And yet those experiences of God’s presence as, apparently, in a special manner within us, and without us, and above us, also lead, by means of another connection of ideas, to another, to a positive result. For those experiences can lead us to dwell, not upon the difference of the “places,” but upon the apparent fact that He is in a “place” of some sort, in space somewhere, the exact point of which is still to find; and, by thus bringing home to the mind this underlying paradox of the whole position, they can help to make the soul shrink away from this false clarity, and to fall back upon the deep, dim, true view of God as existing, for our apprehension, in certain states of soul alone, states which have all along been symbolized for us by these different “places” and “positions.” And thus what before was a paradox and mystery qua space, because at the same time within and without, and because not found by the soul “within” unless through getting “without” itself, becomes now a paradox and mystery qua state, because the soul at one and the same time attains to its own happiness and loses it, indeed attains happiness only through deliberately sacrificing it. And we thus come to the great central secret of all life and love, revealed to us in its fulness in the divine paradox of our Lord’s life and teaching.
God, then, first seems to be in a place, indeed to be a place. “I see all good to be in one only place, that is God.” “The spirit can find no place except God, for its repose.”[261]
If God be in a place, we cannot well conceive of Him as other than outside of and above the soul, which itself, even God being in a place, will be in a place also. “God has created the soul pure and full, with a certain God-ward instinct, which brings happiness in its train (istinto beatifico).” And “the nearer the soul approaches” (is joined, si accosta) “to God, the more does the instinct attain to its perfection.” Here the instinct within pushes the soul “onwards, outwards, upwards.” And the nearer the soul gets to God in front, outside and above of it, the happier it becomes: because, the more it satisfies this its instinct, the less it suffers from the distance from God, and the more does it enjoy His proximity.[262]
This approach is next conceived of as increasingly conveying a knowledge to the soul of God’s desire for union with it; but such an approach can only be effected by means of much fight against and through the intervening ranks of the common enemies of the two friends; and, as we have already seen, chief amongst these enemies is the soul’s false self. “The nearer man approaches to (si accosta) God, the more he knows that God desires to unite Himself with us.” “Being determined to approach God, I am constrained to be the enemy of His enemies.”[263]
And then, that “place” in which God was pictured as being, is found to be a state, a disposition of the soul. Now as long as the dominant tendency was to think God with clearness, and hence to picture Him as in space, that same tendency would, naturally enough, represent this place He was in as outside and above the soul. For if He is in space, He is pictured as extended, and hence as stretching further than, and outside of, the soul, which itself also is conceived as spacially extended; and if He is in a particular part of space, that part can only, for a geocentric apprehension of the world, be thought of as the upper part of space. But in proportion as the picture of physical extension and position gives way to its prompting cause, and the latter is expressed, as far as possible, unpictorially and less clearly, but more simply as what it is, viz. a spiritual intention and disposition, she is still driven indeed, in order to retain some clearness of speech, to continue to speak as of a place and of a spacial movement, but she has now no longer three categories but only one, viz. within and inwards. For a physical quantity can be and move in different places and directions in space; but a spiritual quality can only be experienced within the substance of the spirit. “God created the soul pure and full, with a certain beatific instinct of Himself” (i.e. of His actual presence). And hence, “in proportion as it (again) approaches to the conditions of its original creation, this beatific instinct ever increasingly discovers itself and grows stronger and stronger.”[264]
And God being thus not without, nor indeed in space at all, she can love Him everywhere: indeed the what she is now constitutes the where she is; in a camp she can love God as dearly as in a convent, and heaven itself is already within her soul, so that only a change in the soul’s dispositions could constitute hell for that soul, even in hell itself. “O Love,” she exclaims, after the scene with the Friar, who had attempted to prove to her that his state of life rendered him more free and apt to love God, “who then shall impede me from loving Thee? Even if I were in the midst of a camp of soldiers, I could not be impeded from loving Thee.” She had, during the interview, explained her meaning: “If I believed that your religious habit would give me but one additional glimpse” (spark, scintilla) “of love, I would without doubt take it from you by force, were I not allowed to have it otherwise. That you may be meriting more than myself, I readily concede, I am not seeking after that; let those things be yours. But that I cannot love Him as much as you can do, you will never succeed in making me even understand.” “I stood so occupied in seeing the work of Love (within my soul), that if it had thrown me with soul and body into hell, hell itself would have appeared to me to be nothing but love and consolation.” And, on another occasion, she says to her disciples: “If, of that which this heart of mine is feeling, one drop were to fall into hell, hell itself would become all life eternal”; and she accepts with jubilation this interpretation of her words, on the part of one of them (no doubt Vernazza): “Hell exists in every place where there is rebellion against Love, God; but Life Eternal, in every place where there is union with that same Love, God.”[265]
And she now cannot but pray to possess all this love,—love being now pictured as a food, as a light, or as water, bringing life to the soul. “O tender Love, if I thought that but one glimpse of Thee were to be wanting to me, truly and indeed I could not live.” “Love, I want Thee, the whole of Thee.” “Never can love grow quiet, until it has arrived at its ultimate perfection.” And, in gaining all God, she gains all other things besides: “O my God, all mine, everything is mine; because all that belongs to God seems all to belong to me.”[266]
But if she loves all God, she can, on the other hand, love only Him: how, then, is she to manage to love her neighbour? “Thou commandest me to love my neighbour,” she complains to her Love, “and yet I cannot love anything but Thee, nor can I admit anything else and mix it up with Thee. How, then, shall I act?” And she received the interior answer: “He who loves me, loves all that I love.”[267]
But soon her love, as generous as it is strong, becomes uneasy as to its usual consequences,—the consolations, purely spiritual or predominantly psychical or even more or less physical, which come in its train. And even though she is made to understand that at least the first are necessarily bound up with love, in exact proportion to its generosity, she is determined, to the last, to love for love itself, and not for love’s consequences, battling thus to keep her spirituality free from the slightest, subtlest self-seeking. “This soul said to its Love: ‘Can it really be, O tender Love, that Thou art destined never to be loved without consolation or the hope of some advantage in heaven or on earth” accruing to Thy lover?’” “And she received the answer, that such an union could not exist without a great peace and contentment of the soul.” And yet she continues to affirm: “Conscience, in its purity, cannot bear anything but God alone; of all the rest, it cannot suffer the least trifle.”[268]