On the Trinity, Book 11

No one doubts that, the inner person has understanding, just as the outer person has bodily senses. Let us try, then, if we can, to discover some trace, however slight, in this outer person of the Trinity, although the outer person is not God’s image in the same way. The apostle clearly states that the inner person is renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of Him who created him. Elsewhere he also says, “Although our outer person is wasting away, our inner person is renewed day by day.” Let us therefore look, as far as we can, within what is wasting away for some image of the Trinity, perhaps less distinct, but easier to recognize. The outer person is not called a person without reason, but because there is in it some likeness of the inner person. Because of the way our condition has made us mortal and embodied, we deal with visible things more easily and familiarly than things grasped by understanding; visible things are external, while things grasped by understanding are internal; we perceive the former through bodily senses and understand the latter through the mind; and we ourselves, that is, our minds, are not things perceived by the senses, that is, bodies, but things grasped by understanding, since we are life. Yet, as I said, we have become so accustomed to physical things, and our attention turns outward toward them with such an extraordinary tendency, that when it is withdrawn from the uncertainty of physical things, to settle on spiritual reality with much more certain and stable knowledge, it runs back to those physical things and seeks rest in the very place that caused its weakness. We must adapt our argument to this weakness. Whenever we try to distinguish inward spiritual realities more clearly and explain them more easily, we must use examples drawn from similar external, physical things. The outer person, equipped with bodily senses, perceives physical things. As we can readily observe, bodily sensation has five forms: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Investigating what we are looking for through all five senses would be laborious and unnecessary. What one of them shows us also applies to the others. Let us therefore rely chiefly on what the eyes show us. This bodily sense far surpasses the others; while differing from mental sight in kind, it comes closest to it.

When we see a physical object, we can readily identify and distinguish three things: first, the object we see, whether a stone, a flame, or anything else that can be seen by the eyes. This could certainly have existed before it was seen. Next comes vision or the act of seeing, which did not exist before we perceived the object presented to our sense of sight. Third comes what keeps our eyes focused on the object for as long as we see it, namely, the attention of the mind. These three are clearly distinct and also differ in nature. First, the visible body has a very different nature from the eyes’ power of perception, which produces vision when directed at it. What is vision itself but perception shaped by what is perceived? There is no vision if the visible object is removed, and no vision of this kind could exist without a body that could be seen. Yet the body that shapes the eyes’ perception when that body is seen, and the form it impresses on that perception, which is called vision, are certainly not the same substance. The body we see is by nature separable from sight. But the power of perception already existed in the living being before it saw what it was capable of seeing when it encountered a visible object. Vision arises in this perception from the visible body when the body is brought into contact with it and seen. This power of perception, then, or vision, that is, perception shaped from outside, belongs to the nature of the living being, which is entirely different from the body we perceive by sight. This body shapes perception into vision rather than bringing the power of perception itself into existence. Unless the power of perception existed in us before an object was presented to our senses, we would be no different from blind people whenever we saw nothing, whether in darkness, or when our eyes are closed. We differ from them because we have, even when we are not seeing, the capacity for sight, which is called the sense of sight; they lack this capacity, and that lack is precisely why they are called blind. The mind’s attention keeps perception fixed on what we see and connects the two. It differs in nature from the visible object, since one is mind and the other is body, and also differs from perception and vision themselves, because attention is an act of the mind alone. The eyes’ perception is called a bodily sense simply because the eyes are parts of the body; although a lifeless body cannot perceive, the soul united with the body perceives through a physical instrument, and that instrument is called a sense. When someone becomes blind, bodily injury cuts off and extinguishes this sense; the mind nevertheless remains the same. Since the eyes are lost, its attention no longer has a bodily sense that it can connect through sight to an external body to fix its gaze on that body and see it. Yet its very effort shows that losing the bodily sense has neither destroyed nor diminished attention itself. The desire [appetitus] to see remains intact, whether or not it can be fulfilled. These three, then, the body seen, vision itself, and the mental attention connecting the two, are clearly distinguishable both by their individual properties and by their different natures. In this case the power of sensation does not come from the body seen, but from the perceiving living being’s body, with which the soul is united in its own wonderful way. Yet the body seen produces vision, that is, it shapes perception itself; there is now not only the power of perception, which can remain intact even in darkness if the eyes are healthy, but also perception actually given a form, which is called vision. Vision therefore comes from a visible thing, but not from that alone, since someone who sees must also be present. Vision therefore arises from a visible thing