Chapter 5.—The Opinion Which Devises an Image of the Trinity in the Marriage of Male and Female, and in Their Offspring.

5. Accordingly they do not seem to me to advance a probable opinion, who lay it down that a trinity of the image of God in three persons, so far as regards human nature, can so be discovered as to be completed in the marriage of male and female and in their offspring; in that the man himself, as it were, indicates the person of the Father, but that which has so proceeded from him as to be born, that of the Son; and so the third person as of the Spirit, is, they say, the woman, who has so proceeded from the man as not herself to be either son or daughter,738    Gen. ii. 22 although it was by her conception that the offspring was born. For the Lord hath said of the Holy Spirit that He proceedeth from the Father,739    John xv. 26 and yet he is not a son. In this erroneous opinion, then, the only point probably alleged, and indeed sufficiently shown according to the faith of the Holy Scripture, is this,—in the account of the original creation of the woman,—that what so comes into existence from some person as to make another person, cannot in every case be called a son; since the person of the woman came into existence from the person of the man, and yet she is not called his daughter. All the rest of this opinion is in truth so absurd, nay indeed so false, that it is most easy to refute it. For I pass over such a thing, as to think the Holy Spirit to be the mother of the Son of God, and the wife of the Father; since perhaps it may be answered that these things offend us in carnal things, because we think of bodily conceptions and births. Although these very things themselves are most chastely thought of by the pure, to whom all things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving, of whom both the mind and conscience are polluted, nothing is pure;740    Tit. i. 15 so that even Christ, born of a virgin according to the flesh, is a stumbling-block to some of them. But yet in the case of those supreme spiritual things, after the likeness of which those kinds of the inferior creature also are made although most remotely, and where there is nothing that can be injured and nothing corruptible, nothing born in time, nothing formed from that which is formless, or whatever like expressions there may be; yet they ought not to disturb the sober prudence of any one, lest in avoiding empty disgust he run into pernicious error. Let him accustom himself so to find in corporeal things the traces of things spiritual, that when he begins to ascend upwards from thence, under the guidance of reason, in order to attain to the unchangeable truth itself through which these things were made, he may not draw with himself to things above what he despises in things below. For no one ever blushed to choose for himself wisdom as a wife, because the name of wife puts into a man’s thoughts the corruptible connection which consists in begetting children; or because in truth wisdom itself is a woman in sex, since it is expressed in both Greek and Latin tongues by a word of the feminine gender.

CAPUT V.

5. Opinio fingens imaginem Trinitatis in conjugio masculi et feminae ac eorum prole. Proinde non mihi videntur probabilem afferre sententiam, qui sic arbitrantur trinitatem imaginis Dei in tribus personis, quod attinet ad humanam naturam, posse reperiri, ut in conjugio masculi et feminae atque in eorum prole compleatur: quod quasi vir ipse Patris personam intimet; Filii vero, quod de illo ita processit ut nasceretur; atque ita tertiam personam velut Spiritus dicunt esse mulierem, quae ita de viro processit, ut non ipsa esset filius aut filia (Gen. II, 22), quamvis ea concipiente proles nasceretur. Dixit enim Dominus de Spiritu Sancto, quod a Patre procedat (Joan. XV, 26), et tamen Filius non est. In hujus igitur opinionis errore, hoc solum probabiliter affertur, quod in origine factae feminae, secundum sanctae Scripturae fidem satis ostenditur, non omne quod de aliqua persona ita existit, ut personam alteram faciat, filium posse dici; quandoquidem de viri persona exstitit persona mulieris, nec tamen ejus filia dicta est. Caetera sane ita sunt absurda, imo vero ita falsa, ut facillime redarguantur. Omitto enim quale sit, Spiritum sanctum matrem Filii Dei putare et conjugem Patris: fortassis quippe respondeatur haec in carnalibus habere offensionem, dum corporei conceptus partusque cogitantur. Quanquam et haec ipsa castissime cogitent, quibus mundis omnia munda sunt: immundis autem et infidelibus, quorum polluta sunt et mens et conscientia, ita nihil est mundum (Tit. I, 15), ut quosdam eorum etiam de virgine secundum carnem natus Christus offendat. Sed tamen in spiritualibus illis summis, ubi non est aliquid violabile aut corruptibile, nec natum ex tempore, nec ex informi formatum, si qua dicuntur talia, ad quorum similitudinem etiam ista inferioris creaturae genera, quamvis longe remotissime facta sunt, non debent cujusquam sobriam 1001 perturbare prudentiam, ne cum vanum devitat horrorem, in perniciosum incurrat errorem. Assuescat in corporalibus ita spiritualium reperire vestigia, ut cum inde sursum versus duce ratione ascendere coeperit, ut ad ipsam incommutabilem veritatem per quam sunt facta ista perveniat, non secum ad summa pertrahat quod contemnit in infimis. Nec enim erubuit quidam, uxorem sibi eligere sapientiam, quia nomen uxoris in prole gignenda corruptibilem concubitum ingerit cogitanti: aut vero ipsa sapientia sexu femina est , quia feminini generis vocabulo et in graeca et in latina lingua enuntiatur.