(3) The holy consecration, then, which we are now extolling, is, as I said, of the perfecting rank and capacity of the Hierarchical functions. Wherefore our Divine Leaders arranged the same, as being of the same rank and effect as the holy perfecting of the Synaxis, with the same figures, for the most part, and with mystical regulations and lections. And you may see in like manner the Hierarch bearing forward the sweet perfume from the more holy place into the sacred precincts beyond, and teaching, by the return to the same, that the participation in things Divine comes to all holy persons, according to fitness, and is undiminished and altogether unmoved and stands unchangeably in its identity, as beseems Divine fixity. In the same way the Psalms and readings of the Oracles nurse the imperfect to a life-bringing adoption of sons, and form a religious inclination in those who are possessed with accursed spirits, and dispel the opposing fear and effeminacy from those possessed by a spirit of unmanliness; shewing to them, according to their capacity, the highest pinnacle of the Godlike habit and power, by aid of which they will, the rather, scare away the opposing forces, and will take the lead in healing others; and, following the example of God, they will, whilst unmoved from their own proper gifts, not only be active against those opposing fears, but will themselves give activity to others; and they also impart a religious habit to those who have changed from the worse to a religious mind, so that they should not be again enslaved by evil, and purify completely those who need to become altogether pure; and they lead the holy to the Divine likenesses, and contemplations and communions belonging to themselves, and so establish those who are entirely holy, in blessed and intelligible visions, fulfilling their uniform likeness of the One, and making them one.

(12) But, inasmuch as the Divine Being is source of sacred order, within which the holy Minds regulate themselves, he, who recurs to the proper view of Nature, will see his proper self in what he was originally, and will acquire this, as the first holy gift, from his recovery to the light. Now he, who has well looked upon his own proper condition with unbiassed eyes, will depart from the gloomy recesses of ignorance, but being imperfect he will not, of his own accord, at once desire the most perfect union and participation of God, but little by little will be carried orderly and reverently through things present to things more forward, and through these to things foremost, and when perfected, to the supremely Divine summit. An illustration of this decorous and sacred order is the modesty of the proselyte, and his prudence in his own affairs in having the sponsor as leader of the way to the Hierarch. The Divine Blessedness receives the man, thus conducted, into communion with Itself, and imparts to him the proper light as a kind of sign, making him godly and sharer of the inheritance of the godly, and sacred ordering; of which things the Hierarch's seal, given to the proselyte, and the saving enrolment of the priests are a sacred symbol, registering him amongst those who are being saved, and placing in the sacred memorials, beside himself also his sponsor,--the one indeed, as a true lover of the life-giving way to truth and a companion of a godly guide, and the other, as an unerring conductor of his follower by the Divinely-taught directions.

(7) Now we have set forth in the Theological Outlines whatever Divine Causes we have found in the Oracles, of these unions, and distinctions, by treating each separately, according to our ability; by explaining some things, by the infallible Word, and unfolding them; and by conducting the religious and unpolluted mind to the bright visions of the Oracles; but others, as being full of mystery, by approaching them according to the Divine tradition, which is superior to mental energy. For all the Divine properties, even those revealed to us, are known by the participations alone; and themselves, such as they are in their own source and abode, are above mind and all essence and knowledge. For instance, if we have named the superessential Hiddenness, God, or Life, or Essence, or Light, or Word (λόγος), we have no other thought than that the powers brought to us from It are deifying, or essentiating, or life-bearing, or wisdom-imparting; but to Itself we approach during the cessation of all the intellectual energies, seeing no deification, or life, or essence whatever, such as is strictly like the Cause pre-eminently elevated above all. Again, that the Father is fontal Deity, but the Lord Jesus and the Spirit are, if one may so speak, God-planted shoots, and as it were Flowers and superessential Lights of the God-bearing Deity, we have received from the holy Oracles; but how these things are, it is neither possible to say, nor to conceive.

(4) So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the divine Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere; they may be compared to the light attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its presidency to what lies beneath it. In the Intellectual, then, they remain with soul-entire, and are immune from care and trouble; in the heavenly sphere, absorbed in the soul-entire, they are administrators with it just as kings, associated with the supreme ruler and governing with him, do not descend from their kingly stations: the souls indeed are thus far in the one place with their overlord; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the universal to become partial and self-centred; in a weary desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own. This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All; its differentiation has severed it; its vision is no longer set in the Intellectual; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being; for this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things: thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose inner depths it henceforth sinks far.

