Mandaturn novum do vobis etc. {Joh. In the Gospel of
St John we find our Lord’s words to his diseqles, ‘ A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all know that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another.’
We know of three kinds of love that our Lord had, and in this we must be like him. One is natural, the second gracious and the third divine. In God there is notJiing not God ; in ourselves, however, we may consider them as an ascending scale, from good to better and from better to perfection. But in God is neither more nor less, he is just the simple, pure, essential truth.
The first love God has, in this we learn how his divine goodness has constrained him to create all creatures, wherewith he has been big eternally in his ideal preconception, intending them to enjoy Soo also Wackernagel, No. 66.
his goodness with him. And among all his creatures he bears no more love to one than to another : as each is able to receive he pours his love therein. Were my soul as capacious, as roomy, as a Seraph’s, who has nothing in him, God would pour out into me the same as he does into that angel. If you describe a circle, a ring of dots with one point in the middle, from this point all the dots will be equidistant ; for one dot to get nearer it will have to be displaced, for the middle point is constant at the centre. So with divine being : it is not questing round about but abiding altogether in itself. In order to receive from it a creature must infallibly be moved out of itself. And when wx talk of man we are talking of all creatures ; Christ himself exhorted his disciples, ‘ Go forth and preach the gospel to all creatures,’ for creatures all culminate in man. Not but what, as being, God is pouring himself out into all creatures, to each as much as it can take. Which is a lessoix to us to love all creatures equally with what we have received from God (though some are nearer to us by kinship or by natural friendship), as we are favoured equally with the boon of divine love. I sometimes seem to like one better than another, and yet I have the same goodwill towards that other person whom I have never seen, only, by asking more of me, this one enables me to give him myself more. God loves creatures all alike and fills them with his being. And we too should pour forth ourselves in love upon all creatures. We often find the heathen arriving at this amiable state in virtue of their natural understanding. As the heathen philosopher observes, man is by nature a kindly animal.
The second love of God, the spiritual, he is llowing with into the soul and into the angels, and it is by this light which is supernatural that, as I was saying, creature is rapt away out of itself. Creatures are so enamoured of their own natural light, it needs a strong inducement to take them out of it into the light of grace. In his natural light man enjoys himself, but the light of grace, which is unspeakably more ]>owerful, robs him of his self-enjoyment and draws him into itself. As the soul says in the Book of Love, ‘ Draw me after thee in thy sweet savour.’
Now we cannot love God without first knowing him, but the essential point of God is in the centre, equally far from and near to all creatures, and the only way of getting closer to it is for my natural intellect to be displaced by a light more intense than itself. Supposing, for example, that my eye were a light and strong enough to bear the sunlight in its glory and unite therewith, its interior state would then be due not to itself alone but to the sunlight as well. So with the mind. The intellect is a light, and if I turn it right away from things and in the direction of God then, since God is perennially flowing with grace, my mind is illumined and united with love and therein knows and loves God as he is in himself. Here we have the explanation of how God is flowing out into rational creatures in his light of grace and how we with our intellect approaching this gracious light are rapt out of ourselves and ascend into the light of God himself.
The third love of God : in this it is granted us to learn how God has been begetting his one-begotten Son and is giving birth to him, as the Doctor says, now and eternally, he, like any woman, being brought to bed in every virtuous soul who has embarked on the interior life. This birth is his understanding, perennially up-springing in his paternal heart, wherein he has gotten all his bliss. All he has to give he expends on understanding : it is his progeny, his only pride. His entire happiness is centred in his Son ; he loves nothing but his Son and all he finds in him ; his Son is the light that has been for ever burning in his paternal heart.
To enter there we shall have to climb by way of natural light into the light of grace and therein wax into the light that is the Son himself. There in the Son we are loved by the Father with his love (his Holy Spirit) which has its eternal source in him and having blossomed forth to his eternal birth (namely the second Person) is wafted by the Son back to the Father as the love of both. The Doctor says, I sometimes think of what the angel said to Mary, ‘ Hail, full of grace ! ’ what is the good to me of Mary’s being full of grace if I am not full also ? What does it profit me the F ather’s giving his Son birth unless I bear him too ? God begets his Son in the perfect soul and is brought to bed therein that she may bring him forth in all her works. Thus we, by the love of the Holy Ghost, being unified into his Son, shall know the Father with the Son and love ourselves in him and him in us with their mutual love.
Whoever would achieve this triple love must needs have four things. The first is, real dispassion towards creatures. The second, the true life of Leah, that is to say, the active life which is set in motion in the ground of the soul by the action of the Holy Spirit. The third thing is, the true life of Rachel, the contemplative life. The fourth is, an aspiring soul. A master was once questioned by his pupil about the angelic order. He answered him and said, Go hence and withdraw into thyself until thou understandest : give thy whole self up to it, then look, refusing to see anything but what thou findcst there. It will seem to thee at first as though thou art the angels with them and as thou dost surrender to their collective being thou shalt think thyself the angels as a whole with the whole company of angels. The pupil went away and withdrew into himself until he found all this in truth in his own ground. Then returning to his master he gave him thanks and said : It was as you foretold. On giving my whole mind to the subject of the angels and aspiring to their estate, at first it seemed to me that I was all the angels with the angels. You see then, said his master, that as you draw a little nearer to the source, wonder after wonder is wrought upon the soul ; for while a man is still on the ascent and receiving through the medium of creatures, he has not come to rest. But once he has climbed up into God, there in the Son he will be receiving with the Son the whole of what God has to give. May we, ascending in this way from one love to another, be united into God and there in bliss abide eternally. So help us God. Amen.