It is lamentable how some people think themselves so far advanced, so one with God, although they have not yet abandoned self at all but hug themselves, like trivial things, in fortune and misfortune. They are precious far from what they think. They are full of notions and intentions. I sometimes say, if a man who seeks nothing finds nothing, what right htus he to con\plain? After all, he has found what he sought. To seek or purpose aught is to seek or purpose naught and to pray for aught is to get nothing. But a man with no ulterior motive, who sets his mind on God and God alone, to that man God unbosoms himself wholly and gives him all the things concealed within his heart and for his very own as they arc God’s own, no more nor less, provided he is after God and not things in between. What wonder if a sick man does not relish meat and wine? He cannot taste the meat and wine; his tongue wherewith he tastes is covered with a coating which is nasty and bitter by reason of the sickness of the man: he does not taste the proper flavour, everything tastes bitter. He is right; things are rendered bitter by means and hindrances. When the hindrance is removed he tastes things properly. As long as there is anything between, God will never taste like himself to us and life will seem very hard and bitter.
I once said that virgins follow the lamb wherever it goes, close behind. Some are virgins, some arc not, whatever they appear. Wherever this lamb goes the virgins follow, some only while it leads them in the pleasant places that they like. When it takes them into suffering, travail and discomfort they turn back and refuse to follow, and these are not virgins for all they seem to be. Some say. Lord, I want to go in honour, riches, comfort. Well, if the lamb has led you by that way I wish you well in following his footsteps. True virgins will follow the lamb through the highways and byways, whithersoever it may lead, and have no pity on themselves, befall what may. ‘ In the fullness of time there was born John,* that is, grace, as I have explained. May all things be fulfilled in us and grace be born in us, So help us God. Amen.
MEISTER ECKHART XCI REJOICE O HEAVENS Laudate coeli et exultet terra {Is. Ego sum lux mundi {Joh. 8^2)- I quote two Latin texts: one from the lesson, the words of Isaiah the prophet, ‘ Rejoice, O heavens and earth, God hath comforted his people and will have mercy on his poor ones.’ The other comes out of the gospel. Our Lord’s saying, * I am the light of the world: he that followeth me walketh not in darkness; he shall find and have the light of life.’
First take the words of the prophet, ‘ Rejoice, O heavens and earth.’ Verily, verily, by God, by God and as God liveth, at the least good deed, the least good will, the least good desire, all the saints in heaven as well as all the angels rejoice with such great joy as all the joys of this world cannot equal. With the saints, the higher the more joyful, and all their joy combined is but a speck to the delight that God takes in this act. God plays and laughs in this good work, whereas all other works, those which redound not to God’s glory, are dust and ashes in God’s sight. Therefore he cries, ‘ Ye heavens, rejoice! God has comforted his people.’
Consider the words, ‘ God has comforted his ])eople and will have mercy on his poor.’ ‘ His poor,’ he says. The poor arc left to God alone, for no one troubles about them. Anyone who has a friend, a poor one, if he docs not forget him and if he has posses- sions and is wise, will say ‘ Thou art my servant,’ and he is soon forgot; but to the beggar he will fliiig, ‘ God guard thee,’ and be ashamed of him. The poor are left to God: wherever they go they may come upon God and have God in all places; God takes them in charge, for they are abandoned to him. Wherefore he says in the gospel, ‘ Blessed are the poor.’
Now take the words, ‘ I am the light of the world.’ ‘ I am,’ that touches the essence. According to philosophers, all creatures can say ‘I,’ for the word is common property; but the word sum, am, none can really say but God alone. Smn signifies one thing which is big with good things as a whole, and it is denied to creatures that any one of them should have all human consolation. If I had my heart’s desire but my finger hurt me, then I should have it not, for with a wounded finger, while it hurts me, I lack entire comfort. Bread comforts a man when he is hungry, whereas if he is thirsty bread wifi give him no more comfort than a stone; and the same with clothes, when he is cold, but being hot no clothes will comfort him; and this applies to creatures, hence all creatures have a certain bitterness of heart. True, creatures have this SERMONS AND COLLATIONS comfort for their souls, that none can deprive them of their rights. Their property is all in God whatever possessions they may have in creatures. As it is written in the Book of Wisdom, ‘ In thee all good belongs to my soul.’ Creature comfort is imperfect, it has innate defect. But God’s comfort is complete, with no shortcoming; it is whole and perfect and he needs must give it thee, for he cannot work unless he gives thee himself first. God is foolishly in love with us, it seems he has forgotten heaven and earth and all his happiness and deity, his entire business seems with me alone, to give me everything to comfort me; he gives it to me suddenly, he gives it to me wholly, he gives it to me perfect, he gives it all the time and he gives it to all creatures.
