Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 5 part 45/118

— so that we should not doubt to overthrow a certain idolatry which the weakness of human thought attempts to set up in our heart out of habituation to visible things, nor dare to believe that the Trinity — which we worship as invisible and incorporeal and unchangeable — is, as it were, three living masses, however great and most beautiful, yet bounded by the proper spaces of their own places and cohering to one another in their places by contiguous nearness: whether one of them be so placed in the middle as to separate two joined to it on either side, or whether, in the manner of a triangle, each one touch the other two, so that none be separated from any;

and that of these three persons, so great and such — although in masses very great, yet bounded above and below and on every side — there is one Godhead, some fourth thing, not such as any one of those, but common to all as though the divine power of all, and whole in all and in each, through which one Godhead the same Trinity is called one God; and that its three persons are nowhere save in the heavens, but that Godhead is nowhere absent but everywhere present;

and that through this it is rightly said that God is both in heaven and on earth, on account of that Godhead which is everywhere and common to the three, but that it is not rightly said that the Father is on earth, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, since this Trinity has its seat nowhere save in heaven. When true reason begins to shake this composition of carnal thought and this empty fabrication, straightway, with the help and illumination of him who is within — who does not will to dwell with such idols in our heart — we hasten so to shatter these things and in some manner to shake them out from our faith, that we suffer not even any dust of such phantasms to remain there.

Wherefore, unless the reason of the disputation — by which, admonished from without, we ourselves perceive within, with truth shining, that these things are false — had been preceded in our heart by faith, which would clothe us with piety, should we not hear in vain the things that are true? And through this, because faith did that which pertained to it, therefore the reason that followed found something of the things it was seeking. And so to false reason there is to be preferred not only true reason, by which we understand what we believe, but even the very faith of things not yet understood, without doubt. For it is better to believe, though not yet seen, that which is true, than to suppose that you see as true that which is false.

For faith has its own eyes, by which in some manner it sees that to be true which it does not yet see, and by which it most certainly sees that it does not yet see what it believes. Moreover, he who by true reason already understands what he only believed is assuredly to be preferred to him who still desires to understand what he believes; but if he does not even desire it, and thinks that those things which are to be understood are only to be believed, he is ignorant of what purpose faith serves; for pious faith does not will to be without hope and without charity. So then the faithful man ought to believe what he does not yet see in such a way that he both hopes for and loves the vision.

Of past visible things, which have passed away in time, there is faith alone, since they are not hoped for as still to be seen, but are believed as done and finished — such as this: that Christ died once for our sins and rose again, and dies no more, and death shall no longer have dominion over Him. But those things which are not yet, but are to come — such as the resurrection of our spiritual bodies — are believed in such a way that they are also hoped to be seen; yet they can in no way now be shown. But those things which are such that they neither pass away nor are to come, but abide eternally, are partly invisible, as justice and wisdom are, and partly visible, as is Christ's body, now immortal.

But invisible things, being understood, are beheld, and thereby they too in a certain way suited to themselves are seen; and when they are seen, they are far more certain than those things which the bodily sense attains. Yet they are called invisible because they can in no way be seen by these mortal eyes. But those things which are visible and abiding can, if they be shown, be beheld even by these mortal eyes — as the Lord showed Himself to His disciples after the resurrection, and as He appeared even after the ascension to the apostle Paul and to the deacon Stephen.

Accordingly we so believe these abiding visible things that, even if they are not shown to us, we hope that we shall one day see them; nor do we try to grasp them by reason and understanding, save so as to think of them, because they are visible, more distinctly apart from things invisible; and when in thought we imagine what they are like, we certainly know well enough that they are not truly known to us. For I also think of Antioch, which is unknown to me, but not as I think of Carthage, which is known: the former sight my thought fashions, the latter it recalls; yet in no way do I doubt, whether as to what I believed of the one on the testimony of many witnesses, or of the other by my own beholding.

But justice and wisdom and whatever is of that kind we do not imagine in one way and behold in another; rather these invisible things, being understood by a simple intention of mind and reason, we behold without any bodily forms and masses, without any lineaments and shapes of members, without any local boundaries or infinite spaces.

