Our Lady has a prominent place in the mystery of the Incarnation. The time when the Church celebrates this mystery, that is, Christmastide—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany—is a sort of prolonged feast of Mary. No wonder that her place in Christmas carols and especially in Polish ones is outstanding.

The Blessed Trinity: The significance of our Lady can only be fully understood if it is viewed from the most fundamental truth, namely, the Blessed Trinity ‘from whom all things proceed”.

In the Polish carols there is full awareness of this fact:

I believe in one God in heaven
The Father who created this world for himself
And in Jesus his Son,
In all things equal to the Father
Our Lord.
He desiring to save our human race
From the high heaven descended on earth
And was conceived of the Holy Ghost
Is born among beasts
From the maiden Mary…

This carol, which seems to be the Creed specially arranged for Christmastide, gives the proper setting for the whole problem. It introduces the right order. But it does not exhaust all the ways in which this truth is presented.

Truth must be placed in the centre of your life as something beautiful.

Yet you must not sit in judgment on anyone who hates her, but have compassion on such a one.

Look at yourself too, why—since you desire to come to her—do you refuse to receive her when she reproves you for your vices? For see how many things Truth reveals.…

Without beauty or comeliness, and nailed to a cross, Truth must be adored.

The nobler and more powerful a created being is, so much the more freely must he subject himself to Truth. Indeed it is because he is subject to her that a man is powerful and noble.

The unstable things of time vex and weary you: why then do you not flee from them to other know that beyond is to Truth?

Yet you must bitter and contrary things, Truth is to us most bitter and contrary, because separate adversi- ties fight against one or more worldly pleasures; but Truth attacks them all at one and the same time…

You cannot hate anyone without committing sin. For the work of holy men is to desire the welfare of sinners.

The most important truth for our interior life is an ever more exact knowledge of the God who dwells in us. His goodness, his providence, his justice, and all his attributes seem to grow beneath our gaze, when we consider them in the light of the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption; now we know these only by revelation.

But we receive the greatest light from our knowledge of the Blessed Trinity. There is but one true God. This God who is in us entirely is the God one in nature and three in Persons. This assertion confounds us. This living Trinity, which we are accustomed to represent in I know not what distant heaven where he unveils his splendour for the angels and saints, this adorable Trinity is in us, it lives in us. In me. at this moment, as at all the other instants of my life, God the Father in knowing himself begets his Son and gives to him his whole divine nature so as to make him his equal, consubstantial with himself.

I invite you, dear brethren, on this Feast day to pay a visit with me in all reverence to the shrine of St Thomas's soul. The key of entry lies ready to hand; it is in his written works.

Perfect lucidity, unruffled serenity, transparent candour, austere simplicity, complete self-effacement—these are the qualities which emerge eloquent from the pages of St Thomas, and tell us that here is a man utterly devoted to truth. Ego voz, said the Precursor John the Baptist. May we not say this also of the Angelic Doctor—that he is a voice, a disembodied voice which, if it were possible, would tell us nothing of the speaker, and bear witness only to the truth? Is there a single word in all the volumes that he wrote which betrays anything of the pride of personal opinion, anything of the sense of triumph over opponents, anything of the glow of self-satisfaction in discovery and achievement? There is an impersonal quality in the writings of St Thomas—not a coldness, no, that would be to mistake him entirely—an impersonal quality which comes not of self-impoverishment, but of self-abandonment, of self bendenment to truth.

On St David’s Day Welshmen are apt to make speeches. For once in the year the virtue of speaking Welsh is generally conceded. One of the objections to giving much time to Welsh in the schools used to be its lack of ‘commercial value’: Welsh, it was argued reasonably enough, brought no dividends. John Capgrave, in his Legenda Nova Historiæ Angliæ, tells a story which suggests that Welsh may be very useful indeed:

‘A certain Welshman coming from the diocese of Menevia was captured by the Saracens, and was put in chains together with a German. The Welshman cried aloud day and night in his own language to St David, “Dewi, wared!”, which is to say, “David, come to my aid!” And, wonderful to relate, he suddenly found himself restored to his own country. Making this known to Gervase, at that time the bishop of those parts, he was taken into the dwelling of the latter on account of so notable a miracle. But his companion the German, considered to be privy to what had happened, was submitted to beatings and placed in even stricter custody.

Though perhaps most people who are at all familiar with them appreciate the writings of St Augustine, comparatively few feel any attraction for those of St Jerome who, unlike St Augustine, has left us no sermons or devotional treatises, his work consisting for the most part of technical Commentaries and minute disquisitions on difficult passages of Holy Scripture.

Both Saints have left us a vast correspondence. But how their letters differ! If we except Augustine’s earlier ones, his philosophical discussions during his first days as a Christian, the remainder are for the most part the outpourings of a shepherd of souls; the same is true of his sermons which lend themselves to quotation at every turn and wherein the devout can always find food for their souls. St Jerome, too, has left us many spiritual letters. But we get the impression that such letters were not his life’s work; he writes them almost under protest as though feeling that they are stealing time from the real work to which God has called him, that of translating and commenting on the Bible.

