Sayings of Meister Eckhart: God born in the soul, part one

This is Meister Eckhart, from whom God hid nothing.

Meister Eckhart said in a sermon that the work God works in the God loving soul, when he finds her empty and detached enough for him to bring about his spiritual birth in her, this work gives God greater pleasure than any work he has ever done with any creature, and is far nobler than the creation of all things out of nothing.

When asked why this work gives God such pleasure, he said it is because God has no creature except the soul with a capacity large enough for him to pour his whole might, the whole ground of his being, into her, as he does in this act of begetting himself spiritually in the soul.

When asked what the birth of God is, he said that God being born within the soul is nothing other than God revealing himself to the soul in some new knowledge and in some new way.

Then they asked him, does the soul's highest happiness consist in this act by which God brings himself forth in her in a spiritual way? He said, though it is true that God takes greater pleasure in this act than in any other deed he has ever done concerning a creature, still the soul is happier being reborn into God. Her blessedness depends on more than God being born in her alone: she is made blessed when, in love and praise, she follows this wisdom into which she is born, back to the source it came from, and in their shared origin, holding to what is his, lets go of what is her own, finding her happiness in what is his alone.

Meister Eckhart said, a man of godly love and godly fear and perfect faith may, if he will, receive God's body every day at the priest's hands.

The question is, what does God do in heaven? The answer given by the saint is this: he crowns his own work. The works God crowns his saints for, he himself worked in them.

Meister Eckhart says, I have been asked what God is doing in heaven. I answer, he has been giving birth to his Son from eternity, he is giving him birth now, and he will go on giving him birth forever, with the Father in labor in every virtuous soul. Blessed, three times blessed, is the one within whose soul the heavenly Father is thus brought to bed. All that she surrenders to him here she will enjoy from him in life eternal. God made the soul for the purpose of her bearing his only begotten Son. His birth in Mary in spirit was more pleasing to God than his birth from her in the flesh. When this birth happens today in the good, loving soul, it gives God greater pleasure than his creation of the heavens and the earth.

Meister Eckhart says, the one who is at home everywhere is worthy of God. To the one who is always the same, God is present. And in the one in whom all creatures are stilled, God bears his only begotten Son.

Meister Eckhart says, holy scripture cries out for freedom from self. To be free of self is to be self-controlled, and to be self-controlled is to possess oneself, and to possess oneself is to possess God, and to possess everything God ever made. I tell you, as surely as God is God and I am a man, if you were entirely free from self, free even from the highest angel, then the highest angel would be as much yours as your own self is. This way leads to mastery of self.

According to Meister Eckhart, grace comes only together with the Holy Spirit. It carries the Holy Spirit on its back. Grace is not something fixed, it is always becoming. It flows straight out of the heart of God. Grace does nothing but re-form the soul and carry her into God. Grace makes the soul like God. God, the ground of the soul, and grace belong together.

The question is asked, does God pour his grace into a power of the soul or into her essence, since no creature is allowed into the essence of the soul? The answer is that grace belongs to the soul and nothing else, and grace without soul is not grace at all. It has no substance of its own, for it is not a true creature, it is of the created order. For grace to be grace it must have the soul as its ground, for if God poured his grace into a single power of the soul, only that power would benefit. That is not how it works. He pours it into her essence, and her essence works by grace in all her powers.

Meister Eckhart says, practice is better than precept, but the practice and the precept of the eternal God is a counsel of perfection. If I wanted a teacher of theology I would go to Paris, to its learned university. But if I came to ask about the perfect life, that teacher could not tell me. Where then am I to turn? To pure, bare nature, nowhere else. That can answer your anxious questions. Why, good people, do you search among dead bones? Why not seek the living sacrament that gives eternal life? The dead give nothing and take nothing. An angel seeking God as God would look for him nowhere except in a quiet, solitary creature. The heart of perfection lies in bearing poverty, misery, contempt, hardship, and every trouble that comes, willingly, gladly, freely, eagerly, calm and unmoved, and holding to it to the point of death, without a why.

Meister Eckhart said, whatever it is that kindles devotion in a person's heart and binds them closest to God, that is the best thing for them here in time.

He also says, to be the Son of the heavenly Father one must be a stranger to the world, far from self, whole-hearted, with a mind made pure.

O man, renounce yourself, and so win the prize through effortless virtue, or hold on to yourself, and lose it through virtue that costs you effort.

Meister Eckhart says, the one who is always alone is worthy of God, and to the one who is always at home, God is present, and in the one who stands always in the present now, God the Father bears his Son without ceasing.

Meister Eckhart says, the one for whom God is different in one thing than in another, and for whom God is dearer in one thing than in another, that person is a barbarian, still in the wilds, a child. The one for whom God is the same in everything has grown into adulthood. But the one for whom all creatures mean loss and exile has come into his own.

He was also asked, does the person who goes out of themselves still need to be concerned about their own nature? He answered, God's yoke is easy and his burden is light. No, they need only be concerned about their will. What the beginner fears, the one who is practiced delights in. The kingdom of God is for none but the thoroughly dead.

Every hardship God sends is a kind of invitation. I do not thank God for loving me because he cannot help it, it is his nature to do so. What I thank him for is that in his goodness he cannot stop loving me.

The highest the soul can reach in this life is a settled dwelling that is without all things, in all things. To be without all things means to be detached, entirely free from self and from things. To be in all things means to rest perpetually, held still in her eternal idea, in the image of every form, shining, undivided.

Eckhart said, there are people on earth who carry our Lord in spirit as his mother carried him in the flesh.

They asked him who these were. He answered, being free from things, they see in the mirror of truth, into which they have entered without knowing it. Their dwelling is on earth but it is in heaven, and they are at peace. They go about like little children.

Meister Eckhart said, in my judgment, the person who, for the sake of charity, accepts a gift of bread is better than the one who gives a hundred marks to charity. How do I make that out? I argue it this way. Doctors agree that honor is worth far more than temporal goods. Now the one who gives a hundred marks to charity gets back in praise and honor more than his hundred marks were worth. The hand he stretches out with gifts collects more, and better, than it gave. But the beggar who stretches out his hand for bread is trading away his honor. The giver buys honor, but the one who takes it sells it.

There is another way the beggar who receives has the advantage over the one who gives a hundred marks to God. The giver takes pleasure in his gift and satisfies his own nature. The beggar is putting down his own nature and going against it. The giver is praised for his gifts, the beggar is looked down on and avoided for accepting them.

Meister Eckhart said, I never ask God to give himself to me. I ask him to purify me, to empty me. If I am empty, God by his very nature is bound to give himself to me, to fill me.

How do you become pure? By steady longing for the one good, that is, for God. How do you come to have this longing? By denying yourself and turning from a liking for creatures. Knowing oneself is the way, for creatures are all nothing, and they come to nothing once thought through, leaving only bitterness.

God, being pure good in himself, can dwell nowhere except in the pure soul. He overflows into her, he flows into her whole. What does emptiness mean? It means turning away from creatures, with the heart lifted to the perfect good, so that creatures give no comfort, and there is no missing of them except as the perfect good, namely God, is to be found within them. The clear eye tolerates no speck of dust any more than the pure soul tolerates anything that clouds her or comes between her and God. The creatures she enjoys are all pure to her, for she enjoys creatures in God and God in creatures. She is so clear that she sees through herself, and God is not far to find. She finds him in herself when, in her natural purity, she flows into the pure Godhead above nature, where she is in God and God is in her, and what she does, she does in God, and God does it in her.

Meister Eckhart said, to die the death in love and knowledge is more noble and worth more than all the good works that holy Christendom has done in love and knowledge from its beginning until now, and will ever do until the day of judgment. These works only serve to bring about this death, this death out of which eternal life springs.

Meister Eckhart says, we fail to get our way with God because we lack two things: deep humility and a will that is real. I swear on my life that God in his divine nature is able to do all things, but this he cannot do, he cannot leave unsatisfied the soul that has these two things. So do not trouble yourselves with trivial things. You were not made for trivial things, and the glory of the world is only a mockery of truth, only a false version of happiness.

Meister Eckhart, asked about God's greatest gift to him, answered, there are three. First, the ending of carnal desires and pleasures. Second, divine light that shows me everything I do. Third, that every day I grow and am renewed in virtue, grace, and happiness.

Meister Eckhart says, a high aim comes from a high nature. The vision of God is a high calling, I say. God is all powerful, but he is powerless to stand against a person of humble and great desire, and if I fail to get my way with God, it is for lack either of will or of humility.

Meister Eckhart says, as a person comes to be like God, and God becomes dear enough to him that he no longer seeks what is his own in time or in eternity, he is released from all his sins and from the pains of purgatory, even if he has committed every sin there is. And this life can be reached while he is still eating and drinking. He also teaches, to be the Son of the heavenly Father we must be strangers to the world, far from self, pure in heart, turned inward.

On one occasion Brother Eckhart said, there are five things which, in whoever has them, are a sure sign that they will never fall away from God. First, no matter how painful the things that come to this person from God or from other people, he never complains, nothing is heard from him but praise and thanks. Second, even in the hardest times he never speaks one word to excuse himself. Third, this person wants from God only what God freely chooses to give, and nothing else, he leaves it all to him. Fourth, nothing in heaven or on earth can disturb him, his calm is so settled that even if heaven and earth were turned upside down he would still be entirely content in God. Fifth, nothing in heaven or on earth can lift his spirits, for having reached the point where nothing in heaven or earth can make him sad, nothing can make him glad either, except in small, passing ways.

A person as far removed from his own self as the highest angel of the Seraphim would have that angel for his own, just as that angel belongs to God and God belongs to him. And that is the plain truth, as surely as God is God.

St Paul says, the whole world is a cross to me, and I am a cross to the world.

Meister Eckhart the preacher said, there is no greater courage, no harder fight, than the fight to let go of self, to forget self.

Brother Eckhart said, not all suffering is rewarded; only what is cheerfully agreed to. A man hanged on the gallows, suffering unwillingly, would rather it had been someone else. There is no reward for that. Other kinds of suffering are the same. It is not the suffering that counts, it is the virtue in it. I say, for the one who does not suffer for love, suffering is suffering and hard to bear. But the one who suffers for love does not really suffer, and his suffering bears fruit before God.

According to Meister Eckhart, every sign, every holiness, every perfection possible to a creature, our Lady had to the highest degree. Take her holiness: it was so great that our Lady never sinned. As for signs, she had the greatest one of all, that of being God's mother, though our theologians argue that our Lady was far happier uniting God to the Godhead than she was in giving physical birth to God. As for the overflow she received from the divine nature, she was worthy of it, since she carried God in the flesh. A soul overflowing like this spills over into the body and makes the body like itself, and so she was God's mother in the flesh. Some doctors say that mental states affect the body more than physicians do with all their medicines. God is never born except in souls that have put creatures under their feet. Our philosophers say, perfect rest is freedom from all motion.

On St Peter's words, 'We have left all things,' Meister Eckhart comments: you have said it well, for weighed down you could not have followed him. It is no bad trade, giving up everything for God: through him everything is given back, and once you have him he stands in place of everything.

Meister Eckhart said: what our Lord did, he did for this purpose and this alone, that he might be with us and we with him.

Brother Eckhart preached, saying: St Peter said, 'We have left all things.' St James said, 'We have given up all things.' St John said, 'We have nothing left.' And Brother Eckhart asks: when do we leave all things? When we leave everything we can think, everything we can say, everything we can hear, everything we can see, then and only then do we give up all things. When we give up all things in this sense, we grow flooded with light, bright with God.

Whoever would be what he ought to be must stop being what he is. When God made the angels, the first sight they saw was the Father with the Son sprouting from the Father's heart like a green shoot from a tree. This blessed vision they have had for more than six thousand years, and they understand it today exactly as they did when they were first made. This is because of their sharp perception: the more we know, the less we understand.

MEISTER ECKHART

In the Book of Wisdom it is written, 'all men are fools in whom there is no knowledge of God, for men are mortal without God.' Without divine wisdom we are without God, and to be without God is to be without truth, for it is God who teaches truth. Not being in God means being in lies and without wisdom. One can be worldly-wise without being God-wise, but this is foolishness in God's sight, wisdom without wisdom, more foolishness than wisdom. The question is, who has this heavenly wisdom? Meister Eckhart says: the one who in deep and genuine humility so yields himself to God that his will is wholly God's will and God's will is his, as the prophet Isaiah says, 'God teaches true wisdom to none but the humble.' And in the Book of Wisdom too we read, 'where there is meekness there is true wisdom.' Also the pagan teacher Ptolemy says, 'among the wise, the humblest are the wisest.' According to Meister Eckhart, humility goes with love: lowliness without love is dead, for virtues are virtue only by virtue of love.

'And so shall a man order his life if he would be perfect.' On this Meister Eckhart says: works done from within are pleasing both to God and to man; they are good and living works. They are worthy of God, for he alone does in man the works that are wrought from within, as the prophet Isaiah says, 'Lord, all our works you have wrought in us,' and Christ too said, 'My Father who is in me, he does what I do.' Such works are both easy and pleasant to the one who does them, for all actions are agreeable and pleasant to a person when body and soul are in harmony, and this is the case in all these works. Again, these works are living works: the dead animal differs from the living one in that the dead one is moved only from outside, it must be pulled or pushed, and so its actions are all dead actions. The living animal moves itself wherever it wants; its power of motion is within, and its actions are living actions. In the same way, those works of people which come from within, where God himself moves, works that belong to our very being, these are our works, works of God, useful works. But works that come from some outward cause and not from inner being, these I say are dead works, they are not works of God nor are they truly ours. Meister Eckhart also says: works done from within are willing works. But what is willing is sweet, so works from within are always pleasant, while works due to some outward cause are unwilling and forced, for if nothing moved them from outside no work would be done at all, so such work is reluctant, servile, bitter.

Meister Eckhart said: no one in this life can reach a point where he is excused from outward works. However much a person lives the contemplative life, he cannot entirely avoid flowing out into the life of action. Just as a man with no money can still be generous in his will to give, while a wealthy man who gives nothing cannot be called generous, so no one can have virtues without practicing virtue at the right time and place. For this reason, those who live the contemplative life and do no outward works are deeply mistaken and entirely on the wrong track. What I say is this: the one who lives the contemplative life may, indeed must, be completely free from outward works while he is actually contemplating, but afterward his duty is to do outward works, for no one can live the contemplative life without interruption, and the active life fills the gaps between times of contemplation.

Meister Eckhart says, and so do other teachers, that there are two things in God: essence and regard, that is, relatio. According to these teachers, it is not within the Godhead itself that the Father bears his Son; the Father in his essence simply looks into his own naked essence, where he sees himself in all his power, himself by himself, without the Son and without the Holy Spirit; there he sees nothing but the oneness of his own essence. But when the Father turns to regard himself, to reflect on himself in another Person, through this act of looking back he begets his Son, and being fully satisfied with himself in this regard, finding this reflection utterly delightful, he must, since all joy is his forever, keep looking back forever. So the Son is as eternal as the Father, and from the mutual delight and love between the Father and the Son comes the Holy Spirit, and since this love between the Father and the Son has existed forever, the Holy Spirit is as eternal as the Father and the Son, and these three Persons have one simple essence and are distinct only as Persons: the Father's Person was never the Son's nor the Holy Spirit's Person; all three have their own Person, though they are one in essence.

