enjoyed himself, God being in himself the unique one. The soul sees her impartible idea in God, which has never come out of him. This her multiform image does, and the consummation of her spirit lies in the reduction of its here created aught to the naught of its eternal prototype. God is the origin of the spirit and the spirit never rests till it returns into its origin, to its eternal proto- type. Essentially this prototype is God wherefore it aye eludes the spirit which is never able quite to apprehend it. Yet it divines how it has been in God eternalwise without itself; and the supremest bliss the spirit knows is to relapse into its origin, to its eternal image, wherein, as self, it is lost altogether. There the spirit loses its uses not its essence. The essence of the Godhead sucks the spirit out of itself into itself, making it as itself, so that there seems now but one essence. As though I were to take blood of a serpent—which is very red—and pour it into a trans- parent glass; the glass would lose its seeming not its substance. So in this union the divine light illuminates and outshines the spirit which shines one light with it. The spirit loses its seeming not its substance for God has fetched the spirit out and united it with himself. Natheless the spirit in this union can never plumb the depths of Godhead. As St Paul discovered when, caught up to the third heaven, he saw things not permissible, nay, not possible to speak of, and cried out : ‘ O thou depth of the riches of wisdom and knowledge, how unsearchable are thy judgments and thy ways past finding out.’ God’s riches consist in having nothing and being nothing that can be clothed in words. His wisdom consists in the well-ordering of things. God’s knowledge is his conception of himself in his supernal light. Concerning which St Dionysius says, ‘ The light God dwells in is his own nature which is known to none besides himself.’ This is the highway of the Godhead which no creature ever trod. Of it God spake by his prophet: ‘ As the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than thy ways.’—St Augustine says, There is nothing more difficult and more exacting nor at the same time more useful and salutary to the soul than excursions in the science of the holy Trinity and unity.
Mark well, therefore, the meaning of the Persons and the essence.
—What is a Person in the Trinity ?
—A Person is that which preserves its own rational individuality apart from any other distinct Person. One Person is not another. The work of the Persons consists in the genesis and output of things. Genesis belongs to the Father alone; outputting of things to the Trinity jointly.
—What is the essence of the three Persons in the Trinity ?
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—That which, impartible, contains all things impartibly while of itself as essence it neither generates nor produces things. That is done by the three Persons which activate the essence or it could do nothing. Nevertheless the Persons do not act as three : they work as one God.
—What is the potentiality of the essence ?
—The potentiality of the essence lies in not being a rational Person: in persisting in its essential unity. Not that it differs from the Persons ; this same essence is the essential nature of the Persons and the being of all things. Existence of all existing things, life of all living things, the light of lights and nature of natures: all this it is in its impartibility. Not so with the Persons ; they are not the personality of things as essence is the essence of all things. The Father is not able to be anybody’s person but his own. He gat another Person out of his Person not out of his essence: with his nature in his nature. That the Father was able to produce a Son so rarely, so consummately his like, a God as perfect as himself, is due to his essential nature. When he begets the Son the Father gives him another Person than his own Person but not another nature nor another essence than his own. It follows that the essence is revealed in the procession of the Persons. The Persons are able to reveal the essence which cannot of itself reveal itself, seeing that of itself, as essence, it neither gets nor bears. This impotence of the essence is its chief potentiality ; nevertheless it is revealed to itself.
The Persons know and comprehend the essence equally. The essence hears the same relation to all the Persons. Now it is a question among theologians whether or no the personality has basic knowledge and comprehension of the essence, seeing that the essence is comprehended only by the essence ?
The Persons have basic knowledge and comprehension of the essence because this is the Persons’ own essential nature; more- over, the essence is not comprehended wholly save by the three Persons, whose nature it is. The Persons comprehend the essence wholly, they being God in Person by reason of their comprehension of his essence which is their own essential nature. And so far as the soul comprehends this essence she too is divine. Though what she comprehends of it is no bigger than a drop compared with all the boundless ocean. Still it is God whole. The surplus good which is ever baffling her apprehension, that is the shadowy abyss wherein, self-lost, she sinks eternally.
It may be questioned, Why is there not one Person like one essence ?—I answer that, existing things exist not from themselves but in eternity are descended from an origin which is the origin
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of its own self and in time have been created out of nothing by the blessed Trinity. Their eternal origin is the Father and the universal image in him is the Son; love to this same image is the Holy Ghost. Had not this archetype of all things been always in the Father, the Father could never have wrought anything at all. That is, in his modeless essence. There must be more than one Person, for it was in the eternal procession (that is, in the begetting of) the Son that things as a whole emanated from the Father and not from themselves. This eternal procession is the cause of things on their eternal side, but in time they were created from nothing and in this sense they are creatures. In the eternal procession wherein they flowed without themselves, they are God in God. For as St Dionysius says, the Prime Cause generates all things in the likeness of itself.
