The Book of Ceremonial Magic

In short, it is fully complete in what it understands regarding life—but this is the Divine Life. It is grace that fills the heart; it is the Holy Spirit of God that makes the spirit of human beings holy; it is life lived in God. There is no doubt that in its formulation, it was presented to the mind of Christian Mysticism as the "life which was hidden with Christ in God" This is a reference to Colossians 3:3.. This unspeakable concealment was equivalent to the open teaching of that mystery of symbolic original: "emblematic" death which lies behind all the rituals original: "pageants" of initiation. This was the state of being, and the doctrine upon which that state depends is defined by the First Letter of John original: "Johannine Epistle", which affirms:

(1) That God has given to us eternal life; (2) That this life is His Son; (3) That whoever has the Son has life; (4) That whoever is without the Son is also without life.

These points follow naturally enough from the testimony of the Gospel of John original: "the Fourth Gospel":

(1) In the words of the Divine Voice, saying: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life"; "I am the Resurrection and the Life"; "I am the Bread of Life." (2) In the words of the witness, saying: "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men."

There is no doubt, secondly, that the Divine Voice took human form original: "was incarnate" for Christian Mysticism in Jesus of Nazareth. We must reject the claims of those false witnesses who, from time to time, have pretended that the masters of the hidden life during the Christian centuries had become far too spiritually enlightened to tolerate the outward shell original: "external cortex" of their faith and creed. This point is much more important than it may appear in this context, for I am establishing a standard for judgment original: "canon of criticism".

I will take two typical examples, one of which is moderately early and the other late enough to serve as a point of comparison. The anonymous book The Cloud of Unknowing belongs, I believe, to the early part of the fifteenth century. It should be ranked among the most notable presentations of the conditions and methods of the "Union" with God that I have encountered in Christian literature. It offers an experiment in spiritual integration that seems more practical to me because it is more specific original: "express" than the great insights of Dionysius Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 5th–6th century), an influential Christian theologian and philosopher.. This integration is grounded on the identity of our essential nature with the Divine Nature and our eternal existence within it:

"What you are, you have from Him, and He is that very thing"; and again: "Yet your being has always been in Him, without any beginning, from all beginning, from all eternity, and ever shall be, without end, just as He Himself is."

On the surface of these statements, there is enough similarity for a casual and careless reader to describe them as a simple presentation of the pantheistic pantheismThe belief that God and the universe are the same thing, or that God is everything. doctrine of identity. However, they are saved from this by an important qualification: that—despite this state of eternal Divine indwelling—man had "a beginning in the substantial creation, which was at one time nothing."

This "beginning" signifies the emergence of the human spirit into a state of self-knowledge in "separateness," or some even more internal condition that we cannot accurately describe in language—at least not in language that would satisfy the higher part of our understanding. If it is conceivable that there is a possible state of distinction within Divine Consciousness by which the true self of our spirit became self-knowing, but not "separate," then it is this state which is called in The Cloud of Unknowing "a beginning in the substantial creation." It will be seen that I am implicitly setting aside the suggestion that this passage is a simple reference to the soul at physical birth. I do not think that a mystic whose greatest insights are so otherworldly original: "exotic" would offer a distinction like this as a...