Spiritual poverty: becoming nothing so God can be all

Beati pauperes spiritu, etc. [Blessed are the poor in spirit, etc.] Let us be eternally as poor as we were when we eternally were not. Remaining in him in our essence, we shall be what we are. We shall have all things in abundance, but in their creator. We shall know God without any likeness, love without matter, and enjoy without possession. We shall conceive all things in their perfection, as eternal wisdom shows them planned out within itself.

The poor in spirit go out from themselves and from all creatures. They are nothing, they have nothing, they do nothing, and these poor people exist only in that, by grace, they are God with God, though they are not aware of it. St Augustine says that all things are God. St Dionysius says that things are not God. St Augustine says God is all of them. But Dionysius says God is nothing we can say or think, and yet

God is the hope of all the saints, their intuition of him in which he is himself. He, Dionysius, finds him more in nothing; God is nothing, he says. In nothing everything is suspended. All that has being hangs suspended in nothing, and this nothing is itself an incomprehensible something that all the minds in heaven and on earth can neither fathom nor conceive. So it remains unknown to creatures. When the soul reaches the perfection of hanging on, of being suspended from, nothing, she finds herself without sin. This comes from the freedom in which she is held. Then, coming back to the body and to awareness of herself, and finding again, she returns into herself and considers what she has found there. In this way she raises herself above herself and crosses over to the seat of all her happiness and all her satisfaction. St Bernard says the soul knows very well that her beloved cannot come to her until everything is out of her. St Augustine says that the man loves well and truly who loves where he knows well he is not loved, and that is the best kind of loving. St Paul says, we know well that all things work together for good to those who love God. And Christ said, blessed are the poor in spirit, the kingdom of God is theirs.

They speak of various kinds of poverty of spirit. There are four. What is meant here is the first poverty of spirit, which the soul knows when, enlightened by the spirit of truth, things that are not God weigh with her not at all, as St Paul tells us: all things are as dung to me. In this poverty she finds all creatures tiresome.

In the second poverty she considers the merit of her exemplar, Christ, and her own lack of merit, and finds her own works worthless, even if they were the sum of all human achievement. So she laments in the Book of Love, crying: the form of my beloved passed me by and I cannot follow him. By this passing she condemns herself, following the trail of her quarry, Christ. His scent is so sweet that she swoons away into forgetfulness of outward pain. As St Augustine says, the soul is where she loves rather than where she lives and gives life, and St Peter tells us that our home is in heaven.

The third poverty of spirit belongs to the soul in whom her own nature is put to death. Her natural life is stone dead, and nothing lives in her but the spirit of God. As St Paul declares: I am dead, nevertheless I live, yet it is not I but Christ who lives in me. In this spiritual death she has become poor, for everything she might leave or give has been taken from her. She is poor also in her free will, for he does with it what he wills.

The fourth poverty is the incomprehensibility of God to her mind, her inability to grasp him either by knowledge or by works. But the deeper she goes, the more the incomprehensible splendor of the Godhead is reflected in her poverty. For as far as her inner self has gained intuition of divinity, so far her outer self follows the willing poverty of her pattern, Jesus Christ. In other words, the power of God having stripped her of all selfhood, she uses all creatures as she needs them, always without attachment, and if she does not have them she can do just as well without them, with the same detachment. She knows of nothing more she can do, but she rejoices in his incomprehensible truth, and that created things are all as nothing to him, and that his love has taken to itself her nothingness, which clings to him like a tiny spark. This was the poverty St Paul was in when he declared that he heard in God unspeakable things which it is not lawful for a man to utter. At that time he was so joined to God that neither life nor death could separate him from his love. This is what happens to the soul perfectly lost in God, lost to creatures and to herself alike, aware of nothing but the pure unclouded radiance of God's essence. See her lost in him, her heavenly joy, entirely incapable of any real wrongdoing. The saints all say that nothing whatever can disturb the stability they have in God. Real sin is any disobedience to the law of divine love, any departure from the life of Jesus Christ. He is the form and essence of all things. What then is real virtue? Anything worked in the soul by divine love alone, for that produces nothing but its own likeness.

Such is the teaching on spiritual poverty. May the overflowing goodness of God lead us into this true poverty. Amen.

We read in the gospel that our Lord fed the multitude with five loaves and two fishes. The first loaf was the duty of knowing ourselves, what we have always been to God and what we are now in relation to God. The second was the duty of compassion toward our fellow Christian in his blindness. His misfortune ought to touch us almost as keenly as our own. The third was that we must study the life of our Lord Jesus Christ and copy it as exactly as we can. The fourth was that we must recognize the justice of God. All accounts of the torment of hell are true. St Dionysius explained that absence from God is hell and the presence of God is heaven. The fifth is that we are to have intuition of the deity flowing into the Father and filling him with power, and flowing into the Son and filling him with wisdom, the two being one in nature. Christ himself declared: where I am, there my Father is, and where my Father is, there I am. And they flow into the Holy Spirit, filling him with goodwill. As Christ said, I and my Father have one Spirit, and the Holy Spirit flows into the soul.

