Its more immediate
corollary was the famous axiom of "indifference," of "the coincidence
of contraries." To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through
which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him. The
differences of things, and above all, those distinctions which
schoolmen and priests, old or new, Roman or Reformed, had invented
for themselves, would be lost in the length and breadth of the
philosophic survey; nothing, in itself, either great or small; and
matter, [237] certainly, in all its various forms, not evil but
divine. Could one choose or reject this or that? If God the Spirit
had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter and
spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom and
necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be
superficial rather than substantial differences. Only, were joy and
sorrow also to be added to the list of phenomena really coincident or
indifferent, as some intellectual kinsmen of Bruno have claimed they
should?
The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away
from the election, the seeming "vocation" of his youth, yet would
remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in
some predominant qualities of temper.
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