On the Trinity, Book 8

We have said elsewhere that the descriptions belonging specifically to each person in the Trinity express their relations to one another, such as Father, Son, and their shared gift, the Holy Spirit; for the Father is not the Trinity, nor the Son the Trinity, nor the gift the Trinity: but when each is described individually in Himself, we speak of one, the Trinity itself, rather than three in the plural, as the Father God, the Son God, and the Holy Spirit God; the Father good, the Son good, and the Holy Spirit good; and the Father all-powerful, the Son all-powerful, and the Holy Spirit all-powerful: yet not three Gods, three good beings, or three all-powerful beings, but one God, good and all-powerful, the Trinity itself; the same applies to everything else said of them individually in themselves rather than in relation to one another. These descriptions concern their essence, because existing is the same for them as being great, good, wise, or anything else said in itself of any person or the whole Trinity. They are therefore called three persons or three substances not to imply a difference of essence, but to give us a word for answering anyone who asks “three what?” or “what three things?” The equality in that Trinity is so great that the Father is not greater than the Son in divinity, the Father and Son together are not greater than the Holy Spirit, and is any individual person among the three less than the Trinity itself. These are the points we have made; frequent consideration and repetition certainly make them more familiar. Yet discussion must also have a limit, and we must pray to God with the deepest devotion to open our understanding and remove our desire to argue, in order that our minds may discern the essence of the truth, which has neither physical size nor capacity for change. Now, as far as the Creator Himself helps us in His marvelous mercy, let us consider these subjects more deeply than before, although they are really the same subjects; we must maintain this rule: what has not yet become clear to our understanding must still be held firmly by faith.

We say that in this Trinity two or three persons are no greater than one; a way of perceiving shaped by the flesh cannot grasp this, simply because it perceives real created things as best it can but cannot see the truth itself through which they are created; if it could, physical light itself would be no clearer than this statement. In the substance of truth, which alone truly exists, a thing is greater only if it exists more truly. Among things that are intelligible and unchanging, none exists more truly than another, since all alike are unchangeably eternal; and anything called great there is great through exactly what makes it truly exist. Where greatness itself is truth, therefore, anything with more greatness must have more truth; anything without more truth cannot have more greatness either. Anything with more truth is certainly more true, just as something with more greatness is greater; in the substance of truth, therefore, what is more true is greater. But the Father and the Son together do not exist more truly than the Father individually or the Son individually. The two together are therefore no greater than either individually. Since the Holy Spirit also exists equally truly, the Father and Son together are no greater than He is, because they do not exist more truly either. The Father and Holy Spirit together also do not exceed the Son in greatness, because they do not exceed Him in truth (they do not exist more truly). And so the Son and the Holy Spirit together are just as great as the Father alone, because they exist equally truly. The Trinity itself is likewise as great as each individual person within it. Where truth itself is greatness, what is not more true cannot be greater; in the essence of truth, being true is the same as existing, and existing is the same as being great; therefore being great is the same as being true. Whatever is equally true there must therefore also be equally great.

With physical bodies, however, two pieces of gold can be equally true [real], while one is larger than the other, because size and truth are not the same in this case; being gold and being large are different things. The same applies to the soul’s nature; a soul is not called great in the same respect in which it is called true. Someone without a great soul still has a true [real] soul, since the essence of body and soul is not the essence of the truth [reality] itself, as the Trinity is: one God, the only God, great, true, truthful, truth itself. If we try to think of Him as far as He Himself allows and enables us, we must not imagine contact or an embrace in physical space, as between three bodies, or a tightly joined structure like the three-bodied Geryon of myth; we must reject without hesitation any idea of something greater in three than in each individually, and less in one than in two; this excludes everything physical. Among spiritual things too, we must not identify any changeable thing we imagine with God. As we aspire from these depths to that height, it is a significant step toward knowledge if, before we can know what God is, we can already know what He is not. He is certainly neither earth nor heaven, nor anything like earth and heaven together; nor anything we see in heaven, nor anything similar that may be there without our seeing it. Even if you imaginatively enlarged the sun’s light as much as possible, making it a thousand times larger or brighter, or countless times so, this would not be God. Nor is He like our conception of pure angels as spirits giving life to heavenly bodies, changing and directing them according to the will with which they serve God; even if all of them, the “thousands of thousands,” were brought together and became one, no such thing would be God. Nor would He be those same spirits imagined without bodies, something very difficult for fleshly thinking. Look and see if you can, soul pressed down by a decaying body and weighed down by many different earthly thoughts; see if you can that God is truth. For it is written that “God is light;” not as these eyes see, but as the heart sees, when it is said, He is truth [reality]. Do not ask what truth [reality] is, because the darkness of bodily images and clouds of mental appearances will immediately obstruct you, disturbing the calm that flashed into clarity at the first instant when I said truth [reality]. Remain, if you can, in that first instant when you are dazzled as if by a flash, when it is said to you, Truth [Reality]. Yet you cannot; you will slip back into familiar earthly things. What weight drags you back except the sticky birdlime of the stains you have acquired through desire, and the errors of your wandering from the right path?