By nature the soul has received two powers. One power is understanding, which can conceive the Holy Trinity and all its works, enclosing it as one would fill and seal a cask. The full cask holds what it contains, it is in union with what it holds, what it is full of. In the same way understanding is in union with what it understands, what it conceives. It is one with it by grace, as the Son is one with the Father by nature.

The second power is will. It is the nobler power because by nature it can reach the unknown, that is God. Will seizes God above knowledge, and in grasping what it wills, the imprint of the unknown God is sealed and stamped into the will, so that the will contains God and becomes one with God. Will brings memory and all the soul's powers along with it, so the soul is one with God by grace, as the Holy Spirit is one with the Father and the Son by nature. She is really in God more than in her own person. As St Augustine says, the soul is where she loves rather than where she lives and gives life. To rest in this union would be better than to do all the works of all creatures, for then her higher power absorbs her lower powers and the soul can do nothing but divine work. But since this is not always possible, the highest power, seeing her stability in God, passes it on to the lower powers so that they can tell good from evil. Adam dwelt in this union, and while the union lasted he held all the power of creatures, that is, all creatures in potential, within his highest power. When a lodestone exerts its force on a needle and draws it to itself, the needle receives enough power to pass on to the needles beneath it, which it lifts and attaches to the lodestone. Remove the top needle and all the rest fall away. It was the same with Adam. When his highest power parted from God, all his powers fell with it. Creatures become disjoined because they cannot agree among themselves, one wanting one thing, another wanting something else. The powers decay through creature after creature, down to the lowest. The power of gold, for example, cannot give gold but gives silver, and this falling off continues in silver, from which we get iron. In the same way man's powers dwindle away to nothing. This is why there are so many different creatures.

But now all creatures that came forth from God must strive with all their power to make one man who will return into the union Adam was in before he fell, and who will raise all creatures up again into the same power they had, within human nature. This is accomplished in Christ, as he himself declared: when I am lifted up I will draw all men to me. He meant that when he had risen in our mind he would gather us back to himself. In this sense all creatures are one man, and that man is God. Human nature has never existed in this way before. God is from himself eternally, and the Father made all things from nothing. What he is in himself, he is by his own nature, which is free from becoming and does not become anything, and the becoming of all things ends in not-becoming. The Son is the same as the Father except that he receives from the Father everything he has, and he is the form of all becoming. Yet he is one in the not-becoming. The Holy Spirit is the bond between the Father and the Son and is one with them in the not-becoming. He is the author and agent of becoming, in eternity and in time. This becoming in time ends in eternal not-becoming, and the eternal not-becoming is the work of the eternal nature and has neither end nor beginning.

God is his own form and matter. His form emerges from his matter, and according to this form he shapes everything that comes into being. But his simple nature is formless in form, modeless in mode, uncaused as cause, being without becoming, and this transcends all things that become, and everything that becomes comes to an end in it.

God is eternal, and all things have been in him eternally. They were not in themselves. Before God created creatures, he was nothing at all to creatures, in their understanding, though in himself he was to them eternally the same as he is now and always will be. No creature could say God at a time when it itself did not exist. What minds do not grasp, they count for nothing. A creature did not know God when it did not yet exist, so it could not speak of him. Heretics claim that Christ brought human nature with him out of heaven. In truth, Christ received his manhood from our Lady Saint Mary, while remaining as before in the Godhead. And the Almighty knew, in his eternal wisdom, the ordering of all things, that is, the Holy Spirit. This Trinity poured itself forth into time, into the nothingness of human nature. From then on human nature was changeable in time, and God put on human nature. In him human nature was God, and human nature knew it, with the three powers it has received from the blessed Trinity, and gave God thanks for it and loved him with infinite love. God sets such store by this that he loves human nature back with a love so great that any man who knows it possesses heaven within himself. I charge you, my brothers and sisters, to grow in knowledge and to give thanks to God while you are still in time, for having made you out of nothing into something, and to unite yourselves with his divine nature. Once you are out of time, your chance is gone. But if you cannot grasp God's nature, then believe in Christ and follow his example steadily. Jews, pagans, bad Christians, all who fail to exercise their awareness of God, are lost, except for infants who have not yet come to knowledge of themselves and who are properly baptized in his name. In the enjoyment of Christ's name they hold fast to the knowledge by which he knows the Father eternally.

Rejoice, all you powers of my soul, at being joined to God so that nothing can part you. But I cannot glorify God or love him fully in this, so, dying to the virtues, I plunge myself into the nothing of the naked Godhead, where, sinking eternally from nothing to something, I pass with nothing into something.

