The Trinity

Book I

BOOK ONE Chapter 1 IIHE READER OF THIS TREATISE on the Trinity should know beforehand that our pen is' on the watch for . the sophistries of those who consider it beneath their dignity to begin with faith, and who thus are led into error by their immature and perverted love of reason. Some of them attempt to transfer the ideas of corporeal things, which they have experienced through their bodily senses, or have grasped by their native human ingenuity and assiduous application , or by the help of art, to incorporeal and spiritual substances so as to measure and explain the latter by the former. There are others, too, who think about God, if they do any thinking at all, according to the nature and affections of the human soul, and from this error they deduce cunning and fallacious rules for their argumentation when they are discoursing about God. There is still another group, namely, those who strive indeed to transcend the whole of creation, which is certainly changeable, in order to fix their attention on the unchangeable substance which is God, but weighed down by the burden of their mortality-since they wish to appear as knowing what they do not know, and cannot know what they wish to know-they insist all the more boldly on their preconceived ideas, and thus shut themselves off from the roads of understanding, and would rather hold on to 3 4 SAINT AUGUSTINE their own opinion, even when it is erroneous, than to change that which they have once defended. This indeed is the disease of all three classes that 1 have mentioned, namely, those who reason about God according to the flesh, those who think about Him as a spiritual creature such as the soul is, and those who think about God neither as a body nor as a spiritual substance, and yet believe false things about Him. They are so much further from the truth in that nothing found in the body or the spirit either made or formed, or in the Creator Himself, affords a basis for their theories. For example, he who imagines God as white or red is mistaken, and yet these things are found in the body. Again he who thinks of God now as forgetting, now as remembering, or in any similar way, is nevertheless in error, but still these things are found in the soul. On the other hand he who believes that the power of God is such that He Himself has begotten Himself errs all the more, since, not only does God not exist in such a way, but neither does a spiritual nor a corporeal creature so exist, for there is nothing whatsoever that begets itself that it may exist. (2) Consequently, in order that the human mind may be cleansed from errors of this kind, Sacred Scripture, adapting itself to little ones, has employed words from every class of objects in order that our intellect, as though strengthened by them, might rise as it were gradually to divine and sublime things. For when it spoke of God, it made use even of words taken from material objects, as when it said: 'Protect me under the shadow of thy wings.'! And it has borrowed many things from the spiritual creature in order to describe thereby not that which is actually so, but that which had to be spoken of as being so, as for example, when it says: 'I am a jealous God,'2 and 'I regret that 1 made man.'3 But it has not drawn any of its words from things that have no existence at all, 1 Cf. Ps. 16.8. 2 Ex. 20.5. !I Cf. Gen. 6.7. BOOK ONE 5 either to form its figures of speech or to make enigmatic sayings. Hence, they boast in a pernicious and futile manner, who shut themselves off from the truth by that third kind of error, in their predicating to God what can be found neither in Him nor in any creature. For, from the things which are found in the creature, the divine Scripture is wont to prepare enticements, as it were, for children. Its purpose is to arouse the affections of the weak, so that by means of them, as though they were steps, they may mount to higher things according to their own modest capacity, and abandon the lower things. But the divine...