The drowning: losing the self in the Godhead's unity

Though there is neither hell nor heaven, still I will love God: the Father, and your sovereign nature in which the Trinity dwells in the unity from which it draws its power. Now you want to hear about this hidden and exalted nature of the Trinity. The Persons are God in their personal being. Godhead by nature is in their oneness. But you must know what God and Godhead are. God has distinctions, which my soul explains through the reflection of the exalted unity. This unity shines in its own essence, wholly without distinction. In it is contained the whole of its unity, including the distinctions of the high Persons. The river has its source where unity abides; this one alone needs nothing, resting in itself in dark stillness. It cannot be grasped and yet it is self-evident. Light is the first thing to appear. It draws the mind out into the unknown beyond itself, everlasting, drawn inward, sunk in darkness. There the mind is made a fool of, there it is stripped of light's darkness, losing both in the abyss. There this mysterious thing, the mind, is made a stranger to itself in the unity which is also its life.

O bottomless depth, in your depth you are high and in your height you are deep. How can this be? That is hidden from us in your bottomless abyss. St Paul says that it will be made known to us. In this knowing the mind goes beyond itself, it is taken up into the Trinity. There the mind dies the whole of its dying in the wonder of the Godhead, for it is merged with that unity, the personal losing its name in sameness. There the mind, made one, is counted as nothing. There it loses the means of its divinity. Light and darkness, it is freed from both, matter as well as form. The spark, laid bare this way, made nothing out of its own nothing, is swallowed up in the something of its nothing. This same nothing is poverty in the Persons, which draws the mind out and reduces it to unity. In the embrace of this sovereign one, which strips things of their separate selves, being is one without distinction, though it remains a created thing in its own individual nature. The one I mean has no word for it. One and one joining, emptiness shines into emptiness. Where these two depths hang, equally breathed forth and unbreathed, there is the highest being. Where God gives up the ghost, darkness reigns in the unity that is known yet unknown. This is hidden from us in his motionless depth. Creatures cannot enter into this something.

It is well that this something is beyond us.

Even so, loving it beyond ourselves,

Plunge in. This is the drowning.

This is the gloss on the drowning

It is true spiritual perfection to love God for his own sake, regardless of hell or heaven. We must love the three Persons in their unity of nature and their one nature in the three Persons. The Trinity has its power in the unity, and the unity has its dignity in the Trinity. It belongs, too, to the noble mind to see the distinction between God and Godhead, to see how the three Persons in him have taken his unity as their natural being. Each Person has for nature the whole of his unity, so each of the Persons is in himself God, and in his nature, Godhead. God is God in the Persons, and Godhead in his nature, in his undivided nature. The unity shines out in the Trinity as spoken words. But the perfect reflection of the one shines by itself in lonely silence, kept safe there as one and undivided. Further, the three Persons, in their speaking forth, keep their own distinct properties. The Father is the source of the Son, and the Son is the river flowing eternally out of the Father as a Person, while staying within him in essence. The Father and the Son breathe forth their breath, or spirit. So the river that comes forth, together with its original source, is the origin of the Holy Spirit. The unity which, in strict terms, belongs to the original source also belongs to the river, which together with its source is the source of the Holy Spirit. And as this oneness is the nature of both of them, so too it is the nature of the breath breathed out by both. This river, then, has its spring. The unity that is in them both needs nothing, it has no need of speech, but exists alone in unbroken silence. This does not mean the spoken word dies away, that is, the essence that is spoken. But where speech beats against the silence of its own nature, both share one character, the character of sameness. What is this? It is the still darkness that no one knows except the one in whom it reigns, the one with its own selfhood. The first thing to arise in it is light. This is the river that has come forth, and the origin itself, which bears the character of light as it proceeds forth in its own individual nature. And what streams forth here into view will reveal both itself and the source it springs from. In its inward procession, this river that has come forth, which is also the origin itself, has the nature of hidden, unseen understanding, but the light that proceeds forth brings this to light for the mind, drawing it out of itself into its hidden indwelling cause. There it is stripped of light's illusion, that is, of everything that has been revealed to it in the form of light. It is stripped of this, but now it finds something else, better than this light-like understanding. Light has a mode but no knowledge. Darkness is knowledge without mode, something we can in no way have. The mind is freed from light when it is freed from mode, and it is freed from darkness when, letting go of all created things, it sinks into actuality beyond naming. Then it loses both light and darkness in the abyss that no creature can ever fathom on its own. This is the estrangement in the one as it is foreshadowed in the ordinary mind, but the knowing of unity that the blessed have lies in a finer awareness that is not their own.

