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| Every Corporeal Conception Must Be Rejected, in Order that It May Be Understood How God is Truth.
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Chapter 2.—Every Corporeal Conception Must Be
Rejected, in Order that It May Be Understood How God is
Truth.
3. But in respect to bodies, it may
be the case that this gold and that gold may be equally true
[real], but this may be greater than that, since magnitude is not
the same thing in this case as truth; and it is one thing for it to
be gold, another to be great. So also in the nature of the soul; a
soul is not called great in the same respect in which it is called
true. For he, too, has a true [real] soul who has not a great soul;
since the essence of body and soul is not the essence of the truth
[reality] itself; as is the Trinity, one God, alone, great, true,
truthful, the truth. Of whom if we endeavor to think, so far as He
Himself permits and grants, let us not think of any touch or
embrace in local space, as if of three bodies, or of any
compactness of conjunction, as fables tell of three-bodied Geryon;
but let whatsoever may occur to the mind, that is of such sort as
to be greater in three than in each singly, and less in one than in
two, be rejected without any doubt; for so everything corporeal is
rejected. But also in spiritual things let nothing changeable that
may have occurred to the mind be thought of God. For when we aspire
from this depth to that height, it is a step towards no small
knowledge, if, before we can know what God is, we can already know
what He is not. For certainly He is neither earth nor heaven; nor,
as it were, earth and heaven; nor any such thing as we see in the
heaven; nor any such thing as we do not see, but which perhaps is
in heaven. Neither if you were to magnify in the imagination of
your thought the light of the sun as much as you are able, either
that it may be greater, or that it may be brighter, a thousand
times as much, or times without number; neither is this God.
Neither as663
| 663 Read si for sicut,
if for as. Bened. ed. | we think of
the pure angels as spirits animating celestial bodies, and changing
and dealing with them after the will by which they serve God; not
even if all, and there are “thousands of thousands,”664
were brought
together into one, and became one; neither is any such thing God.
Neither if you were to think of the same spirits as without
bodies—a thing indeed most difficult for carnal thought to do.
Behold and see, if thou canst, O soul pressed down by the
corruptible body, and weighed down by earthly thoughts, many and
various; behold and see, if thou canst, that God is truth.665
| 665 Wisdom 9.15" id="iv.i.x.iii-p5.1" parsed="|Wis|9|15|0|0" osisRef="Bible:Wis.9.15">Wisd. ix. 15 | For it is
written that “God is light;”666
not in such way as these
eyes see, but in such way as the heart sees, when it is said, He is
truth [reality]. Ask not what is truth [reality] for immediately
the darkness of corporeal images and the clouds of phantasms will
put themselves in the way, and will disturb that calm which at the
first twinkling shone forth to thee, when I said truth [reality].
See that thou remainest, if thou canst, in that first twinkling
with which thou art dazzled, as it were, by a flash, when it is
said to thee, Truth [Reality]. But thou canst not; thou wilt glide
back into those usual and earthly things. And what weight, pray, is
it that will cause thee so to glide back, unless it be the
bird-lime of the stains of appetite thou hast contracted, and the
errors of thy wandering from the right path?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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