Plato, that great priest, who occupied himself with lofty matters, makes reference to this thing. He speaks about a light which is not in this world; not in the world and not out of the world; not in time nor in eternity: it lias neither in nor out. God the eternal Father, the fullness and the sink of all his deity does he give birth to here in his one-begotten Son, so that we are that very Son, and his birth is his presence within and his abiding within is his bringing forth. That remains ever the same which comes welling up in itself. Ego, the word /, is proper to none but to God himself in his sameness. Vos, the word implies your collective unity, so that ego and vos, I and you, stand for unity. May we be the unity itself, unity abiding. So help us God. Amen.
LXXXII THE FEAST OF MARTYRS In occasione gladii mortal stmt {Hehr. II37). read of the blessed martyrs, whom we commemorate to-day, that they were slain with the sword. Quoth our Lord to his disciples, ‘ Blessed are ye when ye suffer for my name’s sake.’ And according to the scriptures these martyrs suffered death for Christ’s name, being put to the sword.
Here we learn three things. First, that they are dead. Man’s sufferings in this world have an end. St Augustine says pain and the work of pain is finite and the reward is infinite. Secondly, that, seeing this life is mortal, we have no need to fear all the pain and travail falling to our lot, for it will end. Thirdly, that it behoves us to emulate the dead in dispassion towards good and ill and pain of every kind. The i)hilosophcr says heaven is immoveable. Referring to the soul as being the heavenly man who is imperturbable. One master enquires. If creatures are so vile, how comes it they so easily distract the soul from God; is not the soul at her vilest better than heaven and all creatures? The Doctor says it comes of minding too little about God. Were we to pay due heed to God it would be nigh impossible to lapse. From which we draw the moral that we ought in this world MEISTER ECKHART to emulate the dead. According to St Gregory, no one gets so much of God as the man who is throughly dead.
The fourth point is the weightiest. He speaks of their being dead. Death gives them being. A philosopher says, ‘ Nature never breaks but to mend.’ Air to fire, for instance, is a change for the better; but air to water were destruction and untowardness. If this is nature’s way much more is it God’s: he never destroys without providing something better. The martyrs died: they lost their life and found their being. The philosopher says, ‘ Most precious is being and life, and knowledge is higher than life and nobler than being, for in knowing we have life and being.’ Yet life is nobler than being in the sense that a tree has life whereas a stone has being. Again, take being pure and simple, as it is in itself, and being transcends both knowledge and life, for in that it is being it is both knowledge and life. They have, I say, lost their natural life and have acquired being. The philosopher says there is nothing so like God as being: in so far as it is real being it is the same thing as God. The philosopher says, Being is pure, exalted: all that God is is being. God knows nothing but being, he is conscious of nothing but being; being is his ring. God loves naught save his being, he thinks of naught save his being. I say, all creatures are being. One master says some creatures are so nigh to God and so instinct with divine light that they give being to other creatures. Tliat is not the case: being is too pure, too high, too much the same as God, for anyone but God to be able to give being. God’s idiosyncrasy is being. The philo- sopher says one creature is able to give another life. For in being, mere being, lies all that is at all. Being is the first name. Defect means lack of being. Our whole life ought to be being. So far as our life is being, so far it is in God. So far as our life is akin thereto, so far it is kin to God. There is no life so feeble but taking it as being it excels anything life can ever boast. I have no doubt of this, that if the soul had the remotest notion of what being means she would never waver from it for an instant. The most trivial thing perceived in God, a flower for example as espied in God, would be a thing more perfect than the universe. The vilest thing present in God as being is better than angelic knowledge.
When angels turn to creaturely knowledge, then it grows dark. St Augustine says. When angels know ereatures in God, twilight falls; when the soul knows God in creatures it is eventide. But knowledge of creatures in God is the dawn. And when she knows God in himself as pure essence, that is high noon. It should be the soul’s desire to see, as though in non-sense, this most noble being. We advocate dying in God, to the end that he may raise SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 207 us up to being which is better than life: the being our life subsists in, wherein our life is quickened into actuality. We ought to face ^ death willingly and die in order to obtain a better resurrection.
