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| The Trinity Which is the Image of God is Now to Be Sought in the Noblest Part of the Mind.
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Chapter 8.—The Trinity Which is the Image of God is
Now to Be Sought in the Noblest Part of the Mind.
11. But we have come now to that
argument in which we have undertaken to consider the noblest part
of the human mind, by which it knows or can know God, in order that
we may find in it the image of God. For although the human mind is
not of the same nature with God, yet the image of that nature than
which none is better, is to be sought and found in us, in that than
which our nature also has nothing better. But the mind must first
be considered as it is in itself, before it becomes partaker of
God; and His image must be found in it. For, as we have said,
although worn out and defaced by losing the participation of God,
yet the image of God still remains.878
For it is His image in this very
point, that it is capable of Him, and can be partaker of Him; which
so great good is only made possible by its being His image. Well,
then, the mind remembers, understands, loves itself; if we discern
this, we discern a trinity, not yet indeed God, but now at last an
image of God. The memory does not receive from without that which
it is to hold; nor does the understanding find without that which
it is to regard, as the eye of the body does; nor has will joined
these two from without, as it joins the form of the bodily object
and that which is thence wrought in the vision of the beholder; nor
has conception, in being turned to it, found an image of a thing
seen without, which has been somehow seized and laid up in the
memory, whence the intuition of him that recollects has been
formed, will as a third joining the two: as we showed to take place
in those trinities which were discovered in things corporeal, or
which were somehow drawn within from bodily objects by the bodily
sense; of all which we have discoursed in the eleventh book.879
Nor, again,
as it took place, or appeared to do so, when we went on further to
discuss that knowledge, which had its place now in the workings of
the inner man, and which was to be distinguished from wisdom; of
which knowledge the subject-matter was, as it were, adventitious to
the mind, and either was brought thither by historical
information,—as deeds and words, which are performed in time and
pass away, or which again are established in the nature of things
in their own times and places,—or arises in the man himself not
being there before, whether on the information of others, or by his
own thinking,—as faith, which we commended at length in the
thirteenth book, or as the virtues, by which, if they are true, one
so lives well in this mortality as to live blessedly in that
immortality which God promises. These and other things of the kind
have their proper order in time, and in that order we discerned
more easily a trinity of memory, sight, and love. For some of such
things anticipate the knowledge of learners. For they are knowable
also before they are known, and beget in the learner a knowledge of
themselves. And they either exist in their own proper places, or
have happened in time past; although things that are past do not
themselves exist, but only certain signs of them as past, the sight
or hearing of which makes it known that they have been and have
passed away. And these signs are either situate in the places
themselves, as e.g. monuments of the dead or the like; or
exist in written books worthy of credit, as is all history that is
of weight and approved authority; or are in the minds of those who
already know them; since what is already known to them is knowable
certainly to others also, whose knowledge it has anticipated, and
who are able to know it on the information of those who do know it.
And all these things, when they are learned, produce a certain kind
of trinity, viz. by their own proper species, which was
knowable also before it was known, and by the application to this
of the knowledge of the learner, which then begins to exist when he
learns them, and by will as a third which combines both; and when
they are known, yet another trinity is produced in the recollecting
of them, and this now inwardly in the mind itself, from those
images which, when they were learned, were impressed upon the
memory, and from the informing of the thought when the look has
been turned upon these by recollection, and from the will which as
a third combines these two. But those things which arise in the
mind, not having been there before, as faith and other things of
that kind, although they appear to be adventitious, since they are
implanted by teaching, yet are not situate without or transacted
without, as are those things which are believed; but began to be
altogether within in the mind itself. For faith is not that which
is believed, but that by which it is believed; and the
former is believed, the latter seen. Nevertheless, because it
began to be in the mind, which was a mind also before these things
began to be in it, it seems to be somewhat adventitious, and will
be reckoned among things past, when sight shall have succeeded, and
itself shall have ceased to be. And it makes now by its presence,
retained as it is, and beheld, and loved, a different trinity from
that which it will then make by means of some trace of itself,
which in passing it will have left in the memory: as has been
already said above.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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