Meister Eckhart says, and so do other teachers, that no one has merit apart from his intention, and the why behind a person's action is the measure of his merit, nothing else. So anyone intending, anyone striving, for something less than God is not worthy of God, unless he loves that creature, whatever it is, in God. Lovers of God have no reward but God; God rewards them with himself.

Meister Eckhart says, and so do other teachers, that in the order of nature it is always the higher that is more ready to pour its power out into the lower than the lower is ready to receive it. The highest heaven, for instance, turns far more quickly than the others that run against it. However fast the lower heavens race against the upper one in order to receive its influence, the highest heaven will still move harder and faster, both in speed and in what it pours out. In the same way God is far quicker to pour out his grace than man is to receive it. There is no lack of God in us; whatever lack there is comes entirely from us, who fail to make ourselves ready to receive his grace.

The question is, when do the passions have no choice but to obey the mind?

Meister Eckhart's answer is this. When the mind is fixed on God and stays there, the senses obey the mind. It is like hanging a needle on a magnet, then hanging another needle on that one, until there are four needles, say, hanging from the magnet. As long as the first needle stays attached to the magnet, all the other needles will stay attached to it too, but when the leading one drops, the rest will fall as well. So while the mind stays fixed on God, the senses are subject to it, but if the mind wanders away from God, the passions break loose and become unruly.

Why is it, Meister Eckhart asks, that people are so slow to look for God in earnest? His answer: when someone is looking for a thing and finds no trace that it exists, he searches half-heartedly and in low spirits. But when he comes across some sign of what he is hunting, the search grows lively, cheerful and earnest. The man looking for fire, encouraged when he feels the heat, searches for its source with eagerness and pleasure. It is the same with those seeking God: feeling none of God's sweetness, they grow listless, but sensing the sweetness of the divine, they pursue their search for God gladly.

Meister Eckhart asks: whose prayers does God always hear? And Meister Eckhart answers: whoever worships God as God, God hears.

But the one who worships God for the sake of worldly goods does not worship God at all: he worships whatever it is he wants from God, and uses God as a servant to get it. As St Augustine puts it, what you love, you worship; true prayer, real prayer, is nothing but love: what one loves, one prays for, and so no one prays rightly to God except the one who prays to God for God alone, with no thought of anything but God.

Meister Eckhart says, and so do other teachers, that whoever wants a virtue should look for it at its source, namely in God, where we find all the virtues gathered into one virtue. The one who finds a single virtue there finds every virtue in that one, and in reaching the unity where all virtues are one virtue, the soul sees God and God looks on the soul. The soul is embraced by God, who, speaking with her as a familiar friend, teaches her universal wisdom, and once God and man are fully reconciled, man becomes lord of every creature, of all the good things that have flowed from God, as it is written in the Book of Wisdom, where the wise man says, 'all good things have I received in you alone': in virtue I have received all the virtues.

According to Meister Eckhart, God is the Father of all good things, and he is also the mother of all things. He is Father because he is the cause of all things and their creator. He is the mother of all things too, because once creatures have received their being from him, he still stays with them to keep them in being. If God did not remain with creatures after they began their own life, they would fall out of being at once. To fall away from God is to fall from being into nothing. Other causes differ from this: they can safely leave behind the things they cause once those things have being of their own. Once a house exists, its builder can leave, because the builder alone does not make the house, he draws the materials for it from nature. But God gives the creature the whole of what it is, both its form and its matter, so he must stay with it or it would drop out of existence at once.

Meister Eckhart says, the one who does some good deed without doing it wholly for God's sake, without any thought but God, darkens God's glory. All good works belong to God. So if a person, in doing a good work, carries some intention toward anything other than God...

he gives to it the honor of the work and robs God of his glory, and all such works are sterile and unfruitful.

The question is, does the virtue of prayer increase with the outward practice of it? Meister Eckhart says that the external habit adds little or nothing to the value of prayer. Prayer is a good thing in itself. Now a thing that is good because of its quantity is not good in virtue of itself. One groat has little value all alone, but if you had a thousand groats that would be a handsome property, solely by reason of the number. Groats have small value in themselves apart from number. And so it is with outward practices: number adds little to the good of prayer; one Ave coming freely from the heart has greater power and virtue than a thousand from the lips. And by the same token, no virtue lives in number of good works; virtue is every bit as fine, as good, in one small act of virtue rightly done as in a thousand. Virtue is not increased by multiplying outward acts of virtue, for if it were good because of number it would not then be good in its own right. A thing good in itself is good in its oneness, not in its multiplication. True virtue means virtuous works done virtuously. Whoever gives alms in God's name but gives it grudgingly and not with a cheerful heart, even though he does a virtuous deed, does not do it virtuously. And so with prayer or any other virtue: done rightly it is virtue, but not otherwise. Take patience for example. External suffering does not make one patient: it merely tests one's patience, as fire tests a penny to see whether it is silver or copper. The patient man is patient still even when outward suffering never comes his way. And prayer is the same. The man of pure heart turned toward God who never does a single outward work is nonetheless in good standing, for hearts are not made pure by outward prayers: prayer rises pure out of pure hearts.

Doctors of theology declare that God moves all things, that is, all creatures, but creatures cannot move God. God can move creatures for he has created all creatures and it is he who keeps them in existence. But creatures cannot move God: no creature can affect God, according to the universal law that the lower does not flow into the higher. Now creatures are inferior to God so they do not influence God, therefore they do not move God.

In this connection some ask how God can move creatures and not be defiled by creatures which are full of fault. The masters answer: if, as we see, the sun can shine on mud and filth without being contaminated, then how much more can God protect himself from any taint of creature. But Meister Eckhart argues in a different way. He says God is in all things but so as to be wholly outside things, hence faults in creatures do not affect God. Just as we see the soul whole in the eye and at the same time whole outside the eye, for she is whole in every limb, no flaw of the eye can touch the soul, which is in such a way wholly in the eye as to be independent of the eye. Even so God in creature is wholly without creature, untouched and untainted by creature.

There is another answer Meister Eckhart gives: God is only in the essence, or being, of a creature. His argument runs thus. Essence is without defect, defect being nothing but a falling away from being. Now since no defect can touch the essence, and God is only in the essence of a creature, therefore God is unaffected by the defects of creature. Regarding this astonishing fact of deity John Chrysostom observes, 'That God is in all creatures we know and declare, but how and in what manner we do not understand.' Yet Meister Eckhart says it is quite plain if for the word God we put the word being. We see and have abundant proof that being is in all things. But if actual being is God it follows then that God must be in all things.

So the wise man says in the Book of Wisdom, 'Eternal wisdom is all-powerful for it is one.' Upon which Meister Eckhart comments thus. The simpler a thing is the more powerful and effective it is. We can show this as follows. In a thing made of parts the power of the thing lies in its parts. In a house made of walls, foundations and roof, the whole strength of the house consists in these parts. If the house could draw from its oneness the virtue it gets from its walls, then it would need no walls. Now God is the simplest possible good, in whom all things are one, and as one he is therefore all-powerful. Again, the pagan doctors say that power scattered is weakened. It is so with the mind. Scattered among many creatures it is that much weaker and feebler toward God. But when the mind gets rid of creatures, when all the senses dissolve into mind, then mind and desires being joined in one, the mind is strong enough to wrest from God whatever it wants. When man does what is in him not even God can refuse him.

In one of his sermons Meister Eckhart said. It is my humility that gives God his divinity, and the proof of it is this. God's peculiar property is giving. But God cannot give if he has nothing to receive his gifts. Now I make myself receptive to his gifts by

my humility, so I by my humility do make God a giver, and since giving is God's own peculiar property I do by my humility give God his property. The one who would give must find a taker; without a taker he cannot be a giver, for it is the taker by his taking that makes the man a giver. So God, to be the giver, must find a receiver. Now none but the humble can receive the gift of God. So God, to use his godlike power of giving, will also need my humility; without humility he cannot give me anything, for I without humility cannot accept his gift. Thus it is true that I by my humility do give God his divinity.

Meister Eckhart also said, my lowliness raises up God, and the lower I humble myself the higher I exalt God, and the higher I exalt God the more gently and sweetly he pours into me his divine gift, his divine inflow. For the higher the inflowing thing the more easy and smooth is its flow. How God is raised up by my lowliness I argue thus: the more I abase and keep myself down the higher God towers above me. The deeper the trough the higher the crest. In just the same way, the more I abase and humble myself the higher God rises and the better and more easily he pours into me his divine inflow. So it is true that I exalt God by my lowliness.

Meister Eckhart says. We ought not to have to ask God for his grace, his divine goodness, we ought to manage to take it ourselves without asking. God has established himself in his divine outflow just as the flowing...

Meister Eckhart points out how Isaiah says, 'Your light has come to you,' the light which is eternal, unchangeable and new and inconceivable, free and your own; well may your heart both wonder and rejoice.

The question is, how is it light if it is inconceivable? How does it come if it is unmoving? How can it be called yours if it is free? I answer first, that light is God, which is light in itself and which is light in all created things and in which all creatures are light. For to begin with I hold that light has the peculiar property of being clear and luminous in itself and, in others, a revelation. But this belongs only to God. So I say the light in itself is God. The second point is argued thus. If everything caused is a manifestation of the first cause, then the light of intellect in us is surely God; no mind can see the naked truth in a created light, for nothing gives what it does not have. Augustine says, 'Our mind can only see the naked truth in light which is perfectly simple and pure, God, that is.' The third point is proved as follows. If creature is light and God is light, as has been shown before, then creaturely being is merely a light within light-being. But one light within another produces only one light, so it is true.

Speaking of light, now if it is so that in this life our minds can see the naked truth by means of the light that is God, then it is also true that man may here see God, and it must also be true that man is here made blessed.

I answer that, although here a man may see the truth by means of the light that is God, he nonetheless does not see what God is, using this light as a means. I say, even if he sees God as he is, he is not yet blessed, for God as a means belongs to the nature of creature. Understand, God does not give blessedness as being the beginning, when he is of the nature of all things, nor as being the means, where he is of the nature of a creature, nor even as being the end, for then again he is all things, nor does he give blessedness as being all of these, but he gives blessedness precisely in that he goes beyond them all; he gives blessedness as being God undivided, as being simply pure light in himself.

If you should ask, how is he light, being incomprehensible? I answer, being incomprehensible, therefore he is the light. I say, moreover, incomprehensibility is the nature of light, and this is plain, for his incomprehensibility comes from his endlessness. But his endlessness comes from his simplicity, from his purity, which constitutes lightness in God. It is well said then, God is light. But know this: this vision of the truth in the divine light is gained in no school of creatures, it is learned in the school of renunciation, of complete detachment from creatures, and for such learning the school is heaven, the book is your empty heart, eternity is your reading, your teacher is uncreated light and truth is your teacher too. This is what David meant when he declared, 'Lord, in your light shall we see the light.'

Then take the second question. How does he come who is without motion, and how does he come who is without place? To whom does he come who is in all hearts?

I answer, he does not come as anything at all, nor as gaining something for himself, but he comes putting in order; he who was hidden comes and reveals himself. He comes as the light which lay hidden in people's hearts and in their minds, now taking shape in intellect and will and in the deepest being of the soul. He is in the inner man in such a way that there is nothing without him and there is nothing there with him: he is there all by himself. He comes, appearing in the mind and in the will, nothing at all without him, nothing at all with him, but mind and will are full

of him alone. There seems nothing with him, nothing without him; the mind is simply the place of God, a Godstead to itself and nothing more, as David sings, 'Lord, the light of your countenance has risen upon us,' as though to say, holding your peace, with sighing and with sorrow, through intellect turn your will round to feel the charm of God. Speak with him as man to man, and as you do speak with God in the first person and of God in the third, so speak to God in the second person. Forgetting everything, aware of God alone, say to him, you are my God, you alone are within, you alone are all things. Creatures are not receptive to God, except those that are made in the image of God, like angels and man's soul: these being God-receptive, he is in them and they in him. To others God is necessary, not that they have gained him but simply that they have no being without him. Not because of his presence do they see him, does she see God in her innermost depth; nor is it by his power, for he is powerless apart from her; but we can do nothing without him. God being in the soul as in himself, therefore the soul is called a place, and soul is also called the place of peace, for where God is as it were in himself there is the kingdom of heaven and peace untroubled, joyous and delightful. The blessed soul is at rest in God as in her own, and more so.

A person who has gone completely out of himself finds God in God at once, and God with God. He behaves like God, for what he is, he is to God, and what he is to God, God is to him. God belongs wholly to him and is wholly him, and he is wholly in God and is simply God. They are so completely the same that one cannot be without the other.

The soul is no different from Christ except that the soul has a born nature and a created nature. Christ does not have this in his eternal Person. If the soul put off her born nature and her created nature she would be entirely the same, pure essence itself. I say, put off your created nature. It is easy to put off the creature, for this is a labor of love, and the greater the pain the greater the joy.

Whoever has three things is loved by God. The first is being free of possessions, the second is being free of friends, and the third is being free of self.

Meister Eckhart said that in the essence of the soul we can surely see and know God. And the closer one is acquainted in this life with the soul, the closer one is acquainted with God. The only way is to let go of creatures and escape from self. Listen. However much I love creatures for God's sake, I can never love God in creatures as perfectly as I can love him in myself. You have to go out of yourself and then back into yourself again. There lies the home of truth, which no one can find who looks for it in outward things. Mary Magdalene, when she left creatures and turned into her own heart, found our Lord there. God is unmixed and pure, so I can find God only in what is pure. But my inner soul is more undefiled and pure than any creature, so my best chance of finding God is down in my own soul. And I am also the life in God, for 'All that is in the Father is the life in him,' as John said. In this way the Father bears the Son, and in this very birth I proceed from him. Now he says the Son is in him, in the very depth of his heart. But since all that was made in him is the life in him, I too am this life in the innermost heart of God. 'And the life was the light of men,' said John. Notice, he says the divine light in us is our light, in which we see everything conceived in the mind.

God is being, perfect being, and without him there are no beings, for all beings come from his being. May we be this same being. So help us God.

According to Meister Eckhart, there are seven degrees of contemplation. Whoever wants to practice contemplation should find a quiet place and begin by thinking how noble his soul is, how it has flowed straight out of God, a thought that fills him with great delight. Having thought this through well, let him next consider how God must love his soul to make it in the likeness of the Trinity, so that all that God is by nature he may be by grace. This will delight him even more strongly, for it is far more noble to be made in the form of the Trinity than merely to come straight from God. In the third stage he considers that he has been loved by God forever. The Trinity has existed forever, and God has loved the soul forever. Fourth, he reflects that God has always intended him to enjoy with God what God has always enjoyed and always will, namely God himself. At the fifth stage the soul enters into herself and knows God in herself, and it happens like this. No being can exist without being, and being feeds on being. But being cannot live on this food until the food is converted into the same blessed nature as that which feeds on it, and this applies to being that is being-of-itself. But there is no being-of-itself except God, so my soul lives on nothing but God. And by entering into oneself like this one finds God in oneself. If God wants me not to fail he must give me being. No being can stand without God, so if he means for me to have being, he must give me himself.

The sixth stage is that the soul knows herself in God. Like this. Everything in God is God. Now my idea has always been in God, is still in God, and always will be, so my soul is forever one with God and is God, and I find myself in God in the high way of being God in God eternally. This brings the experienced soul joy beyond words.

At the seventh stage the soul knows God in himself as being without beginning, from whom all things came. This knowledge comes to no one fully in this life, for it would mean seeing God directly, and that belongs to another world.

