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| How the Apostle Says that God is Now Seen by Us Through a Glass.
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Chapter 8.—How the Apostle
Says that God is Now Seen by Us Through a Glass.
14. I know that wisdom is an
incorporeal substance, and that it is the light by which those
things are seen that are not seen by carnal eyes; and yet a man so
great and so spiritual [as Paul] says, “We see now through a
glass, in an enigma, but then face to face.”961
If we ask what and of what sort is
this “glass,” this assuredly occurs to our minds, that in a
glass nothing is discerned but an image. We have endeavored, then,
so to do; in order that we might see in some way or other by this
image which we are, Him by whom we are made, as by a glass. And
this is intimated also in the words of the same apostle: “But we
with open face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are
transformed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by
the Spirit of the Lord.”962
“Beholding as in a glass,”963
he has said,
i.e. seeing by means of a glass, not looking from a
watch-tower: an ambiguity that does not exist in the Greek
language, whence the apostolic epistles have been rendered into
Latin. For in Greek, a glass,964
in which the images of things are
visible, is wholly distinct in the sound of the word also from a
watch-tower,965
from the
height of which we command a more distant view. And it is quite
plain that the apostle, in using the word “speculantes” in
respect to the glory of the Lord, meant it to come from
“speculum,” not from “specula.” But where he says, “We
are transformed into the same image,” he assuredly means to speak
of the image of God; and by calling it “the same,” he means
that very image which we see in the glass, because that same image
is also the glory of the Lord; as he says elsewhere, “For a man
indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image
and glory of God,”966
—a text already discussed in the
twelfth book. He means, then, by “We are transformed,” that we
are changed from one form to another, and that we pass from a form
that is obscure to a form that is bright: since the
obscure form, too, is the image of God; and if an image, then
assuredly also “glory,” in which we are created as men, being
better than the other animals. For it is said of human nature in
itself, “The man ought not to cover his head, because he is the
image and glory of God.” And this nature, being the most
excellent among things created, is transformed from a form that is
defaced into a form that is beautiful, when it is justified by its
own Creator from ungodliness. Since even in ungodliness itself, the
more the faultiness is to be condemned, the more certainly is the
nature to be praised. And therefore he has added, “from glory to
glory:” from the glory of creation to the glory of justification.
Although these words, “from glory to glory,” may be understood
also in other ways;—from the glory of faith to the glory of
sight, from the glory whereby we are sons of God to the glory
whereby we shall be like Him, because “we shall see Him as He
is.”967
But in that
he has added “as from the Spirit of the Lord,” he declares that
the blessing of so desirable a transformation is conferred upon us
by the grace of God.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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