De docta ignorantia

That no mortals comprehend that judgment and the sentence of that judge is manifest. Since it is above all time and motion, it is not expedited by comparative or presumptive discussion and vocal prolation and such signs, which take delay and protraction; but as in the word all things were created, since he said and they were made, so in the same word, which is also called reason, all things are judged. Nor is there anything between sentence and execution, but this is what comes to pass in a moment, namely that both resurrection and the different apprehension of the end, glorification in the translation of the sons of God and damnation in the exclusion of the averted, are distinguished not even by an indivisible moment of time.

The intellectual nature, which is above time and not subjected to temporal corruption, enfolding within itself from its own nature incorruptible forms, e.g. mathematical in its own abstracted way, and also natural ones, which are hidden in the intellectual itself and easily transformed, which are to us leading signs of its incorruptibility, since the place of incorruptibles is incorruptible, would be moved by a natural motion unto the most abstract truth, as unto the end of its desires, and unto the ultimate most delectable object. And since such an object is all things, because God, the immortal and incorruptible intellect until it attain it, is insatiable, since it is not satiated except in the eternal object. But if the intellect, absolved from this body, in which it is subjected to opinions from time, does not touch the desired end, but rather, while it appetites, the truth, it falls into ignorance, and while with ultimate desire it desires nothing other than to apprehend the truth itself not in enigma or signs, but with certainty face to face, then, since on account of its own aversion from the truth in the hour of separation and conversion to the corruptible, it falls to the desired corruptible, to uncertainty and confusion into the tenebrous chaos itself of mere possibility, where nothing certain is in act, it is rightly said to have descended to intellectual death. For to the intellectual soul to understand is to be, and to understand the desired is to live for it. On account of this, as eternal life is for it to apprehend the ultimate desired stable eternal, so eternal death is for it to be separated from that stable desired and to be precipitated into that chaos of confusion itself, where it is tortured with perpetual fire, in its own way, not intelligible otherwise by us than as it is tortured deprived of vital aliment and health, and not of those only, but also of hope of ever attaining, so that without extinction and end it ever dies agonizing. This is the calamitous life above what can be thought; which is so life that it is death, which is so being that it is non-being, which is so understanding that it is ignorance. And since in what went before it is proved that above all motion and time and quantity and the rest subjected to time is the resurrection of men, so that the corruptible is resolved into the incorruptible, the animal into the spiritual, so that the whole man is his own intellect, which is spirit, and the true body is absorbed in spirit, so that the body is not in itself, as in its corporeal qualificative and temporal proportions, but translated into spirit, as in a contrary way to this our body, where the intellect is not seen, but the body, in which the intellect itself appears as incarcerated; but there the body is so in spirit, as here the spirit is in body, and on account of this as here the soul is burdened by the body, so there the body is lightened by spirit. Hence, as the spiritual joys of intellectual life are maximal, which also the glorified body itself participates in spirit, so the infernal tristesses of spiritual death are maximal, which also the body receives in spirit. And since our God, who apprehended is eternal life, is comprehensible above all intellect, then those eternal joys, exceeding all our intellect, are greater than can be handed down by any sign. In like manner also the punishments of the damned exist above all thinkable and describable punishments. Hence among all those musical harmonic signs of joy, gladness, glory, which, as signs known to us, are found handed down by the fathers for thinking the judgments of eternal life, there are certain most remote sensible signs distantly through the infinite from those intellectual things perceptible by no imagination. So too with infernal punishments, which are assimilated either to elemental sulfurous fire and pitch and other sensible tortures, they have no comparison to those fiery intellectual miseries, from which may Jesus Christ, our life and salvation, deign to preserve us, who is blessed for ever. Amen.