ST
JOHN SAYS, 'I SAW THE WORD IN GOD'
St John says, 'I saw the Word in God.'
God is abstract being, pure perception, which is perceiving itself in
itself. St
John means that the Son is in the Father, in his nature.
'I saw the Word with God.'
Here he is referring to the intellect which, flowing into God eternally,
proceeded forth from God in distinction of Person, namely, the Son.
' I saw the Word before God.'
This means that the Son is ever being born of the Father and that he is
the image of the Father.
'In the Word there is only the Word,' refers to the eternal emanation of
creatures in the Word.
'I saw the Word under God'; the Son becomes man, as God said, 'I have
loved you in the reflection of my darkness.'
God's darkness is his nature which is unknowable.
Good people know it not and no creature can divine it;
therefore it is a darkness.
While God was flowing in his own darkness the Son was not distinct from
him. In
the darkness of his nature the Father flowed as Person so far as he was
pregnant. The
Father gave his Son birth and gave him his own nature;
he gave him not his Person: his nature he can give away but he can give
to none his Person for that is the product of his unborn essence.
The Father spoke himself and all creatures in his Son; the Father spoke
himself to all creature in his Son.
The Father turning back into himself speaks himself in himself; he flows
back into himself with all creatures.
As Dionysius says, 'God proceeded himself,' meaning that his hidden
nature suffices him, which is concealed from creatures. The
soul cannot follow him into his nature, except he absorb her altogether, and
then in him she is made dark of all created lights.
The darkness of creatures is their incomprehensibility in their simple
nature, that is, in the nothing from which they were created.
In this uncreated light they discern his uncreatedness.
Into his uncreatedness they flow in the reflection of his darkness.
--'Tell me, good Sir, do Father, Son and Holy Ghost speak the same word
in the Godhead or has each a different word? '
-- In the Godhead there is but one word; in it the Father in the Godhead
speaks into his unborn essence and into his born essence, the Father flowing
into his Son with all that he is and the Son speaks the same word, and the
Father and the Son flow into the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost speaks the same
word. They
speak this one simple word in their essence and each speaks the same word in his
own Person, and in their common nature they discourse the truth and the Persons
receive the essence as it is essentially.
Yet the Persons receive from one another. They bow down to the essence in
praise, lauding the essence; and the unborn essence pronounces its unborn word
in the Persons, lauding the Persons, and the Persons receive the essence every
whit and pass it on to one another.
This unborn essence is self-sufficient, without birth and without
activity. Birth
and activity are in the Persons. The Persons say they are the truth and that
creatures have none of the truth.
When the soul attains to this divine speech she speaks this very truth
and is the Deity to every creature as well as to herself.
This comes of his indivisible nature and therein creatures are a matter
of the will. The
bad are bad and the good good, the Persons preserving justice in the Godhead.
They give the bad their due and the good theirs.
St Dionysius says, 'God is the Prime Cause, and God has fashioned all
things for himself who is the cause of all; and his works are all wrought in the
likeness of the First Cause.'
Father and Son show forth the first cause, and the Son is playing in the
Father with all things for he proceeded forth from him.
The Son plays before the Father with all things, the Son plays below the
Father with all things. The Father begat his Son with his Godhead and with all
things. The
Father begat his Son in his Godhead with all things. The Godhead is the several
Persons and the fullness of the Persons.
The Godhead is not given to any thing.
On coming to its knowledge the soul sees God and glancing back into
herself she sees that the Godhead is in all things.
Receiving into her the likeness of the creator she creates what she will
but cannot give it essence: she gives it form and is herself its matter and its
eternal activities are in her; these are in the eternal birth.
Its temporal activities are in time, where God gives his works essence,
form and matter out of nothing, which the soul is unable to do; God reduces his
works to the unity of Christ and this order shall not pass away but shall be
raised up to the glory of the one.
Soul, transcending order, enters the naked Godhead where she is seen when
God is seen in the soul as God.
This soul has God as God in her, she has gotten in her the image of her
creator.
