The three creations and the soul's passage into the Godhead

The three Persons made creatures out of nothing to enjoy the uses of the blessed Trinity. There is a difference of way of acting in the Persons and their powers; for since the essence is self-sufficient there is nothing in the essence to enjoy except unity, so the soul demands nothing, knows nothing, wills nothing.

As to the Persons, each one knows the others so far as they are Persons, for one Person begets the others. Essence does not beget. In the domain of Person, one is receiving from another. The Son receives all he possesses from the Father; the Holy Ghost receives all he possesses from the Father and the Son, and each of the Persons receives from the others presence and well-being and co-operation and mutual delight. As to their activity, each one finds itself entire as essence in the others and each enjoys the others as Persons and itself in both the others.

We speak of three creations. Birth is called creation, and being made from nothing, and being raised in grace to higher grace. The same applies especially to Christ. If birth is a creation then Christ was the creature of his Father in his eternal birth of Person and of nature. Christ himself declared, 'Wisdom created wisdom.' The creation of the Son has always been to him his whole existence, who is still being born of the Father eternally with all that he is, and this birth remains in the Father eternally. St Dionysius says, 'God created a God as good as God.' Inasmuch as the Father conceives himself of himself he is his own creation. As St Dionysius says, 'God is his own self-begotten Son.' In eternity, that is. Creatures remain in eternity as being in the God-bearing Godhead. The Son knows all things essentially in the essence of the Father who, essentially, has the potential for all things that shall happen and shall not happen. He has in his Person the universal image, so that he knows all things in common with the Father and holds joint power over what has happened, what is happening and what is still to happen, as well as over what God could do if he wanted that never happens. As the Father stretches his will to things that are to happen so the Son stretches his wisdom to bring about their happening; and as the Father directs his will against things that shall not happen, the Son directs his wisdom to prevent them from happening.

The second creation is that of all three Persons at once who are one in their work of making all things from nothing. This applies most of all to Christ's soul, for she was created from nothing in time. The images existing in the middle Person are imprinted on his soul's potential so that she knows, in the form of ideas, all things past, present and to come. But things that are not going to happen, things which God in his omnipotence could do but which will not take place, though possible in essence, these his soul does not know, for that belongs to God alone. This light is a creature, created from nothing, and is above the natural reach of the soul. His soul has one light in common with the angels. This is the image stamped into her where she perceives in herself things that have happened and are happening; but in this image she sees nothing of the things that are going to happen unless God grants her knowledge of them. And this is above her nature.

The third creation is the raising of his body from grace to higher grace, that is, something extra to his animal nature, for in his animal nature he cannot see into people's hearts; in his animal nature he could give no sign nor know about the future unless God granted it. Christ was so much a child that he did not know his father or his mother. St Ambrose says, 'He was raised from grace to higher grace when he rose from death to immortality.' Christ sees in heaven, with his bodily eyes, only what is in front of him; he must turn around to see what is behind him. So the Son has never known the Father in that fundamental way in which the Three are united in one nature. Christ's soul was sharing in that way when, at the moment of her creation, she was deprived of it and kept from seeing her own divine nature. Christ's soul enjoys the divine nature by grace as God does by nature. This is so far removed from any creature that never a drop of it has ever reached any creature. The furthest limit of human knowledge is a glimpse of how the three Persons enjoy their divine nature. No one can reach this unless his soul is plunged into the awareness of the created and uncreated natures flowing together in her, where she stands in the middle and, looking straight into both, grasps directly how her own experience is and how what she enjoys there is withheld from her, and how, though carried along by grace, she is still unable to grasp God's nature. She sees clearly that she belongs to God and is not her own at all. She is sharply aware that enjoying and suffering are one and the same thing. That Christ should have action and passion both together, in the body, that was the wonder. His soul must have suffered in all her powers. Her highest power suffered all the more than the rest in proportion as it was more capable of suffering. One wise teacher says, 'In this awareness the soul has perfect joy, for perfect joy is perfect knowledge.' Christ says, 'They that know thee, Father, and thy Son whom thou hast sent, have eternal life.' He also says, 'Pray that your joy may be full.' St Dionysius says, 'Fullness of joy is perfect awareness, a balanced exchange of nature, by which the soul sees herself in the mirror of the Godhead.' God is the mirror, unveiled to whomever he chooses and veiled from whomever he chooses. St Peter says, 'God shaped his nature and the Persons in that nature, and chose the nature, not the Persons.' St Dionysius says the soul has a light that guides her in her work. By the light God casts on the angels nearest him, they throw themselves back into God with all that they are. As St Bernard observes, minds do not flow back into God by their own natural light; the Godhead takes them into its own light without their seeing it happen. Now St John says, 'God is love, and he who lives in love lives in God and God in him.' When God reveals himself to the soul and the soul loves God, she is in God and God is in her. When the sun shines and the eye sees it, the eye is in the sun and the sun is in the eye. Well then, friend, here you have the idea, which I cannot put into words, for the divine nature in the Persons is a mirror beyond the reach of any word. So far as the soul can carry herself beyond words, so far she comes near that mirror. In that mirror the union is only a union of likeness.

