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Eckhart : Tractates |
Tractates
According to one master, many people arrive at specific
understanding, at
formal, notional knowledge, but yet there are few who get beyond the
science and
the theory; yet one man whose mind is free from notions and from forms
is more
dear to God than the hundred thousand who have the habit of discursive
reason. God cannot enter in and do his
work in them owing to the
restlessness of
their imagination. If they were free from
pictures they could be caught and
carried up
beyond all rational concepts, as St Dionysius says, and also have the
super-rational light of faith at its starting-point, where God find his
rest and
peace to dwell and work in as he will and when he will and what he will. God is unhindered in his work in these so he
can do in
them his most
precious work of all, working them up in faith into himself. These people no one can make out; their life
is an enigma,
and their
ways, to all who do not live the same. To
this truth and to this blessed life, to this high and
perfect
consummation no one can attain except in abstract knowledge and pure
understanding.
Many
a lofty intellect, angels not excepting (for in life and nature an
angel is
nothing but pure mind), has erred and lapsed eternally from the eternal
truth
and this may happen also to those who, like the angels, preserve their
idiosyncrasy and find satisfaction in the exercise of their own
intelligence. Hence the masters urge, and
saints as well, the use and
the necessity of
careful observation and close scrutiny to test the light which flashes
in, the
light of understanding and of vision which man has here in time, lest
he be the
subject of hallucination. If you would
know and recognize the really sane and
genuine seers of God,
whom nothing can deceive nor misinform, they can be detected by four
and twenty
signs.
The
first sign is told to us by the chief exponent of knowledge and wisdom
and
transcendental understanding, who is himself the truth, our Lord Jesus
Christ. He says, 'Thereby ye shall know
that ye are my disciples,
if you love one
another and keep my commandment. What is my commandment? That ye love
one
another as I have loved you,' as though to say, ye may be my disciples
in
knowledge and in wisdom and high understanding but without true love it
shall
avail you little if nothing at all. Balaam was so clever he understood
what God
for many hundred years had been trying to reveal. This
was but little help to him because he lacked true
love. And Lucifer, the angel, who is in
hell, had perfectly pure
intellect and
to this day knows much. He has the more hell pain and all because he
failed to
cleave with love and faith to what he know. -- The second sign is
selflessness;
they empty themselves out of themselves giving free furlough to things.
--- The
third sign: they have wholly abandoned themselves to God: God works in
them
undisturbed. -- The fourth sign: wherever they still find themselves
they leave
themselves; sure method of advancement. -- The fifth sign: they are
free from
all self-seeking: this gives them a clear conscience. --The sixth sign:
they
wait unceasingly upon God's will and do it to their utmost. The seventh
sign:
they bend their will to God's will till their will coincide with God's.
-- The
eighth sign: so closely do they fit and bind themselves to God and God
to them
in the power of love, that God does nothing without them and they do
nothing
without God --The ninth: they naught themselves and make use of God in
all their
works and in all places and all things. -- The tenth sing: they take no
single
thing from any creature, neither good nor bad, but from God alone,
albeit God
effect it through his creature. -- The eleventh sign: they are not
snared by any
pleasure or physical enjoyment or by any creature. -- The twelfth sign:
they are
not forced or driven by insubordination: they are steadfast for the
truth. --
The thirteenth sign: they are not misled by any spurious light nor by
the look
of any creature: they go by the intrinsic merit. -- The fourteenth
sign: armed
and arrayed with all the virtues they emerge victorious from every
flight of
vice. -- The fifteenth sign: they see and know the naked truth and
praise God
without ceasing from this gnosis. -- The sixteenth sign: perfect and
just, they
hold themselves in poor esteem. --The seventeenth sign: they are chary
of words
and prodigal of works. -- The eighteenth sign: they preach to the world
by right
practice. The nineteenth sign: they are always seeking God's glory and
nothing
at all besides. --The twentieth sign: if any man fight them they will
not let
him prevail before accepting help of any sort but God's.
-- The twenty-first sign: they desire neither comfort nor
possessions, of
the least of which they deem themselves all undeserving. -- The
twenty-second
sign: they look upon themselves as the most unworthy of all mankind on
earth;
their humbleness is therefore never-failing. --The
twenty-third sign: they take the life and teaching
of our Lord
Jesus Christ for the perfect exemplar of their lives and in the light
of this
are always examining themselves with the sole intention of removing all
unlikeness to their high ideal. --The twenty-fourth sign: to outward
appearance
they do little who are working all the time at the virtuous life, hence
the
disteem of many people, which, however, they prefer to vulgar
approbation.
These
are the signs of the true ground wherein lives the image of the perfect
truth
and he who does not find them in himself may account his knowledge vain
and so
may other people.