together with someone who sees; the person who sees supplies the sense of sight and the intention to look and gaze at the object. Yet the shaping of perception called vision is impressed on it only by the body seen, that is, by a visible thing. Once that object is removed, the form no longer remains in perception as it did while the visible object was present; the power of perception itself remains, as it existed before anything was perceived. Similarly, an impression in water remains as long as the body making it remains in the water; once the body is removed, its impression disappears, although the water remains, just as it existed before taking that body’s form. We therefore cannot say that a visible thing produces the power of perception; it does produce a form, something like its own likeness, which arises in perception when we see something. Yet through this same sense we cannot distinguish the visible body’s form from the form it produces in the observer’s perception; the two are joined so closely that there is no opportunity to tell them apart. Reason tells us, however, that we could not perceive it at all unless a likeness of the visible body were formed in our perception. When a ring is pressed into wax, an image is produced even though we can only distinguish it after the ring is removed. Once the wax and ring are separated, the impression remains visible. This readily convinces us that the wax already held a form impressed by the ring before the two were separated. If the ring were pressed into a liquid, no image would be visible after it was removed. Reason should nevertheless recognize that the liquid contained, before the ring was removed, a form of the ring produced by the ring itself. This must be distinguished from the form in the ring, which produced the impression that disappears when the ring is removed, while the form in the ring that produced it remains. We therefore should not suppose that the eyes’ [sensuous] perception lacks an image of the body for as long as that body is seen, [merely] because the image disappears when the body is removed. This makes it very difficult to convince people who understand more slowly that seeing a visible thing forms an image of it in our perception, and that this very form is vision. Those who notice what I am about to mention will not have this difficulty in our investigation. Often, after looking at a light for a while and then closing our eyes, we seem to see bright colors shifting in various ways and growing dimmer until they disappear. We must understand these as traces of the form produced in perception while the bright body was visible, changing as they gradually fade away. If we have been looking at window lattices, these too often appear in those colors; this clearly shows that the visible object impresses these effects on our perception. The form therefore also existed while we were looking, when it was clearer and more distinct. It was then closely joined to the appearance of the thing being perceived, so that it could not be distinguished from it at all; and this was vision itself. Even when the eyes’ diverging rays make a lamp’s small flame seem to double, two visual impressions arise, although only one thing is seen. The rays coming from each eye are affected separately, because they cannot converge evenly on that physical object to form a single view from both. If we close one eye, we therefore see one flame as it really is, rather than two. Why closing the left eye makes the right-hand appearance disappear, and closing the right eye makes the left-hand appearance disappear, would take a long investigation and discussion that our present subject does not need. For our present purpose, it is enough to consider that unless an image exactly like what we see were produced in our perception, the flame’s appearance would not double to match the number of eyes; this happens when a way of looking separates the converging rays. Certainly one eye cannot see a single thing as double, however you pull it downward, press it, or twist it, if the other eye is closed. Since this is so, let us remember how these three things, although different in nature, are combined into a kind of unity: the visible body’s form, its image impressed on perception, which is vision, or perception given a form, and the mind’s will, which directs perception toward the perceptible thing and keeps vision fixed on it. The first of these, that is, the visible thing itself, does not belong to the living being’s nature, except when we see our own body. The second belongs to that nature in that it is produced in the body and through the body in the soul; for it is produced in perception, which exists neither without the body nor without the soul. The third belongs to the soul alone, because it is the will. Although these three have such different substances, they form such a unity that the first two can hardly be distinguished, even when reason judges between them: the visible body’s form and its image produced in perception, that is, vision. The will joins these two so powerfully that it directs perception toward the object to receive its form and keeps it fixed on that object once formed. If it is strong enough to be called love, desire, or lust, it also powerfully affects the living being’s entire body; where sluggish, harder matter does not resist, it changes the body to a similar shape and color. We can see a chameleon’s little body readily change according to the colors it sees. In other animals, whose thicker flesh does not readily change, the offspring generally reveal what caught their mothers’ imagination, whatever they saw with particular delight. The more delicate and, so to speak, easily shaped the earliest seeds of life are, the more effectively and readily they follow the direction of the mother’s soul and the mental image formed in it by the body she has eagerly looked at. Many examples could be given, but one from the most trustworthy books is enough: what Jacob did to make sheep and goats bear offspring of various colors, placing rods of varied colors in front of them in the water troughs for them to look at as they drank, at the time they conceived.

