The rank and nature of the soul

When God created the soul he turned back upon himself and made her after his own likeness. Meister Eckhart of Paris says, God made nothing like himself besides the soul. So we can give no shape to God, nor can we give one to the soul, and as God is immortal so he made the soul immortal. The soul does not depend on temporal things but in the exaltation of her mind she is in communication with the things of God, hence her tremendous capabilities, and it amazes me that, being so like God and of such perfection and with such a powerful word of her own, the soul is still unable to speak as God speaks. Some say it is because what is innate in God is not innate in the soul: God is his own being and has this from himself, but what the soul is, she has from God, and when she comes forth from him she does not keep his nature: she takes on another nature, one descended from divinity. So she does not act as God acts: God moves all things in heaven and earth and gives life to all, and the soul moves the body, giving life to every limb so that it sees, hears, feels, walks and talks, even though the mind may be elsewhere. St Gregory observes, 'We cannot see the visible except by means of the invisible': the eye sees nothing bodily without the incorporeal thing that quickens it to sight. Take away the mind, that is, the soul which is invisible, and the eye stands open for no purpose, though before it could see. God has formed the soul to himself, with himself, and in himself: of time and in time and in a timely way, and no soul can enter into God without first being God, as she was before she was made into a soul. Nothing but God finds its way into

God, and once the soul is in God she is God, carried into God on his eternal Word. The soul is the midpoint between God and creature. She stands at the beginning and end of the highest order, in touch with common knowledge and with the comfort the angels bring her from God. If she prefers the lower powers of her five senses to her higher ones, from which her knowledge of heavenly things comes, then she grows base and low. For the pleasures that creatures give the soul, God has no taste, and when she realizes this she sets aside the joys in which God has no part.

While the soul is still here, in sleep, she drives the angels away, and refusing any longer to serve the creature she conceives herself as wholly one with God. St Augustine says the soul is nobler, mightier, and greater than any creature, but the angels are by nature still higher in rank, for they are the first issue of the breath of God which gives them life. Gregory, again, observes that 'the soul to whom God has appeared, who has some sense of him, finds all creatures so narrow and so empty.' While the higher powers of the soul hold fast to God, she sets her lower powers in motion so that whatever happens in them comes to the knowledge of the higher powers. The highest power of the soul is called an inextinguishable light because of the vision the soul has within this power. However far her power may stray from God, she can always perceive God. Her power is never so far out that it stops burning somewhat, enough to serve as a warning sign to the soul, and even if she were spiritually dead in sin, a light showing her the way back to life, to rise again in true sorrow and repentance.

Here comes the question. Can the soul, by her own powers, grasp her highest happiness? The answer given to this question by the four doctors, Thomas, Egidius, Henricus, and Albertus, is that if the soul had knowledge of herself as she has her being, free of images, then she would be able to take in her highest happiness, being herself an infinite capacity which God cannot fill except with himself. St Augustine says: if her own perfect nature were immediately present to the soul, she would be her true self rather than a creature in her nature, as she is now classed. For God is spirit, and he breathes spirit into the soul, who in her spiritual nature belongs to an order above creatures. She has done with the creature in the perfect image of the eternal birth which is formed directly within her.

Another question is this. How does God enter the soul? Is he innate in her, sustaining her with his own inner power, and giving her life and being? One view is that God enters the soul in three ways. First, in his grace, by which a man, being gratified, is filled with the desire of perfecting virtue as a whole, mixed with the fear that some creature might ever take it from him.

Second, God enters the soul in pure perception, in which a man beholds himself and comes to know himself and answer whatever call God may make upon him, whether suffering or trial, of body or of mind. Third, God enters the soul in true freedom, freeing man from all the cares of life. Let the soul welcome him, refusing to be satisfied with anything but him alone. At the highest point of his inner self, his soul, man is more God than creature: however much he is like the creature in his nature, in mind he is more like God than any creature is. To the soul at rest in God in her potential, inherent, intellectual nature, everything comes naturally, as though she were created not by the will of another but solely by her own will. At this point creatures are her subjects, all submitting to her as though they were her own handiwork. It was in this power that the birds obeyed St Francis and listened to his preaching. And Daniel relied on this power, trusting himself to God alone, when he sat among the lions. Moreover, it is in this power that the saints have been accustomed to offer up their sufferings which, in the greatness of their love, are no suffering to them at all.

Dionysius says the soul must purify herself until, in her perfect clarity, she is like the angels and receives by grace what the angels have by nature. For the soul cannot fulfill her destiny until she is like the angels, in whom there is no sin. But the soul is from heaven, that is, from God who is the heaven of the soul, and the body is from the earth, so the two are forever opposed to one another. And that is why the soul, wanting to return to God from whom she came forth, withdraws and leaves behind all the things that are not God and do not lead to God. Dionysius says that God first imprinted all form and likeness in the lesser angels, so that they might inform the soul with divine light and comfort and enable her to enter into her own solitude, which is God, where no creature can ever look and see.