Notice this: all our perfection, our whole happiness, depends on our passing through and beyond creatures, time and condition, and entering the cause that has no cause.

God will never give himself openly to the soul unless she brings her husband with her, that is, her whole free will.

What the joy of the Lord is, no one can say. But note this much about it. The joy of the Lord is the Lord himself and nothing else, the Lord being living, inherent, actual intellect, which knows itself and is and lives itself in itself and is the same. I give it no mode at all, I strip it of every mode, for he himself is the modeless mode, who is and is glad because he is. This is the joy of the Lord and it is the Lord himself. White is not black, and nothing is not something. From nothing, nothing can be taken. From something, something can be taken, and this is wholly true of God. Of anything that is wholly in God, nothing remains outside. The soul joined to God has in him, once and for all, everything that exists at all, in absolute perfection. There the soul forgets things and forgets herself as she is in herself, waking up in God, made godlike as God is in her, so in love with herself in him, so without distinction from him, that she enjoys nothing but him, delighting in him. What more should she know or want?

God, remaining still, sets everything in motion. Being so desirable, he starts all things running back to where they came from, back to what stays unchanged in itself. And the nobler the thing, the more gladly it runs.

God can no more put up with things like himself than he could put up with not being God. Likeness is not something that can belong to God. There is sameness in the Godhead, in eternity, but likeness is not sameness. If I am the same, I am not like. Likeness is not a kind of being within the One. There is sameness for me in the unity, not likeness.

The first work of God in the soul is the birth of his Son in the soul, and from this act all his other gifts flow into the soul, such as grace and virtue. What God can do in the soul is bring forth his Son in the soul, and this has to happen. It belongs to God's nature that he cannot hold back, he must beget his Son in me and in all of you. I say, God begets me as his Son, and I say the same of all of you. That we are all born of God as his Son is nothing strange. We can see this with creatures too. Now mark my words. I say, this man is the not. I am not what you are, and you are not what I am. Take away the not, and we are exactly the same. Take away the nothing from creatures, and all creatures are the same. What remains is one. What is this one? It is the Son whom the Father bears. To actually be the Son the Father bears, we must cancel the nothing in creatures. This nothing, which all creatures are, weighs a person down and stops him from being the very Son begotten by the Father. God asks us to part with nothing, so as to become the very Son the Father bears. For this to happen a person must become one. He must escape from images and forms before he can be the actual Son the Father brings to birth. He must be rid of everything, both what is foreign to him and what is his own, for God's Son and man's son are not two sons, they are one Son, one nature. So a person must flee from other natures as well as from his own, and stand in the bare nature of the Son within the Godhead, in that alone. What I am saying is that to be the actual Son the Father bears, one must give up one's own nature entirely. But many people have natures so foreign to their true nature, how then can they give up their own nature? We must always give up our own nature in order to become the very Son the Father bears. As St. Paul says, 'We must be changed into his Son.' In other words, since the Son alone is loved by the Father, whatever things the Father loves, he must love in his Son, and as we become this Son the Father bears, we are changed into his Son of love and become his very Son. Be sure of this. God will love them in us and in all creatures in the form of his only-begotten Son, provided we give up nothing, become strangers to nothing. We must give up all things, forget all things, keeping nothing but the single nature of the Son. It sounds like a great deal, but it is not. It is a simple thing God asks of us, he asks us to give up nothing. Whoever lives without a why has given up nothing, and by doing this we gain the whole world and abundance. Everything good comes to the good person, be sure of that. If I am better than you, then all the good you do and have belongs more to me than to you, because what you have, you have in nothing. But if I have given up nothing, I am the very Son the Father bears, and everything belongs to me in God.

What could be sweeter than having a friend with whom, as with yourself, you can speak everything that is in your heart?

When God made man, the innermost heart of the Godhead was put into man.

What is God's speaking? The Father, looking at himself with pure perception, sees into his own simple, uncompounded essence, and there sees the whole idea of creature. In doing this he speaks himself, and his Word, which is clear understanding, is his Son.

When we speak of man, we mean a person. When we speak of manhood, we mean human nature.

The learned define what nature is. It is the thing that essence can take on. God took on manhood, not a man. I say Christ was the first man. How can this be? What comes first in intention comes last in execution, the way the roof is the last part finished on a house.

The highest face of the soul has two activities. By one she knows God, his gift and his outflowing. In this she loves and knows God today, and not tomorrow. The image does not lie in these powers, because they come and go. There is another activity of the highest face, which is hidden. The image lies in this hidden part. Five things belong to this image. First, it is cast by another. Second, it answers to that other. Third, it flows out from it. Fourth, it is like it in nature, being a substance that exists on its own rather than sharing God's nature, pure light flowing out from God, differing from him only in that it knows God. Fifth, it tends toward the model it came from. Two things give beauty to this image. One is that it is arranged like him. The other is that it holds something of eternity within it. The soul has three powers. The image does not lie in them. But she has a single power, the active intellect. Now according to Augustine and the New Philosophers, memory, understanding, and will are found together here, and these three cannot be told apart. This is the hidden image that answers to God, with God shining straight into this image.

It is God's will that we be holy and that we do what makes us holy. Holiness is a matter of will and wisdom. According to the best authorities, holiness lies in the ground, in the summit of the soul, where the soul is in her cause, where she has outgrown names and even her own powers. For powers too are a falling short. We cannot give a name to God, nor can we name the soul in her own nature. The point where these two meet is holiness.

Essence is so noble that it gives being to all things. If there were no essence, angels would be like stones.

A learned doctor said once, preaching in the capital city, that there was a man, and we read of him in holy scripture, who spent a full eight years longing for God to point out someone who could teach him the way of truth. Then in a moment of strong desire a voice came from God and said, 'Go to the temple, there you will find a man to set you on the path to truth.' And he went and found a beggar, his feet all cracked and dirty, his rags scarcely worth three pence. He greeted him, 'Good morning to you!' The beggar answered, 'I never had a bad one.' 'How is that?' he said. 'Good luck to you!' The beggar answered, 'I never had bad luck.' He tried again, 'God bless you. What do you say to that, sir?' The beggar said, 'I was never cursed.' 'God's mercy,' the doctor cried, 'explain this to me, I think it is beyond me!' The beggar said, 'I will. You wish me good morning and I say I never had a bad one. Hungry, I praise God; freezing, I praise God; poor and forsaken too, I praise God, so I never have a bad morning. You wish me good luck; I say I have never had bad luck. Whatever God gives or chooses to send me, sour or sweet, good or bad, I accept it all from God as the best, so I never have bad luck. You call down God's blessing on me. I answer, I am not cursed. I have given my will up entirely to God's will, so that whatever God wills, I will. That is why I am never without blessing, because I have no will but God's.'

'Well then, good sir, suppose God chose to throw you into hell, what would you say to that?' 'Throw me into hell?' said the beggar, 'that would be spiting himself! Yet if he threw me into hell I should still have two arms to hold him with. One arm is true humility, and this I would put under him, embracing him at the same time with the other arm, which is love. It is better,' he said, 'to be in hell with God than in heaven without him.'

Meister Eckhart said to a beggar, 'Good morning, brother.' 'The same to you, sir, but I never have bad ones.' 'How is that, brother?' he asked. 'Whatever God gives me to bear, I suffer gladly for his sake, thinking myself unworthy of it, so I am never sad or sorry.' 'Where did you first find God?' he asked. 'By leaving all creatures I found God.' 'Where did you leave God, brother?' he said.

'In every man's pure heart.' 'What kind of man are you, brother?' he said. 'I am a king,' he said. 'King of what?' he asked. 'Of my own flesh. Whatever my spirit desires of God, my flesh is more eager and more ready to do and to bear than my mind is to accept it.' 'Kings have kingdoms,' he said. 'Where is your kingdom, brother?' 'In my own soul.' 'How is that, brother?' he asked. 'When, having locked the doors of my five senses,

I desire God with all my heart, then I find God in my soul as clearly and as joyfully as he is in eternal life.' He said, 'Granting that you are holy, who made you so, brother?' 'Sitting still and thinking deeply and keeping company with God has brought me to heaven, for I could never rest in anything less than God. Now that I have found him, I have peace and rejoice in him forever, and that is more than any earthly kingship. No outward act, however perfect, fails to hinder the inward life.'

Meister Eckhart met a lovely naked boy. He asked him where he came from. He said, 'I come from God.' 'Where did you leave him?' 'In virtuous hearts.' 'Where are you going?' 'To God.' 'Where will you find him?' 'By leaving all creatures.' 'Who are you?' 'A king.' 'Where is your kingdom?' 'In my own heart.' 'Mind that no one shares it with you.' 'I take care of that.' He took him to his cell and said, 'Take any coat you like.' 'Then I would be no king,' he said, and vanished.

It was God himself whom he had had with him for a little while.

A daughter came to the Dominican convent asking for Meister Eckhart. The porter said, 'Who shall I say is asking?' She answered, 'I do not know.' 'Why do you not know?' he asked. 'Because,' she said, 'I am neither virgin nor spouse, neither man nor wife nor widow nor lady nor lord nor serving girl nor slave.' The porter went off to Meister Eckhart. 'Do come out,' he said, 'to the strangest creature I ever heard of, and let me come too, and you put your head out and say, Who is asking for me?' He did so. She said to him what she had said to the porter. He said, 'My child, you have a sharp and ready tongue, I beg you now, what do you mean?' 'If I were a virgin,' she replied, 'I would be in my first innocence; a spouse, I would be bearing the eternal Word within my soul unceasingly; were I a man I should grapple with my faults; a wife, I should be faithful to my husband. Were I a widow I should be forever yearning for my one and only love; as a lady I should render fearful homage; as a serving girl I should be living in humble service to God and to all creatures, and as a slave I should be working hard, doing my best to serve my master faithfully. Of all these things I am not a single one, who am the one thing that runs to meet the other.' The doctor went away and told his students, 'I have been listening to the most perfect person I think I have ever met.'

This fragment is entitled, 'Meister Eckhart's Daughter.'

MEISTER ECKHART'S FEAST

Meister Eckhart tells how once upon a time a beggar came to Cologne on the Rhine seeking poverty and the life of truth. A noble lady approached him, 'Eat with me, brother, for the love of God!' 'Gladly,' he said. When they were seated she encouraged him, 'Eat heartily, do not be ashamed.' 'It is wrong,' he said, 'to eat too much, and wrong to eat too little; the just measure lies between: I will eat as a beggar.' 'What is a beggar?' she asked. He said, 'It means three things. First, being dead to natural things. Second, not having an excessive desire for possessions. Third, wishing suffering on no one but oneself.' 'Tell me,' she asked, 'what is poverty of the inner man?' 'That also means three things,' he said. 'First, complete detachment from creatures, which come from God, in time and in eternity. Second, deep humility of the outward and inward man. Third, an active inner life, the mind unceasingly drawn up to God.' 'What is poverty of spirit?' she asked. 'You want to know too much,' he said. 'I can never know too much,' she said, 'of God's glory and man's happiness.' 'True,' he said. 'That too means three things. First,

knowing nothing but God, in time and in eternity. Second, not seeking God outside oneself. Third, owning no property that one carries from place to place.' 'But surely, Meister Eckhart, our father, must take from his cell the sermons he preaches from his pulpit?' 'Not he,' he said. 'Where then?' she asked. 'The more it comes from beyond time, the more it is his own; the more it is his own, the more it comes from beyond time.' 'I think,' she said, 'this guest is not from Bohemia.' He said, 'The sun that shines here in Cologne is shining also in the city of Prague.' 'Explain,' she begged. He said, 'It is not my place to, with Meister Eckhart present.' Meister Eckhart said, 'Whoever knows nothing of the truth from within, if he seeks it from outside, shall find it within too.' 'The bill is paid,' she cried. And he said, 'Lady, you provide the wine.' 'I am not unwilling,' she answered, 'if you ask me.'

(So Meister Eckhart asked her), 'How do we recognize the working of the Holy Spirit within our souls?' She answered, 'In three things. First, in the daily lessening of personal concerns, desires, and natural love. Second, in the daily growth of divine love and of grace. Third, in the eager charity that moves us to act for our neighbor's sake before our own.' He said, 'Our Lord's friends show this.' Then he asked, 'How does the spiritual man recognize God's presence in his prayer or his practice?' She answered, 'By three things. First, by the goal he sets before himself, namely scorn of the world and suffering of the body. Second, by a growth in grace matching the love between himself and God. The third is that God never leaves him without a hint of some new truth.' 'That is indeed so,' he said. 'Now tell me, how does he know whether what he does is wholly in keeping with the sovereign will of God?' She answered, 'By three things. First, clear awareness never fails him. Second, he has unbroken union with God. Third, the heavenly Father keeps giving birth to his Son in him, through inspiration.' Meister Eckhart said, 'If every bill were paid as well as this one for the wine, many a soul in purgatory would this day be in eternal life.' Then the beggar put in, 'What remains is for the Doctor to pay.' 'Leave the old to their age,' Meister Eckhart protested. 'Then love shall settle it,' the beggar said, 'love that never fails.'

The lady asked, 'Tell me, father, how does one know oneself to be a child of the heavenly Father?' He answered, 'By three things. First, one does everything out of love. Second, one takes everything the same way from God. Third, one puts hope in no one but God.'

The beggar asked, 'Tell me, father, how do we know whether virtue is doing her perfect work in us?' He answered, 'By three things: loving God for God's sake, loving good for good's sake, loving truth for truth's sake.'

The Doctor asked, 'My children, how does the teacher of truth live?' The lady said, 'He practices what he preaches.' The beggar cried, 'Agreed. But the truth in his heart, no words can tell it.'

As the eternal Word is the birth of the heavenly Father, so is the will of God the birth and the becoming of all creatures.

THIS IS MEISTER ECKHART'S FEAST

LIBER POSITIONUM

1. Here the disciple is supposed to question his master, saying,

'Tell me, could God, if he wished, have made all things as good as he is himself?' The master said, 'Yes, what God wills he can do.' 'Are all things made of his own nature?' The master said, 'No.'

2. The disciple asked, 'What is the soul made of?' 'She is made out of nothing.' 'Where did God get the nothing he made the soul out of?' 'Some say he got it in himself. That is not so, for in God there is no nothing: what is in God is God.' 'But God has all things in himself, and outside God is nothing. Surely then he gets this nothing out of himself?' The master said, 'No, not at all! He gets it neither inside himself nor outside himself, neither above himself nor below himself. There is no getting nothing from inside or outside. If it were gotten from anywhere it would not be nothing. Whatever does this, takes nothing from nowhere and makes something of it, is God. So the argument runs that the nothing is gotten from nowhere. They asked St Augustine about this mysterious nothing out of which the soul is made, and where, apart from place, this nothing hides. His explanation was that this nothing is openly enclosed between God and the Godhead, in his almighty power. If it were shut up somewhere it would not be nothing: it would either have a place or else be God by nature, the soul being made of the nature of God. But it is not. Therefore this nothing is at large in the almighty power of the Father, for whom it is as easy to get nothing from nowhere as to get something. It belongs to his omnipotence to be able to take nothing from nowhere and from it create something. Whatever can do this is God.

