Then up and spake the loving soul, ‘ Lord, when enjoyest thou thy creatures ? ’—‘ That do I at high noon when God is reposing in all creatures and all creatures in God.’ St Augustine says, ‘ All things are God,’ meaning, they have always been in God and shall return to God. So when St Dionysius says, ‘ All things are naught,’ he means they are not of themselves and that in their egress and their ingress they are as incomprehensible as naught. When St Augustine says, ‘ God is all things,’ he means he has the power of all things, one more noble than he ever gave to. creatures. And St Dionysius’ dictum; ‘ God is naught,’ implies that God is as inconceivable as naught. As King David sings, ‘God has assigned to everything its place: to fish the water, birds the air and beasts the field and to the soul the Godhead.’ The soul must die in every form save God : there at her journey’s end her matter rests and God absorbs the whole of the powers of the soul, so now behold the soul a naked spirit. Then, as St Dionysius says, the soul is not called soul, she is the sovran power of God wherewith God’s will is done. It is at this point St Augus- tine cries, ‘ Lord thou hast bereft me of my spirit!’ Whereupon Origen remarks, ‘ Thou art mistaken, O Augustine. It is not . thy spirit, it is thy soul-powers that are taken from thee.’ The soul unites with God like food with man, which turns in eye to eye, in ear to ear. So does the soul in God turn into God: com- bining with each divine power she is that power in God ; and God combines with the soul and is each power in the soul; and the two natures flowing in one light, the soul comes utterly to naught. That she is she is in God. The divine powers swallow her up out of sight just as the sun draws up things out of sight.
What God is to himself no man may know. God is in all things, self-intent. God is all in all and to each thing all things at once. And the soul shall be the same. What God has by nature is the soul’s by grace. God is nothing at all to anything ; God is nothing at all to himself, God is nothing that we can express. In this sense Dionysius says, ‘ God is all things to himself for he bears the form of all things.’ He is big with himself in a naught : there all things are God, and are not, the same as we were. When we
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were not then God was heaven and hell and all things. St Diony- _ Sius says that ‘God is not’, meaning that he bears himself in a not, namely, the not-knowing of all creatures, and this not draws the soul through all things, over all things and out of all things into that superlative not where she is not-known to any creature. There she is not, has not, wills not, she has abandoned God and everything to God. Now God and heaven gone, the soul is finally cut off from every influx of divinity, so his spirit is no longer given to her. Arrived at this the soul belongs to the eternal life rather than creation; her uncreated spirit lives rather than herself: the uncreated,. eternally-existent which is no less than God. Wherewith being all-pervaded to the total loss of her gwn self, the soul at length returns without herself to eternal indigence,
for what is left alive in her is nothing less than God. Thus she is poor of self. This is the point where soul and Godhead part and the losing of the Godhead is the finding of the soul, for the spirit which is uncreated drawing on the soul to its own knowledge she comes nearer to the not-being of the Godhead than by knowing all the Father ever gave. [The gift of the Father is the positive existence of all creatures in the Person of his Son and with the Son the Holy Ghost as well. For the Persons must be looked on as inseparate, albeit distinct illuminations of the understanding.] And so far as she attains this in the body she enjoys the eternal wont and escapes her own.
We ought to be eternally as poor as when we were not and then our kingdom shall not pass away, abiding as it does in God whose it is eternally. The Godhead gave all things up to God; it is as poor, as naked and as idle as though it were not: it has not, wills not, wants not, works not, gets not. St Dionysius says, ‘ Be the soul never so bare the Godhead is barer’: a naught from which no shoot was ever lopped nor ever shall be. It is this counsel of perfection the soul is straining after more than after anything that God contains or anything she can conceive of God. Saith the bride in the Book of Love, ‘ The form of my beloved _ passed by me and I cannot overtake him.’ It is God who has the treasure and the bride in him, the Godhead is as void as though it were not. God has consumed the form of the soul and formed her with his form into his form. Now she gets all things free from matter, as their creator possesses them in him, and resigns the same to God.
