The just man lives in God, without a why

Iustus in perpetuum vivet, apud Dominum est merces eius (Wisdom 5:15-16): The just will live forever, and his reward is with the Lord. We read today in the epistle the wise man's words, 'The just lives in eternity.' I have defined elsewhere what a just man is, but here I say in another sense that a man is just, that is, righteous, who is informed with and transformed into righteousness. The just lives in God and God in him, for God is born in the just and the just in God. At every virtue of the just, God is born and rejoices, and this holds too for every action worked by the just out of the virtue of the just and in righteousness. At this God is glad, yes, thrilled with joy, there is nothing in his depths that does not dance for joy. To people who are not enlightened this is a matter of belief, but the enlightened know it. The just seek nothing in their work; only servants and hired hands ask something for their work, or work for the sake of some reason why. If you would be informed with, transformed into, righteousness, have no further purpose in your work. Form no idea in yourself, in time or in eternity, not reward, not happiness, not this, not that, for truly all such works are dead. Believe me, the idea of God in you, if you work with that in view, means death to all your works. They become good works spoiled, and you sin besides, for you act like the gardener who plants the garden and then pulls up the trees but still expects a harvest. In this way you throw away good work. If you would live, and have your work live too, you must die to all things and be reduced to nothing. It belongs to the creature to make something out of something, but it is God's own way to make something out of nothing. So if God is to make anything of you or in you, you must first come to nothing. So enter into your own ground and work there; the works you do there are all alive.

He says, his reward is with the Lord. He says 'with,' meaning that the reward of the just is where God himself is, that the happiness of the just and God's happiness are one, the righteous are in bliss where God is in bliss. St John says, 'The Word was with God.' He says 'with' because God is righteousness and the righteous are like him. Whoever is in righteousness is in God and is God.

Further, as to the word 'just': he does not say the just man or the just angel, he simply says 'the just.' The Father begets his Son the just, and the just begets his Son. Every virtue of the just, every act done by the just, is nothing but the Son being begotten by the Father. The Father never stops. He is always trying to beget his Son in me, according to the scripture: 'For Zion's sake I will not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until the righteous is revealed and shines like lightning.' Zion is the height of the living, the contemplative life, and Jerusalem is the deepest calm. Not for the most exalted life, nor for the deepest peace, will God stop until the righteous is revealed. God and God alone works in the just. If your works are prompted by anything outside you, then your works are dead. For your works to be alive, it must be God who prompts them in the innermost depths of your soul. That is your life, and that alone.

Further I say: if it seems to you that one virtue is greater than another, if you nurture it more and value it above the rest, then you are not loving it as it is in righteousness, nor is it God who works in you. As long as a person prizes or leans toward one virtue more than another, he neither grasps nor feels it as it rightly is, and he is not righteous. The just love and practice virtue as a whole, in righteousness, as righteousness itself. Scripture says: 'Before the world was made, I am.' He says 'I am before, above,' meaning that in eternity, raised above time, a person does one work with God. People sometimes ask how a person can do the work that God was doing a thousand years ago, and will still be doing in a thousand years to come. They cannot understand it. But in eternity there is no before and no after; what happened a thousand years ago, what will happen a thousand years from now, and what is happening now, are all the same in eternity. God's doings of a thousand years ago, and now, and a thousand years to come, are but one single act. It follows that the person who is raised above time into eternity does with God what he did in the past, and also what he will do in the next thousand years. This is a matter of knowledge to the wise, and a matter of belief to fools.

St Paul says, 'We are eternally chosen in the Son,' and we should never rest until we become what we have eternally been in him. The Father ceaselessly labors to have us born in his Son, so that we may be what his Son is. The Father is begetting his Son, and in this begetting the Father finds so much peace and pleasure that his whole nature is spent on it. What is in God moves him to beget; by his ground, his nature, and his essence, the Father is moved to generation. And you should know: God is born in us as soon as all the powers of our soul, which until now have been tied and bound, are completely free and passive, and when the mind is stilled and the senses no longer trouble us. Then the Father begets his Son in us. Then we remain as free from forms and images as God, and find ourselves as free from likeness as God is empty and free in his very self. When the Father bears his Son in us, we shall know the Father with the Son, and the Holy Spirit in both of them, and the holy Trinity, and in it all things as a mere nothing in God. Then time and number are no more. God's essence neither acts nor is acted upon, nor does his nature suffer, but it works.

Sometimes a light appears in the soul, and she fondly thinks it is the Son, when it is nothing but a light. When the Son reveals himself within the soul, the love of the Holy Spirit is revealed at the same time. It is the nature of the Father to beget his Son, and it is the nature of the Son for me to be begotten in him and in his nature, and it is the nature of the Holy Breath for me to be consumed in it, melted, and reduced entirely to love. Someone who is thus in love, and altogether love, will think that God loves no one but him, and knows no love for anyone, nor from anyone, but him alone.

Some doctors hold that the spirit finds its blessedness in love. Some say it finds it in beholding God. I say it finds it neither in love nor in knowledge nor in vision. But, it may be asked, does the spirit in eternal life have no vision of God? Yes and no. Once born, he neither sees nor pays attention to God. But in being born, he does see God. The spirit is then in bliss, not in its begetting, but as being begotten, for then it lives as the Father lives, undivided, in its abstract and inmost nature. So turn away from things and realize yourself in your naked essence, for outside essence everything is accident, and the accidental produces a why. Let us live in the eternal. So help us God. Amen.