And that very light by which we discern all these things — in which it becomes sufficiently clear to us what we believe though unknown, what we hold as known, what form of body we recall, what we fashion in thought, what the bodily sense attains, what the mind imagines as like a body, what the understanding contemplates as certain and most unlike all bodies — this light, then, in which all these are judged, is not, like the brightness of this sun or of any bodily light, diffused round about through local spaces and illumining our mind as it were with a visible radiance; but it shines invisibly and ineffably and yet intelligibly, and it is as certain to us as it has made certain to us all the things which we behold according to it.

Since, then, there are three kinds of things which are seen: one of bodily things, such as heaven and earth and whatever in them the bodily sense perceives and touches; a second like to bodily things, such as those which we imagine as thought by the spirit, or, when recalled or presented, behold as it were as bodies — whence come also the visions which, whether in dreams or in some ecstasy of mind, are pressed upon us as it were in local dimensions; and a third distinct from both, which is neither a body nor has any likeness of a body, as is wisdom, which is beheld when understood by the mind, and in whose light all these things are truly judged — among which of these kinds must we believe that Trinity to be, which we desire to know?

Assuredly either in some one of them or in none. If in some one, then surely in that which is more excellent than the other two, as is wisdom. But if that which is His gift is in us, and is less than that supreme and unchangeable wisdom which is called the Wisdom of God — I think we ought not to conceive the Giver as inferior to His gift — but if there is in us some splendour of His, which is called our wisdom, however much of it we can grasp through a glass in a dark manner, we ought to separate it both from all bodies and from all likenesses of bodies.

But if this Trinity is to be thought to be in none of those kinds, and is so invisible that it is not even seen by the mind, then all the less ought we to hold concerning it an opinion of this sort — that we should believe it to be like bodily things or like the images of bodily things.

For it surpasses bodies not by beauty of mass or by magnitude, but by the unlikeness and disparity of its nature; and if it is distinct from comparison with the goods of our soul — such as wisdom, justice, charity, chastity, and other such things, which assuredly we do not weigh by bodily mass, nor fashion in thought as it were their bodily forms, but when we rightly understand them we behold them without any corporeality or likeness of corporeality in the light of the mind — how much more distinct is it from comparison with all bodily qualities and quantities! Yet that it is not utterly foreign to our understanding the Apostle is witness, where he says:

'For His invisible things, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, His eternal power also and Godhead.' And by this, since the same Trinity has made both body and soul, without doubt it is more excellent than both. The soul, therefore, considered — especially the human and rational and intellectual soul, which was made to His image — if it does not overcome our thoughts and understandings, but we are able by mind and understanding to apprehend that which it has as its chief part, that is, the very mind and understanding itself, it will perhaps not be absurd that, with His help, we should endeavour to lift it up toward understanding its own Creator also.

But if it fails within itself and sinks under its own weight, let it be content with pious faith, so long as it is absent from the Lord on pilgrimage, until there be wrought in man that which has been promised, by Him who is mighty — as the Apostle says — to do above what we ask and understand. Since these things are so, meanwhile I wish that you should read those things which we have already written at length pertaining to this question, and also those which we have now in hand, and which, because of the magnitude of so difficult a question, we are not yet able to unfold.

But now hold with unshaken faith that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are a Trinity and yet one God — not that there is a common Godhead of them as it were a fourth, but that the Trinity itself is ineffably inseparable; and that the Father alone begot the Son, and the Son alone was begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit both of the Father and of the Son. And whatever likeness of bodily things occurs to you when you think of these things, refuse it, deny it, spurn it, cast it away, flee it; for it is no small beginning of the thought of God, if, before we can know what He is, we begin already to know what He is not.

