The soul conceives more truly without images than in them, for this birth is more by way of Godhood than of selfhood. But we may still enquire, in which image does the soul best succeed in giving birth to the eternal Word? There are three kinds of images. The llrst the soul takes in from without through the senses. The second the soul conjures up from within by thinking on the childhood of our Lord or on his martyrdom; but all images so gotten arc called divine births in the soul. The third kind of images is given to tlie soul by God direct. It is in these last that the soul conceives the best. According to another gloss: this happens when the mind engenders, feels and knows the eternal Word in its proper image as gotten by the Father in himself, supposing the soul able to attain thereto; or, intellect failing her for this, when, faring forth in biith and love, he reaches out to this same image: for in this final image the eternal Word is born most perfectly of all.
Another (juestion is, whether the birth of the eternal Word is fleeting or essential? Now you must understand that it is this birth which unifies tlie soul, and in this respect it is intrinsic and passes not away unless a man should fall into mortal sin. But as happening in the sensible pen^eptions and in the discursive mind this birth is fugitive.
Further, it is asked, in what particular place does the soul bring forth or seek the eternal Word? Mark. It is in the Father as the intellectual image of his divine essence and is the reflection of his divine nature, so that it embodies both his essence and his nature. It is with the Father as the filial Person. It is in the Holy Ghost as the exuberance of their eternal satisfaction. It is in the soul as the likeness of God’s equal forms (or Persons). It is in all creatures as the preserver of their being. It is here the soul must seek the eternal Word, here in these places, and Christ says: ‘ Seek and ye shall find.’ May we so seek as to find eternally. So help us almighty God. I will say no more at this collation. Pray God to fit me for this blessed moment. Amen.
X MAN HAS TO SEEK GOD IN ERROR AND FORGETFULNESS i Man has to seek God in error and forgetfulness and foolishness. For deity has in it the power of all things and no thing has the like. The sovran light of the impartible essence illumines all things.
^ Josios, No- 3.
40 MEISTER ECKHART St Dionysius says that beauty is good order with pre-eminent lucidity. Thus God is an arrangement of three Persons. And the soul’s lower powers should be ordered to her higher and her higher ones to God; her outward senses to her inward and her inward ones to reason; thought to intuition and intuition to the will and all to unity, so that the soul may be alone with nothing flowing into her but sheer divinity, flowing here into itself. As St Dionysius says, By purity she has discovered her capacity and only her superior powers are in operation.
It has been said by one philosopher that as soon as the chief power takes cominand the others all run into it, leaving their own work. Then the soul is in order and in her pure nature, in her supernal light-nature wherein all things are potential. A heathen doctor says, If the soul knew herself she would know all things. Deity flowed into the Father and into the Son and into the Holy Ghost: in eternity into itself and in time into creatures, to each as much as it can hold: to the stone its being, to the tree its growth, to beasts sensation, to the angels reason and to mankind all these four natures. When God was made man he took upon himself by grace, in time, the nature of all things, which in eternity was his by nature. As St Paul says, ‘ To me C'hrist is all things.’ Here it was a matter of the light and reflection of his own nature. God’s being is fontal: flowing and fixed, final as well as the first. From being power flows out into work. In this sense the three Persons are the storehouse of divinity and the three Persons are poured forth into the essence of the soul as grace, God’s being in the essence of the soul is the imitation of the Persons and one being permeates the other. Her chief power flows from the essence of the soul just as the three Persons issue from the Godhead. And when God pours his grace into the soul it is into her essence that he pours it. For into the soul’s essence no speck can ever fall, do her powers what they may. The chief power of the soul draws its virtue from the grace existing in the essence of the soul and this highest power goes out into the lower ones, into their essence. The crescent soul, the spirit receptive of God’s nature, is the imitation of Christ’s Person and man’s nature. The soul when she reaches divine nature is deprived of all deficiency and imperfection; she suffers death in divine nature, getting God’s nature in herself as the Father does in him. She takes it not from her own nature, she receives it from God’s nature into her nature; she receives perfection and power according to the words of St Paul, ‘ I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.’ The wisdom thence arising in her mind begins in under- standing and is perfected in will and it has neither heart nor thought. St Dionysius says. As the soul takes the outgoing tide SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 41 to journey in eternity and time and in her own intelligence, so on the ebb does she return; as God the soul Hows back again, without exertion. God returns to himself as little mindful of his own as though they wore not. And the soul shall do the same. She shall grasp with her manhood the Person of the Son, and with the Person of the Son she shall apprehend the Father and the Holy Ghost in both, and them both in the Holy (ihost; and with the Person of tlie Father she shall apprehend his simple essence, and with the essence the abyss, and shall sink into the void without matter and without form. Matter and form, being and knowledge, she loses ill this unity, for she herself has come to naught. God does all her work, he preserves her in his being and leads her in his power into his very (Godhead where she Hows with deity itself into all God Hows into. She is all things’ place and has herself no place. This is the most eternal wisdom, which has neither heart nor thought. So nigh soul Ho\vs to God that many are deceived; but wdiat she is she is by grace, and where she is she is by another’s power. Yet she approaches near enough to (xod to be, in the power of the Father, invested with divinity by grace the same as the Father is by nature. St Paul says: ‘ In the same image we shall go from one glory to another,’ meaning, we shall receive divinity in its perfection and all that is consequent thereon. Therein she shall conceive divinity as it conceives itself and her will and God’s will shall be one: whatever God may be wc shall be with God. No one can attain it in this body, but when (Jod gives the soul his final gift, the vision of his Godhead, the soul is raised up in the Trinity. May wc attain to this, So help us God. Amen.
