Works (City of God, On the Trinity, etc.) 35 part 2/2

For just as in that manifest marriage of the two human beings who were first made, the serpent did not eat of the forbidden tree but only persuaded that it should be eaten, and the woman did not eat alone but gave to her husband, and they ate together — although she alone spoke with the serpent and was alone seduced by it — so also in this which is transacted and discerned even in a single man, by a certain hidden and secret marriage the carnal, or, so to speak, the sensual motion of the soul which is directed toward the body's senses (which motion is common to us and to the beasts) is cut off from the reason of wisdom. For by the sense of the body bodily things are perceived; but eternal and unchangeable spiritual things are understood by the reason of wisdom.

Now to the reason of knowledge appetite is a near neighbour, inasmuch as concerning those very bodily things which are perceived by the body's sense it reasons out that which is called the knowledge of action — well, if it refers that acquaintance to the end of the supreme good; but ill, if it enjoys them as good things of the kind in which it may rest in a false blessedness. When, therefore, to this intention of the mind, which is occupied with liveliness of reasoning among temporal and bodily things for the office of action, that carnal or animal sense presents a certain allurement of enjoying itself — that is, as it were a certain private and proper good, not as a public and common good which is the unchangeable good — then, as it were, the serpent addresses the woman.

But to consent to this allurement is to eat of the forbidden tree. Yet if this consent is content with the mere delight of thought, while the members are so held in check by the authority of the higher counsel that they are not presented as weapons of iniquity to sin, then, I judge, it is to be held that the woman alone has eaten the forbidden food. But if, in the consent to make evil use of the things which are perceived through the body's sense, whatever sin is so decreed that, if there be the power, it should be completed even in the body, then that woman is to be understood as having given to her husband to eat with her at the same time the unlawful food.

For sin cannot be decreed in the mind — not only as sweetly to be thought of, but even as effectively to be perpetrated — unless that intention of the mind also, in whose keeping is the supreme power of moving the members to the deed or of restraining them from the deed, yield and become a servant to the evil action. Nor indeed, when the mind is delighted with unlawful things in thought alone — not decreeing that they are to be done, yet holding and willingly turning over things which, the moment they touched the mind, ought to have been spurned — is it to be denied that this is sin; but it is far less than if it were also resolved to be fulfilled in deed. And therefore for such thoughts too pardon must be sought, and the breast must be smitten, and it must be said: Forgive us our debts; and what follows must be done and joined in the prayer:

as we also forgive our debtors. For not as in those two first human beings, where each one bore his own person — and therefore, if the woman alone had eaten the unlawful food, she alone assuredly would have been punished with the penalty of death — can it in like manner be said, in the case of a single man, that if the thought alone willingly feeds upon unlawful delights, from which it ought at once to turn itself away, while evil things are not decreed to be done but are only sweetly held in remembrance, that the woman, as it were, can be condemned without the man. Far be it from us to believe this.

For this is one person, one man, and the whole will be condemned, unless these things — which, though without the will to do them, yet with the will of delighting the soul in such things, are felt to be sins of thought alone — are remitted through the grace of the Mediator.

This discussion, therefore, by which we have sought in the mind of each individual human being a certain rational marriage of contemplation and action, with the offices distributed through certain particulars, yet with the unity of the mind preserved in both — while the historical truth is kept intact which divine authority delivers concerning the two first human beings, namely the man and his wife, from whom the human race was propagated — is to be heard only for this end: that it may be understood that the Apostle, in attributing the image of God to the man only and not also to the woman, nevertheless wished, in the different sex of the two human beings, to signify something which was to be sought in the one man.

[XIII 20] Nor does it escape me that certain men who were before us, distinguished defenders of the Catholic faith and expounders of the divine eloquence, when they sought these two things in one man — whose whole good soul they held to be a certain paradise — said that the man is the mind, but the woman the sense of the body. And according to this distribution, by which the man is set down as the mind, but the sense of the body as the woman, all things seem fitly to agree if they be treated with consideration — except that it is written that among all the beasts and birds there was not found for the man a helper like unto him, and then the woman was made for him from his side.

On which account I did not think that the sense of the body ought to be set down for the woman, since we see it to be common to us and to the beasts; but I wished for something which the beasts do not have; and I judged that the sense of the body was rather to be understood as the serpent, who is read to be more cunning than all the beasts of the earth.

