X
MAN HAS TO SEEK GOD IN ERROR AND FORGETFULNESS
Man has to
seek God in error and forgetfulness and foolishness. For deity has in it the
power of all things and no thing has the like. The sovran light of the
impartible essence illumines all things. St Dionysius says that beauty is
good order with pre-eminent lucidity. Thus God is an arrangement of three
Persons. And the soul's lower powers should be ordered to her higher and
her higher ones to God: for her outward senses to her inward and her inward ones
to reason; thought to intuition and intuition to the will and all to unity, so
that the soul may be alone with nothing flowing into her but sheer divinity,
flowing here into itself. As St Dionysius says, By purity she has
discovered her capacity and only her superior powers are in operation.
It has been said by one philosopher
that as soon as the chief power takes command the others all run into it,
leaving their own work. The soul is in order and in her pure nature, i.e., in
her supernal light-nature wherein all things are potential. A heathen
doctors says, If the soul knew herself she would know all things. Deity flowed
into the Father and into the Son and into the Holy Ghost: in eternity into
itself and in time into creatures, to each as much as it can hold: to the stone
its being, to the tree its growth, to beasts sensation, to the angels reason and
to mankind all these four natures. When God was made man he took upon
himself by grace, in time, the nature of all things, which in eternity was his
by nature. As St Paul says, 'To me Christ is all things.' Here it was a
matter of the light and reflection of his own nature. God's being is fontal:
flowing and fixed, final as well as the first. From being power flows out into
work. In this sense the three Persons are the storehouse of divinity and the
three Persons are poured forth into the essence of the soul as grace. God's
being in the essence of the soul is the imitation of the Persons and one being
permeates the other. Her chief power flows from the essence of the soul
just as the three Persons issue from the Godhead. And when God pours his
grace into the soul is is into her essence that he pours it. For into the soul's
essence no speck can ever fall, do her powers what they may. The chief
power of the soul and this highest power goes out into the lower ones, into
their essence. The crescent soul, the spirit receptive of God's nature, is
the imitation of Christ's Person and man's nature. The soul when she
reaches divine nature is deprived of all deficiency and imperfection; she
suffers death in divine nature, getting God's nature in herself as the Father
does in him. She takes it not from her own nature, she receives it from
God's nature into her nature; she receives perfection and power according to the
word of St Paul, 'I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.' The
wisdom thence arising in her mind begins in understanding and is perfected in
will and it has neither heart nor thought. St Dionysius says, As the soul takes
the outgoing tide to journey into eternity and time and in her own intelligence,
so on the ebb does she return; as God the soul flows back again, without
exertion. God returns to himself as little mindful of his own as though
they were not. And the soul shall do the same. She shall grasp with
her manhood the Person of the Son, and with the Person of the Son she shall
apprehend the Father and the Holy Ghost in both, and them both in the Holy
Ghost; and with the Person of the Father she shall apprehend his simple essence,
and with the essence the abyss, and shall sink into the void without matter and
without form. Matter and form, being and knowledge, she loses in this
unity, for she herself has come to naught. God does all her work, he
preserves her in his being and leads her in his power and into his very Godhead
where she flows with deity itself into all God flows into. She is all
things' place and has herself no place. This is the most eternal wisdom,
which has neither heart nor thought. She is nigh soul flows to God that
many are deceived; but what she is she is by grace, and where she is she is by
another's power. Yet she approaches near enough to God to be, in the power
of the Father, invested with divinity by grace the same as the Father is by
nature. St Paul says: 'In the same image we shall go from one glory to
another,' meaning, we shall receive divinity in its perfection and all that is
consequent thereon. Therein she shall conceive divinity as it conceives itself
and her will and God's will shall be one: whatever God may be we shall be with
God. No one can attain it in this body, but when God gives the soul his
final gift, the vision of his Godhead, the soul is raised up in the
Trinity. May we attain to this, So help us God. Amen.