Though there
be neither hell
nor heaven yet I will love God: thee Father and thy sovran nature
wherein the
Trinity abides in the unity whence it gets its power. -- Now you desire
to hear
about this hidden and exalted nature of the Trinity. The Persons are
God in
their personality, Godhead by nature in their oneness. But you
must
know what God and Godhead are. The former has distinctions; which the
soul of me
explains by the reflection of the exalted unity. This shines in its own
essence
wholly indiscriminate. Therein is contained the unity entire,
including
the distinctions of lofty personality. The river is fontal
wherein unity
abides; the one alone is unnecessitous, poised in itself in sable
stillness. Incomprehensible and yet self-evident. Light is the
first thing
to appear; it beguiles the mind into the unknown without itself,
everlasting,
in-drawn, plunged in gloom. There it is befooled, there it is bereft of
light's
darkness, losing them both in the abyss; there that mysterious thing
the mind is
estranged in the unity which is withal its life.
O unfathomable sink, in thy depth thou art high in
thy height
profound! -- How so? -- That is hidden from us in thy bottomless abysm.
St Paul
declares that it shall be made known to us. In this gnosis the mind
transcends
itself; it has been absorbed into the Trinity. There the mind
dies all
dying in the wonder of the Godhead, for with that unity it is confused;
the
personal losing its name in sameness. There mind, atoned, is accounted
naught;
there it loses the means of divinity. Light and darkness, it is
rid of
both, matter as well as form. The spark thus bare, made naught from its
own
naught, is swallowed up in its naught's aught. This same naught is
poverty in
the Persons, which beguiles the mind and reduces it to unity. In the
embrace of
this sovran one which naughts the separated self of things, being is
one without
distinction although a thing created in its individual nature. The one
I mean is
wordless. One and one united, void shines into void. Where these two
abysms
hang, equally spirated, de-spirated, there is the supreme being; where
God gives
up the ghost, darkness reigns in the unknown known unity. This is
hidden from us
in his motionless deep. Creatures cannot penetrate this aught.
Well that this aught transcends us.
Even so loving it transcendently,
Plunge in: this is the drowning.
THIS IS THE GLOSS ON THE DROWNING
It is true
spiritual perfection to
love God for his own sake regardless of hell or heaven. We must love
the three
Persons in their unity of nature and their one nature in the three
Persons. The
Trinity has its power in the unity and the unity has its dignity in the
Trinity.
It belongs, moreover, to the noble mind to perceive the distinctions
between God
and Godhead: how it is the three Persons in him have gotten his unity
as their
natural being. Each Person has for nature his entire unity, so each of
the
Persons is in himself God and in his nature Godhead. God is God in the
Persons
and Godhead in his nature: in his impartible nature. The unity shines
forth in
the Trinity as articulate speech. But the perfect reflection of the one
is
shining by itself in lonely silence, there safely pent as one and
indivisible. Further, the three Persons in their utterance keep
their
distinctive properties. The Father is the source of the Son and the Son
is the
river abiding within him in essence. The Father and the Son give forth
their
breath (or spirit). Thus the originated river with its original source
is the
origin of the Holy Ghost. Unity which, logically speaking, is the
condition of
the original source is also the condition of the river which, together
with its
source, is the source of the Holy Ghost. And as this oneness is the
nature of
them both so too it is the nature of the breath exhaled by both. The
river then
is fontal. The unity which is in them both is unnecessitous, it has no
need of
speech, but subsists alone in unbroken silence. Not that the utterance
dies, i.e. the spoken essence. But where speech beats into the
silence
of its nature
both have one common character, the character of sameness. What is
this? It is
the motionless dark that no one knows but he in whom it reigns: the one
with its
selfhood. First to arise in it is light. Lo, this is the originated
river, and
origin itself, which has the character of light as proceeding forth in
its
individual nature. And what here streams forth to view will reveal
itself and
that from which is springs. In its interior procession this originated
river,
which is also the origin of itself, has the nature of obscure,
unmanifest
intelligence, but the light proceeding froth brings revelation to the
mind,
beguiling it out of itself into its mysterious indwelling cause. There
it is
shorn of light's illusion. Of everything, that is, which has been
revealed to it
in the form of light. Thereof it is despoiled, but now it finds another
and
better than this light-like understanding. Light has mode without
knowledge.
Darkness is knowledge without mode, a thing, that is, we can in nowise
have. The
mind is rid of light when it is rid of mode; and it is rid of darkness
when
letting go of all natural things, it sinks in nameless actuality. Then
it loses
both light and darkness in the abyss that creature in its own right
never
plumbs. Such is the estrangement in one as foreshadowed in the ordinary
mind,
but the realization of unity which the blessed have lies in the
exquisite
consciousness of another than themselves.
