We ought to recompense our Lord for all that he has done. — There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honours, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.
Some there be, neither wanting nor looking for honours, yet, chancing to come their way, honours affect them.
St Bernard says: ‘When a soul comes to wanting what few desire: to be nameless, outcast and disgraced, and makes all welcome equally, then she attains to peace and the true freedom needed for real vision in the mirror of divinity.’
Perfect rest is absolute freedom from motion. Our Lord says, ‘Continue in my word and the truth shall make you free.’ Freedom of soul consists in this : in finding in herself no sin ; in tolerating in herself no spiritual imperfection. She is more free lacking all hold on what possesses name and it on her. Freest-of all when she transcends her selfhood and flows with all she is into the bottomless abyss of her primordial mould, into God himself.
Our Lord Jesus Christ exhorts us to renounce all things that we may be less hindered. St Bernard declares: ‘ All the time thou occupiest not with God is accounted unto thee for lost.’ And again, ‘The most subtle temptation that can beset us is to occupy ourselves too much in outward works.’ Further he says, ‘The best preparation I know for heaven is having no home among externals.’
Our least interior act is higher and nobler than our grandest outward one, and yet our loftiest interior act halts in God’s unveiled presence in the soul.
The very best work that we can do is to prepare for union with - the present God and wait for this with fixed intention.
St Paul says, Optimum esse unire deo: Best of all is to be one
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with God. In this union the soul is dead, not only to all outward but also to all inward ghostly acts. God operates unhindered, and the soul bears his godly operation to which she yields obediently enough for God to bring to birth his only Son in her no less than in himself. This is the atonement wherein, in the twinkling of an eye, the soul is made more one with God than by her doing any act, bodily or ghostly. The oftener this birth happens in the soul the closer grows her union with God.
God is born in the empty soul by discovering himself to her in a new guise without guise, without light in divine light.
St Augustine says, ‘ The soul being aflame with divine love, God is born in the soul, the Holy Ghost being the enkindler of love.’
God has vouchsafed divine light to the soul that he may blithely work in his own image.
Now no creature can do what is not in its power. Hence the soul cannot act above herself, not even with the bridal gift that God has given her in the shape of her most exalted faculty. This light, albeit divine, is still created. The creator is one and the light another. So God comes to the soul in love, purposing that love shall raise her to a higher power, to a function superior to her own. But love fails to tell unless she meets or makes her match. As far as God finds his likeness in the soul, so far is God in operation. If her love is boundless, God acts as boundless love.
A man might live a thousand years and go on growing all the time in love, just as fire will burn so long as there is wood. The bigger the fire and the stronger the wind, the more fiercely it burns. Now put love for the fire and the Holy Ghost for the wind : the greater the love and the stronger the inspiration of the Holy Ghost in grace, the quicker the work of perfection is achieved. Yet not suddenly, but by the gradual growth of the soul. It would not be well for the whole man to be consumed at once.
The soul becomes so one with God that grace confines her; she is not satisfied with grace, for grace is creaturely. The soul is so curiously glamoured, she does not realise that she exists : she fancies herself God, so utterly she has escaped from self. But be she never so far gone from self, she goes on being creature. Pouring a drop of water into a vat of wine does not destroy it. Seeing herself the soul sees spirit; seeing the angels she again sees spirit; but God is such pure spirit that soul and angel are nigh bodily compared with him. A portrait of the highest seraph limned in black would be a better likeness far than God portrayed as highest seraph : that were a pre-eminent unlikeness.
Now in the contemplative state we are consumed by fiery love in the Holy Ghost. Sooner than knowingly commit a sin, venial or mortal, we shall prefer to suffer every imaginable martyrdom.
