' The Secret Union '...

"In this secret union the loving soul flows forth and escapes from itself, and is swallowed up and as it were annihilated in the abyss of eternal love, dead to itself and living in God, knowing naught and feeling naught except the love that it savors.

For it loses itself in the immense desert and darkness of Godhead.

But to lose oneself thus is find oneself....

In truth, that which puts off the human and puts on the divine is transformed into God, the same as iron in the fire takes on the appearance of the fire and is changed into it.

But the essence of the soul thus deified subsists, just as the red iron does not cease to be iron."



François Louis de Blois (1506-1566)
Insitutio Spiritualis, XII
in Henri Plard
Angelus Silesius, Pelerin chérubique_
Paris: Aubier, 1946, p. 53