O unfathomable void, bottomless to creatures and to
thine own
self, in thy depth art thou exalted in thy impartible, imperishable
actuality;
in the height of thy essential power thou art so deep thou dost engulf
thy
simple ground which is there concealed from all that thou are not; yet
those
whom thou wouldest commune with shall know thee with thyself. As St
Paul
declares, 'Then shall we know as we are known.' This knowledge the mind
gets not
from its individual nature: the unity hales it to the Three into
itself, that
is, to its true and natural abode where it transcends itself in what it
inhales;
where 'the spirit dies all dying in the wonder of the Godhead.' This
dying of
the spirit means its confusion with the one essential nature though it
remains
discrete in the Persons of the Trinity. This shows the activity of
spirit; its
having variety of Persons. But by their union is shed a single light,
for the
three Persons are aglow with one intrinsic nature, like three lights
with one
shine. According to St Augustine this essential light is cast by the
Persons
into the pure spirit. At its glance the spirit forfeits self and
selfhood and
the uses of its power. Such is the effect of the shaft of pure
impartible light
of unity which this spirit is rather than itself when it is reduced to
nothing
but the same. We call the unity naught because mind has no notion of
what it is;
What the mind does know is that it is upheld by another than itself.
Its
upholder then is aught rather than naught, though mind has no idea what
it can
be. It is more real to him than his own self in that it belies his
personal
naught. For mind, as actually dwelling there, loses every means of
divine
nature, which to him is all things. He loses his individual nature and
yet he
does not die; he wins the nature of divinity although not God by nature
but by
grace. Now remember, he is something created out of naught. Yet he, a
mere
created wight, is drawn by the power of God's essence into his unity, a
thing
unknown in anywise to any creature. This unity which is in nowise
creaturely is
poverty, for it is poor of creatures, its content being that of simple
actuality. This modeless creature-essence is the being of the Persons
who alone
contain it in its most primitive and simple form as their nature. This
knowledge
de-ments the mind. This spiritual dementia means the absolute modeless
of the
unity which the Persons have in actual mode. The spirit broods in
sameness
without light or darkness. Sans light, in its impenetrable actuality;
sans
darkness in its lack of any special name. The spirit free from matter
and from
form has taken on the form of God. Thus the mind attains to its eternal
image
which is one in its essential nature and threefold as uttered in the
Persons.
Though the spirit of this image has entered of its own yet in itself it
is a
thing created. This created thing is mens; by mens
being meant the
spark, the living principle of spirit. This is the spirit in itself.
Its eternal
image is another; this is really God. When the spirit in itself turns
from all
things becoming into the not-becoming of its eternal object in the
Persons,
whence it comes, then the mind is said to return to its exemplar. Then
void
shines into void; the purified becomingness of mind turns to the pure
not-becoming nature of its eternal idea. In this embrace is consummated
the
exalted union wherein at length the spirit at one with all its nature
is in
divine atonement. Where these two meet in one, equally spirit and
not-spirit,
there is beatitude.
Now consider what the spirit of God means. The most
significant and subtile word that creatures can employ is spirit
(breath or
ghost) and that is why we call God spirit. But creature has no proper
name for
the nameless God and therefore to our mind God is not spirit.
Mark too the meaning of spirituality of soul. It
means that,
aloof from the coil of nether things, she is living at her summit in
thought and
love. Here she is one spirit with God. Spirituality of soul, besides,
means that
in her aught she is no more material than in her naught wherefrom she
was
created. Such is the spiritual nature of the soul. But she is
de-spirited (de-mented)
when, at her absorption, she is what is his rather than her own, and,
this is
the perfection of her sanity. The interior spiration of God, again, is
his
hidden nature, the quarry of the mind which it escapes; for this
mysterious and
silent one lies hid in depths of stillness that no creature ever
plumbs. This
being is beyond our grasp, whereat, rejoicing greatly, let us hasten to
seize it
with itself: this is our highest happiness. So be it, by thy help, O
divine
Trinity. Amen.
King David said: 'Lord in thy light we shall see light.' Doctors debate as to the medium in which we shall see God. The common doctrine is that it will be in the light of glory. But this solution appears to me to be unsound and untenable. From time to time I have explained that man has within him a light called the active intellect: this is the light in which man will see God in bliss, so they seek to prove. Now man according to his creaturely nature is in great imperfection and is unable by nature to discern God otherwise than as creatures do, by images and forms, as I have elsewhere demonstrated. The soul is unable of herself and by her innate power to transcend this state; that must happen in some supernatural power such as the light of grace. Mark this solution which I will now proceed to discuss.