I said on one occasion that a bit of wood is more precious than gold, a surprising statement. But a stone is nobler (having being) than God and his Godhead without being, if such a thing is possible as to abstract his being. That must be a vigorous life in which dead things revive, in which even death is changed to life. To God naught dies: all things are living in him. They being dead (as the scriptures say about the martyrs) are quickened into life eternal, into the life where living is real being. We must be so tliroughly dead as to be moved by neither good nor ill. What we know we must knoAv in its cause. We never really know anything in itself till we know it in its cause. There is no understanding it until wc^ apj^rehend it in its origin. Just as life is never perfected till it returns to its original source, wherein life is real being. The thing that k(ieps us from remaining there is, as the philosopher explains, our being in contact with time. What time can touch is temporal and mortal. The philosopher states that the heavenly progression is eternal; true, it gives rise to time, and that makes it mortal. In its course it is eternal, all unwitting of time; in other words, the soul obeys the laws of abstract being. Another thing is its being full of opposites. What are opposites? Good and bad, white and black are in opposition, a thing which has no j)lace in real being.
The philosopher says the soul is given to the body for her perfecting. Soul apart from body possesses neither intellect nor will: she is one with no attendant power of speech; true, she has it in her ground, in its root as it were, but not in fact. The soul \ is purified in body by collecting things scattered and dispersed. The resultant of the five senses, when these are recollected, gives her a common sense wherein everything sums up to one. In the second place, she is purified by a saving habit, that namely of ascending into the unitive life. The soul’s perfection consists in liberation from the life which is in part and admission to the life which is whole. All that is scattered in nether things is gathered together when the soul climbs up into the life where there are no opposites. The soul knows no opposition when she enters the light of intellect. Anything short of this light falls into death and dies. Perfection of soul consists, thirdly, in absence of sensible affection. What is prone to aught other shall die, it cannot last. We beseech thee Lord God to help us escape from the life that is divided into the life that is united. So help us God. Amen.
MEISTER ECKHART LXXXIII ST GERMANUS’ DAY In diebus suis placuit deo et inventus est Justus {Eccl. In these words which I quote in Latin we celebrate the saint, Ger- manus by name, whose virtuous life so much is written of and whose festival is kept to-day in holy Christendom.
‘ In his days,’ that means there is more than one day. There is the soul’s day and God’s day. Days here, all that have passed for seven thousand years, are as near God’s day, to-day, as is yesterday. Why? Because time yonder is in the present now. The heavens revolve, hence time; day started when the heavens began to spin. Yonder the soul’s day is passing in the present, in her natural light where all things are, where there is perfect day, God’s day, day and night in one. Yonder in the day of eternity the soul is in the essential now; there the Father is be- getting his (one-begotten Son) in the here and now, there the soul is being reborn in God. As often as this birth takes place she is giving birth to the only Son. Full many arc the sons of virgins born who travail in eternity, superior to time. But however many sons the soul gives birth to in eternity she has no more than the one Son, for it is supcrtemporal; it comes to pass in the eternal day.
Just indeed is he who lives in virtue and in virtuous deeds; who seeketh not his own in any thing, iicithcr in God nor creature. That man dwells in God and (iod in him. He takes delight in flouting and getting rid of things, in being done with things as far as that is possible. St John says, ‘ God is love and love is God and he who dwells in love dwells in God.’ Doubtless he is well lodged as heir to God, and he in whom God dwells has a good lodger. One of the masters says, God gives the soul a gift which moves her lo interior things. And it has been explained that the soul is moved directly by the Holy Ghost, for in the love wherein God loves himself, in that same love he is loving me, and the soul loves God in the same love wherein he loves himself; and were there not this love wherein God loves himself there would be no Holy Ghost at all. It is the heat, the blowing of his holy Breath that the soul loves God in.
In one of the Evangelists we read, ‘ This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’ In another we read, ‘This is my beloved Son in whom all things please me.’ And in a third we find, ‘ This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleasing to myself.’ Whatever pleases God is pleasing to him in his only Son: whatever God loves he is loving in his only Son. So it SERMONS AND COLLATIONS behoves a man to live so that he is one with his only Son, so that he is his only Son. Between the only Son and the soul there is no difference. Between the servant and his lord there is no like love. As long as I am servant I remain unlike, remote from his only Son. If T could see God with my eyes the same as I see colours, that would not be right, for that which is visible is temporal. The temporal taken according to time is taken at its lowest value. Noxv is time and place in itself. While man has time and place, number and quantity, he is not as he should be, is not just, and God is remote and not his own. Our Lord says, ‘ Whosoever would be my disciple let him forsake himself,’ as though to say, no one can hearken to my teaching till he is rid of his own self. All creatures in themselves are naught, ami that is why I counsel you to abandon naught and enjoy the perfect state where the will is just. His own will once relinquished man relishes my doctrine and can listen to my word. One master says, All creatures have their being straight from God, therefore by nature God must love them better than they do themselves. Did the soul know its own detachment it would not stoop to any thing.
