On the Trinity 15.5–15.9

But all these things that I have said, and whatever others in a like manner of human speech seem worthily said of God, befit both the whole Trinity, which is one God, and each person in the same Trinity. For who would dare say that either the one God, which is the Trinity itself, or the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit is not living, or perceives or understands nothing, or that, in that nature by which they are declared equal to one another, any of them is mortal or corruptible or changeable or bodily? Or who would deny that each there is most powerful, most just, most beautiful, best, most happy? If, then, all these things and others like them can be said both of the Trinity itself and of each in it, where or how will the Trinity appear? Let us, then, first reduce these many to some few. For what is called life in God is his very essence and nature. God, then, does not live except by the life which he himself is to himself. But this life is not such as is in a tree, where there is no understanding and no sensation; nor such as is in a beast, for the life of a beast has fivefold sensation but no understanding at all. But that life which is God perceives and understands all things, and perceives with mind, not with body, because “God is spirit.” God does not perceive through a body as animals that have bodies do, for he does not consist of soul and body; and therefore that simple nature perceives as it understands and understands as it perceives, and for it sensation is the same as understanding. Nor is it such that at some time it ceases to be or began to be, for it is immortal. And not in vain was it said of him that he “alone has immortality”; for his immortality is truly immortality, in whose nature there is no change. That is also true eternity, by which God is unchangeable, without beginning, without end, and consequently incorruptible. One and the same thing, then, is said whether God is called eternal, or immortal, or incorruptible, or unchangeable; and likewise when he is called living and understanding, which is surely wise, the same thing is said. For he did not acquire wisdom by which to be wise, but he is himself wisdom. And this life is the same as the power or might, and the same as the beauty, by which he is called powerful and beautiful. For what is more powerful and more beautiful than wisdom, which “reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly”? Goodness, too, and justice: do they differ from each other in the nature of God as they do in his works, as if they were two different qualities of God, one goodness, the other justice? Certainly not; but what is justice is goodness itself, and what is goodness is happiness itself. And God is called incorporeal or bodiless so that he may be believed or understood to be spirit, not body.

Accordingly, if we say eternal, immortal, incorruptible, unchangeable, living, wise, powerful, beautiful, just, good, happy, spirit, the last of all these that I have put seems to signify only substance, and the others qualities of this substance; but it is not so in that ineffable and simple nature. For whatever seems to be said there according to qualities is to be understood according to substance or essence. Far be it that God should be called spirit according to substance and good according to quality; both are according to substance. So it is with all the others we have mentioned, of which we have already said much in the earlier books. Of the first four, then, which we have just listed and arranged, namely eternal, immortal, incorruptible, unchangeable, let us choose one, since these four signify one thing, as I have already argued, so that our attention may not be stretched over many; and let it be rather the one placed first, namely eternal. Let us do the same with the second four, which are living, wise, powerful, beautiful. And since life of some kind is found even in a beast, which has no wisdom, while these two, wisdom and power, are so compared with each other in man that holy Scripture said, “Better is the wise man than the strong,” and since bodies too are commonly called beautiful, let the one we choose of these four be wise; although these four are not to be called unequal in God, for they are four names but one reality. Of the third and last four, although in God to be just is the same as to be good and to be happy, and to be spirit is the same as to be just and good and happy, yet because in men there can be a spirit that is not happy, and a man can be just and good but not yet happy, while he who is happy is certainly also just and good and a spirit, let us rather choose this one, which in men cannot exist without those three, namely happy.

When we say, then, “eternal, wise, happy,” are these three the Trinity which is called God? We have indeed reduced those twelve to this small number of three; but in the same way perhaps we can reduce these three also to some one of them. For if in God's nature wisdom and power can be one and the same thing, or life and wisdom, why can eternity and wisdom, or happiness and wisdom, not be one and the same thing in God's nature? And therefore, just as it made no difference whether we spoke of those twelve or of these three, when we reduced those many to this small number, so it makes no difference whether we speak of these three or of that one into whose singleness we have shown that the other two can likewise be reduced. What manner of argument, then, what force and power of understanding, what liveliness of reason, what sharpness of thought will show (to say nothing now of the others) how this one thing, that God is called wisdom, is a Trinity? For God does not receive wisdom from anyone, as we receive it from him; he is himself his own wisdom, because his wisdom is not one thing and his essence another: for him, to be is to be wise. Christ is indeed called in the holy Scriptures “the power of God and the wisdom of God”; but how this is to be understood, lest the Son seem to make the Father wise, was discussed in the seventh book; and the reasoning came to this, that the Son is wisdom from wisdom just as he is light from light, God from God. Nor could we find the Holy Spirit to be anything else than himself also wisdom, and all together one wisdom, as one God, one essence. How, then, do we understand this wisdom, which is God, to be a Trinity? I did not say, “How do we believe it?” for among the faithful this ought to raise no question; but if in some way we can see by understanding what we believe, what will that way be?