Look again, and see if you can. You certainly do not love anything except what is good. The earth is good, with its high mountains, proportioned hills, and level plains; a pleasant and fertile estate is good; a spacious, bright, well-proportioned house is good; animals, living bodies, are good; mild and healthy air is good; pleasant and wholesome food is good; health without pain or fatigue is good; a human face with balanced proportions, a cheerful expression, and a bright complexion is good; a friend’s mind is good, with the sweetness of agreement and the confidence of love; a righteous person is good; riches are good because they are readily useful; heaven is good, with its sun, moon, and stars; angels are good through their holy obedience; speech is good when it teaches pleasantly and gives its hearer fitting guidance; a poem is good when its rhythms are harmonious and its meaning substantial. Why keep adding more examples? This thing is good and that thing is good, but remove this and that and consider goodness itself if you can; then you will see God, who is not good through some goodness other than Himself, but is the goodness of every good thing. For in all these good things, whether those mentioned or any others we can perceive or think of, we could not say that one was better than another, when we judge truly, unless a conception of goodness itself had been impressed on us, enabling us to judge things good and prefer one good thing to another. We should therefore love God as goodness itself, rather than as this or that good thing. The good we must seek for the soul is one to which it should hold fast in love, rather than rise above in judgment; and what can this be except God? Not a good mind, a good angel, or good heaven, but good goodness itself. Perhaps this will make what I mean easier to understand. When a mind is called good, for example, the two words signify two things to me: what makes it a mind and what makes it good. The mind had no part in making itself a mind, because it did not yet exist to make itself anything; becoming a good mind, however, must clearly be brought about by the will. This is not because what makes it a mind is not itself good, for otherwise how could it already be called, quite truly, better than the body? It is not yet called a good mind because an act of will is still needed to make it better; if it neglects this, it is justly blamed and rightly described as not a good mind. It differs from a mind that does act in this way; since that mind deserves praise, the mind that does not act certainly deserves blame. When it deliberately acts in this way and becomes a good mind, it can do so only by turning toward something other than itself. What could it turn toward to become a good mind, except the good that it loves, seeks, and obtains? If it turns away again and becomes bad, it could not turn back when it wished to improve unless the good from which it turned continued to exist in itself. There would therefore be no changeable good things without unchanging goodness. Whenever you hear of this or that good thing, which can also in other respects be called not good, if you can set aside things made good by sharing in goodness, and discern goodness itself, which makes them good by their sharing in it (for when this or that good thing is mentioned, you also understand goodness itself along with it): if, as I say, you can remove these things and discern goodness in itself, you will have discerned God. If you hold fast to Him in love, you will immediately be blessed. Since other things are loved only because they are good, be ashamed to hold fast to them without loving the goodness itself that makes them good. Consider also something that is merely a mind, not yet made good by turning toward unchanging goodness, but simply a mind, as I said. When it pleases us so much that, if we understand correctly, we prefer it even to all physical light, it pleases us not in itself but in the art through which it was made. We approve its creation through the same art in which we see that it ought to have been created. This is truth and simple goodness: it is nothing other than goodness itself, and therefore also the highest good. Only what receives its goodness from another good can become less or more good. To become good, therefore, the mind turns toward what gives it existence as a mind. The will therefore agrees with nature and perfects the mind in goodness when it turns in love toward the good that also gives it the goodness it does not lose by turning away. By turning away from the highest good, the mind stops being good but does not stop being a mind. Being a mind is already a good, and a good better than the body. The will therefore loses what the will obtains. The mind already existed when it could wish to turn toward the source of its existence; it did not yet exist to wish for existence before it existed. Our [supreme] good is where we see whether something ought to exist or have existed, whenever we understand that it ought to exist or have existed, and where we see that something could not have existed unless it ought to have existed, even when we do not understand how it ought to have existed. This good, then, is not far from any of us: for in it we live, and move, and have our being.

