Proslogion: Chapter 6/Chapter 7
BASIC WRITINGS
Chapter 6 How God can perceive even though he is not a body* Now it is better to be percipient, omnipotent, merciful, and impassible* than not. But how can you perceive if you are not a body? How can you be omnipotent if you cannot do everything? How can you be both merciful and impassible? If only corporeal things can perceive, because the senses exist in a body and are directed toward bodies, then how can you perceive? For you are not a body but the highest spirit, which is better than any body.
But if to perceive is just to know, or is aimed at knowledge—for whoever perceives knows according to the appropriate sense, as, for example, we know colors through sight and flavors through taste—then it is not inappropriate to say that whatever in some way knows also in some way perceives. Therefore,
Lord, although you are not a body, you are indeed supremely percipient in the sense that you supremely know all things, not in the sense in which an animal knows things through its bodily senses.
Chapter 7 In what sense God is omnipotent even though there are many things he cannot do
But how are you omnipotent if you cannot do everything?21 And how can you do everything if you cannot be corrupted, or lie, or cause what is true to be false (as, for example, to cause what has been done not to have been done), or many other such things?
Or is the ability to do these things not power but weakness? For someone who can do these things can do what is not beneficial to himself and what he ought not to do. And the more he can do these things, the more power misfortune and wickedness have over him,and the less he has over them.So whoever can do these things can do them, not in virtue of his power but in virtue of his weakness. So when we say that he "can" do these things, it is not because he has the power to do them, but because his weakness gives something else power over him. Or else it is some other manner of speaking, such as we often use in speaking loosely. For example, we sometimes say 'to be' instead of 'not to be', or 'to do' instead of 'not to do' or 'to do nothing'. For often when someone denies that something exists, we say "It is as you say it is"; but it would seem more correct to say "It is not as you say it is not."Again, we say
21 This chapter is full of word play in the Latin that does not all come across in English.
The words for 'power' (potentia),'weakness' (impotentia), and various forms of the verb 'can'
(posse)—also translated here as 'have power'—all share a common stem. And the word for omnipotent (omnipotens) means literally "able to do everything" (omnia potens).