Letters 120.14–120.20

But you, dearest brother, pray strongly and faithfully that the Lord may give you understanding, so that the things which the diligence of an instructor or teacher applies from outside may be fruitful; since neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth, to whom we say, “Our Father, who are in heaven”: not because he is there and not here, he who by incorporeal presence is whole everywhere, but because he is said to dwell in those whom he aids in their piety by his presence; and these are chiefly in the heavens, where our citizenship also is, if our mouth truly answers that we have our heart lifted up. For even if we took carnally what is written, “Heaven is my seat, but the earth the footstool of my feet,” we ought to believe that he is both there and here, though not wholly there, since his feet would be here, nor wholly here, since the upper parts of his body would be there. That carnal thought would in turn be shaken out of us by what is written of him, that he measured heaven with his palm and the earth with his fist. For who would sit in the space of his own palm, or set his feet in a place no bigger than his fist can hold? Unless perhaps vain flesh goes so far that it is not enough for it to attribute human limbs to the substance of God unless it also fashions monstrous ones, where the palm is broader than the loins and the fist broader than both soles put together. But these things are said so that, when the things we take carnally do not agree with one another, we may be admonished by them to think of spiritual things ineffably.

Hence, even if we think of the Lord's body, which he raised from the tomb and lifted into heaven, only in human form and limbs, we must not think that he sits at the right hand of the Father in such a way that the Father appears to sit at his left. For in that blessedness which surpasses all human understanding there is only a right hand, and that same right hand is the name of that same blessedness. Accordingly, not even what he said to Mary after his resurrection, “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father,” is to be taken so absurdly that we suppose he wished to be touched by women once he had ascended, he who offered himself to be touched by men before he ascended. But surely, when he said this, he wished it to be understood by Mary, in whom the church is figured, that he would have ascended to the Father for her when she recognized him as equal to the Father, and touched him with such faith for her salvation; lest, if she believed him to be only what had appeared in the flesh, she should not touch him rightly. So the heretic Photinus touched him, who believed Christ to be a man only.

And even if something more fitting and better can perhaps be understood in these words of the Lord, the opinion must without hesitation be rejected by which it is thought that the substance of the Father is in heaven, inasmuch as the Father is one person in the Trinity, while the divinity is not in heaven only but everywhere; as though the Father were one thing and his divinity, which he has in common with the Son and the Holy Spirit, another, so that the Trinity itself is as it were in bodily places and as it were corporeal, while the one divinity of the three persons is present everywhere and alone, as being incorporeal, is whole everywhere. For if it were their quality (and far be it that in the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit quality should be one thing and substance another), yet if it could be their quality, it certainly could not extend anywhere beyond its own substance; but if it is a substance and is other than they themselves are, it is another substance, which is likewise believed most falsely.

But if perhaps you do not quite understand the difference between quality and substance, you will certainly notice this more easily: that the divinity of the Trinity (which is thought to be other than the Trinity itself, and on whose account the Trinity is said to be not three gods but one God, because it is one and common to the three) either is a substance or is not. If it is a substance and is other than the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit or the Trinity itself together, it is without doubt another substance; but truth refutes and rejects this. But if this divinity is not a substance and is itself God, because it, and not that Trinity, is whole everywhere, then God is not a substance; what Catholic would say this? Again, if this divinity is not a substance, and according to it the Trinity is one God because it is one in the three, it ought not to have been said that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one substance, but of one divinity which is not a substance. But you recognize that in the Catholic faith, because it is true, this has been firmly established: that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, though a Trinity, are one God for this reason, that they are inseparably of one and the same substance or, if this is a better way of saying it, essence. For some of our writers, and especially the Greeks, have said that the Trinity which is God is one essence rather than one substance, thinking or understanding that there is some difference between these two names, which we need not dispute now; for even if we call this divinity, which is thought to be other than the Trinity itself, not a substance but an essence, the same falsehood will follow. For if it is other than the Trinity itself, it will be another essence, which far be it that a Catholic should think. It remains, then, that we believe that the Trinity is of one substance in such a way that the essence itself is nothing other than the Trinity itself. However much we advance in this life toward seeing it, what we shall see will be through a mirror and in an enigma. But when we have begun to have the spiritual body which is promised in the resurrection, whether we see it with the mind or, in a wonderful way (since the grace of the spiritual body is ineffable), even with the body, we shall see it according to our capacity, not through intervals of places, nor as smaller in one part and greater in another, since it is not a body and is whole everywhere.