Now mark the difference of this emanation in eternity and time. What is the (temporal) emanation? It is the indulgence of his love of clear discrimination. So we come forth into time by constraint of his love. The eternal procession is the revelation of himself to himself. The knower being that which is known. This is the eternal flow no drop of which did ever fall into any created intelligence; it is the Son from the Father. In the temporal emanation things flowed forth finite. In the eternal emanation they remain infinite. The flow goes flowing on in itself. As St Dionysius hath it, ‘God is a fountain flowing into itself.’
The Father is the origin of his Son, in his eternal child-bearing ; Father and Son originate their Spirit, in the eternal out-pouring. But, someone may question, how about the Father-nature? Is it the cause (of the essence or is the essence cause) of the Paternity ?
What follows needs clear thinking. Essence as essence neither gives nor takes. Now were the essence origin of the Father then the essence, being parent, would not be essence, it would be Person. But it is not; for essence in its unity is not Person. Again, were paternity the origin of essence the cause of this would be the paternal Person. But this is not so either. The Father in Person is a cause but not of essence; for paternity and essence have the same characteristic. That is why, in his paternity, he is the omnipotent cause. The essence cannot be apart from Person nor can Person be apart from nature, as ye can see. For nothing that exists can be without its nature, since it cannot take leave of itself ; it must be what it is. Now the Father is a Person and he cannot be a Person without a nature nor can his nature be without a Person. Given his nature, there must be someone whose nature it is. Note then that the essence can in nowise
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exist without distinction and hypostasis. Person and hypostasis can in nowise be without their nature, to wit, their essence.
Thus it is demonstrated that neither is the essence cause of paternity nor paternity cause of the essence, for neither can be without the other. The Son cannot be without the Father nor the Father without the Son nor the twain without the Holy Ghost albeit they have three properties to distinguish them apart. Not so with paternity and essence. Neither of these can be without the other. For albeit essence is not Person nor Person essence yet paternity and essence have the same nature so that neither can be said to be the origin of the other; for it is with one and the same nature that the Father originates his Son and these twain originate their Spirit which is of one nature with them both.
All hail to the exalted spirit that is received into this full, this naked knowledge which is unknown to those that are not naked of themselves. For the soul to be naked she must turn away from all the images and forms spread out before her and stop at none of them. For the divine nature is no form nor semblance that she can understand. Being turned away from these towards what transcends them—divorced, that is, from images and forms —the soul receives the likeness of the formless nature of God whose real form has never been revealed to any creature. This is the secret door into the divine nature, which the soul has in the image. For when the soul has naught to stay her, she is ready to pass into the image of God whereto none can attain be he not stripped of spiritual matter. Alas, how they obstruct this secret passage, those who so lightly stop in temporal things! Wherein I also acknowledge my wretchedness. In this sense St Dionysius exhorted his disciples, saying, ‘ An thou wouldst know the hidden mystery of God, transcend whatever hinders thy pure perception.’ When with her pure intellect now illumined with divine light, the naked soul sees God, then she knows herself. And when she sees how apt she is to him, how she is his and how they are both one, then, the burden of the body permitting, she remains thus always. This lofty intuition the soul has of the hidden mystery of God is that of which Job tells: ‘In the horror of a vision by night he cometh and whispereth in the ears of men.’ What does he mean by the horror? Solieitude for this perception we are speaking of. The nocturnal vision is the revelation of the hidden truth. And the whispering is the flowing union wherein knower and known are one.
This book is difficult and obscure to many people. Publish it not I pray you for God’s sake, for it was forbidden to me to do so. If any condemn it, forsooth it is the fault of his blindness for it is
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the absolute truth. But if there be in it things inaptly expressed, do not wilfully misunderstand it, for words fail in speaking of the divine nature. Its meaning is clear in the truth which is with Christ and in Christ. Wherefor may he be blessed and praised for ever. Amen.
Commentary on the Gospel of St John
The profound Gospel of St John begins: in principio erat verbum, that is to say :
‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ He who would grasp the interpretation of these abstruse writings of St John, which with God’s help I shall unfold, let him turn his mind from created things and from his own understanding, that being illumined by God’s spirit he may apprehend the meaning I shall give to these dark sayings.