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| The Opinion Which Devises an Image of the Trinity in the Marriage of Male and Female, and in Their Offspring.
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Chapter 5.—The Opinion Which Devises an Image of the
Trinity in the Marriage of Male and Female, and in Their
Offspring.
5. Accordingly they do not seem to
me to advance a probable opinion, who lay it down that a trinity of
the image of God in three persons, so far as regards human nature,
can so be discovered as to be completed in the marriage of male and
female and in their offspring; in that the man himself, as it were,
indicates the person of the Father, but that which has so proceeded
from him as to be born, that of the Son; and so the third person as
of the Spirit, is, they say, the woman, who has so proceeded from
the man as not herself to be either son or daughter,746
although it
was by her conception that the offspring was born. For the Lord
hath said of the Holy Spirit that He proceedeth from the Father,747
and yet he
is not a son. In this erroneous opinion, then, the only point
probably alleged, and indeed sufficiently shown according to the
faith of the Holy Scripture, is this,—in the account of the
original creation of the woman,—that what so comes into existence
from some person as to make another person, cannot in every case be
called a son; since the person of the woman came into existence
from the person of the man, and yet she is not called his daughter.
All the rest of this opinion is in truth so absurd, nay indeed so
false, that it is most easy to refute it. For I pass over such a
thing, as to think the Holy Spirit to be the mother of the Son of
God, and the wife of the Father; since perhaps it may be answered
that these things offend us in carnal things, because we think of
bodily conceptions and births. Although these very things
themselves are most chastely thought of by the pure, to whom all
things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving, of whom
both
the mind and conscience are polluted, nothing is pure;748
so that even
Christ, born of a virgin according to the flesh, is a
stumbling-block to some of them. But yet in the case of those
supreme spiritual things, after the likeness of which those kinds
of the inferior creature also are made although most remotely, and
where there is nothing that can be injured and nothing corruptible,
nothing born in time, nothing formed from that which is formless,
or whatever like expressions there may be; yet they ought not to
disturb the sober prudence of any one, lest in avoiding empty
disgust he run into pernicious error. Let him accustom himself so
to find in corporeal things the traces of things spiritual, that
when he begins to ascend upwards from thence, under the guidance of
reason, in order to attain to the unchangeable truth itself through
which these things were made, he may not draw with himself to
things above what he despises in things below. For no one ever
blushed to choose for himself wisdom as a wife, because the name of
wife puts into a man’s thoughts the corruptible connection which
consists in begetting children; or because in truth wisdom itself
is a woman in sex, since it is expressed in both Greek and Latin
tongues by a word of the feminine gender.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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