‘ He that folio weth me walketh not in darkness.’ Philosophers attribute three powers to the soul. The first power ever seeks the sweetest. The second ever seeks the highest. The third one ever seeks the best, and the soul is too noble ever to rest anywhere but in her source whence drops what goodness is made out of. Behold, so sweet God’s consolation, all creatures go in quest of him, hunting after him. Nay, I say more: it is creature’s life and being, this searching after God, this hunting for him.
Peradventure ye will say. Where is this God all ereatures are in quest of and whence they get their being and their life? (Fain would I speak of the Godhead whence comes all our happiness.) The Father says, ‘ Son, this day do I beget thee in the reflection of the saints.’ Where is this God? Where the saints leave off there I begin. Where is this God? In the Father. Where is this God? In eternity. No man ever found God. As the wise man says, ‘ Lord, thou art a liidden God.’ Where is this God? Su))pose a man in liiding and he stirs, he shows his whereabouts thereby and God does the same. No one could ever have found God; he gave himself away. One of the saints has said, ‘ I sometimes experience such sweetness in me that, forgetting creatures altogether, I dissolve right into thee. But when I try to embrace thee Lord, lo, thou art fled. What wouldst thou then? Why draw me on only to run away? If thou dost love me wherefore dost thou shun me? Nay, Lord, it is to make me more eager to obtain.’ The prophet says, ‘ my God.’ — ‘ Who told thee that I am thy God? ’ — ‘ Lord, I cannot rest except in thee, I have no well-being but in thee.’ May we thus seek God and also find him, So help us God. Amen.
MEISTER ECKHART XCII Posui VOS ut eatis et fructum afferatis (Joh. Christ said to his disciples, ‘ I have set you to go and bring forth fruit.’ God spake to them and to us all who are in darkness. Being in the dark we need a light to walk by. But Christ says: ‘ I am the light of the world.’ If we keep in the true love of our head we shall be lighted by Christ. For a taper goes on burning at the tip in virtue of its contact with the flame which consumes the matter it supplies and changes it into itself.
Observe. When Christ said to his disciples, ‘ I have set you to go,’ he referred to our being taken up into the light of grace. The prophet says, ‘ I was sitting when he took me up into himself.’ Sitting, we stop groping and, in the light, can see our way. To wit, the way of virtue. That is the meaning of Christ’s words, ‘ I have set you to go.’ Sitting is not going. We cannot go the right way without first sitting in the light of contemplation and making out the way to take; all our works must be a light to lighten our neighbour’s darkness.
Now Dionysius says: ‘ These, who have thus gone out of themselves and are living in the light of truth, these (I say) are the christened, they arc god-children and godfathers.’ Bishop Albertus expounds this as follows: God-children are they who, reading or hearing the holy scriptures read, take them to heart and show them forth in good works whereby they ultimately find the truth in God. The christened again arc dead in God, there is no longer anything alive in them but God. As St Paul says, ‘ We are dead and our life is hid with Christ in God.’ But the most perfect of all are the godfathers, who are drowned in the unfathomableness of God; not only does God live in them but they are alive in God and there is now in them the beginning of eternal life.
Consider now those who arc god-children. Comprehending the scriptures in the light of faith they come into the dew of grace and in this gracious dew inhale the fragrance of the path of life eternal. As saith the Bride in the Book of Love, ‘ Take me along with thee, out in thy desert, within in thy fastness.’ Out in the desert means detached from creatures; the inner fastness is the subjective certainty of truth which tieither life nor death can alter. Such are these god-children, sons of power and wisdom and goodness. To them our Lord cries in the Book of Love, ‘ How beautiful arc thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter! ’ The shoes being the holy life put on the feet of love and knowledge in the desire to walk SERMONS AND COLLATIONS therein. But the christened are in mystical union with God and are actually leading the life of God. What shall I say of these? In their eating and drinking, their sleeping and their entire wont there is nothing found but God, did we but know it. Burn them, they yield but the test of divinity, the sweetness of the Holy Ghost, wherein they are gotten full of sap. But this none knoweth save the children of true light and him they dwell in, namely God. The children of darkness know it not, whose hearts are filled with the poison of everlasting death. Wherefore the light is turned to darkness in them and the eternal sweet to bitterness. God light us with the light we used to bask in in his Son eternally, so shall we escape from darkness into the true light!
