Sermons on the Song of Songs

“In my bed by night I sought Him Whom my soul loveth: I sought Him and found Him not.

“I will rise, and will go about the city: in the streets and the broad ways I will seek Him Whom my soul loveth: I sought Him and I found Him not.

“The watchmen who kept the city found me: Have you seen Him Whom my soul loveth?

“When I had a little passed beyond them, I found Him Whom my soul loveth: I held Him and I will not let Him go, till I bring Him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that bore me.”

What think you, my brethren? May we now return to the point whence we digressed and resume the order of our exposition? For the digression was made for the purpose of demonstrating the affinity between the Word and the soul, and this has already been rendered sufficiently plain. We might indeed go back now, as it seems to me, did I not feel conscious that there still remains some little obscurity in regard to what has been said. I desire to defraud you of nothing. I should not like to pass over anything at all which I think might profit you. How then could I dare to withhold from you any part of that which has been given me for you especially? I know a person who once, whilst delivering a discourse, with a diffident although not with a faithless soul, wished to keep back and to reserve for himself some of the thoughts wherewith the Holy Spirit was inspiring him, in order to have matter for another sermon on the same subject: but lo! he heard a voice saying to him, “so long as thou withholdest this thou shalt receive nothing else.” What would have been the case had he kept back what was given him, not from any desire to make provision for his own poverty, but through envy of his brethren’s progress in virtue? Would he not be deprived, and justly deprived, like the unprofitable servant, of even that which he seemed to have? May God continue always in the future (as He has always done in the past) to keep such a misfortune far from your servant! So may He, who is the ever-flowing Fountain of salutary wisdom, condescend henceforth to abound unto me without failing, according as I without envy have communicated to you and poured out for your benefit whatever He has so far deigned to impart to me! If I were to keep back what I owe to you, from whom could I any longer hope to receive anything? From no one surely, not even from the bounty of God.

Well, then, as I was saying, there is a difficulty arising out of my last two discourses, which I am afraid will prove a stumbling block to some of you, unless it is explained away. And indeed, if I am not mistaken, there are some here present whose minds are already perplexed concerning this very point whereof I am about to speak. With regard to that threefold likeness to the Word which I have assigned to the soul, or rather to which I have called your attention as naturally implanted in the soul, do you remember my saying also that it inheres inseparably in the soul? Yet this appears to conflict with certain passages of Holy Scripture, for example, with these words of the Psalmist, “man when he was in honour did not understand: he is compared to senseless beasts, and is become like to them”; and with these also, “They changed their glory into the likeness of a calf that eateth grass”; and with what the same Prophet says, speaking in the person of the Lord, “Thou thoughtest unjustly that I shall be like to thee”; as well as with all those other testimonies which seem to agree in declaring that man’s likeness to God has been lost by sin. How are we to solve the difficulty, my brethren? Shall we say that the three attributes, which I have mentioned as constituting the likeness in question, are not found in God at all, and that therefore we have to seek for others to serve as a foundation for that likeness? Or shall we say, that although these attributes are really possessed by God, they do not likewise belong to the soul, and thus again cannot constitute a likeness between them? Or finally that, granting the existence both in God and in the soul of simplicity, immortality and liberty, yet the soul may also be without such characteristics, and therefore they are not inseparable from her? God forbid that we should speak so! Not only do these attributes exist both in the Word and in the soul, but they also exist inseparably in either. And so there is nothing in what I have said which I have reason to repent of, for it is all grounded on absolute and unquestionable truth. With regard to what Holy Scripture says about the soul’s having been made unlike to God, I observe that it does not assert the putting off of the old similitude but only the putting on of a new dissimilitude. The soul, as is evident, has not stripped herself of her original form but simply covered it over with an adventitious. The latter has been added to, not substituted for the former. And although that which is superinduced has been able to obscure the natural form, it has not been able to destroy it completely. Hence St. Paul says, “Their foolish heart was darkened” (obscuratum), and Jeremias, “How is the gold become obscured, and the finest colour changed?” The Prophet laments that the gold has lost its brightness, yet acknowledges that it still preserves the nature of gold; he grieves to see the finest colour dimmed, but does not complain that it has been utterly destroyed. For the soul still retains her attribute of simplicity quite unimpaired in its essentials, although it is no longer visible, being overlaid with the vice of duplicity which exhibits itself in human deceit, simulation, and hypocrisy.