Theologians say the soul is more blessed when God begets himself in her without bodily union than the body of Christ is without his Godhead and without his soul. Yet any blessed soul is a nobler thing than Christ's mortal body, for the inward birth of God within the soul is the final completion of her happiness, a happiness more real to her than Christ's becoming man, since this profits the soul nothing without union with God. As Dionysius says, 'Beatitude means dwelling with God in such a way that he is more present to the soul than she is to herself, and the soul grasps him best when she comes to him with a quiet mind.' For in peace is his dwelling place, and in peace he chose us as his children. But as God is the mover of the starry, turning heavens, so here in the soul he is the mover of the freedom of our will toward himself and toward all good things.

It is in his light that she sees the light, and in his light she will be joined to the light. Theologians say that by nature the angels in heaven are nobler than the soul of Christ or of Mary, because in their essence they stand nearer to God. But by merit, Christ's soul has more joy than all the angels and is nearer to God than any angel. And the same is true of Mary's soul. Not by nature, though, for by nature Christ's soul, and Mary's too, is the same as mine or any other human soul. Further, theologians teach that the soul in man is more than a thousandfold, for she is whole in every limb: in the fingers, in the eyes, in the heart, and in every single part of each member, large or small. Just as in the eighth heaven, where there are so many stars, there is one angel who turns that heaven and is wholly present in each star. When God created man he guarded him against all harm, the golden chain of destiny running from the Trinity down to the highest power of the soul and through her lower powers as well, so that the lower are made subject to the higher, and no serious disorder can strike either body or soul unless this law is broken. In her higher powers the soul is spirit, and in her lower powers, soul, and between soul and spirit there is the bond of one shared being.

You should also know that in the soul there exists one power that never rests, day or night. It flows from the Spirit and is wholly spiritual, and in this power God comes forth in the full flower of his joy and glory, just as he is in himself. Such intense delight, such supreme exaltation, as no mind can conceive nor tongue express. If a man were always gathered up in this power he would never grow old. More than that, I say: if he caught in this power but one fleeting glimpse of the joy and bliss within it, that alone would be happiness enough to make up for anything he might suffer.

The soul receives four things from God in her power of understanding. First, complete certainty of freedom, of release, from all creatures, which is what God requires of her. Second, the full enjoyment of God while she dwells in the power of love. Third, complete protection by God against any harm from creatures. Fourth, victory in this power over all her enemies. For as the Son of God is, so also is the soul, and the promise given to the Son is the promise given to the soul, only she is not derived from where the Son issues from the Father. Fire and heat are one, taste and the thing tasted are one, though far apart. The Word that God speaks eternally lies hidden in the soul so deeply that one neither knows of it nor hears it. Dionysius says the soul resembles the procession within the Godhead, since the higher powers of the soul share one nature in common, and each power flows into the rest. For the soul to rise to spirit, she must turn to her eternal part, never forgetting that, by the grace of God, hers is an imperishable nature capable of eternal bliss. Her spirit hangs upon the unchanging God, so that neither life nor death nor height nor depth nor angel nor man nor any creature can loosen her steady hold on God. The soul who dies in God is also buried in him, and as far beyond the reach of creatures as God himself is beyond their reach. As Dionysius says, when the soul considers the greatness of God's power beside her own smallness, she casts herself out of herself and out of every creature, and thus reduced to bare nothingness, kept by God in his power, she stands simply in the grace of God. God is concerned only with himself. To every thing he is wholly present. And the soul should be the same: what God is by nature, she must become by grace, detached and free from creatures, giving up all things to God as though they were nothing. In a soul like this, all that remains is God. His uncreated breath is what the soul draws in when she breathes, and she is spirit to all things and all things are spirit to her, in the eternal breathing forth of the Holy Spirit. Vicentius the philosopher observes, 'The detached spirit is of such perfection that what it sees is real, what it wills comes to be, and its commands must be obeyed.'

It should be remembered that when the free spirit stands in perfect isolation it draws God to itself, and if it could exist as pure form without accident it would carry all the character of God. But this God grants to none but himself. The most God can do is give himself to such a one, and such a person is so far raised up into eternity that nothing temporal can move him, nothing material can touch him. He is dead to the world, as St Paul says, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.'