XI THE HOUR COMETH AND NOW IS Mulier^ venit horn ci nunc e.st, quando veri adoratores adorabunt pafrem in spiritii et veritaie (Job, This comes from St John’s Gospel. I take one sentence from a long discourse. Our Lord said: ‘ Woman, the hour eometh and now is, when true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth and the Father seeketh such.’
Taking the opening words: ‘ The hour eometh and now is.’ He who would worship the Father must betake himself into eternity in his desires and hopes. There is one, the loftiest, part of the soul which stands above time and knows nothing of time or of body. The happenings of a thousand years ago, days spent millenniums since, are in eternity no further off than is this moment 1 am passing now; the day to come a thousand years ahead or in 42 MEISTER ECKHART as many years as you can count, is no more distant in eternity than this very instant I am in.
He says, ‘ true worshippers worship tlie Father in spirit and in truth.’ What is trutJi? The truth is a most noble thing. Tf (iod were able to backslide from truth T would fain cling to truth and let God go. Hut (iod is truth, and things in time, the things that (xod created, are not truth.
He says, ‘they worship the Father.’ Alas, how many worship crealurcs and saddle tlKanselv^es with them, fools that they arc. As sure as thou dost pray to God for creatures thou prayest for thine own undoing, for no sooner is creature creature than hey for trouble and bitterness, Avrong and distress. They get tlieir deserts, do these lolk, with their wrongs and their bitterness. For why? They prayed for it.
I have sonudimes said, whoso gO('s seching God and seekiiig aught with God docs not iind (md; but he who seeks God by himself in truth docs not lind God alone; all God affords he finds as well as God. Art tliou looking for God, sc'eking God with a view to thy jiersoual good, thy personal prolit? Then in truth thou art not sething God. ' True Avorshippers Avorship the Father,’ he saA^s, and he says right well. If a A irtuous man is asked, ‘ Why dost thou seek (xod V ’ he ansAvers: ‘ Because he is God.’- AVhy dost thou s(‘ek truth? ’ - ^ Beeause it is truth.’ — ‘ Why dost thou seek right? ' ‘ Jh'cause it is right,’ and Avith such all is aa'cII. Things here in tinui have each tlieir cause. Ask a man why he eats? ‘ For strength,’ he says. Why he sleeps?
‘ For tile very same reason.’ And so Avith everything in time. But ask a good man, " hy dost thou lo\^e God? ’ -He says: A philosopher says: ‘ He aa Iio has once been touched by truth, by right, by good, though it entailed the pangs of hell, that man could ncA^er turn therefrom, not for an instant.’ The man, whoe’er he be, nioAxd by these three — truth, righteousness and goodness — can no more quit these three than God can quit his Godhood.
A philosopher says that goodness has three branches. The first is use, the second is enjoyment and the third is secmlincss. Con- cerning his AA^ords, ‘ they AA^orsliip the Father.’ Why does he say ‘ the Father ’? Seek God alone and thou shalt find with God all that he gives. It is the positiA^e truth, true of necessity, a Avritteii axiom though no less true uiiAvritten, that if God had more SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 43 he could not keep it from thee, he would have to sliow it thee, to give it thee, and, as I soinctinu^s say, he gives it to thee as a birth.
Philosophers say the soul is double-faeed, her upper face gazes at God all the time and her lower fac’e looks somewhat down, informing the senses; and the upper face, whieli is the summit of the soul, is in eternity and has nothing to do with time: it kno\vs nothing of time or of body. Kls(‘wherc T have (‘xplaiiu'd how in this li(‘S hid llu* fount as it were of all good, as a shining light that is always shining, a burning brand that is always hairning, which brand is none other than the Jloiy Ghost.
