Ecce mitto angelum meum (Malach. 3j, Luc, 7), It is written in the gospel, ‘ Behold, I send my angel. Angels are within our ken for the evangelists deelare, ‘we shall be like the angels.’ One authority says, an angel is an image of God. Another one says he is fashioned like God. A third one describes him as a clear mirror wherein is reflected the goodness of God, the absolute stillness and mystery of God, as far as that is possible. Angels, again, have been defined to be pure intellectual light free from material things. We shall be like the angels. Perception here means seeing in the light that is in time, for anything I think of I think of in the light that is in time and temporal. But angels perceive in the light that is beyond time and eternal. They know in the eternal now. Men know in the now of time. The now of time is infinitely short. Yet take away this now of time and thou art everywhere and hast the whole of time. This thing or that thing is not all things ; as long as I am this or that, have this or that, I am not all things nor I have not all things. Purify till thou nor art nor hast not either this or that, then thou art omnipresent, and being neither this nor that thou art all things. An angel is and acts as an intelligence in his degree, beholding God without ceasing and his object is intelligible essence. Hence he is far removed from things. Remote from time and temporalities.
Mark the prophet’s words, he says, ‘ I send my angel.’ The evangelist, however, omits the pronoun I. This points, in the first place, to God’s elemental nature ; to the fact that God is uiinameable, transcending speech in the abstraction of his essence where, without word or utterance, God is ineffable to creatures. It shows next, that the soul is ineffable and wordless ; in her proper cause she is inarticulate, nameless and mute. The I is suppressed because there she has neither word nor utterance. Thirdly, it suggests that God and the soul are so entirely one that God has not a single thing to tell him from the soul, nor is he any other than the soul. The I is silent because he and the soul are every whit the same ; he has no property apart from soul nor does any other nature come within his ken. In the other reference, the text says 1 to indicate God’s is -ness : that God simply is. All things are in God ; out of him, without him, is naught. All creatures are infernal and of no account compared with God. What they are in truth that they are in God, for it is God alone who is the truth ; the word I stands for the actuality of divine truth for it is the glyph of one-existence. It proclaims that God alone is. Secondly, it means that God is inseparate from things ; that he is more innate in them than they are in themselves. And man should be inseparate from things : not as cleaving to self but as wholly detached from himself ; thus he is inseparate from all things, and he is all things. So far as thou art nothing to thyself so far thou art all things and iriscparate from all things ; and so far as thou art not divorced from all things so far thou art God and all things, for God’s deity consists in his being present in all things. Wherefore the man who is inseparate from all things enjoys divinity as God himself enjoys it. Thirdly, the word / is in a sense the end of name for it is no proper name : it signifies the perfection of name and means immutability, dispassion : that God is immoveable, intangible, eternal stability.
Fourthly, it points to the absolute purity of the divine being which is entirely without admixture. Goodness, wisdom and anything else that we can attribute to God are impurities with God’s abstract essence ; coexistence is foreign to essence, but the word I denotes God’s pure essence, his being in itself without anything alien and strange. The angels are the image, the mirror of God, which contains the reflection of the Godhead, of the glory, the stillness and the mystery of God. Let us like the angels imitate God. According to philosophers, to make a portrait of a man one must not copy Conrad nor yet Henry. For if it be like Conrad or like Henry it will not recall the man, but will remind one of Conrad or of Henry. Moreover, Conrad’s portrait will not be like Henry for, given the knowledge and the art, one could do Conrad to the life, the very image of him. Now, God both will and can : he made thee like unto himself, the very image of himself. But like him argues something foreign and aloof. Now there is nothing foreign nor aloof betwixt God and the soul, therefore the soul is not like God : she is identical with him, the very same as he is.
More I do not know and cannot tell, so here my argument must end. But I was thinking on the way, that we ought to be utterly detached in our intention, having no one, nothing, in view but the Godhead as such : not happiness nor this nor that.
just God and Godhead in itself. Aught beside that thou intendest is a divine impurity. Seize the actual Godhead itself. God help us so to do. Amen.