Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| What We are to Understand by God’s Speaking to the Angels.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter 6.—What We are to
Understand by God’s Speaking to the Angels.
We might have supposed that the
words uttered at the creation of man, “Let us,” and not Let me,
“make man,” were addressed to the angels, had He not added
“in our image;” but as we cannot believe that man was made in
the image of angels, or that the image of God is the same as that
of angels, it is proper to refer this expression to the plurality
of the Trinity. And yet this Trinity, being one God, even after
saying “Let us make,” goes on to say, “And God made man in
His image,”878
and not
“Gods made,” or “in their image.” And were there any
difficulty in applying to the angels the words, “Come, and let us
go down and confound their speech,” we might refer the plural to
the Trinity, as if the Father were addressing the Son and the Holy
Spirit; but it rather belongs to the angels to approach God by holy
movements, that is, by pious thoughts, and thereby to avail
themselves of the unchangeable truth which rules in the court of
heaven as their eternal law. For they are not themselves the
truth; but partaking in the creative truth, they are moved towards
it as the fountain of life, that what they have not in themselves
they may obtain
in it. And this movement of
theirs is steady, for they never go back from what they have
reached. And to these angels God does not speak, as we speak to
one another, or to God, or to angels, or as the angels speak to us,
or as God speaks to us through them: He speaks to them in an
ineffable manner of His own, and that which He says is conveyed to
us in a manner suited to our capacity. For the speaking of God
antecedent and superior to all His works, is the immutable reason
of His work: it has no noisy and passing sound, but an energy
eternally abiding and producing results in time. Thus He speaks
to the holy angels; but to us, who are far off, He speaks
otherwise. When, however, we hear with the inner ear some part of
the speech of God, we approximate to the angels. But in this work
I need not labor to give an account of the ways in which God
speaks. For either the unchangeable Truth speaks directly to the
mind of the rational creature in some indescribable way, or speaks
through the changeable creature, either presenting spiritual images
to our spirit, or bodily voices to our bodily sense.
The words, “Nothing will be
restrained from them which they have imagined to do,”879
are
assuredly not meant as an affirmation, but as an interrogation,
such as is used by persons threatening, as e.g., when Dido
exclaims,
“They will not take arms and
pursue?”880
| 880 Virgil, Æn., iv.
592. |
We are to understand the words as if it had
been said, Shall nothing be restrained from them which they have
imagined to do?881
| 881 Here Augustin remarks on the
addition of the particle ne to the word non, which he
has made to bring out the sense. | From these
three men, therefore, the three sons of Noah we mean, 73, or
rather, as the catalogue will show, 72 nations and as many
languages were dispersed over the earth, and as they increased
filled even the islands. But the nations multiplied much more
than the languages. For even in Africa we know several barbarous
nations which have but one language; and who can doubt that, as the
human race increased, men contrived to pass to the islands in
ships?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