With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in body: the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the All-Soul, that earlier state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back.

It has fallen: it is at the chain: debarred from expressing itself now through its intellectual phase, it operates through sense, it is a captive; this is the burial, the encavernment, of the Soul.

But in spite of all it has, for ever, something transcendent: by a conversion towards the intellective act, it is loosed from the shackles and soars- when only it makes its memories the starting point of a new vision of essential being. Souls that take this way have place in both spheres, living of necessity the life there and the life here by turns, the upper life reigning in those able to consort more continuously with the divine Intellect, the lower dominant where character or circumstances are less favourable.

All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he distinguishes those of the second mixing-bowl, describes them as "parts," and goes on to say that, having in this way become partial, they must of necessity experience birth.

Of course, where he speaks of God sowing them, he is to be understood as when he tells of God speaking and delivering orations; what is rooted in the nature of the All is figuratively treated as coming into being by generation and creation: stage and sequence are transferred, for clarity of exposition, to things whose being and definite form are eternal.

(3) We must, then, in my opinion, pass within the All Holy Mysteries, after we have laid bare the intelligible of the first of the votive gifts, to gaze upon its Godlike beauty, and view the Hierarch, divinely going with sweet fragrance from the Divine Altar to the furthermost bounds of the holy place, and again returning to it to complete the function. For the Blessedness, supremely Divine above all, even if, through Divine goodness, It goes forth to the communion of the holy who participate in It, yet It never goes outside its essential unmoved position and steadfastness; and illuminates all the Godlike in due degree, being always self-centred, and in nowise moved from its own proper identity; so, too, the Divine initiation (sacrament) of the Synaxis, although it has a unique, and simple, and enfolded Source, is multiplied, out of love towards man, into the holy variety of the symbols, and travels through the whole range of the supremely Divine description; yet uniformly it is again collected from these, into its own proper Monady, and unifies those who are being reverently conducted towards it. In the same Godlike manner, the Divine Hierarch, if he benignly lowers to his subordinates his own unique Hierarchical science, by using the multiplicities of the holy enigmas, yet again, as absolute, and not to be held in check by smaller things, he is restored to his proper headship without diminution, and, when he has made the intellectual entry of himself to the One, he sees clearly the uniform raisons d'être of the things done, as he makes the goal of his philanthropic progress to things secondary the more Divine return to things primary.

(26) These holy Souls Works also follow them, in their Tincture of the Spirit of the Soul, in the holy Element, so that they see and know how much Good they have wrought here; and their highest Delight and Desire is still continually (in their Love) to do more Good; although without the paradisical Body (which they [shall then] first attain at the Restoration) they work nothing, but their Source, [Quality or Property,] is mere Delight and soft Welfare.

(36) We need not carry this matter further; we turn to a question already touched but demanding still some brief consideration.

Knowledge of The Good or contact with it, is the all-important: this- we read- is the grand learning, the learning we are to understand, not of looking towards it but attaining, first, some knowledge of it. We come to this learning by analogies, by abstractions, by our understanding of its subsequents, of all that is derived from The Good, by the upward steps towards it. Purification has The Good for goal; so the virtues, all right ordering, ascent within the Intellectual, settlement therein, banqueting upon the divine- by these methods one becomes, to self and to all else, at once seen and seer; identical with Being and Intellectual-Principle and the entire living all, we no longer see the Supreme as an external; we are near now, the next is That and it is close at hand, radiant above the Intellectual.

Here, we put aside all the learning; disciplined to this pitch, established in beauty, the quester holds knowledge still of the ground he rests on but, suddenly, swept beyond it all by the very crest of the wave of Intellect surging beneath, he is lifted and sees, never knowing how; the vision floods the eyes with light, but it is not a light showing some other object, the light is itself the vision. No longer is there thing seen and light to show it, no longer Intellect and object of Intellection; this is the very radiance that brought both Intellect and Intellectual object into being for the later use and allowed them to occupy the quester's mind. With This he himself becomes identical, with that radiance whose Act is to engender Intellectual-Principle, not losing in that engendering but for ever unchanged, the engendered coming to be simply because that Supreme exists. If there were no such principle above change, no derivative could rise.

