Chapter 1: The author turns to the discussion of wisdom and its appropriate function of contemplation, in which the true image of God is to be found; …

The author turns to the discussion of wisdom and its appropriate function of contemplation, in which the true image of God is to be found; but first he picks up a thread from the previous book and examines in more detail why in fact a trinity of faith as the appropriate function of knowledge may not be said to be the image of God.

1, 1. Now it is wisdom's turn to be discussed. I do not mean God's wisdom, which is undoubtedly God; it is his only begotten Son that is called God's wisdom. What we are going to talk about is man's wisdom, true wisdom of course which is in accordance with God and is in fact the true and principal worship of him, which in Greek is the single noun theosebeia. Our people, as I have already mentioned, Book XII, 22. ^†1 translated this by “piety,” as they too wanted to find a single noun for it. But piety is more usually called eusebeia in Greek; and as theosebeia cannot be completely translated by one word, it is better to use two for it and say “God's worship.” That this is man's wisdom, as we have already settled in the twelfth volume of this work, is proved on the authority of holy scripture in the book of God's servant Job, where we read that God's wisdom said to man, Behold piety is wisdom, while to abstain from evils is knowledge (Jb 28:28). It is interesting he should ascribe these words to divine Wisdom; in the text God is the speaker, but the words are the conclusion of an anomalous poem in the book which is in praise of Wisdom. ^†2 Some have here translated the Greek word episteme by “discipline,” which of course derives from discere, to learn, and so can mean knowledge, seeing that a thing is only learned in order to be known. But it also has the other meaning, according to which the pains a man suffers for his sins in order to be corrected are commonly called “discipline”; it is used in this sense in the Letter to the Hebrews: What son is there whose father does not give him discipline? And even more clearly from the same letter: All discipline seems at the time to be a matter for sadness, not joy, but afterward it will repay the peaceable fruit of justice to those who have competed through it (Heb 12:7.11). ^†* So God himself is supreme wisdom; but the worship of God is

2. But what are we to do if the discussion of wisdom is the prerogative of the wise? The same problem arose with “justice” in Book VIII, 9. ^†3 Will we have the nerve to profess wisdom, and if not will our discussion of it not be sheer impertinence? Will the example of Pythagoras not frighten us off? Not daring to profess to be wise, he answered that he was rather a philosopher, that is, a lover of wisdom. From him onward this name found favor among his successors, so that however outstanding a man might seem to be, either in his own or other people's opinion, as a teacher of matters that belong to wisdom, he would never be called anything but a philosopher, a wisdom-lover. Or possibly the reason why none of these men dared to profess to be wise was that they thought a wise man would be entirely without sin. But our scriptures do not say this, because they say, Rebuke a wise man and he will love you (Prv 9:8); and presumably they judge a man who is considered to be worthy of rebuke to have sin. Even so, I for one do not dare to profess to be wise. It is enough for me that it is also the business of the philosopher, that is of the wisdom-lover, to discuss wisdom, which even these old philosophers cannot deny. After all, they did not stop doing this, even though they professed to be lovers of wisdom rather than wise men.

3. Now in their discussions of wisdom they defined it as follows: Wisdom is the knowledge of things human and divine. A commonplace Stoic definition, quoted frequently by Cicero, for example in De Officiis 2, 12, 5. ^†4 That is why in the previous book I expressly said that awareness of each kind of things, namely human and divine, could be called both wisdom and knowledge. Book XIII, 24. ^†5 But in terms of the distinction made by the apostle, To one is given a word of wisdom, to another a word of knowledge (1 Cor 12:8), this definition can be split up, in such a way that knowledge of things divine is properly called wisdom, and of things human is properly given the name of knowledge. I discussed this knowledge in the thirteenth volume, where I did not of course ascribe to it any and every thing a man can know about things human, because this includes a great deal of superfluous frivolity and pernicious curiosity; all I ascribed to it was anything that breeds, feeds, defends, and strengthens the saving faith which leads to true happiness. Very many of the faithful do not excel in such knowledge, though they excel very much in faith itself. That hoary old theological character, the unlettered charwoman of deep and simple faith, who is too often introduced as an excuse for avoiding, or even inhibiting theological thought, was embodied for Augustine in his mother, Monica. But it never occurred to him that his veneration for her should limit the range of his intellectual appetite, and she herself would have been horrified if it had. ^†6 It is one thing to know only what a man should believe in order to gain the happy life which is nothing if it is not eternal; quite another to know how the godly are to be assisted in this and how the attacks of the ungodly upon it are to be met, and it is this that the apostle seems to call by the proper name of knowledge. When I was speaking about it above, my chief concern was to commend faith itself, after first briefly distinguishing between eternal and temporal things. While discussing temporal things in that place and deferring eternal ones to this book, I showed that faith in eternal things is also necessary for gaining these eternal things, though faith itself is temporal and finds a temporal dwelling in the hearts of believers. I also argued that faith

