Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| God Must First Be Known by an Unerring Faith, that He May Be Loved.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter 4.—God Must First Be
Known by an Unerring Faith, that He May Be Loved.
6. But it is by love that we must
stand firm to this and cleave to this, in order that we may enjoy
the presence of that by which we are, and in the absence of which
we could not be at all. For as “we walk as yet by faith, and not
by sight,”668
we certainly
do not yet see God, as the same [apostle] saith, “face to
face:”669
whom however
we shall never see, unless now already we love. But who loves what
he does not know? For it is possible something may be known and not
loved: but I ask whether it is possible that what is not known 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 behold Him and
steadfastly perceive Him with the mind? For He is not a body to be
searched out by carnal eyes. But before also that we have power to
behold and to perceive God, as He can be beheld and perceived,
which is permitted to the pure in heart; for “blessed are the
pure in heart. for they shall see God;”670
except He is loved by faith, it
will not be possible for the heart to be cleansed, in order that it
may be apt and meet to see Him. For where are there those three, in
order to build up which in the mind the whole apparatus of the
divine Scriptures has been raised up, namely Faith, Hope, and
Charity,671
except in a
mind believing what it does not yet see, and hoping and loving what
it believes? Even He therefore who is not known, but yet is
believed, can be loved. But indisputably we must take care, lest
the mind believing that which it does not see, feign to itself
something which is not, and hope for and love that which is false.
For in that case, it will not be charity out of a pure heart, and
of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned, which is the end of
the commandment, as the same apostle says.672
7. But it must needs be, that, when
by reading or hearing of them we believe in any corporeal things
which we have not seen, the mind frames for itself something under
bodily features and forms, just as it may occur to our thoughts;
which either is not true, or even if it be true, which can most
rarely happen, yet this is of no benefit to us to believe in by
faith, but it is useful for some other purpose, which is intimated
by means of it. For who is there that reads or hears what the
Apostle Paul has written, or what has been written of him, that
does not imagine to himself the countenance both of the apostle
himself, and of all those whose names are there mentioned? And
whereas, among such a multitude of men to whom these books are
known, each imagines in a different way those bodily features and
forms, it is assuredly uncertain which it is that imagines them
more nearly and more like the reality. Nor, indeed, is our faith
busied therein with the bodily countenance of those men; but only
that by the grace of God they so lived and so acted as that
Scripture witnesses: this it is which it is both useful to believe,
and which must not be despaired of, and must be sought. For even
the countenance of our Lord Himself in the flesh is variously
fancied by the diversity of countless imaginations, which yet was
one, whatever it was. Nor in our faith which we have of our
Lord
Jesus Christ, is that wholesome which the mind imagines for itself,
perhaps far other than the reality, but that which we think of man
according to his kind: for we have a notion of human nature
implanted in us, as it were by rule, according to which we know
forthwith, that whatever such thing we see is a man or the form of
a man. E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