But the third class, yclept godfathers, these climbing hill and mountain have followed the track of the true sons with will and knowledge, and the flaming heat of the Holy Ghost having burnt up all their matter, they show now only the one light in God. In this light they have come to rest, at peace after their labours, the peace of absolute eonseiousness, a j)ea(?e which is never dis- turbed. Thought fails in speaking of these fathers, for they have received all good and perfect gifts from the Father of lights and have reached the goal of virtue. This goal set John, the soaring eagle, wondering in the Apocalypse. And Christ answered him, saying, ‘ I am the first without beginning and the last that has no end.’ Amen.
XCIII THE CROSSING Ejchibite membra vestra servire justituv iti sanctificationem (Rom, 619). St Paul says, ‘ Yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness, for the wages of sin is death but the reward of virtue is eternal life.’ The soul has but two members to offer for service of the sort acceptable to God, these are will and understanding.
One master says, God exerts the whole force of his will in loving the soul. But my point is that God’s sole object in loving the soul is to make her love him in return. Again, I contend that God devotes his divine nature to pleasing the soul, to making her like him and enjoy his society and be friendly with him and love him. Thirdly, I hold that this love which comes up in the ground of the soul, sprouting out of the ground of the Godhead, that this (I say) is the self-same love wherewith God loves his one-begotten Son, and nothing less. And fourthly, if so be that man is planted in God as he is in creature, then I maintain it is in the very ground MEISTER ECKHART of the Holy Ghost’s being and becoming, the very ground where the Holy Ghost is coming out in blossom.
St Paul does well to say, ‘ Yield your members.’ For intellect, albeit natural, is too exalted to be moved by mundane things. Yet, rendered to the source whence it proceeded forth it is absorbed in God, and that which absorbs it it becomes. Will, that is will proper, is as such omnipotent. But thousands die without acquiring this genuine will. Doubtless they had desires and inclinations like other animals. One man does something trifling, does it just once and sends it on the wings of praise and thank- fulness up to its source. Another one does some important work which occupies him long and constantly, and yet this little thing done once is more acceptable to God than the other man’s great work which cost him so much time and trouble. Why? I will tell you. Because the trivial act was carried up past time into the now of eternity, therefore it was to God’s entire satisfaction. Though one should live through all the time from Adam and all the time to come before the judgment day doing good works, yet he who, energising in his highest, purest part, crosses from time into eternity, verily in the sight of God this man conceives and does far more than anyone who lives throughout all past and future time, because this now includes the whole of time.
One master says that in this crossing over time into the now, each power of the soul will sur{>ass itself. The five powers must pass into her collective power (or common sense), and common sense will vanish into the formless power wherein nothing forms. Intellect and will are transcended. True, grace is a creature, but by no means altogether. The soul has no inherent grace excepting in her ground, and above this ground of the soul grace is indigenous. Therein grace docs nothing, although it is effective in the uses of her powers,* but in the ground of the soul grace, happiness and God’s ground are one and the same life wherein God is living. There the power behind the eye is as noble as the understanding; there foot and eye rank equal. What the soul is in her ground has never been determined. But Paul says, ‘ The grace of God is eternal life.’ Paul also says, ‘The wages of sin is death.’ The deaths men die arc all of them as nothing to the death of the soul who is divorced from God, from which may God preserve us. Amen.
XCIV THE SOUL St Paul says, ‘ Put off self, put on Christ.’ In abandoning our- self we initiate Christ and holiness and happiness and are ennobled.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS The prophet marvelled at two things. First, at God’s doings with the sun and moon and stars. And secondly he marvelled at the soul, at the prodigious things God does and has done with her and for her sake, yet do what prodigies he may she still preserves the absolute dispassion which befits one of her noble lineage. Mark the nobility of her descent. I make a letter of the alphabet like the image of that letter in my mind, not like my mind itself. And so with God. God makes things in general like the universal image of them in himself, not like himself. Certain things he has speeially made like emanations of his own, such as goodness, wisdom and other so-called attributes of God. lint the soul he has made not merely like the image in himself nor like anything proceeding from himself that is predicated of him, but he made her like himself, nay, like he is, all told: like his nature, his essence, his emanating-immanent activity, his ground wherein he is subsisting in himself, wherein he is begetting his alone -begotten Son and where the Holy Ghost comes into flower: in the likeness of his in-dwelling out-going w^ork did God make the soul.