(3) The most holy ministration, then, of the Mystic Rites has, as first Godlike power, the holy cleansing of the uninitiated; and as middle, the enlightening instruction of the purified; and as last, and summary of the former, the perfecting of those instructed in science of their proper instructions; and the order of the Ministers, in the first power, cleanses the uninitiated through the Mystic Rites; and in the second, conducts to light the purified; and in the last and highest of the Ministering Powers, makes perfect those who have participated in the Divine light, by the scientific completions of the illuminations contemplated. And of the Initiated, the first power is that being purified; and the middle is that being enlightened, after the cleansing, and which contemplates certain holy things; and the last and more divine than the others, is that enlightened in the perfecting science of the holy enlightenment of which it has become a contemplator. Let, then, the threefold power of the holy service of the Mystic Rites be extolled, since the Birth in God is exhibited in the Oracles as a purification and enlightening illumination, and the Rite of the Synaxis and the Muron, as a perfecting knowledge and science of the works of God, through which the unifying elevation to the Godhead and most blessed communion is reverently perfected. And now let us explain next the sacerdotal Order, which is divided into a purifying and illuminating and perfecting discipline.

(11) We will now explain, in detail, to the best of our ability, certain works of God, of which we spoke. For I am not competent to sing all, much less to know accurately, and to reveal their mysteries to others. Now whatever things have been sung and ministered by the inspired Hierarchs, agreeably to the Oracles, these we will declare, as far as attainable to us, invoking the Hierarchical inspiration to our aid. When, in the beginning, our human nature had thoughtlessly fallen from the good things of God, it received, by inheritance, the life subject to many passions, and the goal of the destructive death. For, as a natural consequence, the pernicious falling away from genuine goodness and the transgression of the sacred Law in Paradise delivered the man fretted with the life-giving yoke, to his own downward inclinations and the enticing and hostile wiles of the adversary--the contraries of the divine goods; thence it pitiably exchanged for the eternal, the mortal, and, having had its own origin in deadly generations, the goal naturally corresponded with the beginning; but having willingly fallen from the Divine and elevating life, it was carried to the contrary extremity,--the variableness of many passions, and lead astray, and turned aside from the strait way leading to the true God,--and subjected to destructive and evil-working multitudes--naturally forgot that it was worshipping, not gods, or friends, but enemies. Now when these had treated it harshly, according to their own cruelty, it fell pitiably into danger of annihilation and destruction; but the boundless Loving-kindness of the supremely Divine goodness towards man did not, in Its benevolence, withdraw from us Its spontaneous forethought, but having truly participated sinlessly in all things belonging to us, and having been made one with our lowliness in connection with the unconfused and flawless possession of Its own properties in full perfection, It bequeathed to us, as henceforth members of the same family, the communion with Itself, and proclaimed us partakers of Its own beautiful things; having, as the secret teaching holds, loosed the power of the rebellious multiplicity, which was against us; not by force, as having the upper hand, but, according to the Logion, mystically transmitted to us, "in judgment and righteousness." The things within us, then, It benevolently changed to the entire contrary. For the lightless within Our mind It filled with blessed and most Divine Light, and adorned the formless with Godlike beauties; the tabernacle of our soul It liberated from most damnable passions and destructive stains by a perfected deliverance of our being which was all but prostrate, by shewing to us a supermundane elevation, and an inspired polity in our religious assimilation to Itself, as far as is possible.

(16) Next, they throw garments, white as light, over the man initiated. For by his manly and Godlike insensibility to contrary passions, and by his persistent inclination towards the One, the unadorned is adorned, and the shapeless takes shape, being made brilliant by his luminous life. But the perfecting unction of the Muron makes the man initiated of good odour, for the holy perfecting of the Divine birth unites those who have been perfected to the supremely Divine Spirit. Now the overshadowing which makes intelligibly of a good savour, and perfect, as being most unutterable, I leave to the mental consciousness of those who are deemed worthy of the sacred and deifying participation of the Holy Spirit within their mind. At the conclusion of all, the Hierarch calls the man initiated to the most Holy Eucharist, and imparts to him the communion of the perfecting mysteries.

(2) Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals: we are not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their nature rejects. We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, of the Father.

