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We have said as much as the scope of this work demands regarding these
two things, to wit, our existence, and our knowledge of it, and how
much they are loved by us, and how there is found even in the lower
creatures a kind of likeness of these things, and yet with a
difference. We have yet to speak of the love wherewith they are
loved, to determine whether this love itself is loved. And doubtless
it is; and this is the proof. Because in men who are justly loved,
it is rather love itself that is loved; for he is not justly called a,
good man who knows what is good, but who loves it. Is it not then
obvious that we love in ourselves the very love wherewith we love
whatever good we love? For there is also a love wherewith we love that
which we ought not to love; and this love is hated by him who loves
that wherewith he loves what ought to be loved. For it is quite
possible for both to exist in one man. And this co-existence is good
for a man, to the end that this love which conduces to our living well
may grow, and the other, which leads us to evil may decrease, until
our whole life be perfectly healed and transmuted into good. For if we
were beasts, we should love the fleshly and sensual life, and this
would be our sufficient good; and when it was well with us in respect
of it, we should seek nothing beyond. In like manner, if we were
trees, we could not, indeed, in the strict sense of the word, love
anything; nevertheless we should seem, as it were, to long for that
by which we might become more abundantly and luxuriantly fruitful. If
we were stones, or waves, or wind, or flame, or anything of that
kind, we should want, indeed, both sensation and life, yet should
possess a kind of attraction towards our own proper position and natural
order. For the specific gravity of bodies is, as it were, their
love, whether they are carried downwards by their weight, or upwards
by their levity. For the body is borne by its gravity, as the spirit
by love, whithersoever it is borne. But we are men, created in the
image of our Creator, whose eternity is true, and whose truth is
eternal, whose love is eternal and true, and who Himself is the
eternal, true, and adorable Trinity, without confusion, without
separation; and, therefore, while, as we run over all the works
which He has established, we may detect, as it were, His
footprints, now more and now less distinct even in those things that
are beneath us, since they could not so much as exist, or be bodied
forth in any shape, or follow and observe any law, bad they not been
made by Him who supremely is, and is supremely good and supremely
wise; yet in ourselves beholding His image, let us, like that
younger son of the gospel, come to ourselves, and arise and return to
Him from whom by our sin we had departed. There our being will have
no death, our knowledge no error, our love no mishap. But now,
though we are assured of our possession of these three things, not on
the testimony of others, but by our own consciousness of their
presence, and because we see them with our own most truthful interior
vision, yet, as we cannot of our selves know how long they are to
continue, and whether they shall never cease to be, and what issue
their good or bad use will lead to, we seek for others who can acquaint
us of these things, if we have not already found them. Of the
trustworthiness of these witnesses, there will, not now, but
subsequently, be an opportunity of speaking. But in this book let us
go on as we have begun, with God's help, to speak of the city of
God, not in its state of pilgrimage and mortality, but as it exists
ever immortal in the heavens, that is, let us speak of the holy angels
who maintain their allegiance to God, who never were, nor ever shall
be, apostate, between whom and those who forsook light eternal and
became darkness, God, as we have already said, made at the first a
separation.
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