The Book of Ceremonial Magic

An immeasurable silence drew the soul down—from the many splendors into the one splendor, from the crowded cities of the blessed, from the things that exist outside in the realm of transcendence into the essence that is within all things—as if the soul saw there the one God and itself as the one worshiper. But after a little while, the worshiper itself has dissolved, and from then on and forever, it possesses only the consciousness of God. This is the knowledge of self, no longer attained by a self-reflective act of consciousness, but by a direct act within the unity of the infinite consciousness. In this mode of knowledge, there is that which knows even as it is known, but such a mode exists by virtue of such a union that the self does not remain, because there is no longer any separateness.

It follows that the Divine Union—as I have sought to express it, set apart from all previous examples and the justifications of predecessors (of which I think, indeed, there are none)—is something much deeper and higher than what is understood by the Beatific Vision, which shines with all the lights of noon and sunrise and sunset at the summit of the mountain of theology. That Vision is more especially associated with St. Thomas, the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the most influential philosopher and theologian of the Catholic Church., the mighty Angel of the

Schools The "Schools" refers to Scholasticism, the medieval system of theology and philosophy taught in European universities., expounding the Transcendence to himself in the most resplendent and spiritual terms of the logical understanding. The distinction between the Beatific Vision and the ultimate goal is that the one is the state of beholding and the other is the state of being; the one is seeing the Vision and the other is becoming it. Blessed and holy are those who receive the experience of God in that clear and bright original: "dilucid" contemplation; but sanctity, blessing, and the "all in all" is that state wherein contemplation is ineffably unified—by a supreme leap of love—with its object. In that love and in that joining together, there is no longer a passage from the subject the person perceiving to the object God. But this is the Godhead.

These considerations have moved so far beyond even The Cloud of Unknowing A 14th-century English mystical text advising a "darkness" or "unknowing" of the self to reach God. that it seems almost a descent into material concerns to speak, as I had intended, of Molinos Miguel de Molinos (1628–1696), a Spanish mystic and founder of Quietism, who emphasized internal passivity. and his Spiritual Guide, which is in no sense truly comparable to the older work. It is a more ascetic treatise, and it is somewhat hindered by its asceticism; it is a less universal original: "catholic" treatise, and it suffers here and there from a narrow perspective. Yet it bears the same testimony of a full and complete intention—much too complete and full to feel like a staged performance—to maintain the veils of doctrine and to speak the high and orthodox language of the official Church. But again, it is like a moving, yet distant, echo from a world which has almost passed out of knowledge.

What is there left for the soul to say of the Holy Humanity, of the Precious Blood, of the five wounds, or of the painful death and passion of Christ? It is not that all this has been swallowed up in the glories of the resurrection, but that those who have entered "where God keeps His Throne and communicates Himself with incredible intensity"—and those who have obeyed the last precept "to be lost in God"—have entered into a new order. The ships that carried them have dropped out of sight with the tide, with the breeze, and in the sunshine.

Now, the secret of this is—not that Dionysius Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a 5th-6th century theologian whose "Mystical Theology" deeply influenced later mystics. and Ruysbroeck Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293–1381), a Flemish mystic known as "The Divine Doctor.", with all their fellow heirs and companions original: "cohæredes et sodales", had become unitarians meaning those who reject the Trinity in favor of God as a single person., but that the purpose of the Christian dispensation had been personally fulfilled in each of them. Christ had been born and lived, had taught