Like a vase of gold: becoming an image of God

Quasi vas auri solidum ornatum omni lapide pretioso (Ecclesiasticus 50:9), As a massive vessel of gold adorned with every precious stone. My text applies to St Augustine or to any virtuous soul, such a soul being likened to a golden vessel, massive and firm, adorned with every precious stone. Because of the perfection of the saints we have no likeness to express them, and so we symbolize them by trees, the sun, or the moon. So here St Augustine is compared to a chalice of gold, solid and firm, set all over with precious stones. Indeed the same may be said of any saintly virtuous soul who, leaving all things here, enjoys them yonder where they are eternal. Whoever gives up things in their passing sense possesses them as absolute and eternal.

Every cup has two things about it: it receives and it holds. The spiritual vessel differs from the physical one. The wine is in the cup, not the cup in the wine, though the wine is not in the cup the way it is in the body; if it were in the cup the way it is in the body we could not drink it. It is different with the spiritual vessel. Everything received into this vessel is in the cup and the cup is in it and is the cup itself. All that this spiritual cup receives is its own nature. It is God's nature to give himself to every virtuous soul, and it is the soul's nature to receive God, and this we say of the soul in her highest capacity. There the soul bears the image of God and is godlike. No image can exist without likeness, but likeness can exist without image. Two eggs may both be white alike, but one is not the image of the other: for one to be the image of the other it must come forth out of the other's nature and be born of it and be like it.

An image has two properties. First, it receives its being from the thing whose image it is, directly and above the will, for it is a natural product, sprouting out of its source the way a branch sprouts out of a tree. Any face thrown on a mirror is, willing or not, imaged there. But its nature does not appear in its mirror image: only the mouth, nose and eyes, just the features, are seen in the mirror. God keeps to himself the power to show in his reflections, at once, his nature, all he is and all he can do, and this above his will. His image comes before his will, will following the image, for out of his nature there first leaps his image, gathering into itself the whole promise of his nature and his essence, all his nature pouring out into his image while remaining intact within itself. Now the masters place this image not in the Holy Spirit but in the middle Person, for the Son, being the earliest issue of his nature, is therefore called his Father's express image, and not the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is simply the flowering of the Father and the Son, and shares one nature with them both. Will is not a middle term between the nature and the image, nor, for that matter, can knowledge or perception, nor even wisdom, come between, for this image of God is the direct product of his fruitful nature. If there is a means of wisdom here it is the image itself. So the Son in the Godhead is called the Wisdom of the Father.

Know this: this undivided image of God which is stamped in the soul is sealed directly in her innermost nature; this most basic, most noble part of her nature is really what takes on this soul-pattern, and not by means of either will or wisdom. As I said just now, if wisdom enters here at all it is as the pattern itself. God exists in this image without any means and the image exists without means in God. But God is far more noble in the image than the image is in God. The image does not receive God as creator; it conceives him as understanding, the summit of her nature itself taking on his form. This is the inborn divine image which God has stamped by nature in every soul. I dare not grant more to this image; to grant it more would make it God himself, which it is not, or God would not be God.

The second characteristic of an image is its likeness to its object. Here notice especially two things. First: an image has no independent existence of its own and belongs wholly to the thing it reflects. So an image received into the eye exists only as suspended from and tied to the thing it is the image of, to which it entirely belongs and from which it gets its being and is that very being. Note well my definition of an image. There are four points to keep in mind, and perhaps others will occur to you. An image exists only in dependence on the thing whose reflection it is, and that alone is why it exists at all. Apart from the thing whose image it is, it has no existence and belongs to nothing else. The image takes its being directly from the thing whose image it is, sharing one nature with it and being the very same being. This is not a matter for debate in the schools, though one might well propose it from the professor's chair.

You are always asking how you ought to live. Then take this answer to heart: just as the image is said here to behave, so it behooves you to live. Be his and belong to him, not your own and belonging to yourself, nor to anyone else either. Whoever has a well-loved friend holds that friend's belongings dear and objects to anything against that friend. Take the dog, for example, an animal without reason. He is so faithful to his master that he resents what his master hates, while to his master's friends he is most friendly. He pays no attention to poverty or wealth; if some blind beggar were his master's close friend, the dog would be more affectionate to him than to the king or emperor who was his master's enemy. I believe that if it were possible for the dog to be half unfaithful to his master, the other half of him would have to hate itself. Yet some people complain of having no interior life, no devotion, no sweetness, no such godly consolation. Truly, these people are all still unrighteous, and though they suffer it is not the best kind of suffering. I tell you truly, as long as any image forms in you that is not the eternal Word nor any shadowing forth of the eternal Word, however good it may be, it is in truth wrong. That person alone is righteous who, having emptied himself of all created things, stands facing straight along the unswerving line into the eternal Word, where, in righteousness, he is shaped anew and transformed. That person is begotten where the Son is begotten and is the Son himself.

According to scripture, no one knows the Father but the Son, and so, if you wish to know God, you must not merely be like the Son, you must be the Son himself. Some people think to see God with their eyes the way they would see a cow, and they expect to love him the way they would love a cow. You love the cow for its milk and its cheese: for what it profits you.

Just so do those who love God for the sake of outward riches or inward consolation, not loving God rightly but loving their own advantage. I believe that whatever object you set before your mind, except God in himself, however good it may be, is nothing but a barrier to the absolute truth. As I said just now that St Augustine is compared to a golden cup, closed underneath and open to the sky, so it behooves you to be: if you would stand with St Augustine in the communion of saints, then close your heart to everything created and be open to God as he is in himself.

Men are compared to the higher faculties because they always go bareheaded, and women to the lower faculties because the head is always veiled. The higher powers rise above time and space, springing straight out of the essence of the soul, and they resemble men in always going uncovered. Accordingly, their working is eternal. The philosopher says that all the powers of the soul, so far as time and space affect them, have lost their virgin purity and can never be so fully drawn back nor so finely refined as to pass into the higher faculties. Yet they are stamped with the same image.

Be firm and steady, the same, that is, in weal and woe, in fortune and misfortune; and be set with all the precious stones, a treasury, that is, of all the virtues that come pouring naturally out of you. Pass through all the virtues and, going beyond them, draw virtue only from its source, where it is one with the divine nature. And in so far as you are more united to God's nature than the angels are, to that extent they must receive through you. May we be one. So help us God. Amen.