But love the understanding greatly, for even the Holy Scriptures themselves, which persuade to faith in great matters before the understanding of them, cannot be profitable to you unless you understand them rightly. For all heretics who receive them in authority seem to themselves to follow the Scriptures, whereas they rather follow their own errors; and by this they are heretics, not because they despise them, but because they do not understand them. But you, dearest one, pray strongly and faithfully that the Lord may give you understanding, and so that the diligence of teacher or instructor which is applied from without may be able to be fruitful — since neither he that plants is anything, nor he that waters, but God that gives the increase, to whom we say:

'Our Father, who art in heaven' — not because He is there and not here, who by incorporeal presence is wholly everywhere, but because He is said to dwell in those to whose piety He is present; and these are chiefly in heaven, where our conversation also is, if we truly answer our own mouth that we have our heart on high. For even if we understood in a carnal way that which is written, 'Heaven is my seat, and the earth is my footstool,' we ought to believe Him to be both there and here, though not wholly there — since His feet would be here — nor wholly here, since the upper parts of His body would be there. And this carnal thought would again be shaken off from us by that which is written of Him, that He hath measured heaven with a span and the earth with a fist.

For who could sit in the space of his own palm, or set his feet in so small a place as his fist grasps? Unless perhaps vain flesh proceeds so far that it is too little for it to attribute human members to the substance of God, unless it also fashion monstrous ones, where the palm should be broader than the loins and the fist than both soles joined together. But these things are said in order that, when the things we hear carnally do not agree with themselves, we may, admonished by these very things, think ineffably of things spiritual. Hence, even if we conceive the body of the Lord, which He raised from the tomb and lifted into heaven, only in human form and members, still it is not to be supposed that He so sits at the right hand of the Father that the Father should seem to sit at His left.

For in that blessedness which surpasses all human understanding there is only a right hand, and that same right hand is the very name of that blessedness. Accordingly, neither is that which He said to Mary after His resurrection, 'Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father,' to be taken so absurdly that we should suppose that He, when He had ascended, willed to be touched by women, who before He ascended offered Himself to be touched by men. But to Mary — in whom is a figure of the Church — when He said that, He willed it to be understood that He then ascended to the Father, when she knew Him to be equal to the Father, and by such faith touched Him savingly; lest, if she believed Him to be only that which had appeared in the flesh, she should not touch Him well.

Thus did the heretic Photinus touch Him, who believed Christ to be man only. And even if perhaps in these words of the Lord something more fitting and better can be understood, yet the opinion by which the substance of the Father is thought to be in heaven — according to which the Father is one person in the Trinity, while the divinity is not in heaven only but everywhere, as though the Father were one thing and His divinity another, which is common to Him with the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that the Trinity itself should be as it were in bodily places and as it were corporeal, while the one divinity of the three persons should be present everywhere and it alone, as it were incorporeal, be everywhere whole — this opinion is without doubt to be rejected.

For if it were their quality — which God forbid that in the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit quality should be one thing and substance another — yet if it could be their quality, it certainly could not be in anything more than in its own substance; but if it is a substance, and is other than they themselves are, it is another substance, which nonetheless is most falsely believed. But if perhaps you less understand what is the difference between quality and substance, this at least you more easily notice: that the divinity of the Trinity too — which is thought to be other than the Trinity itself is, and on account of which it is said that there are not three gods but one God, since it is one common to the three — either is a substance or is not a substance.

If it is a substance, and is other than the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit or the same Trinity together, then beyond doubt it is another substance; but this the truth refutes and rejects. But if this divinity is not a substance and it itself is God, because it itself is everywhere whole, not that Trinity, then God is not a substance; who that is catholic would say this? Likewise, if this divinity is not a substance, and according to it the Trinity is one God, in that this is one in three, then it ought not to have been said that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one substance, but of one divinity, which is not a substance.

But you acknowledge in the catholic faith, since this is true and is thus established, that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, therefore, though they be a Trinity, are one God, in that they are inseparably of one and the same substance, or, if this is better said, essence. For some of our people, and especially the Greeks, have said that the Trinity, which is God, is essence rather than one substance, judging or understanding that there is some difference between these two names — whereof it is not needful now to dispute — for even if we should call that divinity, which is thought to be other than the Trinity itself, not substance but essence, the same falsity would follow.