We must hold firmly to this through love, so that we may enjoy the presence of what gives us existence and without which we could not exist at all. For as “we still walk by faith rather than sight,” we certainly do not yet see God, as the same [apostle] says, “face to face:” yet we will never see Him unless we already love Him now. But who loves what he does not know? Something can be known without being loved, but I ask whether something unknown can be loved; since if it cannot, then no one loves God before he knows Him. And what is it to know God except to see Him and grasp Him firmly with the mind? He is not a physical body to be discovered with bodily eyes. Yet even before we can see and grasp God as He can be seen and grasped (something granted to the pure in heart, for “blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God”), the heart cannot be cleansed and made fit and ready to see Him unless He is loved through faith. Where else are the three things that the whole structure of divine Scripture builds up in the mind, Faith, Hope, and Love, except in a mind that believes what it does not yet see, and hopes for and loves what it believes? Even what is unknown but believed can therefore be loved. We must certainly take care that a mind believing what it cannot see does not invent something nonexistent, and hope for and love what is false. Then it would not be love from a pure heart, good conscience, and sincere faith, which is the commandment’s goal, as the same apostle says. When we believe in physical things we have not seen, through reading or hearing about them, the mind inevitably imagines bodily features and shapes as they occur to thought; this imagined appearance is either untrue or, in the very rare case that it is true, believing it brings no benefit to our faith in itself, but serves another useful purpose indicated through it. Who reads or hears the Apostle Paul’s writings, or writings about him, without imagining the faces of both the apostle and everyone named there? Among the many people who know these books, each imagines those bodily features and shapes differently, and it is certainly unclear whose image comes closest to reality. Our faith is not concerned with those people’s physical faces, but with their living and acting through God’s grace as Scripture testifies; this is what benefits us to believe, what we must not despair of, and what we must seek. Even our Lord’s own human face is imagined in countless different ways, though it was one particular face, whatever it looked like. Likewise, what benefits our faith in our Lord Jesus Christ is not the mind’s imagined appearance, perhaps very different from reality, but our thought of humanity as a species; a conception of human nature is implanted in us like a standard, by which we immediately recognize anything of this kind we see as a human being or a human form.

This conception shapes our thinking when we believe that God became human for us, as an example of humility, and to show the love of God toward us. This is what benefits us to believe and hold firmly and unshakably in our heart: that the humility by which God was born of a woman, and was led to death amid such great insults from mortal people, is the strongest medicine to cure the swelling of our pride, and the deep mystery that releases sin’s bonds. Likewise, because we know what unlimited power is, we believe in the all-powerful God’s miraculous power and resurrection. We form ideas about these deeds according to conceptions of species and genera either implanted in us by nature or gathered through experience, so that our faith is not fabricated. We do not know the Virgin Mary’s face, from whom He was miraculously born, though she had known no husband and remained a virgin through the birth itself. Nor have we seen Lazarus’s bodily features, Bethany, the tomb, or the stone He ordered removed when He raised Lazarus from the dead; nor the new tomb cut out in the rock, from which He Himself arose; nor the Mount of Olives, from where He ascended into heaven. In fact, those of us who have not seen these things do not know whether they match our ideas, and judge that they probably do not. When a place, person, or other body we imagined before seeing it turns out to look exactly as we imagined, we are greatly surprised. This happens so rarely as almost never to occur. Yet we believe these things very firmly, because we imagine them according to conceptions of species and genera that we know with certainty. We believe that our Lord Jesus Christ was born from a virgin called Mary. But what a virgin is, what birth is, and what a proper name is are matters of certain knowledge rather than belief. Whether Mary’s face was what we imagine when speaking or thinking of these things is something we neither know nor believe. We can therefore say without violating the faith that perhaps she had such a face and perhaps she did not; but no one could say that perhaps Christ was born from a virgin without violating the Christian faith. We therefore want to understand the Trinity’s eternity, equality, and unity as far as we are permitted, but must believe before understanding; we must take care that our faith is not fabricated; we must enjoy that same Trinity to live in blessedness; if we believe something false about it, our hope would be worthless and our love impure. How, then, can we love through belief the Trinity we do not know? Is this through a conception of species or genus, like the conception through which