Even if I were to live here in the flesh until judgment day, bearing the pains of hell, it would be a small matter because of my Lord Jesus Christ, since I have received from him the certainty of never being parted from him. While I am here he is in me, after this life I am in him. All things are possible to me, united as I am with him to whom all things are possible. Before that I was at a loss to know whether we are God by nature or by grace. Then Jesus came with the light of his own nature, and then I saw my memory beneath my understanding, issuing from the essence of my soul, and my understanding flowing out of memory, and will flowing out of them both. Essence is revealed by the powers, and the powers by their works. What my knowledge gave me, that I loved; what I did not know I could not love, and to will, all things were possible. At one time I was deeply perplexed as to whether we are God by nature or by grace. Fear led me to Christ, who truly knows the answer. He gave me the light of grace, by which I saw in the divine nature three Persons, his Father being the begetter of all things. According to the words of Saint James,

'Every perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights.' The Father is the light itself, self-luminous in Person and in essence. In the unborn essence he is essence itself, essence without personality: essence manifest in itself as impersonal being. The Father is that same being in essence. In the essence the Father loses his fatherhood completely, he is not Father there at all. The Father's knowledge of himself in himself, both in essence and in person, he draws from his unborn essence through the exalted root of his personality. So far as he draws on his unborn essence he is paternal, Father in essence. This exalted light has been flowing in his heart forever, and it flows out of him into his Son, as essence and as Person, and it flows from them both into their Holy Spirit, in essence and in Person, and these three shed one light, in essence and in person. The Father sheds on both the light of his essence and his Person, and the Father and the Son shed on the Holy Spirit the light of both essence and Person. The unborn essence being

the oneness of the three Persons, the born essence is God as begetter so far as it flows into the Persons and so far as it emanates with the Persons. Not that the essence begets, essence does not beget. The Son and the Holy Spirit are twin lights of the God-bearing essence in the paternal source where the Father draws his born being out of his unborn essence. The Father knows himself with his Son, perceiving himself in himself. For this the Son is the light, and he wills himself in himself, and for this the Holy Spirit is the light. Father and Son have one will, and that is the Holy Spirit. It graces the soul, this divine nature, and so fills the powers of the soul that the soul can do nothing except divine work. Just as a spring at the roots of the flowers gives them itself, and the flowers grow green and colored on the spring water, so the deity, giving itself to the powers of the soul, makes them grow in the likeness of God. His image appears in her powers, his likeness in her virtues. The more divine nature the soul receives, the more she grows like the nature of God, and the closer her union with God becomes. Her union can become so close that God suddenly absorbs her into himself, completely, whether vice or virtue, so that the soul can no longer tell apart anything that might be taken for herself. God takes her for a creature. Do not be deceived by the light of nature. For a soul rising toward higher knowledge in the light of grace, the light of nature grows dimmer and dimmer. If she would know the truth itself, she must be certain whether she is detached from things, whether she is dead to self, whether she loves God with his own love and without self-interest, and has nothing holding her back or keeping her from him, and whether God alone is alive in her. If so, then she has lost herself as Mary lost Christ. For three days she sought him, knowing all the while that she would find him. And Christ, meanwhile, was at his Father's school of higher learning, paying no attention to his mother's search. The noble soul who goes to school in God learns to know what God is in the Godhead, what God is in the Trinity, what God is in humanity, and comes to know his will.

God in the Godhead is spiritual substance, so elemental that we can say nothing about it except that it is nothing. To say it is something would be more false than true. God in the Trinity is the living light in its radiant splendor, one nature with distinct Persons. The light that is life is not this light. Though one might attribute three natures to these Persons or distinctions, there is only one nature in their union, for they all act together exactly as one, working all at once in all creatures. According to Saint Augustine, the precision, or justice, of God in the Godhead, in the Trinity, and in all creatures, is the chief delight there is in heaven.

God in human nature is a lamp of living light, and this light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not grasp this light. Darkness always flees from light as night flees from day. From this comes the soul's knowledge of God's will. Now Saint Paul says, 'It is God's will that we be made holy.' And our holiness lies in this, in knowing what we were before time, what we are in time, and what we shall be after time. Lost during these three days, the soul pays no attention to the body until the body joins her in the temple and is subject to her without complaint.

The Trinity is the heart of divine and human nature, and human nature flows into the Trinity in a steady stream of love. Suppose the soul crosses over: then she sinks down and down into the depth of the Godhead and never finds a footing, unless she has carried some temporal thing with her. Resting on temporal things brings her back into the Trinity. Things made in time have a ground of their own to rest on, they find no ground in the Godhead. By this same sign the soul knows that she is a creature, for everything she has she has received in time from the three Persons. She flows out and in among the three Persons. The reason Christ's soul never plumbed the depths of the Godhead is that she too is a creature made in time. God is indeed the substance of the soul, of her powers, but not of her creation. Her powers are eternal because he is eternal. This substance never fails her. When fire lacks fuel it returns to its own place. So the soul would come to nothing if her substance failed her. When all her work is done, she and her powers remain in God, her substance. She throws herself, in her undivided essence, into the passive, immaterial Godhead, that is her native land. Then the Godhead is to her all things in a single passive power, and she in turn is all things to it, just as the heart of the sea sends out, from within the earth, the waters that circle back to the heart of the sea across the face of the earth. Suppose someone dropped a millstone from the sun to the earth, with the earth pierced straight through its center: the millstone would stop falling at the center of the earth. There is the heart of the earth, the stopping place of everything on earth. So the Trinity is the stopping place of creatures as a whole, since all that the Godhead has, it has gotten undivided and eternal from itself. The Father is the manifestation of the Godhead, the Son is the image and face of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the light of his face and the love of them both. All they have, they have gotten eternally from themselves. But the three Persons stooped in compassion toward human nature, and the Son was made man, and in this world was despised more than any man on earth, suffering want and pain from creatures he himself had made together with his Father, by whose will he became man.

