Beati pauper es spiritu etc. Let us be eternally as poor as we were when we eternally were not. Abiding in him in our essence we shall be that we are. We shall abound in all things, but in their creator. We shall know God without any sort of likeness and love without matter and enjoy without possession. We shall conceive all things in perfection as the eternal wisdom shows them planned out in itself.
The poor in spirit go out of themselves and all creatures : they are nothing, they have nothing, they do nothing, and these poor are not save that by grace they are God with God : which they are not aware of. St Augustine says, all things are God. St Dionysius says, things are not God. St Augustine says, God is all of them. But Dionysius : God is nothing we can say or think, yet
God is the hope of all the saints, their intuition of him wherein he is himself. He (Dionysius) finds him more in naught ; God is naught, he says. In naught all is suspended. All that has being is in suspension in naught, this naught being itself an incomprehensible aught that all the minds in heaven and on earth cannot either fathom or conceive. Hence it remains unknown to creatures. When the soul attains to the perfection of hanging to (being suspended from) naught she will find herself without sin. This is due to the freedom she is poised in. Then on coming to the body and awareness of herself, and again finding sin as before, she becomes bound and then she returns into herself and bethinks her of what she has found yonder. Thus she raises herself up above herself and crosses over to the seat of all her happiness and all her satisfaction. St Bernard says the soul knows very well that her beloved cannot come to her till everything is out of her. St Augustine says. Well and truly loves the man who loves where he well knows he is not loved ; that is the best of all loving. St Paul, We know right well that all things work together for good to them that love God. And Christ said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, God’s kingdom is theirs.
They tell of various kinds of poverty of spirit. There are four. What he refers to here is the first poverty of spirit the soul knows when, illumined by the spirit of truth, things that are not God weigh with her not a jot ; as St Paul tells us, ‘ All things are as dung to me.’ In this indigence she finds all creatures irksome.
In the second poverty she considers the merit of her excm})lar Christ and her own demerits and finds her own works worthless, though they be the sum of men’s achievements. Hcitfce she laments her in the Book of Love, crying, ‘ The form of my beloved passed me by and I cannot follow him.’ To this passing she is self-condemned, following the spoor of her quarry, Christ. So sweet his scent, she swoons away into forgetfulness of outward pain. As St Augustine says. The soul is where she loves rather than where she is giving life, and St Peter tells us that our dwelling is in heaven.
The third poverty of spirit is that of the soul wherein her own nature is slain ; her own natural life is stone dead and there is living in her nothing but the spirit of God. As St Paul declares, ‘ I am dead nevertheless I live ; yet my life Christ liveth in me.’ In this spiritual death she is grown poor, for all she has to leave or give has been taken from her ; moreover she is poor of her free will, for he is doing with it what he will.
The fourth poverty is the incomprehensibility of God in her mind, her inability to compass him whether with knowledge or with works. But the deeper she gets the more the incompre- hensible splendour of the Deity is reflected in her poverty For as far as with her inner man she has gotten intuition of divinity so far she follows with her outer man the willing poverty of her pattern Jesus Christ ; or in other words, the power of God having deprived her of all selfhood, she uses all creatures as she needs them, always without attachment, and if she has them not she can do as well without them and with the same detachment. She knows of nothing more that she can do but she rejoices in his incomprehensible truth and that created things are all as naught to him and that his love has taken to itself her naught which is cleaving to him like a tiny spark. It was this poverty St Paul was in the time that he declared ‘ he heard in God unspeakable things which it is not lawful for a man to utter.’ On that occasion he was knit to God so that neither life nor death could separate him from his love. Thus it befalls the perfectly lost soul in God, lost, not to creatures merely but to herself as well and aware of nothing but the pure unclouded radiance of God’s essence. Behold her lost in him, her heavenly joy, and all incapable of any real wrongdoing. The saints invariably say that nothing whatever can disturb the fixity they have in God. Real sin is any disobedience to the law of divine love, any departure from the life of .Tesus Christ. He is the form and essence of all things. What then is real virtue ? Anything wrought in the soul by divine love alone, for that effects naught but its like.
Such is the doctrine of spiritual poverty. Into this true poverty lead us, O superfull goodness of God. Amen.
