Angels, the eternal now, and the soul's oneness with God

Ecce mitto angelum meum (Malachi 3:1, Luke 7:27), Behold, I send my angel, it is written in the gospel. Angels are within our understanding, for the evangelists tell us that we shall be like the angels. One authority says an angel is an image of God. Another says he is fashioned like God. A third describes him as a clear mirror in which is reflected the goodness of God, the absolute stillness and mystery of God, as far as that is possible. Angels, again, have been defined as pure intellectual light free from material things. We shall be like the angels. Perception here means seeing in the light that is in time, for anything I think of I think of in the light that is in time and temporal. But angels perceive in the light that is beyond time and eternal. They know in the eternal now. People know in the now of time. The now of time is infinitely short. Yet take away this now of time and you are everywhere and have the whole of time. This thing or that thing is not all things; as long as I am this or that, have this or that, I am not all things nor do I have all things. Purify yourself until you neither are nor have either this or that, then you are everywhere present, and being neither this nor that you are all things. An angel is and acts as an intelligence in his own degree, beholding God without ceasing, and his object is intelligible essence. For this reason he is far removed from things, remote from time and from temporal things.

Notice the prophet's words: he says, I send my angel. The evangelist, however, leaves out the pronoun I. This points, first, to God's elemental nature, to the fact that God is unnameable, beyond speech in the abstraction of his essence, where, without word or utterance, God is ineffable to creatures. It shows next that the soul is ineffable and wordless; in her proper ground she is inarticulate, nameless and silent. The I is left out because there she has neither word nor utterance. Third, it suggests that God and the soul are so entirely one that God has not a single thing to tell apart in him from the soul, nor is he anything other than the soul. The I is silent because he and the soul are every bit the same; he has no property apart from the soul, nor does any other nature come within his awareness. In the other reference, the text says I to show God's is-ness: that God simply is. All things are in God; outside him, without him, is nothing. All creatures are as nothing and of no account compared with God. What they are in truth, they are in God, for God alone is the truth; the word I stands for the actuality of divine truth, for it is the mark of one single existence. It declares that God alone is. Second, it means that God is not separate from things, that he is more inward to them than they are to themselves. And a person should not be separate from things, not by clinging to self but by being wholly detached from self; in this way one is not separate from any thing, and one is all things. So far as you are nothing to yourself, so far you are all things and not separate from all things; and so far as you are not cut off from all things, so far you are God and all things, for God's being God consists in his being present in all things. So the person who is not separate from all things enjoys divinity just as God himself enjoys it. Third, the word I is in a sense the final word, for it is no proper name: it stands for the perfection of naming, and means unchangeableness, freedom from passion, that God is immovable, untouchable, eternally steady.

Fourth, it points to the absolute purity of the divine being, which is entirely without mixture. Goodness, wisdom, and anything else we can say of God are impurities beside God's bare essence; coexistence is foreign to essence, but the word I points to God's pure essence, his being in himself without anything foreign or strange added. The angels are the image, the mirror of God, which holds the reflection of the Godhead, of the glory, the stillness, and the mystery of God. Let us, like the angels, imitate God. According to the philosophers, to make a portrait of a man one must not copy Conrad, nor copy Henry either. For if it looks like Conrad or like Henry, it will not call to mind the man himself, but will remind one of Conrad or of Henry. Moreover, Conrad's portrait will not look like Henry, for given the knowledge and the skill, one could render Conrad true to life, the very image of him. Now God both wills and can: he made you like himself, the very image of himself. But to be like someone implies something foreign and set apart. Now there is nothing foreign or set apart between God and the soul, and therefore the soul is not like God: she is identical with him, the very same as he is.

More I do not know and cannot say, so here my argument must end. But I was thinking on the way here, that we ought to be utterly detached in our intention, holding nothing in view, no one and nothing, but the Godhead as such, not happiness, not this, not that,

just God and the Godhead in itself. Whatever else you intend beside that is a divine impurity. Take hold of the actual Godhead itself. God help us to do this.