Mark this. No fire no light, no earth no life, no air no love, no water no place. Ergo, God is not light nor life nor love nor nature nor spirit nor semblance nor anything we can put into words. ' God flows into God and God flows out of God and God knows himself God in himself and knows himself God in his creatures in general and he knows himself God in the noble soul in particular. The Father is almighty in the soul; the Son all- wise, the Holy Ghost all-loving, loving all creatures with the same love. But he manifests as different and the soul is destined to know things as they are and conceive things äs they are when, seized thereof, she plunges into the bottomless well of the divine nature and becomes so one with God that she herself would say that she is God. The soul withdrawn into herself till nothing made or named takes shape in her and she is bare as God of any name, gathers herself up above herself into her God and takes herself cum God for God. God is not black nor white, nor large nor small, he has no place nor any past nor future time, and the soul is like him only in so far as she can project herself above all _ creatures. '
The soul is a creature receptive to everything named, but the nameless she cannot receive until she is gotten so deep into God that she is nameless herself. And then none can tell if it is she that has gotten God or God has gotten her. Dionysius says,
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‘God has conceived himself in her, so utterly absorbing her that she is now no longer self but God.’ And the soul’s inferior powers have distinction of person, love uniting the persons not the essence. The soul is destined to this knowledge when, on the ebb-tide of God’s glory, she is borne back into the bottomless ground of the fount whence she flowed. forth and finds she is not from ~ herself.
The highest boon, the chief good of the soul, is not from herself. Christ himself declared he was not from himself. The truest thing we have is our intuition of not being from ourselves and that we ourselves are not of ourselves.
God has done all things for himself and he has made the soul like to himself, over all things, under all things, in all things, out of all things and withal abiding in herself impartibly. But she is noblest keeping to the desert wherein she is naught and there is nothing doing. St Dionysius prays, ‘ Lord, lead me into the desert where thou art formless that in thy solitude I may lose all form.’ The soul is in all things in her subtile nature wherein she inhabits all things without affecting them or being affected by them. Thus transcending things she cries, * Lord, fetch me into thy Godhead where thou art naught, for what is aught I deem to be not God.’ The soul is over all things in her freedom; she knows none can compel her, not even God himself. Surrendering her free will to God she plunges into her own emptiness, beseeching, ‘ Lord, take me into the gloom of thy Godhead that in thy dark I may lose all my light, for nothing that can be revealed do I account as light.’ She is out of all things in her power of understanding, which makes her so elastic she is able to hold God as well as all his creatures. Embodying God thus she is more God than her own self. This is hers by grace. Aught of God is God entire and aught of him holds his whole being. This he is in the lowliest as much as in the loftiest nature. A small bung stops the barrel no less well than the biggest. |
Comprehension belongs to his paternal power. He grasps him- self in himself in all creatures and grasps himself in his countenance whereto he admits no creature and whereinto no creature can get. And this comprehension he veils in a cloud of distortion so that no creature can grasp him as he grasps himself. What the soul grasps in the light she loses in the darkness. Yet she makes for the cloud, deeming his darkness better than her light. There she suddenly loses her light and herself in his darkness.
The soul cries in the Book of Love, ‘ No one is my God and I am no one’s soul, and nothing manifest to me do I take for God. I flee from God for God’s sake.’ St John says, ‘ God is love.’ But theologians argue that if he means the love wherewith the soul loves
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God, this is not true. Were that love God, wherewith the soul can love, it would not fail her as it does. This is a natural love, the virtue. But suppose her will is turned toward God, then God draws love from nothing and pours it into the virtue, so her love is both nature and grace. In grace God gives himself to the soul and the Holy Ghost unites with her love, and the love which is the Holy Ghost is God, and the love which is grace is the nature which unites the soul with God, and in this union the soul is absorbed into God and loves God with his own love in God, which in herself she cannot do.