Ours to contain all things in the same perfection wherein the eternal wisdom has eternally contained them. Ours to expire them as the Holy Ghost has expired them eternally. Ours to be all things’ spirit and all things’ spirit to us in the spirit. Ours to know all and deify ourselves with all. Ours to be God by grace
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as God is God by nature ; ours to resign the same to God and be as poor as when we were not. In this state we are as free as when we were not: free as the Godhead in its non-existence. Christ says, ‘ Blessed are the poor in spirit.” These same poor in spirit enjoy the Father without let or hindrance. The Father knows no difference between this soul and him save that he has by nature what she has by grace. For as Christ declares, ‘Them that follow me I will bring to where I am.’ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: God’s kingdom is in them.’ These spiritual poor are those who have abandoned everything to God as he possessed them when we were not and the naught itself. In this naught dwells God and in God dwells this soul. There she has no dwelling and thereinto no creature can get in its own right and no creature can go higher.
The Three Creations
The three Persons made creatures out of nothing to enjoy the uses of the blessed Trinity. There is difference of wont in the Persons and their powers; for the essence being self-sufficient there is nothing in the essence to enjoy excepting unity, so the soul demands nothing, knows nothing, wills nothing.
As to the Persons, the one knows the others so far as they are Persons, for one Person begets the others. Essence begets not. In the domain of Person, one is receiving from another. The Son receives all he possesses from the Father ; the Holy Ghost receives all he possesses from the Father and the Son, and each of the Persons receives from the others presence and well-being and co-operation and mutual delight. As to their activity, each one finds itself entire as essence in the others and each enjoys the others as Persons and itself in both the others.
We speak of three creations. Birth is called creation, and being made from nothing, and being raised in grace to higher grace. The same applies especially to Christ. If birth is a creation then Christ was the creature of his Father in his eternal birth of Person and of nature. Christ himself declared, ‘ Wisdom created wisdom.’ The creation of the Son has ever been to him his whole existence, who is still being born of the Father eternally with all that he is, and this birth remains in the Father eternally. St Dionysius says, ‘God created a God as good as God.’ Inasmuch as the Father conceives himself of himself he is his own creation. As St Dionysius says, ‘God is his own self-begotten Son.’ In eternity, that is. Creatures abide in eternity as being in the God-bearing Godhead. The Son knows all things essentially in the
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essence of the Father who, essentially, has the potentiality of all things that shall happen and shall not happen. He has in his Person the universal image, so that he knows all things in common with the Father and wields joint power over what has happened, what is happening and what is still to happen, as well as’ over what God could do an he would that never happens. As the Father stretches his will to things that are to happen so the Son stretches his wisdom to effect their happening ; and as the Father directs his will towards things that shall not happen, the Son directs his wisdom to prevent them happening.
The second creation is that of all the three Persons at once who are one in their work of making all things from nothing. This applies pre-eminently to Christ’s soul, for she was created from nothing in time. The images existing in the middle Person are imprinted in his soul’s potentiality so that she knows ideally, all things past, present and to come. But things that are not going to happen, things which God in his omnipotence could do but which will not take place, albeit possible essentially, these his soul does not know for that belongs to God alone. This light is creature, created from nothing and is supernatural to the soul. His soul has one light in common with the angels. This is the image impressed in her wherein she perceives in herself things that have happened and are happening; but in this image she sees nothing of those things which are going to happen except God grant her knowledge of them. And this is supernatural to the soul.
The third creation is the raising of his body from grace to higher grace, that is, something extra to his animal nature. In his animal nature he cannot see into peoples’ consciousness ; in his animal nature he could give no sign nor know about the future unless God granted it. Christ was so foolish as a child he did not know his father or his mother. St Ambrose says: ‘He was created from grace to higher grace when he rose from death to immortality.’ Christ sees in heaven, with his fleshly eyes, only what is before him; he must turn round to see what is behind him. So the Son has never known the Father in that funda- mental mode wherein the Three are united in one nature. That mode Christ’s soul was sharing when, at the moment of her creation she was bereft of it and prevented from seeing her divine nature. Christ’s soul enjoys divine nature by grace as God does by nature. This is so far removed from creature that never a drop has ever leaked into any creature. The furthest limit of man’s knowledge is an intuition of how the three Persons enjoy their divine nature. To this none can attain unless his soul is plunged into the consciousness of the created and uncreated