3. Now another question. Dionysius says, Tell me, what about the soul who is in full enjoyment of her rights: what is it that she has by rights at the height of her perfection? By rights the soul has knowledge: clear understanding of all things and is so mellowed by love as to be all unwitting, when people love and hate her, whether she is not dearer to her haters than her lovers. And this soul has by rights absolute freedom from herself and things: sunk in the sovereign good she cannot find herself at all. Here we have two natures. One, the thing that sinks; the other, what it sinks in. She sinks eternally but never touches bottom. This

sinking shows her two things. In sinking from herself she is more God than creature. The fact that she does sink proclaims her creaturely, for deity does not sink. But when she has yielded her aught to his aught and her naught is subsisting in naught, then what will belong to her aught and her naught? None can tell, but she has no more than her rights. That is the answer.

4. Another question is, has the soul more enjoyment in the source of joy or in the vision of its wonders? Consider what she has in each. In admiring its wonders she obeys the same wondrous law that the first cause laid down for all causes as befitting each. But the soul does not stop here, she transcends wonder. The wonders have become her potential being. So her enjoyment is much keener in the source of joy than in the beholding of its wonders. In the source is her home, not in its wondrous vision. There all wonders end; there all is one to her and one in all. That is the answer to this question.

5. The question is, if the Godhead has all things how is it then that it neither gives nor begets? If it does not beget it is not Father. The explanation is this. Man's nature is called manhood, and manhood as such neither acts nor begets; it acts and begets in a human person. And the same with Godhood: it contains all things and yet is not active and productive in itself. What it does is all done by the Persons in person and nature. The Godhead is called fruitful in that it is brought forth in the Persons, in Person and essence.

6. An angel may do three things in the soul. Either he confronts her with the scriptures or with the holy life or, again, with the example of Christ Jesus, showing her something clearly as though in a mirror in which one may spot some blemish on the human face and so proceed to cure it. Thus she sees herself, what she still lacks; where she is not yet all that she ought to be; what things to leave and what to keep; how much or little she should give herself to things: all this she plainly sees. And whatever an angel can do the devil may very well copy. 'Have we no means of telling, Sir, if it is an angel or the devil?' Yes, they are very different. Tests for angel and devil are as follows. Anything an angel does is done in the light, orderly and clearly, and the soul rejoices in the kindly presence of the angel; also it is a sign by which to know him, that she is left with a sense of pleasure. In counterfeiting this the devil makes it vague, confused, uncertain, and the soul, frightened at this haunting of the fiend, is restless and troubled and by this she may know it is the devil.

The angel talks virtue to the soul, the fiend talks virtue too but God does not talk virtue. 'For the love of God, good Sir, tell us what you mean.' I will explain. The angel talks virtue to the

soul and his talk, which is of necessary virtue, is friendly and persuasive, something in this fashion: 'See, there is still this to do and that to do and the other to leave off': orderly counsel and plain, and the soul finds peace in complying with his words. The devil talks virtue too, but he urges unnecessary virtues: too much fasting and watching and kneeling, too much weeping, and his counsels are more in the nature of commands, as thus: 'Do this or that or you are damned,' or 'you are not good nor perfect.' An excess of uncontrolled virtues with no clear aim, that is his way, and the soul is frightened within herself and gets no satisfaction from his words. But God's talk is not of virtue though it is wonderful talk. The sum of it is a fair Word that is very good to hear. The Holy Ghost goes before the angel and embracing the soul prepares her to receive what the angel has to say; and the Son gives wisdom and order to the words and God the Father gives help and completion to that which is spoken in the soul. Thus God does not talk virtue in the soul; he goes ahead of the angel and prepares the soul, giving wisdom, order and completion to the angel's words in the soul; the Holy Trinity all work together in her without speaking.

7. The statement that our Lord from time to time holds converse with good people and that they hear words or become impressed with the sense of certain sayings such as, 'You are my chosen one, or my beloved; you shall never leave me and I will never leave you,' and things like this, I say, should be accepted with reserve and judged on their merits, for words of this kind are often due to a trick the soul has, when indulging in comfortable intuitions of divinity, of answering herself by a sort of reflex action. When the soul, flooded with God, is empty and free from sensible affections she grows quickly in created light till nothing goes beyond her but intellect and intrinsic knowledge. In this detachment the knower is the known; out of her own light she creates what she desires. Such is the effect of the kindly reign of fundamental understanding. Aristotle says in the third book of The Soul, 'Every immaterial substance or isolated form is in itself both the knower and the known,' and this is why the soul, cut off from bodily things by the encircling flood of God, draws God-shaped truth out of her own self. It follows that anything in her of which she has a rational perception is not said by God: God's speech is nothing other than the perfect image of divine truth in which the spirit is caught up out of its selfhood, past understanding, into intellect. There in unity she understands without understanding.

8. To drag the hawthorn through the hay without catching, we must trim it well, like our Lord Jesus Christ, the tree of love, who

dragged the hawthorn through the hay of this wicked world, so stripped of all its branches that nothing could cling to it, and so he caught up nothing that was unstable. And to reach him we must be too bare for things to cling to us or for us to cling to them. We take up our cross when, stripping everything of self and self of everything, we cling all pure and naked to the bare cross of Christ.

9. He who loves rightly does not love, nor is he loved. They love and are beloved who can be pleased and pained: they pour out themselves in love on creatures and creatures pour back on them. But they do not love nor are they loved who are not moved by creature good and ill; these neither give nor take; they do not pour out on creature nor does creature pour back on them. They do not love, neither are they loved. We ought to love God out of love. They love in love who love for a reason: who love him for some bodily or temporal good. But they love out of love who love without a why; who do not love for temporal good nor even eternal good: they love him simply for himself, for his own sake, pure and simple, apart from anything he gives.

10. We read of John the Baptist that he was a prophet. He was more than prophet, for when the Holy Ghost from time to time spoke by the prophets they were afterward as they were before, in sinful habit. Prophets are people who are now and then called to play this part. While the Holy Ghost is speaking through them by actual infusion of his grace they are exercising virtue and afterward they go back to their former habit: they are called virtuous as practising virtue off and on: they do right and also wrong. Not so St John; he was more than prophet, for he practised virtue not now and then, it was his natural and settled way. And those who follow him in this are not prophets either, they are more than prophets, since they see in the clear light of God exactly what to do and what to leave undone, and have been given the godlike power to act on their light with effortless, spontaneous delight and delightful spontaneity. These are called virtuous not because they practise virtue off and on: they are fixed and established in it. That thing is habitual which we do at one time and not at another; it is an alternation. That is not habitual which is continuous and without mixture.

11. A good man is known by three things. One is singleness of will: by this we mean his will is free from nature. The second is clear understanding: whatever mental knowledge his soul has, she has fully mastered it: she deepens it either here or there in the common ground during illumination. The third is peace of mind: such images as may occur in it are no hindrance to the soul.

12. Three things mark the solitary soul. The first is,

cessation of desire: no more wants or sense of lack. The second is active love for and acceptance of the will of God. The third is a living feeling in the soul of the love of the Holy Ghost.

13. Divine good in the singular, no body or blood receives, but it does receive God's manifold goodness. It is simple divine good for the spirit to be caught up out of itself into God's oneness, there to understand without sensible perception. But God's manifold goodness means anything revealed to her in form and likeness, for this all belongs to the mortal nature. The heavenly Father gives his comfort to none but the man of peaceful heart. Christ said to his disciples, 'My peace I give unto you.'

14. Let no one claim to have received the perfect gift of the Holy Ghost, if he can be shaken in his convictions by any arguments that are disturbing. I mean things that are spoken against our knowledge of eternal truth.

15. Nature comes with God into the creature and, driving God out, remains alone in the creature. Spirit goes with the creature into God and, driving the creature out, stays by itself in God. The most perfect state of the soul is one of self-forgetting in good works as a whole, and the way to it is the clear discernment of particular imperfections. In the smallest mortal pursuit there is at stake all the appetite of natural creatures. Effortless achievements are wiped from the mind as though they had never been. It is true wisdom to recognize the folly of evil and the freedom of perfection.

16. Hosea the prophet, caught up in wonder, was shown a threefold marvel. The first was how God is one in essence and three in Person. The second marvel, somewhat less but still beyond words and beyond the grasp of any creature, is this: how two natures meet together in one Person. The third marvel is the marvel of marvels: how creator is creature and creature is creator. The prophet Hosea says, 'His going forth is prepared as the morning; he shall come unto us as the soft evening rain.' Here the morning light suggests the nearness of his coming: the dawn is the herald of the day. The day dawns three times. First in the chamber of the Person of the Father. Next, in the chamber of the Person of the Son. Third, in the world. The first dawn was the will of the Father; the second, the obedience of the Son; the third broke when their common Spirit caught the precious, most pure drops of blood that ever flowed from the virgin heart of Mary. Once the fire of love is kindled, he no longer delays: day is here.

17. Suppose a man insults me and I silence him with my retort, it is not I who win: I am defeated. I win if, in true humility, I hold my peace. Winning we are defeated, and being defeated we win.

18. It is a question whether angels grow in heaven. I say they do. They go on growing until the day of judgment, increasing in knowledge and love, so that by then the lowest will be about as wise as the highest was when he was created. 'But tell me, Sir, does the soul grow in heaven as well?' I say, No. 'But why, Sir, should the angel grow and not the soul?' For this reason. The soul grows in the body, and when she leaves the body that is her judgment day: the highest she has reached by then is the nearest she will ever get to knowing God. But her growth is far nobler than an angel's, for what an angel has comes without any effort of his own; hers is the reward of labor, so that one light of hers is worth ten of any angel's.

22. Three kinds of progress take place in serious people. The first is natural; when, fought to a finish, a person's nature is overcome and subdued, then at last he sees all random thoughts as things he can turn to his own account, and we to ours. Not a single notion but will serve to bring light to pious people, and this light is inherent almost as much as natural; inherent, though by grace, a divine distaste for all base inventions. The second kind of progress is unconscious. The person is made spiritual so that his words, his ways, and his whole self enlighten other people with a recognition of their own shortcomings. Nature asleep, spirit wide awake, that I call light, and it is a light to other people, and the devil shrinks back from it. 'Sir, tell me, what is he afraid of?' The devil does not know what is in the soul except what he can recognize by its outward form. Suppose her brimful of light, then divine light comes surging out of her, and when the fiend sees this he is afraid and dare not test her with a notion, so the soul stays undisturbed. Which is to her credit though she does not know it herself. The third progress is spiritual. When such a soul is flooded with the inflow of God's spirit, love reinforces love, light reinforces light, giving a love which sets the soul on fire and which she cannot fail to be aware of. The first growth is conscious, the third also is conscious, and the middle one unconscious.

28. Plato says, 'The soul of all creatures is the Godhead.' Then our Lord Jesus Christ is the soul of the elect.

24. The question is, what is the effect on a person of the body of our Lord Jesus Christ? I say that its effect on a person is to clarify his nature and prevent him from committing mortal sin. On the enlightened it grants another gift, receptivity to the divine light, and then though they die they will have nothing in between.

27. Please, Sir, one to whom eternal light is given, suppose he were to die, would he have anything in between?' Once having had eternal light he never has anything in between.

28. Tell me, good Sir, what is divine light?' With divine light the natural life is no obstacle to the eternal light, or in other words, there is no consenting to sin. When we are unable to act up to our light, that is a sign that we have not received eternal light. Knowledge together with the power to apply it, that is eternal light. Whoever receives eternal light takes everything the same way.

29. But even good people are sometimes troubled: do they then have no light?' When our Lord Jesus Christ was drawing near his passion, his agony of suffering pierced his soul and called forth the rebuke to Judas at the table and to St Peter on the mountain, to whom he said, 'Could you not watch with me a while? You who promised to be with me unto death.' But he did not on this account lose the light of unity. Once again in harmony with his Father's will he was filled with joy at having, in accord with that will, submitted willingly to pain. Being moved involves no loss of light: anything conceived in time is moved in time. While we are in time we are affected by time. But the more unshakeable one is, the more one is established in eternity. By their deeds you shall know them.

30. Only he can do God's will who gives up his own. We are strong in proportion as we are inspired with divine power to withstand the things that come between ourselves and God. When we stand in our original innocence, then at last we begin to live.

31. But when is a person in a state of original innocence?' Original innocence is not reached without divine light. Simple, original innocence holds when the pattern of all virtues is present in a person and he stands without hindrance of nature in the eternal truth. It is only by treading upon creature that we reach the bottom rung of Godhood. 'What is the bottom rung of Godhood?' It is spiritualized nature.

32. Sir, is it better having and giving, or not having and letting?' Letting is better than giving. Giving adds more shine, letting shows more spirituality. We shed our blood; the saints let their blood be shed.

33. Will you tell me, Sir, what causes the fading of tenderness?' 'What is the tenderness you mean?' 'I mean interior tenderness.' To have it is a sign of immaturity; to lose it shows growth toward adulthood. The father pets his child while the child is young, but as the child comes to know its father's will he seems to grow less fond, and this less visible fondness is a sign of the child's approach to adulthood. With the soul it is the same. God's tenderness toward her shows that she is not yet mature, but as she grows in knowledge and steady harmony with the will of God, he fills her with less instinctive fondness, and this is a sign she is developing.

35. That alone is perfect which does not seek for anything outside itself. Whatever we can say about perfection, that we can reach. A gentle person is one whose calm no trouble can disturb. We stand before God while we do not cross the will of God.

36. When does God work in a person without hindrance? God finds no hindrance in a person who takes both good and ill from God with the same thankfulness.

37. Sure proof of true humility is the fearful joy of being praised. For on coming into touch with truth and finding in himself a witness to it, a person feels pleasure but fears it as a likely cause of his undoing.

38. The truly loyal heart receives with bitterness inventions of the soul which are not sent by God. The heart is kind whose graciousness holds firm through every good and ill.

39. The treasure of God is loss of possessions, people's contempt, sickness, and submission to God.

41. Our Lord Jesus Christ did not grow at all in eternal light; but in beholding the things he taught, he took particular pleasure.

42. Pious people should imitate the deified man, Christ. By imitating Christ I mean becoming Godlike. What I mean by Godlike is this: your words, deeds, and conduct being free from what is merely human. By human I mean imperfect. In proportion to his imperfection a person can be moved by anything or anyone. 'What do you mean by moveable?' By moveable I do not mean only impatience: I call moveable anything affected by either good or ill, anything that can in any way be something to someone, or to whom someone can in that way be something, and I call immoveable only that which nothing can affect and which affects nothing. That person then I call immoveable to whom good and ill are just the same, who is as far as possible free from the stirrings of both joy and sorrow. It will never be natural to him that his feelings stir apart from his mind. But once the mind takes charge, it is all over, and things are as they were before, and then the person is no longer a mortal man, he is man made divine.

43. Good people have three sorts of expert knowledge. First, the intelligence is sharpened so that it judges correctly the smallest thing set before it: they measure its degree of sensible mixture exactly and can act accordingly. Second, when they have something to do they can always tell whether it comes from the ground of God or the ground of nature. Third, their understanding is so fine that any ghostly form, the very faintest light, that appears to them, they recognize as devil or spirit.

44. The true test of interior perfection is that nothing you do from without casts any shadow within.

45. When the Godhead began to consider how mankind could be restored to its original perfection, the Father sat in council in the chamber of the Holy Trinity. The Father said, 'Who shall we send to save mankind?' The Son answered him and said, 'Father, send me: I will save mankind.' Then the eternal Word of the heavenly Father, that is to say his Son, who is the middle Person of the Holy Trinity, bent down and clothed himself in human nature. Remaining what he was, he took on what he was not, and was thus obedient to his Father in heaven, and not in heaven only but on earth as well. Obedience to his Father and love toward mankind drove him to complete all his Father's work.