We read in the gospel that our Lord fed the multitude with five loaves and two fishes. The first loaf was, the duty of knowing ourselves : what we have always been to God and what we are now in relation to God. The second was, the duty of compassion towards our evenchristian in his blindness ; his misfortune ought to touch us wellnigh as keenly as our own. The third was, that it behoves us to study the life of our Lord Jesus Christ and copy it exactly so far as that is possible. The fourth, that it behoves us to recognise the justness of God. All accounts of hell-torment are true. St Dionysius has explained that absence from God is hell and God’s presence is heaven. The fifth is, that it is for us to have intuition of the deity flowing into the Father and filling him with power and flowing into the Son filling him with wisdom, they beg one in nature. Christ himself declared, ‘ Where I am there my Father is and where my Father is there I am.’ And they flow into the Holy Ghost filling him with goodwill. As Christ said, ‘ I and my Father have one Spirit ’ ; and the Holy Ghost flows into the soul.
The soul by nature has received two powers. One power is understanding which can conceive the Holy Trinity and all its works, enclosing it, as one would fill and close a cask. The full cask comprehends its contents : it is in union with what it comprehends, what it is full of. And so is understanding in union with what it understands, what it conceives. It is one therewith by grace as the Son is one with the Father by nature.
The second power is will. It is the nobler in that by nature it can reach to the unknown, God namel}/. 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,&, all cr(turcs in posse) in his highest power. When a lodestonc 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 powders. Creatures are disjoined 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 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 transcends 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 Iloly 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 Gk)d 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 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.
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 certainty 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 J>eing 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 knowledge 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 shes 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 essence being the oneness of the three Persons and the bom 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 Godbearing 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 backend 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 af his Father’s school of higher learnin)? all unheeding of his mothera quest. The noble soul which goes, to school in God learns to knoiy what God is in the Godhead and what Gqd is in the Trinity and what God is in humanity and gets to know his will.
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 comjjlex 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.
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 ground in the Godhead, lly this same token the soul knows that she is creature, for all she has she has received in time from the three Persons. She flows out and in in the three Persons, 'fhe reason why Christ’s soul did never plumb the deeps of Godhead is that she too is creature made in time. God is indeed the matter of the soul, of her energies but not of her creation. Tier energies are eternal because he is eternal. This matter never fails her. When fire lacks fuel it goes back to its own land. So would the soul eome to naught were her matter to fail. When all her work is done she with her powers remains in God her matter ; she casts herself in her impartible essence into the passive, immaterial Godhead ; that is her native land. Then the Godhead is to her all things in a single passive power, and she withal all things to it, just as the heart of the sea gives forth in the bowels of the earth the waters which circulate back to the heart of the sea on the face of the earth. Suppose one dropped a millstone from the siin tp earth, the earth being pierced straight through the centre, the millstone would stop falling at the centre of the earth. Here is tiie heart of yie earth, the stopping-place of everything on earth. §o is the Trinity the stopping -place of creatures as a whole, all the. Godhead has being gotten impartible and eternal from itself. The Father is the manifestation of the Godhead, the Son is the image and countenance of the Faither and the Holy Ghost is the light of his countenance and the love of them both ; all they have have they gotten eternally from their own selves. But the three Persons stooped in compassion towards human nature and the Son was made man and in this world was more despised than any man on earth, suffering want and pain from creatures himself had made in conjunction with his Father, by whose will he became man.
Christ lived in time down to his death and then, arising from the dead, this most despised of men is seen united with the Godhead in the Person of the Christ who came on earth. Human nature wedded with the divine nature ; her eternal portion, fellowship with divine nature in the same Person.
This is God’s good will, that we should know ourselves and that we should know God, and our salvation lies in putting our knowledge into practice and loving in God all that we know. He who knows God in very truth is bound to love and will nothing but what God loves and wills. As St Paul says, ‘ I do good and doing naught but good to me all things are possible. Many a thing is lawful for me which I do not lest I sin.’ Our Lord commands us to be without sin. To whom all things are possible it is also possible to keep this commandment.
