Grace, the eternal image, and seeing God beyond all light

THE BEATIFIC VISION

King David said: Lord in thy light shall we see light.' Doctors debate as to the medium in which we shall see God. The common doctrine is that it will be in the light of glory. But this solution appears to me to be unsound and untenable. From time to time I have explained that man has within him a light called the active intellect: this is the light in which man will see God in bliss, so they seek to prove. Now man according to his creaturely nature is in great imperfection and is unable by nature ' See Preger, Geschichte der deutschen Mystiker vol. i, p. 484.

to discern God otherwise than as creatures do, by images and forms, as I have elsewhere demonstrated. The soul is unable of herself and by her own innate power to transcend this state; that must happen in some supernatural power such as the light of grace. Mark this solution which I will now proceed to discuss.

St Paul says: By God's grace I am that I am.' He does not say that he is of grace.' There is a difference between being by grace and being grace itself. Doctors declare that form gives being to matter. Now there are various definitions of grace current among them. But I say grace is nothing else than the flowing light proceeding direct from God's nature into the soul: a supernatural form of the soul which gives her a supernatural nature. This is what I had in mind when I stated that the soul was unable of herself to transcend her own natural activity; this she can do in the power of grace which endows her with a supernatural nature.

Observe, grace effects nothing by itself. Moreover it exalts the soul above activity, Grace is bestowed in the essence of the soul and is received into her powers; for if the soul is to effect anything in this matter, she must needs have grace by virtue of which to transcend her own activities such as knowing and loving. Whilst the soul is in process of taking this transcendental flight out of herself into the nothingness of herself and her own activity, she is by grace ' ; she is grace when she has accomplished this transcendental passage and has overcome herself and now stands in her pure virginity alone, conscious of nothing but of behaving after the manner of God. As God lives, while the soul is still capable of knowing and acting after the manner of her creatureliness and as a child of nature, she has not become grace itself though she may well be by grace. For to be grace itself the soul must be as destitute of activity, inward and outward, as grace is, which knows no activity. St John says: To us is given grace for grace,' for to become grace by grace is the work of grace. The supreme function of grace is to reduce the soul to what it is itself. Grace robs the soul of her own activity; grace robs the soul of her own nature. In this supernatural flight the soul transcends her natural light which is a creature and comes into immediate touch with God.

Now I would have you understand me. I am going to give an explanation I have never given before. The worthy Dionysius says: When God exists not for the spirit there exists not for it either the eternal image, its eternal origin.' I have said before and say again that God has wrought one act eternally in which act he made the soul in his own [likeness], and out of which act and by means of which act the soul issued forth into her created

existence, becoming unlike God and estranged from her own prototype, and in her creation she made God, who was not before the soul was made. At various times I have declared: I am the cause that God is God. God is gotten of the soul, his Godhead of him- self; before creatures were, God was not God albeit he was Godhead which he gets not from the soul. Now when God finds a naughted soul whose self and whose activity have been brought to naught by means of grace, God works his eternal work in her above grace, raising her out of her created nature. Here God naughts himself in the soul and then neither God nor soul is left. Be sure that this is God indeed. When the soul is capable of conceiving God's work she is in the state of no longer having any God at all; the soul is then the eternal image as which God has always seen her, his eternal Word. When, therefore, St Dionysius says that God no longer exists for the spirit, he means what I have just explained.

Now it may be asked whether the soul as here seen in the guise of the eternal image is the light meant by David wherein we shall see eternal light?

We answer, no. Not in this light will the soul see the eternal light that shall beatify her; for, says the worthy Dionysius, neither will the eternal image exist for the spirit.' What' he means is that, when the spirit has accomplished its transcendental flight, its creaturely nature is brought to naught, whereby it loses God as I have already explained, and then the soul, in the eternal image, breaks through the eternal image into the essential image of the Father. Thus saith the Scriptures: Everything flows back in the soul into the Father who is the beginning of the eternal Word and of all creatures.'

It may be questioned whether this is the light, the Father namely, in which the spirit sees the eternal light?