For if it is other than the Trinity itself, there will be another essence, which God forbid that a catholic should hold. It remains, therefore, that we so believe the Trinity to be of one substance that the essence itself is nothing other than the Trinity itself. However much we may advance in this life toward seeing it, it will be through a glass and in a dark manner that we shall see it. But when we have begun to have a spiritual body, which is promised in the resurrection, whether we see it with the mind, or in a marvellous manner (since the grace of the spiritual body is ineffable) see it even with the body, yet not through intervals of places, nor lesser in a part and greater in a part — since it is not a body and is everywhere whole — we shall see it according to our capacity.

But as to what you set down in your letter, that it seemed to you — or rather, what seemed to you — that nothing living according to substance was in justice, and that therefore you could not yet conceive God, that is, a living nature like to justice, which justice, as you say, 'lives not in itself but in us, or rather we live according to it, while justice of itself in no way lives' — that you may answer yourself in this matter, consider whether it can rightly be said that life itself does not live, by which it comes to pass that whatever we not falsely say to live, lives.

For I think it seems absurd to you that life should be lived by, and yet life should not live. Further, if life itself chiefly lives, by which lives everything that lives, recall, I beseech you, which souls the divine Scripture calls dead: assuredly you will find them to be the unjust, the impious, the unbelieving.

For although the bodies of the impious live through those souls — of whom it was said that the dead should bury their dead — and although there too even the wicked souls are understood not to be without some life (for otherwise the bodies could not live from them save by some life or other, of which souls can by no means be deprived, whence they are rightly called immortal), yet they are called dead not for any other reason, having lost justice, than because, although the life of souls living in whatever manner immortally is truer and greater, justice is a life as it were the life of lives; and when these are in bodies, even the bodies themselves are alive, which through themselves cannot live.

Wherefore, if souls cannot but somehow live even in themselves, because from them the bodies too live, which, forsaken by them, die, how much more is true justice to be understood to live even in itself, from which souls so live that, when this is lost, they are called dead, although with whatever small life they do not cease to live! Now that justice, which lives in itself, is beyond doubt God, and lives unchangeably. And just as, since it is life in itself, it becomes life also to us when we somehow become partakers of it, so, since it is justice in itself, it becomes justice also to us when by cleaving to it we live justly; and we are the more or the less just, the more or the less we cleave to it.

Whence it is written of the only-begotten Son of God, since He is assuredly the wisdom and justice of the Father and always is in Himself, that He was made to us of God wisdom and justice and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, 'He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.' This indeed you yourself also saw, by adding and saying: 'Unless perhaps that is asserted to be justice not of human equity, but that which God is, the only justice.' Plainly that supreme God is true justice, or that true God is supreme justice; to hunger and thirst for which is our justice in this pilgrimage, and to be afterward satisfied with which is our full justice in eternity.

Let us not therefore conceive God as like to our justice, but let us rather conceive ourselves to be the more like to God, the more just we shall have been able to be by participation of Him. If, then, we must beware lest we suppose God to be like our justice — since the light which illumines is incomparably more excellent than that which is illumined — how much the more must it be guarded against that we should believe Him to be anything inferior and in a certain way more discoloured than our justice is! But what else is justice, when it is in us, or any virtue by which one lives rightly and wisely, than the beauty of the inner man? And certainly according to this beauty rather than the body are we after the image of God, whence it is said to us:

'Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed in the newness of your mind, that ye may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.' If, then, not in mass, nor in parts distant through their places — as bodies are whether beheld or thought of — but in intelligible virtue, such as justice is, we call, or know, or will the mind to be beautiful, and according to this beauty are transformed to the image of God, then assuredly the beauty of God Himself, who formed us and reforms us to His image, is not to be suspected in any bodily mass; and He is to be believed by the minds of the just to be incomparably more beautiful the more He is incomparably more just.

These things, as far as pertains to the customary measure of letters, I have said to your dearness perhaps more copiously than you expected; but as far as pertains to the inquiry of so great a matter, it will suffice to have admonished briefly — not that it may be enough for your erudition, but that, being diligently instructed by reading and hearing other things also, you may yourself more richly refute what has been ill said — which is assuredly the better the more humbly and faithfully it is done. Letter 121. Concerning a few things which have now already come into my mind, as the bearer of the letters hastens to the ship and I hurry pressed by his very haste, I shall propose some points, that you may not write back to me without a corollary.