The saints declare that all things are in God as they have been in God eternally ; not that we were in God in the gross nature we have here : we were in God eternalwise, like art in the artist. God saw himself and saw all things. God was not therefore manifold as things are here in separation. Though creatures here are manifold they are but one idea in God. God in himself is just the one alone. When creature goes back to her first cause she knows God simply as one in form and essence and threefold in operation. What intellect knows is knowledge and knowledge stops at what is known, with what is known becoming one. Into the simple idea no knowledge ever entered, for this impartible exemplar after which God created all creatures towers God-high above creatures. Creature in pursuing God to his eternal heights must mount above all creatures, nay, beyond her very self, her own wont and uses, and follow agnosia into the desolate Godhead. St Dionysius says, ‘ God’s desert is God’s simple nature.’ A creature’s desert is her simple nature. In the desert of herself she is robbed of her own form and in Gk)d’s desert, leading out of hers, she is bereft of name ; there she is no more called soul, she is called God with God.
Peradventure ye will say, ‘ Being in this exalted state why does the soul not raise the body above necessity of earthly things ? ’ To which I answer, at this stage the soul has a body of perfection which uses all things to the glory of God, there being now betwixt God and the soul no barrier nor hindrance. So far as the soul has followed God into the desert of his Godhead so far the body follows Christ into his desert of willing poverty and is one with
God. Well may the Father say, ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased : follow ye him. All creatures are with God : the being that they have God gives them with his presence. Saith the bride in the Book of Love, ‘ I have run round the circle and have found no end to it, so I cast myself into the centre.’
This circle which the loving soul ran round is all the Trinity has ever wrought.
Why is the work of the Trinity called a circle ? Because the three Persons have wrought their own likeness in all creatures which are rational. The Trinity is the origin of all things and all things return into their origin. This is the circle the soul runs. When does she run in this circle ? She does so when she muses : All this that he has made he could make again a thousand times if he were so minded. So she goes round in endless chain. The least of all his creatures she can find no end to nor can she approfound its worth. Spent with her quest she casts herself into the centre. This point is the power of the Trinity wherein unmoved it is doing all its work. Therein the soul becomes omnipotent.
The three Persons are one omnipotence. This is the motionless point and the unity of the Trinity. The circumference is the incomprehensible work of the three Persons. The point is fixed. The union of the Persons is the essence of the point. In this point God runs through change without otherness, involving into unity of essence, and the soul as one with this fixed point is capable of all things. But her powers, wherein she imitates the Trinity, with them she cannot apprehend its unity. The work of the Trinity has proved the undoing of many Paris theologians : engrossed in the working of the Trinity they have never gotten at their unity. The centre is equally near to all ends, like time in all lands. Now is the time here and now is the same time in Rome.
Saith the bride in the Book of Love, ‘ He has wounded me with a glance of his eye.’ This refers to the unitive force which streams down from the point, isolating the soul from creatures and changing things and gathering her up again into the point therewith to be united and therein to be eternally established.
One is conscious of this glance within the confines of the soul when she is quite unoccupied, innocent of the practice whether of vice or virtue. During this quiet state intuitive perception is most vivid, so it is then he stabs her with his glance to make her really feel how he has known and loved her while she herself was not. This serves as a piercing reminder to the soul to go out of herself. Whom this glance wounds not is not nor ever has been wounded by love. [Concerning it St Bernard says, ‘ To him whose spirit has felt this glance it is unutterable ; to him who knows it not it is incredible.’ ’Tis an arrow shot without anger and felt without pain. Thence starts the clear and limpid stream of healing grace which enlightens the inner eye to perceive in blissful beholding the delight of the divine affliction wherein we share unheard of spiritual graces, favours untold, not preached nor written down in any book.]
(Saith the soul), ‘ Lord, thou thyself declarest that thou hast made me like thyself. That passes the ingenuity of man, for no philosopher is sage enough to fabricate the double of himself. Lord,’ she cries, ‘if thou hast made me like to thee, grant me to see thee seized of the power wherein thou hast created me, to know thee in the wisdom wherein thou hast known me, to conceive thee as thou conceivest me ; and grant me Lord that by thy grace 1 be made one with thee in nature as thy Son is one with thy nature eternally, and that thy grace may be my nature ; for, Lord, thy grace becomes thy nature and in thy nature we become God, as the Father in his nature is God by nature.’