'When, Lord, I was in thee I had no needs in my nothingness; it was thy look, thy noticing of me, that made me needy.' If it is death for the soul to part from God, then it is death for her to come forth from God. All change is a kind of dying. So we die from time to time, and the soul dies an all-encompassing death in the wonder of the Godhead, reaching helplessly for the divine nature. In the nothing she is undone and comes to nothing. In this not-being she is buried, in unknowing she is merged with the unknown, in unthinking she is merged with the unthought-of, in unloving she is one with the unloved. No one can loosen death's grip; it cuts life from limb and the soul from God and throws her into the Godhead,

where, buried there, she is unknown to every creature. She is forgotten like one changed within the tomb, and held in no one's embrace. Like God, she is beyond grasping. For the dead who have died into the Godhead are beyond our knowing, just as the dead who die here are beyond the knowing of the body. That death is the soul's eternal pursuit. Slain in the three Persons, she loses her nothingness and is thrown into the Godhead. There she discovers the face of her nothingness. 'Thou art all fair, my love, there is no flaw in thee,' says our Lord; and of his beauty beyond understanding she says, 'Thou art more fair.' There she sees the hidden art of God: how wonderfully God arranged it so that nothing should be needy, yet without harm to itself. St Dionysius says, 'No wonder God made the soul needy with a look, when the sun, unasked, gives life to mites and worms in rotten wood.' The soul, seeing God's vastness and her own smallness, casts herself out of God's heart and out of all creatures and rests on her own bare nothingness: the divine power holds her in its keeping. As St Dionysius says, 'All things are nothing at the command of God.' Again he says, 'The look that goes from God into the soul is the beginning of faith, by which I believe things not revealed to me.' So far as the soul sinks down in faith into the unknown good, so far she is one with the unknown good and is unknown to herself or to any creature. She knows clearly that she is, but does not know what she is. Not until she knows everything there is to know does she cross over to the unknown good. This crossing is obscure to many a religious person.

The nature of the soul is such that wherever she is at all, there she is entirely. She is whole in every limb, for wherever her nature is at all, it is wholly there. So the Godhead is in all places and in all creatures and wholly in each one.

Nature without a given form is only formed so far as it is capable of being formed. It does not form itself; rather the Father forms his Son in formed nature, for the Father is as much formed as unformed nature, since this is one with him. The Father alone is in unformed nature and is first in formed nature. And in formed nature the Son forms along with the Father, for the Father and Son form the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost exists with the Father and the Son in formed nature but does not itself form. In unformed nature they are one, with formed nature distinguishing the Persons; and the Persons are as eternal in their Persons as the unformed nature is in its nature, and their formed nature is as eternal in them as their unformed nature, and this is nothing other than one God in three Persons who give form to creatures, each according to its own nature, giving them the power and activity best suited to them. Each creature holds its own nature so dear that it would want no other.