And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings, while in part it is concerned with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle ground. It is one nature in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul in its entirety is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in the Authentic Existent; sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the mid-soul with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire.

The Soul's disaster falls upon it when it ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty- the appropriate dwelling-place of that Soul which is no part and of which we too are no part- thence to pour forth into the frame of the All whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty. There that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by plan or policy, not redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous efficacy of its contemplation of the things above it.

For the measure of its absorption in that vision is the measure of its grace and power, and what it draws from this contemplation it communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating always.

(7) Now the multitude of the possessed indeed is unholy, but it is next above the catechumens, which is lowest. Nor is that which has received a certain participation in the most holy offices, but is yet entangled by contrary qualities, whether enchantments or terrors, on a par, as I think, with the altogether uninitiated and entirely uncommunicated in the Divine initiations; but, even for them, the view and participation in the holy mysteries is contracted, and very properly. For, if it be true that the altogether godly man, the worthy partaker of the Divine mysteries, the one carried to the very summit of the Divine likeness, to the best of his powers, in complete and most perfect deifications, does not even perform the things of the flesh, beyond the most necessary requirements of nature, and then as a parergon, but will be, at the same time, a temple, and a follower, according to his ability, of the supremely Divine Spirit, in the highest deification, implanting like in like;--such an one as this would never be possessed by opposing phantoms or fears, but will laugh them to scorn, and when they approach, will cast them down and put them to flight, and will act rather than comply, and in addition to the passionless and indomitableness of his own character, will be seen also a physician to others, for such "possessions" as these; (and I think further, yea, rather, I know certainly that the most impartial discrimination of Hierarchical persons knows more than they, that such as are possessed with a most detestable possession, by departing from the Godlike life, become of one mind and one condition with destructive demons, by turning themselves from things that really are, and undying possessions, and everlasting pleasures, for the sake of the most base and impassioned folly destructive to themselves; and by desiring and pursuing the earthly variableness, and the perishable and corrupting pleasures, and the unstable comfort in things foreign to their nature, not real but seeming;) these then, first, and more properly than those, were shut out by the discriminating authority of the Deacon; for it is not permitted to them to have part in any other holy function than the teaching of the Oracles, which is likely to turn them to better things. For, if the supermundane Service of the Divine Mysteries excludes those under penitence, and those who have already attained it, not permitting anything to come near which is not completely perfect, and proclaims, and this in all sincerity, that "I am unseen and uncommunicated by those who are in any respect imperfectly weak as regards the summit of the Divine Likeness" (for that altogether most pure voice scares away even those who cannot be associated with the worthy partakers of the most Divine mysteries).; how much more, then, will the multitude of those who are under the sway of their passions be unhallowed and alien from every sight and participation in the holy mysteries. When, then, the uninitiated in the mysteries, and the imperfect, and with them the apostates from the religious life, and after them, those who through unmanliness are prone to the fears and fancies of contrary influences, as not reaching through the persistent and indomitable inclination towards godliness, the stability and activity of a Godlike condition; then, in addition to these, those who have separated indeed from the contrary life, but have not yet been cleansed from its imaginations by a godly and pure habit and love, and next, those who are not altogether uniform, and to use an expression of the Law, "entirely without spot and blemish," when these have been excluded from the divine temple and the service which is too high for them, the all-holy ministers and loving contemplators of things all-holy, gazing reverently upon the most pure rite, sing in an universal Hymn of Praise the Author and Giver of all good, from Whom the saving mystic Rites were exhibited to us, which divinely work the sacred deification of those being initiated. Now this Hymn some indeed call a Hymn of Praise, others, the symbol of worship, but others, as I think, more divinely, a Hierarchical thanksgiving, as giving a summary of the holy gifts which come to us from God. For, it seems to me the record of all the works of God related to have been done for us in song, which, after it had benevolently fixed our being and life, and moulded the Divine likeness in ourselves to beautiful archetypes, and placed us in participation of a more Divine condition and elevation; but when it beheld the dearth of Divine gifts, which came upon us by our heedlessness, is declared to have called us back to our first condition, by goods restored, and by the complete assumption of what was ours, to have made good the most perfect impartation of His own, and thus tp have given to us a participation in God and Divine things.