Christ exhorts us to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect in his nature. He says, ‘ God is more near to you than yc are to yourselves.’ And in the same sense St Augustine says the soul has private entry to the divine nature, where things for her all come to naught. Then she is ignorant with knowing, loveless with loving, dark with enlightenment. Then to know God would be an imperfection ; to know herself in God would be an imperfection or to know God in her would be an imperfection. The incomprehensible essence she absorbs above all knowledge by grace, as the Father does by nature ; and the born essence being gotten in her understanding as the Father has gotten it in him, she steals out of herself and pierces the naked essence there to retain no more of things than when she issued forth from God. She comes so utterly to naught that there is nothing left but God ; God outshines her as the sun the moon, and she in God’s own subtile nature flows into all that God is flowing in eternally.
If thou hast apprehended me, there are two points to notice in these words. First, the soul knowing she was made from naught desires to see who made her. And secondly, her words, ‘ Grant me to see thee as creating me,’ mean that she wants to feel the faith and love wherein she was created. For then the soul sees God though she does not see through him. She knows God although she cannot fathom him ; she apprehends God but cannot comprehend him as he comprehends himself. St Paul says, ‘ Then we shall know as we are known.’ Stripped of her own being, with God her only being, the soul sees God with God, knows and conceives God with God. One high authority declares that the soul sees, knows, apprehends God with his very own essence which is the very essence of the soul. The soul sees, knows, conceives God as she is herself conceived in the pure intellect of the Deity. Then soul is comprehender as well as comprehended. But no man in this body and after the mode of his own mind can understand how soul is both conceiver and conceived be he not wholly sunk into himself, into pure knowledge of his own God-nature where no created thought did ever enter.
Now mark. The naught whereby soul comes to naught is the turning from images and forms to stay at none of them, for the divine nature is neither form nor image. And soul divorced from images and forms is like to the formless nature of God. This is the secret passage of the soul into divine nature. The soul which has nowhere to turn is ready to turn to the image of God. In other words, she goes with naught to naught : to the divine nature whereto none may attain be he not stripped of all mental matter. Alas ! how sorely they obstruct this secret passage, those who so lightly stay at temporal things ! Dionysius exhorted his disciples in this sense, saying, ‘ Wouldst know the hidden mystery of God ? then transcend whatever hinders thy pure perception, whatever thou caust grasp with thy understanding. God has nothing so hid as to be beyond the ken of a soul that has the wit to seek it right diligently and with prudence.’
A hard saying this, there is nothing in him so hidden as to be beyond her ken. Yet mark these facts.
The power of things resides in essence. Now the soul is capable of knowing all things in her highest power, she being all closeted ill her secret chamber. To the soul thus freed from things there is disclosed his secret essence. She is able to receive his arcane power. As St Paul says, ‘ I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.’ Up, noble soul ! seek thee no other place than this unneccssitous naught that did create thee, the same in its immovableness shall be thy place ; there shalt thou be more motionless than naught. — But this is traversed by some learned men who hold it is impossible. Naught, say they, is motionless, so how can the soul be more motionless than naught ? The soul is a created aught which can be moved : she is a variable ; naught is a constant. The soul, for instance, goes from light to light until she finds the sovran truth where all things end. So too the soul is moved in that she is aware of things other than herself. Naught has no awareness. Therefore aught is more movable than naught. So runs the argument against our thesis. Now to prove that the soul is more motionless than naught.
The arch-good, God, is more motionless than naught. And the most perfect likeness of this motionless arch-good is also most immovable. Haply thou wilt object : Naught is the same as
Gk>d for both of them are non-existent. Not so. For naught is nothing to itself or any creature. But God is to himself his aught and naught to the mind of any creature. Withal the creature aught tells forth God’s aught by nature rather than its own. God’s aught is intellectual being. Dionysius says, ‘The intellectual light that God is, gat its own image in the rational soul.’ Now if God is more motionless than naught, it follows that the soul as reflected into her motionless aught, God namely, is more motionless than naught. Naught is movable out of itself when naught becomes aught and always is moved when aught is produced out of naught. Not so the soul : she always is aught and can never be naught. Behold the soul more motionless than naught, God having set her free, free to assert her own free will.
Her motion is the quest of him who has never loved nor was ever loved. Which may be interpreted thus. The soul, uplifting with all her might and main herself above herself to love the sovran good, sees clearly she can never reach the divine aught accompanied by any of her powers. So down she goes again into herself, and the motionless aught bides unbeloved of her and of all that is not its very self. Thus the divine aught is never loved by her nor by anything that is not itself, nor has it ever loved. You can put it like this. He loves nothing but himself or his image in all things. But since he is not love nor anything named, therefore he loves not neither is he loved. This is the meaning of St Dionysius’ words, ‘ God dwells in motionless calm.’ And the bride says in the Book of Love, ‘ I have crossed all the mountains, aye, even my own powers, and have reached the dark power of the Father. There heard I without sound, there saw I without light, there breathed I without motion ; there did I taste what savoured not, there did I touch what touched not back. Then my heart was bottomless, my soul loveless, my mind formless and my nature natureless.’