The discussion consequent on the challenging article of Père Nicolas in the July and August Life of the Spirit has centred round two main issues. The first is concerned with the general view raised by Fr Scott-James (September) who suggested that the French Dominican took for granted the subjective emphasis of the post-tridentine spirituality. The true basis, he implied, should be centered on objective beatitude, the end which gives meaning to the whole action of religious life. The love of God in himself must be set before the young religious, rather than the perfection of the religious himself. This is the goal if he is to avoid strain and break-down.

Against Fr James's thesis it has been argued that St Thomas himself, sufficiently pre-Tridentine and objective to satisfy most, constantly regards the religious life as a school of perfection; and as perfection in his theology stands for charity, the love of God itself, ‘the school of perfection’ carries no subjective stigma with it. It is a slur too on the Council of Trent and the theologians who have since considered religious life.

Records and diaries of individuals, especially of such as this creature’ Margery, reveal both highlights and shadows, black chaos on either side of the mountains of youth. In this long-forgotten book of Margery Kempe the slightest innuendo, the merest agitation, the unbalanced phrase, the flicker of surprise each in its own allusive manner betrays some chosen subject for human enquiry and scholarship above all others and sweeter in the discovery than the gums and vineyards of Engaddi. Like Christina Mirabilis—the surprising character who lived two centuries before Margery—this burgher’s wife has been called the ‘Astounding’. The Philosopher’s happy phrase admiratio est delectationis causa may then be our invitation to share the medieval experiences of one whose delights were found in the homesteads, and on the pilgrim paths of the crumbling later Middle Ages when the youthful bloom of the thirteenth century was wellnigh a memory and the modern decay already growing.

Before proceeding to a detailed discussion of the English spiritual authors, some explanation is required of the order and design of the treatment. For we do not intend to follow a chronological order and indeed we have included the Ancren Riwle which is outside our period, as also William Langland who scarcely deserves the name of mystic though he was a great poet and the mystic is often, if not always, a poet too.

Our plan is to climb up the scale, the ladder of perfection, from the lowest rungs to the topmost, where, like Jacob’s ladder, they disappear into heaven. The theme of this essay has been adopted from Père Garrigou-Lagrange’s now celebrated thesis that the highest flights of infused contemplation and mystical union are on the royal road to holiness open to all. A scheme therefore of tEe normal growth of the generous soul cooperating to the full with the graces offered her, will begin with the first conversion and end with the heights of union described in different terminology by St John of the Cross, Mother Julian, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing.

The mystic state, surrounded with so much splendour in the lives of the saints—is it really nothing but the ‘normal’ development of the virtues and the gifts? Why, then, do the mystics, a St Bernard, a St Catherine of Siena, a St John of the Cross, seem so different from ourselves? How can the mystical life, which in them abounds in visions, locutions, stigmata and other marvellous experiences, rest on the same principles as our own, devoid of all these things? It would seem to be this consideration that has led many modern theologians and spiritual writers to assume that the mystic state is ‘extraordinary’ in the strict sense, i.e. that it is not in the normal way of sanctity. In fact attempts have been made to divide the spiritual life into two completely separate compartments: the one ascetical and ‘normal’, with an ascetical purgative, illuminative and unitive way, the other mystic and ‘extraordinary’, with the same three ways. There is no necessity to repeat the arguments against this view so convincingly stated by theologians like Saudreau and Garrigou-Lagrange.

This title of Christ is obviously true in that God is infinite and since Christ is God, therefore Christ is our all. But there is a sense in which it is difficult to reach a happy mean; and it is this sense that we shall now consider.

No one would deny that we love things other than God: creatures, friends, goods, art, power, our own selves. None of these are God, yet there is not wrong-doing in loving them. We need not go into the ordinary theology of the due measure of love to creatures. All our loves are conditioned by circumstance; none are absolute. God alone has absolute dominion over us.

The problem becomes more subtle when we are seeking perfection. Should God be all, and all else nothing? Are we being traitors to our bond by loving God and creatures? Have we not given up all to follow Christ; and to return to creatures, is that not apostasy? The doctrine of the “Nada,” St John of the Cross's word for utter self-abnegation, is very logical from one point of view: the less we give to creatures, the more we give to God; but is this what God asks?

[The translation is taken from the Middle High German text from the authoritative edition of Josef Quint. Few of the sermons have as yet appeared in this edition so that the choice was limited; moreover these sermons are for the most part reconstructed somewhat disjointedly from verbatim notes. In reading this sermon therefore one should be careful to remember that here only a portion of the mystic’s thought is given, and that it stands out of its context. But in view of the immense importance of Meister Ekkhart in the subsequent development of mystical theology almost any words of his have a tremendous significance. At risk of misrepresenting the author this excerpt is published as being of considerable interest to those who study the development of mysticism.]

’In hoc apparuit caritas Dei in nobis (1 John iv. 9).

What has revealed the love of God, where we are concerned, is that he has sent his only-begotten Son into the world, so that we might have life through him’ (that is with him and in him); for all who do not live in the Son, are surely on the wrong road’.