46. Sir, for God's sake, may I ask you something I want to know, something very subtle?' 'By all means. Whatever it may be and however subtle, I will try to answer. Ask me what you will.' 'Well, what I want to know is this: was our Lord Jesus Christ hindered in any way by doing outward works?' I can give you a clear answer to that. The soul of Christ was never an independent thing on its own. The moment it existed, it was Christ; the instant it was made, it was united; first one and then the other, it is true, yet both outside time. At his first appearance Christ was taken from independence into the keeping of the middle Person of the Trinity, where in inherent wisdom he gazes without flinching at the naked fullness of the divine perfection. From the moment Christ's soul and body were united with the Godhead, his soul has been gazing at the Godhead as it still does today. As for the lower powers of his soul, which work in the body and make possible his preaching and teaching and the other things he did, there the joy of contemplation was somewhat lessened, affecting the pleasure of seeing rather than the seeing itself. But the higher powers of his soul, in which he was united, remained always in unveiled contemplation. Now I have explained both how Christ was hindered and how he remained unhindered. One more thing, and let that be the key to the whole matter. The hindrance belonged to the body rather than the mind. But even so he never failed in the smallest point to carry out the mission his Father sent him on, preaching and teaching and doing outward works by which he earned reward and honor.

47. Could Christ earn reward?' There are two rewards; one of them Christ earned, the other not. One reward we earn by our good works is the vision of the Godhead. This reward Christ did not earn, since from the moment Christ's body was united with the Godhead, his soul has been gazing at the Godhead, as it still does today. The other reward we earn by our good works is the glorifying of the body together with the soul after the day of judgment, and this reward Christ did earn by his holy life, his body being glorified together with his soul at his resurrection. Now you know how Christ did earn reward, and also how he did not.

48. Just one other thing.' 'Tell me, what is that?' 'You say that Christ gained honor. What honor did he gain?' Christ holds the title of the Head of Holy Christendom, and this honor Christ won by his holy life.

49. A person to whom eternal light is given, is he still prone to sin in time?' One to whom eternal light is given may still stoop to imperfection, and sometimes falls an easier prey to frivolity and such venial sins than another person. 'What causes this tendency?' It comes from being absorbed in one simple thing; a crowd of images disturbs the soul, tossing her about with their various notions. Once she has grasped unity she is pulled apart by diversity. But as soon as she begins to see, it is as though it had never happened, and she can free herself completely without the slightest effort, which is a sign that she has eternal light. To see and be unable to escape would show a lack of eternal light. Now you know how it is that people, even with eternal light, are prone to sin. St Paul sinned after he had been caught up.

50. The first and noblest work of God is motionlessness: divine rest. It stands to reason that the maker of the motionless is himself unmoved. If God were not immoveable, nothing motionless could be made. Aristotle says all moving things come from rest and from necessity, and moving things are all seeking rest. A person likewise ought to be as motionless as possible. 'When is a person motionless?' The soul is motionless when nothing at all can disturb her, when she is neither glad nor sad and cannot be made glad nor sad. And she must be without need. 'When is she without need?' The soul is without need when she has no need to cling to any creature, and beyond having no need, it is a torment to her to dwell on the form of a creature, since there is no rest for her except in the formless form of God. She is without need when she has come into her own and, with no need of change, rests in the needless nothingness of his unchanging nature.

Sir, what did St Paul mean when he said, We shall be one spirit with God? When is the soul one spirit with God?' 'She is one spirit with God when she has no image and nothing between. And she turns to spirit when she is not subject to any creature's love or appetite.'

Sir, what is perfect love?' 'Perfect love leaves nothing less than God.' 'Please tell me what you mean.' 'I mean that those who hold on to nothing but God cannot settle for anything less than God, if they are as they should be. Natural ties have been cut.'

Tell me, Sir, for the love of God, is it possible to pray or ask something of God quite unselfishly?' 'Oh yes. I will tell you how. There are two cases of unselfish prayer. The first is on our own account, that we may be rid of some imperfection that comes between us and eternal truth. The second is prayer for someone else's sin, knowing the facts and that he wants to be free of it. For these things we may pray, and eagerly. But our human will must stay within the will of God, like this: Lord, you know I desire nothing and will nothing except what you will. If you know something better, give me that, so losing what is mine and keeping what is his.'

Sir, what about the man they sometimes talk of among devout people, who puts such store by physical hardships and long prayers? Is that the best thing, or is there something better?' 'The strongest bond we can have is innocence, a blameless life, and being completely without guile. It is best to drop words altogether, for words come between us and God.'

What is the sign of union with God's will?' 'Complete singleness of mind. It is characteristic of the gracious, godlike mind to draw much wisdom even from a small error. The least thing beyond what is strictly necessary will count. Every act of Christ is a devout teaching. An angel's nature is his intellect, and his intellect is his undivided nature.'

He to whom light is given becomes aware of the darkness in all creatures.

Will you tell me, Sir, why Solomon says, The righteous man falls seven times a day? What is this falling of the righteous man?' 'It is the slipping of his soul from the highest point she can reach, the failure to stay at the very summit where she rises above creatures into God. That is the fall of the perfect man.'

When does one person love another in God without any mixture of nature?' 'The sure test of pure, divine love is that it is aware of nothing but God, and is always lit by that awareness.'

Why does a man ask for things he does not need, and keep on doing it even knowing this is so? What is he doing it for?' 'It is nature. When the appetites are not under control, a man will ask for the impossible.' 'But suppose it is not impossible, not even unlikely, and he is self-controlled. What then?' 'I tell you, it is still nature. It is nature mixed with divine nature.' 'Yes, yes, good Sir, but leave nature out of it!' 'That I will not do.'

What is an angel?' 'Angel, like soul, is a perpetual nature. The soul has no parts, no this and that. Wherever she turns, she turns as a whole.'

What is true virtue?' 'In true virtue a man has no active craving of the heart. He knows what is right and is able to live up to it, by the strength of his original nobility.'

What is the sign of eternal life?' 'Freedom from hate is a sign of eternal light. To the extent that we fall short in love toward all people, we never truly have it.'

Tell me, Sir, when are we exercising discrimination?' 'When we know one thing from another.' 'And when are we above discrimination?' 'When we know all in all, we go beyond discrimination.'

What does St Paul mean when he speaks of redeeming the time, because the days are evil? He calls the days evil because of the changeableness of time. He says, redeeming the time. When is time redeemed?' 'Let me tell you. To do a good work only pawns time rather than redeeming it. It is a good work to rest from sin and practice some virtue. To do better work is not redeeming time either. One who perfects himself by practice does better. To do the best of all, that is what redeems time. The best of all is to rest in the embrace of God.' 'But is that really redeeming time?' 'It certainly is. Time is not redeemed within time. The redemption of time is the spirit's atonement above time, in the spirit that stands beyond time.'

Will you explain that sentence in St John's epistle, Blessed are the dead that die in God? When do we die in God?' 'When everything that stands between ourselves and God has died.' 'Then tell me, what is the joy of spirits in eternity? Are they always finding something new in God?' 'I tell you truly, if they did not always find it new, eternity would come to an end. If there were anything in God that a creature could exhaust, eternity would end and heaven would cease to be.'

Sir, what is true wisdom?' 'True wisdom, as one philosopher says, is the knowledge of all created things and of the creator who made them.'

According to St Paul, the closest bond of love a man can have is agreement of will with God. Our Lord in his love made eternal provision for all human suffering when his Son died on the cross.

He follows hardest on the heels of God who leaves all temporal things behind and holds fast to the eternal.

Joy is the reward of virtue, says one of the saints. Tell me, when does a man give creatures their due?' 'When he knows them and lets them go.'

A saint says: as long as we will this and refuse that, our free will is not surrendered to God. If a man does what he should, God will do what that man wants.

Sir, how would you define grace?' 'I define grace as that in a man whom no joy or pleasure can make glad, and no pain or hardship can make sad.'

The most effective prayers come from willing learners, whether from a creature or from the spoken word.

When does God work in a man without hindrance?' 'When he receives good and bad from God with the same gratitude.' 'But is that the same gratitude, or each thing received with its own gratitude?' 'They must be received with the same gratitude. Time always stays true to its own nature, but if soul and body were moved into eternity, motion itself would cease. The less you can be moved, the more you are established in eternity.'

Sir, when is virtue present in a man?' 'Virtue is present in the soul the way memory and knowledge and love are present in the soul, for they are spiritual in their substance. Virtue is present in a man for as long as it is not driven out by disordered speech.'

Will you tell me, Sir, why we are sometimes quite unmoved by suffering, while at other times we welcome it gladly, and then again it easily affects us?' 'Suppose a man is by himself, with his senses drawn in from the many distractions of things and gathered back into himself. Then his soul will be unmoved, because God is present in her. But if his senses are scattered out over things and unsteady, held loosely to them, he will be easily affected. Then let him be careful about disordered speech. He must gather himself back and, in deep humility, simply turn to God in love: Lord, you know I can do nothing without you. And in an instant you are back in God.'

Tell me, Sir, is one truly detached when one gives no consent to sin, and when returning to the things one bitterly gave up would be just as bitter as the giving up was?' 'Yes, certainly.'

Is eternal light given to anyone who falls short?' 'Oh yes. It was given to St Paul.'

Is no holy soul made blessed if it has shortcomings?' 'Yes, thousands of them, if one counted.' 'But can no saint be made holy unless he has received eternal light?' 'Yes, many are.'

Sir, what do you mean when you speak of divine light and eternal light? Are they the same thing, or is there a difference? Do they consist in the same thing?' 'They are not the same. By one light we know, by another we are able, and by a third we act. Let me set out the difference. To perceive divine truth and respond to it, that I call divine light. I call it God's light because it is godlike. It is not God himself. It can be given by an angel or a saint. Eternal light I define as the perfect image of the undivided nature of God, and of it St Paul speaks when he mentions the third heaven, whose light is not directly present to us here in this body. We must return to our true selves. Ah, how wearisome is this exile! It is undivided light when the soul, leaving the body, flies straight back to God and is absorbed into his light. Her perception goes no further than this. And by undivided light I mean the vision of God with nothing between, no creaturely hindrance, no time, no looking back, in eternity. St John had eternal light. He knew the whole truth and reached it. All things were possible to him, but though he committed no mortal sin, he was still open to its suggestion. No one can escape that.'

What is the sign of eternal light?' 'It is a sure sign when everything that is not God becomes tiresome, and virtue has turned into a second nature.'

Too much talking, or too much attention to our daily needs, is fatal to a close relationship with God. If we want to escape the fires of purgatory, we must watch over all our ways, and especially our words. The cleansing fire of God's perfection is different from the love of the soul, though between them our imperfections are burned away.

Good people's food is a clear conscience, fellowship with holy souls, and regularly receiving the body of our Lord Jesus Christ. Neither the devil nor any creature ever gave anyone an appetite for the body of our Lord Jesus Christ. This comes from God alone, you may be sure.

Tell me, Sir, do we find in scripture any mention of rapture besides that of St Paul?' 'No.' 'But I am told three can be found. Adam was caught up while asleep, St John while resting on the breast of our Lord, and St Paul when he was struck down to the ground. Each of them saw God directly, without any image or likeness.' 'I tell you truly, before the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, no one had ever seen God in his divine nature except that golden temple, our Lady Mary, at the moment she conceived the divine and human natures. Then she received eternal light and saw God in his simple nature, but before that, no creature had.' 'Then what was Adam's rapture, and St John's?' 'When God created Adam, his body was made without pain, like his soul. You could have cut into him in his sleep and it would not have hurt him, because the lower powers of his soul were obedient to its higher ones, and the soul was subject to the law of her own perfect nature, unhindered by a gross body. This was his by right of nature. If he had remained at the summit of his soul, he would have stayed united with his maker. He knew that God had made him and that divine nature was meant to be joined with human nature, and he had clear knowledge of all creatures, each in the natural perfection in which God had made it, and he was carried away by the enjoyment of this sight. You should know that he was sleeping just as any man sleeps.' 'Then what was the rapture of St John?' 'He was resting. It is called rest because it resembles the stillness of our Lord Jesus Christ, and St John's rapture is called this because it resembles both of them, a gentle sinking into stillness of feeling. That is what his rapture was.'

85. Is a man liable to fall once he has had eternal light? -- I say, No. If Adam had seen God he would not have fallen, and the archangel Lucifer, if he had seen God in his indivisible essence, would not have fallen. -- I have heard it said that in ecstasy there is no interference with free will. Is that really so? -- It neither strengthens nor weakens the free will. Truly I say, anyone who holds that a man can fall after eternal light, even if he commits no greater sin than Saint Agnes did, will certainly die for it, for it is heresy and mortal sin to believe this. That soul can no more fall than Saint Peter could. The heavenly Father might as well abandon his Son as abandon the soul in which he has given his Son birth. If the Father ends, the Son ends; if the Son ends, eternity ends; if eternity ends, the soul ends.

86. Sir, when you speak of God's birth, of the Father begetting his Son in the soul, is this birth the same as the rapture of Saint Paul and what happened to the disciples at Pentecost, or are these different things? -- They are exactly the same. -- Then when you speak of eternal light, do you mean God's birth in the soul, or is that something else? -- I mean the same thing; they are identical. But I will say one thing. Birth is the better word and closer to the truth, though in reality there is no difference. I will tell you why. An angel by nature is eternal light; the sun is eternal light; the stars are eternal light. Eternal light is attributed to things that are not changed by time, and since we can attribute eternal light to creatures, we may also attribute it to man, though in an imperfect sense. But birth belongs to the heavenly Father alone, this birth in eternity. God catches the soul up to himself all at once, and his birth happens within it. There it is, for him, almost the same as the Son in the Trinity. I say almost, for it is there by grace, while the Son is there by nature. -- Suppose a man has eternal light, is he still prone to temporal sin? -- It was after Pentecost that Peter sinned.

90. Can a man be certain that he has nothing more to overcome? -- Saint Paul had things to overcome after he was caught up. And our Lord Jesus Christ had to overcome too. Though his soul and body were united with the Godhead, and the Godhead cannot suffer, his future sufferings were present to him, tormenting all the powers of his soul.

91. When the soul prepares for God by driving away thoughts and setting aside everything she has relied on, and tries to get rid of every means but cannot manage it, tell me, Sir, what ought she to do next? -- When all the images from outside are gone, let her humble herself and lovingly ask him for whatever she still lacks. -- But if she refuses to desire or ask anything, wanting to remain entirely simple? -- Then let her simply fix her mind on God with strong longing. -- But surely, Sir, longing is itself a means, and she wants to be completely simple and direct, without any images, free from this and that, with no word or prayer coming between? -- I say that is impossible in the unglorified body; she should not expect it. -- If that is so, Sir, then it seems to me her rule ought to be refusal, of outward things and of inward images, and that is her best way. -- There is no doubt of it; she can do no more. When a soul like this is caught up above herself into bare knowledge of nothing, it is God who does it, entirely at his own pleasure, freely, without any help from her.

92. Sir, can we accomplish everything our minds can grasp? -- No. I can conceive of things I cannot be; the unglorified body is not as agile as the mind.