The Father is the revelation of all things and the Son is the image of all things and the Holy Ghost is the fulfilling of that order. Philosophers say that things in contact with God are not God but his works. The soul is self-motive before she is moved and her being moved is the work of God, the soul being the agent while the work itself is creature. The power which perfects the soul, which sweeps her out of herself without her aid or abetting, is God. I can touch the minster, not carry it off. That we attribute to God matter and form and work is due to our gross senses. Theologians tell of the light which gives no light, which has no form nor matter and is yet a creature. To know God as he is we must be absolutely free from knowledge. Thus St Augus- tine says, ‘ Lord, I know not what I love in thee if it be not light.’ As God is timeless and modeless so he is also nameless. St Paul says, “ There be many that run but one receiveth the prize.’ All the soul-powers run but pure nature alone receives the crown, for, according to Dionysius, this race is nothing else than the flight from creatures to unite with their creator. Atoned with her creator the soul has lost her name for she herself does not exist : God has absorbed her into him just as the sunlight swallows up the dawn till it is gone.
Tell me, where is the soul’s abode ?—Upon the pinions of the wind. The pinions are the powers of divine nature. The wind is the waging of the powers of the soul’s divine nature. When he thrusts her sins under her eyes she sinks down into him like a fish in the sea. All creatures lose their names on entering human nature. Hence Christ’s exhortation, ‘Preach the gospel to all creatures.’ He meant only human beings.
Observe when a man is all creatures. When he has the power of them all. When a man, knowing with his outward senses all corporal things, detaches himself from them and abides therein without attachment; when, knowing with his interior senses all spiritual things, he detaches himself from these and abides therein without attachment, then at length that man is all creatures ; then, not till then, that man has come to his own nature and is
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ready to go into God. If we fail to find God it is because we seek in semblance what has no resemblance. The scriptures tell us more of his unlikeness than his likeness. Origen says the soul’s quest of God comes by self-observation. If she knew herself she would know God also. If she pietures herself or pietures her God that comes of over-defining. On merging into the Godhead all definition is lost.
Dionysius says to Timothy, ‘Friend Timothy, if thou dost view the spirit of truth, pursue it not with mortal senses. It is so swift, it comes rushing.’ God must be sought in estrangement, forget- fulness and non-sense ; for the Godhead has in it all things in posse without the least likeness to anything. The supremely pure splendour of the impartible essence illumines all things at once. According to Dionysius, beauty is order : symmetry with supreme . lucidity.” In this sense the Godhead is the beauty of the three Persons. And it behoves the soul to order her lower powers to her higher and her higher ones to God ; the outer senses to the inner and the inner ones to reason ; thought servant to intelligence, intelligence to willand her will to their unity, then the soul will be a unity with nothing flowing into her except pure deity as it is proceeding from itself. Concerning this St Dionysius says the soul has flung her faculties into her pure being and only her chief ~ power remains at work. And one doctor says that when the chief power takes command the rest all enter into it losing their own activities, so now behold the soul in her proper order and in her pure nature, her pure nature being her exalted light-nature which is potentially all things.
The Godhead flows into the Father, into the Son and the Holy Ghost, into itself in eternity and in time into creatures. It gives to each as much as it can hold: to stones existence, to the trees their growth, to birds their flight, to beasts their pleasures, to the angels reason and to man free nature. God was made man and _ took upon himself by grace the nature of all things in time even as in eternity he has them all by nature. St Paul says, ‘ Christ is to me all things.’ One Person with two natures. Each seems all things to each. It is a play of the light and reflection of his own nature. God’s being is first being, flowing being, fixed being, initial being and final being.
From essence in general emanates power and work. The three Persons are in this respect the storehouse of divinity, and the three Persons descend into the essence of the soul by grace, and the Persons bring divine nature into the soul in their train, one nature coursing through the other. The higher powers of the soul fiow out of the essence of the soul as the three Persons issue from the Godhead. And when God pours his grace into the soul he pours
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it into the essence of the soul, for into the essence of the soul no fleck can fall let her powers do what they may. The higher powers of the soul draw their seeming from the essence of grace in the essence of the soul, and her chief power transcends the lower ones in nature.
Mind big with the conception of God’s nature is the corollary of Christ’s Person in human nature. When the soul is absorbed into God’s nature her sins and shortcomings are stripped off and she becomes God, divine in nature ; she enjoys divine nature in herself just as the Father does in him. She gets it not from her own nature: she takes divine nature from God into her. nature. She receives perfection and power. Hence the words of St Paul, ‘I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.’ Wisdom springs up in understanding ; it begins in understanding and ends in desire and has neither heart nor thought. As St Dionysius says, ‘ When the soul, finding this outlet, has a footing in eternity and in time in her own understanding, therein she shall return into the flow where God is flowing back into himself, and does not flow away.’