According to Dionysius, death in God is nothing but the uncreated life, that is, God himself, no longer called the soul but the sovereign power of God, because with it he carries out his will. Whatever the five senses receive from such a soul, she gives the whole of it to her inner self whenever that inner self sets out on some high adventure, and such a soul then has no ordinary sense left, her object being the rational, non-sensible idea. Dionysius comments on the saying of St. Paul, "There are many who run for the crown, but it falls to none but the wise." This race, he says, is nothing other than the flight from creatures into union with their uncreated God. The soul, in eager pursuit of God, becomes absorbed in him, and she herself is reduced to nothing, just as the sun swallows up and puts out the light of dawn. St. Augustine says, "The soul has a private door into the divine nature, where for her all things amount to nothing." And, "The taste of the spirit spoils the taste for flesh." And, "The soul at her summit is ignorant in a knowing way; in the oneness of the spirit, those who have given up everything to God are as he had them before we existed at all." The Lord Jesus stands before the soul as the perfect pattern for our human life. But the inner reality of the three Persons, the Godhead, the mind, no creature has ever seen, not soul, not angel, not even the humanity of Christ in its own nature. Yet some hold, and Meister Eckhart of Paris notably maintains against every objection: "As surely as you know me to be a man, just as surely God gives birth to his own nature in the ground of my soul as in his own heaven, and I am not at rest until I return to God, setting aside every occasion of sin and all that follows from it, together with all creatures. For in the very ground where the Father brings forth his Son in his own nature, there am I born. In the soul that has trodden underfoot all the troubles of time, the Father will beget his Son as naturally as my own father brought me into life. In the very ground where the Father begets his Son, there he begets me, and all whom the Father draws to himself by grace. And as God in himself is utterly free of all things, so I am there, by grace, what God is by nature." God intends for all of us a destiny so glorious that few can believe it who have not stepped outside themselves. If God gave the soul the whole of his creation, she would not be satisfied by it, only by himself: he is the highest uncreated heaven above all the heavens in God's nature. That the soul in us cannot die is not our doing but God's: it belongs to her nature. But union with God comes by grace, the highest bending down to give form to the lowest, and in this lies our hope of seeing him one day.

The soul rises above bodily things and, lifted above herself, remains within herself, first, because of the delight she finds in God. For the fullness of God clothes her, in him, with his likeness. His fullness pours out without limit: angels more numerous than grains of sand or blades of grass or drops of water, and every single angel with his own distinct nature, no one the same as another. Second, the soul rises for the purity she finds in God; everything in him is utterly pure and noble, but once things go out from him into the nearest creatures there is the whole difference between something and nothing. Third, the soul rises for the recollection she enjoys in God. To take hold of God she needs a habit higher than herself; even if God had made a thousand earths and a thousand heavens, the soul could grasp them all within her single power, which is the reflection of her active power. But she cannot grasp God in the act of making her in his own image. Fourth, the soul rises for the sake of the endless good things she enjoys in God: everything in him is forever new in his Son, who is born today exactly as if his Father had never given him birth. And as God flows into the soul, she flows back into

The soul takes four steps into God. When she first turns toward God, she feels afraid of his greatness. Her next step is to get past this fear and come to hope for God's love. Her third step brings a strong desire, which she takes as the promise of the infinite embrace in which God will hold her. At the fourth step she falls into such deep forgetting of everything else that she never thinks of leaving what she has found in God. God made the soul so that his only Son could be born in her. And whenever and wherever this birth happens, it gives God more joy than the creation of the heavens and the earth, because the soul is nobler and greater than the heavens. As there is marriage between a man and his wife, so there is marriage between God and the soul. The highest power in the soul is the husband and the lowest power is the wife. The husband in the soul always stands bareheaded and the wife veiled, since the lower power is caught up into the highest part of the soul. First God brings forth his likeness in the soul, and afterward he brings forth himself as he is in eternity. God's Son is the soul's Son: in him, God and the soul have the same Son, who is God himself. Once this birth has taken place in the soul, she is ready for God, and the more often this birth happens, the more at home the soul becomes in God, in his fatherly heart.

The soul has two feet, understanding and love. And the more she knows, the more she loves. Who could make her fall, when she is held up by the one who sustains all creatures? Grace gives wings to her longing, and she is carried out of herself, and by grace, and in grace, she is carried into grace, and beyond grace into God, her first cause, where in blissful union her lot is good beyond comparison. There every sense falls silent; the soul's will and God's will are merged into one another, the two wills locked together in true at-one-ment, in love. Now the soul does nothing more and nothing less than the work of God, for nothing lives in her any longer but God. As the soul cries out in the Book of Love, "I have run the whole world round and found no end to it. So I have cast myself into the solitary point of my one God, who has wounded me with his glance." Whoever this glance has never wounded, that soul has never been pierced by the love of God. St. Bernard says, "To the spirit that feels this glance it cannot be put into words; to the one who does not feel it, it cannot be believed." It is an arrow sent without anger and received without pain; from it flows the pure, clear stream of healing grace that opens the inner eye to see, in blissful contemplation, the delights of this divine wound, in which we enjoy favors of the spirit beyond telling, things never spoken, never preached, never set down in any book.

