Within and without

Meaning

The direction “from within outwards, not from outside inwards” concerns knowledge of the divine light in the human being. Part IV: the spiritual comparison · unit 10 contrasts the inward eye and light with merely outward literal looking. Yet the same passage insists that knowledge of the heavenly Stone is found in God’s Word, the Old and New Testaments. Inwardness therefore does not authorise replacing Scripture with any private feeling or inventing one’s own truth. The English preserves the directional negation and the author’s assignment of error to the faulty eye rather than the sound Word. The relation is between reception, illumination and textual testimony, not a denial that reading and hearing matter.