(3) Dense clouds do not appear, nor rarefied, Nor coruscation, nor the daughter of Thaumas, That often upon earth her region shifts; No arid vapour any farther rises Than to the top of the three steps I spake of, Whereon the Vicar of Peter has his feet. Lower down perchance it trembles less or more, But, for the wind that in the earth is hidden I know not how, up here it never trembled. It trembles here, whenever any soul Feels itself pure, so that it soars, or moves To mount aloft, and such a cry attends it. Of purity the will alone gives proof, Which, being wholly free to change its convent, Takes by surprise the soul, and helps it fly. First it wills well; but the desire permits not, Which divine justice with the self-same will There was to sin, upon the torment sets. And I, who have been lying in this pain Five hundred years and more, but just now felt A free volition for a better seat. Therefore thou heardst the earthquake, and the pious Spirits along the mountain rendering praise Unto the Lord, that soon he speed them upwards."

(3) It is necessary then, as I think, that those who are being purified should be entirely perfected, without stain, and be freed from all dissimilar confusion; that those who are being illuminated should be filled with the Divine Light, conducted to the habit and faculty of contemplation in all purity of mind; that those who are being initiated should be separated from the imperfect, and become recipients of that perfecting science of the sacred things contemplated. Further, that those who purify should impart, from their own abundance of purity, their own proper holiness; that those who illuminate, as being more luminous intelligences, whose function it is to- receive and to impart light, and who are joyfully filled with holy gladness, that these should overflow, in proportion to their own overflowing light, towards those who are worthy of enlightenment; and that those who make perfect, as being skilled in the impartation of perfection, should perfect those being perfected, through the holy instruction, in the science of the holy things contemplated. Thus each rank of the Hierarchical Order is led, in its own degree, to the Divine co-operation, by performing, through grace and God-given power, those things which are naturally and supernaturally in the Godhead, and accomplished by It superessentially, and manifested hierarchically, for the attainable imitation of the God-loving Minds.

(42) This fire-spirit, and right devil's spirit, elevated itself now also in the centre of the heart, and would rule through the animated or soulish spirit, ["Hereby is understood the spirit of the will, out of the centre, which is generated out of the genitrix, viz. out of the seven qualifying or fountain spirits, which is the image of God,"] in the whole divine power, and kindle the whole Salitter of God as a new and potent God; and so the formings and heavenly imagings should rise up in a horrible fiery quality, and suffer themselves to be imaged and framed according to this fierceness.

(12) But the reasoning faculty, being peculiar to the human soul, ought not to be impelled similarly with the irrational animals, but ought to discriminate appearances, and not to be carried away by them. The powers, then, of which we have spoken hold out beautiful sights, and honours, and adulteries, and pleasures, and such like alluring phantasies before facile spirits; as those who drive away cattle hold, out branches to them. Then, having beguiled those incapable of distinguishing the true from the false pleasure, and the fading and meretricious from the holy beauty, they lead them into slavery. And each deceit, by pressing constantly on the spirit, impresses its image on it; and the soul unwittingly carries about the image of the passion, which takes its rise from the bait and our consent.

(3) The Soul once seen to be thus precious, thus divine, you may hold the faith that by its possession you are already nearing God: in the strength of this power make upwards towards Him: at no great distance you must attain: there is not much between.

But over this divine, there is still a diviner: grasp the upward neighbour of the soul, its prior and source.

Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, an image of the Intellectual-Principle: reason uttered is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the same way soul is an utterance of the Intellectual-Principle: it is even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life sent forth by that Principle to the production of further being; it is the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also heat essentially inherent. But within the Supreme we must see energy not as an overflow but in the double aspect of integral inherence with the establishment of a new being. Sprung, in other words, from the Intellectual-Principle, Soul is intellective, but with an intellection operation by the method of reasonings: for its perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind, which may be thought of as a father watching over the development of his child born imperfect in comparison with himself.

Thus its substantial existence comes from the Intellectual-Principle; and the Reason within it becomes Act in virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and act are its own intimate possession when it looks to the Supreme Intelligence; those only are soul-acts which are of this intellective nature and are determined by its own character; all that is less noble is foreign and is accidental to the soul in the course of its peculiar task.

