How the soul flows out from God and flows back to God

A person has to seek God in error and forgetfulness and foolishness. Deity holds within it the power of all things, and nothing else is like it. The supreme light of the undivided essence shines on all things.

MEISTER ECKHART

Saint Dionysius says that beauty is good order joined with outstanding clarity. In this sense God is an ordering of three Persons. And the soul's lower powers should be ordered toward her higher powers, and her higher powers toward God: her outward senses toward her inward senses, her inward senses toward reason, thought toward intuition, and intuition toward the will, and all of this toward unity, so that the soul may be alone, with nothing flowing into her but pure divinity, flowing here into itself. As Saint Dionysius says, through purity she has found her own capacity, and only her higher powers are at work.

One philosopher has said that as soon as the chief power takes command, all the other powers run into it and leave their own work behind. Then the soul is in order, in her pure nature, in her supreme light-nature where all things exist as possibility. A pagan teacher says, if the soul knew herself she would know all things. Deity flowed into the Father and into the Son and into the Holy Spirit: in eternity into itself, and in time into creatures, giving each as much as it can hold: to the stone its being, to the tree its growth, to animals their sensation, to the angels their reason, and to humankind all four of these natures. When God became man he took on, by grace and in time, the nature of all things, which in eternity was already his by nature. As Saint Paul says, 'To me Christ is all things.' Here it was a matter of the light and reflection of his own nature. God's being is a fountain: flowing and fixed, the last as well as the first. From being, power flows out into work. In this sense the three Persons are the storehouse of divinity, and the three Persons are poured out into the essence of the soul as grace. God's being in the essence of the soul is the likeness of the Persons, and one being runs through the other. The soul's chief power flows from the essence of the soul, just as the three Persons come forth from the Godhead. And when God pours his grace into the soul, it is into her essence that he pours it. For nothing, no speck, can ever fall into the soul's essence, whatever her powers may do. The chief power of the soul draws its strength from the grace that exists in the essence of the soul, and this highest power goes out into the lower powers, into their essence. The growing soul, the spirit open to receive God's nature, is the likeness of Christ's Person and of human nature. When the soul reaches divine nature she is stripped of all lack and imperfection. She undergoes a kind of death in divine nature, receiving God's nature in herself just as the Father has it in himself. She does not take this from her own nature, she receives it from God's nature into her nature. She receives perfection and power, according to the words of Saint Paul: 'I can do all things in him who strengthens me.' The wisdom that arises from this in her mind begins in understanding and is perfected in will, and it has neither heart nor thought. Saint Dionysius says: as the soul takes the outgoing tide

to journey out into eternity and time and into her own intelligence, so on the ebb tide she returns. As God, the soul flows back again, without effort. God returns to himself, as little mindful of his own things as if they did not exist. And the soul shall do the same. She shall grasp, by her human nature, the Person of the Son, and with the Person of the Son she shall grasp the Father and the Holy Spirit in both of them, and both of them in the Holy Spirit. And with the Person of the Father she shall grasp his simple essence, and with the essence, the abyss, and shall sink into the void that has no matter and no form. Matter and form, being and knowledge, she loses in this unity, for she herself has come to nothing. God does all her work. He keeps her in his being and leads her by his power into his very Godhead, where she flows with deity itself into everything that God flows into. She is the place of all things and has no place of her own. This is the most eternal wisdom, which has neither heart nor thought. The soul flows so near to God that many people are deceived by it, but what she is, she is by grace, and where she is, she is there by another's power. Yet she comes close enough to God that, in the power of the Father, she is clothed with divinity by grace, the same way the Father has it by nature. Saint Paul says: 'In the same image we shall go from one glory to another,' meaning that we shall receive divinity in its perfection and everything that follows from it. In this, she shall conceive divinity just as it conceives itself, and her will and God's will shall be one. Whatever God may be, we shall be that with God. No one can reach this while still in the body, but when God gives the soul his final gift, the vision of his Godhead, the soul is raised up into the Trinity. May we come to this. So help us God. Amen.