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| Simon's Accusation of Peter.
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Chapter III.—Simon’s Accusation of Peter.
“‘Peter does this to you while
promising to make you wise. For, under the pretext of proclaiming
one God, he seems to free you from many lifeless images, which do not
at all injure those who worship them, because they are seen by the eyes
themselves to be made of stone, or brass, or gold, or of some other
lifeless material. Wherefore the soul, because it knows that what
is seen is nothing, cannot be spell-bound by fear in an equal degree by
means of what is visible. But looking to a terrible God through
the influence of deceptive teaching, it has all its natural foundations
overturned. And I say this, not because I exhort you to worship
images, but because Peter, seeming to free your souls from terrible
images,1317
drives mad the
mind of each one of you by a more terrible image, introducing God in a
shape, and that, too, a God extremely just,—an image which is
accompanied by what is terrible and awful to the contemplative soul, by
that which can entirely destroy the energy of a sound mind. For
the mind, when in the midst of such a storm, is like the depth stirred
by a violent wind, perturbed and darkened. Wherefore, if he comes
to benefit you, let him not, while seeming to dissolve your fears which
gently proceed from lifeless shapes, introduce in their stead the
terrible shape of God. But has God a shape? If He has, He
possesses a figure. And if He has a figure, how is He not
limited? And if limited, He is in space. But if He is in
space, He is less than the space which encloses Him. And if less
than anything, how is He greater than all, or superior to all, or the
highest of all? This, then, is the state of the
case.
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