Putting off self: the soul's hidden likeness to God

St Paul says, "Put off self, put on Christ." In giving up ourselves we set Christ in motion, and holiness and happiness with him, and we are made noble.

The prophet marveled at two things. First, at God's doings with the sun and moon and stars. And second he marveled at the soul, at the prodigious things God does and has done with her and for her sake. Yet whatever prodigies he works, she still keeps the absolute freedom from passion that befits one of her noble lineage. Notice the nobility of her descent. When I write a letter of the alphabet I make it like the image of that letter in my mind, not like my mind itself. It is the same with God. God makes things in general like the universal image of them in himself, not like himself. Certain things he has made specially, like emanations of his own: goodness, wisdom, and the other so-called attributes of God. But the soul he made not merely like the image in himself, nor like anything proceeding from himself that can be said of him. He made her like himself: no, like what he is, altogether. Like his nature, his essence, his emanating and immanent activity, his ground where he subsists in himself, where he begets his only-begotten Son and where the Holy Spirit comes into flower. In the likeness of his indwelling, outgoing work God made the soul.

It is a law of nature that fluids run downhill into whatever is fitted to receive them. The higher does not receive from the lower, but the lower receives from the higher. Now God is higher than the soul, and so there is a constant flow of God into the soul, which cannot miss her. The soul herself may well miss it, but as long as a person stays right under God, he catches this divine influence straight out of God at once. He is then subject to nothing else, not fear, not pain, not pleasure, nor anything that is not God. Put yourself, then, right under God, and you will receive his inflowing divinity wholly and only. The soul does not receive from God as from a stranger, the way the air receives the light of the sun, taking it as something foreign coming in. The soul receives her God not as a stranger, and not as something lower than God, for the lower is both different and distant.

Philosophers say the soul receives as light receives from light, where there is nothing foreign or distant. There is something in the soul in which God simply is. According to the philosophers this is a thing without a name and has no proper name. It neither has nor is a definite thing, for it is not this or that, nor here nor there. What it is, it is from another with which it is the same. The one streams into it and it streams into the one. Hence the exhortation, "Enter into God in holiness," for here is the source of the soul's whole life and being. This light is wholly in God, and apart from him the soul is other than this, so in this one thing the soul is always in God, as long as she does not smother it and put it out in herself.

Philosophers say this light is present in God and never goes out of him, and God is always in it. I say, God has always been in it, and of it, from eternity. The union of man and God is not a matter of grace, for grace is a created thing and a created thing has nothing to do with this, except in the ground of divinity, where the three Persons are one in nature, and it, grace, is that very nature. So if you will, God and the universe are yours. That is, if you will put off self and things, strip off the habit of your own personality, and take hold of yourself in your divinity.

The philosophers say that human nature has nothing to do with time, that it is more deeply seated and more firmly rooted in a person than he is in himself. God took on human nature and united it with his own Person. In this way human nature was God, who put on man's nature only, not any individual man. Do you want to be true Christ and God? Then put off whatever the eternal Word did not put on. The eternal Word never put on a person. So strip yourself of everything personal and selfish and keep only your bare humanity. Then you will be to the eternal Word exactly what his human nature is to him. Your human nature is no different from his. They are the same. What it is in him, it is in you. And so I said at Paris that every prophecy of holy scripture is fulfilled in the just man, for being perfect, the whole promise of the old and new testaments is fulfilled in you.

How is one to be perfect? There are two sides to the question. The prophet says, "In the fullness of time the Son was sent." Now fullness of time is of two kinds. In the first place a thing is fulfilled when it is finished, the way day is done at evening. So when time drops away from you, your time is fulfilled. Again, time is fulfilled when it reaches its end, that is, in eternity. Time ends when there is no before and after, when all that is, is here and now, and you see at a glance all that has ever happened and all that will ever happen. Here there is no before nor after. Everything is present, and in this immediate seeing I possess all things. This is the fullness of time, and I am perfect, and I am truly the only Son and Christ. May we come to this fullness of time. So help us God. Amen.