Letters 161.1–163.1

Through Jovinus, who had been sent to the Marcian estate, I asked some time ago, in a letter I sent, one question about reason and God; I have not yet been favored with a reply to it. But since we have had in our hands and read letters of your Holiness, one to the illustrious man Italicus and the other to Italica, an illustrious woman in Christ, what you set down in the letter about the fleshly conception of our Lord Jesus Christ, our God, in the virgin and his birth from her occurred to me: "If a reason is sought, it will not be wonderful; if an example is demanded, it will not be unique." And it seemed to me that something of the kind could be said of every birth, of a human being or of any animal or seed. For if its reason is sought, it will not be traced, and so it will certainly be wonderful; and if an example is demanded, since there is nothing like it among examples, it will be unique. For neither can what is formed in secret from the union of man and woman, or from any conception, ever be explained by reason; or will any reason be found for seeds born from the earth, which first rot and afterward bear fruit? For is it not wonderful too that a single worm without any parent, if something is sought for uniqueness, is found formed and complete within an apple by a virgin conception? Hence I think it was said by way of example: "I am a worm and no man." Of conceptions, then, whether of the joined or of the single, I do not know what reason can be given. It is not, then, only of the virgin's conception that no reason is given; but of no conception, I think, can a reason be fully rendered.

But an example is demanded. Behold, mares are said to bear their young from the wind, hens from ashes, ducks from water, and some other animals without male seed. Certainly, even if they do not give birth intact, they can conceive undefiled. How, then, is it stated, "If an example is demanded, it will not be unique," when so many examples come forward? It is known to everyone, too, that certain animals are born inside bodies, not only of females but also, I say, of males. Does seed cause conception there too? Behold examples, behold miracles, of which no reason is given at all; or, if it is replied to this that in a human virgin nothing of the kind ever happens, yet there are examples in other natures of things, that things born are conceived even without seeds, of which no reason at all can be given. Something of the kind can also be found in generation that brings forth offspring without violating the integrity of nature. For I often hear that the spider, without any male conception and without corruption in giving birth, wonderfully produces, according to the manner of its nature, all those threads from which it is accustomed to weave its webs, and shows that this is granted to it alone, as something unique. If this too is examined, then, is it not equally wonderful, and can no examples of such things be given? For I fear that these may have come first among examples for this very purpose, that those who had not believed that a virgin could conceive might be convinced by these examples that it is indeed wonderful, yet it will not be unique; for all God's works are wonderful, since they were made in wisdom. If this is objected to us, then, what shall we answer?

This too presses me most urgently: that the same can be said of the substance of the Lord's glorified body, that it too will be able to see the substance of God (for you said in the letter to Italica that it cannot, and that is certain); so that, when we begin to give the reason why it cannot, it may be objected to us: if what was done in that conception and birth is wonderful and unique, so that they will have neither a reason nor an example sought, since this was granted to him alone, then, just as no reason is given of his conception and generation but it is found unique in him alone, so no reason should be given of his vision, nor an example required, but to him alone it is uniquely permitted to see the substance of the divinity with the body. But it will be answered that a reason can be given, because by a bodily thing an incorporeal thing can by no means be seen; I fear lest it be answered that that conception too can be explained by reason and confirmed by examples. For either reason will fail in human beings and examples will cease, and they will affirm that the Only-begotten can see God with his body; or, if a reason has been given here, it will follow that a reason can be given by some exceedingly wise men also of that conception and the consequent birth. What, then, should be answered to such people, I ask. For I am not sowing disputes, but asking how to answer the insidious. I myself, however, believe in the virgin's conception and childbirth as I always have believed, and I have gathered by reason, in some fashion, that God cannot be seen by a body, however glorified. Yet I think we must be ready to meet people who either usually stir up dissensions from questions or keep awake with fervent zeal for learning. Pray for us. May the peace and love of Christ perfect your Holiness, mindful of us, holy lord and venerably most blessed brother.

You ask many things of a man much occupied, and, what is more serious, you think that things should be dashed off in dictation which are so difficult that, even when dictated or written with great care, they can scarcely be brought within the understanding even of people like yourself. Add to this that not only you and people like you must be considered as going to read what we have written, but also those endowed with a less sharp and less trained mind, who are nevertheless carried with such eagerness, whether friendly or hostile, to get to know our writings that they cannot be kept from them at all. When you think of this, you see how much care there must be in writing, especially about matters so great that even great minds labor over them. But if, when I have something in hand, it must be passed over and postponed in order to answer rather the things that come in and are asked, what will happen if, while these are being answered, still others come in? Do you want these too to be dropped and those taken up, so that whatever arises later always comes first, and I manage to finish only those things during the writing of which nothing new arrives to be asked? That this should happen to me is most difficult; but I do not think you would like that. I ought not, then, to have interrupted other things when your questions arrived, just as I ought not to interrupt yours if others rushed in again. And yet I am not allowed to keep this justice; for see, in order to write back to you these very things by which to remind you of this, I have interrupted what I was doing and turned my mind to this letter from another great undertaking.

