On the Trinity 4.11–4.19

For it is easy for the most wicked spirits to do many things through aerial bodies which souls weighed down by earthly bodies, even those of better disposition, wonder at. For if earthly bodies themselves, trained by certain arts and exercises, display such marvels to men in theatrical shows that those who have never seen such things scarcely believe them when told, what great thing is it for the devil and his angels to make from the bodily elements, through aerial bodies, things that the flesh wonders at; or even, by hidden inspirations, to contrive phantoms of images to mock the human senses, by which to deceive people awake or asleep, or to drive the frenzied into agitation? But just as it can happen that a man better in life and conduct watches the most wicked men walking on a rope or doing many incredible things by manifold motions of their bodies, and in no way desires to do such things, nor thinks them on that account to be preferred to himself, so a faithful and pious soul, not only if it sees the miracles of demons but even if it shudders at them through the frailty of the flesh, will not on that account either grieve that it cannot do such things or judge the demons better for this reason; especially since it is in the fellowship of the saints, who, whether men or good angels, have done things not at all deceptive and much greater, through the power of God, to whom all things are subject.

In no way, therefore, are souls cleansed and reconciled to God through sacrilegious likenesses and impious curiosities and magical consecrations; because the false mediator does not carry them across to higher things, but rather, besieging the way, shuts it off through the affections which he breathes into those of his company, the more malignant the prouder they are. These cannot nourish the wings of the virtues for flying upward, but rather heap up the weights of the vices for sinking down, the soul being about to fall the more heavily the more loftily it seems to itself to be raised. Therefore, as the Magi did, divinely warned, whom the star led to adore the lowliness of the Lord, so we too ought to return to our homeland not by the way we came, but by another way, which the humble king has taught, and which the proud king, adversary of the humble king, cannot besiege. For to us too, that we might adore the humble Christ, "the heavens have declared the glory of God," since "their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world." Our way to death was through sin in Adam. "For through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death; and so it passed to all men, in whom all sinned." The mediator of this way was the devil, the persuader to sin and the one who hurls into death. For he too, to work our double death, brought his single one. For through ungodliness he died in spirit, but certainly he did not die in the flesh; yet to us he both persuaded ungodliness and through it brought it about that we deserved to come into the death of the flesh. The one, then, we sought by wicked persuasion; the other followed us by just condemnation. For this is why it is written, "God did not make death," because he himself was not the cause of death; but yet through his most just retribution death was inflicted on the sinner. Just as a judge inflicts punishment on a guilty man, yet the cause of the punishment is not the justice of the judge but the desert of the crime. Where, then, the mediator of death sent us but did not himself come, that is, to the death of the flesh, there the Lord our God inserted for us the medicine of correction, which the devil did not deserve, by a hidden and exceedingly secret ordering of divine and lofty justice. So, then, that "as through one man came death, so also through one man might come the resurrection of the dead" (because men avoided more what they could not avoid, the death of the flesh, than the death of the spirit, that is, the punishment more than the desert of punishment; for not to sin they either do not care about or care little about, but not to die, though it is not obtained, they strive for vehemently), the Mediator of life, showing how little death is to be feared, which through the human condition can no longer be escaped, but rather ungodliness, which can be guarded against through faith, met us at the end to which we had come, but not by the way by which we had come. For we came to death through sin; he, through righteousness; and therefore, while our death is the punishment of sin, his death was made a sacrifice for sin.

