On the Trinity, Book 12

Let us now consider where the boundary, so to speak, between the outer and inner person lies. Whatever we share mentally with animals is rightly said to belong to the outer person. We should not consider the outer person to be only the body, but also the body’s own particular life, which gives strength to the body’s structure and to all the senses that equip it to perceive external things. When images of external things already perceived and fixed in memory are seen again through recollection, this too still belongs to the outer person. In all these things we do not differ from animals, except that our bodies stand upright rather than facing downward. Through this, He who made us urges us not to resemble animals in our better part, the mind, when our upright bodies distinguish us from them. This does not mean directing our minds toward elevated physical things; seeking the will’s resting place even in these things brings the mind low. As the body naturally stands upright toward the highest physical things, the heavenly bodies, so the mind, a spiritual substance, must be raised toward the highest spiritual things, through righteous devotion rather than the arrogance of pride.

Animals too can perceive external physical things through the senses of the body, fix them in memory, and remember them, seeking what benefits them and avoiding what harms them. But we can also notice these things and retain them not only as naturally absorbed but also as deliberately committed to memory. We can also impress them again through recollection and thought as they are about to slip into forgetfulness, so that just as thought is formed from what memory holds, thought can also firmly establish memory’s own contents. We can combine imaginary visual objects by taking this or that from what memory retains and, so to speak, stitching them together. We can examine how, in this category, things resembling the truth can be distinguished from what is true, not in spiritual things but in physical things themselves. These and similar acts, although concerned with perceptible things and what the mind has derived through bodily senses, involve reason and are therefore not shared by humans and animals. Higher reason judges these physical things according to nonphysical and eternal principles. Unless these were above the human mind, they would certainly not be unchanging; yet unless something within us were subject to them, we could not use them as standards for judging physical things. We judge physical things by the principles of dimensions and shapes, which the mind knows remain unchanging.

The part of us concerned with managing physical and temporal things is rational, since animals do not share it with us; it is drawn, so to speak, from our mind’s rational substance, through which we depend on and hold to unchanging truth grasped by understanding. This part of our reason is assigned to manage and direct lower things. Just as no suitable helper for the man was found among all the animals, until one was taken from himself and formed to be his companion, so for the mind through which we consult higher, inward truth, there is no suitable helper for the use of physical things required by human nature among the parts of the soul that we share with animals. A certain part of our reason is therefore assigned its particular function, not separated in a way that breaks its unity, but, so to speak, redirected to assist their partnership. Just as man and woman are two in one flesh, so the mind’s single nature includes our intellect and action, or our deliberation and execution, or our reason and rational desire, or whatever other terms might express these more clearly; just as it was said of the former, “And the two shall be one flesh,” we can say of these, they are two in one mind.

When we discuss the human mind’s nature, we discuss a single thing, dividing it into the two I mentioned only in respect of its functions. When we seek a trinity in the mind, we therefore seek it in the whole mind, without separating reason’s activity in temporal things from contemplation of eternal things and then looking for a third thing to complete a trinity. This trinity must be found throughout the mind’s nature. Even if activity concerning temporal things were removed, work that requires this help, for which part of the mind is redirected to manage lower things, a trinity would still be found in the single mind, not divided at all. When this division of functions has been made, not only a trinity but also an image of God may be found only in the part concerned with contemplating eternal things. In the other part, redirected to manage temporal things, a trinity may be found, but not an image of God.