It was easy, I think, to send you back this not unreasonable excuse set down in a letter; but to answer your inquiries is not so easy, and I think that in the very works which now hold me most intent there will be some places, if the Lord favors, where I shall settle the very things you ask. Already, too, of the questions you have just sent, many are solved in the books I have not yet published, whether on the Trinity or on Genesis. And if you reread those things which have long been known to you, or, unless I am mistaken, were known (for perhaps you have forgotten what I wrote while you were conferring and conversing with me, whether on the greatness of the soul or on free will), you will find there the means to resolve your doubts even without my help, applying some labor of thought, of course, so that consequences may be joined to the things that were brought there to clear and certain understanding. You have also, in the book on religion, things which, if you recalled and examined them, would never let it seem to you that God is compelled by reason to exist, or that by reasoning it is brought about that God must exist; since even in the reckoning of numbers, which we certainly use daily, if we say, "Seven and three must be ten," we speak inconsiderately; for they do not have to be ten, but are ten. Of what things it may rightly be said that they "must be," whether they already exist (so as to remain) or so that they may come to exist, we have discussed sufficiently, I think, in those books I have mentioned. For a man must be wise: if he is, so as to remain so; if he is not yet, so as to become so; but God does not have to be wise; he is wise.

As for what I wrote to you very recently about visions, which you say was subtly expressed but has entangled you in greater questions, go over it again and again and think about it more carefully; let your consideration not pass through it but dwell in it, and from there you may perhaps somehow conjecture how the soul is present or absent. For in those visions in sleep it lingers when it is absent from the sense and from the presence of seeing which, when awake, it provides to the eyes. If a greater force increases this absence of the soul from the eyes, that is, as it were from the lamps of the body, which happens when we sleep, so that the whole of what it is is withdrawn from there, that is death. Just as, then, from the sense of seeing to the visions of dreams it departs with no body (unless perhaps we think that the things seen in dreams are bodily and that we ourselves are carried this way and that among them with some body, which I think no longer seems so to you), so, if it is wholly withdrawn and absent, which happens in death, it is not to be thought that it carries some body with it out of the body. For if it did, then surely, even when we sleep and it withdraws from the eyes, insofar as it leaves them, it would carry away bodily eyes with it, however subtler, which it does not do. Yet it does carry with it certain eyes most like them, but not bodily, by which it sees in dreams visions most like bodies, but themselves not bodily either.

Moreover, if someone grants that even the visions of dreams, which appear like bodies, are nothing but bodily, he may seem to himself to be saying something. Nor is this slowness of mind easily refuted; for it belongs to many people, even not moderately acute, because they pay too little attention to how much power there is in the images of bodies which are formed in the spirit and are not bodies at all. But when they are compelled to look at them, if they rightly notice and discover that they are not bodily but most like bodies, they are nevertheless not at once able to give an account of them: by what causes and in what way they come about, and by what nature they subsist or in what subject they are; whether they are formed in the mind as letters are formed in ink on parchment, where there are two substances, namely parchment and ink; or as a seal in wax or any shape whose subject is the wax, the shape being in the subject; or whether these things are formed in our spirit in both ways, sometimes in one way and sometimes in another.

For what perplexes us is not only that we think of things that are absent from the bodily senses and are found in our memory, or which we ourselves, as we please, make, arrange, enlarge, diminish, and vary in position, condition, motion, and innumerable qualities and forms, of which kind are perhaps also those by which we are deluded while sleeping, when we are not admonished by God, except that the former we do willingly, the latter we undergo apart from our choice; not only do these things perplex us, which someone might not unreasonably think are produced in the mind from the mind itself (though by more hidden causes by which it comes about that this rather than that comes before the mind's view); but also what the prophet says: "And the angel who spoke in me said to me" (for it is not to be believed that voices came from outside to the bodily ears of the prophet, when he says "who spoke in me," not "to me"): whether these were voices produced in the spirit similar to bodily ones, such as we produce when we silently run through many things from memory, often even singing, yet uttered by the angel, which the prophet in wonderful ways perceived were suggested to him by another than himself; and what is written in the gospel: "Behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying": for how did he appear, whether an angelic body to closed eyes (for to Abraham awake they so appeared that he could even feel them by touch when he washed their feet), or a spirit to the spirit of the sleeper in some form like a body, just as we ourselves seem to ourselves, when dreaming, to move through places in such a figure, quite otherwise than the members lying in our beds?

