This is life eternal: becoming the only Son

Haec est vita aeterna ut cognoscant te solum deum verum etc. (John 17:3), This is life eternal, to know thee the only true God and thy Son whom thou hast sent. Here begins a discourse on a gospel saying, Christ's statement, This is life eternal, to know thee the only true God and thy Son whom thou hast sent.

Now no one knows the Father except his only Son, for he says himself, No man knows the Father except the Son and no man knows the Son except the Father. So, if a person is to know God, and in that consists his eternal happiness, he must be, with Christ, the only Son of the Father. If you want to be blessed you must be the only Son, not many sons, one Son. True, you are many in your physical birth, but you will be one in the eternal birth, for in God there is no more than the one natural source with its single natural outlet, the Son, not two but one. And so if you are one with Christ you are the single offspring with the eternal Word.

How does a person come to be the only Son of the eternal Father? I answer: the eternal Word did not take upon itself this man or that man, it took upon itself one undivided free nature, human nature, bare and without form, for the indivisible form of manhood is entirely without shape. And since in this union the eternal Word took human nature without form, the Father's image, his eternal Son, became the form of human nature. Here it is just as true to say that man became God as that God became man. For human nature was transformed by taking on the divine form, which is the image of the Father. It follows that to be the Son you must depart from and set aside whatever makes for division in you. Man is an accident of nature. Do away with accidents and take yourselves in the freedom of your undivided humanity. But this very nature in which you take yourselves has become the Son of the eternal Father through union with the eternal Word, and therefore you with Christ become the Son of the eternal Father by sharing the same nature that was there made God. Be careful not to take yourselves as either this or that: realize yourselves in the freedom of your undivided manhood. If you want to be one you must be rid of not, for not's pride is division. How is that? Well, suppose I say, You are not the man. This not puts a division between you and this man. To be undivided you must be free of not. There is one power in the soul that is untouched by not, that has nothing in common with any mortal thing: there is nothing in this power, only God is seen there face to face.

A man being thus the Son, his motion, his energy, whatever he enjoys, he has gotten of his own. Now the Son of the Father is the eternal Son as descended from the Father. Further, all he has he has within himself, since he is one in essence and in nature with the Father, his essence and his quiddity, he has both within himself, and in this sense he prays, Father, as I and thou are one even so I would they should be one. And just as the Son is one with the Father in his essence, so you, being one with him in essence and nature, have gotten it all within you as the Father has in himself. You have it not on loan from God, because God is your own: everything you have you have gotten of your own, and works that are not the produce of your own are dead works in the sight of God. These you are moved to by outside things and they are not living: they are dead, for anything alive is endowed with a motion of its own. If a person's works are to live they must come from within, not from foreign things nor from outside but from within him.

Remember. If you love what is right the way God loves it, you love it not as right but as something else, and so you neither take it nor love it as a whole but as divided.

But God is right, so you are not taking him nor loving him in his entirety. Take right as right and you take it as God. Then where right is at work you will be working too, since you do right all the time. Even if hell stood in the way of right you would still do right, and not as a hardship but as a pleasure, because being right itself you must do right. The more a thing shares in a common nature, the more it is one with the indivisibility of that common nature, the more undivided it is itself. To the whole truth, God help us. Amen.