A teacher says, 'If sorrow could touch the Father he would grieve at his inability to make all things divine by nature.' When the soul in her simple nature turns into God's nature she is at once made one with God, but paying attention to separate powers and persons and virtues gets in the way of the soul's divine unity. Her common sense gives the other senses sight, hearing, touch and taste, though in itself it is only one thing. And the perceptions of the outward senses are all referred back to common sense. Discursive reason sorts out what is good and, setting aside the animal and the coarse, presents it to the memory for union with the soul. Her highest power brings it to her understanding, which has a direct grasp of God's will, and so it is carried into the soul, who brings all of it into harmony with God's good will.

God in himself is simple good and undivided. The names the soul gives God are taken from herself. Though threefold in his Person, God is the one and only good by nature. He is all-powerful good in the Father, clear wisdom in the Son and pure goodness in the Holy Ghost. He is threefold and he is one in creatures generally; and for those burning spirits who are consumed in the fire and reduced to nothing in him, he is the undivided substance. When, having brought all things into harmony in herself, the soul is reduced to her undivided substance, then she breathes in the powers of the divine nature and breathes them out from her own being into the being of the divine nature, which passes through her completely, the two beings meeting at one point common to the soul and God, and the variety of Persons does not block their unity, nor does their nature interfere with the variety of Persons. He is threefold and one in every Person in his born and unborn natures taken separately, and the Persons are not let into the essence. To receive one Person is to receive the divine nature threefold in its unity. For one Person in essence is as good as three held apart.

Happy is the soul who, taking this flight beyond all things, receives everything in the naked Godhead. That soul is buried in the face of God; she is caught up into heaven where the three Persons dwell in the oneness of their nature. This is the hidden Godhead of which no one can speak. Blessed are they who make this crossing over: all things are known to them in truth, and they themselves are unknown to any creature. So far as they are above creatures they are God and beyond creatures, because of their oneness with God. God's face hides them, every shadow of them, within itself. Where two become one, the stronger draws the weaker to itself. Christ says, 'You have not chosen me but I have chosen you.' Blessed are the chosen, they carry God's image. Christ says, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.' The poor in spirit are those who have given up everything to God the way he held it before we existed. God's kingdom means the soul being full of God and empty of herself. In this nothing God dwells, and the soul dwells in that same nothing. There she does not change, and no creature can enter it by its own right, and no creature can rise higher. St Dionysius says, 'God dwells in the nothing.' O Dionysius, that is not enough! God dwells in the nothing-at-all that came before nothing, in the hidden Godhead of pure knowing of which no one dares speak. Oneness belongs to God alone. As St Dionysius says, 'If God did not dwell in the naught, all things would perish.' St Dionysius, that is not enough! If God did not dwell in the nothing-at-all, holding creatures up by his power, they would all fall to nothing, since by their own nature they pass away into the nothingness out of which they were created. So God dwells in the nothing-at-all that came before nothing.

The creature has access to God, who is her being, working in the power that moves her to rise from naught to something. Now St Paul asks, and Augustine too, 'How did I get from naught to something, from a worm to God, from creature to creator?' The soul shall become so one with God that she thinks nothing exists but God alone, and that God made no creature except herself alone. The soul who makes this crossing beyond all things enters the peace that holds everything. She is God as he is in himself. Christ says, 'I have been man for your sake, and if you are not God for me, you wrong me.' God became man so that we might become God. God in his God-nature lay hidden in human nature, so that we saw nothing but man. And so this soul shall hide herself in God's nature until nothing can be seen but God, not by putting on a Person as Christ did, but by being wholly immersed in the divine nature. God is not a nature the way a creature is, which has some quality that another lacks. A brewer who is also a baker cannot simply be called a brewer, since he is a baker too. God is the nature of every nature: he is the undivided nature of all natures. He is the light of lights, the life of lives, the being of beings, the reason of reasons. He is the common nature of all natures. As Dionysius says, 'We cannot say he is a nature, since he cannot be divided and there is nothing like him.' And again St Dionysius says, 'We know God only in unknowing.'

