On the Holy Trinity

⁵⁰ But among these many things which I have now said, and of which there is nothing that I dare to profess myself to have said worthy of the ineffableness of that highest Trinity, but rather to confess that the wonderful knowledge of Him is too great for me, and that I cannot attain to it: O you, my soul, where do you feel yourself to be? Where do you lie? Where do you stand? Until all your infirmities be healed by Him who has forgiven all your iniquities. You perceive yourself assuredly to be in that inn whither that Samaritan brought him whom he found with many wounds inflicted by thieves, half-dead. And yet you have seen many things that are true, not by those eyes by which colored objects are seen, but by those for which he prayed who said, “Let my eyes behold the things that are equal.” Certainly, then, you have seen many things that are true, and hast distinguished them from that light by the light of which you have seen them.

Lift up your eyes to the light itself, and fix them upon it if you can. For so you will see how the birth of the Word of God differs from the procession of the Gift of God, on account of which the only-begotten Son did not say that the Holy Spirit is begotten of the Father, otherwise He would be His brother, but that He proceeds from Him. Whence, since the Spirit of both is a kind of consubstantial communion of Father and Son, He is not called, far be it from us to say so, the Son of both.

But you can not fix your sight there, so as to discern this lucidly and clearly; I know you can not. I say the truth, I say to myself, I know what I cannot do; yet that light itself shows to you these three things in yourself, wherein you may recognize an image of the highest Trinity itself, which you can not yet contemplate with steady eye. Itself shows to you that there is in you a true word, when it is born of your knowledge, i.e. when we say what we know: although we neither utter nor think of any articulate word that is significant in any tongue of any nation, but our thought is formed by that which we know; and there is in the mind's eye of the thinker an image resembling that thought which the memory contained, will or love as a third combining these two as parent and offspring.

And he who can, sees and discerns that this will proceeds indeed from thought (for no one wills that of which he is absolutely ignorant what or of what sort it is), yet is not an image of the thought: and so that there is insinuated in this intelligible thing a sort of difference between birth and procession, since to behold by thought is not the same as to desire, or even to enjoy will. You, too, hast been able [to discern this], although you have not been, neither art, able to unfold with adequate speech what, amidst the clouds of bodily likenesses, which cease not to flit up and down before human thoughts, you have scarcely seen.

But that light which is not yourself shows you this too, that these incorporeal likenesses of bodies are different from the truth, which, by rejecting them, we contemplate with the understanding. These, and other things similarly certain, that light has shown to your inner eyes. What reason, then, is there why you can not see that light itself with steady eye, except certainly infirmity? And what has produced this in you, except iniquity? Who, then, is it that heals all your infirmities, unless it be He that forgives all your iniquities? And therefore I will now at length finish this book by a prayer better than by an argument.