I therefore do not find plausible the opinion of those who claim that a trinity in God’s image in three persons, as far as human nature is concerned, can be found and completed in the marriage of man and woman and in their offspring. They claim that the man himself represents the Father’s person, what proceeds from him by birth represents the Son’s person, and that the woman represents the third person, the Spirit, having proceeded from the man without being his son or daughter, although the offspring was born through her conceiving. The Lord said of the Holy Spirit that He proceeds from the Father, yet He is not a son. The only plausible point in this mistaken opinion, also sufficiently established according to the faith of Holy Scripture, is shown in the account of the woman’s original creation: when one person comes into existence from another, the new person cannot always be called a son; the woman’s person came into existence from the man’s person, yet she is not called his daughter. Everything else in this opinion is so absurd, indeed so false, that it is very easy to refute. I pass over the idea of considering the Holy Spirit the mother of God’s Son and the Father’s wife; someone might answer that these things offend us in physical matters because we think about bodily conception and birth. Yet pure people think about these very things with complete purity, since to them everything is pure; to defiled unbelievers, whose minds and consciences are polluted, nothing is pure; so that even Christ’s bodily birth from a virgin offends some of them. Yet in those highest spiritual realities, in whose likeness these kinds of lower creation are also made, though very remotely, nothing can be harmed or corrupted, nothing is born in time, and nothing is formed from what is formless. Whatever similar expressions may be used should not disturb anyone’s sound judgment, so that avoiding groundless revulsion does not lead to harmful error. One should learn to find traces of spiritual things in physical things so that when reason leads one upward from there, toward the unchanging truth itself through which these things were made, one does not carry into higher things what one despises in lower things. No one has ever been ashamed to choose wisdom as a wife because the word “wife” brings to mind the perishable sexual union through which children are conceived; nor is wisdom itself actually female in sex because it is expressed in both Greek and Latin by a grammatically feminine word.

We therefore reject this opinion not because we are afraid to think of that holy, inviolable, unchanging Love as God the Father’s spouse, existing from Him, but not as His offspring, in order to give birth to the Word through whom everything is made; we reject it because divine Scripture clearly shows it to be false. God said, “Let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness;” and a little later it says, “So God created humanity in the image of God.” Since it is plural, the word “our” would not be appropriate if humanity were made in the image of one person, whether the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit; because humanity was made in the Trinity’s image, it says, “According to our image.” Again, to prevent us from thinking that we should believe in three Gods in the Trinity, when this same Trinity is one God, it is said, “So God created humanity in the image of God,” instead of saying, “In His own image.” Such expressions are customary in Scripture; yet some people, while maintaining the Catholic faith, do not pay close attention to them, and think the words, “God made humanity in the image of God,” mean that the Father made humanity according to the Son’s image; they want in this way to establish that divine Scripture also calls the Son God, as if there were no other completely true and clear proofs that call the Son not only God but the true God. While trying to explain another difficulty in this passage, they become so entangled that they cannot free themselves. If the Father made humanity according to the Son’s image, so that humanity is the image of the Son rather than the Father, then the Son is unlike the Father. But if devout faith teaches us, as it does, that the Son resembles the Father through equality of essence, whatever is made in the Son’s likeness must also be made in the