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| The Question Why the Holy Spirit is Not Begotten, and How He Proceeds from the Father and the Son, Will Only Be Understood When We are in Bliss.
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Chapter 25.—The
Question Why the Holy Spirit is Not Begotten, and How He Proceeds
from the Father and the Son, Will Only Be Understood When We are in
Bliss.
For if any belong to Him, although
far duller in intellect than those, yet when they are freed from
the body at the end of this life, the envious powers have no right
to hold them. For that Lamb that was slain by them without any debt
of sin has conquered them; but not by the might of power before He
had done so by the righteousness of blood. And free accordingly
from the power of the devil, they are borne up by holy angels,
being set free from all evils by the mediator of God and men, the
man Christ Jesus.1044
Since by the harmonious testimony
of the Divine Scriptures, both Old and New, both those by which
Christ was foretold, and those by which He was announced, there is
no other name under heaven whereby men must be saved.1045
And when
purged from all contagion of corruption, they are placed in
peaceful abodes until they take their bodies again, their own, but
now incorruptible, to adorn, not to burden them. For this is the
will of the best and most wise Creator, that the spirit of a man,
when piously subject to God, should have a body happily subject,
and that this happiness should last for ever.
45. There we shall see the truth
without any difficulty, and shall enjoy it to the full, most clear
and most certain. Nor shall we be inquiring into anything by a mind
that reasons, but shall discern by a mind that contemplates, why
the Holy Spirit is not a Son, although He proceeds from the Father.
In that light there will be no place for inquiry: but here, by
experience itself it has appeared to me so difficult,—as beyond
doubt it will likewise appear to them also who shall carefully and
intelligently read what I have written,—that although in the
second book1046
I promised
that I would speak thereof in another place, yet as often as I have
desired to illustrate it by the creaturely image of it which we
ourselves are, so often, let my meaning be of what sort it might,
did adequate utterance entirely fail me; nay, even in my very
meaning I felt that I had attained to endeavor rather than
accomplishment. I had indeed found in one person, such as is a man,
an image of that Highest Trinity, and had desired, especially in
the ninth book, to illustrate and render more intelligible the
relation of the Three Persons by that which is subject to time and
change. But three things belonging to one person cannot suit those
Three Persons, as man’s purpose demands; and this we have
demonstrated in this fifteenth book.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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