93. What is a reasonable man? -- One who stays in control in both joy and sorrow, him I call a reasonable man. -- How would you define prayer? -- Saint Augustine says prayer is the soul's detachment from things and attachment to God. -- Tell me, Sir, can we be free of things all at once, without any trouble? -- No, it is always accompanied by pain; that pain shows the pull of something higher. If it comes without pain, it is nothing to rejoice over. It is true that Saint Paul lost everything at once, but afterward he had to conquer it piece by piece. What is won through suffering lasts.

94. What God has by nature in unity is not denied to any rational creature, by grace, in its own particular being. Rejoicing and sorrowing, that is nature. We must expect nature in people.

95. Sir, are we punished for faults? -- We are punished for sins and hindered by faults. -- But you said that when a man has eternal light he never has anything standing between him and God, and now you say he is still prone to sin. Do such people sin, and is sin punished with fire? You did say they have nothing between. How are these two things to be reconciled? How is the sin wiped away? -- By the perfect love of the creator for his creature and the creature for his creator: the sin lies between them, and in the fire of their love the sin burns away.

96. Do those to whom eternal light has come remain afterward in a state of love and vision? I wonder, being established in the one, where there is nothing but one, how they manage to be one and also other, for there is something in me, when the spirit grasps unity, that goes beyond all distinction. Are grace and vision and light all the same thing? -- No, not at all. Take an example. The stars are put out by the sun, and in the same way grace and vision fade once eternal light is given. The highest of the angels draws a form from God, and on receiving it, shapes it further for himself, and passes it down to the middle angels, who hand it on to those below, and the lowest give it to the soul, and the devil can imitate it. So people can be deceived. But the soul in whom the heavenly Father speaks his Word does not receive it through the lower angels: what the highest angel draws from God, he pours straight into this soul, without the rest having any part in it. Truly I say, people seldom or never receive, through angels, visions of such things as are given within time and temporal things.

97. What is the difference between nature and spirit? -- I call spirit that by which we know what we ought to have and what we ought to leave, whether we want to or not. Spirit makes us do it whether we like it or not. Not doing it, because we do not want to, that would be nature.

98. When does nature take the upper hand? -- When we hold on to something we ought to let go of and will not.

99. How would you tell the difference, Sir, between sin, fault, and weakness? -- It is sin to cling with desire to anything that does not lead toward God. By fault I mean any accidental falling short of God. And weakness may be defined as not keeping the mind fixed on God the whole time.

100. O fathomless Truth, cries Saint Paul, your ways are beyond finding out! When he cries O, he is thinking of the hidden treasure of the divine nature. -- What treasure? -- The wisdom of God. The desire of angels and souls is satisfied by nothing but the best. The wisdom of God is tasted when all creatures point us toward the best. The other treasure is God's art. In temporal things, art amounts to picking out the best. True art lets go of this entirely and rests in the ground of all things. Saint Paul was caught up above this wonder and above this O and saw the very thing he is still seeing today, while the bond of life meanwhile continued in his body the way form continues in its matter. His higher self received bare eternal light; the body was no hindrance; the soul received directly from God.

101. When is the soul above O? -- When she receives the simple impression of divine form, the image which is the Son himself, for this is how the Father is always letting the summit of the higher world down into the one below. -- Anyone on earth can be deceived except the one in whom the Father gives birth to his Son.

102. What is the sign of the eternal birth? -- While a man is subject to feeling and sense-affection he has no grasp of eternal truth. When he does grasp the eternal truth, no creature can comfort him or trouble him. The time Paul was struck to the ground he heard a voice that said to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' He said, 'Who are you, Lord?' -- 'I am Jesus of Nazareth.' The voice was not God himself: God was speaking through an angel. God can no more lose his own nature than utter his eternal Word in sound or image. God said through the angel, 'I am Jesus of Nazareth.' He said 'I,' referring to the indivisible 'I' of the divine nature. This shows the distinction between the Father and the Son. 'Jesus of Nazareth' points to the union of divine and human nature.

108. Saint James says, 'With the Father of lights there is no turning.' There are three kinds of turning: one of nature, another of will, and a third of power. I am speaking of the first. Turning means changing from one thing into another, becoming more or less, going back and forth. One philosopher says, 'All things are fighting their way back toward nothing.' If God withdrew his support, everything would fall back into primal chaos. The philosopher says all created things are in flux. What is in flux is what does not stay still in itself. If a creature could reach bottom, heaven would end and the creature would become God. There is no natural change in the Father of lights. Change comes from a longing for rest. If there were rest in him, the divine nature would come to an end and heaven would be finished. He does not change. What he has instead of change is begetting. If the begetting stopped, everything would fall back into its original nothingness. But what use is it to talk at length about God's nature if we are not aware of his image within us?

104. Pray, Sir, what makes the soul unchangeable? -- The stability of the soul rests on three things. First, that she has her body under control: what the soul wills, the body must do without question. If Adam had kept his natural perfection he could have done whatever he wanted, and every creature would have obeyed him. But when he fell, both his own body and all creatures stopped obeying him; they would no longer be true to the one who had been untrue to God. -- The second thing is to have no attachment to, and no enjoyment in, anything less than God. -- Third, no ground must be given to mortal nature. If Adam had stood firm he would never have become mortal. Adam, as God made him on the first day, would have lived until the day of judgment. Saint Paul says, 'From the moment God called me, I have not once looked back.' If Adam had seen God in himself he could not have fallen. He knew that God had made him, and for what purpose he had made him, and he looked at this with carnal pleasure. It was this, and nothing else, that carried him away.

105. When our Lord Jesus Christ was about to go up to heaven to his Father, his disciples stood with him at the place of his ascension, overwhelmed, unable to speak or pay attention, so taken up were they with the bodily presence of our Lord. And while they stood staring up at the sky, an angel came and said, 'Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking up into heaven?' Why be so taken up with something that, after all, cannot stay with you forever? The philosophers tell us that no creature stays still; it is always flowing back into its source. If the disciples had not been so caught by this sweetness, not one of them would have been so overwhelmed. This is why the angel rebuked them, saying, 'Why do you stand here?' as if to say, why fill your minds so much with the beloved bodily form of our Lord Jesus Christ? You are only wasting yourselves on temporal things which, after all, do not last. 'Why do you stand here looking up into heaven?' God is the form of the soul, the soul of the soul. When the spirit is caught up above all images, into the eternal truth, then the soul comes to rest and sees into heaven. It is man's highest happiness that she cannot rest until, freed from images, she is reflected back into the nothing where she has been eternally, beyond herself. The soul becomes Son when she is carried in this way over everything into the open where God is; then the soul draws out of God, and once she is as we have described, she stands at the door. She loses her own nature, drinking out of God, on the threshold of knowing, where nothing enters into her except the eternal. Eternal rest, then, is given to her by nothing but him.

Aristotle says that everything partial is painful, and the thing most unified is most painful when it is divided.

Three kinds of people receive God. The first receive him for pleasure. God tastes sweet to them in anticipation, so they welcome him selfishly, to their own cost, with little real profit. The second receive him out of necessity, to cast off sins, for without God they have no power to do it. The third let go of desire, and wanting nothing, receive him wisely and with real benefit. The benefit is this: they recognize each fault with sorrow, and in true repentance arrange things so that he finds in us the reflection of what we seek in him. In this way, getting him to dwell in us as we dwell in him, we reach the life of angels: the upward flight, the simple glance into God's nature, and at the end of each act the steady reflection of God, so that amid the many things of bodily need the soul is not shut out from the eternal, but remains united even in the midst of multiplicity.

Sir, is it possible for a mere creature to share in God's nature? -- No, for as Saint Augustine argues, God is far removed from matter, and what has no matter has no parts and cannot be divided. A creature can receive no part of God's nature, because God by nature cannot be divided into parts. -- I do not mean part, sir, in the sense of a fragment. I mean part in the sense of a community of spirit with spirit in the divine nature. That was my meaning in asking. -- You must allow for the difference among creatures. One kind is united, another is separated. See how one is united. The will of the Father and the obedience of the Son, seized by the power of their shared Spirit, worked within the bare chamber of the virgin heart of their chosen vessel Mary, using her most pure blood, and from it, with all his members, formed one faultless man, and poured into him a soul complete with its powers, all by the power of the Godhead. When, out of that darkness, where it had long been forming, a shining spiritual soul emerged, at once every imperfection was removed, and by the Spirit itself this soul was raised to the rank of spirit, and through the soul's sponsorship the body too was received. This is the pattern of union for united creatures. -- And how do separated creatures share in God's nature? -- Saint Peter says that creatures, according to their natures, share in God in three ways: as being, as life, and as grace. As being, all creatures without exception. As life, those creatures capable of receiving it, from angels and humans downward. Notice how the Father, by his power to generate, created through the sending forth of his Word. From his inward Word their shared mind burst forth, by nature the one angel of all creatures. Him he commanded to pour his moving power into the sun, and from the sun's energy, showered down upon the earth, trees, animals, and all humankind grew and multiplied. As for the soul, the heavenly Father draws up by his power the lower powers of the soul, the Son gives light to the middle powers, and the Holy Spirit, touching the sharpest point of her mind, flashes it back to the utmost edge of the Trinity's oneness. I say to the edge, to the boundary between united and separated creatures. For Christ, as he was in his first light, stripped of the personal distinction that the middle Person of the Trinity keeps within himself, where in inherent wisdom he is held fast, merged with God's complete perfection. Beyond this, the soul receives light from God's own revealing of himself. This is her 'something' and his causeless incomprehensibility. There her 'something' remains, engraved as a point, set within the splendor of his eternal nature of love. In this sense a mere creature receives and shares in the divine nature.

When do we lose God altogether? -- What do you mean by lose? What are you asking? -- I mean lose in the sense of knowing God as one without any other, free from matter and form, set apart from creatures, which are matter and form, one thing and another. So that no creature brings her any trace of God, even though they say God is in all creatures. How is this loss to be explained? -- I answer: three kinds of people are deprived of God. One in material creatures, another in spiritual substances, the third above creature and below God. In the first case the loss happens in creatures of coarse material nature. This happens when, her senses having had their fill of outward forms, she passes beyond their separateness into their whole. In this way she loses the dense part of their nature, and what remains to her is only the sweetness of their inborn nobility. In the second case, since no caused thing is higher than its cause, and the sweetness just mentioned comes from creatures while the soul comes from God, like him though not of his same nature, the soul, having had her fill of this sweetness without being satisfied, develops a new thirst, for a sweetness beyond words, a longing for her first happiness. This at last frees her from material nature and drives her toward pure knowledge of herself and of spiritual substances generally. Now she looks for delight among her own kind but does not find it, for creatures are all dry, and like gives no more to like. Only lasting actuality can quench her burning thirst. -- In the third case she loses her activity. It happens like this. All spiritual substances act all at once, though not within any instant of time. Losing her materiality all at once, she loses every use of her separated nature. This thirst is followed by the loss of all changing activity and by drawing near to the edge of eternity. Here she waits for the light of love in which she will see the Trinity. This waiting is shown in Mary, Mary standing outside the tomb, waiting in her outward helplessness for the embrace of the eternal nature. She saw two angels, one at the feet and one at the head. Seeing here means perceiving light. The angel at the head stands for the power of God's majesty, the one at the feet for his subtle nature. They asked her, 'Whom are you looking for?' This is because the incomprehensibility of God and her burning desire could not form a satisfying union by themselves. The question points to her inability to grasp his incomprehensible nature. She wants to take hold of the whole of him and cannot. She said, 'Jesus of Nazareth.' He is the keeper of this solitude. Turning, she sees him standing like a gardener: in the imprinted nature of the Person pictured within the ground of unity. He asked her, 'Whom are you looking for?' This is the blinding light beyond understanding, the glory at the heart of the Trinity, which outshines both her own dim understanding and the light just spoken of. 'If you have carried him away, tell me,' she says. She has lost her wits in the overwhelming light of the truth right in front of her. He says, 'Mary,' calling her by her own name. When the Father, stepping outside his own inherent personhood, brings forth from himself, as another Person, his Word, the perfect image of himself, he holds in his fatherly hand his undivided, blessed nature, and turning back in spirit to himself, is with himself as Son, almost as another. This is her name, of whose child David cries, 'You are my Son, today I have begotten you.' She wanted to touch him. Now look and wonder at her love for God. Not content with rising above every thought a creature can form, she wants to sink into the undivided oneness of the being of the Three, God with God, nature with nature, and lose the creature-nature that is hers, even though that would not serve her own highest happiness. For in that oneness she would lose her knowledge, her love, and her enjoyment, in other words, the very goal creatures are made for. Hence his warning, 'Do not touch me,' for this touching would mean pouring separated natures back into God, whereas it is to creatures, full of love and feeling, that the awareness of unbroken oneness brings the greatest happiness. Whether she runs into God or God runs into her, either way the loss is hers, because of the vastness of his intrinsic nature and the smallness of her creaturehood. All creatures, compared to their creator, are like a drop of dew to the ocean. He tells her, 'Go to Galilee, to my disciples, and tell them of my resurrection. There they will see me, as I said.' Truly a hard blow. She, who was not content with God in the likeness of the second Person, who wanted to be absorbed into his oneness, is told by Jesus to go to Galilee and carry word of his presence to mere creatures, she who could barely stand the thought of the universal Word in eternal oneness. She obeys him and goes there. To Galilee, in submission to Jesus. Galilee means crossing over, or passing through. There is no life in time that does not have to give way to bodily need. Her watchword from now on must be, 'I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.' She came to the brothers of Jesus, who are three. Unbroken union, perfect likeness to the mirror of eternity without the smallest difference, the complete surrender of the soul's powers, and the loss of all activity in the actual power of God, within the inherent nature of body and soul together. See how she loses God in the limited worth of the creature.

Love God with all your soul. -- What do you mean by loving God with all one's soul? -- Rising bare toward God with nothing standing between, that is what I call love with the whole soul. The soul's life is love, the soul's love is knowing, and her knowing is her being. The soul's true being is delight. The soul is never so close to God that God stands on one side and the soul on the other. Being does not contradict itself. Augustine says, God is the soul of the soul, and her being.

Sir, can a person be moved without sinning? -- When the animal passions stir, the movement comes from outside, not from within. Like a tree shaken by the wind, which is not torn out of the ground because its roots hold firm. In any case of disturbance, allowance has to be made both for the person and for the cause.

Can a person stay the same in good times and bad? -- Your bodily nature will always be tossed between joy and sorrow. That it can never escape. But the will stays the same through fortune and misfortune, without resentment even in the depths of suffering. The power to feel impatience is taken away from anyone given eternal light.

What do you mean, sir, by power? Please explain. -- I use the word power here in two senses. On one hand, there is the loss of the power to resent. Also, the power to be shaken is taken away from those granted eternal light. For them, losing their peace of mind would be like the torment of hell, and it is not possible. Joys and sorrows do not grow out of the ground of eternal truth. None of the things born of creatures are the seeds of truth, and that is the key to this whole matter of being unmoved.

There is something else that needs explaining. You say this power is taken away and they cannot act otherwise. Is this inability from nature or from grace? -- Nature works differently. If it were a natural inability, effort would be useless, which it is not. It is an inability that comes from grace. The soul is caught up in the blaze of divine light and held by the majesty of God, within the reflection of the inherent goodness of the third Person. There, the distinction of persons disappears, merged into the oneness of the Three. There she is lost to the multiplicity of creatures. That answers your question about the loss of power in devoted souls, and how they are unable to lose their peace of mind. Now, at last, they are all-powerful.