Father’s likeness. If the Father made humanity in His Son’s image rather than His own, why does He not say, “Let us make humanity according to Your image and likeness,” when He says “our,” unless it is because the Trinity’s image was made in humanity, so that humanity would in this way be the image of the one true God, since the Trinity itself is the one true God? Scripture has countless expressions of this kind, but these examples are enough. The Psalms speak this way: “Salvation belongs to the Lord; Your blessing is on Your people;” as if these words were addressed to someone else, rather than Him of whom it had just been said, “Salvation belongs to the Lord.” And again, “Through You,” he says, “I shall be rescued from temptation, and by hoping in my God I shall leap over the wall;” as if he were saying to someone else, “Through You I shall be rescued from temptation.” And again, “In the heart of the king's enemies; through which the people fall under You;” as though saying, in the heart of Your enemies. He had said to that King, that is, to our Lord Jesus Christ, “The people fall under You,” the one meant by the word King, when he said, “In the heart of the king's enemies.” Expressions of this kind are rarer in the New Testament. Yet the apostle tells the Romans, “Concerning His Son, who was born to Him from David’s line according to the flesh, and was declared the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead of Jesus Christ our Lord;” as though he had previously been speaking about someone else. What does the Son of God declared by the resurrection of the dead of Jesus Christ mean, except that same Jesus Christ who was declared the Son of God with power? In this passage, when we hear, “the Son of God with power of Jesus Christ,” or “the Son of God according to the spirit of holiness of Jesus Christ,” or “the Son of God by the resurrection of the dead of Jesus Christ,” although it could have been expressed in the usual way, In His own power, or according to the spirit of His own holiness, or by the resurrection of His dead, or of their dead: we are not obliged, as I said, to understand a different person, but the same person, the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. Similarly, when we hear that “God made humanity in the image of God,” although it would have been more usual to say, according to His own image, we are not obliged to understand a different person within the Trinity, but that one and same Trinity, which is one God, and in whose image humanity is made. Since this is so, if we locate this same image of the Trinity in three human beings rather than one, father and mother and son, the man was not made in God’s image before a wife was made for him and they produced a son; there was not yet a trinity. Will anyone say that a trinity already existed, because, although not yet in their distinct forms but in their original nature, the woman was already in the man’s side, and the son in his father’s loins? Why then, after Scripture said, “God made humanity in the image of God,” did it continue, “God created him; He created them male and female: and God blessed them”? (Alternatively, the sentence may be divided this way: “And God created humanity,” then, “in the image of God He created him,” and third, “He created them male and female.” Some people have been afraid to say, He made him male and female, in case something seemingly monstrous should be understood, like those called hermaphrodites, although even this singular wording could truthfully refer to both, because of the saying, “Two in one flesh.”) Why then, as I began by asking, concerning human nature made in God’s image, does Scripture mention only male and female? Certainly, to complete the Trinity’s image, it should also have added a son, although still in his father’s loins, as the woman was in the man’s side. Or had the woman perhaps already been made, with Scripture combining in one brief, comprehensive statement what it would later explain in greater detail, so that a son could not be mentioned because none had yet been born? As if the Holy Spirit could not have included this too in that brief statement, before describing the son’s birth later in its proper place, just as Scripture later described in its proper place how the woman was taken from the man’s side, yet did not omit mentioning her here.

