Monologion: Chapter 62
BASIC WRITINGS
he contains his own memory and understanding does not mean that the Spirit is a father or son, since he is not a memory that begets or an understanding that is begotten;rather,whatever he is only proceeds.So what prevents us from concluding that in the supreme essence there is only one Father, one Son, and one Spirit, not three fathers or three sons or three spirits?
Chapter 62 How it seems that many sons are born from them But perhaps what I am now realizing contradicts this assertion. For there should be no doubt that the Father, the Son, and their Spirit each utters both himself and the other two, just as each understands both himself and the other two. Now if this is so, how is it that there are not as many words in the supreme essence as there are ones uttering and ones being uttered? For if several* human beings utter some one thing in their thought, there appear to be as many words of that thing as there are people thinking, since a word of that thing exists in the thoughts of each of them.Similarly,if one human being thinks of several things, there are as many words in the mind of the thinker as there are things being thought.
But in a human being's thought, when he thinks of something that exists outside his mind, the word of the thing that is thought is not born from the thing itself, since that thing is absent from the gaze of his thought; rather, the word is born from some likeness or image of the thing.That likeness or image exists in the memory of the one thinking; or else perhaps a bodily sense is conveying it into his mind from some present object right then as he is thinking. In the supreme essence, by contrast, the Father, the Son, and their Spirit are always present to one another—for, as we have already seen,58 each exists in the others no less than in himself—in such a way that when they utter one another, each one who is uttered seems to beget his own word, just as when he is uttered by himself. How is it, then, that the Son, and the Spirit of him and the Father, beget nothing, if each of them begets his own word when he is uttered by himself or another? Now however many words we can prove are born from the supreme substance, by our earlier argument he must beget that many sons and send forth that many spirits. And so by this argument it seems that there are in him not only many fathers, sons, and [spirits] proceeding but also other relations.
58 In Chapter 59.