On poverty of spirit: willing nothing, knowing nothing, having nothing

Beati pauperes spiritu quia ipsorum est regnum coelorum (Matthew 5:3), Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessedness itself opened its mouth of wisdom and said, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' Angels and saints and everything that was ever born must all keep silent when the eternal wisdom of the Father speaks, for the wisdom of the angels and of all creatures is nothing at all compared with the wisdom of God, which cannot be fathomed. This wisdom has declared that the poor are blessed.

There are two kinds of poverty. One is outward poverty, and this is good, and much to be praised in anyone who takes it on freely for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, who lived this way on earth himself. About this poverty I will say no more. But there is another poverty, an inward poverty, and this is what our Lord means by the saying, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit,' or 'poor of spirit.' I urge you now to be this same thing, if you want to understand what I am saying, for I promise you by the eternal truth, unless you are like the truth we are speaking of, it is not possible for you to follow me. Several people have asked me what poverty is. This we will now try to answer.

Authorship doubtful. Excerpt only.

Bishop Albert says, 'By a poor man is meant one who is not satisfied with anything God ever made,' and this is well said. But taking poverty in a higher sense, we say something still better: a poor man is one who wills nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing. It is on these three points that I propose to speak.

In the first place, a poor man wills nothing. Some people get this wrong, those, for example, who win a reputation for themselves through penances and outward disciplines, and who are highly regarded, God have mercy on them, though they understand so little of God's truth. To all outward appearance these people are holy, but inwardly they are fools and do not know divine reality. They define a poor man as one who wills nothing, and they explain this to mean that he sets aside his own will entirely and devotes himself to carrying out the will of God. In this they are right, their intention is good, and we give them credit for it, God keep them in his mercy. But I believe these people are nothing like true poor men. They are much admired by people who know no better, yet I say they are fools with no understanding of God's truth. Perhaps heaven is theirs because their intention is good, but of the poverty I am speaking of they have no idea.

Suppose someone asked me, what then is a poor man who wills nothing? I would answer this way. As long as it can be said of someone that it is his will, that it is in his will, to do the will of God, that person does not have the poverty I am speaking of, because he still has a will of his own, a will to satisfy the will of God, and that is not how it should be. If a man is truly poor he is as free of his created will as he was when he did not yet exist. I tell you by the eternal truth, as long as you have the will to do the will of God, and have even the slightest desire for eternity and for God, you are not truly poor. The poor man wills nothing, knows nothing, wants nothing.

While I still stood in my first cause, I had no God, and I was my own. I did not will, I did not want, for I was unconditioned being, the knower of myself in divine truth. Then I wanted myself and wanted nothing else. What I willed I was, and what I was I willed. I was free of God and of all things. But when I left my free will behind and took on my created nature, then I got myself a God, for before there were creatures, God was not God, he was what he was. When creatures came into being and took on their createdness, God was not God in himself, but he was God in creatures. Now we hold that God as God is not the final goal of the creature, nor the great riches that the smallest creature has in God. If a flea had intellect and could think its way down into the eternal depth of God's being, out of which it came, then, we maintain, not God, and all that God is, could fill and satisfy that flea. This is why we pray to be free of God, and to grasp the truth, and to enjoy eternity, for the highest angel and the soul are both the same, there where I was, and willed what I was, and was what I willed. In this way a man will be poor in will, wanting and willing as little as he wanted and willed when he did not exist. And this is how a man is poor who wills nothing.

Secondly, a poor man is one who knows nothing. We have sometimes said that a man ought to live as though he were not living, neither for himself, nor for truth, nor for God. But now we take a different approach and say further that a person in this poverty has gotten back all that he was when he was not living in any way, not for himself, nor for truth, nor for God. He is so free, so empty of every kind of knowing, that no idea of God is alive in him, for while man stood in the eternal image of God, he himself was the only thing that lived in him. And so we say this man is as free of his own knowledge as he was when he did not exist. He lets God work as God wills, while he himself stands idle, as when he came from