The rational soul lives badly, however, when it lives according to a trinity of the outer person; that is, when it directs toward things that shape bodily perception from outside a shameful desire to cling to them rather than a praiseworthy will to put them to some useful purpose. Even when the form of a body perceived through the senses is removed, its likeness remains in the memory, and the will can direct the mind’s eye toward it again, to receive its form from within, just as perception was shaped from outside when the perceptible body was presented. A trinity thus arises from memory, inner vision, and the will that joins the two. When these three are brought together into one, the resulting combination is called thought. These three no longer differ in substance. The perceptible body, entirely distinct from the living being’s nature, is not present, nor is bodily perception being shaped to produce vision, nor does the will perform its function of directing perception, to receive its form, toward the perceptible body and keeping it there once formed. Instead of the body’s appearance perceived from outside, memory now retains the appearance the soul absorbed through bodily perception; instead of the external vision that arose when the perceptible body shaped perception, a similar vision arises within, as the mind’s eye receives its form from what memory holds, while the physical things being thought about are absent. Previously the will directed perception toward the physical thing presented from outside to receive its form and joined it to that thing once formed. Now it turns the remembering mind’s vision toward memory, so that mental sight receives its form from what memory has retained, producing a similar vision in thought. Reason distinguished the visible appearance that shaped bodily perception from its likeness produced in that perception when it was shaped into vision (otherwise they were joined so closely that they seemed completely identical). Likewise, the mental image arising when the mind thinks about a body it has seen consists of the body’s likeness retained in memory, together with the likeness formed from it in the remembering mind’s eye; yet it appears so completely single that only reason’s judgment can reveal these two components. Reason enables us to understand that what remains in memory, even when we think about something else, is different from what arises when we remember, that is, return to memory and find that same appearance there. If it were no longer there, we would say that we had forgotten it so completely that we could not recall it at all. If the remembering person’s mental eye did not receive its form from what was in memory, the thinker’s vision could not arise. The two are joined, that is, what memory retains and what is drawn from it to shape the remembering person’s mental eye; their close likeness makes them seem to be one. When the thinker’s mental eye turns away and stops looking at what was perceived in memory, nothing of the form impressed on that eye remains there, and it takes its form from whatever it turns to next, producing another thought. What it has left in memory nevertheless remains, and the mental eye can turn to it again when we remember it, receive its form from it, and become one with what gives it form.

