Concerning the flow into the Father, note as follows.
The Godhead is contained in the Father as nature, wherefore ' See Spamor’s Texte, B. 2, from which the words in brackets are taken.
he is omnipotent and receives naught from aught that he is not himself in his divine potentiality, seeing that he has it in him in essence, as his own. Nevertheless, speaking of the Father we mean the Person of the Father, and speaking of the Godhead we mean his nature, his impartible substance, that is to say. Now since this nature stays brooding in settled immoveable stillness, moving all things which have proceeded in eternity in the word of his power (or potential Word), it follows that, as power, it has ever been flowing into the Father making him able to beget a Son like unto himself. We can prove it thus. The Persons are impotent as Persons ; anything they do is done in virtue of their nature which is their real being. So much for the flow into the Father which he has of his own nature wherein he is omnipotent.
Now mark The soul has received two powers by nature. The first of these powers is understanding. This comprehends the Trinity, although it is incomprehensible, and all its works. Observe how understanding comprehends the Trinity, and all its works, despite its being incomprehensible. The soul in her understanding is the image of the Son and the Son is the Father’s understanding. So when the soul is empty of her own understanding, and only the Son is her understanding, she understands with the Son the Son and the Father and their common Spirit. That is how the soul comprehends the Trinity and all its works.
Her other power is will. It is its nature to cast itself into the unknown which is God. God is said to be unknown because no creature knows him as he knows himself ; as known to himself he is unknowing to all creatures. Hence we call God agnosia. Now the chief power of the soul is too fastidious to dally with temporal, known things, so free will boldly disregards the known and cleaves to what it knows not. As St Paul says, ‘ I know not; God knoweth.’
Christ says, ‘ When I am ascended I will draw all things to me.’ He means that when he dawns upon our heart artd understanding he gathers us up into himself. In this sense all creatures are one man and that man is God. [In this sense man is all things. For he has the nature of all creatures, and souls joined to Christ are in this sense one man with him. He is the head and they are his members, who are in his charity.] In Christ his all was assembled into one. His higher and his lower faculties, and the senses of his outward and his inward man were in harmonious union with his highest power, conceived there by divine conception, which was united with him in one Person. And so with the man in whom all creatures end, in whom all multitudinous things have been reduced to one in Christ : man is then one in God with Christ’s humanity. Thus all creatures are one man and that man is God in Christ’s Person. As one master says : With Gk)d one spirit and with Christ one body, that is unity indeed.
With the powers received from the Trinity the soul knows the ordering of all things ordained by God in such exalted fashion. But those that turn away their eyes from God relapse into the selfsame naught wherein they were before they had received the likeness of the Trinity, this likeness of the Trinity aye informing them of the dark nothing back to which they wend. In this darkness gather all the pangs of hell. The dark enwraps them and hides the sight of God ; it burns them past soothing by their created aught. This is bitter to their conscience which damns them to all time. In this pit of nothingness they sink for evermore, powerless to grasp the naught they were before they had the likeness of the Trinity.
And now, my children, let us examine these dark sayings carefully. You will see the obvious meaning of these damned. But another, ghostly, sense lies hid therein, which it behoves you to note specially. This applies to the elect who turn away their mind from God and How back into that same naught, for when the soul is carried by her understanding above all things and beyond the scope of her own understanding to the understanding of the sovran good she secs that to all creatures this is unintelligible. So down she goes with her own understanding.
The fastidious soul can rest her understanding on nothing that has name. She escapes from every name into the nameless nothingness. Escaping her own nature she falls clear of her own aught. The naught she falls into is the unknowing, which is called the dark. ‘ In this dark gather the pangs of hell,’ where the soul is plynged sheer into the void. This only happens when she is perfectly devoid of knowledge. The slightest trace of knowledge or understanding of the naught that she is plunged in would be helltorment to her. All sense and knowledge of the naught ends in this darkness. ‘ The darkness burns them past salving by any of their kind. Bitter is this conscience which damns them to all time. In this abyss of nothingness they sink for evermore, failing to grasp the naught they were before they took the likeness of the Trinity.’ By virtue whereof they have their being. To approfound the naught wherein they drown they are as helpless as they were when they were not. All sense and knowledge end in the darkness of their naught. For this darkness is the incomprehensible nature of God. She sinks for evermore in the depths of this naught. She sinks and drowns ; she drowns to her own aught. Her aught, surviving, sinks as naught to naught. But the naught that sinks can never comprehend the naught it sinks in. Every virtue mastered and transcended, the soul cries ; ‘ Even so I cannot glorify and love God to the full. I die then to the virtues casting me into the naught of the Godhead to sink eternally from naught to aught,’ The highest meed of love and praise the soul can lavish on the sovran good is given in the knowledge that all her love and praise fall short of God. So down she goes through the little she can call her own and dying to her virtues is cast into the naught of her own self.
Two points mark here. She casts herself with the naught of herself when, self-bereft of her exalted power she ever regards her own insignificance.
The other naught she plunges in is the naught of the Godhead. Seeing that she herself is naught and not disposed to stay at aught, the soul casts herself into the naught of the Godhead and so comes with naught to naught. She wants the aught she recognises in herself to perish in the naught which is its very aught and so subsist in unity. She sees we cannot love and glorify God better than by recognising how inadequate all love and glory are. Wherefore she holds her peace. St Dionysius being bent on lauding Mary’s virtues found them so inconceivable he held his tongue. By his dumbness the worthy Dionysius did Mary highest honour. Thus it befalls the soul on being ravished into God’s incomprehensibility. Her lips struck dumb, ‘ O groundless Truth,’ she cries, ‘ how paltry is our praise ! ’ So she attains to union close enough for God to pour himself into her every whit and snatch her every whit into himself, leaving no trace of either vice or virtue ; nor does the soul know any difference.