Therefore, since the spirit is set above the body, and the death of the spirit is to be forsaken by God, while the death of the body is to be forsaken by the spirit; and since this is the punishment in the death of the body, that the spirit, because it willingly forsook God, forsakes the body unwillingly, so that, since the spirit forsook God because it willed to, it forsakes the body even if it does not will to, and does not forsake it when it wills to, unless it inflicts on itself some violence by which the body itself is destroyed: the spirit of the Mediator showed how no punishment of sin brought him to the death of the flesh, because he did not forsake it unwillingly, but because he willed, when he willed, and how he willed. For, joined with the Word in unity, he says on this account: "I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself, and I take it up again." And those who were present marveled at this most of all, as the Gospel tells, when, after that cry in which he uttered the figure of our sin, he at once gave up his spirit. For those hung on the wood were tortured by a long death. Hence the legs of the robbers were broken, so that they might die at once and be taken down from the wood before the Sabbath. But that he was found already dead was a cause of wonder. We read that Pilate too marveled at this, when the body was asked of him for burial. That deceiver, then, who was the mediator of man to death, and falsely sets himself up as the way to life under the name of purification through sacrilegious rites and sacrifices, by which the proud are seduced, because he could have neither participation in our death nor a resurrection of his own, could indeed bring his single death to our double one; but a single resurrection, in which there would be both a sacrament of our renewal and an example of the awakening that will come at the end, he certainly could not. He, therefore, who, living in spirit, raised up his own dead flesh, the true Mediator of life, cast out that one, dead in spirit and the mediator of death, from the spirits of those who believe in him, so that he might not reign within, but assault from without, and yet not prevail. To him he himself also offered himself to be tempted, so that he might be the mediator for overcoming his temptations too, not only by help but also by example. But when that one, at first, striving to creep into the inner parts by every approach, had been driven out, after the baptism in the desert, every enticing temptation being finished, because, dead in spirit, he did not invade the one who was living in spirit, eager in whatever way for human death, he turned himself to bringing about the death he could, and was permitted against that which the living Mediator had received from us as mortal. And where he could do something, there he was defeated on every side; and from the point at which he received outwardly the power to kill the Lord's flesh, from there his inner power, by which he held us, was killed. For it came about that the bonds of many sins in many deaths were loosed through the one death of the one whom no sin had preceded. This death the Lord paid for us, though it was not owed, so that the deaths that were owed might not harm us. For he was not stripped of the flesh by the right of any power, but he stripped himself. For he who could not die if he did not will it, without doubt died because he willed; and therefore he made an example of the principalities and powers, triumphing over them confidently in himself. For by his death, the one most true sacrifice offered for us, he cleansed, abolished, and extinguished whatever guilt there was by which the principalities and powers rightfully held us to pay the penalty; and by his resurrection he called us, predestined, to new life, justified us when called, and glorified us when justified. So the devil, in the very death of the flesh, lost man, whom, seduced by his consent, he possessed as if by full right, and over whom he, himself not hedged in by any corruption of flesh and blood, lorded it through this frailty of a mortal body, as over one very needy and weak, and the prouder the richer and stronger he was as it were, as over one ragged and wretched. For where he had driven the falling sinner without following him, there he pursued and drove the descending Redeemer. So in the fellowship of death the Son of God deigned to become our friend, where, by not coming there, the enemy thought himself better and greater than we. For our Redeemer says: "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." Therefore the devil believed himself superior even to the Lord, insofar as the Lord yielded to him in his sufferings; for of him too is understood what is read in the Psalm, "You made him a little lower than the angels"; so that, the unjust one acting against us as if by equal right, he himself, slain though innocent, might overcome him by most equitable right, and so take captive the captivity brought about because of sin, and free us from the captivity that was just because of sin, blotting out the bond of death by his just blood unjustly shed, and redeeming sinners to be justified. Hence the devil still mocks his own, to whom, as the false mediator, he sets himself up through his rites, as if they were to be cleansed, though rather to be entangled and drowned: because he very easily persuades the proud to laugh at and despise the death of Christ, from which the more foreign he is, the holier and more divine he is believed by them to be. Yet very few have remained with him, since the nations acknowledge and drink with pious humility the price paid for them, and in its confidence desert their enemy and run together to their Redeemer. For the devil does not know how the most excellent Wisdom of God uses him, both lying in wait and raging, for the salvation of his faithful, reaching mightily from the upper end, which is the beginning of the spiritual creation, to the lower end, which is the death of the body, and ordering all things sweetly. For it reaches everywhere because of its purity, and nothing defiled runs into it. But for the devil, who is a stranger to the death of the flesh, on account of which he goes about too proudly, a death of another kind is prepared in the eternal fire of Tartarus, by which spirits can be tormented not only with earthly but also with aerial bodies. But proud men, to whom Christ is worthless because he died, though by it he bought us at so great a price, both pay this death together with men by the condition of a wretched nature, which is drawn from the first sin, and will be hurled into that other death together with the devil. They have preferred him to Christ for this reason, that he cast them down into this death, into which he himself, because of his different nature, did not fall, and into which Christ, for their sake, by his great mercy, descended. And yet they do not hesitate to believe themselves better than the demons, and do not cease to assail and detest them with every curse, though they certainly know them to be strangers to the suffering of this death, on account of which they despise Christ. Nor will they consider how it could be that the Word of God, remaining in itself and in no part changeable in itself, could nevertheless, by taking up a lower nature, suffer something lower, which the unclean demon cannot suffer because he does not have an earthly body. So, though they themselves are better than the demons, yet because they bear flesh they can die in the way in which the demons, who do not bear it, certainly cannot. And they presume much on the deaths of their sacrifices, which they do not perceive they are offering to deceitful and proud spirits; or, if they already perceive it, they think the friendship of the faithless and envious to be of some benefit to them, whose purpose has no business except the hindering of our return.