We say about this bishop, ‘ He was well-])leasing to him in his days.’ The soul’s day and God’s day arc different. In her natural day the soul knows all things above time and place; nothing is far or near. And that is why 1 say, this day all things are of equal rank. To talk about the world as being made by God to-morrow, yesterday, would be talking nonsense. God makes the world and all things in this present now. Time gone a thousand years ago is now as present and as near to God as this very instant. The soul who is in the here and now, in her the Father bears his one-begotten Son and in that same birth the soul is born back into God. It is one birth; as fast as she is reborn into God the Father is begetting his only Son in her.
I have spoken about one power in the soul; in her first issue she lays hold of God not as being good nor yet as truth: delving deeper still she grasps him in his loneliness, in his solitude; she finds him in his desert, in his actual ground. But being still unsatisfied, on she goes in quest of what it is that is in his Godhead, of the special property of his peculiar nature. They say no property (or, union) is closer than that of the three Persons being one God. And next they put the union of the soul with God. When the soul, being kissed by God, is in absolute perfection and in bliss, then at last she knows the embrace of unity, then at the touch of God she is made uncreaturely, then, with God’s motion, the soul is as noble as God is himself. God moves the soul afte his own fashion. God contemplating creature gives it life; crea- ture finds life in contemplating God. The soul has intelligent, U MEISTER ECKHART noetic being, and therefore where God is there is the soul and where the soul is there is God.
Of this saint we say, ‘ he was found just.’ Just means equable, alike in joy and sorrow, in bitter and in sweet; one to whom nothing comes amiss, whom nothing keeps from feeling himself one in righteousness. Like to like. Love loves its like alway and God loves the just man like himself. May we find that we arc in this case in the time, in the day of understanding, in the day of wisdom, in the day of beatitude. So help us O undivided Trinity. Amen.
LXXXIVi LXXXIVi LIKE THE MORNING STAR Quasi Stella matutina in medio nehulce etc, {EccL 50^), ‘ Like the morning star in the midst of a cloud and as the moon at the full and as the sun in his glory, so did he shine in the temple of God.’ These words are commonly applied to aJl the saints and teachers who in their virtuous lives and knowledge of God have been a shining light to worldly hearts which, caught with creatures in the fog and cloud of darkness or ignorance, are straying like blind men from the way of eternal liberation, but more especially do they apply to the holy father we celebrate to-day, St Dominic by name, a mainstay of Christendom and founder of the Preaching Order which he started and established to propagate God’s word and to help poor sinners.
He shone like the morning star in the temple of God. What is God and what is the temple of God? Four and twenty doctors met together to settle what God is, and they could not do it. Thereafter at a time appointed again they came together bringing each his verdict. Of these I will pick out two or three. One says: God is something to which all changing, temporal things are nothing; all that has being is from him and is insignificant compared with him. Another says: God is somewhat that transcends being, that in itself needs none and that all things need. A third says: God is the intelligence wliich occupies itself solely in understanding itself.
Passing over the first and the third I will speak of the second; God transcends being. Nothing that has being, time or place is proper to God, he is above them; his being in all creatures shows him superior to them, for that which is the same in many things. must be prior to them. According to some doctors, the soul is in the heart alone. Not so; it is an error some eminent Scholas- tics make. The soul is whole and undivided at once in foot and eye and in each member of the body. Again, I take a span of ^ Sermon on St Dominic’s Day. See also Jostes, No^ 31.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS time, which need not be to-day ov yesterday. But if I take the now that includes all time. The now wherein God made the world is as near this time as the now I am speaking in this moment, and the last day is as near this now as was yesterday.
