holy Ghost are twin lights of the God- bearing essence in the paternal source where the Father is drawing his born being out of his unborn essence. The Father knows himself with his Son, perceiving himself in himself. For this the Son is the light ; and he wills himself in himself and for this the Holy Ghost is the light. Father and Son have one will and that is the Holy Ghost : it graces the soul, this divine nature, and so suffuses the powers of the soul that the soul can do nothing except _divine work. Just as a spring in its bed at the roots of the flowers gives them itself and the flowers grow verdant and coloured on the spring water, so deity giving itself to the powers of the soul makes them grow in the likeness of God. His image appears in her powers, his likeness in her virtues. The more divine nature the soul receives the liker she grows to the nature of God and the closer becomes her union with God. Her union may become so strait that God on a sudden absorbs her in himself and that without remainder whether vice or virtue, nor can the soul distinguish aught that might be taken for herself. God takes her for a creature. Be not deluded by the light of nature. To a soul on the ascent to higher knowledge in the light of grace, dimmer and dimmer glows the light of nature. If she would know the very truth itself she must make certain whether she is detached from things ; whether she is dead to self ; whether she loves God with his own love and without self-intent and has nothing to hold her back and keep her from him ; and whether God alone is alive in her. If so then she has lost herself as Mary lost Christ. Three days she sought him knowing all the while that she would find him. And Christ, meanwhile, was at his Father’s school of higher learning all unheeding of his mother’s quest. The noble soul which goes to school in God learns to know what God is in the Godhead and what God is in the Trinity and what God is in humanity and ‘gets to know his will. : fi God in, the Godhead is spiritual substance, so elemental that ‚we can say nothing about it excepting that it is naught. To say it ‘is aught were more lying than true. God in the Trinity is the | living light in its radiant splendour, a complex of one nature with ‘distinct Persons. The (light) that is life is not this light. Though ‚one might predicate three natures to these (Persons or) distinctions ‚there is but one nature to their union for they all act together exactly like one, working all at once in all creatures. According ‚to St Augustine, the precision (or justice) of God in the Godhead, in the Trinity and in all creatures is the chief delight there is in heaven.
Tractates 855
God in human nature is a lamp of living light and this light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehends not this light. Darkness ever flees from light as night does from the day. Thence comes her knowledge of God’s will. Now St Paul says, “It is God’s will that we be sanctified.’ And our sanctification lies in this, in knowing what we were before time, what we are in time and what we shall be after time. Lost during these three days, soul pays no heed to body till it joins her in the temple and is subject to her without murmuring.
The Trinity is the heart of divine and human nature and human. nature flows into the Trinity in a steady stream of love. Supposing} the soul crosses over, then she sinks down and down in the abysm of the Godhead nor ever finds_a footing unless it be that she has,
_taken with her some temporal thing-;—resting.on temporal things. “brings her back into the Trinity. Things fashioned in time have,
a ground of their own whereon they can rest; they light on no \“