St Paul says: 'By God's grace I am that I am.' He does not say that he is 'of grace.' There is a difference between being by grace and being grace itself. Doctors declare that form gives being to matter. Now there are various definitions of grace current among them. But I say grace is nothing else than the flowing light proceeding direct from God's nature into the soul: a supernatural form of the soul which gives her a supernatural nature. This is what I had in mind when I stated that the soul was unable of herself to transcend her own natural activity; this she can do in the power of grace which endows her with a supernatural nature.
Observe, grace effects nothing by itself. Moreover it exalts the soul above activity. Grace is bestowed in the essence of the soul and is received into her powers; for if the soul is to effect anything in this matter, she must needs have grace by virtue of which to transcend her own activities such as knowing and loving. Whilst the soul is in process of taking this transcendental flight out of herself into the nothingness of herself and her own activity, she is 'by grace'; she is grace when she has accomplished this transcendental passage and has overcome herself and now stands in her pure virginity alone, conscious of nothing but of behaving after the manner of God. As God lives, while the soul is still capable of knowing and acting after the manner of he creatureliness and as a child of nature, she has not become grace itself though she may well be by grace. For to be grace itself the soul must be destitute of activity, inward and outward, as grace is, which knows no activity. St John says: 'To us is given grace for grace,' for to become grace by grace is the work of grace. The supreme function of grace is to reduce the soul to what it is itself. Grace robs the soul of her own activity; grace robs the soul of her own nature. In this supernatural flight the soul transcends her natural light which is a creature and comes into immediate touch with God.
Now I would have you understand me. I am going to give an explanation I have never given before. The worthy Dionysius says: 'When God exists not for the spirit there exists not for it either the eternal image, its eternal origin.' I have said before and say again that God has wrought one act eternally in which act he made the soul in his own [likeness], and out of which act and by means of which act the soul issued forth into her created existence, becoming unlike God and estranged from her own prototype, and in her creation she made God, who was not before the soul was made. At various times I have declared: I am the cause that God is God. God is gotten of the soul, his Godhead of himself; before creatures were, God was not God albeit he was Godhead which he gets not from the soul. Now when God finds a naughted soul whose self and whose activity have been brought to naught by means of grace, God works his eternal work in her above grace, raising her out of her created nature. Here God naughts himself in the soul and then neither God no soul is left. Be sure that this is God indeed. When the soul is capable of conceiving God's work she is in the state of no longer having any God at all; the soul is then the eternal image as which God has always seen her, his eternal Word. When, therefore, St Dionysius says that God no longer exists for the spirit, he means what I have just explained.
Now it may be asked whether the soul as here seen in the guise of the eternal image is the light meant by David wherein we shall see eternal light?
We answer, no. Not in this light will the soul see the eternal light that shall beatify her; for thus says the worthy Dionysius, 'neither will the eternal image exist for the spirit.' What he means is that, when the spirit has accomplished its transcendental flights, its creaturely nature is brought to naught, whereby it loses God as I have already explained, and then the soul, in the eternal image, breaks through the eternal image into the essential image of the Father. Thus saith the Scripture: 'Everything flows back into the soul into the Father who is the beginning of the eternal Word and of all creatures.'
It may be questioned whether this is the light, the Father namely, in which the spirit sees the eternal light?
I answer, no. Now mark my words. God works and has created all things; the Godhead does not work, it knows nothing of creation. In my eternal prototype the soul is God for there God works and my soul has equality with the Father, for my eternal prototype, which is the Son in the Godhead, is in all respects equal with the Father. One scripture says: 'Naught is equal with God; to be equal with God, then, the soul must be naught.' That interpretation is just. We would say, however: where there is equality there is no unity for equal is a privation of unity; and where there is unity there is no equality for equality resides in multiplicity and separation. Where there is equality there cannot be unity. I am not equal to myself. I am the same as myself. Hence the Son in the Godhead, inasmuch as he is Son, is equal with the Father but he is not one with the Father. There is no equality where the Father and Son are one; that is, in the unity of the divine essence. In this unity the Father knows no Son nor does the Son know any Father, for there is neither Father nor Son nor Holy Ghost. When the soul enters the Son, her eternal prototype, she, with the Son, transcends equality and possesses unity with the three Persons in the unity of the essence. David says: 'Lord in thy light shall we see light,' that is: in the light of the impartible divine essence shall we see the divine essence and the whole perfection of the divine essence as revealed in the variety of the Persons and the unity of their nature. St Paul says: 'We shall be changed from one brightness into the other and shall become like unto him,' meaning: we shall be changed from created light into the uncreated splendour of the divine nature and shall become like it; that is, we shall be that it is.