Christ lived in time down to his death, and then, rising from the dead, this most despised of men is seen united with the Godhead in the Person of the Christ who came on earth. Human nature wedded to the divine nature: her eternal portion, fellowship with the divine nature in the same Person.

This is God's good will, that we should know ourselves and that we should know God, and our salvation lies in putting our knowledge into practice and loving in God all that we know. Whoever knows God in truth must love and will nothing but what God loves and wills. As Saint Paul says, 'I do good, and doing nothing but good, all things are possible to me. Many a thing is lawful for me which I do not do, so that I do not sin.' Our Lord commands us to be without sin. For the one to whom all things are possible, it is also possible to keep this commandment.

The saints declare that all things are in God as they have been in God eternally, not that we were in God in the coarse nature we have here: we were in God in an eternal way, like art in the artist. God saw himself and saw all things. God was not therefore manifold as things are here in separation. Though creatures here are manifold, they are only one idea in God. God in himself is simply the one alone. When the creature returns to her first cause, she knows God simply as one in form and essence and threefold in operation. What the intellect knows is knowledge, and knowledge stops at what is known, becoming one with what is known. Into the simple idea no knowledge has ever entered, for this undivided pattern after which God created all creatures stands as high above creatures as God himself. The creature, in pursuing God to his eternal heights, must rise above all creatures, and even beyond her very self, her own habits and uses, and follow unknowing into the desolate Godhead. Saint Dionysius says, 'God's desert is God's simple nature.' A creature's desert is her simple nature. In the desert of herself she is stripped of her own form, and in God's desert, which leads out of her own, she is stripped of name. There she is no longer called soul, she is called God with God.

Perhaps you will say, being in this exalted state, why does the soul not raise the body above the need for earthly things? To this I answer, at this stage the soul has a body made perfect, which uses all things for the glory of God, there being now no barrier or hindrance between God and the soul. So far as the soul has followed God into the desert of his Godhead, so far the body follows Christ into his desert of willing poverty and is one with God. The Father may well say, 'This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, follow him.' All creatures are with God, the being they have, God gives them by his presence. The bride says in the Book of Love, 'I have run around the circle and found no end to it, so I cast myself into the center.'

This circle which the loving soul ran around is all that the Trinity has ever made.

Why is the work of the Trinity called a circle? Because the three Persons have made their own likeness in all creatures that are rational. The Trinity is the origin of all things, and all things return into their origin. This is the circle the soul runs. When does she run in this circle? She does so when she considers: all this that he has made, he could make again a thousand times over if he wished. So she goes around in an endless chain. Of the least of all his creatures she can find no end, nor can she fully fathom its worth. Worn out by her search, she casts herself into the center. This point is the power of the Trinity, where, unmoved, it does all its work. There the soul becomes all-powerful.

The three Persons are one omnipotence. This is the motionless point and the unity of the Trinity. The circumference is the incomprehensible work of the three Persons. The point is fixed. The union of the Persons is the essence of the point. In this point God runs through change without otherness, folding into unity of essence, and the soul as one with this fixed point is capable of all things. But her powers, through which she imitates the Trinity, cannot grasp its unity with those powers. The work of the Trinity has proved the undoing of many Paris theologians: absorbed in the working of the Trinity, they never got as far as its unity. The center is equally near to all points on the edge, like time is the same in all lands. Now is the time here, and now is the same time in Rome.

The bride says in the Song of Songs, 'He has wounded me with a glance of his eye.' This refers to the unifying force that streams down from the point, cutting the soul off from creatures and changing things, and gathering her up again into the point, there to be united with it and there to be established forever.

One becomes aware of this glance within the soul's own ground when she is entirely unoccupied, free from the practice of either vice or virtue. In this quiet state, direct perception is most vivid, so it is then that he pierces her with his glance, to let her truly feel how he knew and loved her before she herself existed. This works as a sharp reminder to the soul to go out of herself. Whoever this glance has not wounded has never been wounded by love at all. On this St Bernard says, 'To the one whose spirit has felt this glance, it cannot be put into words; to the one who has not felt it, it cannot be believed.' It is an arrow shot without anger and felt without pain. From it flows the clear and limpid stream of healing grace that opens the inner eye to see, in blissful beholding, the delight of this divine wound, in which we share unheard-of spiritual graces, favors beyond telling, not preached and not written in any book.

The soul says, Lord, you yourself declare that you have made me like yourself. That is beyond what any human skill could manage, for no philosopher is wise enough to make a double of himself. 'Lord,' she cries, 'if you have made me like you, grant that I may see you possessed of the power by which you created me, know you in the wisdom by which you have known me, and conceive you as you conceive me. And grant, Lord, that by your grace I be made one with you in nature, as your Son is one with your nature from eternity, and that your grace may become my nature. For, Lord, your grace becomes your nature, and in your nature we become God, just as the Father in his nature is God by nature.'

