and appearance was laid bare. It was invisible and without arrangement, and
214 SAINT A UGUSTINE - SERMONS and in this way the word goes out from me, comes to you, and doesn't depart from me.
So then, if we may be permitted to compare tiny things with great ones, the lowest with the highest, the human with the divine, God too has done that. The Word was hidden with the Father. In order to come to us, he commandeered a kind of vehicle, he took flesh to himself. He came forth to us, and did not depart from the Father. But before his incarnation, before Adam himself, the father of the human race, before heaven and earth and everything that is in them, in the beginning was the Word (Jn 1:1), and in the beginning God made heaven and earth (Gn 1:1).
To know God we must rise above and go beyond our time-bound experience of our own minds
3. God made the earth, though, before it was yet furnished, before its form and appearance was laid bare. It was invisible and without arrangement, and there was darkness on the deep. There was darkness where there was no light; light, you see, had not yet been made. The Spirit of God was skimming over the waters (Gn 1:2). He too is a maker, not separated, either, from the Father and the only-begotten Word. And here, you see, if we pay careful attention, the Trinity is being suggested to us. Where it says In the beginning God made, the ousia9 of Father and Son is to be understood: in the beginning, the Son; God, the Father. There remains the Spirit, to complete the Trinity: The Spirit of God was skimming over the waters.
And God said (Gn 1:3). To whom did God say? Before any creature was made, was there anyone to hear?
"There was," he says.10 My question is: who? "The Son himself."
So God said to the Son. What word did he speak to the Word with? I mean if the Son was already there, as no Christian can doubt, then of course he was also the Word. The Son was the Word, and the* Father said to the Word; so words, I take it, ran to and fro between God and the Word? Not at all; get rid of the excess baggage of materialist thinking, brothers and sisters; think about invisible realities in an invisible way;11 don't parade bodily likenesses before the eyes of your minds. Go beyond whatever you can observe in yourself; go beyond even what you cannot observe in yourself; you can observe the body, I mean; you can't observe the soul, and yet it is changeable. Now it wishes, now it doesn't; now it knows, now it's ignorant; now it remembers, now it forgets; now it makes advances, now it regresses. That isn't God, such a nature isn't God, the soul is not a portion derived from the substance of God.12 Whatever God is, after all, he is the unchangeable good, the imperishable good. Even though God is invisible and the soul is invisible, the soul is changeable, God is unchangeable. So rise above, then, not only what you can observe in yourself, but also above whatever is changeable in yourself. Rise above everything, rise above yourself.