Ghost, one God, in whom substance and quality are identical._
There is, accordingly, a good which is alone simple, and therefore
alone unchangeable, and this is God. By this Good have all others
been created, but not simple, and therefore not unchangeable.
"Created," I say,--that is, made, not begotten. For that which is
begotten of the simple Good is simple as itself, and the same as
itself. These two we call the Father and the Son; and both together
with the Holy Spirit are one God; and to this Spirit the epithet Holy
is in Scripture, as it were, appropriated. And He is another than
the Father and the Son, for He is neither the Father nor the Son.
I say "another," not "another thing," because He is equally with
them the simple Good, unchangeable and co-eternal. And this Trinity
is one God; and none the less simple because a Trinity. For we do
not say that the nature of the good is simple, because the Father
alone possesses it, or the Son alone, or the Holy Ghost alone; nor
do we say, with the Sabellian heretics, that it is only nominally a
Trinity, and has no real distinction of persons; but we say it is
simple, because it is what it has, with the exception of the relation
of the persons to one another. For, in regard to this relation, it is
true that the Father has a Son, and yet is not Himself the Son; and
the Son has a Father, and is not Himself the Father. But, as regards
Himself, irrespective of relation to the other, each is what He has;
thus, He is in Himself living, for He has life, and is Himself the
Life which He has.
It is for this reason, then, that the nature of the Trinity is
called simple, because it has not anything which it can lose, and
because it is not one thing and its contents another, as a cup and
the liquor, or a body and its colour, or the air and the light or
heat of it, or a mind and its wisdom. For none of these is what it
has: the cup is not liquor, nor the body colour, nor the air light
and heat, nor the mind wisdom. And hence they can be deprived of
what they have, and can be turned or changed into other qualities
and states, so that the cup may be emptied of the liquid of which
it is full, the body be discoloured, the air darken, the mind grow
silly. The incorruptible body which is promised to the saints in
the resurrection cannot, indeed, lose its quality of incorruption,
but the bodily substance and the quality of incorruption are not
the same thing. For the quality of incorruption resides entire in
each several part, not greater in one and less in another; for
no part is more incorruptible than another. The body, indeed, is
itself greater in whole than in part; and one part of it is larger,
another smaller, yet is not the larger more incorruptible than the
smaller. The body, then, which is not in each of its parts a whole
body, is one thing; incorruptibility, which is throughout complete,
is another thing;--for every part of the incorruptible body,
however unequal to the rest otherwise, is equally incorrupt. For
the hand, _e.g._, is not more incorrupt than the finger because it
is larger than the finger; so, though finger and hand are unequal,
their incorruptibility is equal. Thus, although incorruptibility is
inseparable from an incorruptible body, yet the substance of the body
is one thing, the quality of incorruption another. And therefore the
body is not what it has. The soul itself, too, though it be always
wise (as it will be eternally when it is redeemed), will be so by
participating in the unchangeable wisdom, which it is not; for though
the air be never robbed of the light that is shed abroad in it, it is
not on that account the same thing as the light. I do not mean that
the soul is air, as has been supposed by some who could not conceive
a spiritual nature;[463] but, with much dissimilarity, the two things
have a kind of likeness, which makes it suitable to say that the
immaterial soul is illumined with the immaterial light of the simple
wisdom of God, as the material air is irradiated with material light,
and that, as the air, when deprived of this light, grows dark, (for
material darkness is nothing else than air wanting light,[464]) so
the soul, deprived of the light of wisdom, grows dark.
According to this, then, those things which are essentially and truly
divine are called simple, because in them quality and substance
are identical, and because they are divine, or wise, or blessed in
themselves, and without extraneous supplement. In Holy Scripture, it
is true, the Spirit of wisdom is called "manifold"[465] because it
contains many things in it; but what it contains it also is, and it
being one is all these things. For neither are there many wisdoms,
but one, in which are untold and infinite treasures of things
intellectual, wherein are all invisible and unchangeable reasons of
things visible and changeable which were created by it.[466] For God
made nothing unwittingly; not even a human workman can be said to do
so. But if He knew all that He made, He made only those things which
He had known. Whence flows a very striking but true conclusion, that
this world could not be known to us unless it existed, but could not
have existed unless it had been known to God.