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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, 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, 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; 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.
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