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If by one venial sin we were enabled to release from hell souls without number, we would not ransom them. Such love to God must a man have to be familiar with him in contemplation. Moreover, he must have a mind at ease; and in preparing for it, an undisturbed retired spot is necessary. The body should be rested from bodily labour, not only of the hands but of the tongue as well and all five senses. The soul keeps clear best in the quiet, but in jaded body is often overpowered by inertia. Then by strenuous effort we travail in divine love for intellectual vision till, clearing a way through recollected senses, we rise past our own mind to the wonderful wisdom of God, though this is quite beyond the grasp of any creature. We rise to divine heights. David says: Accedat homo ad cor altum et exaltabitur deus, that is, Man rising to the summit of his mind is exalted God. From this divine eminence we see the lowness and insignificance of creatures. We feel an inkling of the perfection and stability of eternity, for there is neither time nor space, neither before nor after, but everything present in one new, fresh-springing now where millenniums last no longer than the twinkling of an eye. And we win participation in the manifold delights of the heavenly host. So great the joy of Mary Queen in heaven, that having but a thousandth part of it, each member of the heavenly company would taste far more than ever they have earned. There every spirit rejoices in the joy of every other, relishing it each in his degree. Every celestial habitant is, knows and loves in God, in his own self and in every other spirit whether soul or angel. And the distinctive conscious- ness of one God in three Persons and the Three one God gives such ineffable, amazing satisfaction that all their passionate longing is fulfilled. And just what they are full of they crave unceasingly, and what they crave is all their own in new, fresh-springing joyful ecstasy, theirs to enjoy in all security from everlasting unto everlasting.
Thereafter we press on into the truth, into the simplicity God is himself, not seeking what is his. So we fall into peculiar wonder. In this wonder let us remain, for human wit is powerless to fathom it. Plumbing the deeps of divine wonder but stirs facile doubt.
XIII? IN THIS WAS MANIFESTED THE LOVE OF GOD
In hoc apparuit charitas dei in nobis etc. “In this was mani- fested the love of God toward us that he sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live with the Son,’ that is,
1 See also Wackernagel, No. lxv, p. 172.
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‘in and through the Son.’ Those that live not through the Son, verily they err.
If a mighty king had a beautiful daughter and gave her to a poor man’s son, every member of his family would rise in rank and become ennobled. Thus one learned doctor says: ‘By God becoming man the whole human race has been ennobled and exalted ; wherefore it behoves us to rejoice greatly that Christ our brother has with peculiar power ascended up above the choir of angels and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.’ This is well said, though I set but little store by it. What profit to me that my brother is rich if I am poor, or wise and I a fool ?
I say something more and more significant: God not only became man, he assumed human nature. Doctors agree that all men are of equal rank by nature. But I make bold to say that every good thing possessed by the saints and by Mary, God’s mother, and Christin his human nature, is also mine in this same nature. Haply thou wilt ask me: ‘If already I possess in this nature all that Christ does in his humanity, how come we to set Christ so high and honour him as our Lord and God ? ’—Because he was a messenger from God to us, bringing us our happiness. The happiness he brought us was our own. When the Father begets his Son in the innermost ground, what moves there has this nature. This same nature is one and indivisible. Anything distinct in it or connected with it is not this one.
Another thing I say, still harder. To subsist immediately in this pure nature a man must be so wholly dead to person that he wills as well to one across the seas whom his eyes have never seen as to his own present and familiar friend. While thou still wishest better to thine own person than to that man whom thou hast never seen thou art beside the mark, nor hast thou even for an instant seen into this simple ground. Haply in some far-fetched symbol thou hast beheld the truth as in an image, but it was not the best. —Secondly, thou must be pure in heart ; and only that heart is pure which has exterminated creaturehood. And thirdly, thou must be free from not.
It is a question, what burns in hell ? Doctors reply with one accord: ‘self-will.2 But I maintain: not burns in hell. A simile! Suppose I take a burning coal and put it on my hand; then if I say the coal is burning me, I do it great injustice. To define precisely what it is that burns me: not does ; because the coal has in it something my hand has not. Observe, it is this very not that burns me. Did my hand contain what the coal is and can afford, it would possess the fire-nature altogether. In which case all the fire that ever burned might be taken and heaped upon my hand without its burning me. Likewise, I aver that
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because God and those who are in sight of God, have in them something pertaining to real happiness which those who are apart from God have not, therefore this not alone torments the souls in hell more than the personal will or any fire soever. In sooth I hold : as far as not inheres in thee, so far thou art imperfect. To be perfect, then, thou must be free from not.