Light, Life, and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages · Chapter 50How the First River Flows Into the Memory
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THE first river of grace, which God causes to flow in this coming, is a pure simplicity which shines without distinction in the spirit. This river takes its source in the fountain, in the unity of the spirit, and flows directly downwards, and penetrates all the faculties of the soul, both higher and lower, and lifts them up out of all multiplicity and all over-occupation, and makes a simplicity in a man, and gives and shows him an internal bond in the unity of his spirit. A man is thus lifted up according to his memory, and delivered from strange and irrelevant thoughts, and from inconstancy. Now Christ in this light demands a going forth, according to the mode of this light and this coming. Then the man goes forth, and observes himself that by virtue of the simple light that is spread abroad in him he is united, established, penetrated and fixed in the unity of his spirit or of his thoughts. Here the man is exalted and established in a new essence; he turns his thoughts inwards, and rests his memory on the naked truth, above all sensuous images and above all multiplicity. There the man possesses essentially and supernaturally the unity of his spirit, for his own dwelling, and as an heritage of his own for ever. He always has an inclination towards that same unity, and this unity will have an eternal and loving inclination towards the more sublime unity where the Father and the Son are united with all the saints in the bands of the Holy Spirit.