The will moves the mental eye back and forth, here and there, to receive a form, and unites it with its object once formed. If the will concentrates entirely on the inner mental image, turning the mind’s eye completely away from the physical things surrounding the senses and from the bodily senses themselves, and directing it entirely toward the image perceived within, memory presents such an exact likeness of the body’s appearance that even reason itself cannot distinguish whether the body is seen externally or merely imagined internally. Sometimes people become so fascinated or frightened by thinking intensely about visible things that they suddenly speak accordingly, as though they were actually taking part in those actions or undergoing those experiences. I remember someone telling me that he often pictured in his mind a woman’s body so distinctly and seemingly solidly that he was aroused as though it were real. The soul has such power over its own body and such influence in altering the condition of its [corporeal] clothing, according to how the person clothed is affected, since that person clings to the clothing. The same kind of effect misleads us through images in our sleep. It makes a great difference, however, whether the bodily senses are dulled into inactivity, as in sleep, or disrupted internally, as in mental illness, or diverted in some other way, as in diviners or prophets. Through one of these causes, the mind’s attention is necessarily drawn to the images that occur to it, whether from memory or through some other hidden power through spiritual interminglings involving a substance that is likewise spiritual. This differs from what sometimes happens to healthy, waking people, when the will, occupied with thought, turns away from the senses and shapes the mind’s eye with various images of perceptible things, as though those perceptible things were actually being perceived. These images are impressed on us not only when desire directs the will toward such things, but also when, to avoid them and protect itself from them, the mind is drawn to consider the very things it wants to escape. Thus fear as well as desire causes the bodily eye to receive a form from perceptible things themselves and the mental eye (acies) from images of those perceptible things. The stronger the fear or desire, the more distinctly the eye receives its form, whether someone [sensuously] perceives a physically nearby thing through the body or thinks through a body’s image held in memory. The relationship between a physically present body and bodily perception corresponds to the relationship between a body’s likeness in memory and the mind’s eye; the relationship between an observer’s vision and the bodily appearance shaping perception corresponds to the relationship between a thinker’s vision and the body’s image stored in memory, which shapes the mind’s eye. The will directs its attention toward a visible body and the vision to be joined with it to produce a certain unity of three things, although their natures differ. In the same way, the will’s attention joins the body’s image in memory with the thinker’s vision, that is, the form the mind’s eye takes when it returns to memory, so that here too three things form a certain unity, now sharing one and the same substance rather than differing in nature; the whole process is internal, and the whole is one mind.

When [both] a body’s form and appearance have perished, the will cannot direct perception back to it; likewise, when forgetfulness erases an image held in memory, the will cannot turn the mind’s eye back toward it through recollection, to receive its form from it. The mind has great power to imagine not only things forgotten, but also things it has never seen or experienced, by enlarging, reducing, changing, or combining as it wishes things that it still remembers. It often imagines things either as it knows they are not or as it does not know them to be. We must then take care that it neither speaks falsely to deceive others nor holds an opinion that deceives itself. If it avoids these two evils, imaginary pictures do not harm it, just as perceptible things experienced or remembered do not harm it if it neither pursues them passionately when pleasant nor shamefully avoids them when unpleasant. When the will abandons better things and greedily wallows in these, it becomes unclean; thinking about them in this way is harmful when they are present, and even more harmful when they are absent. Anyone living according to the outer person’s trinity therefore lives badly and in a degraded way; the purpose of using perceptible, physical things has also produced this trinity, which imagines internally but imagines external things. No one could even use those things well unless memory retained images of things perceived through the senses. Unless the will chiefly remains focused on higher, inward things, and unless that will, directed toward either external bodies or their internal images, directs whatever it receives from them toward a better and truer life, and rests in the goal that guides its judgment about what actions should be done, what are we doing except what the apostle forbids when he says, “Do not conform to this world”? This trinity is therefore not an image of God, since it is produced in the mind itself through bodily perception from the lowest creation, physical creation, which is below the mind. Yet it is not entirely unlike God: what does not have some likeness of God according to its kind and