As for what you put in your letter, that it seems to you, or rather that it seemed to you, that there is nothing living according to substance in justice, and that therefore you cannot yet think of God, that is, a living nature, as like justice, since justice, as you say, “lives not in itself but in us, or rather we live according to it, but justice itself does not live at all by itself”: to answer yourself on this point, consider whether it can rightly be said that life itself does not live, by which whatever we truly say lives comes to live. For I think it seems absurd to you that one should live by life and life itself not live. Further, if life itself above all lives, by which everything that lives lives, recall, I beg you, which souls divine Scripture calls dead; you will surely find the unjust, the impious, the unbelieving. For although the bodies of the impious live through them (of whom it was said, “Let the dead bury their own dead”), and it is understood there that even wicked souls are not without some life (for bodies could not live from them except by some kind of life, which souls cannot lack at all, whence they are rightly called immortal), yet they are said to be dead, having lost justice, for no other reason than that justice is a truer and greater life even of souls, though they live immortally with some kind of life; justice is, as it were, the life of lives, and when souls are in bodies even the bodies themselves are alive, which cannot live of themselves. Wherefore, if souls cannot help living somehow even in themselves, since from them bodies too live, which die when deserted by them, how much more must true justice be understood to live even in itself, from which souls so live that when it is lost they are called dead, although they do not cease to live with some small life!

That justice, then, which lives in itself is without doubt God, and lives unchangeably. And just as, being life in itself, it becomes life for us too when we are made partakers of it in some way, so, being justice in itself, it becomes justice for us too when by cleaving to it we live justly; and we are more or less just the more or less we cleave to it. Hence it is written of the only-begotten Son of God, who is certainly the wisdom and justice of the Father and is always in himself, that he was made for us by God wisdom and justice and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, he who glories may glory in the Lord. This indeed you yourself saw, when you added: “Unless perhaps it is asserted that not this human equity but only that which is God is justice.” Plainly that supreme God is true justice, or that true God is supreme justice; to hunger and thirst for it is our justice in this pilgrimage, and to be filled with it afterward will be our full justice in eternity. Let us not, then, think of God as like our justice, but rather think that we are the more like God the more just we can become by participation in him.

If, then, we must beware of thinking God like our justice, since the light that illuminates is incomparably more excellent than what is illuminated, how much more must we beware of believing him to be something lower and in a way more faded than our justice! And what else is justice, when it is in us, or any virtue by which one lives rightly and wisely, than the beauty of the inner man? And certainly it is according to this beauty, rather than according to the body, that we are in the image of God; hence it is said to us: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” If, then, we speak of the mind, or know it, or wish it to be beautiful, not in mass nor in parts set apart in their places, as bodies are either seen or thought of, but in an intelligible virtue such as justice, and according to this beauty we are reformed in the image of God, surely the beauty of God himself, who formed us and re-forms us in his image, is not to be imagined in any bodily mass; and he is to be believed incomparably more beautiful than the minds of the just, in the degree that he is incomparably more just. I have reminded Your Love of these things, perhaps at greater length than you expected, as regards the usual measure of letters, but, as regards the question of so great a matter, briefly enough: not so that it may suffice for your instruction, but so that, carefully instructed also by other things you read or hear, you may yourself more fully refute what you have said wrongly; which is certainly the better the more humbly and faithfully it is done.