We should therefore not understand humanity’s creation in the image of the supreme Trinity, that is, in God’s image, as placing that image in three human beings; especially since the apostle calls the man God’s image and therefore removes his head covering, while instructing the woman to wear one. He says: “A man should not cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the man’s glory.” What, then, should we say to this? If the woman completes the Trinity’s image through her own person, why is the man still called that image after she has been taken from his side? Or if even one of the three human persons can be called God’s image, just as each person is God in the supreme Trinity itself, why is the woman not also God’s image? She is instructed to cover her head for this very reason, while he is forbidden to cover his because he is God’s image. We must consider how the apostle’s statement, that the man rather than the woman is God’s image, does not contradict what is written in Genesis: “God created humanity: in God’s image He created him; He created them male and female: and He blessed them.” This passage says that human nature itself, which is complete [only] in the two sexes together, was made in God’s image; it does not exclude the woman from the image of God it describes. After saying that God made humanity in God’s image, “He created him,” it says, “male and female:” or, with different punctuation, “He created them male and female.” How, then, did the apostle tell us that the man is God’s image and therefore forbidden to cover his head, while the woman is not, and is therefore commanded to cover hers? Surely this follows what I have already said when discussing the human mind’s nature: the woman together with her husband is God’s image, so that their whole substance forms one image; but when she is considered separately in her role as helper, which concerns the woman herself alone, she is not God’s image; the man alone, however, is God’s image as fully and completely as when the woman is joined with him as one. We said about the human mind’s nature that when the whole mind contemplates truth, it is God’s image; when a part is assigned a separate function and directed toward knowing temporal things, the part that views and consults truth nevertheless remains God’s image, while the part directed toward knowing lower things is not God’s image. The mind is formed all the more in God’s image the more it reaches toward what is eternal; it therefore should not be restrained from reaching toward it; that is why the man should not cover his head. But going too far toward lower things is dangerous for the rational knowledge concerned with physical and temporal things; this should have authority over its head, as the covering indicates, signifying that it should be restrained. A holy, devout meaning pleases the holy angels. God does not see in a temporal way, nor does anything new arise in His vision and knowledge when something happens temporarily in time, as such things affect the senses, whether the bodily senses of animals and humans or even the angels’ heavenly senses. The Apostle Paul, speaking explicitly about male and female sex, represented the mystery of a more hidden truth. We can understand this from the fact that elsewhere he says that a true widow is alone, without children or grandchildren, yet should trust in God and continue praying night and day. Here he indicates that the woman, led into transgression through deception, is saved through childbearing; he then adds, “If they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.” As if it could harm a good widow to have no sons, or to have sons who chose not to continue in good actions. What we call good works are something like the children of our life, in the sense of life that answers the question, What is someone’s life like? That is, How does that person act in temporal matters? The Greeks call this life βίος, not ζωή; these good works are chiefly performed through acts of mercy, while acts of mercy do not benefit pagans, Jewish people who do not believe in Christ, or any heretics or schismatics who lack faith, love, and self-controlled holiness. What the apostle intended is therefore clear, expressed figuratively and mystically because he was speaking about the woman’s head covering, which remains empty unless related to some hidden sacred meaning. As both the truest reasoning and the apostle’s own authority declare, humanity was not made in God’s image according to bodily shape, but according to the rational mind. The idea is degraded and empty that God is confined and limited by the outlines of bodily parts. Does not the same blessed apostle also say, “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new person, created according to God;” and more clearly elsewhere, “Putting off the old person,” he says, “with his deeds; put on the new person, renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of Him who created him?” If we are renewed in the spirit of our mind, and the new person is renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of Him who created him, no one can doubt that humanity was made in the image of its creator, not according to the body or just any part of the mind, but according to the rational mind, which can have knowledge of God. It is also through this renewal that Christ’s baptism makes us God’s children; in putting on the new person, we certainly put on Christ through faith. Who, then, would exclude women from this fellowship, when they share with us as heirs of grace, and elsewhere the same apostle says, “You are all God’s children through faith in Christ Jesus; all who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ: there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus?” Have believing women, then, lost their bodily sex? They are renewed in God’s image in the part where there is no sex; humanity is made in God’s image in the part where there is no sex, that is, in the spirit of the mind. Why, then, is the man not required to cover his head because he is God’s image and glory, while the woman is required to do so because she is the man’s glory, as though the woman were not renewed in her mind’s spirit, which is renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of Him who created it? Because she differs from the man in bodily sex, her bodily covering could appropriately represent the part of reason directed toward managing temporal things; God’s image can therefore remain in the part of the human mind that holds to viewing or consulting things’ eternal principles; women clearly have this part as well as men.