It is a law of nature that fluids nm downhill into anything adapted to receive them; the higher not receiving from the lower but the lower from the higher. Now God is higher than the soul, and hence there is a constant flow of God into the soul, which cannot miss her. The soul may well miss it, but as long as a man keeps right under God he immediately catches this divine influence straight out of God. Nor is he subject to aught else, not fear nor pain nor pleasure nor anything that is not God. Put thyself therefore right under God and thou shalt receive his inflowing divinity wholly and solely. The soul does not receive from God as from a stranger, as the air docs the light of the sun, which it takes as a foreign intrusion. The soul receives her God not as a stranger nor as inferior to God, for inferior is both different and distant.
Philosophers say the soul receives as a light from the light, wherein is nothing foreign or remote. There is something in the soul wherein God simply is, and according to philosophers this is a nameless thing and has no proper name. It neither has nor is a definite entity, for it is not this or that nor here nor there; what it is it is from another wherewith it is the same; the one streams into it and it into the one. Hence the exhortation ‘ Enter into God in holiness,’ for here is the source of the soul’s whole life and being. This (light) is wholly in God and her other without him, so in this one the soul is ever in God, provided she smother it not and extinguish it in her.
Philosophers say this (light) is present in God and never goes out in him and God is ever in it. I say, God has ever been in it MEISTER ECKHART and of it eternally. The union of man and God is not a matter of grace (for grace is creature and creature has nothing to do with it), except in the ground of divinity, where the three Persons are one in nature and it (grace) is that nature itself. Wherefore an thou wilt, God and the universe are thine. That is, if thou wilt put off self and things: doff the habit of thy personality and take thyself in thy divinity.
The philosophers say that human nature has nothing to do with time; that it is deeper-seated and more firmly rooted in a man than he is in himself. God took on human nature and united it with his own Person. Thus human nature was God who donned man’s nature only, not any individual man. Would ’st thou be very Christ and God? Put off, then, whatever the eternal Word did not put on. The eternal Word never put on a person. So do thou strip thyself of everything personal and selfish and keep just thy bare humanity; thus thou shalt be to the eternal Word exactly what his human nature is to him. Thy human nature is no different from his: they are identical: what it is in him it is in thee. And hence 1 said at Paris that every prophecy of holy scripture is fulfilled in the just man; for being perfect, the whole promise of the old and new testaments is accomplished in thee.
How to be perfect? There are two aspects of the question. The prophet says, ‘ In the fullness of time the Son was sent.’ Now fullness of time is of two kinds. In the first place a thing is ful- filled when it is done, as day is done at eventide. So when time drops from thee thy time is fulfilled. Again, time is fulfilled when it is finished, that is, in eternity. Time ends when there is no before and after: when all that is is here and now and thou scest at a glance all that has ever happened and shall ever happen. Here there is no before nor after; everything is present, and in this immediate vision I possess all things. This is the perfection of time, and I am perfect and I am truly the only Son and Christ. May we attain to this fullness of time. So help us God. Amen.
xcv BUT NOW THE LIGHT IN GOD Eratis enim. aliquando tenebrWy nunc autem Ixlk in domino {Ephes* 5g). St Paul says, ‘ For ye were sometimes darkness but now the light in God.’ The prophets walking in the light perceived and knew the truth umbraged in the procession of the Holy Ghost. Sometimes they were moved to return to the world and speak of things they knew to be conducive to our happiness, thinking SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 287 to teach us to know God. Whereupon they would fall dumb, becoming tongue-tied and for three reasons.
First, because the good they knew by sight in God was too immense and too mysterious to take definite shape in their under- standing. Such ideas as formed were so unlike what they had seen in God, were such a travesty of the reality, that they held their peace for fear of lying. Another reason was, that what they had gotten in God rivalled God’s very self in its immensity and sublimity and yielded no idea nor any form for them to express. Thirdly, they were dumb because the hidden truth they saw in God, the mystery they found there, was ineffable. So it befell from time to time that, coming back and speaking of these things, they slipped, through lapses from the tnith, into gross matter and tried to teach us to know God by means of infernal creature things.
