LXXXII
THE FEAST OF THE MARTYRS

        In occasione gladii mortui sunt (Hebr. 11₃₇).  We read of the blessed martyrs, whom we commemorate to-day as they were slain with the sword.  Quoth our Lord to his disciples, 'Blessed are ye when ye suffer for my name's sake.'  And according to the scriptures these martyrs suffered death for Christ's name, being put to the sword.
        Here we learn three things.  First, that they are dead. Man's sufferings in this world have an end. As St Augustine says pain and the work of pain is finite and the reward is infinite.  --Secondly, that seeing this life is mortal, we have no need to fear all the pain and travail falling to our lot, for it will end. Thirdly, that it behoves us to emulate the dead in dispassion towards good and ill and pain of every kind.  The philosopher says heaven is immoveable. Referring to the soul as being the heavenly man who is imperturbable.  One master enquires, If creatures are so vile, how comes it they so easily distract the soul from God: is not the soul at her vilest better than heaven and all creatures? The Doctor says it comes of minding too little about God. Were we to pay due heed to God it would be nigh impossible to lapse. From which we draw the moral that we ought in this world to emulate the dead. According to St Gregory, no one gets so much of God as the man who is throughly dead.
        The fourth point is the weightiest.  He speaks of their being dead.  Death gives them being.  A philosopher says, 'Nature never breaks but to mend.' Air to fire, for instance, is a change for the better; but air to water were destruction and untowardness.  If this is nature's way much more is it God's: he never destroys without providing something better. The martyrs died: they lost their life and found their being. The philosopher says, 'Most precious is being and life, and knowledge is higher than life and nobler than being, for it knowing we have life and being.' Yet life is nobler than being in the sense that a tree has life whereas a stone has being. Again, take being pure and simple, as it is in itself, and being transcends both knowledge and life, for in that it is being it is both knowledge and life. They have, I say, lost their natural life and have acquired being. The philosopher says it is the same thing as God. The philosopher says, Being is pure, he is conscious of nothing but being; being is his ring. God loves naught save his being, he thinks of naught save his being. I say, all creatures are being. One master says some creatures are so nigh to God and so instinct with divine light that they give being to other creatures. That is not the case: being is too pure, too high, too much the same as God, for anyone but God to be able to give being. God's idiosyncrasy is being. The philosopher says one creature is able to give another life. For in being, mere being, lies all that is at all. Being is the first name. Defect means lack of being. Our whole life ought to be being. So far as our life is being, so far it is in God. So far as our life is akin thereto, so far it is kin to God. There is no life so feeble but taking it as being it excels anything life can ever boast. I have no doubt of this, that if the soul had the remotest notion of what being means she would never waver from it in an instant. The most trivial thing perceived in God, a flower for example as espied in God, would be a think more perfect than the universe. The vilest thing present in God as being is better than angelic knowledge.
        When angels turn to creaturely knowledge, then it grows dark. St Augustine says, When angels know creatures in God, twilight falls; when the soul knows God in creatures it is eventide. But knowledge of creatures in God is the dawn. And when she knows God in himself as pure essence, that is high noon. It should be the soul's desire to see, as though in non-sense, this most noble being. We advocate dying in God, to the end that he may raise us up to being which is better than life: the being of our life subsists in, wherein our life is quickened into actuality. We ought to face death willingly and die in order to obtain a better resurrection.
        I said on one occasion that a bit of wood is more precious than gold, a surprising statement. But a stone is nobler (having being) than God and his Godhead without being, if is such a thing is possible to abstract his being. That must be a vigorous life in which dead things revive, in which even death is changed to life. To God naught dies: all things are living in him. They being dead (as the scriptures says about the martyrs) are quickened into life eternal, into the life where living is real being. We must be so throughly dead as to be moved by neither good nor ill. What we know we must know in its cause. We never really know anything in itself till we know it in its cause. There is no understanding it until we apprehend it in its origin.  Just as life is never perfected till it returns to its original source, wherein life is real being. The thing that keeps us from remaining there is, as the philosopher explains, our being in contact with time. What time can touch is temporal and mortal. The philosopher states that the heavenly progression is eternal; true, it gives rise to time, and that makes it mortal. In its course it is eternal, all unwitting of time; in other words, the soul obeys the laws of abstract being. Another thing is its being full of opposites. What are opposites? Good and bad, white and black are in opposition, a thing which has no place in real being.
        The philosopher says the soul is given to the body for her perfecting. Soul apart from body possesses neither intellect nor will: she is one with no attendant power of speech; true she has it in her ground, in its root as it were, but not in fact. The soul is purified in body by collecting things scattered and dispersed. The resultant of the five senses, when these are recollected, gives her a common sense wherein everything sums up to one. In the second place, she is purified by a saving habit, that namely of liberation from the life which is in part and admission to the life which is the whole. All that is scattered in nether things is gathered together when the soul climbs up into the life where there are no opposites. The soul knows no opposition when she enters the light of intellect. Anything short of this light falls into death and dies. Perfection of soul consists, thirdly, in absence of sensible affection. What is prone to aught other shall die, it cannot last. We beseech thee Lord God to help us escape from the life that is divided into the life that is united. So help us God. Amen.

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