The soul must give up idle thoughts, worldly cares, and bodily pleasures, and find her way into the hiding place of the one whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. God's comfort belongs only to the soul that turns away from every passing consolation; and the faster she runs from creatures, the faster their creator comes to make her one with himself. Dionysius says love takes the soul out of herself and makes her one with what she loves, so that she loses all feeling and all concern for herself, so long as she can do the will of her beloved. The powers of the soul that belong to her spiritual mind are called heavenly because they do heavenly work: the first power receives, the second perceives, and the third loves. When the soul, in thinking of God, uses her power of memory in recollection and her understanding in contemplation, then love carries her into the middle of God, the point where there is eternal rest. The Father, dwelling in the soul, holds her to his heart, and in this fatherly embrace she conceives the Son in his own distinct coming forth, and so comes to know his presence with the Father in the one divine being. As the Lord says, "I will lead her into the desert," meaning that he will lead the soul away from everything empty and speak his word, his only Son, within her. And in this same begetting of the Son, Father and Son breathe their Holy Spirit into the soul, teaching her the truth of all things. Any act of the soul that is to share in eternal reward must be done in God. However good a deed may be in itself, unless it is done in God it gets no reward from him, since he does not pay according to the length or size or number of works but according to whether they are done in God, the soul being the material God works in. In this union with God she is greatly honored, for what God is by nature she becomes by grace. But if a soul comes before her bridegroom Jesus Christ without the ordinary virtues, having failed to prepare herself for heaven in this way, he will cast her out into the pit of hell, there to feel his justice as fully as St. Peter feels his eternal joy in heaven. Her true bridegroom Jesus Christ comes to the soul and shows her, in his visible humanity, his divine love, so that all creatures may honor our human nature, which has been raised higher than the angels. We cannot imagine him making any creature nobler than ourselves. His manhood satisfies our senses, as his Godhood satisfies our soul. As St. Augustine says, we shall end, with our soul, in the Godhead, and with our bodily senses in the humanity of Christ, which is raised above the saints and angels to a height that, in its unchanging nature, no creature can reach. When the watchful soul is warned by various signs that her king is coming, everything in her rejoices, and it is his royal right to use his sovereign power to fulfill the longing of the soul who wants him to guard her against her outer senses, so that she will not, by giving in to them even slightly, do anything in any creature against the will of God. The surest way to friendship with the king is for the soul to follow blindly wherever God leads. If the soul, which makes us human far more than the body does, if the soul, I say, would only obey every prompting of God, she would overcome every obstacle with ease and take joy in the burdens she carries for him. And when she finds nothing in herself left to correct, she will be free, with perfect freedom, from opinion. It is the mark of a soul that loves God that from the moment she enters his service she never again follows her own will as something apart from his. God is the one thing that needs nothing and that everything else needs. And when the soul, looking at herself from within, sees herself through grace as if all-powerful, she remains within her own true nature.

The soul notices, concerning God, first, that she senses the coming of the one who is about to come to her. Next, she is united in her being with the one who is at work in her. Third, she takes delight in him as he feasts her richly at his table. Fourth, he gives her a place of refuge where she finds peace. Dionysius says that when the soul returns to God, her sense of herself in God is such that nothing remains in her, apart from the awareness of herself, but God. When the soul does this she still stays in touch with her outer self, whom she continues to supply with natural life. By speaking himself into the soul, God joins himself to her and makes the soul into himself, giving her such power that being here in time seems to her the only thing standing between her and the good. In the right use of her higher mind, with all things present to the soul in this inner Word of God, her spirit speaks freely with God in proportion to how clearly the Father makes himself known to her. It matters, then, that the soul know how she should act toward God, so that she may find the ways that draw his self-revealing to her. For this, the loving soul must love God above everything, since God, coming down into her and working in her through his spirit, lets her understand that the inward love she receives from him she ought to have, and show, toward all people. And the soul should give herself to God as though he had died for her alone. In doing this she will grow in truth and make herself ready to receive the full gift of God, by which she will come to the truth of the humanity of Christ. But if she does not do her best, she places herself on the level of the animals, which must be driven hard to make any effort; and yet Christ did more deeds of love for the lowest of men, who always fall short of God, than all the saints together have ever done out of love for him. Even if every creature could speak, they could never tell the fullness that God gives to man, and above all to the soul, than which he neither could nor would make any nobler creature. He proves this in his own Person, where his divine and human natures meet. It follows that the soul should turn away from all creatures as things unworthy

that could lure her away from what God has destined her for, and she ought to be ashamed if, being within reach of his eternal good, she fails to grasp it.

Here is a question: if the soul is of such high standing that time and place and nature cannot move or even touch her in her innermost self, does God then work in her without any image of himself? To this theologians reply: granted that the soul is a creature and has a spiritual nature, it follows of necessity that what God does in her is done inherently and free from all contingency, for his works are all inherent and eternal as they are in himself, and the soul takes part in them in her nature above grace. Grace is the outflowing light meant for the service of the spirit; grace would not be a light if it had no recognized spiritual mission. At the point where God enters the soul in love she is no more known than the highest angel is to her, and she loves all things in God's way without any trace of her own nature. God is abstract intellectual essence, eternal in himself, while the soul is made eternal. The soul can no more be grasped in images and forms than God can be grasped in words and names. The soul is one in nature with the true intellect of God and subject to its laws, a unity so perfectly balanced in itself that no creature can find room there.