capacity, since God made everything very good, simply because He Himself is supremely good? To the extent that anything that exists is good, it clearly still has some likeness of the supreme good, however distant; if this likeness is natural, it is certainly right and well ordered; if it is faulty, it is certainly degraded and distorted. Even in sinning, souls strive for nothing but some kind of likeness of God, in a proud, distorted, and, so to speak, enslaved freedom. Thus our first parents could not have been persuaded to sin without being told, “You shall be as gods.” Certainly not every created thing that resembles God in some way should also be called His image; only that which has nothing above it except God Himself is His image. Only that is modeled on Him in every respect, with no other nature standing between it and Him. For vision, then, that is, the form produced in the observer’s perception, the physical object’s form that produces it is something like a parent. It is not a true parent, however, and vision is not a true offspring; vision is not born entirely from it, because something else must be brought to the physical object to receive its form, namely, the observer’s power of perception. Loving this therefore alienates us. The will joining the two, the apparent parent and apparent child, is more spiritual than either of them. The physical object perceived is not spiritual at all. Vision arising in perception, however, has something spiritual mixed with it, since it cannot arise without the soul. It is not wholly spiritual, however; what receives the form is a bodily sense. The will joining the two is therefore admittedly more spiritual, as I have said; and so begins to suggest (insinuare) something like the person of the Spirit in the Trinity. Yet the will belongs more to perception receiving a form than to the physical object giving it that form. A living being’s perception and will belong to its soul, rather than to the stone or other physical object seen. The will therefore does not proceed from that physical object as from a parent; nor does it proceed from the other thing resembling an offspring, namely, the vision and form in perception. The will existed before vision arose, directing perception toward the physical object to receive its form and see it; it was not yet satisfied, however. How could something not yet seen satisfy it? Satisfaction is a will resting content. We therefore cannot call the will an apparent offspring of vision, since it existed before vision, or its apparent parent, since vision was not formed and drawn from the will, but from the physical object seen.

Perhaps we can rightly call vision the will’s goal and resting place, but only in relation to this one object [namely, the bodily thing that is visible]. Seeing something it currently wants does not mean that the will wants nothing else. We are therefore not discussing a person’s entire will, whose goal is nothing other than happiness; we mean the will temporarily directed toward this one object, whose goal in seeing is simply vision, whether or not it directs what is seen toward something else. If it does not direct vision toward any further purpose, but only wants to see this thing, there can be no question that vision is the will’s goal; this is obvious. If it directs vision toward some further purpose, it certainly wants something else, and is no longer merely a will to see; or if it does want to see, it wants to see something beyond this particular thing. For example, someone might want to see a scar to learn from it that there had been a wound, or want to see a window to see the passers-by through it. All these and similar acts of will have their own specific [proximate] goals, which are directed toward the will’s [final] goal of wanting to live happily and reach a life that serves no further purpose, but is enough in itself for whoever loves it. The will to see therefore has vision as its goal; the will to see a particular thing has seeing that thing as its goal. The will to see a scar therefore seeks its own goal, seeing the scar, and goes no further; the will to establish that there had been a wound is a distinct will, although dependent on the first, and its goal is to establish that there had been a wound. Likewise, the will to see a window has seeing the window as its goal; another, further will depends on it, wanting to see the passers-by through the window, whose goal is seeing the passers-by. All the individual acts of will linked together are right if the one toward which they are all directed is good; if that one is bad, they are all bad. The connected series of right acts of will is therefore like a road consisting of steps, leading upward to happiness; the tangle of corrupt and distorted acts of will is a bond binding whoever acts this way to be thrown into outer darkness. Blessed therefore are those whose actions and character sing the song of the steps [degrees]; and woe to those who drag sin along like a long rope. Speaking of the will’s resting place, which we call its goal, while it still serves some further purpose, is like saying that a foot rests during walking when it is set down where the next foot can then be placed in the direction the person is walking. Something may satisfy the will so that it rests there with a certain delight, yet still not be the person’s ultimate goal; this too serves a further purpose, and should be regarded not as a citizen’s homeland, but as a traveler’s place for refreshment or even a stop along the way.