Now mark the difference between the work of God and creature. God has
done all things for himself, for he is the universal cause and all his works are
wrought in the likeness of the first cause and creatures all work according to
the likeness of the first cause.
That is the intention they have towards God.
God made all things from nothing, infusing into them his Godhead so that
all things are full of God.
were they not full of the Godhead they would all perish.
The Trinity does all the work in things and creatures exploit the power
of the Trinity, creatures working as creatures and God as God, while man mars
the work so far as his intention is evil.
When a man is at work his body and soul are united, for body cannot act
without the soul.
When the soul is united with God she does divine work, for God cannot
work without the soul and the soul cannot work without God.
God is the soul's life just as the soul is the body's, and the Godhead is
the soul of the three Persons in that it unifies them and in that it has dwelt
in them for ever.
And since the Godhead is in all things it is all soul's soul.
But in spite of its being all soul's soul, the Godhead it not creatures'
soul in the way it is the Trinity's.
God does one work with the soul; in this work the soul is raised above
herself. The
work is creature, grace to wit, which bears the soul to God.
It is nobler than the soul as admitting her to God; but the soul is the
nobler in her admissibility.
This creature which has neither form nor matter nor any being of its own,
translates the soul of her natural state into the supernatural.
To his eternally elect God gives his spirit as it is, without means; they
cannot miss it. Creatures God is going to make at his good pleasure he has known
eternally as creatures, for in God they are creatures albeit nothing in
themselves: they are uncreated creatures.
Creatures are always more noble in God than they are in themselves.
In God the soul shall see her own perfection without image and shall see
the difference between things uncreated and created and she shall distinguish
God from Godhead, nature from Person, form from matter.
The Father is the beginning of the Godhead, he is the well-spring of the
Godhead, overflowing into all things in eternity and time.
The Godhead is a heaven of three Persons.
The Father is God and a Person not born nor proceeding any; and the Son
is God and a Person and born of the Father; and the Holy Ghost is God and a
Person proceeding from both.
St Paul speaks of the uncreated spirit flowing into the created spirit
(or mind). This meeting which befalls the created spirit is her saving
revelation; it happens in the soul who breaks through the boundaries of God to
lose herself in his uncreated naught.
The three Persons are one God, one in nature, and our nature is shadowing
God's nature in perpetual motion; having followed him from naught to aught and
into that which God is to himself, there she has no motion of her naught.
Aught is suspended from the divine essence; its progression is matter,
wherein the soul puts on new forms and puts off her old ones.
The change from one into the other is her death: the one she doffs she
dies to, and the one she dons she lives in.
St John says, 'Blessed are the dead that die in God; they are buried
where Christ is buried.'
Upon which St Dionysius comments thus: Burial in God is the passage into
uncreated life.
The power the soul goes in is her matter, which power the soul can never
approfound for it is God and God is changeless, albeit the soul changes in his
power. As
St Dionysius says, 'God is the mover of the soul.'
Now form is a revelation of essence.
St Dionysius says, 'Form is matter's aught. Matter without form is
naught.' So
the soul never rests till she is gotten into God who is her first form and
creatures never rest till they have gotten into human nature: therein do they
attain to their original form, God namely.
As St Dionysius hath it, 'God is the beginning and the middle and the end
of all things.'
Then up spake the loving soul, 'Lord, when enjoyest thou thy creatures?'
-- 'That do I at high noon when God is reposing in all creatures and all
creatures in God.'
St Augustine says, 'All things are God,' meaning, they have always been
in God and shall return to God.
So when St Dionysius says,' All things are naught,' he means they are not
of themselves and that in their egress and their ingress they are as
incomprehensible as naught.
When St Augustine says, 'God is all things,' he means he has the power of
all things, one more noble than he ever gave to creatures.
And St Dionysius' dictum, 'God is naught,' implies that God is as
inconceivable as naught.
As King David sings, 'God has assigned to everything its place: to fish
the water, birds the air and beasts the field and to the soul the Godhead.'
The soul must die in every form save God: there at her jouney's end her
matter rests and God absorbs the whole of the powers of the soul, so now behold
the soul a naked spirit.