In two ways, then, the Intellectual-Principle enhances the divine quality of the soul, as father and as immanent presence; nothing separates them but the fact that they are not one and the same, that there is succession, that over against a recipient there stands the ideal-form received; but this recipient, Matter to the Supreme Intelligence, is also noble as being at once informed by divine intellect and uncompounded.

What the Intellectual-Principle must be is carried in the single word that Soul, itself so great, is still inferior.

(7) We have shewn, then, that the Rank of the Hierarchs is consecrating and perfecting, that of the Priests, illuminating and conducting to the light; and that of the Leitourgoi purifying and discriminating; that is to say, the Hierarchical Rank is appointed not only to perfect, but also at the same time, to enlighten and to purify, and has within itself the purifying sciences of the power of the Priests together with the illuminating. For the inferior Ranks cannot cross to the superior functions, and, besides this, it is not permitted to them to take in hand such quackery as that. Now the more Divine Orders know also, together with their own, the sacred sciences subordinate to their own perfection. Nevertheless, since the sacerdotal orderings of the well-arranged and unconfused order of the Divine operations are images of Divine operations, they were arranged in Hierarchical distinctions, shewing in themselves the illuminations marshalled into the first, and middle, and last, sacred operations and Ranks; manifesting, as I said, in themselves the well-ordered and unconfused character of the Divine operations. For since the Godhead first cleanses the minds which He may enter, then enlightens, and, when enlightened, perfects them to a Godlike perfection; naturally the Hierarchical of the Divine images divides itself into well-defined Ranks and powers, shewing clearly the supremely Divine operation firmly established, without confusion, in most hallowed and unmixed Ranks. But, since we have spoken, as attainable to us, of the sacerdotal Ranks and elections, and their powers and operations, let us now contemplate their most holy consecrations as well as we can. II. Mysterion of Sacerdotal Consecrations. The Hierarch, then, being led to the Hierarchical consecration, after he has bent both his knees before the Altar, has upon his head the God-transmitted oracles, and the Hierarchical hand, and in this manner is consecrated by the Hierarch, who ordains him by the altogether most holy invocations. And the Priest, after he has bent both his knees before the Divine Altar, has the Hierarchical right hand upon his head, and in this manner is dedicated by the Hierarch, who ordains him with hallowing invocations. And the Leitourgos, after he has bent one of two knees before the Divine Altar, has upon his head the right hand of the Hierarch who ordains him, being completed by him with the initiating invocations of the Leitourgoi. Upon each of them the cruciform seal is impressed, by the ordaining Hierarch, and, in each case, a sacred proclamation of name takes place, and a perfecting salutation, since every sacerdotal person present, and the Hierarch who ordained, salute him who has been enrolled to any of the aforenamed sacerdotal Ranks. III. Contemplation.

(5) In the lower part of active life a man is without himself and beneath himself. In the higher part of active life and the lower part of contemplative life, a man is within himself and even with himself. But in the higher part of contemplative life, a man is above himself and under his God. Above himself he is: for why, he purposeth him to win thither by grace, whither he may not come by nature. That is to say, to be knit to God in spirit, and in onehead of love and accordance of will. And right as it is impossible, to man’s understanding, for a man to come to the higher part of active life, but if he cease for a time of the lower part; so it is that a man shall not come to the higher part of contemplative life, but if he cease for a time of the lower part. And as unlawful a thing as it is, and as much as it would let a man that sat in his meditations, to have regard then to his outward bodily works, the which he had done, or else should do, although they were never so holy works in themselves: surely as unlikely a thing it is, and as much would it let a man that should work in this darkness and in this cloud of unknowing with an affectuous stirring of love to God for Himself, for to let any thought or any meditation of God’s wonderful gifts, kindness, and works in any of His creatures bodily or ghostly, rise upon him to press betwixt him and his God; although they be never so holy thoughts, nor so profound, nor so comfortable.

(19) And here we give the Reader (that loves God) to understand clearly in the great Deep, what the pure Element is, wherein our Body (before the Fall of Adam) stood, and in the new Regeneration now at present stands also therein. It is the heavenly Corporeity, which is not barely and merely a Spirit, wherein the clear Deity dwells; it is not the pure Deity itself, but [it is] generated out of the Essences of the holy Father (as he continually and eternally goes in through the eternal Gate, in the eternal Mind in himself through the recomprehended Will) into the eternal Habitation, where he generates his eternal Word.