For the love of God, sir, explain one thing you often say. -- What is that? -- You say that the inability to live up to what one knows shows the absence of eternal light. A person who has eternal light can put what they understand into practice. She only has to see something, and already it is as though it had never been, and she is free of it. This troubles me somewhat, for I am never guilty of even the smallest fault without it first being suggested to my mind, and that does not stop me from doing it anyway. Tell me, sir, what is her core power? -- Core power is one thing. Her core power is will joined to love, and this cannot be captured by images, whether of the body or of the mind, so she remains fundamentally free, and that is what I mean when I say she is truly untouched by it.

I would like your counsel, sir. In the middle of forming a thought, right at that moment, I wish I could be completely free. -- That is not possible. Coarse matter will not allow it. The soul is quick by nature, the body is made of dense material. We cannot expect this dense material to move as nimbly as the soul while the body is not yet glorified. The eye receives color, the ear receives sound. There is no harm in that, and it is no obstacle to eternal truth. We should pay no attention to these things, it is true, but we cannot help it. Still, I can tell you one thing for your comfort: no will or love is lost because of these distractions. And I say further, when the power to will and love is absent, what remains is what I call core power. It is a sure sign of essence when nothing worked from outside produces any response within.

120. In the image-bearing form of God, which contains the form of all things without division, there shines the universal form, unformed in its oneness, radiating one single light into all spirits in different ways: into the highest spirits, as fits their stable nature, without reflection, and into souls in this body according to their fitness in this passing time. Notice how this image-bearing light, which the soul receives through its reflection, carries the soul beyond this mode of changing time into eternity, to the level of the highest spirits. When a mind habitually dwells in its eternal image, namely God, with more delight than in itself, to such a mind the image-bearing light appears in its eternal form. Then the mind is carried beyond these many changing things that exist in time and comes to live in them rather than in itself. Remember, we are dealing here with spirit, not with essence.

121. The image-bearing light of divine unity is undivided, and yet it is both essence and nature. Now the question is, how is it essence and how is it nature? The answer is this. As essence it exists in a permanent, indwelling stillness. It appears as all things in an undivided way, not in the mode of any creature: it has a mode of its own within that same absolute stillness. There the distinctions of the Persons are lifted up into this simple, modeless mode. See it now as the essence of the Persons and of all things: it is the essence of the Persons by nature, but of creatures by grace. Consider this. It contains the form of all things without division, as essence. In this form it is built into all things. This same undivided form, or image, is also nature, and as nature it keeps its one being in the Trinity, and the Trinity keeps its one being in the unity. And as this one being in the Trinity it is the undivided potential of the Trinity: the nature of the Persons but not of all things. For if it were the nature of all things it would reproduce itself in all things that appear, in its own potential nature. Then all things would be God in the same sense that God is God. But that is not the case. This shows that it is not the nature of all things but only the nature of the Persons, and that every thing that exists has its own fitting nature.

122. Since the undivided image-bearing light acts as essence and also as nature, does it then, I ask, have the special marks of each, or not? No, certainly not. There is no more than one. Its chief mark is that it shines by itself and is shown only to the Persons. But in that this image-bearing light falls upon all things, and the only thing that reveals it is itself, you see it has the character of light. This character belongs to inherent essence, and it also belongs to the nature of nature. Here essence and nature are shown to be one being with one mark, not two marks; for if there were two, one mark would cause the other, which is impossible: the inherent stillness acts as simple essence, and the radiant Trinity of nature acts likewise.

123. This raises the question: in the essence and its nature, do all things appear in an undivided way or not? The answer is yes, they appear in the essence in indwelling stillness and undivided mode: essence and nature are one light at the summit of light. The essence is the source and center of light. As such it is essence. Also in the Trinity, nature shines with the light of all things in the same undivided way. But there is stillness in the depths of essence.

124. But how nature is one in the Trinity, and three proceed from one, cannot be worked out from the undividedness of the first cause. Augustine says the Persons are one in nature. So nature and the Persons are alike eternal. Intellect is by nature perfectly intelligible to itself in the light of nature, and its conception of itself is other than the intellect itself. Intellect itself is unbegotten; the paternal Person begets the knower, in perfectly conceiving his own Person. See, in a moment, the eternal birth. Now there are two Persons, and in the very act of the Son proceeding from the Father, the knower, looking back, leaps to the perfect understanding of his Father, from whom he sprang. In that same origin these two natures know each other with one knowledge. The knowing is the same as the knower himself. In this they know themselves as one love, in the omnipotence of the Father from whom the knower sprang. This love is their shared breathing forth: in this love they are one. It is the third Person. It begins with the rebirth, the resting of the knower on the heart of the all-powerful Father. So the first stream gives rise to the second stream, together with the original source. So the several natures are all one in nature, and this nature is the same in the several natures. That is to say, in the Persons.

125. But what enjoyment do the Persons get from their natural essence? Well, as you can show, the Persons are in their nature and their nature is in the Persons: their nature keeps the Persons distinct while at the same time keeping them in unity. In keeping them as one, nature is simply the power of the Persons. In this same power the three Persons disappear into their nature. For essence and nature form one light at the summit of light, the undivided image of God, essence passing into nature; and all the Persons, folded into their nature, vanish into the dim silence of their inner being. There they keep no personhood, for with this closeness goes the complete loss of what is their own. See, God beyond the Persons. The bottomless depth is reached by the master mind of God. The delight and satisfaction and completeness found there, no nature can describe. That is how the three Persons enjoy their natural essence.

126. Tell me, when the spirit runs back into its source, does it stay in its original source, or in the nothing of its idea? Its true home is its source. The naked spark of the spirit is the mens, the mind. Mind is the natural image of the spirit. But mind is never perfect spirit until it passes into its model and is lost to its own selfhood, escaping through that same natural image into its ideal nature. In this sense its home is in the nothing of its idea rather than in its source. But its origin is its true home.

127. How is the Son reborn in the Father once he has come forth? In this way. The Father grasps the light of his own understanding and carries it into the ground of his essence. So the knower is reflected back into the light of his Father's heart.

128. I would very much like to know about the appearing of the paternal Person in the unity, where it conceives all things. When the Father, conceiving the undivided idea of all things in the unity, appears to himself in Person and essence, then the paternal Person vanishes into this hidden unity, and there is an end of the Father and of all distinctions. Unity, conceiving all as one, shows nothing but one, and communes with itself. But since, speaking strictly, there is Person in the unity, it is in this unity that it conceives its nature, appearing and calling itself Person, and there too the paternal Person must conceive his unity, as the unity conceives the Person, since both have the same nature.

129. Notice how conceiving differs. There is conceiving in the idea and conceiving in reality. Conceiving in the idea is the general conceiving of the Persons by nature, all three together. But conceiving in reality is the particular conceiving of each Person in its own proper nature within the nature.

130. Tell me, when God conceives the soul, does he conceive her by the general conceiving or by the particular conceiving? He conceives her by the general conceiving, for this general idea embraces all in one; if he conceived her by particular conceiving she would be stripped of the flower of her nature, for in a particular conceiving nothing is conceived beyond the special nature of the thing itself. In other words, her nature as a single thing, an expression, not her inborn nobility.

131. Notice the noble lineage of the Persons. They are uncreated and without beginning, infinite and beyond conceiving, and they have what belongs to them by nature, in the course of nature. Not so with the soul: she is created, has a beginning, and is a human being, and has possessions but not what is her own by nature, since all of it is given to her.

132. Is the one who sees as free as the will? No, not at all. If it were, it would always be in the naked Godhead. But it is not; it has work to do, the ordering and managing of the various powers. Will does not have this to do: it commands and forbids.

133. Now what I want to know is this: why does the Godhead have a feminine name and no feminine function, while the Person of the Father has a masculine name and a feminine function? The answer is this. The Godhead contains all things without division, and the thing in which another is contained is called mother because of this containing. It has, however, no motherly act, since as such it does not give birth to anything. The Father, again, has a masculine name and a feminine function, and the reason is that the Father as Person does not contain things within himself, he begets them out of himself by the power of his Person. The Father in his own personal being is empty of the content that he contains without division. But he also plays a mother's part, the unity giving him all that he brings forth. In this bringing forth he acts as mother; in being free of content in his personal nature he keeps his masculine name. The birth of the Son shows the Father in labor. But the Father is Father in that he begets.

134. Then there is this question: is the Son born, or is he not born, or is he still to be born? Let us think about it. There are three Persons, and that shows the Son is born, for each of the Persons has its own particular nature. None of them could have this if the Son had not been born. This proves the Son is born. But the Father does not change at all in his eternal act of giving birth: if we could speak of him doing anything at all, it would be in the sense that whatever he does he is doing now, and what he is doing now he has always done, for with him there is no past or future. This proves the Son has not been born: he is being born this very instant, and this instant is an ever-becoming; as the Father himself says, 'Today I have begotten you.' Today is the eternal now. It is in this now that his birth is taking place.

135. Remember, the eternal Word is both unborn and born. This is a hard saying, but being in the Trinity the Word must be born; there it cannot be called the unborn Word. Taking the eternal Word as Person, it is born; but take it in its essence, and the Word does not exist as such. Here the Word has to be born.

136. Now notice how we argue that the Word remains the unborn Word. Where the Word comes out from the Father as a birth, it shows its born nature and shows the Father to be its parent. But where the Word proceeds from the Father as a light, it is the likeness of the Father, and shows the Father to be formless, for it has the form of the Father. He himself said, 'Whoever sees me sees my Father.' So the Word shows the Father in its own form, and shows the Father to be without form, and where the Word proceeds from the Father as understanding, it proceeds as remaining within.

As intelligence does not leave the heart but reveals to the man himself the man in whom it lives, so we have the Word in the eternal procession from the Father, the Word that proceeds from understanding, while understanding itself does not go out but remains within. In this procession we have, in the indwelling understanding, the unborn Word. This explains what is meant by the unborn Word, and how, in the eternal procession, the Word is, as it were, born from understanding, and is still to be born, and is being born this very instant.

137. One of the masters (Erigena) says: the Father never made anything less than himself. If this is true, then every creature God has ever made is God. The question here is whether the work made is as noble as the maker, when the maker is God. Let us look at this. We speak of a working work and a made work. The working work is God, the made work is not God, for it is a creature. So here is the explanation. When it is said that the Father made no work less than himself, that is the same as saying that the Father does one work and one only in his own Person, namely the begetting of his Son in the eternal coming forth, personal and intrinsic. Only this one work properly belongs to the Father's nature, and all other work that is made we attribute not to the Father alone but to the three Persons and the one God. But it might be objected, can the eternal coming forth of the Son from the Father be called a work? You can look at it this way. Everything that exists has its own proper work; the work of fire, for instance, is to give heat, and the same with understanding: its work is to understand itself. Here the work is not less than the one who works it. And in this sense the Son may very well be called the eternal work of the Father. He brings him forth eternally as a Person who yet remains in him in essence.

138. Then there is the question: was the eternal Word conceived in Mary in Person and essence, and was it in the bosom of the Father as Person and essence as well? In the continuous emanation in which the Word emanates from the Father as if from understanding, in which the Word is now being born, in that same emanation Mary received the eternal Word in a point of time as Person and essence, in its immanence: the Word as flowing from the understanding of the Father. It remained in the bosom of the Father as immanent understanding, personal and intrinsic. So it came, coming in the manner of a flow and remaining within in the manner of an understanding. Ah, what light and grace enlightened souls get from this glorious knowledge!

139. To return to Christ. According to theologians, our Lord Jesus Christ's soul and Lucifer's were made in the same light.

The soul of Jesus Christ our Lord was the wisest soul that ever existed. She turned, within the creature, toward the creator, and so the Father clothed her in the divine garment and flower of her nature. Lucifer turned toward the deficiency, and so he fell, falling eternally. So fall all who turn away from God toward things that perish.

140. But this light which Christ's soul supernaturally was, this was a creature, and our Lord's soul itself being a creature too, which of these two creatures, theologians ask, is the nobler and higher? I asked one wise doctor about this and he said that in one way the light is nobler, but in another way Christ is. See what this supernatural light means. When Christ's soul was created she was taken out of herself and pulled above herself into the Trinity. There she was united with it. This was not natural to her, it was entirely above nature, what happened to Christ's soul. What happened was the supernatural light. In this, Christ's soul was all-powerful, by virtue of this happening. Here the supernatural light is nobler than Christ's soul, you can see that for yourselves. The thing that adorns is more noble than the thing it adorns. Take an example. Material is adorned by color, while the color is shown by the material, since color has no body of its own. In the same way Christ's soul is adorned by this supernatural light, and Christ's soul, in turn, makes this supernatural light visible.

141. Now notice how the soul of Christ is nobler than the supernatural light. The supernatural light, having had its effect on Christ's soul (it happens in a flash), Christ has no more to do with this supernatural light, for the union of divine and human nature into one Person happens instantly and once for all. Here the soul of Christ is nobler than the supernatural light.

142. Then as to souls who have overcome themselves so far as to imagine themselves God. This comes from nothing more than their own natural light: they are drawn back into themselves until they can see themselves in it as light. You know how a blow to the eye will sometimes make you see stars. By stars in their eyes these souls see themselves. The way the supernatural light reveals the soul to herself is this: the naked spark of the soul, her mens, reflects the supernatural light, and the pure essence of her spirit, seeing itself in this supernatural light, fondly imagines itself God. But as you see, it is nothing else than the spirit in the supernatural light, a very great perfection all the same.

143. Another question is whether God is God by nature or by will. He is God neither by nature nor by will. If God were God by nature he would be a caused God: nature would have caused him. But that is not the case. The same with will: if he were God by will he would be subject to will, and will would be above God. That is not true either. But he is God naturally, not by nature; he is God willingly, and not by will. That is the answer.

144. Again, did God beget himself, or did he beget some other? He did not beget himself, nor any other. God the Father is unbegotten God. He begot another, and not any other: he begot another, that is, another Person, not something other, that is, another nature. The undivided nature of the Father is also the undivided nature of the Son and of their shared Spirit. That is the answer.

145. It is a question among theologians whether the nature is common to the Persons and the Persons common to the nature, seeing that each Person contains the whole of nature as its natural being. Does God give himself to human nature? Yes. How can God give himself to human nature if he is one in essence and distinct in Person? Each of the Persons has the nature as a whole, and the Person of the Son, by taking on human nature, gave himself to it, the two natures meeting in his Person. Here divine and human natures are joined. Only the middle Person took on human nature, but the three Persons are equally bound to the three powers of the soul. Are these two natures one, or are they united? They are united, and not one. A thing is one which is in itself without any other, and where two meet in one they are united. How are these two natures united? They are united by something between them, so that each keeps its own nature. The Person who took on human nature is the means uniting these two natures. If this Person had not taken on man's nature, the two natures could not have been united. Neither robs the other of what makes it itself: uncreated nature does not rob created nature of its createdness, nor does created nature rob the uncreated of its uncreatedness. How did the Person take man's nature? He took on manhood, not a man. What is the difference between man and manhood? Man begins with a complete, perfect man and is not taken on by a Person: it is two natures united in one Person. But manhood flows forth from God and man and is taken on by the Person of the Son, and is divine nature and human nature and bodily nature united in one Person. So much for man and manhood.