Now consider another trinity, more inward than the one found in perceptible things and the senses, but still derived from them; here it is no longer bodily perception that receives its form from a body, but the mind’s eye that receives its form from memory, because the appearance of the body we perceived externally has remained in memory itself. We call this appearance in memory something like the parent of what is produced in the thinker’s imagination. It existed in memory before we thought about it, just as the body existed in its location before we [sensuously] perceived it, allowing vision to arise. When it is thought about, the form retained in memory is copied into the thinker’s mental eye (acie), and recollection forms the appearance that is something like an offspring of what memory retains. Neither is one a true parent nor the other a true offspring. The mind’s eye, which receives a form from memory when we think about something through recollection, does not come from the appearance we remember seeing; we certainly could not remember those things without having seen them; yet the mind’s eye that receives its form through recollection already existed before we saw the body we remember; how much more, then, before we committed it to memory? Although the form produced in the remembering person’s mental eye comes from the form in memory, the mental eye itself does not come from that form but existed before it. It follows that if one is not a true parent, the other is not a true offspring. Yet both this apparent parent and apparent offspring suggest something through which inward and truer realities may become clearer and more certain. It is more difficult to determine clearly whether the will connecting vision with memory is neither the parent nor the offspring of either of them; the likeness and equality of their shared nature and substance make this distinction difficult. We cannot proceed here as with perception shaped from outside (which is easily distinguished from the perceptible body, and the will from both), because in that external trinity all three differ in nature, as we have already discussed sufficiently. Although the trinity we are now discussing is introduced into the mind from outside, it operates within, and no part of it lies outside the mind’s own nature. How, then, can we demonstrate that the will is neither an apparent parent nor an apparent offspring of either the bodily likeness held in memory or the likeness copied from it in recollection, when it joins the two so closely in thought that they appear to be a single thing and only reason can distinguish them? First we must consider that there can be no will to remember unless we retain within memory either the whole or some part of what we want to remember. The very will to remember cannot arise concerning something we have completely and utterly forgotten; we have already remembered that what we want to recall is or has been in our memory. For example, if I want to remember what I ate for supper yesterday, I have either already remembered eating supper, or, if not that, have at least remembered something about that time itself, if nothing else; at any rate, I have remembered yesterday, the part of yesterday when people usually eat supper, and what eating supper is. If I remembered nothing at all of this kind, I could not want to remember what I ate for supper yesterday. We can therefore see that the will to remember does arise from things retained in memory, together with things that the act of discernment copies from memory through recollection; that is, from the combination of something remembered and the vision produced from it when we remembered, in the thinker’s mental eye. The will joining the two also requires something else, something, so to speak, close at hand and beside the person remembering. There are therefore as many trinities of this kind as there are recollections; every one of them includes these three things: what was stored in memory before it was thought about, what arises in thought when that is recognized, and the will joining the two and completing a single whole from them and itself as the third. Or should we instead recognize one trinity in this whole category, speaking generally of all bodily appearances hidden in memory as one unity, and of the mind’s overall vision as it remembers and thinks about such things as another single unity, joining to these two the will that combines them as a third, so that the whole forms a certain unity made up of three?

The mind’s eye cannot see everything held in memory together in a single glance. These trinities of thought therefore alternate, one withdrawing as another succeeds it, and so this trinity takes on countless instances; yet they are not infinite if they do not exceed the number of things stored in memory. Even if we count from someone’s earliest perception of material things through any bodily sense, and include even what that person has forgotten, the number would certainly be fixed and definite, although beyond counting. We call not only infinite things innumerable, but also finite things too numerous for anyone to count. From this we can see a little more clearly that what memory stores and retains differs from what is copied from it in the remembering person’s thought, although they appear identical when joined together; we can remember only as many bodily appearances as we have actually seen, of the size and kind we actually saw; the mind absorbs them into memory through bodily perception. Things seen in thought, however, although drawn from what memory holds, can be multiplied and varied beyond counting and without any end. I certainly remember only one sun, because I have in fact seen only one; but I can imagine two, three, or as many as I wish; the vision in my mind when I imagine many is formed from the same memory through which