When God enters the soul he comes in with all things. Though in God there is only one simple thing, the soul holds it as separate notions, angels and devils and all. The soul is able to grasp all things in God and to discern what God is in them and what they are in God, by rising up into the highest simplicity, into unknowing. St Dionysius says, 'That is Lordship, going beyond earthly things and their likenesses and raising them up to the heights.' Christ says, 'Those who follow me I will raise to where I am.' The Father speaks himself into the soul in his Son.

Now the Son is the Word of the Father, so the Father shows the soul, in this way, that he is formless in his divine nature. The soul, speaking herself back to the Father in that same Word, says that she too has no shape in her nothingness, and so she gives up her nothingness in the Word and plunges, shapeless, into the unshaped.

The Godhead is an abstract, simple thing, all-powerful above every Person and yet holding the power of the three undivided Persons: giving to no one, receiving from no one, except as it exists within itself. St Dionysius says, 'The Godhead has gained all things.' The three Persons are within the Godhead; they reveal as much of it to creatures and to each other as each is able to receive. The Father reveals the Godhead to himself and to his Son, and Father and Son reveal it to the Holy Spirit, and the three Persons reveal it to creatures, and the Godhead plays within and before and above the Word, and the Word cannot grasp it fully. If the three Persons were not distinguished within the Godhead, the Godhead would not be revealed at all, and creatures would never have been made. The eternal activities are the cause of creatures. The Father reveals the Godhead, the Son reveals the Father, the Holy Spirit reveals them both. This revealing is something the Godhead receives from the things beneath it. The highest perfection needs creatures. So it happens, from time to time, that when the moon passes below the sun and takes all the sunlight to itself, so that the sun is said to be eclipsed, a star then exerts its pull on the moon and draws it away from the sun; in this way the sun owes its light to things beneath it.

The soul receives from the Trinity those limited things that match her powers. Out of the naked Godhead a single light shines into the simple being of the soul, invisible to her powers, both the higher and the lower. For though the Godhead holds all things within it, it holds them all as one, not divided up. It does not beget, so it cannot be called the Father; it does not receive, so it cannot be called Son or Holy Spirit. The three Persons are God as person and, in nature, Godhead. The Godhead shines through the distinction of Persons and through each separate creature down to the very least, lighting them and lighting itself within itself. And when the soul in her naked essence enters the Godhead, all things lie within her reach, even the humblest creature; then she lights herself and everything within her and sees, in the Godhead, the divine nature, and in the diversity of Persons she loses her name, and the Persons lose their names in the oneness, and everything the oneness holds loses its name in the oneness. And here the soul, now as good as her own nothingness, and the Godhead's nothingness, both draw together to their end, where her powers are of no use. As St Dionysius observes, 'God passes away.' By this he means that the soul in her naked essence has slipped free of her powers. Her powers have given up their godlike quality, and even the pure substance of that quality, to the Persons and their powers, which powers work against the essence by blocking the return of the Three into oneness. Here love loses its name, and all things are lost in the Godhead's nothingness, now that the soul has flowed into her own somethingness. In the Godhead's nothingness, the Father reaches his completion, and the three Persons their one nature, in which they give creatures the perfection of their created somethingness, and the soul, in her somethingness within the Godhead's nothingness, moves through all things entirely undisturbed within the somethingness of her being. As St Dionysius says, 'The soul is not moved in her nothingness within the Godhead's nothingness, nor does the soul move the Godhead in its nothingness. There she is so great... she flows to him as it were in a light.' St Dionysius says, 'The Godhead has come to nothing, for the powers of the soul cannot grasp it.'

Blessed and praised be the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the oneness of their divine nature. Blessed and praised be Jesus Christ the Son of the living God, one Person of divine nature and human nature.