Christ calls us to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect in his nature. He says, 'God is nearer to you than you are to yourself.' And in the same sense St Augustine says the soul has a private entrance into the divine nature, where everything else comes to nothing for her. Then she is ignorant though knowing, without love though loving, dark though enlightened. At that point, to know God would be an imperfection, to know herself in God would be an imperfection, and to know God in herself would be an imperfection. She takes in the incomprehensible essence, above all knowing, by grace, just as the Father takes it in by nature. And since the essence born in her understanding is gotten there the way the Father has gotten it in himself, she steals out of herself and breaks through into the naked essence, holding on to nothing more of created things than when she first came forth from God. She comes so completely to nothing that nothing is left but God. God outshines her as the sun outshines the moon, and she, in God's own subtle nature, flows into all that God is, flowing in eternity.

'If you have grasped me' contains two points worth noticing. First, the soul, knowing she was made out of nothing, wants to see who made her. Second, her words, 'grant that I may see you as you create me,' mean she wants to feel the faith and love in which she was created. For then the soul sees God, though she does not see through him. She knows God, though she cannot fathom him. She grasps God, but does not comprehend him the way he comprehends himself. St Paul says, 'Then we shall know as we are known.' Stripped of her own being, with God as her only being, the soul sees God with God, knows and conceives God with God. One great authority says the soul sees, knows, and grasps God with his very own essence, which is the very essence of the soul. The soul sees, knows, and conceives God the way she herself is conceived in the pure understanding of the Godhead. Then the soul is both the one who understands and the one understood. But no one in this body, thinking in the ordinary way of the mind, can grasp how the soul is both conceiver and conceived, unless he is wholly sunk into himself, into the pure knowledge of his own God-given nature, where no created thought has ever entered.

Now notice this. The nothing by which the soul comes to nothing is the turning away from images and forms, so as to rest in none of them, since the divine nature is neither form nor image. And the soul set apart from images and forms is like the formless nature of God. This is the hidden passage of the soul into the divine nature. The soul who has nowhere left to turn is ready to turn toward the image of God. In other words, she goes with nothing toward nothing, toward the divine nature, which no one can reach unless stripped of all mental content. How badly they block this hidden passage, those who settle so easily for temporal things! Dionysius spoke to his disciples in this spirit, saying, 'Do you want to know the hidden mystery of God? Then go beyond whatever blocks your pure perception, whatever your understanding can grasp. God has nothing so hidden that it is beyond the reach of a soul with the wit to seek it diligently and wisely.'

This is a hard saying, that there is nothing in him so hidden it lies beyond her reach. Still, consider the following.

The power of things lies in their essence. Now the soul is capable of knowing all things in her highest power, when she is fully withdrawn into her inmost chamber. To the soul freed in this way from things, his secret essence is laid open. She is able to receive his hidden power. As St Paul says, 'I can do all things in him who strengthens me.' Rise up, noble soul! Seek no place other than this needless nothing that created you. Its own stillness shall be your place. There you will be more motionless than nothing. But some learned men object to this, holding it impossible. Nothing, they say, is motionless, so how can the soul be more motionless than nothing? The soul is a created something that can move: she is variable, while nothing is constant. The soul, for example, moves from light to light until she finds the highest truth where all things come to rest. And the soul is in motion in that she is aware of things other than herself. Nothing has no awareness. Therefore something is more capable of motion than nothing. That is the argument made against our claim. Now to prove that the soul is more motionless than nothing.

The highest good, God, is more motionless than nothing. And the most perfect likeness of this motionless highest good is also most unmoving. Perhaps you will object: nothing is the same as God, since both are non-existent. Not so. For nothing is nothing, whether to itself or to any creature. But God is, to himself, his own something, and to the mind of any creature he is nothing. Even so, the creature's something speaks of God's something by nature, more than its own. God's something is intellectual being. Dionysius says, 'The intellectual light that God is got its own image in the rational soul.' Now if God is more motionless than nothing, it follows that the soul, as reflected into her motionless something, namely God, is more motionless than nothing. Nothing can move out of itself when nothing becomes something, and is always set in motion when something is produced out of nothing. Not so the soul: she is always something and can never become nothing. See then the soul more motionless than nothing, since God has set her free, free to exercise her own free will.

Her motion is the search for one who has never loved and was never loved. Here is how to read this. The soul, lifting herself with all her strength above herself to love the highest good, sees clearly she can never reach the divine something by means of any of her own powers. So she sinks back down into herself, and the motionless something remains unloved by her and by everything that is not itself. In this way the divine something is never loved by her, nor by anything that is not itself, nor has it ever loved. You might put it this way: he loves nothing but himself, or his own image wherever it appears in things, surpassing love itself and every name, and so he neither loves nor is loved. This is what St Dionysius means by saying, 'God dwells in motionless calm.' And the bride says in the Song of Songs, 'I have crossed all the mountains, even my own powers, and have reached the dark power of the Father. There I heard without sound, there I saw without light, there I breathed without motion, there I tasted what had no savor, there I touched what did not touch back. Then my heart became bottomless, my soul loveless, my mind formless, and my nature without nature.'

Now what does the soul mean by crossing all the mountains? She means she has gone beyond her own rational powers and reached the dark power of the Father, where all rational distinctions end. 'There I heard without sound': hearing without sound means direct, immediate perception. 'There I saw without light': seeing without light means an undefined, vague perception within the nothing. 'There I breathed without motion': the breathing in of unity, in which all things are still. 'There I tasted what had no savor': over all things that can be sensed hangs the motionless mist of unity.