For in those natural goods which we see to be common to us and to the irrational animals, he excels by a certain liveliness of sense — not that sense of which it is written in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where we read that solid food belongs to the perfect, who by habit have their senses trained to distinguish good from evil (for those are the senses of a rational nature and pertain to the understanding), but that sense which is fivefold in the body, through which not only by us but also by the beasts the appearance and motion of bodies is perceived.

But whether it be understood in this way, or that, or in some other manner that the Apostle called the man the image and glory of God, but the woman the glory of the man, it is nevertheless clear that when we live according to God, our mind, intent upon His invisible things, ought to be progressively formed out of His eternity, truth, and love; while a certain portion of our rational attention — that is, of the same mind — must be directed to the use of mutable and bodily things, without which this life is not carried on: not that it should be conformed to this world by setting its end in such goods and by wrenching aside toward them the appetite for blessedness, but that whatever we do reasonably in the use of temporal things we may do with a view to the contemplation of eternal things, passing through the former, cleaving to the latter.

For knowledge too has its own good measure, if that in it which puffs up, or is wont to puff up, be overcome by the love of eternal things — that love which does not puff up but, as we know, builds up. For without knowledge not even the very virtues by which one lives rightly can be possessed, virtues by which this wretched life is so governed that we may attain to that life which is truly blessed and eternal. Yet the action by which we make good use of temporal things differs from the contemplation of eternal things: the latter is reckoned to wisdom, the former to knowledge. For although that which is wisdom can also be named knowledge — as the Apostle also speaks when he says:

Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known — by which knowledge he certainly means to be understood the contemplation of God, which shall be the supreme reward of the saints. Nevertheless, where he says: To one indeed is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, he assuredly distinguishes these two without any doubt, although he does not there explain what the difference is, nor whence each may be told apart. But having searched the manifold abundance of the Holy Scriptures, I find it written in the book of Job, that same holy man speaking: Behold, piety is wisdom; but to abstain from evils is knowledge. In this distinction it is to be understood that wisdom pertains to contemplation, knowledge to action.

For by 'piety' in this place he set down 'the worship of God,' which in Greek is called *theosebeia; for this is the very word that this sentence has in the Greek codices. And what among things eternal is more excellent than God, whose nature alone is unchangeable? And what is His worship but the love of Him, by which we now desire to see Him, and believe and hope that we shall see Him? And insofar as we advance, we now see through a glass in an enigma, but then in manifestation. For this is what the Apostle Paul says, face to face; and this too is what John says: Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. We know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

Concerning these and such like things, this discourse itself seems to me to be the discourse of wisdom. But to abstain from evils, which Job said to be knowledge, is beyond doubt a matter of temporal things, since it is according to time that we are amid evils, from which we ought to abstain that we may come to those eternal goods. Wherefore whatever we do prudently, bravely, temperately, and justly pertains to that knowledge or discipline by which our action is occupied in avoiding evils and seeking goods; and so likewise whatever we gather by historical knowledge for the sake of examples either to be shunned or to be imitated, and for the sake of the necessary proofs concerning any matters that are suited to our uses.

When, therefore, discourse is made concerning these things, I hold that it is a discourse of knowledge, to be distinguished from the discourse of wisdom, to which pertain those things which neither have been nor shall be, but are; and which, on account of that eternity in which they are, are said both to have been and to be and to be about to be, without any mutability of times. For they have not so been that they should cease to be, nor are they so to be as though they now were not; but they have ever had, and ever shall have, that very selfsame being. Yet they abide, not as things fixed in spaces of places, like bodies, but in an incorporeal nature they are thus present, as intelligible, to the gaze of the mind, just as those visible or tangible things are present in places to the senses of the body.

Not only, however, do the intelligible and incorporeal reasons of sensible things placed in space abide without spatial locations, but even the reasons of motions passing away in time stand fast — themselves also indeed intelligible, not sensible — without any temporal passing. To reach these with the mind's keen edge is the lot of few; and when one does reach them, so far as it can be done, the reacher himself does not abide in them, but, as it were, the very edge of vision, beaten back, is repelled, and there comes to be a passing thought of a non-passing thing.