we love the Apostle Paul? Even if his face was different from what we imagine (something completely unknown to us), we know what a human being is. To take the nearest example, that is what we are; clearly he too was human, and his soul joined to his body lived a mortal life. We therefore believe of him what we find in ourselves, according to the species or genus that includes all human nature alike. What, then, do we know of that supreme Trinity as a species or genus, as if there were many such trinities and we had experienced some of them, so that an impressed standard of likeness, a conception of species or genus, would let us believe this Trinity to be like them, and love what we believe but do not yet know through its likeness to what we do know? This is certainly not the case. Or, just as we love the fact that our Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead, although we have never seen anyone rise from the dead, can we believe in and love the Trinity we do not see and have never seen anything like? But we certainly know what it is to die, and what it is to live; because we are alive and have sometimes seen and encountered dead and dying people. And what else is it to rise again, except to live again, that is, to return to life from death? When, therefore, we say and believe that there is a Trinity, we know what a group of three is, because we know what three means; but this is not what we love. We can easily have such a group whenever we want, simply by holding up three fingers, without considering other examples. Or do we love not every group of three, but the Trinity that is God? What we love in the Trinity, then, is that it is God; but we have never seen or known another God, because God is one, the only God, whom we have not yet seen and whom we love through belief. The question is what likeness or comparison with known things enables us to believe and so love God, whom we do not yet know.

Come back with me, then, and let us consider why we love the apostle. Is it because of his human nature, which we know very well, since we believe he was human? Certainly not; if so, he would no longer be the one we love, because he is no longer that whole human being, for his soul is separated from his body. Yet we believe that what we love in him is still alive, for we love his righteous mind. What standard of genus or species guides us, then, except our knowing both what a mind is and what being righteous is? We rightly say that we know what a mind is because we too have a mind. We have never seen it with our eyes and formed a conception of species or genus from the likeness of several minds we had seen; rather, as already mentioned, we know it because we too have a mind. What is known so intimately, and recognizes itself so directly, as that through which everything else is perceived, the mind itself? We also recognize the bodily movements that show us others are alive by their likeness to our own movements; in living we move our bodies as we observe those bodies moving. Even when a living body moves, our eyes gain no access to the mind, which eyes cannot see; we perceive something within that physical mass like what is within us and similarly moves our own mass: life and soul. This is not exclusive to human awareness and reason, because animals too perceive that they themselves are alive, that other animals are alive in relation to one another, and that we too are alive. They too perceive our souls only through bodily movements, immediately and very easily through a kind of natural affinity. We therefore know another’s mind from our own, and believe in the mind of someone we do not know from our own as well. By reflecting on our own, we can know not only that a mind exists but what a mind is: for we have a mind. But how do we know what a righteous man is? We said earlier that we love the apostle only because he has a righteous mind. We know, then, what a righteous man also is, just as we know what a mind is. We know what a mind is from ourselves, as already mentioned, because we have a mind. But how do we know what a righteous man is, if we are not righteous? If only a righteous person knows what a righteous person is, only a righteous person loves a righteous person; we cannot love someone because we believe him righteous unless we know what being righteous means; as we have already shown, no one loves what he believes and does not see, except through a standard supplied by a conception of genus or species. If this means only a righteous person loves a righteous person, how could someone not yet righteous want to become righteous? No one wants to become what he does not love. Yet someone not righteous must want to become righteous in order to become so; to want to be righteous, he loves a righteous person. Therefore even someone not yet righteous loves a righteous person. Someone who does not know what a righteous person is cannot love one. Thus even someone not yet righteous knows what a righteous person is. How, then, does he know this? Does he see it with his eyes? Is any physical thing righteous as it is white, black, square, or round? Who could say this? Yet eyes have seen nothing except physical things. Nothing in a human being is righteous except the mind; when someone is called righteous, this describes his mind rather than his body. Righteousness is a kind of mental beauty that makes people beautiful, including many whose bodies are misshapen and deformed. And as the mind is not seen with the eyes, so neither is its