'There I touched what did not touch back': the alien, unmixed essence underlying all creatures, the substance behind all substantial things.

'Then my heart became bottomless': the overwhelming wonder that swallows my powers. 'And my soul loveless': powers and senses blotted out. 'And my spirit formless': the sealing of the mind in the unformed form and image of God. 'And my nature without nature': my own nature withering away until nothing is left but the one unique is. This is-ness is the unity, the being of itself and of all things. St Dionysius says, 'The One alone is the life of lives, the being of beings, the reason of reasons, the nature of natures, the light of lights, and yet is not light, not life, not nature.' Of it St James says, 'Every perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights.' Again St Dionysius says, 'The First Cause is above all names and beyond love. It is beyond being, beyond understanding, beyond reason, and beyond nature. The First Cause is neither light nor darkness.' See how different this is from everything that has been caused.

The soul says in the Song of Songs, 'No one is God to me, and I am soul to no one.' By 'no one is God to me' she simply means that no entity, nothing that can be named, is her God. And the words 'I am soul to no one' mean she is so emptied of self that she has nothing left in her to be anything to anyone. This is the state the soul should be in: utter destitution. The soul cries in the Song of Songs, 'He is mine and I am his.' It would have been better if she had said, 'He is not mine, nor am I his,' for God, who is in all things, is in himself entirely his own. She can claim nothing. She has lost every trace by which anyone could in any way belong to her, or she to anyone. No one is her God, and she is no one's soul, which is why she cries in the Song of Songs, 'Flee from me, beloved, on the wings of the wind.'

What do these feathers of the wind mean, on which the soul rides? The feathers are the choirs of Seraphim. The wind of their feathers is their clear, seraphic knowledge. Above this dwells the soul. But not until she has left behind all images and forms, holding none, resting on none. She must have given up her individual motion. And so, stripped of her creaturehood, holding on to nothing at all, she sinks into pure nothingness. There she is hidden from every creature. No understanding of a Seraph can reach this same nothing. In this nothing the soul dwells, above the Seraphim, beyond all such knowing. So the soul rides on the feathers of the wind.

But what a perfect life this man must lead! How dead his soul is to every kind of motion! St John declares, 'Blessed are the dead that die in God.' To this end, O man, free yourself from every sort of sensible affection. God is exempt from such, and it is fitting for you, man, to be the same if you would solve his hidden mystery. For this, look you, the soul must be stripped of all her senses. St Dionysius spoke of this to Timothy, one of his disciples, when talk arose about St Paul who had been put to death.

'Alas, my friend,' said Timothy, 'shall we never hear again the loved voice of our master?' The saint replied, 'Friend Timothy, my counsel is to leave behind us corporal things and go to God. But this we cannot do except with blind eyes and alien senses, not that we ought to have misleading senses: we must transcend sense and knowledge to reach his mysterious unity.' On this St Augustine says, 'The soul has a private door into divinity where for her all things amount to nothing.' There she is ignorant with knowing, will-less with willing, dark with enlightenment. To know herself would mean her imperfection; to know God would mean her imperfection; to know herself in God or God in her would mean her imperfection: self is reduced to utter nothing and there is nothing left but God, for God outshines her as the sun outshines the moon, and she, with God's all-penetrating power, streams into the eternal Godhead where God keeps ever flowing into God.

Nothing is without beginning, and since nothing is without beginning, God could make us from nothing better than nothing, like himself. God's power alone made the soul, so she, like him, is free from matter. And the soul could have no more fitting road into divinity than by way of nothing to nothing, for nothing unites like natural kinship. But St John Chrysostom declares that none can take it until his outward and inward senses are focused to clear vision of the Deity.

The nothing we were before we were created needed nothing. Moreover, of itself it could do absolutely nothing, and nothing withstood creatures, except the power of God; it was this that kept nothing still when God made all things from nothing. Now we must become more motionless than nothing. But how? Mark how. God made the soul mistress of herself, not overriding her free will nor ever demanding from her anything she will not give, so whatever in this body she chooses of her free will, she is free to carry through. Suppose she chooses to need nothing and to be more motionless than nothing: then, gathering all her powers into her free will so as not to be hindered by herself or anything else, she centers herself in the motionless God, who was never moved by any act done by the blessed Trinity, nor needs anything the blessed Trinity has ever done. To reach this point of needing nothing and being more unchanging than nothing, the soul must sink so deep into the bottomless well of the divine nothing that nothing can draw her out to spend herself on mortal things, but there she abides steadfastly; as the heavenly Father is always abiding in his nature without hindrance, so the soul abides there without hindrance, as far as that is possible for a creature.

