Centuries of Meditations

II.7-11. The sun is taken as a test case. Imagine it gone, and the world becomes a dungeon; imagine it fixed in the sky, doubled or made one infinite flame, and each change is for the worse. The real sun is therefore the best of all possible works, and better for being finite. The movement ends with a couplet on the sea within its shore and the lesson that divine wisdom achieves more in bounded things than infinity could, and it adds a praise of limits that balances the book’s love of the infinite.

II.12-18. All creatures and all men serve each one. Land, air and sea are there to be enjoyed as Adam and Eve would have enjoyed them, and each person is alone in the world though millions live in it besides. Hidden common pleasures are preferred to showy ones, which are like Egyptian temples, splendid at the front and absurd within. The movement ends with the promise that one who enjoys the world as God does will come to know Him, and it adds the dignity of the ordinary.

II.19-24. Next comes the question why God is invisible. He is not seen because any visible body would either shut out all other being or fall into contempt by being always present. The world itself is the body He has taken on to show His beauty, and the Greek sages consulted by King Amasis of Egypt were right to call it the most beautiful thing. Motion shows its life better than any picture could. The movement ends by making the human understanding, not an endless wall, the true image of God’s infinity, and it adds a theology of the world as revelation.

II.25-30. God is Love. Nothing is so just as love, which gives each thing its due and to what is lovely its love, so that love and righteousness turn out to be one virtue. Rewards and punishments follow from it, and contempt of an infinite love deserves an infinite anger, yet love can forbear and forgive, hating the sin and loving the sinner. The movement ends with the wonder that the sinner may be restored to greater beauty than before, and it adds the moral seriousness that lies beneath the book’s joy.

II.31-38. The argument turns to the atonement. Sin must be severed from the sinner, and the argument asks who could stand surety, testing the conditions the divines laid down and showing that no angel could meet them. The Socinians, who denied Christ’s divinity, are named and refuted. The movement ends in a strait, since only God could make satisfaction and it seemed unfitting that God should, until love prepares its own offering, one mighty to save, and it adds the book’s one sustained piece of doctrinal argument.

II.39-47. Love is found in the Trinity itself. God by loving begot His Son, and love is at once the lover, the love begotten and the love proceeding, the Producer, the Means and the End. God is pure act and pure love, and loves Himself in loving His creatures. The movement ends with the formula that God does what He does in order to be what He is, and it adds a doctrine of the Trinity drawn from the nature of love rather than from authority alone.

II.48-55. The soul, too, is made by love. By loving the soul begets and enlarges itself, and until it loves it is idle, dark and desolate. Love’s paradoxes follow, excess as its true moderation and activity as its rest. The lover lives more in the beloved than in himself, and becomes supreme and sovereign in every soul he loves. The movement ends with the lover as the end of all things in each of his friends, and it adds the soul’s share in God’s own self-giving.

II.56-61. The soul is a trinity of its own. A loving soul has three subsistences, like the Trinity, and without love it is a sun that never sends out its beams. The end of riches is to be beloved, and giving and receiving make a single circle. The movement ends by blessing the natural wish to be great in the eyes of others, planted in us so that happiness might be enlarged by many spectators, and it adds a defence of honour rightly sought.

II.62-69. Love is the means by which the world is enjoyed. It is the root of nature and the soul of life, and other men are the chief of the soul’s treasures. A man who dotes on one beautiful creature does not love it too much but everything else too little, and a grain of sand, rightly understood, deserves an infinite love. The movement ends with the art of managing love, so as to make it proportionate and holy, and it adds the book’s teaching on ordered love.

II.70-77. The soul’s size is measured next. In each soul there are innumerable infinities, and souls are mirrors in which each sees all the others and all their objects. The understanding is present wherever it reaches, and the multitude of Revelation praises God before His throne. The movement ends by arguing that God, to satisfy His love, must give infinite treasures, and that the soul must therefore seek its riches everywhere, and it adds the soul’s presence in all places.

II.78-83. The soul becomes what it knows. As sunbeams light a looking-glass and are lit by it, the soul is transformed into what it knows. The avaricious and the generous impulse are both satisfied, since every treasure is wholly each person’s own and yet everyone’s too. The soul is an infinite sphere in a centre, and infinity is known before any limit. The movement ends with the soul as an abyss of abysses, followed by four jotted lines of verse, and it adds the doctrine of the soul’s infinite capacity.