Paul says, ‘ but now the light in God.’ Aliquando, to those who are instructed, is the same as tvhen and expresses time, which is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. He means not time alone but temporali- ties; not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and aroma of time; for as, where an apple has lain the smell lingers, so with the contact of time. According to our best authorities the visible heavens and the sun and stars have nothing to do with time beyond bare contact with it. This I cite as showing that the soul, which towers high above the heavens, has, at her very summit, no connection with time at all. Many times I have explained about the act in God, the birth wherein the Father bears his one-begotten Son whose proeession causes the interior blossoming of the Holy Ghost, that the Spirit proceeds from both and that in this pro- cession the soul comes leaping forth, the image of the Godhead being sealed into the soul in this procession; and that in the return of the three Persons the soul goes back, re-informed into her primitive and formless form. Or as Paul puts it, ‘ now the light in God.’ He does not say, ‘ Ye are the light ’ but ‘ now the light.’ Meaning, as I have often said, that to know things (really) we must know them in their cause. The philosophers tell us that things are suspended in their birth as in a look-out over their existence. The Father gives birth to his Son now. In this eternal birth wherein the Father generates his Son, the soul comes into her existence which is the image of the Godhead imprinted in her soul.
It was mooted in the schools and maintained by some of the professors, that God imprints his image in the soul as a picture is painted upon canvas, and it fades. This was refuted. Others suggested with more truth, that God leaves in the soul a permanent MEISTER ECKHART impression of the nature of an abiding intention, as thus; my wish of to-day is my purpose of to-morrow, the idea of which is kept alive by my actual thinking of it, just as, they said, God’s works are done. For if the carpenter were perfect at his work he would not need materials: he would no sooner think a house than, lo, it would be made. And so with works in God: he thinks them and behold they are.
Then came a third professor who spoke most truly of them all. He pointed out that yonder no work is done at all: it is the now, being without becoming, newness without renewing, and this existence is his essence. God’s content is too subtile for renewal. And also in the soul there is a subtile nature too fine and rare to be renewed. In God it is all the here and now; unrenewable.
There are four points I had intended to discuss; the subtile nature of God, the subtile nature of the soul, the work of God and the work of the soul. These I must leave over for the present.
XCVI RIDDANCE Qui audit me non confundetur (Eccl, 2430). The eternal wisdom of the Father says, ‘ He that heareth me is not ashamed. (If he is ashamed he is ashamed of his shame.) He that worketh in me does not sin. He that reveals me and fears me shall have everlasting life.’ I will consider first these words of the eternal wisdom, ‘He that heareth me is not ashamed (or, confounded).’ To hear the eternal wisdom of the Father he must be within, at home and by himself.
Three things prevent our hearing the eternal Word. The first is body, the second number, and the third is time. If wc were rid of these three things we should be living in eternity and in the spirit, solitaries in the desert listening to the eternal Word. But our Lord says, ‘ No man heareth my word or my teaching till he be free from self.’,To hear God’s Word demands absolute self- surrender. Hearer and heard are one in the eternal Word. The subject the eternal Father teaches is his essence, his nature, his whole godhood, w^hich he divulges to us altogether in his Son, teaching us to be the Son himself.
A man who has gone out of himself and is the only-begotten Son owns what is proper to the only Son. God’s work and teach- ing are all done in his Son. God works with the sole object of getting us to be his only Son. As soon as he perceives that we are his only Son, God makes for us impetuously; he comes well- nigh to shattering his essence, naughting his very self, in his SERMONS AND COLLATIONS rash haste to show us the whole abysm of his Godhead, the fullness of his essential nature. God flies to make this ours as it is his. Here God enjoys and delights in his plenitude. And this man who is within God’s love and ken is none other than what God is him- self. Loving thyself thou lovest all men as thyself. While thou lovest anyone less than thine own self thou dost not love thyself in truth: not till thou lovest all men as thyself, all men in one man who is both God and man. The man who loves himself and all men as himself is righteous, absolutely just.
Sometimes people say, ‘ I like my friends and benefactors better than other people.’ But I say that is wrong, imperfect. True, we must make shift with it as we have to do with a side wind to cross the sea: it will take us over. Like our preference for one man above another, it is natural. To love another as myself means that I would as lief his fate for good and ill, for life and death, happened to me as him, which would amount to perfect understanding.