2, 4. Now it is written that As long as we are in the body we are living abroad from the Lord; for we are walking by faith and not by sight (1 Cor 5:6). It would seem to follow then that as long as the just man is living on faith See Hb 2:4; Rom 1:17; Gal 3:11; Heb 10:38. ^†7 he may indeed strive and struggle on by this temporal faith to the eternal truth, Per… fidem ad veritatem nitatur et tendat aeternam; M reads… nitatur et tendat ad eaterna; strive by this… faith to the truth and struggle on to things eternal. ^†8 and yet in his retaining, contemplating and loving of this temporal faith there is not such a trinity as deserves to be called the image of God, even though he is living according to the inner man; otherwise we would appear to be setting up this image in temporal things, although it should only be set up in things that are eternal. Clearly, when the human mind sees the faith with which it believes what it does not see, it is not seeing something everlasting. It will not always exist, because it will certainly no longer exist when this sojourn abroad comes to an end in which we are living away from the Lord so that we have to walk by faith, and when the sight by which we shall see face to face See 1 Cor 13:12. ^†9 takes its place. We do not see now, but because we believe, we shall deserve to see, and shall rejoice at having been brought through to sight by faith. Then there will no longer be any faith by which things that are not seen are believed, but sight by which things that were believed are seen. So even though we then remember this mortal life that is over and done with, and recollect from memory that we once believed what we did not yet see, this faith will be reckoned among things that are past and over and done with, not among things that are present and continue for ever. And therefore this trinity too that consists in the memory, observation, and love of faith now present and continuing will be found to be a thing that is past and done with, not still continuing.

From this we conclude that if this trinity is already the image of God, then such an image is not to be located in things that always are but in things that pass away. But it is intolerable to suppose that while the soul is by nature immortal and from the moment of its creation never thereafter ceases to exist, its very best attribute or possession should not last out its immortality. And was anything better created in its nature than its being made to the image of its creator? So whatever it is that must be called the image of God, it must be found in something that will always be, and not in the retention, contemplation, and love of faith, which will not always be.

5. Or should we perhaps spend a little longer on examining more thoroughly and more searchingly whether this is in fact the case? It could, after all, be said that this trinity does not fade out when faith itself passes away. Just as we now retain our faith by remembering, and observe it by thinking, and love it by willing, so too we will retain it then by remembering our having had it, and we

To be able to understand this, let us take an example from bodily things, which we spoke about sufficiently in the eleventh book. You will remember that in our ascent from lower things to higher, or our entrance from outer things to inner, we found a first trinity in the body that is seen, and the gaze of the seer which is formed from it when he sees it, and the intention of the will which joins the two together. Now to this trinity let us equate the similar one that arises when the faith that is in us is established in our memory like that body in its place, and from it the thought is formed in recollection just as the gaze was formed from that body in seeing, and to these two to make up a trinity is added the will as the third element which connects and joins together faith established in the memory and a kind of copy of it impressed on the inner gaze in recollection; just as in that other bodily trinity of vision the intention of the will joins together the form of the body that is being seen and the conformation to it which is being produced in the outer gaze by looking. Now let us suppose that that body which was being looked at has fallen to bits and vanished, and nothing of it whatever remains anywhere to which the gaze can turn back in order to see it. The image of course of the bodily thing that is now past, over and done with remains in the memory, and in thought the inner gaze can be formed from it, with the will as the third element joining the two together; but is this to be called the same trinity as the one which existed when the look of the body in its place was being seen? Surely not, it is quite a different one. Apart from the fact that the first one was outside, the second inside, the first was produced by the look of a body present, the second is produced by the image of a body past. So too in the point we are considering now and which we brought up this example to illustrate, faith which is now in our consciousness like that body in its place produces a certain trinity when it i retained, looked at, and loved. But this trinity will not continue to be when faith is no longer in the consciousness like that body no longer in its place. The trinity that will exist then when we recall that faith has been, not is, in us, will be quite a different one. The trinity that exists now is produced by the thing present and affixed to the consciousness of the believer; the trinity that will exist then will be made by the image of the thing past, left behind in the recording

Footnotes

^* Some have here translated the Greek word episteme by “discipline,” which of course derives from discere, to learn, and so can mean knowledge, seeing that a thing is only learned in order to be known. But it also has the other meaning, according to which the pains a man suffers for his sins in order to be corrected are commonly called “discipline”; it is used in this sense in the Letter to the Hebrews: What son is there whose father does not give him discipline? And even more clearly from the same letter: All discipline seems at the time to be a matter for sadness, not joy, but afterward it will repay the peaceable fruit of justice to those who have competed through it (Heb 12:7.11).

^* But of course if it leaves no trace of itself in us when it passes away, then indeed we will have nothing of it in our memory to turn back to and recall its having existed in the past, coupling the two together with the intention as third element, namely what was in the memory while we were not thinking about it and what was formed from it by thinking about it.