The Lord Jesus said to his disciples, 'I go to prepare a place for you.' These words teach us two important things. First, that the soul is by nature made for heaven and God is her lawful inheritance. For God brought the soul forth alone, in an unbroken line, and no one knows what she is. Every person has a soul, but what she actually is cannot be told here in time. St Augustine says the soul is sent from God and returns to God and cannot rest except in him, for God is spirit and the soul is also spirit, and close to God as one spirit is to another. They compare the soul to fire, which is the highest in its nature and the most powerful in its action, and never rests until it licks the skies. Fire surrounds all the elements, spreading further and wider and higher than air, water, or earth, so that it encloses the rest and, coming next to the heavens, turns with them. The soul is called a fire because in her longing she keeps pace with God, as fire does with the heavens, and can find no rest except in him. Again, the soul is called a spark of heavenly nature because one soul has already risen into heaven, namely the soul of Jesus Christ, which shows that the common resting place of souls is nowhere else than heaven. But unless the soul has turned from temporal things to heavenly ones, the Holy Spirit cannot enter to do its work in her. All God's work is done in spirit. God is high and man is low: to rise to him in prayer, a person must lift himself by putting beneath him all of God's creatures, including the powers of the soul that end in the functions

of the body, and then she will have the love and knowledge to carry her above the world. For to know God I need no eyes or ears; for union with God in love I need no hands or feet; I want to withdraw myself from all created things and let my spirit sink into God's spirit and become one spirit with God. And it was the love God bears my soul that moved him to create all creatures, and in them to show her his glory. And though he made creatures to give joy, he mixed in some sorrow, so that anyone careless of his honor might be driven and spurred on by pain. The ways of God, like the mind of man, are a wonder, drawing one person to him with pleasure and another with the blows of misfortune. Consider the striking conversion of St Paul on his way to persecute the Christians, after which his soul was caught up into the third heaven. And on the very day St Augustine was converted he would not be satisfied until the extraordinary pleasure he felt, in the security God sent into his soul, had turned her fully to him.

Three things keep the soul from being content with creatures. First, they are partial. Second, they are bodily, marks of stagnation and decay and of standing still. Third, the gift of creatures is not the full generosity of the one from whom the soul first came forth, that is, God, so they give no satisfaction to souls who have been caught up into bliss. Instead the Lord God draws souls to himself the way lambs are drawn from one spot to another by green pasture. Even if all the soul's powers were gathered into one, she could not here receive the very smallest reward for the least act decreed by God in his eternal love without the soul melting and dying to the body. It is not so, however, when she receives the whole reward, namely God himself. But for this the soul must go beyond herself and beyond creatures and enter into the divine estate, into her own divine pattern, for the soul touches eternity with her higher powers and touches creatures with her lower powers, which often lead her into evil. If the soul could see God as clearly as the angels do, she would never have come into the body. God is formed in the image of himself, after a pattern that is his own, and when she joins with him in direct knowing, the soul takes on his form, for he shapes her to himself. Divine light pours into the soul, mingling her with God the way one light mingles with another, and this is called the light of faith, the divine power. Where the soul, with her powers and her passions, is forbidden to go, faith can carry her there. And when God is grasped in the soul by this power, the soul gains the virtue of hope, by which she grows so close to God that she imagines there is nothing in God beyond her reach. St Augustine says, 'The pears I stole were far sweeter to me than the ones my mother bought, because they were private and forbidden fruit.' In the same way, the grace the soul conceives in wisdom is sweeter to her than the grace common to all mankind. The soul must serve God here with her lower powers and in eternity with her higher ones, for she is made neither of time nor of eternity: she is made from nothing, out of the nature of neither. Leaning toward the temporal she is unstable; holding to the eternal she is strong and steady and beyond change.

The bridegroom of the soul is the Lord Jesus, and he resembles her in seven ways. First, in his beauty, with which the sun cannot compare, since the sun is not self-luminous: God gives it the light by which it lights the air. His bride should be the same in thought and word and deed. For this, God has to brighten away every stain of sin in her, making the place where she lives full of light. Second, her Lord is of noble lineage: in heaven he has a Father but no mother, and on earth a mother but no father, a parentage too strange for any mind to grasp. His bride, the soul, is by birth given a rank higher than anything beneath God. Third, her Lord is immensely rich: heaven and earth belong to him, with every creature in them. So his bride, the soul, may freely hand over every care to him and have no doubt that he will provide, for he is readier to give than we are to receive. Fourth, his wisdom is so clear that it lights the depth of every heart, and nothing is hidden from his sight. So his bride, the soul, must take great care never to do anything she thinks might displease him. Fifth, his power is immense; by it all things have come into being and are kept in being. His bride, the soul, matches this with hope in times of trouble or any kind of suffering or struggle. For what she cannot do, he can, since all things are possible to him. Sixth, he is gentle in temper. In scripture he is called a lamb without blemish, for he is free of anger and holds no grudge. In the same way the soul, his bride, must be gentle, kind, and patient in whatever he sends her for his glory. Last, her Lord, Jesus Christ, has eternal health and cannot die. The soul, his bride, should take disease lightly, caring for nothing so much that she would not just as gladly do without it as keep it, exactly as her bridegroom pleases, and finding no pain too hard to bear, willing to suffer it as readily as not. God's justice is as precious to her as his mercy. This soul is as pleased with God's gifts to others as with his gifts to herself.