St John says: 'All things live in him.' In that the Father contemplates the Son all creatures take living shape in the Son, that being the real life of creatures. But in another passage St John says: 'Blessed are the dead that have died in God.' -- It seems passing strange that it should be possible to die in him who himself said that he is the life! -- But see: the soul, breaking through her eternal prototype, is plunged in the absolute nothingness of her eternal prototype. This is the death of the spirit; for dying is nothing but deprivation of life. When the soul realizes that any thing throws her eternal prototype into separation and negation of unity, the spirit puts own self to death to its eternal prototype, and breaking through its eternal prototype remains in the unity of the divine nature. These are the blessed dead that are dead in God. No one can be buried and beatified in the Godhead who has not died to God, that is, in his eternal prototype, as I have explained.
Our creed says: Christ rose from the dead: Christ rose out of God into the Godhead, into the very unity of the divine essence. That is to say that Christ's soul and all rational souls, being dead to their exemplar, rise from that divine death to taste the joys above it, namely the riches of the divine nature wherein the spirit it beatified.
Now consider the fact of happiness. God is happy in himself; and all creatures, which God must make happy, will be so in the same happiness that God is happy in, and after the same fashion that he is happy. But sure that in this unity the spirit transcends every mode, even its own eternal being, and everything created as well as the equality which, in the eternal image, it has with the Father, and together with the Father soars up into the unity of the divine nature where God conceives himself in absolute simplicity. There, in that act, the spirit is no longer creature, it is the same as happiness itself, the nature and substance of the Godhead, the beatitude of its own self and all creatures. Further, I hold if God did what he is impotent to do, granted the soul while still a creature the knowledge and enjoyment of actual beatitude, then, were the soul to be and remain happy, it were impossible for God to remain God. Anyone in heaven knowing the saints according to their happiness, would not have anything to say of any saint but only of God; for happiness is God and all those who are happy are, in the act of happiness, God and the divine nature and substance of God. St Paul says: 'He who being naught, thinketh himself aught, deceiveth himself. ' In the act of happiness he is brought to naught and not creaturehood exists for him. As the worthy Dionysius says: 'Lord lead me to where thou art nothingness,' meaning: lead me, Lord, to where thou transcendest every created intellect; for as St Paul declares: 'God dwells in a light that no man can approach unto'; that is: God is not to be discerned in any created light whatever.
St Dionysius says: 'God is nothing,' and this is also implied by St Augustine when he says: 'God is everything,' meaning: nothing is God's. So that by saying 'God is nothing,' Dionysius signifies that there is no thing in his presence. It follows that the spirit must advance beyond things and thingliness, shape and shapeness, existence and existences: then will dawn in it the actuality of happiness which is the essential possession of the actual intellect.
I have sometimes said that man sees God in this life in the same perfection and is happy in the same perfect fashion as in the life to come. Many people are astonished by this. Let us try therefore to understand what it means. Real intellect emanates from the eternal truth as intelligence and contains in itself intelligibility all that God contains. This noble divinity, the active intellect, conceives itself in itself after the manner of God in its emanation, and in its essential content it is downright God; but it is creature according to the motion of its nature. This intellect is to the full as noble in us now as in the after life.
Now the question may be asked: How then does this life differ from the life to come?
I answer that, this intellect which is happy in exactly the same way as God is, is at present latent in us. In this life we know God only according to potentiality. In the after life, when we are quit of body, our potentiality will be transfigured into the act of happiness which belongs to the active intellect. This transfiguration will render the fact of happiness no more perfect than it is now; for active intellect has no accidents nor any capacity to receive more than it contains innately. It follows that when we are beatified we shall be completely deprived of potentiality and shall conceive happiness only actually, after the manner of the divine nature. As David says: 'Lord in thy light shall we see light'; with the divine nature we shall conceive the perfection of the divine nature, which alone is our entire felicity, here in grace and there in perfect happiness.
Beati pauperes 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 show them planned out in sight.
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, thing are not God. St. Augustine says, God is all of them. But St. 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) find 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 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 dung to me.' In this indigence she finds all creatures irksome.
In the second poverty she considers the merit of her exemplar Christ and her own demerits and finds her own works worthless, though they be the sum of men's achievements. Hence 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 swoon 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.
In 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 her 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 incomprehensible 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 need 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 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 thing 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 as 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 wrong-doing. 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, and departure from the life of Jesus 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.
The soul is furious for self-knowledge. Her face is lit
with passion, red with rage for the arrears withheld from her in God,
because
she is not all God is by nature, because she has not all God has by
nature.
The masters say there is no fiercer appetite than a
friend's
desire to possess his friend and all that he possesses. The soul
proclaims her
rage so boundless she cannot be appeased by him. The bonds of love are
all too
cruel for her. Alas! she cries, who shall console me? My misery is too
deep.