Fo you must know that to the soul in her perfection goodness would con\e quite natural ; she would not merely practise virtues, but virtue as a whole would be her life and she would radiate it naturally. We seem to be vicious or virtuous from being now the one and now the other. This should not be : we ought to be always in a state of perfection. That is one thing to note.
Further, God absorbs the soul, leaving no trace. This means that the soul ravished by God into the peace and quiet of his secret self makes little show save to her kind. There the soul knows no separation, for he who has absorbed her has merged her in himself. She well knows that she is but knows not what she is. — The sun in certain countries is too hot for fruits to flourish on the surface of earth, but, on the other hand, the sun produces gold in plenty in the bowels of earth. And .so with the soul in whom the bright sun of the divine nature shines : it produces its like there, scattering the darkness and bringing about perfect unity. Look you, it behoves us to be very merciful to these, for, withdrawn into his hiding, they are out of touch with the profane.
St Chrysostom says, ‘ It is not yet manifest what we are, but when we are changed into him we shall show what we are.’ Whatever she may take herself for, to God she is creature.
The Godhead is a spiritual substance, so impenetrable that none can say what manner of thing it is. They say ; God in the Trinity is the living light in its visible radiance. In other words, the three Persons are but one in nature though distinct in Person in the same sense that the source of light is not the light nor is the source its shine. Applying this to the three Persons, the source is the Father, the Son is the light and the Holy Ghost is the shine. The Father is the living source in whom all things have lived eternally without themselves as in their cause. The light is the Son in whom all things appear eternally as in their idea. The shine is the Holy Ghost in whom all things are one eternally as in their naught. Not that one Person is the life and another the light : the three Persons are one life, one light.
The Trinity is the heart of the divine nature. As you may prove. For in human life it is the heart which beats in all the limbs, energising, co-ordinating them. Because the limbs receive from it, therefore it is called the heart. Now touching the Godhead, this is not active in its nature, but anything it does it does with the Persons, and the Trinity is called the heart of divine nature because this works by means of it, and because it (the Trinity) is the origin of all things and all things flow back into it and end. This heart’s heart, again, is the paramount power of the unity wherein and whereby it is omnipotent. Human nature Hows in love into the Trinity as into its universal origin. The unity of the Trinity is bottomless and nothing is contained therein. In the embrace of unity the naked soul sinks down for aye nor ever touches bottom. Her temporalities (i.e. the created natures of her powers) stop at the Persons, whereas her pure essence is received by the pure unity of God without return.
Behold the soul divorced from every aught. For he who stoops to aught that is not God can never be received into God’s unity. This unity is causeless ; it is self-caused. Of bottomless depth the floor, of endless height the roof, of boundless space the rim. I refer to the Trinity of Persons : the unity underlies it, holding it together ; it overtops it, energising it ; it surrounds it, ending its distinctions. Thus the Trinity is in the unity and the unity in the Trinity. As saith the psalm Quicumque vult.
That we should know ourselves and God so far as we are able, that is God’s will. If we would know ourselves we have to recognise that we are nothing but the raw material of God for the blessed Trinity to work in. It behoves us therefore to be vastly careful not to hamper in any way the work which the exalted workman designs to carry out in us to his glory, but so to maintain ourselves that the material is always ready for the workman to do his work in us. St Paul says, ‘ The spirit of the Lord descends from on high in secret, working in whom it will and when and where and how it will in him in whom it meets no hindrance.’ In the children of God. They are led by this spirit. — It is thus ye shall know yourselves. Next, we have to know God. To this St Dionysius exhorted one of his disciples, saying, ‘ Up, friend, divest thyself of things and put off thyself that thou mayst understand the Sovran Good.’ Of it three things are predicated. First, it is a unique force entire in everything ; next, a unique good embracing everything. (Thirdly) to know God really ye must know him as the unknown. So Dionysius says.
God’s will is our 'welfare, and our welfare eonsists in knowing God and doing accordingly. Here timorousness mutters in the soul, both she will and she will not. And hard on this comes rage of soul. When she divines that it remains for her to be somewhat that he is not, she is transported with ire. She would sooner come to naught than have or take aught that belongs to him. ‘ Lord,’ she cries, ‘ my welfare lies in thy never calling me to mind ; and forbid, I pray thee, any creature ever to console me. I rejoice that my powers never come before thy face.’
See what the soul means by her strange words : ‘ my welfare lies in thy never calling me to mind.’ She wots right well that she has never been one instant out of his mind and that is her felicity. She begs not to be comforted by any creature, because she is in indigence right comfortless where her disconsolateness is her one consolation. And when she says her powers come not before his face ? Observe what God’s face is. We sec ourselves best in what is called our face. So too where God is manifest to himself in the mysterious stillness of his own essence. This revelation is called the face of the Godhead. The soul is well aware that, accompanied by her powers, she can never enter the absolute stillness where he is manifest to himself. Hence she desires her pdwers not to come before his face, t.e. his self-revelation. See, her powers halt at its reflection in the Trinity and only the pure essence of her spirit is flashed from the stillness of her own power straight into this perfect revelation. As a master says : ‘ Where pure and purified are one the powers of the soul are at an end.’ Meaning that in the one perfect nature the pure nature of the spirit transcends all its powers. St Paul says, ‘ He who is joined to God is one spirit with him.’ Amen.