SPIRITUAL
POVERTY
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.