We therefore recognize a shared nature in their minds, while their bodies represent a division within that single mind itself. As our thoughts ascend inward by certain steps, through the successive parts of the mind, reason begins where we first encounter something we do not share with animals, and here we can recognize the inner person. If this inner person, through the reason entrusted with managing temporal things, slips too far into external things, with the consent of its head, that is, the so-called masculine part presiding in the watchtower of deliberation, because that head does not restrain or check it, it grows old because of all its enemies, the demons and their prince the devil, who envy virtue. The vision of eternal things is also withdrawn from the head itself, which eats what was forbidden with its spouse, so that the light of its eyes is lost. Both are therefore stripped of truth’s illumination, with the eyes of their conscience opened to see how shameful and improper they have become. Like leaves of sweet fruit trees without the fruit itself, they weave good words together without the fruit of good actions, using fine speech to cover their disgrace while living wickedly.

The soul, in loving its own power, slips from the shared whole into a private part belonging to itself. This rebellious pride, which is called “the beginning of sin,” although it could have been governed excellently by God’s laws by following Him as ruler within the whole of creation, seeks something greater than the whole and tries to govern it by its own law. Since nothing is greater than the whole, it is forced into caring for only a part; by craving something more, it becomes less; this is also why greed is called “the root of all evil.” It carries out all of this, trying to act independently against the laws governing the whole, through its own body, which it possesses only in part. Delighted by physical forms and movements, it does not have the things themselves within it but becomes entangled in their images, which it has fixed in memory, and is shamefully polluted by the imagination’s sexual immorality. It directs all its activities toward the goals for which it seeks physical and temporal things with restless curiosity through the senses of the body, either aspiring with swollen arrogance to surpass other souls devoted to the bodily senses, or plunging into a filthy whirlpool of physical pleasure.

Suppose the soul considers what is best for itself or others with a good will directed toward perceiving inward, higher things. All who love these things hold them in a pure embrace without limitation or envy, sharing them rather than possessing them privately. Even if the soul is mistaken about something through ignorance of temporal things (for this action takes place in time), and fails to act as it should, the temptation is only one common to humanity. It is a great achievement to pass through this life, which we travel like a road back home, so that no temptation overtakes us except what is common to humanity. This is a sin outside the body, and should not be counted as sexual immorality, so it is very easily forgiven. When the soul acts to acquire things perceived through the body, craving to experience things, excel, or handle them, in order to make them its ultimate good, whatever it does is done wickedly, and it commits sexual immorality, sinning against its own body. Snatching up within itself the deceptive images of physical things and combining them in empty thought, it thinks nothing divine unless it resembles these things. Through selfish greed it becomes fertile in errors, and through selfish extravagance it is drained of strength. Yet it would not leap directly from the outset into such shameful and miserable sexual immorality, but, as it is written, “Whoever despises small things will fall little by little.”

Just as a snake does not creep forward with visible steps, but advances through the tiniest movements of its individual scales, so the slippery movement of falling away [from what is good] takes hold of the careless only gradually, beginning with a distorted desire to resemble God and ending in the likeness of animals. That is why, stripped of their first garment, they earned clothing of skins through mortality. Humanity’s true honor is God’s image and likeness, preserved only through a relationship with Him who impresses it. The less we love what is privately our own, the more we hold to God. But in wanting to try out its own power, humanity falls by its own choice toward itself as toward an intermediate level. Wanting to be like God, that is, subject to no one, humanity is driven even from its own middle level, as punishment, toward the lowest level, the things that delight animals. Thus, while its honor is God’s likeness and its dishonor an animal’s likeness, “Humanity placed in honor did not understand: it is compared to senseless animals and becomes like them.” By what path could it travel such a great distance from the highest to the lowest, except through its own intermediate level? When humanity neglects love of wisdom, which always remains unchanged, and craves knowledge through experiencing temporal, changing things, that knowledge inflates pride rather than building up; the mind is weighed down and driven out, so to speak, by its own weight from happiness; it learns through its own punishment, through this experience of its own intermediate position, the difference between the good it abandoned and the evil to which it committed itself. Having squandered and destroyed its strength, it can return only through its Maker’s grace, calling it to repentance and forgiving its sins. Who will rescue the unhappy soul from the body of this death, except God’s grace through Jesus Christ our Lord? We will discuss this grace in its proper place, as far as He Himself enables us.