It is written, 'The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God,' who holds them too close to his side for anyone to pry them out. He made them apart, as his own handiwork, their reward in eternal life being himself, for God alone made the soul, with no help from any creature: mighty according to his power, wise according to his wisdom, and good in her will according to his goodness, as he knew from eternity how to make her mighty in his power and blessed in his infinite good. The soul is not made of the nature of God but in the image of the Holy Trinity, and bound to God by love alone, seeking perfect rest in him, she shows herself fit to be his pleasant temple. 'He went into his temple and drove out the buyers and the sellers,' commanding them, 'Take these things away.' By this he made it known that he wants the temple of the soul swept clean, with nothing in it but himself alone. The soul should take her example from the angels, who pay no attention to outward things and have no intention except to do the perfect will of God. They are so set on God's will being done in them that if it meant picking nettles or anything of that sort, they would do it willingly, as though their whole happiness depended on it.

Any soul given over in this way to the will of God, and not seeking her own, delights Jesus, and he works wonders in her. When she steps outside her own will, everything enters with Jesus, and she becomes so full of light that only God himself can match her brightness. For though the angels resemble the soul to some degree in the joys of the life to come, a limit is set on them that they cannot pass. The soul can go beyond it through good works, and once she has, in grace, drawn level here with the highest angel, her will, now free of all good works, carries her far higher than the angels, provided she can leave her body behind.

The uncreated God alone is free, and the soul's virgin nature is the same, though not her nature as a creature: it was she who chose to fall into nothingness, but it is for God to bring her back. For Jesus to be in the soul, she must gather herself inward, be still, and listen to his Word. When her spirit receives power in the Son, her every word is full of purity and virtue and perfection. Nothing can disturb such a soul: she stands firm and unshaken, as if in the power of God.

And Jesus reveals himself in the soul in his infinite wisdom, in which the Father knows himself in all his fatherly authority, together with his Word, which is wisdom itself, and all that is in it, and its oneness. When this same wisdom takes shape in the soul, doubt, error, and every kind of obstacle fall away and leave her in the clear, pure light that is God himself. God in this soul is seen with God: she knows herself and all things by his wisdom. Jesus also shows himself with great sweetness in the power of the Holy Spirit, and with him the soul flows into herself and beyond herself, and rising above all things in grace, plunges straight into her first cause.

Richard writes, commenting on the Book of Virtue: when the divine light strikes into the soul, she finds her own activities utterly flat, and unable to bear herself in her own powers, she settles into enjoying God alone. St Augustine says, 'My soul is where she loves, rather than where she gives life.' On this reckoning, God is nearer to me than I am to myself. And any loving soul who follows God far enough to rise above herself, who finds no pleasure resting in herself or in any creature, such a soul, I say, will find no pleasure even in God's gifts: what she wants is God himself. When the soul is free of the things she has sure knowledge of, and lacks nothing of the image of God, her mind lies wide open to eternal truth. The eternal sun pours its light into this soul and fills her powers, each faculty feeling the touch of this visitation according to its own nature. And the light of the eternal sun lifts all the soul's powers up to its own power, in the wholly intelligible image. When the soul undergoes this working, as God carries it out, in true understanding, then the soul's understanding becomes the light, or knowledge, of everything God is bringing about in her by grace. And her mind being lifted, as we have said, her faculties are raised above the things of time, so that whatever happens, her powers are untouched by anything infernal and keep increasing, never growing less. For divine understanding we depend on God's generosity, but it is his nature to give himself to us, and it is the soul's nature to give herself to the one who gives himself to her, so that giver and gift, the one who acts and the act itself, are one. The Lord Jesus said, 'I go to him who sent me.' And the soul too may say, as she rises to God, 'I go to the one I came from.'

She goes to the Father, first, in her fixed intention never again to disobey his will by burdening herself with wayward creatures. Second, she goes the perfect way of answering every call God makes on her, and third, she goes in the sweet savor of God's love, in which her suffering is no longer suffering. Fourth, she goes in the four cardinal virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, which carry her beyond time and creatures. And she goes in the three virtues of faith, hope, and love, without which no one reaches God. Who knows what wonders the soul may attain by giving herself into the hands of God? Every blessed soul keeps her heart open to God's comfort, and whatever she receives from him she passes on to her lower powers, for without this she would not know God; otherwise he would be dishonored in the weak understanding of these lower faculties. And because not all souls have the same capacity for God, the vision of God is not given the same to everyone, any more than sunlight affects all eyes alike.

