he had in mind here. But 1 doubt if this is the case. While the Arians did indeed hold that the Son
Book VIII 375 heard or seen in unchangeable Wisdom herself, who conveys herself into holy souls (Wis 7:27) at this or that time, while in her there is no movement in time.
lf however Adam was a just man in such a way that he still needed the inter vention of another holier and wiser creature through which he could come to know God's will and his orders, as we needed the prophets, they the angels, why should we have any doubts that God spoke to him through some creature of that sort, with such vocal signs as he would be able to understand? When it comes, you see, to what is written a bit further on, that after they had sinned they heard the voice of the Lord God taking a stroll in Paradise (Gn 3:8), nobody who has the least sense of the Catholic faith will have any doubt at all that this was done through some creature subject to God, and not through his own substance.
The reason, I may say, why I have wanted to range somewhat more widely in discussing this point is that there are some heretics who think that the substance of the Son of God, even without his taking to himself a body, is in itself visible,54 and that is why, they consider, he appeared to the fathers even before he received a body from the Virgin, as though it were of the Father alone that it says, whom no human being has seen or can see ( 1 Tm 6:16), because the Son was seen also through his own substance before receiving theform ofa slave (Phil 2:7). Such an impious idea is to be utterly rejected by Catholic minds.
But let us discuss this matter more fully elsewhere, if the Lord so pleases.55 This volume ends here, and it is in the next one that you must await what follows, that is, how the woman was created from the side of her man.
54. Here the editors of the CSEL text follow the Maurists in saying that the Arians were the heretics he had in mind here. But 1 doubt if this is the case. While the Arians did indeed hold that the Son was a creature, and so "less than the Father." because "there was a time when he was not," they were far too sophisticated to hold such an idea as his being "substantially visible," and Augustine knew them well enough to be aware of this. The idea of the Son being "the visible member of the divine triad" goes back long before their time. We find both Justin and 1renaeus in the second century maintaining that it was the Son who appeared to the fathers under the old covenant, an idea which Augustine demolished ruthlessly in The Trinity 11. Here is what
1renaeus has to say: "By the Word made visible and palpable (in Old Testament theophanies) the Father was being shown For the Father is the invisibility of the Son, and the Son is the visibility of the Father" (Against Heresies 1V,6,6). But he later qualifies this statement to avoid the crass misunderstanding which is the heresy Augustine has in mind here, and he says (ibid. 20,5): "1t is not, as some people say, that the Father of all things being invisible there is another who could be seen by the prophets." We are not concerned here with how 1renaeus goes on to explain what he did mean by calling the Son the visibility of the Father. But the crass misunderstanding he disclaims does seem to have been held both by Tertullian at the beginning of the third century and by Novatian in the middle of it; and there were still a few Tertullianists and Novatianists around when Augustine was writing this. They, surely, are the heretics he has in mind here. 55. Possibly he has The Trinity 11, in mind.