'Please, Sir, how could it be impossible, seeing that the soul was created for that end?' 'Because, you see, if she does stoop to lesser things and lets herself be satisfied with these, then what is above her is beyond her reach, whereas God keeps no secrets from the soul whose lofty nature is equal to the quest. Up, noble soul! Go so far out of yourself that you never come back in, and enter into God so deep that you never come out again: stay there and never stoop to any creature; do not burden yourself with things made clear to you, nor wander among objects presented to your mind, nor let yourself be hindered from this by any service. Steadfastly pursue your simple nature and the needless nothingness, seeking no other place than this needless nothing. God, who made you out of nothing, shall himself, in his needless nothingness and immovability, be your place. There you shall be more immovable than nothing.'

Those who serve God for gain, with outward works, reap their reward in creatures, such as heaven and heavenly things. But those who serve God through inward acts are rewarded with the uncreated, namely, the works of the blessed Trinity.

Mark this. No fire, no light; no earth, no life; no air, no love; no water, no place. Therefore God is not light, nor life, nor love, nor nature, nor spirit, nor likeness, nor anything we can put into words. God flows into God and God flows out of God, and God knows himself as God in himself, and knows himself as God in his creatures in general, and knows himself as God in the noble soul in particular. The Father is almighty in the soul, the Son all-wise, the Holy Spirit all-loving, loving all creatures with the same love. But he shows himself as different, and the soul is meant to know things as they are and understand things as they are when, taken hold of by this, she plunges into the bottomless well of the divine nature and becomes so one with God that she herself would say she is God. The soul, withdrawn into herself until nothing made or named takes shape in her, and she is as bare of any name as God is, gathers herself up above herself into her God and takes herself, with God, for God. God is not black nor white, nor large nor small, he has no place nor any past or future time, and the soul is like him only so far as she can lift herself above all creatures.

The soul is a creature able to receive everything that is named, but she cannot receive the nameless until she has gone so deep into God that she is nameless herself. And then no one can tell whether it is she who has gotten God or God who has gotten her. Dionysius says, 'God has conceived himself in her, so completely absorbing her that she is now no longer herself but God.' And the soul's lesser powers keep the distinction of person, love uniting the persons but not the essence. The soul is meant for this knowledge when, on the ebb-tide of God's glory, she is carried back into the bottomless ground of the fountain from which she flowed, and finds that she is not from herself.

The highest good, the chief good of the soul, is not from herself. Christ himself declared he was not from himself. The truest thing we have is our sense of not being from ourselves, and that we ourselves are not our own.

God has done all things for himself, and he has made the soul like himself: over all things, under all things, in all things, out of all things, and yet remaining in herself undivided. But she is noblest when she keeps to the desert where she is nothing and nothing is happening. St Dionysius prays, 'Lord, lead me into the desert where you are formless, that in your solitude I may lose all form.' The soul is in all things through her subtle nature, in which she dwells in all things without affecting them or being affected by them. So, rising above things, she cries, 'Lord, bring me into your Godhead where you are nothing, for whatever is something I do not take to be God.' The soul is over all things in her freedom; she knows that none can compel her, not even God himself. Giving up her free will to God, she plunges into her own emptiness, begging, 'Lord, take me into the darkness of your Godhead, that in your dark I may lose all my light, for nothing that can be shown do I count as light.' She is out of all things in her power of understanding, which makes her so open that she is able to hold God as well as all his creatures. Holding God in this way, she is more God than herself. This is hers by grace. Any part of God is the whole of God, and any part of him holds his entire being. This he is in the lowliest nature as much as in the loftiest. A small bung stops the barrel no less well than the biggest.

Understanding belongs to his power as Father. He grasps himself in himself in all creatures, and grasps himself in his own face, to which he admits no creature and into which no creature can get. And this grasp of himself he hides in a cloud of distortion, so that no creature can grasp him as he grasps himself. What the soul grasps in the light, she loses in the darkness. Yet she presses toward the cloud, judging his darkness better than her light. There she suddenly loses her light and herself in his darkness.

The soul cries in the Book of Love, 'No one is my God and I am no one's soul, and nothing that shows itself to me do I take for God. I flee from God for God's sake.' St John says, 'God is love.' But theologians argue that if he means the love with which the soul loves God, this is not true. If that love with which the soul can love were God, it would not fail her as it does. This is a natural love, the virtue. But suppose her will turns toward God: then God draws love out of nothing and pours it into the virtue, so her love is both nature and grace. In grace God gives himself to the soul, and the Holy Spirit joins with her love, and the love which is the Holy Spirit is God, and the love which is grace is the nature which joins the soul to God, and in this joining the soul is taken up into God and loves God with his own love in God, which in herself she cannot do.

The Father is the revealing of all things, and the Son is the image of all things, and the Holy Spirit is the completing of that order. Philosophers say that things in contact with God are not God but his works. The soul is self-moving before she is moved, and her being moved is the work of God, the soul being the one who acts while the work itself is a creature. The power that perfects the soul, that carries her out of herself without her help or effort, is God. I can touch the cathedral, not carry it off. That we attribute to God matter and form and work is due to our dull senses. Theologians speak of the light which gives no light, which has no form nor matter and is yet a creature. To know God as he is, we must be entirely free from knowledge. So St Augustine says, 'Lord, I do not know what I love in you if it is not light.' As God is without time and without manner, so he is also without name. St Paul says, 'Many run, but only one receives the prize.' All the powers of the soul run, but pure nature alone receives the crown, for, according to Dionysius, this race is nothing other than the flight from creatures to be united with their creator. United with her creator, the soul has lost her name, for she herself no longer exists: God has absorbed her into himself just as the sunlight swallows up the dawn until it is gone.

