Letter 87. To a Superior of the Visitation

Annecy, April 2, 1621.

.... As to your question, it is impossible to give any full answer — ^impossible to me, but also impossible to the Angels and Cherubim, for God is above all intelligence; and were there any intelligence equal to understand, or to say what God really is, it must, of necessity, be God itself, for it must be Infinite

God is an Infinite Spirit, the cause and motive power of all creation, which exists and lives solely in and by Him. He is Invisible, nor has earthly eye seen Him, save in the Saviour^s Humanity, WTiich He united to Divinity. God is Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Boundless, holding and containing all things, but Himself held and contained by nothing.

In short, my daughter, even as the soul inhabits the body, though invisible, so God is invisibly in the world; as the soul maintains life in the body while it abides therein, so God quickens all creation; and were God not in the world it must cease to be. As in a certain sense the soul, while it inhabits the body, yet has an independent existence, for it sees, hears, and understands things in which the body has no share, so while God is in the world He is without and beyond the world, beyond all that we can imagine; finally, God is the Sovereign Being, the principle and cause of all that is good and free from sin.

Oh, my daughter, this is a mighty abyss of thought; the Spirit Which gives life and creation. Which preserves all creation, without Which nothing can exist, while He has no need of anything, Iiaving been Infinite from all eternity; Infinitely Blessed, without beginning or end — Eternal. To Him only be all honour and glory. Amen.

I have not said this as meaning to tell you what God is, but rather to prove to you that I neither know * it nor can tell you \ that I can but confess myself to be a very nothing before Him Whom I adore devoutly, together with the Humanity of our Saviour Which He has united to Himself, so that therein we may approach Him by means of our thought and feeling in Heaven; — ^with our heart and body in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist on earth. Amen.

C566.3 XC.