If we recall where in these books the Trinity began to appear to our understanding, the eighth book comes to mind. There, as far as we could, we tried by argument to lift the attention of the mind to understanding that most excellent and unchangeable nature which our mind is not. Yet we beheld it in such a way that it was both not far from us and above us, not in place but by its own venerable and wonderful excellence, so that it seemed to be with us by its present light. In it, however, no Trinity yet appeared to us, because we did not hold the gaze of our mind steady in that brightness to seek it; we discerned only, after a fashion, that there was no mass in which the magnitude of two or three must be believed to be more than that of one. But when we came to love, which in holy Scripture is called God, the Trinity shone out a little: the lover, what is loved, and love. But because that ineffable light beat back our gaze, and the weakness of our mind was in some way shown to be not yet able to bear it, we turned back, between what we had begun and what we had planned, to the more familiar consideration, as it were, of our own mind, according to which man was made in the image of God, in order to refresh our laboring attention; and from there, from the ninth book to the fourteenth, we lingered in the creature which we are, so that we might be able to behold the invisible things of God, understood through the things that are made. And see, now that our understanding has been exercised in lower things as much as was necessary, or perhaps more than was necessary, we wish to lift ourselves to behold the supreme Trinity which is God, and we are not able. We see most certain trinities: those that arise from outside from bodily things, or when the very things perceived from outside are thought of; or when the things that arise in the mind and do not belong to the bodily senses, such as faith, or the virtues, which are the arts of conducting life, are discerned by plain reason and held by knowledge; or when the mind itself, by which we know whatever we truly say we know, is known to itself or thinks of itself; or when it beholds something that it is not, eternal and unchangeable. Do we, then, as we see most certain trinities in all these, because they arise in us or are in us when we remember, look at, and will these things, so also see the Trinity that is God, because there too by understanding we behold, as it were, the one speaking and his Word, that is, the Father and the Son, and the love proceeding thence, common to both, namely the Holy Spirit? Or do we see these trinities that belong to our senses or mind rather than believe them, but believe rather than see that God is a Trinity? If this is so, then either we behold none of his invisible things understood through the things that are made, or, if we behold any, we do not behold the Trinity in them, and there is there something that we behold and something that, though not beheld, we must believe. But that we behold an unchangeable good which we are not, the eighth book showed; and the fourteenth reminded us of it when we spoke of the wisdom which man has from God. Why, then, do we not recognize the Trinity there? Does this wisdom, which is called God, not understand itself, not love itself? Who would say so? Or who is there who does not see that where there is no knowledge there is in no way wisdom? Or are we to think that the wisdom which is God knows other things and does not know itself, or loves other things and does not love itself? If it is foolish and impious to say or believe this, see, then, a trinity: wisdom, its knowledge of itself, and its love of itself. For so in man too we find a trinity: the mind, the knowledge by which it knows itself, and the love by which it loves itself.

But these three are in man in such a way that they are not themselves man. For man, as the ancients defined him, is a rational mortal animal. These things, then, are what excel in man; they are not themselves man. And one person, that is, each individual man, has these three in his mind. And if we define man thus, saying, “Man is a rational substance consisting of soul and body,” there is no doubt that man has a soul which is not body and a body which is not soul. And therefore those three are not man, but belong to man or are in man. Even with the body set aside, if the soul alone is thought of, the mind is something of it, like its head, or eye, or face; but these are not to be thought of as bodies. It is not, then, the soul, but what excels in the soul, that is called mind. But can we say that the Trinity is in God in such a way as to be something of God and not itself God? Therefore each individual man, who is called the image of God not according to all that belongs to his nature but according to his mind alone, is one person, and is the image of the Trinity in his mind. But that Trinity of which he is the image is as a whole nothing other than God, and as a whole nothing other than the Trinity. Nor does anything belong to God's nature that does not belong to that Trinity; and the three persons are of one essence, not as each individual man is one person.