146. Did the Person take on the manhood of our Lady? Yes and no. He took the bodily nature of our Lady, and the nature of his spirit God brought forth from nothing and poured into bodily nature. God breathed in his spirit and embodied himself in his body. Is our Lady, soul and body, one person? Yes. Did he not take on the person of our Lady? No. The eternal Word of the Father took to itself what was not already there. Person was already there, for the eternal Word is itself a Person. But human nature was not already there. So the eternal Word took on a nature, not a person. God's nature and man's nature were united in one shared form with one Person, for Christ does not contradict himself. What brings about this union? Grace. What is grace? According to Dionysius, grace is the light of the soul, which lights up the understanding of the soul. This light is not God, but it is something from God. Just as sunshine is not the sun but something that comes from the sun, so God pours this light into the soul. In this light a person knows and loves, and to some extent enjoys in time what blessed spirits know and love and feel in eternal life. But here in time a person knows and loves in his own way, dimly: he does not see God face to face as a spirit does in eternal life. Yet the mere feeling of him makes a person able to do all things, to practice all the virtues, and in the virtues he grows more like God, and the more like God he is in virtue, the more one he is with God. So grace brings about union.

147. There is a further question about the union of divine and human nature: do they both have the same essence in the Person they are joined in, or do they have two essences in this unmingled state? One Person can have no more than one essence. So far as personal nature is Person, each nature is its own hypostasis. Where two natures are brought together in one Person, that Person has one essence, and that in two natures, so far as the two natures remain unmingled. Can we then think of nature as apart from essence in the personal union? Yes, it can be seen another way. We find nature in its own image unmingled, but in the Person two natures are present in one Person as in their hypostasis. So far as both belong to the same Person, the Person has one essence, and that in two natures. The Persons are eternal; they are in no way creature, for they have no before or after. Person is unity keeping silence, though big with speech. The Persons are not contained by the unity: they are within unity.

148. There is the question of the worker and the work: is the work as noble, as perfect, as the worker? This concerns the Persons of the Trinity. Look at it this way. The Father is an origin able to give rise to an origin like himself. The Son is such an origin, and he together with his Father gives rise to their shared Spirit. Here the worker and the work, the effective work of revelation, are equally perfect. As Dionysius says, the first cause causes everything equal to itself. One master said that the work God does in the soul that is patient and stripped bare of things is nobler than any work he has ever done in time, in heaven or on earth. Think what this means. The works God has done among the angels in heaven were done by the almighty power of God, who created them out of nothing. He was not hindered in this work. In the case of the soul, which he also created out of nothing, he gave her free will, and God would not do a single thing without her free will's consent. But when the soul is passive, cleared of everything in her that might stand in God's way, and turns to God of her own accord, giving God the freedom of her noble will as though she had never had free will, letting God work in her as freely as when he made all things from nothing, then this work has two striking features. One is that her free will is no obstacle to God, although he is so careful never to override free will: God can work as freely as he wishes, what he wishes, when he wishes and how he wishes, just as if the soul had no free will at all. The second feature is that God, being free in himself, does his work freely in something which by right of its free will might well object, but which in fact raises no objection. That is why this is the noblest work God does in heaven or earth with respect to any creature. Now you may ask what this work is. It is nothing less than God's revealing of himself to himself in the soul. As surely as he is in himself, he himself is in this work. What is worked upon is turned into what does the working, made like the worker, who has made there his own likeness. Here the work that is done is as perfect as the worker, for it is his living image that is in the work.

149. The soul cannot prepare herself for the reception of God: whoever prepares her, him she receives in that preparation. There is a special gain for the soul in receiving the body of our Lord, a gain she gets from no other gift. What gain is that? Her nature receives its own nature, for Jesus Christ's nature is our nature. Nature is received by nature, though not received as pure nature: it is received joined with divine nature.

150. Notice how these two natures are united. They are not united nature to nature: they are joined together in one Person, that is, the middle Person. Just as the divine nature is the nature of this Person, so is human nature in Christ the Person in the Trinity. For what the eternal Word took on was humanity, not a human person. Had the eternal Word taken on a human person, there would be four Persons in the Trinity. But there are not. Jesus Christ's humanity in the eternal Word belongs to the very Person who has always been the central figure of the Trinity. Here there is not one nature as there is one Person: the natures differ in kind and are united in the Person. So whoever receives the body of our Lord receives the middle Person and divine nature and Christ's manhood, which is Person in the

the eternal Word, and Christ's eternal soul. We receive all this at once in the body of Jesus Christ. We do not receive this in any other gift in heaven or on earth. Let us then value this gift above every other gift to be had here below.

151. When Christ gave his body to his disciples he said, 'Take, eat, this is my body.' But Christ was mortal. Now the question is, did Christ give his body as mortal or immortal? According to Hugh of St Victor, Christ had in himself, even while mortal, every property belonging to his original body of immortality. So although mortal, he could give his brothers his immortal body. If he had given them his mortal body, eating it would have horrified them. Bishop Albert takes issue with this teacher. He says he is amazed that such a great authority would risk so foolish a statement. Every nature flows from its proper form, and Christ's form here was mortal, so no immortal property could flow from his mortal form. If you really want to know how Christ gave his body, both mortal and immortal, he gave it as mortal in itself and immortal in its form and in its effect, for its action is divine, and so he gave it in a form other than his own. He gave his body as immortal in its working and in its form, and mortal in itself, for in his mortal body Christ had the power to give his body immortally as to its effect, but not as to its own nature.

152. It is a question whether anything of what it seems to be remains in Christ's body. No: there is appearance without substance, and substance without appearance. It seems to be bread, but there is really no substance of bread there: it is truly the body of God without the appearance of God. So far as appearance goes, it would nourish us like any other food. But if there is really no substance of bread, and only the substance of bread feeds the body, then how, without the substance of bread, does this food nourish the body? At the consecration of the body of our Lord, the bread loses its nature while keeping its form, its mass, its smell and its feel, so that it does not vanish. Nothing we can taste or feel, nothing, in short, that is apparent to the outward senses, is the body of God. The outward senses do not lose what belongs to them. They draw their nourishment from what remains. In bread, it is the solid part that nourishes. The solidity of the body of Christ is not his body: the solidity of the bread remains, and that feeds the outward man. This explains how the sacrament nourishes like any other food, while really having none of the nature of bread.

153. When Christ consecrated his body on that Sabbath day and gave it to his disciples, suppose some of it had been left over and hidden in a bush: would it have died when Christ died on the cross? If the consecrated body had been mistreated by scourging or in any other way, that would not have harmed it. Christ suffered no harm through being eaten in the sacrament, for he gave his body in a form other than his own. Christ suffered nothing at all in the form he gave. But notice this. When Christ died on the cross, since the body of the soul that died on the cross lay beneath the consecration, all the pain Christ suffered in his human form was suffered also by his body under consecration. When Christ died in his manhood, his body died under consecration too, for there was only ever one body. This death of Christ was the parting of soul from body, and since the soul cannot be divided, wherever she is, she is wholly there. When she was in the region of hell she was not in the body. Nor could she be in his consecrated body. We speak here of two bodies, but there is only one, the one that rose from the dead on the third day.

154. Did the consecrated body rise too? Oh yes, it rose up glorified, for it was Christ.

155. Then the question was asked, can the soul, while in this body, reach the point of receiving without any means? The answer is both no and yes. In the first sense I say that anything the soul receives must come through light and grace. Light and grace are her means, for she is a creature. The soul cannot do without these means as long as she is in the body. Yet the answer that the soul is able to receive directly while in the body is argued this way. The soul has within her a likeness of the highest good. In this likeness she receives like by like. Here like is received directly by like. Notice how. In receiving this way, without means, we must hold to this likeness. Wherein does this likeness consist? Likeness to the highest good consists in stillness of the inner and the outer man: in being undisturbed by all lower things, the outward man not being moved by them, nor the inward man troubled by any stirring of the mind; he remains firm and unshaken in the here and now. Be like this always.

156. One more question. How have all things existed in God? In his undivided essence all things exist undivided, no one more noble than another. But in the inherent Word, where all things are distinct, one thing is more noble than another.

157. Once the spirit is one with God, is it at all enriched by virtues? Virtues come from necessity, and necessity does not enrich the spirit. The fruit of the virtues, rather than the virtues themselves, enriches the spirit.

158. It may be asked, should we take the undivided image of all things as Person or as essence? There are three distinct Persons but not three images to match. So we may look at the image in terms of undivided essence. But since essence in the Persons is held undivided as essence and divided as utterance (one utterance in the Father, another in the Son, another in the Holy Spirit), we may also take the image of the Trinity as a speaking in the Persons as well as simple essence, for the essence is as simple in the Persons as it is in its own particular nature.

159. It may be asked, has the one essence no form to match its intrinsic nature? That which reveals another is its form. Essence cannot show itself in its inherent nature: it is shown through the Persons. So the Persons are the form of the essence insofar as they reveal it. But Person is one thing, essence is another. Nothing that exists can be without its proper form. If essence exists, it must wear its proper form. In its own inherent form it is apparent to itself and to the Persons alone. But the Persons reveal it to creatures. Here the Persons are its form by virtue of being Persons and making the formless essence manifest. The Persons are the form of the essence in that they reveal it, and in its hidden nature it has its own form latent within itself. This form is nothing other than the indwelling essence itself. Under this inherent form, the forms of all things are formless, for this inherent form is the undivided form of all things: this universal form is God's essence, onefold in its nature and threefold as spoken in the Persons.

160. This is what the spirit sees clearly in a foretaste of delight. The best the spirit can hope for in this body is the lasting sense of being without all things and within all things. Without all means in complete detachment, far from self and from things. Within all means dwelling in unbroken stillness: a life of awareness in its eternal pattern, where the universal image shines in undivided wholeness. There the spirit dwells in all things: it has reached its own ideal.

161. Teachers discuss that most hidden and difficult of questions: what is it that is not caused, and that, though it is neither essence nor Person, has might and power in the Father, and makes the Father father and the essence essence? The answer calls for your close attention. Nature cannot exist without something whose nature it is, and the Person of the Father cannot exist without someone whose Person it is. Neither can exist without the other, so neither can give rise to the other. Yet they have a double character: speech and silence. Where both alike fall away into their common ground they share the same character; there speech takes nothing from silence, nor silence from speech. This falling into their common ground belongs to the eternal and to the active nature. The changeless nature does not interfere: the active nature goes on speaking while the changeless nature stays silent. But this changeless nature must have a ground, the eternal and active nature which gives power and might to the objective Person. This is what makes the Father father and nature nature, not that the Father has an active nature: his is the eternal stillness. Let no one deny this, for the sake of eternal truth, for it is eternal truth. Remember, the ignorant are quick to attack eternal truth.

162. St Dionysius says the highest spirits pour themselves into the lower ones in order, and the lowest pour into the soul. Now the question is, can the soul receive anything at all without the help or knowledge of the higher angels? My answer: grant that one spirit stands closer to God than the rest, then anything received by the other spirits will already be known to this spirit, who stands in a better place than any of the others. So a Seraph is more open to divine inspiration than any single spirit in this life, for two reasons. One is that the angel, being pure spirit, cannot be poured into the soul. While she shares life with the body, she has no room for the angel. Second, the angel is always beholding the divine light, and that is not true of any soul in this life. So the Seraph is more fit to receive God's inspiration, and what all spirits receive, that spirit knows, being more fit than all the rest. Flying as he does nearer the source of the divine light, the Seraph sees what the other spirits are getting of that light, rather than serving as the means of its reception. In this sense, souls get nothing without the angels knowing.

But let us see whether, in the working of the soul, we cannot find some hidden way in which enlightened souls receive without the Seraph knowing. Well, as you know, the soul gives life to the members of the body without those members knowing it. And though life flows so secretly into all the limbs that they are unaware of its hidden movement, the work of life still goes on in them. The truth is, God pours his life into the soul and into every spirit secretly: no Seraph knows about this hidden stream of life. The soul's reception of it is a hidden act. How could the Seraph know? He knows nothing of himself or of the soul in this. That is one thing the soul receives without the higher angels knowing.

The other she receives in the hidden spark of her own nature, her undivided likeness. But when like meets like there is nothing between them. Like gives like its likeness, all unknown to what is unlike it, in unbroken union. But the Seraph is unlike the soul. A Seraph, as you know, is spirit not joined to any kind of body. But soul is spirit joined to a body of a kind. And second, to the Seraph in his created nature there came all at once, without addition, what he possesses today in his vision of the eternal light, for he remains constant in his likeness to God. Here the soul differs from the angels, for in the reflection of her own likeness she receives a hidden inflow unknown to any angel. It has been said by John, a wise man of Greece, that the likeness of the soul consists in perfect likeness to that which has no likeness. Dionysius calls the angels 'divine minds.' And St Bernard says of those who live angelic lives while in the flesh that the mind of God flows into them as it does into the angels. O you God turned God in your temporal unified mind, you spirit breathed into the oneness of God, rise up and do your crowning work!

You ask how the spirit rises up? He stands on his two feet, understanding and love, and steps over all things that perish, so as not to foul his feet with the matter of corruption. And what is his crowning work? The clear and naked vision of the highest good, God beyond, in which the highest good will bathe the spirit in the light of perfect awareness. Then you will look and see! Do the streams of light from the highest good touch the spirit? When the Sovereign Good floods the spirit with light, the spirit is lifted above its natural home.

Meister Eckhart was asked by his good friends, 'Give us one last word before you go.' He said, 'I will give you a rule which is the sum of all my arguments, the key to the whole theory and practice of the truth.'

It very often happens that a thing seems small to us which is of greater weight in God's sight than what looms large in ours. So it falls to us to take alike from God everything he sends us without ever stopping to think or look to see which is greatest or highest or best, but following blindly God's lead, that is to say, our own feeling, our strongest promptings, what we are most moved to do. Then God gives us the most in the least without fail.

People often shy away from the least and so stop themselves getting the most in the least. They are wrong. God is everywise, the same in every form to one who can see him the same. There is much searching of heart over whether one's promptings come from God or not, but we can soon tell this, for if we find ourselves aware of, let into, God's will most of all when we follow our own impulse, our clearest sense of things, then we may take it that they come from God.

Some people pretend to find God as a light or a taste. They may find a light or a taste, but that is not finding God. According to one scripture, God shines in the dark, where now and then we may catch sight of him. Where God shows himself to us least, he is often most present. So it falls to us to take God the same in every mode and in every thing.

Someone may say, 'But if I do take God the same in every mode and every thing, my mind will not stay settled in one mode as it does in another.' Then I say, he is wrong. I grant that finding God one way rather than another deserves its due credit, but that is not the best. God is everywise, the same in every form to one who can find him the same. Knowing one form, such and such, is not knowing God. Finding this or that is not finding God. God is everywise, the same in every form to one who can see him the same.

Someone may object, 'But to find God in every mode and in every thing, do I not need some particular way?' In whatever way you find God best and are most aware of him, follow that way. Should another way appear quite different from the first, you will do right in leaving that one and holding to God in this one which appears as in the one you have set aside. It is a mark of perfection to come in this manner to such a final certainty and peace that we can see God and are able to enjoy him in any form and in any thing without having to stop and search for him at all, a gift granted to me. For this, and toward this end, all works are done, and on the whole works help. The things that do not help, let us leave aside.

We thank you, heavenly Father, for giving us your only Son, in whom you give your own self and all things. We pray to you, heavenly Father, as you have given us your only Son our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom and in whom you deny us nothing, nor would nor could, hear us in him and make us pure and free from all our many faults, uniting us with him in you. Amen.