O bottomless emptiness, with no bottom for creatures or even for yourself: in your depth you are raised up in your undivided, imperishable reality. In the height of your inmost power you are so deep that you swallow up your own simple ground, which stays hidden there from all that you are not. Yet those you choose to be close to shall know you as you know yourself. As St Paul says, then we shall know as we are known. The mind does not get this knowledge from its own individual nature. The unity draws it, through the Three, into itself, that is, into its true and natural home, where it goes beyond itself in what draws it in, where the spirit dies the whole of its dying in the wonder of the Godhead. This dying of the spirit means it is merged with the one underlying nature, though it stays distinct in the Persons of the Trinity. This shows the activity of spirit, its having more than one Person. But their union gives off a single light, for the three Persons burn with one shared nature, like three lights giving one shine. According to St Augustine, this inherent light is cast by the Persons into the pure spirit. At its touch the spirit gives up self and selfhood and the use of its powers. This is the effect of the beam of pure undivided light of unity, which this spirit becomes rather than remaining itself, when it is reduced to nothing but that same light. We call the unity nothing because the mind has no notion of what it is. What the mind does know is that it is held up by something other than itself. What holds it up, then, is something rather than nothing, though the mind has no idea what that something could be. It is more real to the mind than the mind's own self, in that it denies the mind's own nothingness. For the mind, actually dwelling there, loses every trace of its divine nature, which to it is everything. It loses its individual nature and yet it does not die. It gains the nature of divinity, though not as God by nature but by grace. Remember, it is something created out of nothing. Yet this mere created thing is drawn by the power of God's essence into his unity, a thing no creature can know in any way. This unity, which is in no way a creature's unity, is poverty, for it is stripped of creatures, holding nothing but plain reality itself. This creature-essence without mode is the being of the Persons, who alone hold it in its simplest and most original form, as their nature. This knowledge unmakes the mind. This unmaking of the mind means the complete modelessness of the unity which the Persons hold in actual mode. The spirit rests in sameness, without light or darkness. Without light, in its reality that cannot be entered; without darkness, in having no special name. The spirit, free from matter and form, has taken on the form of God. So the mind reaches its eternal image, which is one in its underlying nature and threefold as spoken in the Persons. Though the spirit in this image has a nature of its own that is eternal, in itself it is still something created. This created thing is called mens, meaning by mens the spark, the living core of spirit. This is the spirit in itself. Its eternal image is something else, that is truly God. When the spirit in itself turns away from all things coming-to-be, into the not-coming-to-be of its eternal object in the Persons, the place it comes from, then the mind is said to return to its pattern. Then emptiness shines into emptiness: the purified coming-to-be of the mind turns toward the pure not-coming-to-be nature of its eternal idea. In this embrace that high union is brought to completion, in which at last the spirit, at one with all its nature, is reconciled with God. Where these two meet as one, equally spirit and not-spirit, there is blessedness.

Now consider what it means to call God spirit. The most meaningful and subtle word a creature can use is spirit, meaning breath or ghost, and that is why we call God spirit. But a creature has no proper name for the nameless God, and so to our minds, God is not spirit.

Notice too what the spirituality of the soul means. It means that, set apart from the tangle of lower things, the soul lives at its summit in thought and love. There it is one spirit with God. The spirituality of the soul also means that in its something it is no more made of matter than in the nothing out of which it was created. This is the spiritual nature of the soul. But the soul is unmade of spirit, unmade of mind, when, in being taken up, it belongs to him rather than to itself, and this is the perfection of its right mind. The inward breathing forth of God, again, is his hidden nature, the thing the mind searches for and cannot find, for this hidden and silent one lies hidden in depths of stillness that no creature ever reaches the bottom of. This being is beyond what we can grasp. And so, rejoicing greatly, let us hurry to take hold of it with itself. This is our highest happiness. So be it, with your help, O divine Trinity. Amen.