One of the doctors says: ‘ God is impartible, eternally energising in himself, immanent, uriindigent of instrument or aid, in need of none but what all things need and to which all things tend as to their final goal.’ To this goal there is no way, it is beyond all ways, debouching in the open. St Bernard says, ‘ Divine love is a wont without a way.’ I'he physi(‘ian wlio sets out to make a sick man whole has no particular mode of lu'altJi in view; he has a mode whereby he hoj)cs to make him well, but how well he hopes to make him is not sjiccilied: he will make him as well as he can. How shall wc love God then? As well as we can; without measure. Each thing works after its own fashion; things do not work in natures superior to their own; fire, for examjde, only works in wood. God works above all natures, in the uncondi- tioned; wherever he can stir he is at work in modeless mode. Before ever there was being God was working: he wrought in non-existent being. Advamted theology lays down that God is abstract being: he is as mucli above being as an angel is above a fly. I hold it is as wrong for me to say that God is being as to say the sun is black or white. God is neither this nor that. As St Dionysius says, * He who thinks that he sees (iod, if he sees aught sees naught of God.’ But when I say God is not being, is superior to being, I do not witli that deny him being: I dignify and exalt it in him. If I find some copper in the gold, as existing there it is in a nobler being than itself. St Augustine says: God is mode-free mode, power-free power, good-free good.
In the elements of the Scholastic teaching, wc find being divided into ten modes (or categories), all ol’ which arc denied to God. God is subject to none of these mod(‘s nor is he deficient in any. The first, which has most being of them all, wherein all things have being, is substance; and the last, which has least being, is called relatio, and in God it is the same as the first one is, which has most being. In God all things have the same form (idea), though this is the form of very different things. The most exalted angel, the soul, the fly, have all the same prototype in God. God is not being nor yet goodness. Goodness cleaves to being and does not go beyond it: if there were no being there would be no goodness. Being is purer than good. In God is no good nor better nor best. To say that God is good is to do him wrong; as well say that the sun is black. But our Lord himself declares, ‘ None is good but God alone.’ What is good? That which communicates itself. Him we call a good man who MEISTER ECKHART MEISTER ECKHART gives himself and is of use to people. And hence the dictum of a heathen doctor, * A hermit is neither good nor bad, in the sense of giving himself and helping other people.’ God par excellence communicates himself. No thing gives of its own being, for creatures arc not of themselves. What they give they have gotten from another. Nor do they give themselves. The sun gives light, no more; the fire gives heat, the fire itself remains; but God does give his own, for it is from himself he is and in all the gifts he gives he first and foremost gives himself. In all his gifts he gives himself: God, as he is, so far as the recipient will allow. St James says, ‘ Ev^ery good gift comes down from above from the Father ol‘ lights.’
When we take God in his being we take him in the forecourt of his habitation, for quiddity or mode is the way into his temple. Then where is God in his temple? Intellect is the temple of God wherein he is shining in his glory. Nowhere does God dwell more really than in the temple of his intellectual nature, where he is in his stillness by himself, all undisturbed. As one of the doctors says, God in his self-perception is perceiving himself in himself.
Now turning to the soul, she has a drop of intellectual nature, a spark, a ray, and she has sundry powers which function in the body. One is the power of digestion, more active by night than in the day, whereby man grows and thrives. And the soul has a power in the eyes which makes the eye so sensitive and delicate and too fastidious to accept things in the coarse-grained mode they have themselves, but they must first be filtered and refined by light and air, owing to the presence in it of the soul. Another power in the soul is that wherewith she thinks. This power is able to picture in itself things which are not there, so that I can see the things as well as I see them with my eyes, or even better. I can see a rose in winter when there are no roses, there- fore with this power the soul produces things from the non-existent, like God who creates things out of nothing.
A heathen philosopher observes that the soul who loves God takes him under the veil of goodness; and so far 1 have quoted mainly from the heathen doctors who know in the light of nature merely. I have yet to come to the sayings of the saints who see in a light far more exalted. He says then, that the soul in loving God is taking him under the veil of goodness. Intellect draws this veil from God and takes him bare, stripped of goodness, of being and of every name.
