Man has to seek God in error and forgetfulness and foolishness. For deity has in it the power of all things and no thing has the like. The sovran light of the impartible essence illumines all things.
St Dionysius says that beauty is good order with pre-eminent lucidity. Thus God is an arrangement of three Persons. And the soul’s lower powers should be ordered to her higher and her higher ones to God ; her outward senses to her inward and her inward ones to reason ; thought to intuition and intuition to the will and all to unity, so that the soul may be alone with nothing flowing into her but sheer divinity, flowing here into itself. As St Dionysius says, By purity she has discovered her capacity and only her superior powers are in operation.
It has been said by one philosopher that as soon as the chief power takes cominand the others all run into it, leaving their own work. Then the soul is in order and in her pure nature, in her supernal light-nature wherein all things are potential. A heathen doctor says, If the soul knew herself she would know all things. Deity flowed into the Father and into the Son and into the Holy Ghost: in eternity into itself and in time into creatures, to each as much as it can hold : to the stone its being, to the tree its growth, to beasts sensation, to the angels reason and to mankind all these four natures. When God was made man he took upon himself by grace, in time, the nature of all things, which in eternity was his by nature. As St Paul says, ‘ To me C'hrist is all things.’ Here it was a matter of the light and reflection of his own nature. God’s being is fontal : flowing and fixed, final as well as the first. From being power flows out into work. In this sense the three Persons are the storehouse of divinity and the three Persons are poured forth into the essence of the soul as grace, God’s being in the essence of the soul is the imitation of the Persons and one being permeates the other. Her chief power flows from the essence of the soul just as the three Persons issue from the Godhead. And when God pours his grace into the soul it is into her essence that he pours it. For into the soul’s essence no speck can ever fall, do her powers what they may. The chief power of the soul draws its virtue from the grace existing in the essence of the soul and this highest power goes out into the lower ones, into their essence. The crescent soul, the spirit receptive of God’s nature, is the imitation of Christ’s Person and man’s nature. The soul when she reaches divine nature is deprived of all deficiency and imperfection ; she suffers death in divine nature, getting God’s nature in herself as the Father does in him. She takes it not from her own nature, she receives it from God’s nature into her nature ; she receives perfection and power according to the words of St Paul, ‘ I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.’ The wisdom thence arising in her mind begins in understanding and is perfected in will and it has neither heart nor thought. St Dionysius says. As the soul takes the outgoing tide to journey in eternity and time and in her own intelligence, so on the ebb does she return ; as God the soul Hows back again, without exertion. God returns to himself as little mindful of his own as though they wore not. And the soul shall do the same. She shall grasp with her manhood the Person of the Son, and with the Person of the Son she shall apprehend the Father and the Holy Ghost in both, and them both in the Holy (ihost ; and with the Person of the Father she shall apprehend his simple essence, and with the essence the abyss, and shall sink into the void without matter and without form. Matter and form, being and knowledge, she loses ill this unity, for she herself has come to naught. God does all her work, he preserves her in his being and leads her in his power into his very (Godhead where she Hows with deity itself into all God Hows into. She is all things’ place and has herself no place. This is the most eternal wisdom, which has neither heart nor thought. So nigh soul Ho\vs to God that many are deceived ; but wdiat she is she is by grace, and where she is she is by another’s power. Yet she approaches near enough to (xod to be, in the power of the Father, invested with divinity by grace the same as the Father is by nature. St Paul says : ‘ In the same image we shall go from one glory to another,’ meaning, we shall receive divinity in its perfection and all that is consequent thereon. Therein she shall conceive divinity as it conceives itself and her will and God’s will shall be one : whatever God may be we shall be with God. No one can attain it in this body, but when (Jod gives the soul his final gift, the vision of his Godhead, the soul is raised up in the Trinity. May we attain to this, So help us God. Amen.