Yet this passing thought, through the disciplines by which the mind is instructed, is committed to memory, so that there may be somewhere to which that which is compelled to pass away thence can return — although, if the thought did not return to memory and there find what it had committed to it, it would be led, untrained as it were to this, just as it had been led before, and would find it there where it first found it, in that incorporeal truth whence again, as if copied out, it would be fixed in the memory. For not in the same way as, for example, the incorporeal and immutable reason of a square body abides, does the thought of man abide in it — if indeed it could reach it without any phantasm of spatial place.

Or if the numerical measure of some artful and musical sound be grasped through the intervals of passing time — a measure that stands without time in a certain hidden and lofty silence — it can at least be thought about so long as that song can be heard; yet what the mind's gaze, though passing, has snatched from it and, as it were, swallowing into the belly, has stored in memory, one will be able in a certain way to ruminate by recollection, and to transfer into a discipline what one has thus learned. But if it has been wholly wiped out by utter forgetfulness, then once more, with teaching for a guide, one will arrive at that which had entirely dropped away, and it will be found just as it was.

[XV 24] Hence that noble philosopher Plato tried to persuade men that the souls of men had lived here even before they bore these bodies, and that from this it comes about that the things which are learned are remembered as things previously known rather than known as new. For he related that a certain boy, questioned about I know not what points of geometry, answered as though he were most skilled in that discipline. For being questioned step by step and skillfully, he saw what was to be seen and said what he had seen. But if this were a recollection of things previously known, surely not all, or nearly all, would be able to do this when questioned in that manner; for not all were geometers in a former life, since they are so rare in the human race that one can scarcely be found.

But rather it is to be believed that the nature of the intellectual mind has been so constituted that, being joined by a natural order — the Creator so disposing — to intelligible things, it sees these in a certain light of its own peculiar and incorporeal kind, just as the eye of flesh sees the things that lie about it in this bodily light, of which light it was created capable and to which it is suited. For neither does the eye itself, therefore, discern white and black without a teacher because it already knew these before it was created in this flesh. Finally, why is it possible with regard to intelligible things alone that anyone well questioned should answer what pertains to any given discipline, even if he is ignorant of it?

Why can no one do this with regard to sensible things, except those which he has seen while established in this body, or which he has believed on the report of those who knew them, whether by anyone's writings or words? For we must not yield to those who allege that Pythagoras of Samos recalled some such things which he had experienced when he had already been here in another body; and others relate that certain others suffered something of this kind in their minds.

That these were false memories — such as we for the most part experience in dreams, when we seem to ourselves to recollect as though we had done or seen what we neither did at all nor saw — and that the minds of those men, even while awake, were so affected by the instigation of malignant and deceitful spirits, whose care it is to establish or to sow a false opinion about the transmigrations of souls in order to deceive men: this can be inferred from the fact that, if they truly remembered those things which they had here seen while formerly placed in other bodies, it would happen to many, indeed to almost all, seeing that they suppose it to come to pass without ceasing that from the living the dead, and thus from the dead the living, are made — as it were, the sleeping from the waking and the waking from the sleeping.

If, therefore, this is the right distinction between wisdom and knowledge — that to wisdom pertains the intellectual cognition of eternal things, but to knowledge the rational cognition of temporal things — it is not difficult to judge which is to be preferred and which postponed. But if some other discrimination is to be employed by which these two are to be told apart, which the Apostle without doubt teaches to differ when he says: To one indeed is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit — nevertheless the difference of these two that we have set down is most evident: namely, that one is the intellectual cognition of eternal things, the other the rational cognition of temporal things; and that the former is to be preferred to the latter no one doubts.

Since, then, we are leaving behind those things which belong to the outer man, and desiring to ascend inward from those things which we have in common with the beasts, before we come to the cognition of intelligible and supreme things which are everlasting, the rational cognition of temporal things meets us on the way.

Therefore in this too let us find, if we can, some trinity, just as we found one in the senses of the body and in those things which through them entered imaginally into our soul or spirit — so that, in place of the bodily things which we touch by bodily sense as placed outside, we had within the likenesses of bodies impressed upon the memory, out of which thought was formed, with the will as a third joining both together; even as, without, the edge of the eyes' vision was formed, which the will, that seeing might come to be, applied to the visible thing and joined both together, itself there too moving in to bring itself as a third. But this is not to be crowded into this book, so that in the one which follows, if God shall help, it may be fittingly inquired into, and whatever shall be found may be set forth.