Centuries of Meditations

III.61-65. A short metaphysics follows. God cannot make a God, but He can make His image, and every creature is as it seemed in infancy, the work of power wholly exerted, so that the child’s vision turns out to have been simply accurate. God is pure act, His essence one with His operations. The movement ends with Gregory of Nazianzus on goodness overflowing into the creation of the angels, and with time itself seen in God eternally, and it adds a metaphysical foundation for the child’s vision.

III.66-70. Then David appears. The author found that his thoughts, which he had supposed new, were already in Scripture, in the Fathers and above all in David, and that he had been conversing with God without knowing it. Moses, Jacob and Abraham appear in the same light, and Aristotle’s definition of felicity is read anew. A poem on David follows. The movement ends by calling a life retired to contemplate God’s works the only way to become, like David, a man after God’s own heart, and it adds the Century’s turn from autobiography to Scripture.

III.71-77. The Psalms are read in order. Psalms 8, 19, 22, 24, 28, 33, 35, 36 and 45 are quoted and glossed, each for what it shows of God’s works given to man, of His law and of His love. The movement ends with Psalm 45 and the royal Bride, whose sons are princes over all the earth and whose daughters are brides of the King of Heaven, and it adds David’s joy in creation as the pattern for the reader’s own.

III.78-84. The reading turns to true and false joy. Psalms 46 to 51 show the river of grace, expose the folly of trusting in wealth, and teach that praises and groans are the sacrifices God desires, since praise is the end for which the world was made. The movement ends with an invitation to clothe oneself with divine feelings, so that the world becomes a valley of vision, and it adds penitence as a way of seeing.

III.85-94. Memory becomes the theme. The later Psalms keep God’s deliverances and judgements in memory, bring His works into the sanctuary and call on every generation to record His ways, since what is past can still be enjoyed if it is remembered. Memory is a region of celestial light, where past things are as visible as the heavens. The movement ends with David’s soul like an infinite ocean, full of joys and overflowing through every channel, and it adds memory as a faculty of enjoyment.

III.95-100. The Century ends in recovered freedom. David’s soul regained its first freedom and saw through the walls of flesh, and he lived in the spirit with kingdoms and ages about him. The Century then asks what it is to be sons of God, sharing His glory, how the angels serve on earth without leaving the vision of God, and why only glory gives certainty. The movement ends with communion in all God’s works and the fountains of joy in the house of eternity, and it adds the goal towards which the whole life was moving.

The Fourth Century

IV.1-8. The voice changes. Having told of his entrance into felicity, the narrator will now give the principles by which the author enjoyed it, since there is an active happiness as well as a contemplative one. To be a philosopher, a Christian and a divine is a single vocation, and the resolve to be happy is stated without apology. The movement ends with the divine philosopher who lives by rule upon noble principles, and it adds the change of voice, from the I of the Third Century to he.

IV.9-17. The first principles are practical. Happiness is not to be deferred, riches are its servants, and a man who has the Philosopher’s Stone should use it. Happiness was made to be enjoyed, not boasted of, and if no one will come a man must go on alone and be happy alone, since a happiness that waits for company will never begin. The movement ends with a resolve to prize what one has, since a single crooked principle in the mind is of infinite consequence, and it adds a rule of life.

IV.18-21. Enjoyment is communication, and God is the only secure friend. The happy man must be happy among vipers, since all men have fallen, and must see the world as a madhouse and himself as its physician, tending the mad rather than resenting them. The movement ends with the royal chemist who extracts good out of evil and brings light out of darkness, and it adds the art of happiness under provocation, the hardest of the arts the book teaches.

IV.22-30. Charity is the next principle. The author called his house the house of Paradise and welcomed strangers as angels. Charity must supply the defects of the cursed ground, men are more to be loved since the Fall than before it, and every man is to be treated as mankind and as Christ, an incarnate angel. The movement ends with the narrator’s disclaimer that he reports his friend’s principles, not his practices, at his friend’s request, and it adds the social ethic of the book.

IV.31-37. Riches are redefined. Holiness and happiness are one, and his only prayer was to be a blessing to mankind. Covetousness is rooted out, as it was in the reformer Martin Luther and in Phocion, the poor Athenian statesman, and the true treasures are named. Nakedness itself is shown to be wealth, as it was for Adam in Eden. The movement ends with heaven as a state rather than a place, established by principles well practised, and it adds a doctrine of poverty rightly understood.