beauty. How, then, does someone not yet righteous know what a righteous person is and love that person in order to become righteous? Do bodily movements display signs that reveal this or that person as righteous? How could someone recognize these as signs of a righteous mind without knowing at all what being righteous is? He therefore does know. But how do we know what it is to be righteous, even when we are not yet righteous? If we know it from outside ourselves, we know it through something physical. But this is not a thing of the body. Therefore we know in ourselves what it is to be righteous. When I try to express this, I find it nowhere but within myself; if I ask someone else what being righteous is, he looks within himself for his answer; anyone who answers truly from this source has found the answer within himself. When I want to speak of Carthage, I look within myself for what to say and find a conception or image of Carthage; but I received this through the body, through bodily perception, because I was physically present in the city, saw and perceived it, and kept it in memory, so that I could find a word about it within myself whenever I wanted to speak of it. Its word is that very image in my memory, not that sound of two syllables when Carthage is named, or when that name is silently thought from time to time, but what I see in my mind when I voice those two syllables, or even before I voice them. Likewise, when I want to speak of Alexandria, which I have never seen, an image of it is present to me. Having heard from many people and believed the city to be great, I formed an image as best I could from their descriptions; this is its word in me when I want to speak of it, before I utter with my voice the five syllables which make the name almost everyone knows. If I could show that mental image to people who know Alexandria, they would certainly all say it is not the city, or, if they said it was, I would be greatly surprised; looking at it within my mind, at an image like its picture, I would still not know that it was the city, but would believe those who remembered an image they had actually seen. I do not ask what being righteous is, find it, or look at it as I express it in that way; nor do others approve my words, or I theirs, in that way, as if I had seen it with my eyes, learned it through bodily perception, or heard it from people who had learned it like that. When I knowingly say that a righteous mind uses knowledge and reason to give everyone their due in life and conduct, I do not think of something absent, like Carthage, or imagine it as best I can, like Alexandria, whether accurate or not; I see something present within myself, although I am not myself what I see; many who hear this will approve. Anyone who hears and knowingly approves also sees the same thing within himself, even if he is not himself what he sees. When a righteous person says this, however, he sees and states what he himself is. Where else does he see it except within himself? This is not surprising; how else could he see himself except within himself? What is remarkable is that a mind sees within itself what it has seen nowhere else, sees it truly, and sees a genuinely righteous mind, yet is itself a mind without being the righteous mind it sees within. Is another, righteous mind present within a mind not yet righteous? If not, what does it see there when it sees and describes a righteous mind nowhere but within itself, although it is not itself righteous? Is what it sees an inward truth present to a mind capable of seeing it? Yet not everyone has that ability; not everyone able to see it is also what they see, that is, being able to see and describe a righteous mind does not make their own minds righteous. How could they become righteous except by holding fast to the form they see, so that it shapes them into righteous minds, not merely seeing and saying that a righteous mind uses knowledge and reason to give everyone their due in life and conduct, but themselves living righteously with righteous character, giving everyone their due and owing no one anything except mutual love? How can anyone hold fast to that form except by loving it? Why, then, do we love someone we believe righteous without loving the form in which we see what a righteous mind is, so that we too could become righteous? Is it that without loving the form we would not love the person at all, since we love him through it, but while we remain unrighteous, we love the form too little to become righteous? A person believed righteous is therefore loved through the form and truth that the one loving him sees and understands within himself; that form and truth itself, however, cannot be loved through any source other than itself. We find nothing else like it that we already know and could use to love it through belief while it remained unknown. Whatever we have seen of that kind is this very thing; there is nothing else of its kind, because it alone is what it is. Anyone who loves people should therefore love them either because they are righteous or so that they may become righteous. He should likewise love himself either because he is righteous or so that he may become righteous; for in this way he loves his neighbor as himself without danger. Someone who loves himself otherwise loves himself wrongly, because he loves himself in order to be unrighteous, and therefore in order to be wicked; it follows that he does not love himself; for, “Whoever loves injustice hates his own soul.”

