14. This Is the Seventh Step

NEXT follows the seventh step, the noblest and most elevated that it is possible to realize in the life of time or eternity. It is attained when, above all

Love's Gradatory knowledge and science, we find within us a limitless ignorance ; when, passing beyond every name given to God or creatures we expire and pass to an eternal Unnameable where we are lost ; when, further than any practice of Virtue, we contemplate and discover within us everlasting Repose, or immeasureable Beatitude where none can act ; when we contemplate above all blessed Spirits an essential Beatitude where all are one, melted, lost, in their Super-essence in the bosom of a darkness defying all determination or knowledge.

1 This seventh degree of Love may be compared with what St. Denis calls the Divine Obscurity in the first and following chapters of his " Mystical The ology."

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We shall also contemplate the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, triune in Person, one only God in Nature ; by Whom was created Heaven and earth and all that exists ; Whom we shall love, thank, and praise for ever and ever, for that we are made in His image and likeness is the great happiness of those who are noble and pure. The Divinity does not operate, being simple essence, always in repose. Had we part in this repose with Him, we should, with Him, be merely Repose and lifted even to His altitude, and thus be above all the steps of the heavenly Ladder, with God in His Divinity, one essence of Repose and eternal Beatitude. The Divine Persons in the fecundity of their

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Nature, are one God eternally active; and in the simplicity of their Essence, eternally in repose, and thus, according to the Per sons God is everlasting activity ; according to Essence eternal Repose.

Between Labour and Repose live Love and Possession. Love will always act, for it is ever lasting operation in God. To possess always requires Repose, for it is above will and desire, the embrace of the Beloved by the Beloved, in a pure love with out images ; the Father conjointly with the Son takes possession of His beloved in the possessive Unity of the Spirit, above the fecundity of Nature; the Father saying to each spirit in eternal contentment : "I am

Love's Gradatory thine, and thou art Mine ; I have chosen thee from all eternity." Such joy and mutual complaisance so unite God and His beloved that they are ravished out of self, melting, liquefying, becoming in enjoyment one spirit with God, tending ever toward the infinite Beatitude of His Essence. This sort of happiness belongs to the contemplative life.

Another kind leads to the enjoyment of God those of interior life who are perfected in Charity after the most dear will of God. It belongs to those who renounce and abandon self, leaving every creature to which they might be attached, every creation of God which could become a care and obstacle in this intimate

Love's Gradatory life of the service of God. Then they rise towards God by affective love flowing from the depth of the living Soul, the affections lifted above the heavens and the powers on fire with burning Charity, while the spirit is raised to an intelligence without images.

Here the law of Love attains the summit, and every virtue becomes perfect. Emptied of all, God, our heavenly Father, dwells in the Soul in the fulness of Grace, and we in Him above all works, in a state of possession. The Christ lives in us and we in Him, and in His life we conquer the world and sin. With Him we are uplifted in Love even to the heavenly Father. The Holy Spirit oper-

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God. Between love and possession there is a distinction as between God and His grace. When we cleave to Him by love, then are we spiritual, but when the Spirit ravishes us and trans forms us, we are carried on into Possession. The Spirit of God exhales us in acts of love and virtue, and inhales us, drawing us back to repose and possession of Him, which is eternal Life ; just as we exhale the air in us and inhale anew, for mortal and natural life. And although the spirit be ravished out of us and our works fail in Possession and Beatitude, they are always re newed by Grace in Charity and Virtue.

Thus, then, to enter into a repose of possession, to go out

Love's Gradatory by good works and yet remain always united to the Spirit of God, is what I wish to express. Just as we open the eyes of the flesh to see, and close them so rapidly that we do not even observe it, so we expire in God, live in God, and remain always with God. We must go out in the works of the sensitive life, to return by love, attaching ourselves to God, to remain always one with Him without change. This exhalation and respiration of the Soul is the noblest sentiment we can discover and under stand; nevertheless, we must always go up and down the steps of the spiritual Ladder in interior virtue and exterior works, according to the Com mandments of God and the Pre-

Love's Gradatory ates in us and with us in all our works, crying in us loudly with out words : " Love the Love Who loves you with everlasting love." His clamour is an intimate touch on our spirit, and His voice more terrible than the tempest. The lightnings accom panying it open Heaven to us and show us the light of eternal Truth. The ardour of this secret touch and of His love is such that it would entirely consume us; and His voice cries ceaselessly in our spirit : " Pay thy debt; love the Love Who has loved thee with an everlasting love." Hence dawns a great interior impatience and in ex ternal conduct a variety of contradictory ways and manners. For the more we love the more

Love's Gradatory we desire to love, and the more we pay that which Love requires of us, the more we remain in debt. Love is never silent ; He constrains us continually with out a truce, crying : " Give love to Love." Those who do not understand these things cannot know this combat of love. To love is to possess, is to act and suffer action. God, living in us by His Grace, teaches, counsels, commands us to love; but we, living in Him above Grace and beyond works, endure His action in possessing Him.