At the School [the College of St Jacob] I used to teach that intellect is higher than the will, both as belonging to this light. Another theologian at the other School put will before the intellect on the ground that will enjoys things as they are in themselves, SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 213 whereas intellect enjoys them as they are in it. That is quite true. The eye in itself is a better thing than the eye as painted on the wall. Nevertheless, 1 still maintain that intellect is higher than the will. Will takes God under the garment of good. Intel- lect seizes him naked, divested of good and of being. Goodness is a garnxent under which God is concealed and will takes God in this garment of goodness. If God had no goodness my will would repudiate God. It would be unseemly to robe a king in drab on his coronation day. I am not hap])y by reason of God’s goodness. Never should I think of asking God to beatify me with his goodness, for he could not do it. Goodness is his vesture. My beatitude lies wholly and solely in the fact that God is knowable and in my knowing him. A philosopher says, The intellecit of God is what angelic being is suspended from.
It is a question where the image really has its being: in the mirror or the object it proceeds from? My image is in me, of me, mine. While the mirror faces me, it is my image in it; if the mirror falls it is my image which has been destroyed. Angelic being likewise depends upon the presence of God’s intellectual nature wherein he secs himself like a morning star enveloped in the mist. I always have before my mind this little word quasi, like: indeed, it is the burden of my entire teaching. What at school the children call a mock, a by-word.
The truest thing that man can predicate of God is word-and- truth. God calls himself a word. And St John says, ‘ In the beginning was the Word,’ meaning that man is a word with the eternal Word. Like Venus, Fria’s star, which Friday is named after and which has many names. When it is earlier than the sun and is uj) before it then it is called the morning star; when it rises later than the sun and the sun sets lirst then it is called the evening star. Now it is above and now IxJow the sun, hut of all the stars it best keeps its distance from the sun, never going far away, and the moral of this is that any man who would attain to God must stay by, in the presence of, God the whole time and refuse to let God be put out of his mind by fortune or misfortune or by any creature whatsoever.
And he says, ‘ like the moon at the full in his days.’ The moon is the ruler of moist nature. The moon is never nearer to the sun than at the full, and then it gets its light at first-hand from the sun, but owing to the fact that of all the stars it is the nearest to the earth, it suffers from two drawbacks: being pale and mottled and also being liable to lose its light. It is never so potent as when it is furthest from the earth, and in that position it tells most upon the sea; when it is on the wane its effect gets less and less. And the higher the soul rises above earthly things the MEISTER ECKHART more powerful she grows. Merely creature-lore will place a man beyond the need of sermons. For every single creature is a book. But anyone who means to get to that whereof we speak, to where my arguments all tend, must be as the morning star: a man in the presence of God, always with him, equally near him and exalted above mundane things: a word by the Word.
There is one word both thought and spoken: angels, the soul and all creatures. Another Word, thought but unspoken, I can conceive. And there is still another Word unthought of and unspoken which never proceeds forth but is eternally in him who speaks it: in the Fatlier, for it is he who speaks it, it is eternally proceeding and abiding. Intellect is intrinsically active and more and more outwardly effective in proportion as it is directed inwards. God’s ha])piness consists in its operation. And here again the soul should be an ad -verb. As the intellect of the soul turns more inwards, the more closely, more minutely is it identified with what it knows. The more powerful it is the more clearly it reflects and is atoned with God. That is not the case with corporal things: the stronger they arc tlic more external is their action. God’s happiness lies in the subjective working of the intellect wherein his Word abides. It is this eternal Word the soul should be a word with and, doing one work with God, she will find her happiness in self-perception: in the very thing that God is happy in. May we ever be a word with this Word, So help us the Father and this same Word and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
LXXXVi A NEW COMMANI^IMENT I GIVE UNTO YOU Mandaturn novum do vobis etc. {Joh. In the Gospel of St John wc find our Lord’s words to his diseq^les, ‘ A new com- mandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all know that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another.’
We know of three kinds of love that our Lord had, and in this we must be like him. One is natural, the second gracious and the third divine. In God there is notJiing not God; in ourselves, however, we may consider them as an ascending scale, from good to better and from better to perfection. But in God is neither more nor less, he is just the simple, pure, essential truth.