Our inquiry into the Trinity and the knowledge of God must therefore focus above all on what true love is, or rather what love is. Only true love should be called love; otherwise it is desire; people who desire are therefore incorrectly said to love, just as people who love are incorrectly said to desire. True love means holding fast to truth and living righteously, and so treating all mortal things as worthless beside the love of people through which we want them to live righteously. In this way we should also be ready to die for our brothers’ benefit, as our Lord Jesus Christ taught us by His example. Since the two commandments on which all the Law and prophets depend are love of God and love of our neighbor, Scripture has good reason often to mention one instead of both. Sometimes only love of God is mentioned, as in the passage, “For we know that all things work together for the good of those who love God;” and again, “If anyone loves God, that person is known by Him;” and that, “Because the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us;” and in many other passages. Someone who loves God must do what God commands, and loves Him in proportion to doing so; he must therefore also love his neighbor, because God has commanded it. Sometimes Scripture mentions only love of our neighbor, as in the passage, “Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ;” and again, “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself;” and in the Gospel, “Do to others everything you want them to do to you; for this is the Law and the prophets.” There are many other passages in the sacred writings where only love of our neighbor seems required for perfection, without mentioning love of God; yet the Law and prophets depend on both commands. This too is because someone who loves his neighbor must love love itself above everything else. But “God is love; and whoever lives in love lives in God.” He must therefore love God above everything else. People who seek God through the Powers governing the world or its parts are therefore far removed and cast away from Him, through differences in desire rather than distances in space; they try to find an outward path and abandon their own interior, where God is. Even if they have heard of some holy heavenly Power or conceived it in some way, they want its deeds that astonish human weakness, rather than imitating the devotion through which divine rest is attained. Through pride they prefer to do what an angel does rather than, through devotion, become what an angel is. No holy being delights in his own power, but in Him who gives the power fitting for him to possess; he knows it is a greater sign of power to be united to the All-powerful through a devout will than to do through his own power and will what makes those unable to do it tremble. When the Lord Jesus Christ Himself did such things, He wanted to teach better things to those astonished by them, and turn people absorbed and bewildered by unusual events in time toward eternal and inward things; He says, “Come to me, all of you who labor and carry heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke on you.” He does not say, Learn from me because I raise people who have been dead four days; but He says, “Learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in heart.” Humility, which is completely firm, is more powerful and safer than pride, which is completely inflated. And so He goes on to say, “And you shall find rest for your souls,” for “Love is not puffed up;” and “God is Love;” and “those faithful in love will rest in Him,” called back from outward noise to quiet joys. Look, “God is Love”; why go out and run to heaven’s heights and earth’s lowest parts, seeking Him who is within us, if we wish to be with Him?

