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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. 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 bodyily 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. 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.
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