So greatly has the truth, sought out through diverse cares, with Christ favouring, instructed your mind, that there is absolutely nothing which may lie hidden from you concerning the definition of the catholic law. Hence, in the matters which your Highness's piety deigns to inquire, now descending from the citadel of full instruction, it is not the questioning of one who is ignorant, but of one who confers. So much so that the sentence of the Gospel which you have touched upon in your letter has in it no ambiguity of faith, but rather in the sum of its exposition seeks out the Jewish objections. Thus, then, says the Gospel reading of which you made mention below:
But you say, if a man shall say to his father or mother: 'Corban'—that is, in the Hebrew tongue, that gift especially which is offered in the observance of a devout oblation—'it shall have profited you' (that is, his father or mother); and you no longer 'let him do' (non missum facitis) anything for his father or mother (Mark VII, 11). But I think you begin with this phrase, since indeed you have made mention of it more particularly in your letter—what and whence the saying 'non missum facitis' comes from. Which is nothing else at all than 'you do not release' (non dimittitis). From the proper sense of which phrase, in churches and palaces or praetoria, the 'dismissal' (missa) is proclaimed to take place, when the people are released from the observance.
For you will find this kind of noun even in secular authors—unless disused reading, through your occupations, has escaped your memory. Therefore 'non missum facitis,' that is, 'you do not release him to do anything for his father or mother,' by whom it is commanded that the elder be honoured with parental respect, not by words only, but by deeds and services. 'And many such like things,' he says, 'you do,' by preferring your tradition to the heavenly institutions. But these things, said to the scribes and Pharisees alone—who, flattering themselves upon the loftiness of the law, demanded as it were the due prices of doctrine—I find to have had no place in the discourse which is a treatise concerning faith. But 'Racha' is a Hebrew name; in Latin it sounds 'empty' or 'void':
which the Greek, as more fittingly for us, expresses in one word. But we are forbidden to say this reproach to a brother—that is, to one set under one God the Father and one Church the mother in one faith: who is unworthily assailed with the reproach of emptiness, being not himself void of salvation. But reserving these things for the exercise of collation rather than of elucidating the faith, you would rather turn over that which you wrote was objected by your priests. Therefore, as you were discussing whether the Holy Spirit—who in the secret of baptism claims the unity of an undivided naming—is to be believed creator or creature; since, if He is creator, He cannot be separated from the Divinity; if a creature, He cannot be united to God:
for lack of an answer, the question was asked from the opposing side, under the slippery footing of a certain question, whether our spirit should be judged created or eternal—as though the example of the heavenly Scripture were interposed, in which it was said: 'God breathed a spirit into the soul of life' (Wisdom XV, 11). First, then, conjecture what men will do in exposition who lie about a testimony; or how they will fill their inventions with the swellings of falsehood, who alter the sayings of divine authority. For what they said—'God breathed a spirit into the soul of life'—was fabricated by their artful fraud. Which passage, if your piety should decree that it be offered to be reviewed, will thus find it written:
'And God made man of the slime of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life: and man became a living soul' (Gen. II, 7). Weigh now how great is the distance in the wording. They said, 'He breathed into the soul,' whereas it is written: 'He breathed into the face.' For the incorporeal can inspire (inspirare), but only the corporeal can breathe upon (insufflare). Now God is not read to have breathed upon (insufflasse) a spirit into a soul as though already living, which He might have added; but into matter not yet living, as the ancient codices have it, He infused the breath of life by which it might be exalted into a living soul. Therefore, if by this inspiration the soul of man was made, and the human soul is nothing other than spirit, it remains that the spirit is not without a beginning.
Which, being rebuked by you, they perceived must forthwith be objected against them, unless, by the carnal fabrication of the 'breathing upon,' they should falsely represent that spirit itself as bestowed upon the soul rather than upon the body. For since they seek, with lethal intent, not how they may know the things that are written, but how the things they preach may be thought to be written, what do we suppose they do to the unlearned, who do not dread the reverence due to your instruction? Let us treat, if you graciously permit, how great an absurdity is put forward: that if the Spirit of God is not a creature, and thus neither in man can the spirit be called a creature, which God is reported to have breathed upon. It has often been defined that there is absolutely nothing besides two, that is, creator and creature.
Furthermore, the Spirit of God must be received as maker, but the spirit of man as a thing made. Hence the spirit which lives in us is understood as a power of God, not as his nature. For if the substance of the Holy Spirit be believed to be mingled into us for our quickening, may the hearing of God — and yours — be appeasable, for such a blasphemy, that it may even be refuted, can scarcely be repeated without sin. For if the human spirit, being forestalled, sins carnally, the Holy Spirit must be said to sin in it; or surely we are asking that remission be granted to the Holy Spirit, when we make supplication on behalf of the spirits of the dead. Was it too little, I ask, hitherto, that one was called the Holy Spirit and another the Paraclete —
— unless there be added, as a last necessity of refuge, this multiplicity: that, being moreover subjected to the contagion of sins, there be reckoned as many divine spirits as there are men? And of course priestly authority skilfully decreed that in one manner the spirit of the divinity is generally poured into all. Does the Holy Spirit perhaps insinuate himself into a Jew, a heretic, and a pagan just as into a Catholic, or is he perhaps thrust unwilling by the command of the Father or the Son into the members of the guilty? But what do we make of the fact that the Spirit breathes where he wills? If he sanctifies unworthy bodies apart from his own choice, he refutes the prophet who says that wisdom did not dwell in a body subject to sins (Wis. 1:4).
Wherefore the human spirit is begun by creation, but the divine is granted by kindness. For those were not without the spirit of their own life upon whom, in the Acts of the Apostles, a hand is laid that they may receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:17; 19:6). But if they wish the Holy Spirit himself also, on the ground that he enters the minds of the created faithful, to become a creature — drawing, that is, upon the aforesaid conclusion, they who, peremptorily saying nothing decisive, say: if the spirit is God's, it is not a creature, and thus neither in man can it be called a creature — what then will they judge concerning the divinity of the Father or the Son, which they will neither be able to feign as created, and, terrified by the reading, will not deny to dwell in the bodies of the saints, the Apostle testifying to the faithful:
For the temple of God is holy, which you are (1 Cor. 3:17)? But since incomparably more things could be suggested in the presence of your glory, this at the end of my discourse — you who not only grant but enjoin freedom — relying upon God and upon you, and upon the divine promise and your own, I beseech: that those be no longer called your priests who contradict the Holy Spirit; that henceforth those be not permitted to teach before you who refuse to learn; that, in order somehow to defer your perfection, those persist not in blaspheming what you hear, who will not think what you believe; that, by tolerating the cunning of the unskilled and the follies of the crafty, you be not suspended from your profession, when you have long since been held fast in your confession.
To you the holy apostle Paul cries out through his epistle: What peace has the faithful with the unfaithful? What fellowship has light with darkness? Wherefore, he says, go out from their midst, and be separated (2 Cor. 6:15, 17); that is, lest the nearness of the left-hand party stain with the sins of others those — who are to have no further communion with them — whom the truth of the right hand has won.