Philosophers say that out of the summit of the soul there tlow twin powers. The one is will, the oilier intiHeet, and her ])owers’ jierfeetion lies in the sovran })ower of intellect. TJiis ne\'cr rests. It wants (xod not as Holy Ghost nor 3'et as Son; it (lees the Son. It wants God not. as (iod. And why? Heeanse thus he has name; \vere th(*re a thousand (»ods ye t would it penudrate them all in the desire to get to where he has no name at ail: it wants a nobler, better thing than (iod as having nanux Wiiat Avonld it, tlien? It do('S not know: it would havc‘ Jiiin Kiithca*. ‘ Lord, show" us the Patiier,’ Pliilij) erics, ‘ and \V(' shall be content.’ It wants him as the quick of kindness; it wants liini as the miirrow dripping fatness; it w^ants him as the root, the main of goodness: thus he is simply Father.
Our Lord says: ‘No man know^eih the Father but the Son, nor tlic Son but tlic Father.’ In truth, to know tlie father we must be the Son. I have laid dowm tliese three' maxims wdiich take like three bad gra])es and drink tb(‘reafter. First, if wci arc Son, we must have the Fatlier: none f'an say lie is ii son unless lie has a father, nor father unless he has a son. His father dead, he says, ‘ he w’as my father.’ II is son being deael, he says.
‘ he was my son.’ The son’s life hangs upon tlu‘ father, and the father’s on the son, and thendbre none can say: ‘ 1 am the Son ’ unless he have the Fatlier and he is in truth Son whose every work is wrought for love therein. Secondly, that which most makes man Son is equaliility. lleing sick lie would as soon be sick as sane, as sane as sick. His frit nd dit s, ‘ In God’s name! ’ He has an eye out, ‘ In God’s name! Fhirdly, it beseems the Son to bow the head to no one save the Father. Truly, a royal power this, transcending time and w"ithoiit place! And by the facd of its transcending time it both contains all time and is tlu? w")iolc of time, and the least jot of that which transcends time makes a man rich indeed, for things at the antipoilcs an^ no more distant to this power than those present here. It is of these he says, ‘ the Father seeketh such.’
Look you, God loves us so, God importunes us so, because God 44 MEISTER ECKHART cannot work till the soul is shelled and trimmed of creatures, and the plain truth is that of necessity God is bound to cherish us just as though his Godhood were at stake, as in fact it is. God can no more do without us than we can without him, nay, even if we turned from (lod it would be imj^ossible for God to turn his back on us. I vow 1 will not pray to God for gifts nor worship him because of gifts bestowed, but I will entreat him to make me worthy to receive and worship him for being of the essence and of the nature that must give. lie who would spoil God of this would spoil him of Ins veiy life, of his very being. That we may thus in truth be Son, help us the truth of which I speak. Amen.
XII CONTEMPLATION, HINTS AND PROMISES' When a man delights to read or h(‘ar tell about, Ciod, that comes of divine grace and is lordly entertainment for the soul. To entertain God in one's thoughts is sweet(‘r than Jioney, but to be sensible of God is teeming consolation to the nol)le‘ soul, and union with God in love is everlasting joy which we relish here as we arc fitted for it.
They arc all too few who are fully ripe for gazing in God’s magic mirror. Precious few sin^eced in living tlie contemplative life at all here upon earth. Many begin, but fail to consummate it. Because they have not rightly lived the life of Martha. As the eagle spurns its young that (cannot gaze at the sun, even so fares it with the spiritual child.
lie who would build high must lay firm and strong foundations. The true foundation is the very way and pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ, who liimsclf declared: ‘ I am the way, the truth and the life.’
Dionysius says, ‘ The soul shall follow God into the desert of his Godhead, so far as here the body follows Christ in outward willing poverty.’ — ‘ But that soul is idle.’ To which St Bernard answers: ‘ Waiting upon God is not idleness but work which beats all other work to one unskilled in it.’ In order to find God, we must seek him in his Godhead. Christ says, ' If father and mother or anything else be a hindrance, quit them for good and serve God unhindered.’ The philosopher says, ‘ The soul which is mov^ed by the power of the Prime Cause need seek no counsel from any human wisdom; he is obeying what transcends wisdom, for lie is niovx*d by the latent primitive truth.’
Though we meditate upon the blessed works of our Lord’s poverty and his humility, yet coveting them not ourselves, the ^ See Preger, Zeitschr. f. hist. Theol., Bd. 36. 1866. (Two versions.)
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 45 thoughts are useless. And to cov’-et them is useless too, unless wc diligently seek how we may acquire them.
We would fain be humble; but not despised. To be despised and rejected is the heritage of virtue. Wc would be poor too, but without privatioti. And doubtless we are patient, except with hardslups and with disagreeables. And so with all the virtues.