Then, as St Dionysius says, the soul is not called soul, she is the
sovran power of God wherewith God's will is done.
It is at this point St Augustine cries, 'Lord thou hast bereft me of my
spirit!' Whereupon
Origen remarks, 'Thou art mistaken, O Augustine.
It is not thy spirit, it is thy soul-powers that are taken from thee.'
The soul unites with God like food with man, which turns in eye to eye,
in ear to ear.
So does the soul in God turn into God; and God combines with the soul and
is each power in the soul; and the two natures flowing in one light, the soul
comes utterly to naught.
That she is she is in God.
The divine powers swallor her up out of sight just as the sun draw up
things out of sight.
What God is to himself no man may know.
God is in all things, self-intent.
God is all in all and to each thing all things at once.
And the soul shall be the same.
What God has by nature is the soul's by grace.
God is nothing at all to anything; God is nothing at all to himself, God
is nothing that we can express.
In this sense Dionysius says, 'God is all things to himself for he bears
the form of all things.'
He is big with himself in a naught; there all things are God, and are
not, the same as we were.
When we were not then God was heaven and hell and all things.
St Dionysius says that 'God is not', meaning that he bears himself in a not,
namely, the not-knowing of all creatures, and this not draws the soul
through all things, over all things and out of all things into that superlative not
where she is not-known to any creature.
There she is not, has not, wills not, she has abandoned God and everything to
God. Now God and heaven gone, the soul is finally cut off from every
influx of divinity, so his spirit is no longer given to her. Arrived at this the
soul belongs to the eternal life rather than creation; her uncreated spirit
lives rather than herself; the uncreated, eternally-existent which is no less
than God. Wherewith being all-pervaded to the total loss of her own self, the
soul at length returns without herself to eternal indigence, for what is left
alive in her is nothing less than God. Thus she is poor of self.
This is the point where soul and Godhead part and the losing of the Godhead is
the finding of the soul, for the spirit which is uncreated drawing on the soul
to its own knowledge she comes nearer to the not-being of the Godhead than by
knowing all the Father ever gave. [The gift of the Father is the positive
existence of all creatures in the Person of his Son and with the Son the Holy
Ghost as well. For the Persons must be looked on as inseparate, albeit distinct
illuminations of the understanding.] And so far as she attains this in the
body she enjoys the eternal wont and escapes her own.
We ought to
be eternally as poor as when we were not and then our kingdom shall not pass
away, abiding as it does in God whose it is eternally. The Godhead gave
all things up to God; it is as poor, as naked and as idle as thought it were
not: it has not, wills not, wants not, works not, gets not. St Dionysius
says, 'Be the soul never so bare the Godhead is barer': a naught from which no
shoot was ever lopped nor ever shall be. It is this counsel of perfection
the soul is straining after more than after anything that God contains or
anything she can conceive of god. Saith the bride in the book of Love,
'The form of my beloved passed by me and I cannot overtake him.' It is God who
has the treasure and the bride in him, the Godhead is as void as though it were
not. God has consumed the form of the soul and formed her with his form
into his form. Now she gets all things free from matter, as their creator
possesses them in him, and resigns the same to God.
Ours to
contain all things in the same perfection wherein the eternal wisdom has
eternally contained them. Ours to expire them as the Holy Ghost has
expired them eternally. Ours to be all things' spirit and all things
spirit to us in the spirit. Ours to know all and deify ourselves with all.
Ours to be God by grace as God is by nature; ours to resign the same to God and
be as poor as when we were not: free as the Godhead in its non-existence. Christ
says, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit.' These same poor in the spirit
enjoy the Father without let or hindrance. The Father knows no difference
between this soul and him save that he has by nature what she has by grace. For
as Christ declares, 'Then that follow me I will bring to where I am.'
'Blessed are the poor in spirit: God's kingdom is in them.' These spiritual poor
are those who have abandoned everything to God as he possessed them when we were
not and the naught itself. In this naught dwells God and in God dwells the
soul. There she has no dwelling and thereinto no creature can get in its
own right and no creature can go higher.