the Trinity, as the reader ought to be in- disease of all the three classes which I have
THE
FIFTEEN BOOKS OF AURELIUS AUGUSTINUS,
BISHOP OF HIPPO,
ON THE TRINITY
BOOK I.
IN WHICH THE UNITY AND EQUALITY OF THE SUPREME TRINITY IS ESTABLISHED FROM THE SA-
CRED SCRIPTURES, AND SOME TEXTS ALLEGED AGAINST THE EQUALITY OF THE SON ARE EX-
PLAINED.
order to raise their thought to the unchangeable~substance, which is God; but being weighed down by the burden of mortality, whilst they both would seem to know what they do not, and cannot know what they would, preclude themselves from entering the very path of understanding, by an over-bold affirmation of their own presumptuous judgments; choosing rather not to correct their own opinion when it is perverse, than to change that which they have once defended. And, indeed, this is the common disease of all the three classes which I have mentioned,—viz., both of those who frame their thoughts of God according to things corporeal, and of those who do so according to the spiritual creature, such as is the soul; and of those who neither regard the body nor the spiritual creature, and yet think falsely about God; and are indeed so much the further from the truth, that nothing can be found answering to their conceptions, either in the body, or in the made or created spirit, or in the Creator Himself. For he who thinks, for instance, that God is white or red, is in error; and yet these things are found in the body. Again, he who thinks of God as now forgetting and now remembering, or anything of the same kind, is none the less in error; and yet these things are found in the mind. But he who thinks that God is of such power as to have generated Himself, is so much the
CHAP, I.—THIS WORK IS WRITTEN AGAINST THOSE WHO SOPHISTICALLY ASSAIL THE FAITH OF THE TRINITY, THROUGH MISUSE OF REA-
SON, THEY WHO DISPUTE CONCERNING GOD ERR FROM A THREEFOLD CAUSE. HOLY SCRIPTURE, REMOVING WHAT IS FALSE, LEADS US ON BY DEGREES TO THINGS DIVINE. WHAT TRUE IMMORTALITY IS. WE ARE NOURISHED
BY FAITH, THAT WE MAY BE ENABLED TO APPREHEND THINGS DIVINE.
1. THE following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason. Now one class of such men endeavor to transfer to things incorporeal and spiritual the ideas they have formed, whether through experience of the bodily senses, or by natural human wit and diligent quickness, or by the aid of art, from things corporeal; so as to seek to measure and conceive of the former by the latter. Others, again, frame whatever sentiments they may have concerning God according to the nature or affections of the human mind; and through this error they govern their discourse, in disputing concerning God, by distorted and fallacious rules. While yet a third class strive indeed to transcend the whole creation, which doubtless..is changeable, in