These things perplex us and are wonderful precisely because they have a reason too hidden to be seen or given by one human being to another. For these are the causes of wonder: either the reason of some thing is hidden, or the thing itself is not usual, because it is either unique or rare. From the first cause, then, the hidden reason, I said in the letter which you mention having read, when I was answering those who deny that it should be believed that a virgin bore Christ and remained a virgin: "If a reason is sought, it will not be wonderful"; for this was said not because the thing lacks a reason, but because the reason is hidden from those for whom God willed it to be wonderful. But from the other cause of wonder, which arises because something unusual occurs, it is written of the Lord that he marveled at the centurion's faith; for no reason of anything could be hidden from him, but the marveling was put as praise of a man whose equal had not appeared among the Hebrew people. Hence the marveling itself is sufficiently explained when the Lord says: "Amen I say to you, I have not found such faith in Israel."

As for what I added in the same letter, "If an example is demanded, it will not be unique," you vainly think you have found examples in the little worm that is born in an apple and the spider that brings forth the thread of its weaving from a body as it were intact. For some things are said cleverly for the sake of a certain likeness, some more remotely and some more fittingly; but Christ alone was born of a virgin; from which you now understand, I think, why I said this is without example. All things, then, that God works, whether usual or unusual, have their causes and reasons, right and blameless. But when these causes and reasons are hidden, we wonder at what is done; when they are plain, we say that the things are done consequently or fittingly, and that they are not to be wondered at, because what reason required to be done has been done; or, if we wonder, we wonder not by being astonished at the unexpected but by praising the excellent, the kind of wonder with which that centurion was praised. Nor is the statement, "If a reason is sought, it will not be wonderful," to be blamed on the ground that there is another kind of wonder, even when the reason is plain to the one who wonders; for neither is the statement "God tempts no one" blamed on the ground that there is another kind of temptation, on account of which it was likewise rightly said: "The Lord your God tests you."

Nor should anyone think that it can therefore rightly be said that the Father is seen by the Son with bodily eyes, and not rather as the Son by the Father, on the ground that those who think so, when they fail to give a reason, can themselves also say: "If a reason is sought, it will not be wonderful"; for that was said not because there is no reason but because it is hidden. But whoever undertakes to refute those who hold this opinion ought to show that for this, not a miracle but an error, there is no reason at all. For just as there is no reason by which the nature of God could die, or be corrupted, or sin, and when we say that God cannot do this we do not detract from his power but praise his eternity and truth, so, when we say that he cannot be seen with bodily eyes, the reason is not hidden but plain to those who understand well; by it it is clear that God is not a body, and that nothing can be seen by bodily eyes except what is seen with some interval between, and that this can only be a body, a substance which is less in a part than in the whole; which it ought to be wicked to believe of God even for those who are not yet able to understand this.

The reason for the various changes of speed and slowness in the motions of bodies and of bodily qualities is hidden; hence comes the whole forest of visible miracles. Yet is it therefore hidden that bodies exist, that we have a body, that there is no tiny body, however small, which does not occupy a space of place in its measure, and is not whole everywhere in what it occupies, but is less in a part than in the whole? Since these things are not hidden, to them must be joined the consequences (which it would be too long to do now) by which it may be shown that it is not that the reason is hidden, but that there is no reason at all by which it should be believed, or could be understood, that God, who is whole everywhere and is not diffused through spaces of places by bodily mass, in which he would have to consist of greater and lesser parts, can be seen with bodily eyes. On this I would say more if I had undertaken it in this letter, into whose length I have advanced without noticing, almost forgetting my occupations, so that perhaps, contrary to what I thought, I have satisfied your attention, since you can think out many fitting things when reminded with few; but not that of those into whose hands these things may usefully come if they are discussed more carefully and fully. For people labor in learning when they cannot understand brief things and do not love to read long ones; and those labor likewise in teaching who vainly press a few things on the slow and many on the lazy. Send also a copy of that letter which went astray with us and could not be found. May you be well and flourish in the Lord, remembering us.

Some time ago I sent your Holiness one question about reason and God, I think through Jovinus, who serves the handmaids of God; another about the Savior's body, which is thought to see the substance of God. I now put a third: the rational soul which the Savior assumed with the body, does it come under one of those opinions which are proposed when the origin of the soul is inquired into, if any of them can be supported by truth there; or, although it is rational, will it not belong to those kinds which are spoken of concerning the human soul? I ask a fourth: who are those spirits of whom Peter in his letter gives testimony concerning the Lord, saying: "Put to death in the flesh, made alive in the spirit, in which he also preached to those spirits who were in prison," and the rest; implying that they were in hell, and that Christ, descending, preached the gospel to all and freed all from darkness and punishments by grace, so that from the time of the Lord's resurrection judgment is awaited, hell having been emptied? I desire to know what your Holiness thinks about this.