The willing poor, imsolaccd by corru[)tiblcs, descend into the valley of humility. They arc pursued by insult and adversity, the best school of self-knoAvledge. And self-knowledge gets God- kn owl edge.
My children, ye who suffer insult, if the world reject you, do ye therewith likewise assail yourselves, helping to reject yourselves. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘ The servant is not greater than his lord. If the world hate you, know ye it hated me before it hated you.’
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 Lernard says: ‘ When a soul comes to wanting what few desire: to be nam<*lcss, 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 trutli shall make you free.* Freedom of soul consists in this: in finding in hcrs(*lf 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 Hows with all she is into the bottoml(*ss abyss of her primordial mould, into God liimsclf.
Our liord Jesus Christ exhorts us to renounce all things that we may be less hindered. St Bernard declares: ‘ All the time thou oceupiest not with God is accounted unto thee for lost.’ And again, ‘ The most subtle temptalion that can beset us is to occupy ourselves too much in outward works.’ Further he says, ‘ The best preparation 1 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 wc 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 46 MEISTER ECKHART 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 oftencr 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 tlie 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 I wind: the greater the love and the stronger the inspiration of the I 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 creaturcly. 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.
SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 47 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 exaltahitur 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 evcrytliihg present in one new, fresh-springing noiv where millenniums last no longer than the twinkling of an eye. And we win participation in the manifold delights of tlie 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 Gpd 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 1 IN THIS WAS MANIFESTED THE LOVE OF GOD In hoc ajpparuit 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 Wackeraagel, No. Ixv, p. 172.
48 MEISTER ECKHART ‘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 Christ in 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.’ But I maintain: not burns in hell. A simile 1 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 bums me: not docs; because the coal has in it something my hand has not. Observe, it is this very not that bums 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 SERMONS AND COLLATIONS 49 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.
Further, my text says: ‘ God sent his only-begotten Son into the world,’ by which ye are to understand not the external world: it must be taken of the inner world. As surely as the Father by his simple nature begets the Son innately, so surely he begets him in the innermost recesses of the mind, which is the inner world. Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground God’s ground. Here I live in my own as God lives in his own. To one who even for an instant has seen into this ground, a thousand ducats of red beaten gold are worth no more than a false farthing. Out of this innermost ground thy works should be wrought without why. Indeed, I hold that as long as thou doest thy works because of the kingdom of heaven, or God, or thine own eternal happiness, from without (that is to say), all is not well with thee. It may be tolerable but it is not the best. He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts, prayers, pious offices and so forth, than by the fireside or in the stall: in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle his head in a cloak and hide him under the table. For he who seeks God under settled forms lays hold of the form while missing the God concealed in it. But he who seeks God in no speeial guise lays hold of him as he is in himself, and such an one ‘ lives with the Son ’ and is the life itself. We might question life for a thousand years: ‘ Why dost thou live! * It would only say, if it replied at all, ‘ I live because I live.’ For life lives in a ground of its own, wells up out of its own. It lives without a cause for it lives itself. And if anyone asked a proper man, one who works his own ground, ‘ Why dost thou work? ’ he too would say, if he told the truth: ‘ I work because I work.’
Where creature stops, there God begins. All God wants of thee is for thee to go out of thyself in respect of thy creatureliness and let God be God in thee. The smallest of creaturely images that ever takes shape in thee is as big as God. — ‘ How so? ’ — It shuts out the whole of God. As soon as this image appears God disappears with all his Godhood. As this image fades out God comes in. [No temporal image is so godly but thrice harms the soul. First, it vexes spirituality; next, it tarnishes her purity; and thirdly, it disturbs detachment.
— ‘ What does God do to my mind? ’ — Transcend thyself and repress creatures: God does that to thy mind.]
4 50 MEISTER ECKHART God longs as urgently for thee to go out of thyself in respect of thy creaturely nature as though his whole felicity depended on it. Why, man, what is the harm of letting God be God in thee? Go clean out of thyself for God’s sake, and God will go clean out of his for thy sake. Both being gone out, what remains is simply the one. In this one the Father gives birth to his Son, in his inner- most source. Thence blossoms forth the Holy Ghost and thence originates in God the will belonging to the soul. The while this will remains unmoved by creatures and by creaturehood, the will is free. Christ says: ‘ None goes to heaven but he who came from heaven.’ Things are all made from nothing; hence their true source is nothing. This noble Avill, as far as it inclines to creatures, with them elapses into nothing.
The question is, Docs the will lapse so far that it is never able to return? Doctors reply with one accord that it docs not return so far as it has lapsed with time. But I maintain that if this will turns back, even for an instant, from its oAvri self and things created and rallies to its source, there in its own free origin the will is free and in this instant time lost is all recovered.