Let no one say, I do not know what I love. Let him love his brother, and he will love love itself. For he knows the love with which he loves, more than the brother whom he loves. He can now know God better than he knows his brother: God is more clearly known because He is more present, more inwardly present, and more certain. Embrace the love of God, and by love embrace God. That is love itself, which unites all good angels and all God’s servants in the bond of holiness, joins us and them with one another, and joins us in submission to Himself. As we are healed of pride’s swelling, we are increasingly filled with love; what fills someone full of love except God? You may reply: I see love, and, as far as I am able, I contemplate it with my mind, and believe Scripture’s statement that “God is love; and whoever lives in love lives in God;” but when I see love, I do not see in it the Trinity. Yet if you see love, you see the Trinity. I will remind you, if I can, so that you may recognize that you see it; only let love itself be present to move us toward something good. When we love love, we love someone who loves something precisely because he loves something; what, then, does love love, so that love itself can also be loved? What loves nothing is not love. If it loves itself, it must love something in order to love itself as love. For as a word indicates something, and indicates also itself, but cannot identify itself as a word without indicating that it signifies something, so love does love itself, but unless it loves itself as loving something, it does not love itself as love. What, then, does love love except what we love through love? To begin with what is nearest to us, this is our brother. Listen to how strongly the Apostle John praises brotherly love: “Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is no cause of stumbling in him.” Clearly he located perfect righteousness in love for our brother; for he certainly is perfect in whom “there is no occasion of stumbling.” Yet he seems to have left love of God unmentioned, which he would never have done unless he intended God to be understood within brotherly love itself. A little later in the same letter, he says very plainly: “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God; for God is love.” This passage states sufficiently and clearly that brotherly love itself (for that is brotherly love by which we love each other) is declared by such great authority not only to come from God, but to be God. When, therefore, we love our brother from love, we love our brother from God; we cannot fail to love above all else the very love through which we love our brother; we can therefore conclude that these two commandments cannot exist without one another. For since “God is love,” he who loves love certainly loves God; and anyone who loves his brother must love love. A little later he therefore says, “How can someone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, love God, whom he has not seen?” The reason he does not see God is that he does not love his brother. Someone who does not love his brother does not remain in love, and someone who does not remain in love does not remain in God, because God is love. Furthermore, someone who does not remain in God does not remain in light, for “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” Why be surprised if someone not remaining in light does not see light, that is, does not see God, because he is in darkness? But he sees his brother with human sight, with which God cannot be seen. If he spiritually loved the person he sees with human sight, he would see God, who is love itself, with the inner sight by which He can be seen. How, then, can someone who does not love his visible brother love God, whom he consequently does not see, since God is love, and whoever does not love his brother does not have love? We should not be troubled by the further question of how much love we should give our brother and how much God: incomparably more to God than to ourselves, but as much to our brother as to ourselves; the more we love God, the more we love ourselves. Therefore we love God and our neighbor from one and the same love; but we love God for the sake of God, and ourselves and our neighbors for the sake of God.

Why do we burn with love when we hear and read, “Look, now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation: giving no offense in anything, so that the ministry is not blamed: but in all things proving ourselves as God’s ministers, in great patience, afflictions, needs, distress, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and fasts; through purity, knowledge, patience, by kindness, by the Holy Spirit, through sincere love, by the word of truth, by the power of God, by the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, by honor and dishonor, through bad and good reputation: as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, yet look, we live; as disciplined, yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things?” Why is it that we are inflamed with love of the Apostle Paul, when we read these things, except that we believe he lived in this way? We do not believe God’s ministers should live in this way because someone told us, but because we see it inwardly, within ourselves, or rather above ourselves in truth itself. We therefore love the person we believe lived this way because of what we see. Unless we loved above all else the form we see as forever firm and unchanging, we would not love him because we firmly believe that his earthly life conformed to and agreed with this form. Somehow, however, believing someone lived in this way stirs us to greater love for this form itself, and to hope that keeps us from despairing that we too can live this way, because we are human and some human beings have lived this way, so that we desire it more intensely and pray for it more confidently. Love for the form according to which we believe they lived therefore makes us love their lives, while belief in their lives stirs a more intense love for that same form; the more intensely we love God, the more certainly and calmly we see Him, because in God we see the unchanging form of righteousness by which we judge how people should live. Faith therefore helps us know and love God, who is neither completely unknown nor completely unloved, so that through faith He may be known more clearly and loved more firmly.

What is the love or affection that divine Scripture so strongly praises and proclaims, except love of the good? Love belongs to someone who loves, and something is loved through it. There are therefore three: the one who loves, what is loved, and love. What, then, is love except a kind of life joining or seeking to join two things, the one who loves and what is loved? This holds even for outward and bodily loves. To drink in something purer and clearer, however, let us put the flesh beneath our feet and rise to the mind. What does the mind love in a friend except the mind? There too are three: the one who loves, what is loved, and love. We must still rise from here and seek what is above, as far as human beings are permitted. For a little while, however, let our inquiry rest here, without imagining we have already found what we seek; usually we must first find where to search for something, without yet finding the thing itself, but only where to look; so let this discussion be enough to give us a starting point, a kind of hinge from which to weave the rest of our argument.