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| Curious Views Respecting God's Method of Working with Matter Exposed. Discrepancies in the Heretic's Opinion About God's Local Relation to Matter. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter
XLIV.—Curious Views Respecting God’s Method of Working with
Matter Exposed. Discrepancies in the Heretic’s Opinion About
God’s Local Relation to Matter.
But it remains that I should show also how you
make God work. You are plainly enough at variance with the
philosophers; but neither are you in accord with the prophets. The
Stoics maintain that God pervaded Matter, just as honey the honeycomb.
You, however, affirm that it is not by pervading Matter that God makes
the world, but simply by appearing, and approaching it, just as beauty
affects6589 a thing by simply
appearing, and a loadstone by approaching it. Now what similarity is
there in God forming the world, and beauty wounding a soul, or a magnet
attracting iron? For even if God appeared to Matter, He yet did not
wound it, as beauty does the soul; if, again, He approached it, He yet
did not cohere to it, as the magnet does to the iron. Suppose, however,
that your examples are suitable ones. Then, of course,6590 it was by appearing and approaching to
Matter that God made the world, and He made it when He appeared and
when He approached to it. Therefore, since He had not made it before
then,6591 He had neither appeared nor approached to
it. Now, by whom can it be believed that God had not appeared to
Matter—of the same nature as it even was owing to its eternity?
Or that He had been at a distance from it—even He whom we believe
to be existent everywhere, and everywhere apparent; whose praises all
things chant, even inanimate things and things incorporeal,
according to (the
prophet) Daniel?6592 How immense the
place, where God kept Himself so far aloof from Matter as to have
neither appeared nor approached to it before the creation of the world!
I suppose He journeyed to it from a long distance, as soon as He wished
to appear and approach to it.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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