I remember one. I remember it as large as I saw it. If I remember it as larger or smaller than I saw it, I am no longer remembering what I saw, and therefore am not remembering it. Because I do remember it, I remember it as large as I saw it; yet I can imagine it as larger or smaller as I wish. I remember it as I saw it; but I imagine it following whatever course I wish, standing still wherever I wish, and moving from wherever I wish to wherever I wish. I can imagine it as square, although I remember it as round; and also in whatever color I wish, although I have never seen, and therefore do not remember, a green sun; and what applies to the sun applies to everything else. Because these forms of things are physical and perceptible, the mind goes wrong when it imagines them to exist externally in the same way it thinks of them internally, either when they have already ceased to exist externally but are still held in memory, or when what we remember is formed in the mind in some other way, through variations of thought rather than faithful recollection. Very often we also believe a true account, told by others, of things they have themselves perceived through their senses. When we picture what they tell us as we hear it, the mind’s eye does not seem to turn back toward memory to produce visions in our thoughts; we do not picture these things from our own recollection, but from someone else’s account. The trinity does not seem to be completed here as it is when the appearance hidden in memory and the remembering person’s vision are joined by the will as a third. When someone tells me something, I do not picture what lay hidden in my memory, but what I hear. I do not mean the speaker’s words themselves, in case anyone supposes I have turned to the other trinity, which operates externally in perceptible things or the senses; I mean the appearances of material things that the narrator communicates through words and sounds; I certainly picture these appearances through hearing rather than remembering. If we examine this more carefully, even here we do not go beyond memory’s limits. I could not even understand the narrator unless I remembered the general kinds of individual things being described, even if I hear them joined in a single story for the first time. For example, someone who describes a mountain to me cleared of woodland and covered with olive trees speaks to someone who remembers the appearance of mountains, woodland, and olive trees; if I had forgotten these, I would not know at all what was being described and could not picture the description. Thus anyone thinking about physical things, whether imagining something independently or hearing or reading an account of the past or a prediction of the future, turns to memory and finds there the limit and measure of all the forms considered in thought. No one can imagine a bodily color or shape never seen, a sound never heard, a flavor never tasted, a scent never smelled, or the touch of a physical thing never felt. If no one imagines anything physical except what has been [sensuously] perceived, because no one remembers anything physical except what has been perceived in this way, then just as the limits of perception lie in bodies, the limits of thought lie in memory. Perception receives its form from the body we perceive, and memory from perception; the thinker’s mental eye receives it from memory. Just as the will directs perception toward a physical object, it directs memory toward perception, and the thinker’s mental eye toward memory. The same will that brings these things into harmony and joins them also divides and separates them. It separates bodily senses from the bodies to be perceived by movement of the body, either to prevent perception or to stop perceiving something; for example, we turn our eyes away from something we do not want to see or close them; similarly, we turn our ears away from sounds or our nostrils from smells. We also avoid tastes by closing our mouths or spitting something out. In touch too, we either remove the physical object to avoid touching something we do not want to touch, or throw or push it away if we are already touching it. The will thus acts through bodily movement to keep bodily perception from joining with perceptible things. It does this as far as it can; when this brings hardship because of the slavery of our mortal condition, suffering results, leaving the will nothing but endurance. The will turns memory away from perception when, intent on something else, it does not allow present things to attach themselves to memory. We often seem not to have heard someone who was speaking to us, because we were thinking about something else. This is a mistake: we did hear, but we do not remember, because the speaker’s words immediately slipped out of our ears’ perception, as the direction of the will was diverted elsewhere, although it usually fixes those words in memory. It would therefore be more accurate in such cases to say “We do not remember,” rather than “We did not hear”; this even happens in reading. Very frequently I read through a page or a letter, do not know what I have read, and start again. Because the will was intent on something else, memory was not directed toward bodily perception as perception itself was directed toward the letters. Likewise, someone walking with the will intent on something else does not know where he has arrived; without seeing, he would not have walked there, or would have felt his way with greater attention, especially through an unfamiliar place; because he walked easily, he certainly saw. But memory was not directed toward perception itself as the eyes’ perception was directed toward the places he passed through; he therefore could not remember even the last thing he saw. To will to turn the mind’s eye away from what is in memory is simply not to think about it.

