It are just two groups of God’s creatures who repute this interrelationship of praise of this divine and cosmic ordinance and despise it: the master of darkness and his black angels and individual human beings who are entangled in the net of ignorance, forgetfulness and laziness. Such creatures do not praise God! It is thus in the power of praise how humanity rises even above the ranks of the highest order of the celestial hierarchies as the human soul has accomplished what Hildigard of Bingen called the plenum opus Dei or the “full work of God,”


All the choirs of the celestial hierarchies are enchanted when a human soul places her heart on the plate of the golden altar as an offering of praise and good works,


And when they see a true high priest of the New Covenant clothed in the incredible beautiful vestments of the high priest – these garments of light and love – they awake wonder among the angels, this token of true praise and good deeds,


The vestments are indeed the Royal Image of Glory appearing before the eyes of the white nation of everlasting joy from their heavenly abode and thus they come rushing forth in order to see this wonder of the Eternal birth of the Word appear once more on earth in a human heart. And just as the celestial hierarchy of the Thrones gave the bride an admonition to Who it is that seats on the Throne of grace as a King, now the cherubim give the bride a lesson in the value of humility. The disobedience of the first man resulted in his exclusion from the garden, just as this same disobedience hurled the great guardian cherub to the ground sweeping with him one third of the celestial hierarchies (see Lk 10. 18; Rv 12. 4) they say, or by the words of Meister Eckhart,


Thus the bride is borne aloft on the wings of love and can flow back to God clothed in her Royal Image of Glory as pure as she flowed out from Him at her conception as a Living ark of the New Covenant.
   The spirit feels in an authentic way how it is borne aloft by an irresistible divine power or drawn into the inmost center of its essence by the holy respiration of the Spirit of Life when the curtain is swept apart or by the “breathing of the air” as John of the Cross exposed this mystery,


In his commentary on this same stanza he said, “In His divine breathing this Spirit lifts the soul very high. He makes it able to breath in the same love as the Father reveals in the Son and the Son in the Father and is the same Holy Spirit an they breath in it in this transformation.
   There would not be a true and total transformation if the soul were not transformed in the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity in an open and manifest degree. And this kind of spiration of the Holy Spirit in the soul, by which God transforms her into himself, is so sublime, delicate, and deep a delight that a mortal tongue finds it indescribable, nor can human intellect, as such, in any way grasp it. Even what comes to pass in the communication given in this temporal transformation is unspeakable, for the soul united and transformed in God breathes out in God to God the very divine spiration that God – she being transformed – breathes out in himself. In the transformation that the soul possesses in this life, the same spiration passes from God to the soul and from the soul to God with notable frequency and blissful love, although not in the open and manifest degree proper to the next life. Such I believe was St. Paul’s meaning when he said: Since you are children of God, God sent his Spirit of his Son into your hearts, calling to the Father [Gl 4. 6]. This is true of the Blessed in the next life and of the perfect in this life according to the ways described.” [6]
  
John of the Cross used the word filomena in Spanish speaking of the nightingale and referred to a Greek myth where Filomele, the daughter of king Pandion in Athens, was transformed into a nightingale. This reference is most enlightening as in this “flight of the spirit” the soul is literary speaking transformed into a true person, a personare or resonance of heavenly praise when the eternal dream of God is fulfilled, to see all the perfection of the Royal Image of His Son shine as in the clarity of a pure jewel, in the splendor of Ruysbroeck’s “Sparkling stone,” Teresa’s diamond,


This soaring or flight of the spirit right up into God when the bride is transformed into a nightingale of praise is an experience in this Life of Glory which is not uncommon at all and we can define as normal mysticism and a token of the “felicity and sweetness of God’s love, a true spiritual song that the worldly lovers have not,” as Richard Rolle emphasized,


The beautiful butterfly which sprang out of its cocoon in the prayer of union is thus transformed into a nightingale in this night of its redemption and recites the New song continuously before the Throne of Glory with the Victorious Church in heaven, a “hymn that could be learnt only by the hundred and forty-four thousand who had been redeemed from the world” (Rv 14. 3), a hymn “as it were from a pipe shall issue and my soul shall yield angels melody, kindled within, to the most high, and offered by the mouth at the altar of God’s praise,” as Rolle put it 700 years ago. [9]

This is the strange prayer of heavenly jubilation which Teresa mentioned in the Interior Castle as a “jubilation and a strange prayer“, [10] Ruysbroeck’s smakender wijsheit (tasting wisdom) “called Jubilus, or jubilation, that is, a joy which cannot be uttered with words.” [11] It is this heavenly song which begins to sound in a human heart when this spiritual nightingale flies to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for festival” (Heb 12. 23), la soledad sonora or “the sounding solitude” of John of the Cross, O, jubilo del core or the jubilation of the heart of Jacopone da Todi,


It is this hymn which  sounds eternally in heaven when the eternal birth of the Word has taken place  in a human soul and the Spirit represents this blessed soul as His harvest in the Royal Image of Glory and awakes the angel’s excitement and admiration in the continuous enfoldment of the economy of the Trinity,


These pure and simple mirror beings wait thus continuously at the gates of the Celestial City and rejoice with boundless gladness when the vine dresser appears at one of the twelve gates carrying the  lost sheep from the fold of the heavenly Father on His shoulders in order to fill the numeral of the hagios eskatos or holy one hundred as Gregory of Nyssa put it. In God’s holy geamatria the numeral 100 is the numeral of perfection where 1 is the numeral of unity, the first nil refers to the eternity of God – totum simul – and the latter to God’s created eternity.

This flight of the nightingale on the wings of praise is a mystery which filled Teresa of Avila with amazement,


In another place she refers to God as a giant snatching up a straw to carry away the spirit.” [15] But she is in no doubt regarding what is happening, “It seems that the little bird, the spirit, escapes from the misery of this flesh and the prison of his body, and thus it can be more occupied in what the Lord gives it.” [16]
  
As I understand this mystery its cause is the natural “spannungskraft” of the prayer, an ontological fact when the Uncreated energy or glory of God flows into the inmost essence of the spirit as created being, the effects of God’s transcendence in His immanence in the human heart. Thomas Aquinas “hit the nail on the head” when he emphasized this ontological difference or “distinction” in its effects by the phrase gratia creata or “created grace” as it manifests itself in the human being as creation of its Creator in its cause, “a kind of an expansion of God’s own glory“ as Elizabeth of the Trinity stated, which whole of the human being as a psychosomatic unity gets participation in.

St. Thomas used the term gratia creata or “created grace” with extreme hesitation as A. N. Williams has pointed to. [17] The only perspective which Thomas considered using this phrase was to “preserve the creaturely status of the human subject.” He defined in clear terms the fundamental role of grace as  “a participated likeness of the divine nature  [participata similitudo divinae naturae]” [18] as gratia increata, the Holy Spirit, God ipse or Himself who manifests Himself in the human person analogous to this essential grace and what is more empathetic as gloria increata or Uncreated glory. It is “uncreated becoming” of the human object as a formation of the Royal Image of Glory by its subject who is God ipse.

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