Let us now complete, as far as the Lord helps us, our discussion of the part of reason to which knowledge belongs, that is, awareness of temporal, changing things, needed to manage this life’s affairs. In the visible marriage of the first two human beings, the serpent did not eat from the forbidden tree, but only persuaded them to eat from it; the woman did not eat alone, but gave some to her husband, and they ate together, although she alone spoke to the serpent and she alone was deceived by him. Similarly, in the hidden, secret kind of marriage that takes place and is recognized within a single human being, the bodily, or, as I might say, sensory movement of the soul, since it is directed toward bodily senses, which we share with animals, is separate from the reason belonging to wisdom. Bodily things are certainly perceived through bodily senses; spiritual things, which are eternal and unchanging, are understood through the reason belonging to wisdom. Desire lies very close to the reason belonging to knowledge: what is called the science or knowledge of action reasons about physical things perceived through bodily senses. If it reasons well, it directs that knowledge toward the goal of the highest good; if badly, it seeks to enjoy those things as goods in which it rests in a false happiness. The mind’s attention uses reason’s active power to deal with temporal, physical things for human activity. Whenever bodily or animal sense presents to this attention an inducement to enjoy itself, that is, as though it were its own private good, rather than the public, shared, unchanging good, the serpent is, so to speak, talking with the woman. Consenting to this attraction is eating from the forbidden tree. If consent is satisfied with pleasure in thought alone, while the body’s members are restrained by the authority of higher deliberation and are not handed over to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, I think we should regard this as the woman alone eating the forbidden food. If, in consenting to misuse things perceived through bodily senses, a sin is decided upon so that it will also be carried out bodily if possible, we should understand that the woman has given the forbidden food to her husband to eat together with her. The mind cannot decide not only to think about a sin with pleasure but also to carry it out unless that part of the mind’s attention also yields and serves the evil action. This part has the chief authority to direct the body’s members toward outward action or restrain them from it. Certainly, when the mind delights in forbidden things in thought alone, without deciding to act on them, yet willingly retaining and considering things that should have been rejected as soon as they entered the mind, this cannot be denied to be sin, although far less than deciding to carry it out in an outward act. We must therefore seek forgiveness for such thoughts too, beat our breasts, and say, “Forgive us our debts;” we must also do what follows and add it to our prayer: “As we also forgive our debtors.” This is unlike the case of the first two human beings, each of whom was a separate person; if the woman alone had eaten the forbidden food, she alone would certainly have suffered death as punishment. We cannot say the same thing now about a single human being: if thought alone willingly feeds on forbidden pleasures, from which it should immediately turn away, without deciding to carry out evil actions, but only retaining them with pleasure in memory, the figurative woman cannot be condemned without the man. We should never believe this. Here there is one person, one human being, who will be condemned as a whole unless these sins, lacking the will to act but involving the will to delight the mind, and recognized as sins of thought alone, are forgiven through the Mediator’s grace. Through this reasoning we have sought within each individual human mind a certain rational marriage of contemplation and action, assigning each its own functions, while preserving the mind’s unity in both. We also preserve the truth of the history that divine testimony gives about the first two human beings, the man and his wife, from whom the human race descends. This reasoning should be understood only to this extent: the apostle can be understood to have intended something to be sought within one individual person, when assigning God’s image to the man alone rather than the woman too, although speaking of two human beings differing only in sex.

I am also aware that some distinguished defenders of the Catholic faith before us and interpreters of God’s word looked for these two things within one human being, whose whole soul they regarded as a kind of excellent paradise, and said that the man was the mind and the woman bodily perception. With this division, taking the man as the mind and the woman as bodily perception, everything seems to fit together well when examined carefully, except that it is written that among all the animals and flying creatures no suitable helper was found for the man; the woman was then made from his side. For this reason I have not thought that bodily perception should represent the woman, since we see that animals share it with us; I wanted to find something animals did not have, and instead thought bodily perception should be understood as the serpent, which we read was more cunning than all the animals of the field. Among the natural goods we share with irrational animals, perception stands out through a kind of vital power; I do not mean the sense described in the letter to the Hebrews, where we read that “solid food belongs to the mature, those whose senses have been trained through practice to distinguish good from evil;” these “senses” belong to rational nature and concern understanding. I mean bodily perception, divided into five senses, through which bodily appearance and movement are perceived by animals as well as ourselves. Whether the apostle’s description of the man as God’s image and glory, and the woman as the man’s glory, should be understood in this way, that way, or another way, it is clear that when we live according to God, our mind, intent on His invisible things, should progressively be formed by His eternity, truth, and love; part of our own rational attention, that is, of this same mind, must be directed toward using changing, physical things, without which this life cannot continue. We should not conform to this world by making these goods our ultimate goal and directing our desire for happiness toward them; rather, whatever we do rationally in using temporal things, we should do while contemplating the attainment of eternal things, passing through temporal things while holding to eternal things.

