Proslogion: Chapter 19/Chapter 20
BASIC WRITINGS
are happiness, you are eternity, and you are every true good. These are many things; my narrow understanding cannot see so many things in one glance and delight in all of them at once. How then, Lord, are you all these things? Are they parts of you? Or rather, is not each of them all that you are? For whatever is composed of parts is not completely one. It is in some sense a plurality and not identical with itself, and it can be broken up either in fact or at least in the understanding. But such characteristics are foreign to you, than whom nothing better can be thought. Therefore, there are no parts in you,
Lord, and you are not a plurality. Instead, you are so much a unity, so much identical with yourself, that you are in no respect dissimilar to yourself.You are in fact unity itself; you cannot be divided by any understanding.Therefore, life and wisdom and the rest are not parts of you; they are all one. Each of them is all of what you are, and each is what the rest are. And since you have no parts, and neither does your eternity, which you yourself are, it follows that no part of you or of your eternity exists at a certain place or time. Instead, you exist as a whole everywhere, and your eternity exists as a whole always.
Chapter 19 That God is not in a place or a time, but all things are in him But if by your eternity you have been, and are, and will be, and if to have been is not the same as to be in the future, and to be is not the same as to have been or to be in the future, then how does your eternity exist as a whole always?
Is it that nothing of your eternity is in the past in such a way that it no longer exists, and nothing is in the future as if it did not exist already? So it is not the case that yesterday you were and tomorrow you will be; rather, yesterday, today, and tomorrow you are. In fact, it is not even the case that yesterday, today, and tomorrow you are; rather, you are in an unqualified* sense, outside time altogether.Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are merely in time. But you, although nothing exists without you, do not exist in a place or a time; rather, all things exist in you. For nothing contains you, but you contain all things.
Chapter 20 That he is before and beyond even all eternal things Therefore you fill and embrace all things;you are before and beyond all things.
And indeed you are before all things, since before they came into being, you already are.38 But how are you beyond all things? In what way are you beyond those things that will have no end?
38 Cf. Psalm 90:2 (89:2).