I answer, no. Now mark my words. God works and has created all things; the Godhead does not work, it knows nothing of creation. In my eternal prototype the soul is God for there God works and my soul has equality with the Father, for my eternal prototype, which is the Son in the Godhead, is in all respects equal with the Father. One scripture says: Naught is equal with God; to be equal with God, then, the soul must be naught.' That interpretation is just. We would say, however: where there is equality there is no unity for equal is a privation of unity; and where there is unity there is no equality for equality resides in multiplicity and separation. Where there is equality there cannot be unity.. I am not equal to myself. I am the same as myself. Hence the Son in the Godhead, inasmuch as he is Son, is equal with the Father but he is not one with the Father. There

is no equality where Father and Son are one; that is, in the unity of the divine essence. In this unity the Father knows no Son nor does the Son know any Father, for there there is neither Father nor Son nor Holy Ghost. When the soul enters into the Son, her eternal prototype wherein she is equal with the Father, then, breaking through her eternal prototype, she, with the Son, transcends equality and possesses unity with the three Persons in the unity of the essence. David says: Lord in thy light shall we see light,' that is: in the light of the impartible divine essence shall we see the divine essence and the whole perfection of the divine essence as revealed in the variety of the Persons and the unity of their nature. St Paul says: We shall be changed from one brightness into the other and shall become like unto him,' meaning: we shall be changed from created light into the uncreated splendour of the divine nature and shall become like it; that is, we shall be that it is.

St John says: All things live in him.' In that the Father contemplates the Son all creatures take living shape in the Son, that being the real life of creatures. But in another passage St John says: Blessed are the dead that have died in God.' -- It seems passing strange that it should be possible to die in him who himself said that he is the life! -- But see: the soul, breaking through her eternal prototype, is plunged in the absolute nothingness of her eternal prototype. This is the death of the spirit; for dying is nothing but deprivation of life. When the soul realizes that any thing throws her eternal prototype into separation and negation of unity, the spirit puts its own self to death to its eternal prototype, and breaking through its eternal prototype remains in the unity of the divine nature. These are the blessed dead that are dead in God. No one can be buried and beatified in the Godhead who has not died to God, that is, in his eternal prototype, as I have explained.

Our creed says: Christ rose from the dead: Christ rose out of God into the Godhead, into the unity of the divine essence. That is to say that Christ's soul and all rational souls, being dead to their exemplar, rise from that divine death to taste the joys above it, namely the riches of the divine nature wherein the spirit is beatified.

Now consider the fact of happiness. God is happy in himself; and all creatures, which God must make happy, will be so in the same happiness that God is happy in, and after the same fashion that he is happy. Be sure that in this unity the spirit transcends every mode, even its own eternal being, and everything created as well as the equality which, in the eternal image, it has with the Father, and together with the Father soars up into the unity of the divine nature where God conceives himself in absolute simplicity. There, in that act, the spirit is no longer creature, it is the same as happiness itself, the nature and substance of the Godhead, the beatitude of its own self and of all creatures. Further, I hold that if God did what he is impotent to do, granted the soul while still a creature the knowledge and enjoyment of actual beatitude then, were the soul to be and to remain happy, it were impossible for God to remain God. Anyone in heaven knowing the saints according to their happiness, would not have anything to say of any saint but only of God; for happiness is God and all those who are happy are, in the act of happiness, God and the divine nature and substance of God. St Paul says: 'He who being naught, thinketh himself aught, deceiveth himself.' In the act of happiness he is brought to naught and no creaturehood exists for him. As the worthy Dionysius says: 'Lord lead me to where thou art a nothingness,' meaning: lead me, Lord, to where thou transcendest every created intellect; for as St Paul declares: 'God dwells in a light that no man can approach unto'; that is: God is not to be discerned in any created light whatever.

St Dionysius says: 'God is nothing,' and this is also implied by St Augustine when he says: 'God is everything,' meaning: nothing is God's. So that by saying 'God is nothing' Dionysius signifies that there is no thing in his presence. It follows that the spirit must advance beyond things and thingliness, shape and shapenness, existence and existences: then will dawn in it the actuality of happiness which is the essential possession of the actual intellect.

I have sometimes said that man sees God in this life in the same perfection and is happy in the same perfect fashion as in the life to come. Many people are astonished at this. Let us try therefore to understand what it means. Real intellect emanates from the eternal truth as intelligence and contains in itself intelligibly all that God contains. This noble divinity, the active intellect, conceives itself in itself after the manner of God in its emanation, and in its essential content it is downright God; but it is creature according to the motion of its nature. This intellect is to the full as noble in us now as in the after life.

Now the question may be asked: How then does this life differ from the life to come?

I answer that, this intellect which is happy in exactly the same way as God is, is at present latent in us. In this life we know God only according to potentiality. In the after life, when we are quit of body, our potentiality will be all transfigured into the act of happiness which belongs to the active intellect. This transfiguration will render the fact of happiness no more perfect than it is now; for active intellect has no accidents nor any capacity to receive more than it contains innately. It follows that when we are beatified we shall be completely deprived of potentiality and shall conceive happiness only actually, after the manner of the divine nature. As David says: 'Lord in thy light shall we see light': with the divine nature we shall conceive the perfection of the divine nature, which alone is our entire felicity, here in grace and there in perfect happiness.