Were I the one creator, beginningless and endless, and had I made
creatures and
were he soul like me, then I would go straight out of my estate and let
her
enter in and be God while I be creature; and if it were an obstacle to
God to
get his being from me, he would be welcome to efface me for I would
perish
sooner than be a hindrance to him. But seeing it is common to
everything created
to have somewhat of the eternal in man's nature ever present in it,
therefore I
know not where to turn to find a place. So I take refuge in myself and
there I
find the lowest place, aye, one more base than hell for even thence do
my
shortcomings hound me. It seems I cannot then escape myself. Here I sit
me down
and herein will I stay. And I beseech thee, Lord, that thou never
callest me to
mind and forbiddest any creature ever to console me and deniest to my
powers
that ever any one of them should come before thy face, lest I offend
thee. So I
go out and let the soul go in.
The third rage of the soul is that she should be God
and that
there should not be a single creature, like when God was in his
eternity ere he
created creature, so that she may enjoy God-nature in its simplicity as
he did
before. But then his love were lacking to him, for it is the nature of
good
things to communicate themselves.
Fourthly, she rages to be absolutely nothing but the
naked
essence, there being neither God nor creature. She asks, What is the
good of the
three Persons in the Godhead and what is the use of creatures? But
hold, she
cries, except for them there would be no creatures. That must be the
reason why
there are three Persons in the Godhead: they are the cause of
creatures. God is
God-exalted: the creatures he has made cannot exalt him. All that
creatures do
to God is themselves: such glory as they can give to God is the same as
they
are.
ST
JOHN SAYS, 'I SAW THE WORD IN GOD'
St John says, 'I saw the Word in God.'
God is abstract being, pure perception, which is
perceiving itself in
itself. St
John means that the Son is in the Father, in his nature.
'I saw the Word with God.' Here
he is referring to the intellect which, flowing into
God eternally,
proceeded forth from God in distinction of Person, namely, the Son. ' I saw the Word before God.'
This means that the Son is ever being born of the Father
and that he is
the image of the Father. 'In the Word
there is only the Word,' refers to the
eternal emanation of
creatures in the Word. 'I saw the Word
under God'; the Son becomes man, as God
said, 'I have
loved you in the reflection of my darkness.' God's
darkness is his nature which is unknowable. Good
people know it not and no creature can divine it; therefore
it is a darkness. While God was flowing in
his own darkness the Son was not
distinct from
him. In
the darkness of his nature the Father flowed as Person so far as he was
pregnant. The
Father gave his Son birth and gave him his own nature;
he gave him not his Person: his nature he can give away
but he can give
to none his Person for that is the product of his unborn essence. The Father spoke himself and all creatures in
his Son; the
Father spoke
himself to all creature in his Son. The
Father turning back into himself speaks himself in
himself; he flows
back into himself with all creatures. As
Dionysius says, 'God proceeded himself,' meaning that
his hidden
nature suffices him, which is concealed from creatures. The
soul cannot follow him into his nature, except he absorb her
altogether, and
then in him she is made dark of all created lights.
The darkness of creatures is their incomprehensibility in
their simple
nature, that is, in the nothing from which they were created. In this uncreated light they discern his
uncreatedness. Into his uncreatedness they
flow in the reflection of his
darkness.
--'Tell me, good Sir, do Father, Son and Holy Ghost speak
the same word
in the Godhead or has each a different word? ' --
In the Godhead there is but one word; in it the Father
in the Godhead
speaks into his unborn essence and into his born essence, the Father
flowing
into his Son with all that he is and the Son speaks the same word, and
the
Father and the Son flow into the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost speaks
the same
word. They
speak this one simple word in their essence and each speaks the same
word in his
own Person, and in their common nature they discourse the truth and the
Persons
receive the essence as it is essentially. Yet
the Persons receive from one another. They bow down to
the essence in
praise, lauding the essence; and the unborn essence pronounces its
unborn word
in the Persons, lauding the Persons, and the Persons receive the
essence every
whit and pass it on to one another. This
unborn essence is self-sufficient, without birth and
without
activity. Birth
and activity are in the Persons. The Persons say they are the truth and
that
creatures have none of the truth. When the
soul attains to this divine speech she speaks
this very truth
and is the Deity to every creature as well as to herself.
This comes of his indivisible nature and therein creatures
are a matter
of the will. The
bad are bad and the good good, the Persons preserving justice in the
Godhead. They give the bad their due and
the good theirs.
St Dionysius says, 'God is the Prime Cause, and God has
fashioned all
things for himself who is the cause of all; and his works are all
wrought in the
likeness of the First Cause.' Father and
Son show forth the first cause, and the Son is
playing in the
Father with all things for he proceeded forth from him.