They do not understand that not even the proudest spirits could have rejoiced in the honors of sacrifices unless a true sacrifice were owed to the one true God, in whose place they wish to be worshiped; and that it cannot be rightly offered except through a holy and righteous priest; nor unless what is offered is received from those for whom it is offered, and is without fault, so that it can be offered for the cleansing of the faulty. This certainly all desire who wish a sacrifice to be offered to God for themselves. Who, then, is so righteous and holy a priest as the only Son of God, who had no need to cleanse his own sins by sacrifice, neither original sins nor those added from human life? And what could so fittingly be taken from men to be offered for them as human flesh? And what so suited to this offering as mortal flesh? And what so clean for cleansing the faults of mortals as flesh born in and from a virgin's womb without any contagion of carnal concupiscence? And what could be offered and received so gratefully as the flesh of our sacrifice, made the body of our priest? So that, since four things are considered in every sacrifice, to whom it is offered, by whom it is offered, what is offered, and for whom it is offered, the same one true Mediator, reconciling us to God through the sacrifice of peace, might remain one with him to whom he offered, might make one in himself those for whom he offered, and might himself be one, the one who offered and that which he offered.

But there are some who think that they can be cleansed by their own power to contemplate God and cleave to God; whom that very pride stains most of all. For there is no vice that the divine law resists more, and over which that proudest spirit, the mediator to the depths and the barrier to the heights, receives a greater right of dominion; unless he is avoided by another way when he lies in wait secretly, or, when he rages openly through the failing people (which is what Amalek means) and, by resisting, refuses passage to the land of promise, he is overcome through the cross of the Lord, which was prefigured by the outstretched hands of Moses. For these people promise themselves cleansing by their own power on this ground, that some of them have been able to send the eye of the mind beyond all creation and to touch, in however small a part, the light of unchangeable truth; which they mock many Christians, living meanwhile by faith alone, for not yet having been able to do. But what does it profit the proud man, who for this reason blushes to climb on board the wood, to look from afar at the homeland across the sea? Or what harm is it to the humble man not to see it from so great a distance, while he comes to it on that wood on which the other disdains to be carried?

These people also find fault with us for believing in the resurrection of the flesh, and wish rather that they themselves should be believed even on these matters. As though, because they have been able to understand the most high and unchangeable substance through the things that are made, they must therefore be consulted about the conversion of changeable things or the connected order of the ages. For because they argue most truly and persuade by most certain proofs that all temporal things are made by eternal reasons, have they therefore been able to see in those reasons themselves, or gather from them, how many kinds of animals there are, what the seeds of each are in their beginnings, what the manner of their growth, what numbers run through their conceptions, births, ages, and deaths, what motions in seeking what accords with their nature and fleeing what is contrary? Have they not sought all these things, not through that unchangeable wisdom, but through the history of places and times, and believed what others have experienced and written down? So it is the less to be wondered at that they could in no way trace the sequence of the longer ages, and a certain goal of this course down which the human race runs as down a river, and from there the turning to the end due to each. For not even historians could write these things, being far in the future and experienced and narrated by no one. Nor did those philosophers, better than the rest, contemplate such things by understanding in those highest and eternal reasons; otherwise they would not inquire into past things of the same kind, as historians could, but would rather foreknow the future too; and those who could do this were called seers by them, and prophets by us.