Now the question is, where does happiness lie most of all? Some masters say it lies in love. Others say it lies in knowledge and in love, and these come closer to the mark. We, for our part, hold that it lies neither in knowledge nor in love, but that there is in the soul one thing from which both knowledge and love flow, and which itself does not know or love the way the powers of the soul do. Whoever knows this knows where happiness sits. This has no before and no after, and it is not waiting for anything to come, for it can neither gain nor lose. It lacks something, in the sense that it knows nothing of working within itself, but it simply is itself, enjoying itself in God's own way. And in this sense I say a man ought to be idle and free, with no awareness at all of what God is doing in him, that is the way to be poor. According to the masters, God is being, an intellectual being who knows all things. But I say that God is not being, nor intellect, and he does not know this or that. God is free of all things, and he is all things. Being poor in spirit means being poor of all particular knowledge, like someone who knows nothing at all, not God, not creature, not even himself. Here there is no question of a man wanting to know or recognize the way of God. In this way a man can be poor in knowledge of himself.

Thirdly, the poor man has nothing. It has often been said that perfection means not having the mortal things of this earth, and perhaps this is true in one particular case, namely when it is taken on freely. But this is not the sense I mean. I have already said, the poor man lives in such a way that he is free from his own will and from the will of God, just as he was free of them when he did not exist. This poverty, we say, is the deepest poverty. Secondly, we say that the man is poor who has no knowledge of God's work in him. Being as free of knowing and perceiving as God is free of all things, this is the barest poverty. But the third poverty, the narrowest, is the one I am about to describe, that is, having nothing.

Here I want to remind you how I have often said, and how eminent authorities have said the same, that a person must be empty of things and of activities, both inwardly and outwardly, to be a fit place for God to work in. Now we say something more. Even granting that a man is bare of everything, of creatures, of himself, of God, if it is still in him to offer God room to work in, then we say that as long as this is in the man he does not have the strictest poverty. God does not intend, in his work, that man should hold in himself the place where God does his work. Poverty of spirit means freedom from God and from all his works, so that if God wants to work in the soul, he must be his own workshop, as he prefers to be. When God finds a man this poor, God is his own patient and his own operating room, since God is in himself the operation. Here in this need, man is obeying his eternal nature, the nature that he has been, that he is now, and that he will be forever.

There is the question of St Paul's words, 'All that I am, I am by the grace of God.' Here the argument rises above grace, above understanding, and above desire. The answer is that St Paul's words are true, not that grace remained in him. The grace of God worked in him, bringing him to unity, and then the work of grace was finished. Once grace had done its work, Paul remained as he was. We might say he was a man too poor to have, or to be, a place for God to work in. To keep a place is to keep a distinction. The reason I ask God to rid me of God is that unconditioned being is above God and above distinction. It was there that I was myself, there that I willed myself and knew myself, to make this man, and in this sense I am my own cause, both of my nature which is eternal and of my nature which is in time. For this I am born, and as for my birth which is eternal, I can never die. In my eternal way of being born I have always been, I am now, and I will remain forever. What I am in time will die and come to nothing, for it belongs to the day and passes with the day. In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of my own self and of all things, and if I had willed it I would never have existed, nor would anything else, and if I had not existed, God would not have existed either. It is not necessary to understand this.

One learned doctor says that his breaking-through is nobler than his flowing-out. When I flowed out of God, then all things said, there is a God. But this alone cannot make me blessed, for in it I know myself as a creature. But in my breaking-through, when I stand passive in the will of God, free of the will of God and of all his works and even of God himself, I go beyond all creatures and am neither God nor creature. I am what I was and what I will remain, now and forever. Then I receive an impulse that carries me above all angels. In this impulse I take hold of such surpassing riches that I am not content with God as being God, or with all his godly works, for in this breaking-through I find that God and I are one and the same. Then I am what I was, I neither grow nor shrink, for I am the unmoving cause that moves all things. Now God can find no place in man, for man has gained through his poverty what he has been eternally and what he will always remain. Here in the spirit God is one, and that is the narrowest poverty a man can know.

Whoever cannot follow this teaching should not worry about it. As long as he is not like this truth, he will not see what I am saying, for it is the naked truth, straight from the heart of God. May we live in such a way that we experience it forever. So help us God. Amen.