It is written, 'There shall come forth a stem out of the root of Jesse.' Let us consider three things here: what this root is, out of which God is born in the soul, and what and how much profit it brings. 'Root of Jesse' is a term for the fiery nature that draws and changes everything that comes to it. It is the fiery nature of God: drawing the soul, it turns her into itself, and she is born again spiritually in understanding. For the soul shares with the angels a light by which she can see God, and this light she is given is her intellect, which never stops carrying God's wisdom to the soul. But it grows dark when it is poured into the body.

We read of three kings bringing their gifts to Christ. We take these to mean the three lower powers of the soul, things that by right belong under the control of her higher powers. Now I will speak of these higher powers, showing how they are the kings, and what gifts of the lower powers they bring.

The first king is memory, bringing the yield of his kingdom. When the soul remembers how nobly God has made her, a passionate longing flows out of this awareness and rises to God, casting behind it all the things of time. Then King Memory comes, offering the gold of love to God, along with the surrender of everything else. The second king of the soul is understanding. This matches her other power, reason or judgment. When the soul sees that by grace she is able to fulfill the will of God, she never tires of putting creatures in their place to please God, more so in proportion to the merit she gains from God. Understanding then comes rich with patience and grateful acceptance of whatever God appoints for her here in the body, and with this she brings the gift of incense, the union of all the virtues, so that whatever would otherwise be hard and difficult, her love makes possible and easy. The soul's third king is will. When, at the height of his strength, he brings the soul the fire of love, which tests her through and through and burns away all the sinful leanings of her nature, then she is fixed, and neither life nor death nor any creature can separate her from the love of God. So they bring her myrrh, to keep her from the decay of temporal things, which for the soul are a rich source of evil. Saint Ambrose says, 'God pours forth the soul; in creating and pouring forth, he creates her.' And when she is in love with him, he comes to her at once, as his spiritual bride admits when she says in the Song of Songs, 'While I lay at rest on my bed, my love came tapping at my window, and he put in his hand and touched me.' This suggests that when the soul comes to know herself she withdraws from everything present to her here, for she herself is worth more and stands higher than anything else in time. Now when the loving soul has gone out of all creatures and out of herself, the eternal truth comes forward to meet the loving soul, touches her understanding, and lifts it up with his light, which enriches her more than all the knowledge of material things she has gathered by her own nature until now. Saint Augustine says, 'As the sun shines through glass and makes what is inside it plain, so the soul's intelligence is lit up by the light of God with the recognition of her divine abilities.' Then the soul is seen in her poverty and God in his purity. Dionysius says much the same when he speaks of the naked soul, one with her naked God, resting in the desert of the Godhead. It may well be called a desert, for by grace no creature has ever looked into it. Not knowing these things is reason enough for shame. Yet if one of the highest angels came down, and with him all the creatures as wise as he is, to speak of human happiness, they could talk until doomsday and still not tell the whole of what God has waiting for every loving soul in life everlasting. But the soul must not seek God for any reason except God himself. The emptier she stays, the more God fills her, and the more completely he does his work in her. Besides, it is the safest way, for then at any moment she will be ready to leave the body at God's bidding rather than stay there by her own. And being so poor in herself, she will find nothing but God, here and in the life to come. Such a soul has no need to look outside herself: the Holy Spirit will teach her the elements of blessing in the school of her own heart. She treasures the gift with which God has endowed his best beloved. And the better to carry out God's will in everything she does, she trains herself never to be without pure awareness, so that the heavenly Father can go on forever giving birth in her to his eternal Word, Jesus Christ his Son. For at her highest point, my soul is not in time and does not work in time, and is just as near to things a thousand miles away as to the spot where I now stand.

In principle, nothing that takes shape or is touched by time can get into the soul, and likeness cannot either. The head of the soul is her highest power, and from the moment she was made she has never for a single instant been without the gift of this divine light, this power in which the time God made the world and the day of judgment are just as present to the soul as the time in which I am speaking now. Living in the power of her head, the soul shares in the grace and happiness common to all the saints as though it were her own. It is certainly true that anyone who actually lives in this head never sins, and knows so much about eternal blessing, and is so well taught, that he needs no sermons. So let us lift up the head of the soul and gather ourselves into the breadth and freedom of a power like this, and move from temporal to eternal things, when, in this same power, God suddenly gives birth in the soul to all that he is in might and truth and wisdom. The soul in whom this grace is found is truly pure and every bit like God. For anything that pleases the Father, or works for our good and our well-being, must please him in his Son, because apart from the Son he has no likes at all. This then is the nobility God has planted in the soul, her blessed nature, which is open to the grace of God, so that in this grace the light of God's pure nature can shine into the soul, and the Word of the Trinity can be spoken in her mind, and the life of eternity can work in her.