The Son plays before the Father with all things, the Son
plays below the
Father with all things. The Father begat his Son with his Godhead and
with all
things. The
Father begat his Son in his Godhead with all things. The Godhead is the
several
Persons and the fullness of the Persons. The
Godhead is not given to any thing. On
coming to its knowledge the soul sees God and glancing
back into
herself she sees that the Godhead is in all things.
Receiving into her the likeness of the creator she creates
what she will
but cannot give it essence: she gives it form and is herself its matter
and its
eternal activities are in her; these are in the eternal birth. Its temporal activities are in time, where God
gives his
works essence,
form and matter out of nothing, which the soul is unable to do; God
reduces his
works to the unity of Christ and this order shall not pass away but
shall be
raised up to the glory of the one. Soul,
transcending order, enters the naked Godhead where
she is seen when
God is seen in the soul as God. This soul
has God as God in her, she has gotten in her the
image of her
creator.
Now mark the difference between the work of God and
creature. God has
done all things for himself, for he is the universal cause and all his
works are
wrought in the likeness of the first cause and creatures all work
according to
the likeness of the first cause. That is
the intention they have towards God. God
made all things from nothing, infusing into them his
Godhead so that
all things are full of God. were they not
full of the Godhead they would all perish. The
Trinity does all the work in things and creatures
exploit the power
of the Trinity, creatures working as creatures and God as God, while
man mars
the work so far as his intention is evil. When
a man is at work his body and soul are united, for
body cannot act
without the soul. When the soul is united
with God she does divine work, for
God cannot
work without the soul and the soul cannot work without God. God is the soul's life just as the soul is the
body's, and
the Godhead is
the soul of the three Persons in that it unifies them and in that it
has dwelt
in them for ever. And since the Godhead is
in all things it is all soul's
soul. But in spite of its being all soul's
soul, the Godhead it
not creatures'
soul in the way it is the Trinity's. God
does one work with the soul; in this work the soul is
raised above
herself. The
work is creature, grace to wit, which bears the soul to God. It is nobler than the soul as admitting her to
God; but
the soul is the
nobler in her admissibility. This creature
which has neither form nor matter nor any
being of its own,
translates the soul of her natural state into the supernatural.
To his eternally elect God gives his spirit as it is,
without means; they
cannot miss it. Creatures God is going to make at his good pleasure he
has known
eternally as creatures, for in God they are creatures albeit nothing in
themselves: they are uncreated creatures. Creatures
are always more noble in God than they are in
themselves. In God the soul shall see her
own perfection without image
and shall see
the difference between things uncreated and created and she shall
distinguish
God from Godhead, nature from Person, form from matter.
The Father is the beginning of the Godhead, he is the
well-spring of the
Godhead, overflowing into all things in eternity and time.
The Godhead is a heaven of three Persons.
The Father is God and a Person not born nor proceeding
any; and the Son
is God and a Person and born of the Father; and the Holy Ghost is God
and a
Person proceeding from both. St Paul
speaks of the uncreated spirit flowing into the
created spirit
(or mind). This meeting which befalls the created spirit is her saving
revelation; it happens in the soul who breaks through the boundaries of
God to
lose herself in his uncreated naught. The
three Persons are one God, one in nature, and our
nature is shadowing
God's nature in perpetual motion; having followed him from naught to
aught and
into that which God is to himself, there she has no motion of her
naught. Aught is suspended from the divine
essence; its
progression is matter,
wherein the soul puts on new forms and puts off her old ones. The change from one into the other is her
death: the one
she doffs she
dies to, and the one she dons she lives in.
St John says, 'Blessed are the dead that die in God; they
are buried
where Christ is buried.' Upon which St
Dionysius comments thus: Burial in God is
the passage into
uncreated life. The power the soul goes in
is her matter, which power the
soul can never
approfound for it is God and God is changeless, albeit the soul changes
in his
power. As
St Dionysius says, 'God is the mover of the soul.'
Now form is a revelation of essence. St
Dionysius says, 'Form is matter's aught. Matter without
form is
naught.' So
the soul never rests till she is gotten into God who is her first form
and
creatures never rest till they have gotten into human nature: therein
do they
attain to their original form, God namely. As
St Dionysius hath it, 'God is the beginning and the
middle and the end
of all things.'
Then up spake the loving soul, 'Lord, when enjoyest thou
thy creatures?'
-- 'That do I at high noon when God is reposing in all creatures and
all
creatures in God.' St Augustine says, 'All
things are God,' meaning, they
have always been
in God and shall return to God. So when St
Dionysius says,' All things are naught,' he
means they are not
of themselves and that in their egress and their ingress they are as
incomprehensible as naught. When St
Augustine says, 'God is all things,' he means he
has the power of
all things, one more noble than he ever gave to creatures.
