XCIV
THE SOUL
St Paul says, 'Put off self, put on Christ.'
In abandoning ourself we initiate Christ and holiness and happiness and
are ennobled. The prophet marvelled
at two things. First, at God's
doings with the sun and moon and stars. And
secondly he marvelled at the soul, at the prodigious things God does and has
done with her and for her sake, yet do what prodigies he may she still preserves
the absolute dispassion which befits one of her noble lineage.
Mark the nobility of her descent. I
make a letter of the alphabet like the image of that letter in my mind, not like
my mind itself. And so with God.
God makes things in general like the universal image of them in himself,
not like himself. Certain things he
has specially made like emanations of his own, such as goodness, wisdom and
other so-called attributes of God. But
the soul he has made not merely like the image in himself nor like anything
proceeding from himself that is predicated of him, but he made her like himself,
nay, like he is, all told: like his
nature, his essence, his emanating-immanent activity, his ground wherein he is
subsisting in himself, wherein he is begetting his alone-begotten Son and where
the Holy Ghost comes into flower; in the likeness of his in-dwelling out-going
work did God make the soul.
It is a law of nature that fluids run downhill into anything adapted to
receive them: the higher not receiving from the lower but the lower from the
higher. Now God is higher than the
soul, and hence there is a constant flow of God into the soul, which cannot miss
her. The soul may will miss it, but
as long as a man keeps right under God he immediately catches this divine
influence straight out of God. Nor
is he subject to aught else, not fear not pleasure nor anything that is not God.
Put thyself therefore right under God and thou shalt receive from God as
from a stranger, as the air does the light of the sun, which it takes as a
foreign intrusion. The soul
receives her God not as a stranger nor as inferior to God, but inferior is both
different and distant.
Philosophers say the soul receives as a light from the light, wherein is
nothing foreign or remote. There is
something in the soul wherein God simply is, and according to philosophers this
is a nameless thing and has no proper name.
It neither has nor is a definite entity, for it is not this or that nor
here nor there; what it is it is from another wherewith it is the same; the one
streams into it and it into the one. Hence
the exhortation 'Enter into God in holiness,' for here is the source of the
soul's whole life and being. This
(light) is wholly in God and her other without him, so in this one the soul is
ever in God, provided she smother it not and extinguish it in her.
Philosophers say this (light) is present in God and never goes out in him
and God is ever in it. I say, God
has ever been in it and of it eternally. The
union of man and God is not a matter of grace (for grace is creature and
creature has nothing to do with it), except in the ground of divinity, where the
three Persons are one in nature and it (grace) is that nature itself.
Wherefore an thou wilt, God and the universe are thine.
That is, thou wilt put off self and things: doff the habit of thy
personality and take thyself in thy divinity.
The philosophers say that human nature has nothing to do with time; that
it is deeper-seated and more firmly rooted in a man than he is in himself.
God took on human nature and united it with his own Person.
Thus human nature was God who donned man's nature only, not any
individual man. Would'st thou be
very Christ and God? Put off, then, whatever the eternal Word did not put on.
The eternal Word never put on a person.
So do thou strip thyself of everything personal and selfish and keep just
thy bare humanity; thou shalt be to the eternal Word exactly what his human
nature is to him. Thy human nature
is no different from him: they are identical: what it is in him it is in thee.
And hence I said at Paris that every prophecy of holy scripture is fulfilled in
the just man; for being perfect, the whole promise of the old and new testaments
is accomplished in thee.
How to be perfect? There are two aspects of the question.
The prophet says, 'In the fullness of time the Son was sent.' Now fullness of time is of two kinds. In the first place a thing is fulfilled when it is done, as
day is done at eventide. So when
time drops from thee thy time is fulfilled.
Again, time is fulfilled when it is finished, that is, in eternity.
Time ends when there is no before and after; when all that is is here and
now and thou seest at a glance all that has ever happened and shall ever happen.
Here there is no before nor after; everything is present, and in this
immediate vision I possess all things. This
is the perfection of time, and I am perfect and I am truly the only Son and
Christ. May we attain to this
fullness of time. So help us God.
Amen.