And yet the name of prophets is not altogether foreign to their writings. But it makes a great difference whether the future is conjectured from experience of the past, as physicians, foreseeing many things, have also committed to writing what they noted by experience, and as farmers or even sailors foretell many things (for such things, if they are done at long intervals of time, are thought to be divinations); or whether things to come have already set out, and, seen far off as they come, are announced by the keen sense of those who see them, and when the aerial powers do this they are believed to divine, as if someone from the top of a mountain should see someone coming far off and announce it beforehand to those who live close by in the plain; or whether they are foretold to certain men by holy angels, to whom God shows them through his Word and Wisdom, where both future and past things stand, or, heard by them, are passed on again to other men; or whether the minds of certain men themselves are so lifted up by the Holy Spirit that, not through angels but through themselves, they behold the standing causes of future things in the very highest citadel of things. For the aerial powers too hear these things, whether angels or men announce them; and they hear only as much as he judges necessary, to whom all things are subject. Many things are also foretold by a certain instinct and impulse of the spirit by those who do not know it, as Caiaphas did not know what he said, but, being high priest, he prophesied. Therefore, about the successions of the ages and about the resurrection of the dead, we ought not to consult even those philosophers who understood, as far as they could, the eternity of the Creator, in whom we live and move and have our being. For, knowing God through the things that are made, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but, saying they were wise, they became fools. And since they were not fit to fix the eye of the mind so steadily on the eternity of the spiritual and unchangeable nature as to see, in the very wisdom of the Creator and Ruler of the universe, the volumes of the ages, which there already were and always were, but here were to be, so that they were not yet; and to see there the conversions for the better not only of human souls but also of human bodies, up to the perfection of their own measure; since, then, they were in no way fit to see these things there, they were not counted worthy even of this, that they should be announced to them by holy angels, whether outwardly through the bodily senses or by inner revelations expressed in the spirit; as these things were shown to our fathers, endowed with true godliness, who, foretelling them, and gaining belief either by present signs or by near events coming to pass as they had foretold, deserved to have an authority by which they should be believed about things far in the future, even to the end of the world. But the proud and deceitful aerial powers, even if they are found to have spoken through their seers some things about the fellowship and city of the saints and about the true Mediator, heard from the holy prophets or angels, did this in order to draw away, if they could, even the faithful of God to their own falsehoods through these truths that belonged to others. But God brought it about through those who did not know it, that the truth should resound from every side, as a help to the faithful and a testimony against the ungodly.

