CHAPTER LI.

How to distinguish between a well-ordered reason and one which is all flowers and glitter.

THE Servitor replied as follows:—At the end of the first combats, which have for their object to bring flesh and blood into subjection, a man arrives at a deep sea in which many perish; and this is a use of reason which is all glitter and external show. Now what is meant by this? The following is what I mean by a use of reason which is all glitter and outward show:—When a man has been emptied interiorly of the grossness caused by sin, and his mind is freed from the forms and images which used to cling to it, and he is able to soar upwards joyously above time and space, which till then held him in bondage, so that he could not 258use his nature’s noble powers—at such a time, when he has already begun to open his soul’s eves and to taste a new and better pleasure, even that which springs from the perception of truth, the enjoyment of divine bliss, the gazing into the now of eternity which lies before him, and such like, and when, moreover, his created reason begins to recognise in itself and in all things a portion of the everlasting and uncreated reason, it comes to him as something wondrous strange, when, for the first time, he sees himself as he was before and as he is now, and he discovers that he was before like a poor, godless, needy creature, both blind and far from God; whereas now it seems to him that he is full of God, and that there is nothing which is not God; nay, more, that God and all things are absolutely one. And he catches at this view too hastily, and in an unseasonable way, and his mind runs wild, like new wine which is still fermenting and has not settled, and he seizes upon that which is present to his thoughts, or which is suggested to him, without the needful distinction, by some One, who is Himself that very One to whom alone he should give ear, and to no one else; and then he resolves according to his self-satisfied judgment to dismiss 259from his thoughts every thing created, and he regards no longer hell or heaven, devil or angel, in their own created nature; nay, he disdains also Christ’s suffering Humanity as soon as he has beheld God in it. Yet for all this, he has not gone to the bottom in his knowledge of things; namely, in regard to their distinctions, and what is permanent and what is transient in them. It fares, in fact, with such men as with the honey-bees. When the bees are fully grown, and for the first time burst forth out of the hive, they fly at random on this side and on that, they know not whither; and some go astray in their flight and are lost, while others return again in due course to the hive. The same thing happens with these persons when, with their undisciplined reason, they try to behold God as all in all, and endeavour, according to their imperfect intelligence, to let go this and that, they know not how. It is true, indeed, that every thing must be let go by him who would attain perfection; but they do not understand how this letting-go of things is to be managed, and they try to let go this and that without discretion, and to rid themselves of all things without attending to the necessary distinctions. This fault arises either from unlearned simplicity or 260unmortified craftiness. Hence many a one imagines that he has attained every thing if only he can go forth out of himself in this way, and detach himself from himself. But it is not so. For he has only slunk over the outer ditch of the still unstormed fortress, under cover of the screen behind which he skilfully and secretly conceals himself, and he cannot yet, by the orderly annihilation of his spiritual being, pass away into a veritable poverty of spirit, in which every foreign object is in a certain sense let go, and to which the possession of the everlasting and simple Godhead corresponds, now that all human activity has come to an end, as will be shown hereafter with the requisite distinctions.

Behold, this is the point where some persons, without knowing it, stick fast for many years, and can neither come in nor go out. But I will show thee, by the help of a distinction, the right road, so that thou mayest not be able to go astray.