There is also a great difference in this: whether we speak of the mind in man and its knowledge and love, or of memory, understanding, and will, we remember nothing of the mind except through memory, understand nothing except through understanding, and love nothing except through will. But in that Trinity who would dare say that the Father understands neither himself nor the Son nor the Holy Spirit except through the Son, or loves except through the Holy Spirit, but through himself only remembers himself or the Son or the Holy Spirit; and in the same way that the Son remembers neither himself nor the Father except through the Father, nor loves except through the Holy Spirit, but through himself only understands the Father, himself, and the Holy Spirit; and likewise that the Holy Spirit through the Father remembers the Father, the Son, and himself, and through the Son understands the Father, the Son, and himself, but through himself only loves himself, the Father, and the Son: as though the Father were the memory of himself, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Son the understanding of himself, of the Father, and of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit the love of himself, of the Father, and of the Son? Who would presume to suppose or affirm these things in that Trinity? For if there the Son alone understands, for himself and for the Father and for the Holy Spirit, we return to that absurdity, that the Father is not wise of himself but of the Son, and that wisdom did not beget wisdom, but the Father is said to be wise by the wisdom which he begot. For where there is no understanding there can be no wisdom; and therefore if the Father does not understand for himself, but the Son understands for the Father, the Son certainly makes the Father wise. And if for God to be is to be wise, and his essence is the same as his wisdom, it is not the Son who has his essence from the Father, which is true, but rather the Father who has it from the Son, which is utterly absurd and false. That we discussed, refuted, and rejected this absurdity in the seventh book is most certain. God the Father, then, is wise by that wisdom which he himself is to himself, and the Son is the wisdom of the Father from the wisdom which is the Father, from whom the Son was begotten. Consequently the Father also understands by that understanding which he himself is to himself, for he who did not understand would not be wise; and the Son is the understanding of the Father, begotten from the understanding which is the Father. This can fittingly be said of memory too. For how is he wise who remembers nothing, or does not remember himself? Accordingly, because the Father is wisdom and the Son is wisdom, as the Father remembers himself, so does the Son; and as the Father remembers himself and the Son by a memory not of the Son but his own, so the Son remembers himself and the Father by a memory not of the Father but his own. And where there is no love, who would say there is any wisdom? From this it follows that the Father is his own love just as he is his own understanding and memory. See, then: those three, memory, understanding, and love or will, in that supreme and unchangeable essence which is God, are not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but the Father alone. And because the Son too is wisdom begotten from wisdom, just as neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit understands for him, but he himself for himself, so neither does the Father remember for him nor the Holy Spirit love for him, but he himself for himself; for he too is his own memory, his own understanding, his own love; but that he is so he has from the Father, from whom he is born. The Holy Spirit also, because he is wisdom proceeding from wisdom, does not have the Father as his memory and the Son as his understanding and himself as his love; for he would not be wisdom if another remembered for him and another understood for him and he only loved for himself; but he himself has these three, and has them in such a way that he himself is these very things. Yet that it is so he has from that from which he proceeds.

Who among men, then, can comprehend that wisdom by which God knows all things, in such a way that neither do the things called past pass away there, nor are the things called future awaited, as if absent, until they come, but past and future together with the present are all present; nor are things thought of one by one, passing in thought from one to another, but all are at hand at once in a single view: who among men, I say, comprehends that wisdom, and the same prudence, and the same knowledge, since we do not even comprehend our own? The things present to our senses or our understanding we can behold after a fashion; the things that are absent, yet were present, we know through memory, if we have not forgotten them. Nor do we infer the past from the future, but the future from the past, and yet not with firm knowledge. For certain of our thoughts, which we foresee as about to come, as if more clearly and certainly near at hand, we carry out by the work of memory, when we are able and as far as we are able; and memory seems to belong not to what is future but to what is past. One can test this in those sayings or songs whose sequence we render from memory. For unless we foresaw in thought what follows, we would certainly not say it. And yet it is not foresight that equips us to foresee, but memory. For until all that we say or sing is finished, there is nothing that is not uttered as foreseen and looked ahead to. And yet when we do this, we are not said to sing or speak with foresight but from memory; and those who are very able at uttering many things in this way are usually praised not for their foresight but for their memory. That these things happen in our mind or by our mind we know and are most certain; but how they happen, the more attentively we try to observe, the more our speech fails, and our very attention does not hold out, so that our understanding, if not our tongue, might arrive at something clear. And do we think that with such weakness of mind we can comprehend whether the providence of God is the same as memory and understanding, God who does not look at things one by one in thinking, but embraces all that he knows in one eternal, unchangeable, and ineffable vision? In this difficulty and distress, then, one may cry out to the living God: “Your knowledge is made wonderful from me, and I shall not be able to reach it.” For from myself I understand how wonderful and incomprehensible is your knowledge by which you made me, since I cannot comprehend even myself whom you made; and yet “in my meditation a fire flames up,” so that I seek your face always.

