The light in God and the soul beyond time

Eratis enim aliquando tenebrae, nunc autem lux in Domino (Ephesians 5). St. Paul says, 'For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.' The prophets, walking in the light, perceived and knew the truth that was shadowed forth in the procession of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes they were moved to return to the world and speak of things they knew to be useful for our happiness, thinking to teach us to know God. And then they would fall silent, becoming unable to speak, and for three reasons.

First, because the good they had seen in God was too immense and too mysterious to take definite shape in their understanding. Any ideas that did form were so unlike what they had seen in God, such a distortion of the reality, that they kept quiet for fear of lying. Another reason was that what they had received in God matched God's very self in immensity and greatness, and gave them no idea or form they could put into words. Third, they were silent because the hidden truth they saw in God, the mystery they found there, could not be spoken. So it happened at times that, coming back and trying to speak of these things, they slipped through failures of truth into coarse matter, and tried to teach us to know God by means of created things that belong to the lower world.

Paul says, 'but now light in God.' Aliquando, for those who understand it rightly, means the same as 'when' and points to time, which is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. He means not just time itself but temporal things, not just temporal things but temporal attachments, not just temporal attachments but the very trace and scent of time. Just as the smell of an apple lingers where it has lain, so it is with the touch of time. According to our best authorities, the visible heavens and the sun and stars have nothing to do with time beyond bare contact with it. I bring this up to show that the soul, which rises high above the heavens, has at her very summit no connection with time at all. Many times I have explained the act in God, the birth in which the Father bears his only-begotten Son, whose coming forth causes the inner blossoming of the Holy Spirit, how the Spirit proceeds from both, and how in this procession the soul comes leaping forth, with the image of the Godhead sealed into the soul in this same procession. And in the return of the three Persons the soul goes back, remade into her original and formless form. Or as Paul puts it, 'now light in God.' He does not say, 'You are the light,' but 'now the light.' He means, as I have often said, that to truly know things we must know them in their cause. The philosophers tell us that things hang suspended at their birth, as if looking out over their own existence. The Father gives birth to his Son now. In this eternal birth, in which the Father generates his Son, the soul comes into her own existence, which is the image of the Godhead stamped into her soul.

It was debated in the schools, and held by some of the teachers, that God stamps his image into the soul the way a picture is painted on canvas, and that it fades. This view was rejected. Others suggested, with more truth, that God leaves in the soul a lasting impression, like a standing intention, in this way: my wish of today is my purpose for tomorrow, and the idea stays alive because I keep actually thinking of it, and they said God's works are done the same way. For if a carpenter were perfect at his craft he would need no materials: he would no sooner think a house than it would be made. And so it is with works in God: he thinks them, and there they are.

Then came a third teacher who spoke more truly than either of the others. He pointed out that there, in God, no work is done at all: it is the now, becoming without having become, newness without renewal, and this existence is his very essence. What is in God is too fine for renewal. And in the soul too there is something so fine and rare that it cannot be renewed. In God everything is the here and now, and cannot be renewed.

There are four points I had meant to take up: the fine nature of God, the fine nature of the soul, the work of God, and the work of the soul. These I must leave for another time.