Knowledge too has its own proper measure, if whatever in it inflates pride, or tends to inflate pride, is overcome by love of eternal things, which does not inflate pride but, as we know, builds up. Certainly without knowledge we cannot possess the virtues themselves, through which we live rightly, which can govern this miserable life so that we reach the eternal life that is truly happy. Yet the activity through which we use temporal things well differs from contemplating eternal things; contemplation belongs to wisdom and activity to knowledge. What is wisdom can also be called knowledge, as the apostle does when he says, “Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I am known;” he undoubtedly intended this to be understood as the knowledge gained in contemplating God, which will be the saints’ highest reward. Yet when he says, “To one the Spirit gives the word of wisdom, to another the same Spirit gives the word of knowledge,” he certainly distinguishes these two things, although he does not explain their difference there or how one can be distinguished from the other. After examining many passages of Holy Scripture, I find these words in the Book of Job, spoken by that holy man: “Look, devotion is wisdom; turning from evil is knowledge.” In making this distinction, we must understand that wisdom belongs to contemplation and knowledge to action. Here he meant by devotion the worship of God, which in Greek is called θεοσέβεια. The sentence in the Greek manuscripts uses that word. Among eternal things, what is more excellent than God, whose nature alone is unchanging? What is worshiping Him but loving Him, through which we now desire to see Him, and believe and hope that we shall see Him? As we progress, we see now through a mirror in a puzzling image, but then clearly. This is what the Apostle Paul means by “face to face.” This is also what John says, “Beloved, we are now God’s children, and what we shall be has not yet appeared; but we know that, when He appears, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.” Discussion of these and similar subjects seems to me to be the very discourse of wisdom. Turning from evil, which Job calls knowledge, undoubtedly concerns temporal things. It is in relation to time [and this world] that we experience evil, from which we should abstain so that we may reach those eternal goods. Whatever we do prudently, courageously, with self-control, and justly therefore belongs to the knowledge or discipline concerned with our activity in avoiding evil and desiring good; so does whatever we gather through knowledge gained from inquiry, as examples either to avoid or imitate, or as necessary evidence concerning any subject, suited to our use. When a discussion concerns these things, I consider it a discourse belonging to knowledge, distinct from discourse belonging to wisdom, which concerns things that neither were nor will be, but are; because of the eternity in which they exist, they are said to have been, to be, and to be in the future, without any temporal change. They have not existed in such a way that they cease to exist, nor will they exist in such a way that they do not exist now; they have always had and always will have that same absolute existence. They remain, but are not fixed in a place as bodies are; as things grasped by understanding in nonphysical nature, they are present to the mind’s gaze as visible or tangible things in space are present to bodily perception. Not only do perceptible things located in space have nonphysical principles grasped by understanding that remain apart from physical space; movements passing through successive times also have similar principles that remain without passing through time, and are certainly grasped by understanding, not the senses. Few can reach these principles with the mind’s eye; when they are reached as far as possible, the person reaching them does not remain in them, but is, so to speak, driven back as the mind’s eye itself recoils, producing a passing thought of something that does not pass away. Yet this passing thought is committed to memory through the disciplines in which the mind is instructed, so that the mind, compelled to leave that place, can return there again; although if thought did not return to memory and find what it had entrusted to it, it would be led there like an untaught person, as it was led before, and would find the thing where it first found it, in that nonphysical truth, from which it could again be, so to speak, copied down and fixed in memory. Human thought, for example, does not remain in the nonphysical, unchanging principle of a square body as that principle itself remains, if indeed it can reach it at all without imagining physical space. Or if someone grasped the rhythm of a skillfully produced musical sound, passing through certain time intervals, as it rested timelessly in some hidden, deep silence, it could at least be contemplated for as long as that song could be heard. Yet the mind’s gaze, passing though it was, caught something from there; it absorbed it as though into a stomach and stored it in memory. Through recollection it can chew this over again, so to speak, and transfer what it has learned into systematic knowledge. If complete forgetfulness has erased this, teaching can once again guide someone toward what was completely lost, and it will be found just as it was.