In us, then, are loving, knowing, contemplating, desiring, and above all possessing. Our action consists in loving God, and our possession in allowing ourselves to be embraced by the love of

Love's Gradatory cepts of the Church, as has been already said. By the likeness with God that comes from good works, we are united to Him in His fecund Nature, which acts continually in the Trinity of Persons, perfecting all good in the Unity of the Spirit. Dead to sin and made one with God, we are born anew of the Spirit, elect sons of God, caught out of self, the Father and the Son holding us embraced in eternal love and everlasting felicity ; this action is always commenc ing anew, continuing and con summating ; and thus are we blessed in knowing, loving, and possessing God.

1 According to the doctrine already expounded, it may be seen that supernatural labour of the active life, or

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In enjoying God we are in active, for He alone operates when He ravishes loving spirits out of themselves and perfects them in the Unity of His Spirit, where we become as one single fire of love, greater than any thing which God has ever created. Each separate spirit is as a burning coal ignited by God at the fire of His infinite Love, and all together are as a flaming practice of the virtues, tends always towards the repose of the contemplative life. Labour likens one to God, Who works without ceasing in the fecundity of His Nature. The Repose of Possession unites the Soul to Him in simple Beatitude, where Blessed John Ruysbroeck looks on God in the tranquillity of His Unity. The terms here employed by him must be weighed with great care in order not to be confounded with Quietism or Pantheism.

Love's Gradatory furnace which can never again be extinguished, with the Father and the Son in the Unity of the Holy Spirit, where the Divine Persons are ravished in unity of Essence in the midst of that limitless abyss of simple Beatitude. There is neither Father nor Son, nor Holy Spirit, nor any creature, according to Nature, but one sole Essence, the very Substance of the Divine Persons. There are we all united, even before Creation, in our super-essence; there all enjoyment is consummated and perfected in essential Beatitude ; there God is in His simple Essence, without operation ; eternal Repose, darkness with out method, Being without name, super-essence of every creature,

Love's Gradatory simple and infinite Beatitude of God and the Saints.

But in fecund Nature, the Father is God Almighty, Creator and Author of Heaven and earth and all creatures. Of His own Substance He engendered the Son, His eternal Wisdom, one with Him in Nature, distinct in Person, God of Gods, by Whom were all things; and from the Father and the Son proceeds, in Unity of Nature, the Holy Spirit, the third Person, Who is infinite Love, embracing them eternally in love and possession, and we all with them, forming one life, one love, one happiness.

God is thus Unity in Nature,

Trinity in fecundity of Nature, three Persons really distinct.

And these three Persons are

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Unity according to Nature, Trinity according to the quali ties they possess in the fecund Nature of the Divinity. These three qualities constitute three Persons distinct in Name and fact, yet one in Unity of Nature and Operation, each Person having the Divine Nature entire. Each is God, all-powerful by Nature and not in virtue of the personal distinction. The three Persons are thus one Divine in divisible Nature, consequently one only God by Nature, and not three Gods after the distinction of Persons. Three, according to Names and Persons, God remains One by Nature ; Trinity in His fecund Nature according to the qualities of the Persons, but Unity by Nature.

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And this one God is for us a Father Who is in Heaven, Almighty Creator of Heaven and earth and all beings. He lives in us and governs us, Unity in Trinity, Trinity in Unity, God all - powerful, in the summit of our created essence. We must seek, find, and possess Him by means of His Grace and the aid of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the Christian Faith, with direct intention and sincere Charity; and by means of our virtuous life and His Grace we live in Him and He in us with all the Just. Thus are we all united in one with Him in love; and the Father and the Son take, embrace, and transform us in the unity of the Spirit. Then are we one in love and enjoy-

Love's Gradatory ment with the Divine Persons, and that Possession is consum mated in the Essence of the Divinity, a simple and essential Beatitude, which we enjoy with God and where is neither God nor creature, according to the mode of personality, all being with Him indistinctly simple, infinite Beatitude; lost, engulfed, poured into one unknown darkness.

This is the highest degree of life and death, of love and possession in eternal Beatitude ; and any who conceives it otherwise errs.

Pray for him who, with the Grace of God, composed and wrote these matters, and for all those who listen and read, that God may bestow Himself

Love's Gradatory upon us in everlasting Life. Amen.

Here ends the Book of the