As bearing on this subject St Paul says, ‘ I would I were divorced from God for ever, for God and for my friends’ sake.’ And as you know, to leave God for an instant is to leave God eternally and to leave God at all is hell torment. What does St Paul mean then by wishing to be divorced from God? Doctors debate whether St Paul was upon the way to his perfection or whether he was perfect? I say he was perfect, otherwise he could not have said this.
I will put into plain words what St Paul means by wishing to depart from God. Man’s last and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God. St Paul left God for Gixl: he left everything he could give or take of God, every concept of God. In leaving these he left God for God since God remained to him in his essential self; not as a concept of himself, nor yet as an acquired thing, but God in his essential actuality. This is no case of give and take between himself and God: it is the one and perfect union. Here man is the true man whom suffering can no more befall than it can befall the divine essence, for, as I have said before, there is something in the soul so nearly kin to God that it is one and not united. It is one; it has naught in common with naught and is naught to aught. Anything created is naught. It is remote and alien from creature. If man were wholly this he would be wholly uncreated and uncreaturely; if everything temporal were so, were comprehended in this one, it would be nothing else than the unity itself. Were I to find myself but for a single instant in this case, I should esteem myself of no more moment than a worm.
God gives to everything alike, and as flowing forth from God MEISTER ECKHART things are all equal; angels, man and creatures all proceed from God alike in their first emanation. To take things in their primal emanation is to take them all alike. If here in time they are alike, in God in eternity they are much more so. Any flea as it is in God is nobler than the highest of the angels in himself. Things are all the same in God: they are God himself.
God delights so in this likeness that he pours out his whole nature, his whole substance into it, in his own self. The joy and satisfaction of it are ineffable. It is like a horse turned loose in a lush meadow giving vent to his horse-nature by galloping full- tilt about the field: he enjoys it, and it is his nature. And just in the same way God’s joy and satisfaction in his likes finds vent in his pouring out his entire nature and his being into this likeness, for he is this likeness himself.
It is a question whether those angels who are dwelling here with us to serve and guard us have less likeness in their joys than the ones abiding in eternity: is it in any sense a drawback to them to be serving and protecting us? No, not at all. Their joy is undiminished, so is too their likeness; for the work of the angels is the will of God and the will of God is the work of the angels. Neither in their joy, their likeness nor their work arc these angels handicapped. If God should bid an angel go pick the cater- pillars off a tree, the angel would obey him readily, nay, since it is God’s will it would be his happiness.
Being established in God’s will, a man will want what is God and what is God’s will and nothing else. If he is sick he will not be wanting to be well. To him all pain is pleasure, multitude is pure and single, provided he is really in the will of God. Aye, though it were the pains of hell it would be joy and happiness to him. He has left himself and he is free, passive to all impressions. My eye can see colour because it is free to be coloured. When I see blue or white, my eye which is seeing the colour is taking the colour that it sees. The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one vision, one knowing, one love.
Man being thus in the love of God is dead to self and all created things, and no more mindful of himself than one a thousand miles away. This man abides in likeness, in unity, and there is no unlikeness in him. This man has left the world and himself as well. Supposing some man owned the world and for God’s sake gave it up just as he had gotten it; then God would give him back the world and eternal life to boot. And if there were a second man possessing merely the good will, who thought; Lord were this whole world mine, nay two of them (or any number he may choose), I would resign it and myself as well, entire as I received it from SERMONS AND COLLATIONS thee: him would God recompense no less than if it had been given by his hand. Another man with nothing to resign, bodily or ghostly, would be the most resigned of all. He who for one instant wholly resigns self, to him shall all be given. To leave himself for twenty years and then to have self back again, an instant, is never to have left himself at all. He who both has and is resigned, nor ever casts one glance at what he has resigned but remains firm and unshaken and motionless in himself, that man is free. May we remain steadfast and immoveable, like the eternal Father, So help us God and his eternal Wisdom. Amen.
XCVII DIVES Homo quidam erat dives etc, (Ltic, IC^^). ‘ There was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day and he had no name.’
This will equally apply to the causeless Deity and to the loving soul. ‘ There was a rich man.’ Man means a rational entity. A heathen philosopher says, ‘ By man in the scriptures we mean God.’ And St Gregory says, if there were in God one thing nobler than another we should say it is his understanding; for in under- standing God is manifested to himself; in understanding God is proceeding in himself; in understanding God is proceeding forth into all things. Were there no understanding in God there would be no Trinity and no emanation of creatures.