This led the distinguished philosopher Plato to try to persuade us that human souls lived before inhabiting these bodies; what we learn is therefore remembered as something already known, rather than acquired as new knowledge. He tells us that a boy, asked some questions about geometry, answered as though thoroughly skilled in that discipline. Through skillful, step-by-step questioning, he saw what needed to be seen and stated what he saw. If this were recollection of previously known things, certainly not everyone, or almost everyone, could answer this way when questioned. Not everyone was a geometer in a previous life, since geometers are so rare among humans that one can hardly be found anywhere. Instead, we should believe that the intellectual mind is created with a nature that enables it to see these things through a unique kind of nonphysical light. By the Creator’s arrangement it is subject to intelligible things in a natural order, just as the bodily eye sees nearby things in physical light, which it was created to receive and be suited to. The bodily eye can distinguish black from white without a teacher, but not because it knew them before it was created in this body. Why, finally, only in things grasped by understanding can someone properly questioned answer questions in a discipline, despite knowing nothing of it? Why can no one do this with perceptible things, except things seen in this present body or learned by believing others who knew them, through someone’s writings or speech? We must not accept the account of those who claim that Pythagoras of Samos recalled some things of this kind experienced while previously living here in another body; others also report other people having similar mental experiences. We can conjecture that these were false memories, like those we commonly experience in sleep, when we imagine we remember, as though we had done or seen something, what we never did or saw at all; these people’s minds, even while awake, could have been affected this way at the prompting of evil, deceptive spirits, intent on establishing or planting a false belief about souls changing bodies, in order to deceive people. We can conjecture this, as I said, from the fact that if they really remembered things they previously saw here while inhabiting other bodies, this would happen to many, indeed almost everyone; they suppose that just as the dead come from the living, so continuously, without interruption, the living come into existence from the dead, like sleepers from those awake and those awake from sleepers. If this is the correct distinction between wisdom and knowledge, that intellectual understanding of eternal things belongs to wisdom, and rational awareness of temporal things to knowledge, it is not difficult to judge which should take priority and which should come second. If we must use some other distinction to tell these two apart, which the apostle undoubtedly teaches are different, saying, “To one the Spirit gives the word of wisdom; to another the same Spirit gives the word of knowledge:” the difference between the two we have identified remains completely clear: intellectual understanding of eternal things is one thing, rational awareness of temporal things another; no one doubts that the former should be preferred to the latter. As we leave behind what belongs to the outer person and seek to ascend inward from what we share with animals, before reaching understanding of the highest intelligible things, which are eternal, we encounter rational awareness of temporal things. Let us find a trinity here too, if we can, as we found one in bodily senses and in things entering our soul or spirit through them as images. Instead of physical things reached through bodily senses, located outside us, we have bodily likenesses impressed within our memory from which thought can be formed, with the will joining the two as a third. Similarly, the eyes’ sight was shaped from outside, as the will directed it toward the visible thing to produce vision, joining the two and adding itself there too as a third. We should not squeeze this subject into the present book; in the next book, with God’s help, we can examine it appropriately and explain the conclusions we reach.