I know that wisdom is an incorporeal substance, and that it is the light in which are seen the things that are not seen by fleshly eyes; and yet so great and so spiritual a man says, “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face.” If we ask what kind of mirror this is and what it is, this surely occurs to us, that in a mirror nothing is seen but an image. This, then, is what we have tried to do: through this image which we are, to see after a fashion him by whom we were made, as through a mirror. This is also what the same apostle signifies when he says: “But we, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord.” He said speculantes, meaning “seeing through a mirror (speculum),” not “looking out from a watchtower (specula).” In the Greek language, from which the apostolic letters were translated into Latin, this is not ambiguous. There the mirror, in which the images of things appear, is wholly different even in the sound of the word from the watchtower, from whose height we view something farther off; and it is quite clear that the apostle took “beholding the glory of the Lord” from the mirror, not from the watchtower. And when he says, “are transformed into the same image,” he certainly means the image of God, calling it “the same,” that is, this very image which we behold; because the same image is also the glory of God, as he says elsewhere: “A man ought not to veil his head, since he is the image and glory of God”; we have already treated these words in the twelfth book. He says “we are transformed,” that is, we are changed from form to form, and we pass from an obscure form to a bright form; because even the obscure one is the image of God, and if image, then surely also glory, in which we were created as men, excelling the other animals. For it was of human nature itself that it was said, “A man ought not to veil his head, since he is the image and glory of God.” When this nature, the most excellent among created things, is justified from ungodliness by its Creator, it is transferred from a deformed form to a beautiful form. For even in ungodliness itself, the more damnable the vice, the more certainly praiseworthy the nature. And for this reason he added “from glory to glory”: from the glory of creation to the glory of justification. Though “from glory to glory” can also be understood in other ways: from the glory of faith to the glory of sight; from the glory by which we are sons of God to the glory by which we shall be like him, “because we shall see him as he is.” And by adding “as by the Spirit of the Lord,” he shows that the good of so desirable a transformation is conferred on us by the grace of God.

These things have been said because the apostle says that we now see through a mirror. But as for his adding “in an enigma,” this is unknown to many who do not know the literature that contains a certain teaching about modes of speech, which the Greeks call tropes; and we too use that Greek word instead of a Latin one. For as we more commonly say schemata than “figures,” so we more commonly say tropes than “modes.” But to express in Latin the names of the individual modes or tropes, so that each answers to each, is very difficult and most unusual. Hence some of our translators, where the apostle says, “which things are an allegory,” not wishing to use the Greek word, translated by circumlocution, saying, “which things signify one thing by another.” Of this trope, that is, allegory, there are several species, among which is also what is called an enigma. The definition of the general name must embrace all the species too. And therefore, as every horse is an animal but not every animal is a horse, so every enigma is an allegory but not every allegory is an enigma. What, then, is allegory but a trope in which one thing is understood from another, like the passage to the Thessalonians: “So then let us not sleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk are drunk at night; but let us who are of the day be sober”? But this allegory is not an enigma; for, except to the very slow, its sense is at hand. An enigma, to explain briefly, is an obscure allegory, such as “The leech had three daughters,” and whatever is similar. But where the apostle named an allegory, he found it not in words but in a deed: from the two sons of Abraham, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman, which was not only said but also done, he showed that two covenants are to be understood; and before he explained it, it was obscure. Accordingly such an allegory, which is the general name, could be specifically called an enigma. But since not only those who do not know the literature from which tropes are learned ask what the apostle meant by saying that we now see in an enigma, but also those who do know it still wish to know what that enigma is in which we now see, one meaning must be found from both: from what he says, “We see now through a mirror,” and from what he adds, “in an enigma.” For it is one sentence when it is said whole: “We see now through a mirror in an enigma.” Accordingly, as it seems to me, as by the name of mirror he meant an image, so by the name of enigma he meant a likeness, but an obscure one and difficult to see into. Since, then, by the names of mirror and enigma any likenesses can be understood as signified by the apostle that are suited to understanding God in the way that is possible, still nothing is more suitable than that which is not in vain called his image. Let no one wonder, then, that even in this mode of seeing granted to this life, namely through a mirror in an enigma, we labor to see in whatever way we can. For the name of enigma would not sound here if seeing were easy. And this is a greater enigma: that we do not see what we cannot fail to see. For who does not see his own thought? And who sees his own thought, I do not mean with fleshly eyes, but with the inner sight itself? Who does not see it, and who sees it? For thought is a certain sight of the mind, whether those things are present which are seen by bodily eyes too or perceived by the other senses; or they are not present and their likenesses are discerned in thought; or none of these, but things are thought that are neither bodily nor likenesses of bodily things, such as virtues and vices, or as thought itself is thought of; or those things that are handed down through the disciplines and liberal studies; or the higher causes and reasons of all these are thought of in the unchangeable nature; or even when we think of evil, vain, and false things, either with the sense not consenting or with consent erring.