Tell me, where does the soul live? On the wings of the wind. The wings are the powers of the divine nature. The wind is the rising of the powers of the soul's divine nature. When he holds her sins up before her eyes, she sinks down into him like a fish into the sea. All creatures lose their names on entering human nature. This is why Christ said, 'Preach the gospel to all creatures.' He meant only human beings.

Notice when a man is all creatures. It is when he has the power of them all. When a man, knowing all bodily things with his outward senses, frees himself from them and remains in them without attachment; when, knowing all spiritual things with his inward senses, he frees himself from these too and remains in them without attachment, then at last that man is all creatures; then, and not until then, that man has come into his own nature and is ready to go into God. If we fail to find God, it is because we look for likeness in what bears no likeness. Scripture tells us more about his unlikeness than his likeness. Origen says the soul's search for God comes through knowing herself. If she knew herself, she would know God too. If she pictures herself, or pictures her God, that comes from over-defining. On merging into the Godhead, all definition is lost.

Dionysius says to Timothy, 'Friend Timothy, if you want to see the spirit of truth, do not pursue it with mortal senses. It is so swift, it comes rushing.' God must be sought in estrangement, forgetfulness and unknowing; for the Godhead holds all things within it potentially, without the least likeness to anything. The supremely pure splendor of the undivided essence lights up all things at once. According to Dionysius, beauty is order: proportion joined with the highest clarity. In this sense the Godhead is the beauty of the three Persons. And it falls to the soul to order her lower powers to her higher ones and her higher ones to God: the outer senses to the inner, the inner ones to reason, thought in service to intelligence, intelligence to will, and her will to their unity. Then the soul becomes a unity, with nothing flowing into her except pure deity as it proceeds from itself. On this point Saint Dionysius says that the soul has cast her faculties into her pure being, and only her chief power remains at work. And one teacher says that when the chief power takes charge, all the rest enter into it, giving up their own activities. So now see the soul in her proper order and in her pure nature, her pure nature being her exalted nature of light, which holds all things potentially.

The Godhead flows into the Father, into the Son and the Holy Spirit, into itself in eternity, and in time into creatures. It gives to each as much as it can hold: to stones existence, to trees their growth, to birds their flight, to animals their pleasures, to angels reason, and to man a free nature. God became man and took on himself by grace the nature of all things in time, just as in eternity he holds them all by nature. Saint Paul says, 'Christ is all things to me.' One Person with two natures. Each seems all things to the other. It is a play of light, a reflection of his own nature. God's being is first being, flowing being, fixed being, beginning being and final being.

From essence in general, power and action flow out. In this respect the three Persons are the storehouse of divinity, and the three Persons descend into the essence of the soul by grace, bringing divine nature into the soul with them, one nature running through the other. The higher powers of the soul flow out of the essence of the soul just as the three Persons issue from the Godhead. And when God pours his grace into the soul, he pours it into the essence of the soul, for no stain can fall into the essence of the soul, whatever her powers may do. The higher powers of the soul take their appearance from the essence of grace within the essence of the soul, and her chief power rises above the lower ones in nature.

A mind pregnant with the thought of God's nature is the counterpart of Christ's Person in human nature. When the soul is taken up into God's nature, her sins and shortcomings are stripped away and she becomes God, divine in nature. She enjoys the divine nature in herself just as the Father enjoys it in him. She does not get this from her own nature: she takes divine nature from God into her own nature. She receives perfection and power. Hence Saint Paul's words, 'I can do all things in him who strengthens me.' Wisdom springs up in understanding; it begins in understanding and ends in desire, and it has neither heart nor thought. As Saint Dionysius says, 'When the soul, finding this way out, has a footing in eternity, and in time has it in her own understanding, there she shall return into the flow where God flows back into himself, and does not flow away.'

God flows back into himself, taking no more notice of creatures than he did before they existed. And the soul shall do the same. With her humanity she shall conceive the Person of the Son, and with the Person of the Son she shall grasp the Father and the Holy Spirit in both, and both of them in the Holy Spirit. And with the Person of the Father she shall grasp his undivided nature, and discerning the abyss in his nature, she shall flow into the void stripped of matter and form. Form, matter, mind and mode she loses in the unity, for she herself has come to nothing. God does all her work. He keeps her in his being and leads her by his power into his naked Godhead. She flows with his deity into everything that God flows into. She is the place of all things and has no place of her own. This is the spirit of wisdom, which has neither heart nor thought.

The soul flowing in the Deity comes so close to God that in the power of the Father she receives divinity, by grace, as the Father has it by nature. Saint Paul says, 'In one image we shall go from glory to glory.' This means that we shall receive the undivided Godhead with everything that flows from it, and shall conceive the Deity in ourselves as the Deity conceives itself. Her will and God's will shall be one, and wherever God has placed himself, there she is with God. No one can reach this while still in the body, unless God grants the soul his best gift, namely the vision of God, which confirms the soul in the Trinity and in the image of the Godhead.