On mercy, detachment, and the Pharisee who asked Christ to dine

The prophet said, 'Lord, be merciful to the people who are in you.' The Lord replied, 'All who enter in, I will make whole and love greatly.'

I take up the words of the Pharisee who asked our Lord to dine with him, and our Lord's words to the woman, vade in pace, go in peace. It is good to pass from restlessness to calm: this is praiseworthy but imperfect. 'Go in peace': be not troubled. God means that we should enter into peace, continue in peace, and end in peace. God said, 'In me you have peace.' As far as one is in God, so far one is in peace. Whatever is in God is in peace; whatever is outside God is without peace. St. John says, 'Whatever is born of God overcomes the world.' What is born of God seeks peace and follows after it. He who keeps to the even course of his way and is at peace is a heavenly man. Heaven is always turning, and in its turning it seeks rest.

See also Jostes, No. 10.

The Pharisee asked our Lord to dine with him. The food a person eats is changed within them into their own body, just as the body is changed by the soul. Body and soul are one in being, though not in activity: my soul is united with my eye in one particular way, that of seeing. In the same way the food a person eats mingles with their nature in its essence but not in its activity. And the great union we are destined for with God will be a union of essence, not of operation. This is why the Pharisee asked that God would eat with him.

Pharisee means a solitary person, one who knows no limit to the detachment of the soul. The nobler the powers, the more freedom they bring. Some powers stand far above the body and are detached enough to separate and release themselves completely. As the philosopher rightly says, 'What moves mortal things does not itself enter into them.' Again, by being free and unattached, the unlearned person may, in love and longing, receive wisdom and pass it on. And third, having no end means having no final stopping point, no lasting security, until one comes to rest and is untroubled by disturbance: until the powers of the soul, fixed on God, are wholly free of attachment. As the prophet cries, 'Lord, be merciful to the people who are in you.'

One master says, 'Of all the exalted works God has ever done in creatures, mercy is the most familiar and the most mysterious, not excepting his work in the angels.' Here the work of mercy is raised up to mercy as it is in itself and as it is in God. The first outcome of God's activity is mercy, not in the sense of forgiving a person's sins, nor in the sense of one person forgiving another. His highest work is mercy in the sense that he brings the soul into the highest and most perfect thing she can conceive in this world. In his bottomless ocean, God is forever producing mercy.

The prophet said, 'Lord, be merciful to the people who are in you.' What people is in God? St. John says, 'He who dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him.' St. John says, 'Love unites, love brings one into God.' Perhaps that is only secondary. Love does not unite, not in any way. Being satisfied, or having enough, is not what holds things together or binds them together. Love unites in act, not in essence. The best authorities hold that the intellect strips everything away and grasps God bare, as pure being in himself. Intellect penetrates goodness and truth, and, coming upon the unmixed essence, it seizes God in the abstract, as being without name. Neither knowledge nor love unites anything. Love takes God only under the aspect of goodness, and God escapes beyond that name. Good is as far as love goes. Love takes God under a veil, under a garment. Not so with understanding: understanding takes God as he is known in himself, though it can never grasp him in the depths of his own unfathomable nature. Above both these ways of knowing, God is at work as mercy, at the height and perfection of his activity.

A philosopher says, 'There is something in the soul, intimate and hidden, far higher than the soul herself, from which her powers of intellect and will flow.' St. Augustine says, 'Just as that is ineffable out of which the Son leaps forth from the Father in the first procession,' so there is some hidden thing behind the first procession of intellect and will. According to the philosopher who is our chief authority on the soul, no human wisdom can ever grasp what the soul is. That requires a wisdom beyond nature. We do not know the source from which the powers of the soul come forth into act: of that perhaps we know a little, but what the soul is in her ground, no one knows. Whatever knowledge of this we may be allowed must come from beyond nature, by grace: God's agent of mercy.