In this arrangement, starting with the body’s appearance and ending with the appearance arising in the thinker’s contemplation (contuitu), we find four appearances born, so to speak, successively from one another: the second from the first, the third from the second, and the fourth from the third. From the body’s own appearance arises the appearance in the observer’s perception. From this arises the appearance in memory. From this arises the appearance in the thinker’s mental eye. The will therefore joins something like parent and offspring three times: first, the body’s appearance with what it produces in bodily perception; then that appearance with what it produces in memory; and third, that appearance with what is born from it in the thinking mind’s contemplation. The intermediate combination, the second, is closer to the first, but resembles the third more than the first. There are two kinds of vision: that of [sensuous] perception (sentientis) and that of thought (cogitantis). For the vision of thought to arise, the vision of [sensuous] perception produces a likeness of itself in memory, toward which the mind’s eye can turn in thought, as the eyes’ gaze (acies) turns toward a physical object in [sensuously] perceiving it. I have therefore chosen to present two trinities in this category: one when a physical object forms the vision of [sensuous] perception, the other when memory forms the vision of thought. I have not proposed an intermediate trinity, because we do not usually call it vision when the form arising in the observer’s perception is entrusted to memory. In every case the will appears only as joining something like parent and offspring; wherever it proceeds from, it can therefore be called neither parent nor offspring.

If we remember only what we have [sensuously] perceived, and think only from what we remember, why do we often imagine false things, when we certainly do not falsely remember the things we have perceived? Is it not because the will (which I have already tried as far as possible to show joins and separates things of this kind) guides the thinker’s vision as it takes shape, according to its own wish and pleasure, through memory’s hidden stores? To picture [imagine] things we do not remember, it makes it take one thing from here and another from there from what we do remember. These things combine into a single vision and produce something called false, because it either does not exist externally among physical things or does not seem copied from memory, since we do not remember ever seeing such a thing. Who has ever seen a black swan? No one therefore remembers a black swan; yet who cannot imagine one? It is easy to apply to a shape we know from sight the black color we have also seen in other bodies; and because we have seen both, we remember both. I do not remember a bird with four feet either, because I never saw one; but I can picture such an image very easily, by adding to a winged shape I have seen two additional feet of a kind I have also seen. By imagining together what we remember seeing separately, we therefore seem not to be imagining what we remember; in fact we do this within memory’s rules, taking from it everything we combine as we wish in many different ways. We cannot even imagine bodies of sizes we have never seen without memory’s help; the extent of space our gaze usually reaches across the vastness of the world also measures how far we enlarge bodies, whatever they are, when imagining them as large as we can. Reason goes still further, but imagination cannot follow it; for example, reason declares that numbers are infinite, which no vision of someone thinking in physical images can grasp. The same reason also teaches that the tiniest atoms are infinitely divisible; yet once we reach those tiny particles we remember seeing, we can no longer picture images thinner or smaller, although reason continues dividing them. We therefore imagine no physical things except what we remember or what we form from things we remember.

Things impressed individually on memory can be multiplied in thought; measure therefore seems to belong to memory and number to vision. Although such visions are countless, memory prescribes a limit for each that it cannot exceed. Measure therefore appears in memory and number in the vision of things; visible bodies themselves have a certain measure, to which the perception of many observers conforms, and one visible object forms the vision of many observers. Even one person commonly sees a single thing as two appearances because of having two eyes, as we explained above. Thus things from which visions are copied have a certain measure, while the visions themselves have number. The will joins and regulates these things and combines them into a certain unity. It does not let its desire for [sensuously] perceiving or thinking rest content except in the things from which visions are formed, and so resembles weight. I therefore want to anticipate these three things briefly: measure, number, weight, which can be perceived in everything else too. For now, I have shown as far as I can, to those I can, that the will joins the visible thing and vision, something like parent and offspring, whether in [sensuous] perception or in thought, and cannot be called either parent or offspring itself. It is therefore time to seek this same trinity in the inner person and try to move inward from the natural, fleshly, and (as it is called) outward person I have discussed at such length. Here we hope to find an image of God as Trinity, with His own help in our efforts, since, as things themselves show and Holy Scripture also testifies, He has ordered everything in measure, number, and weight.