Because, then, we were not fit to lay hold of eternal things, and the filth of sins weighed us down, contracted by the love of temporal things and grown into us as if naturally from the stock of mortality, we had to be cleansed. But we could be cleansed so as to be attuned to eternal things only through temporal things, such as those to which we were already attuned and by which we were held. For health is very far from disease; but the cure that lies between does not lead to health unless it suits the disease. Useless temporal things deceive the sick; useful temporal things take up those who are to be healed and carry them across, once healed, to eternal things. And as the rational mind, when cleansed, owes contemplation to eternal things, so, when it is to be cleansed, it owes faith to temporal things. One of those who were once held to be wise among the Greeks said: "As eternity is to what has come into being, so truth is to faith." And it is certainly a true saying. For what we call temporal, he called "what has come into being." Of this kind we too are, not only according to the body but also according to the changeableness of the mind. For that is not properly called eternal which is changed in any part. Insofar, then, as we are changeable, so far are we distant from eternity. But eternal life is promised us through the truth, from whose clear sight our faith in turn is as distant as mortality is from eternity. Now, then, we give faith to the things done in time for our sake, and through it we are cleansed; so that when we have come to sight, as truth succeeds to faith, so eternity may succeed to mortality. Therefore, since our faith will become truth when we have come to what is promised us as believers, and eternal life is promised us, and the Truth said (not the truth that will come to be as our faith is to become, but that which is always Truth, because eternity is there), the Truth said, then, "And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent": when our faith by seeing becomes truth, then eternity will hold our mortality changed. Until this happens, and so that it may happen, since we accommodate the faith of belief to things that have come into being, as in eternal things we hope for the truth of contemplation, lest the faith of mortal life should be out of harmony with the truth of eternal life, the Truth itself, coeternal with the Father, sprang up from the earth, when the Son of God came in such a way as to become the son of man and to receive in himself our faith, by which he might lead us to his truth, he who so took up our mortality as not to lose his eternity. For "as eternity is to what has come into being, so truth is to faith." So, then, it was necessary for us to be cleansed in such a way that he who remained eternal should become for us one who had come into being, lest he be one thing for us in faith and another in truth. Nor could we pass from what we are as beings that have come into being to eternal things, unless, the eternal one being joined to us through our coming into being, we were carried across to his eternity. Now, then, our faith has in a certain way followed thither where he in whom we have believed ascended: born, dead, raised up, taken up. Of these four, we knew the first two in ourselves, for we know that men are both born and die; but the other two, that is, to be raised up and taken up, we rightly hope for in ourselves, because we have believed that they were done in him. And so, because in him what had come into being passed over to eternity, ours too will pass over, when faith has come to truth. For to those who already believed, so that they might remain in the word of faith, and, led from there to the truth and through it to eternity, might be freed from death, he speaks thus: "If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples." And as if they asked, "With what fruit?", he went on to say: "And you will know the truth." And again, as if they said, "What use is truth to mortals?", "And the truth," he says, "will set you free." From what, except from death, from corruption, from changeableness? For truth remains immortal, incorrupt, unchangeable. And true immortality, true incorruptibility, true unchangeableness, is eternity itself.

See for what purpose the Son of God was sent; or rather, see what it is for the Son of God to have been sent. Whatever was done in time, in things that had come into being, brought forth from eternity and referred back to eternity, to produce the faith by which we might be cleansed to contemplate the truth, was either testimony to this sending or the very sending of the Son of God. But some testimonies foretold that he would come, some testified that he had come. For it was fitting that he, through whom every creature was made, when made a creature should have every creature as witness. For unless the one were proclaimed by the many sent, the one would not be held when the many were let go. And unless there were testimonies such as seemed great to the little, it would not be believed that the great one, who was sent as little to the little, would make them great. For heaven and earth and all that is in them, made by the Son of God, are incomparably greater, since all things were made through him, than the signs and wonders that broke forth in testimony to him. But still men, in order that, being little, they might believe these great things made through him, trembled at those little things as though they were great. "When, then, the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the Law": so little as to be made; sent, therefore, in that he was made. If, then, the greater sends the lesser, we too confess that he was made lesser, and lesser insofar as he was made, and made insofar as he was sent. For he sent his Son made of a woman; and yet, because all things were made through him, not only before he was made and sent but before all things were, we confess the same one equal to the one who sends, when we say that he was sent as lesser. How, then, before that fullness of time at which it was fitting that he be sent, before he had been sent, could he be seen by the fathers, when certain angelic visions were shown to them, since not even when already sent was he seen as he is equal to the Father? For why does he say to Philip, by whom he was certainly seen, as by the rest and even by those by whom he was crucified in the flesh, "Have I been with you so long, and you have not known me? Philip, he who has seen me has seen the Father too," unless because he was both seen and not seen? He was seen as, having been sent, he had been made; he was not seen as all things had been made through him. Or why does he also say, "He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself to him," when he was manifest before the eyes of men, unless because he was offering the flesh, which the Word had become in the fullness of time, to be received by our faith, while he was keeping the Word himself, through whom all things had been made, to be contemplated in eternity by the mind cleansed through faith?