And St Dionysius' dictum, 'God is naught,' implies that
God is as
inconceivable as naught. As King David
sings, 'God has assigned to everything its
place: to fish
the water, birds the air and beasts the field and to the soul the
Godhead.' The soul must die in every form
save God: there at her
jouney's end her
matter rests and God absorbs the whole of the powers of the soul, so
now behold
the soul a naked spirit. Then, as St
Dionysius says, the soul is not called soul,
she is the
sovran power of God wherewith God's will is done. It
is at this point St Augustine cries, 'Lord thou hast
bereft me of my
spirit!' Whereupon
Origen remarks, 'Thou art mistaken, O Augustine. It
is not thy spirit, it is thy soul-powers that are taken
from thee.' The soul unites with God like
food with man, which turns
in eye to eye,
in ear to ear. So does the soul in God
turn into God; and God combines
with the soul and
is each power in the soul; and the two natures flowing in one light,
the soul
comes utterly to naught. That she is she
is in God. The divine powers swallor her
up out of sight just as the
sun draw up
things out of sight.
What God is to himself no man may know.
God is in all things, self-intent. God
is all in all and to each thing all things at once.
And the soul shall be the same. What
God has by nature is the soul's by grace. God
is nothing at all to anything; God is nothing at all
to himself, God
is nothing that we can express. In this
sense Dionysius says, 'God is all things to
himself for he bears
the form of all things.' He is big with
himself in a naught; there all things are
God, and are
not, the same as we were. When we were not
then God was heaven and hell and all
things. St Dionysius says that 'God is
not', meaning that he bears
himself in a not, namely, the not-knowing of all creatures,
and this not
draws the soul
through all things, over all things and out of all things into that
superlative not where she is not-known to any creature.
There she is not, has not, wills not, she has abandoned God and
everything to
God. Now God and heaven gone, the soul is finally cut off from
every
influx of divinity, so his spirit is no longer given to her. Arrived at
this the
soul belongs to the eternal life rather than creation; her uncreated
spirit
lives rather than herself; the uncreated, eternally-existent which is
no less
than God. Wherewith being all-pervaded to the total loss of her own
self, the
soul at length returns without herself to eternal indigence, for what
is left
alive in her is nothing less than God. Thus she is poor of
self.
This is the point where soul and Godhead part and the losing of the
Godhead is
the finding of the soul, for the spirit which is uncreated drawing on
the soul
to its own knowledge she comes nearer to the not-being of the Godhead
than by
knowing all the Father ever gave. [The gift of the Father is the
positive
existence of all creatures in the Person of his Son and with the Son
the Holy
Ghost as well. For the Persons must be looked on as inseparate, albeit
distinct
illuminations of the understanding.] And so far as she attains
this in the
body she enjoys the eternal wont and escapes her own.
We
ought to
be eternally as poor as when we were not and then our kingdom shall not
pass
away, abiding as it does in God whose it is eternally. The
Godhead gave
all things up to God; it is as poor, as naked and as idle as thought it
were
not: it has not, wills not, wants not, works not, gets not. St
Dionysius
says, 'Be the soul never so bare the Godhead is barer': a naught from
which no
shoot was ever lopped nor ever shall be. It is this counsel of
perfection
the soul is straining after more than after anything that God contains
or
anything she can conceive of god. Saith the bride in the book of
Love,
'The form of my beloved passed by me and I cannot overtake him.' It is
God who
has the treasure and the bride in him, the Godhead is as void as though
it were
not. God has consumed the form of the soul and formed her with
his form
into his form. Now she gets all things free from matter, as their
creator
possesses them in him, and resigns the same to God.
Ours
to
contain all things in the same perfection wherein the eternal wisdom
has
eternally contained them. Ours to expire them as the Holy Ghost
has
expired them eternally. Ours to be all things' spirit and all
things
spirit to us in the spirit. Ours to know all and deify ourselves
with all.
Ours to be God by grace as God is by nature; ours to resign the same to
God and
be as poor as when we were not: free as the Godhead in its
non-existence. Christ
says, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit.' These same poor in the
spirit
enjoy the Father without let or hindrance. The Father knows no
difference
between this soul and him save that he has by nature what she has by
grace. For
as Christ declares, 'Then that follow me I will bring to where I
am.'
'Blessed are the poor in spirit: God's kingdom is in them.' These
spiritual poor
are those who have abandoned everything to God as he possessed them
when we were
not and the naught itself. In this naught dwells God and in God
dwells the
soul. There she has no dwelling and thereinto no creature can get
in its
own right and no creature can go higher.