Theologians say the soul is a suspended power held in the power of the Father, a reflected light in the wisdom of the Son, and a flowing movement in the sweetness of the Holy Spirit. According to Saint Augustine, the soul comes from the heavenly country, out of the Father's own heart; she is the offspring of God's love and comes from the noble house of the Holy Trinity, heir to heaven, mistress of all creatures, and owner of all the joys God gives in his eternity. She is the image of God and the noblest creature God ever conceived. For God reached in between his divine nature and his Godhead, into his eternal being, and brought the soul out of nothing, just as he made heaven and earth and all things out of nothing. If you ask how large the soul is, know that she is too large for heaven and earth to fill, or even for God himself, whom the heavens cannot contain. To measure the soul you must measure her against God. And she is so beautiful, as long as she stays in the grace of God and is not disfigured by sin, that the highest angels, the Seraphim and Cherubim, and all the saints, try in vain to match her in form and likeness, for she is the image of God. As for her life in time, she is flowing back toward the natural source she came from, and the more free she has kept herself from the forms of time and from creatures, the gentler her return to God, for God is utterly free of matter, mode, and form. For the soul to be like the pure spirit of God she must be free of the smallest trace of sensible attachment, with no attachment to anything that is not God. That such complete freedom is unknown to most spirits comes only from our undiscovered life and our untaught senses. The soul will find in God all the good that creatures hold the potential for, along with joy beyond measure. Saint Augustine says, 'When everything within me had gone quiet, God spoke a silent word in my soul, which no one understood but me.' And whatever soul this Word is spoken to will forget all modes and forms and come to dwell within God. So Saint Paul says, 'From the moment the eternal Word was shown within my soul I no longer lived for flesh and blood.' Because she is without self, she possesses herself and is strong. The faithful, loving soul is like the bee, drawing from every kind of flower the sweetness to make its honey. In the same way the soul gathers from the flowers of virtue a little of each one, to heal and strengthen herself. This is badly needed, for she has three deadly enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil, hanging together like three cherries on one stem. Of these three the deadliest is the body, in which the soul is shut up as in a prison, not so that she might indulge its base appetites, but so that she might refuse them, and by this resistance add daily to her reward in heaven and to the love poured into her here. It was Seneca, the pagan philosopher, who said, 'Man is his own worst enemy.' Death stands at the door of evil appetites, and the pursuit of vice leads down paths that look fine to us but sometimes end in the pit of hell. If the soul, the mistress of the body, gives in to its base appetites and fails to check its sins, she has herself to blame when, either here or in the life to come, she must answer for it to God. And so that no one can escape God's justice who kills the soul with sin and ends up in the lusts of the flesh, he says through the prophet Amos, 'My wrath will roll over you like a chariot, groaning under its own weight; my anger the swift will not outrun, the strong will not turn aside, nor will the mighty man win out by his strength. Not one will escape me, however handsome or strong or powerful he may be.' And seeing that the soul has such a high and heavenly destiny, Meister Eckhart of Paris, at the end of the foregoing, which is drawn from his writings, sets down the following prayer:

O highest riches of the divine nature, show me your way, which you in your wisdom have ordained, and open to me your most precious treasure, to which you have called me: to know with understanding beyond any creature, to love with the angels, to enjoy with your only Son our Lord Jesus Christ, and to be your heir to eternal wisdom, and by your help to be kept safe from evil. For you have raised me above all creatures and sealed me with the seal of your eternal image, and put my soul beyond the reach of creatures, and made nothing more like yourself than the human soul. Teach me to live so that I never lack you, so that I never block the working of your stream of love in me, so that I never give myself to any outward pleasure apart from you, nor fill my mind with any creature more than with you. Lord, you are spirit and beyond any creature's grasp. You breathe life into the soul and raise her to a level above creatures, so that she can do your will, O eternal Wisdom, and by grace be kept free from the invasion of unwanted images. You have made the soul to match yourself in her nature and her laws, and she insists she has no room for anyone but you. O almighty and most merciful Creator and dear Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner, and help me to overcome all the traps and their lures toward empty pleasure, to avoid in thought and act what you forbid, and both to do and keep all your commands. Help me to believe, to hope, to love, to live and feel exactly as

As much as you will and what you will. Lord, grant me the sorrow of the humble; a mind escaped from the mortal body; to love, to praise and to behold you and to cherish every act and thought that is toward you. Grant me a clear and sober and genuinely prayerful mind with real intuition of your will, together with the love and joy which make it easy to perform. Lord, grant me always modest progress towards better things and never to backslide. And, O my Lord, do not condemn me, as I deserve, to rely on my own powers or on human weakness and unwisdom, but on your good providence alone. Direct me, Lord, to The Good itself, my every thought and act to your own liking, so that on my part, in me, your will is always being done and I am being saved from evil and brought to your eternal life, where you are three in Person and one in the essence of your divine nature: Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and ever blessed almighty God. Amen.