On Simeon: union, likeness, and the birth of God in the soul

Et ecce, homo erat in Jerusalem cui nomen Simeon etc (Luke 2:25). Luke tells in his gospel that when the time was complete, Christ was brought to the temple. And behold, there was a man in Jerusalem named Simeon, who was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.

'And.' This little word et in Latin means joining, binding, or locking together. Things firmly bound or locked together are said to be in union. Here I mean the soul being bound, knit, and united to God. According to our teachers, union requires likeness. There is no union without likeness. Binding or knitting together, that is what union means. Nearness to me does not make likeness: my sitting beside someone, or in the same place, for example, does not. As Saint Augustine says, Lord, when I found myself far from you, it was not because of distance of place, it came from the unlikeness I found in myself. One master says that people who live and work wholly in time never agree, they never come together. According to our teachers, a thing whose life and work is in eternity and a thing whose life and work is here in time need something to bridge them. Where there is knitting and binding together there must be some likeness. The union of God and the soul is a matter of likeness. Where there is no difference there must be identity, not merely union in mutual embrace, but oneness, not merely likeness, but sameness. So we say that the Son is not like the Father but is his image, one with the Father.

One of our best teachers says that an image in stone or on a wall, with nothing underlying it, taken simply as a form, is the same form as the one whose form it is. This holds true for the soul passing into her exemplar, where there is nothing foreign, only her own form, with which she is one. Having taken on the form that is divine, we see God, we find God. God is not found in separation. When the soul passes into her exemplar and finds herself in that image alone, in that same image she finds God, and the finding of herself and the finding of God are the same act, and it is beyond time, it is the finding of God. So far as she is there, so far she is one with God. He means:

as far as a person has reached the stage where his soul is the divine image. To that extent he is divine. So far as he is there, so far he is in God, not attached to God, not merely united with God, but one and the same as God.

One master says that likeness means birth. He says further that likeness is not found in nature unless it is born. Our teachers say that fire, however fierce, would never burn if it had no hope of reproducing itself. However dry the wood supplied, it would never catch fire if fire lacked the power to generate its own kind. What fire wants is to be born in the wood, so that both become one fire, living and lasting. Put out and dead, it would be fire no longer, so it wants to keep itself going. The nature of the soul would never have taken on its own kind if she did not want God to be born in her. She would never have come forth into her own nature, would never have wanted to enter it, except in hope of this birth. Nor would God ever have brought it about if he had not meant the soul to be born into him. God acts, and the soul desires. God has the power, and the soul has the will and the capacity to have God born into her and to be born into God herself. God arranges this on purpose, so that the soul will be like him. She must wait for God to be conceived in her, and for her treasure to grow into God, wanting union with him and to be kept safe in him. God's nature pours into the light of the soul, and there she is kept safe. God means in this way to be born into her, united with her, held within her. How can that be? Do we not say that God contains himself? When he draws the soul in, she finds that God holds himself, and there she stays, dwelling nowhere else. Augustine says, as you love, so you are: loving earth, you are earthly, loving God, you will be divine. If I love God, then, shall I be God? It is not I who say this, search the scriptures. In the Prophets, God says, you are gods, and children of the Most High. I say that it is in those who are like him that God brings about this birth. If the soul had no expectation of this, she would not want to reach it. She wants to be kept safe in him, he is her life. God has a preserve, a safe place in himself, which no one can know anything about until he strips away and is rid of everything that belongs to the soul, her life, her powers, her nature, all of it must go. That means standing in that perfect light where she and God are one form, where she finds herself to be God. It is characteristic of God to have nothing foreign in him, nothing attached, nothing added. And in the same way it is fitting for the soul to have no impressions from outside, nothing put on, nothing attached. So much for the first word.

'Behold': ecce. This word ecce carries the full meaning of logos, or word, and no greater meaning could be given to it. Word, that is, God. God is a word, God's Son is a word. It carries the sense that our life and all our desire are centered on God, dependent on God, oriented toward God. As Saint Paul says, by the grace of God I am what I am. And again, I live, yet not I, but God lives in me. What more is there to say?

Homo erat. He says, behold, a man. We use the word homo for women as well as men, but the Latins withheld it from woman because of her weakness. Homo points to something whole, with nothing lacking. Homo, a man, a mortal, means one belonging to earth, carrying the sense of humility. Earth is the lowest of the elements, set in the middle with the heavens all around it, open to everything that flows down from above. All the work and waste of heaven gathers in the end in the basin of earth. Homo in another sense means moisture, as if to say, one who is watered with grace, meaning those humble souls who receive the direct inflow of grace. In this inflowing grace there arises at once that light of the mind into which God sends a ray of his unclouded splendor. In this powerful light a mortal stands as far above his fellows as a living man stands above his shadow on the wall. This light has great power, both because it is itself beyond time and place, and because anything it touches is stripped of time and place and bodily likeness and everything foreign to it. As I have often said before, if there were no time, no place, and nothing else besides, it would all be one being. The person who in this sense is one, and throws himself into the ground of humility, will there be watered with grace.

Now for the third point: this light strips away time and place. 'There was a man.' Who gave him this light? The light did. This word erat belongs properly to God. In the Latin language there is no word so fitting for God as erat. John, in his gospel, comes to use erat as another word for pure being. Everything else is an addition, but addition is possible only in thought, not by real addition but by mental separation. Goodness and truth are additions, at least in theory, but the bare essence with nothing added to it is what erat means. Again, erat implies birth, an end to becoming. I was coming today, now I have come, and if we take time out of my coming and my having arrived, then coming and come draw together into one. Where coming and come meet, there we are born and remade and reshaped into our original form. I have often said that as long as a thing's being is a matter of concrete existence, it will never be created anew. It can be refurbished and given fresh color, the way an old seal is restamped and renewed. A pagan teacher says, things there cannot be worn down by time, there is the blessed life in the forever, faultless, free of care, unmixed being. Solomon says, there is nothing new under the sun, though this is rarely understood in its proper sense. Everything under the sun grows old and dies, but there, nothing is anything but new. Time brings two things, age and decay. What the sun shines on exists in time. Creatures are here, and they come from God, but there, where they are in God, they are not at all what they are here. They differ as much as the sun differs from the moon, and far more. Erat in eo, he says, the Holy Spirit was in him, in which there is both being and becoming. 'There was a man.' Where was he? In Jerusalem. Jerusalem means vision of peace, and stands, in short, for human peace and well-being. It may mean more than this. Paul says, the peace that surpasses all understanding will keep your hearts and minds. May God grant that we are fit to enter into this peace, which is God himself. So help us God. Amen.