Now what does the soul mean by ‘ crossing all the mountains ? ’ She means she has transcended her own rational powers and gotten ‘ to the dark power of the Father where all rational distinctions end. ‘ There heard I without sound.’ Hearing without sound means intuition, direct apprehension. ‘ There saw I without light.’ Seeing without light means undefined, vague perception in the naught. ‘ There breathed I without stir ’ : the inspiration of unity wherein all things are still. ‘ There tasted I what savoured not ’ : over all sensible things hangs the motionless haze of unity.
‘ Then my heart was bottomless ’ : the overwhelming wonder of my powers. ‘ And my soul loveless ’ : powers and senses blotted out. ‘ And my spirit formless ’ : the sealing of the mind in the unformed form and image of God. ‘ And my nature natureless ’ : my own nature withered away till nothing is left but the one unique is. This is-ness is the unity, the being of itself and of all things. St Dionysius says, ‘ The one alone is the life of lives, being of beings, reason of reasons, nature of natures, light of lights and yet not light, not life, not nature.’ Of it St James declares, ‘ The most perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights.’ Again St Dionysius says, ‘ The First Cause is above all names and transcends love ; it is superessential, superintelligible, super-rational and supernatural. The First Cause is neither light nor darkness.’ Behold how different from all caused things.
Saith the soul in the Book of Love, ‘ No one is God to me and I am soul to none.’ By ‘ no one is God to me ’ she means merely that no entity, nothing nameable, is her God. Again the words, ‘ I am soul to none ’ mean that she is so void of self she has not got it in her to be aught to anyone. This is the state in which the soul should be : in utter destitution. The soul cries in the Book of Love, ‘ He is mine and I am his.’ It were better she had said, ‘ He is not mine nor am I his,’ for God who is in all is therein all his own. She can lay claim to naught : she has lost every whit whereto any wight could in anywise be aught or she withal be aught to any wight. No one is her God and she is no one’s soul, wherefore she cries in the Book of Love, ‘Fly from me, beloved, on the feathers of the wind.’
What is the meaning of these feathers of the wind whereon the soul rides ? The feathers are the choirs of Seraphim. Th wind of their feathers is their clear seraphic knowledge. Above this dwells the soul. But not till she has left behind all images and forms, not harbouring any, not resting upon any. She must have lost her individual motion. And thus divested of her creaturehood, having no hold on anything at all, she sinks into downright nothingness ; there she is concealed from every creature. To this same naught no Seraph’s understanding can attain ; in this naught dwells the soul, super-seraphic, above all such knowing. Thus the soul rides on the feathers of the wind.
But what a perfect life this man must lead I How dead his soul to every kind of motion ! St John declares, ‘ Blessed are the dead that die in God.’ To this end, O man, do thou free thyself from every sort of sensible affection. God is exempt from such, and it behoves thee, man, to be the same if thou wouldst solve his hidden mystery. For this, look you, soul must be stripped of all her senses. St Dionysius spoke of this to Timothy, one of his disciples, when talk arose about St Paul who had been put to death.
‘ Alas ! my friend ’ (said Timothy), ‘ and shall we never hear again the loved voice of our master ? The saint replied, ‘ Friend Timothy, my counsel is to leave behind us corporal things and go to God. But this we cannot do save with blind eyes and alien senses ; not that we ought to have misleading senses : we must transcend sense and knowledge to get to his mysterious unity.’ Anent which St Augustine says, The soul has a private door into divinity where for her all things amount to naught.’ There she is ignorant with knowing, will-less with willing, dark with enlightenment. To wot of self would mean her imperfection ; to wot of God would mean her imperfection ; to wot of self in God or God in her would mean her imperfection : self is reduced to utter naught and there is nothing left but God, for God outshines her as the sun the moon and she with God’s all-penetrativeness streams into the eternal Godhead where God keeps ever flowing into God.