The first love God has, in this wc learn how his divine goodness has constrained him to create all creatures, wherewith he has been big eternally in his ideal preconception, intending them to enjoy ^ Soo also Wackernagel, No. 66.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS his goodness with him. And among all his creatures he bears no more love to one than to another: as each is able to receive he pours his love therein. Were my soul as capacious, as roomy, as a Seraph’s, who has nothing in him, God would pour out into me the same as he does into that angel. If you describe a circle, a ring of dots with one point in the middle, from this point all the dots will be equidistant; for one dot to get nearer it will have to be displaced, for the middle point is constant at the centre. So with divine being: it is not questing round about but abiding altogether in itself. In order to receive from it a creature must infallibly be moved out of itself. And when wx talk of man we arc talking of all creatures; Christ himself exhorted his dis- ciples, ‘ Go forth and preach the gospel to all creatures,’ for crea- tures all culminate in man. Not but what, as being, God is pouring himself out into all creatures, to each as much as it can take. Which is a lessoix to us to love all creatures equally with what we have received from God (though some are nearer to us by kinship or by natural friendship), as wc are favoured equally with the boon of divine love. I sometimes seem to like one better than another, and yet I have the same goodwill towards that other person whom I have never seen, only, by asking more of me, this one enables me to give him myself more. God loves crea- tures all alike and fills them with his being. And we too should pour forth ourselves in love upon all creatures. Wc often find the heathen arriving at this amiable state in virtue of their natural understanding. As the heathen philosopher observes, man is by nature a kindly animal.
The second love of God, the spiritual, he is llowing with into the soul and into the angels, and it is by this light which is super- natural that, as I was saying, creature is rapt away out of itself. Creatures are so enamoured of their own natural light, it needs a strong inducement to take them out of it into the light of grace. In his natural light man enjoys himself, but the light of grace, which is unspeakably more ]>owerful, robs him of his self-enjoy- ment and draws him into itself. As the soul says in the Book of Love, ‘ Draw me after thee in thy sweet savour.’
Now we cannot love God without first knowing him, but the essential point of God is in the centre, equally far from and near to all creatures, and the only way of getting closer to it is for my natural intellect to be displaced by a light more intense than itself. Supposing, for example, that my eye were a light and strong enough to bear the sunlight in its glory and unite therewith, its interior state would then be due not to itself alone but to the sunlight as well. So with the mind. The intellect is a light, and if I turn it right away from things and in the direction MEISTER ECKHART MEISTER ECKHART of God then, since God is perennially flowing with grace, my mind is illumined and united with love and therein knows and loves God as he is in himself. Here we have the explanation of how God is flowing out into rational creatures in his light of grace and how we with our intellect approaching this gracious light are rapt out of ourselves and ascend into the light of God himself.
The third love of God: in this it is granted us to learn how God has been begetting his one-begotten Son and is giving birth to him, as the Doctor says, now and eternally, he, like any woman, being brought to bed in every virtuous soul who has embarked on the interior life. This birth is his understanding, perennially up-springing in his paternal heart, wherein he has gotten all his bliss. All he has to give he expends on understanding: it is his progeny, his only pride. His entire happiness is centred in his Son; he loves nothing but his Son and all he finds in him; his Son is the light that has been for ever burning in his paternal heart.
To enter there we shall have to climb by way of natural light into the light of grace and therein wax into the light that is the Son himself. There in the Son we are loved by the Father with his love (his Holy Spirit) which has its eternal source in him and having blossomed forth to his eternal birth (namely the second Person) is wafted by the Son back to the Father as the love of both. The Doctor says, I sometimes think of what the angel said to Mary, ‘ Hail, full of grace! ’ what is the good to me of Mary’s being full of grace if I am not full also? What does it profit me the F ather’s giving his Son birth unless I bear him too? God begets his Son in the perfect soul and is brought to bed therein that she may bring him forth in all her works. Thus we, by the love of the Holy Ghost, being unified into his Son, shall know the Father with the Son and love ourselves in him and him in us with their mutual love.
Whoever would achieve this triple love must needs have four things. The first is, real dispassion towards creatures. The second, the true life of Leah, that is to say, the active life which is set in motion in the ground of the soul by the action of the Holy Spirit. The third thing is, the true life of Rachel, the contempla- tive life. The fourth is, an aspiring soul. A master was once questioned by his pupil about the angelic order. He answered him and said, Go hence and withdraw into thyself until thou understandest: give thy whole self up to it, then look, refusing to see anything but what thou findcst there. It will seem to thee at first as though thou art the angels with them and as thou dost surrender to their collective being thou shalt think thyself the angels as a whole with the whole company of angels. The pupil SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 217