And if perhaps they are clear and yet seem obscure to me, let none of the prudent sons — who perhaps of our people may chance to be standing about you in the hour of this little reading — laugh at my ignorance, but rather let brotherly charity's good will favour me by instructing, that I may be made a partaker of those who see, and, from your teaching, of those who with enlightened minds consider the wondrous things of the law of the Lord. Tell me then, blessed teacher of Israel, what it is that he says in the fifteenth psalm: 'To the saints who are in His earth, He hath made wonderful all His wills among them. Their infirmities were multiplied; afterward they made haste.' Whom does he call saints — who are the saints in the earth?

Is it perhaps those Jews who, being sons of the flesh of Abraham and not sons of the promise, are excluded from the seed which was called in Isaac — therefore saints in the earth, because they are saints by carnal descent, but earthly in life and sense, who savour earthly things and grow old in the oldness of the letter by carnal observance, not being reborn into a new creature, because they did not receive Him through whom old things passed away and were made new? For thus perhaps in this psalm he calls them saints in the same way as in the Gospel he calls them righteous, where He says: 'I came not to call the righteous but sinners' — that is, those righteous who glory in the sanctity of descent and in the letter of the law, to whom it is said:

'Boast not that Abraham is your father, for God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.' Whose figure is set forth in that Pharisee, who, recounting his own righteousnesses to the Lord as though to one who knew them not, proclaimed them in the temple, not praying that he might be heard, but demanding as it were a debt of merit for works good indeed but ungrateful to God — because what righteousness had built, pride was destroying — and this not in silence but crying out with his voice, so that it might appear that he was not speaking to divine ears, since he wished to be heard also by men; and therefore he did not please God, because he pleased himself: 'For the Lord hath scattered the bones of them that please themselves. They are confounded,' he says, 'because He hath despised them' — He who despises not a humble and contrite heart.

Finally, even in that very parable of the Gospel in which the person of the Pharisee and of the publican is compared, the Lord Himself plainly shows what He receives in man, what He rejects — as it is written, that God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Therefore He testifies that the publican, from the confession of his sins, went away from the temple more justified than the Pharisee from the imputation of his own righteousnesses. But that praiser of himself deservedly departed rejected from the face of God, who, though by his very name he vaunted skill in the law, had forgotten the Lord saying in the prophet: 'Upon whom shall I rest, but upon him that is humble and quiet and trembleth at my words?'

But the other, in a contrite heart an accuser of himself, is received, and obtains pardon for his confessed sins on account of the grace of humility, while that holy Pharisee — such as the holy Jews are — carries back the burden of his sins from the boasting of his sanctity.

Of these truly is a figure those Jews of whom the Apostle says that, desiring to establish their own righteousness which is of the law, they were not subject to the righteousness of God which is of faith — which was reckoned to Abraham our father unto righteousness, not from works, because according to the omnipotence of God he believed God; with whom he is truly just who lives by faith, and is not a saint in the earth but in heaven, because he walks not according to the flesh but according to the spirit, whose conversation is in the heavens, glorying not in the cutting of the flesh but in the circumcision of the heart, which is wrought invisibly not by the letter but by the spirit — whence his praise is not of men but of God. Then as to what he joins in the same verse:

'He hath made His wills wonderful among them' — I believe he says it from this, that He first kindled for them the lamp of the law and gave the precepts of living. 'For He made known,' it says, 'His ways to Moses and to the sons of Israel His wills.' Then He wrought the very sacrament of His piety among them, God born in the flesh of a virgin among their nation and made man of their flesh, of the seed of David; then the mighty works of healings which He performed among them and before them — since these things He was not only believed but also blasphemed by them, when they said: 'This man, if He were of God, would not heal on the sabbaths,' and: 'He casteth not out demons but by Beelzebub the prince of demons.'