Letter 119: Consentius asks Augustine for a fuller correction of his Trinitarian arguments.

To Augustine, holy and Most Blessed Father: Consentius. I had already explained the nature of my request briefly to your holy brother, Bishop Alypius, a man I admire for every virtue of the soul, hoping that he would be willing to support my petition before you. But since the reason that forced you to go to the villa deprived me of your presence, I preferred to put my request into a letter rather than leave my mind tossing in uncertainty. If you decide that what I ask ought to be granted, I think the solitude of the place where you now are may help your mind as it searches out the deepest mysteries. For my part, I have settled this firmly in my own mind: divine truth should be received by faith more than by reasoning. If the faith of the holy Church were grasped by argumentative proof and not by devout belief, no one except philosophers and public speakers would possess blessedness. But God chose the weak things of this world to shame the strong, and it pleased him to save believers through what looks like the foolishness of preaching. So with God we should not so much demand a rational account as follow the authority of the saints. Surely the Arians, who think the Son whom we confess as begotten is lesser, would not persist in that impiety, nor would the Macedonians, so far as they can, push the Holy Spirit down from the height of divinity, if they preferred to adapt their faith to holy Scripture rather than to their own lines of reasoning. Yet you, admirable man, if our Father, the only one who knows secrets and who holds the key of David, has allowed you with the gaze of a most serene heart to penetrate the structure of heaven and, with unveiled face, to contemplate the glory of the Lord, then tell us some portion of that ineffable substance, as far as the one who gave you such thought has also given you power to express it. Try, with his help, to set out in words, as far as you can, an image of his likeness. Unless you are present as guide and teacher in so great a matter, our thought, like weak eyes, is afraid to look toward it when struck by the reflected blaze of so much light. Enter, then, into that darkest cloud of God's mysteries, which keeps our sight away. Correct, first in me and then in my books, the little questions in which I know I go astray when trying to resolve them. I want to follow the authority of Your Holiness by faith rather than be deformed by the false image of reasoning conceived in my own heart. With very cautious simplicity, I heard and believed that the Lord Jesus Christ is light from light, as it is written, "Proclaim good news day after day, his salvation," and in the Wisdom of Solomon, "He is the brightness of eternal light." I believed that God, though I could not believe worthily what he is, is the infinite greatness of an inestimable light. The human mind, however loftily it thinks, cannot estimate its quality, measure its quantity, or fashion its appearance; yet whatever that reality is, I believed it possesses an incomparable form and immeasurable beauty, which at least Christ sees with bodily eyes. So near the end of my first book, as you no doubt remember, I wanted to prove that the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, the human being he assumed, possessed divine power in such a way that the material of the human flesh he had taken remained. I had taught that in those inward parts nothing perished except weakness. Then this knot of a question was thrown at me: if the man whom Christ assumed was turned into God, then he ought not to have been local. Why, then, after the resurrection did he say, "Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father"? Trying to prove that Christ is everywhere by power, not by bodily operation; by divinity, not by flesh, I wrote these words about the unity of God and the Trinity of persons: God is one, and the persons are three. God is undivided; the persons are distinct. God is within all things and beyond all things; he encloses the lowest, fills the middle, transcends the highest, and spreads beyond and through the universe. The persons, however, remain themselves, separated by property and not mixed by confusion. God, then, is one and is everywhere, because there is no other besides him, and there is no empty place where another could be. All things are full of God, and nothing exists outside God. He is in the Father, he is in the Son, he is in the Holy Spirit; therefore Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not several gods, but the one God himself. Yet the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Holy Spirit. The Father is in the Son, the Son in the Father, and the Holy Spirit in both, because in the three, distinct in number and not in rank, that is, in persons and not in power, the one indivisible God dwells. Everything that belongs to the Father belongs to the Son; everything that belongs to the Son belongs to the Father; and what belongs to both belongs to the Holy Spirit. They possess not a merely equal substance of deity, but the same substance, the one substance, not separated. For that reason one does not precede another in majesty or age, because what is full cannot be divided, and within fullness there is nothing that can separate fullness and make a larger portion for one and a smaller portion for another. But it is not so with the persons: the person of the Father is not the person of the Son, nor is the person of the Son the same as the person of the Holy Spirit. There is one power, possessed by the threefold power; one substance, in which the three subsist. Therefore Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are everywhere in majesty, because they are one; they are with themselves only in persons, because they are three. Weaving further arguments of this sort, I brought the matter to this point: I affirmed that the persons are present and everywhere, but that the one majesty, the same above the heavens, across the seas, and beyond the lower regions, is everywhere. From this, I argued, one should understand that the human being whom Christ assumed was indeed turned toward God, while not losing the nature he had taken, and yet could not be believed to be a fourth person. But you, a man to whom I think it has been granted to enter heaven itself by the refinement of thought, since the one who said, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," is true, lift the height of a pure heart above all the stars to contemplation itself. You say that God must not be thought of as any body. Even if someone imagines in his mind a light a thousand times brighter and more intense than this sun, no likeness of God can be grasped there, because everything that can be seen is a body. Just as we cannot think of justice or piety as bodily, unless perhaps by pagan vanity we picture feminine bodies, so God must be thought, as far as we can, without any imitation produced by the imagination. But to me, since I can barely take in the subtlety of the discussion with a rather lukewarm heart, it seemed that justice has nothing living in it according to substance. Therefore I still cannot think of God, that is, the living nature, as like justice, because justice does not live in itself but in us; or rather, we live according to justice, while justice itself does not live by itself, unless perhaps it is asserted that the only justice is not this human equity, but that justice which is God. So I want to be strengthened in all this, not only by spoken words when you are present, but also by a fuller letter. It is not right that only our feet should be called back, by your warning, from this road of error on which many of us are walking. Since many in the islands where we live, while trying to go by the straight embankment toward the road, have fallen into the track of this twisting error, will there be some Augustine there whose authority they will yield to, whose teaching they will believe, whose intelligence will overcome them? Or perhaps, from fatherly affection, would you rather guide me by a private warning than rebuke a companion in a bad journey? But for me, since I want to run for the profit of my soul rather than for worldly praise, your correction is not useless, and therefore not bitter, especially when it will bring both life and good repute to me and to others. No one, I think, can be so unfair as to prefer marking me as foolish because I once followed crooked paths, rather than judging me prudent because I chose the straight ones. Those whom the apostle Paul warned not to run uncertainly should not be counted fools: "Run in such a way that you may obtain." Therefore this road we are running on must not only be abandoned by us, but blocked and cut off, so that it may not deceive others by a false appearance of love. You have been chosen, unless I am mistaken, not as the reader of books already published by me, but as the corrector of books still to be approved. In the letter I put at the front of those little books as a kind of preface, I wrote these words: "I have decided to steady the wavering boat of our faith by the judgment of the blessed Bishop Augustine." Why, then, summit of this teaching which is in Christ, do you hesitate to rebuke openly a son who must be corrected? Unless the anchor of your judgment bites more deeply, it cannot steady us securely. The question is not light or blame-free. In it, not only have I made no progress, but, as you said most forcefully, the blindness of our thought has fallen into the crime of idolatry. I want this to be examined by you carefully and prudently, so that the clarity of your teaching and intellect may wipe away the fog of our mind, and what we cannot now think may be made clear by the light of understanding you give, so that we may see it with the eyes of the heart. May you possess the heavenly kingdom safe and blessed forever, remembering me, holy and Most Blessed Father.

EPISTOLA 119 Scripta a. 410. Consentius Augustino quaestiones de Trinitate proponit, praesertim quid inter divinam humanamque Christi naturam, inter Christi ac Patris et Spiritus Sancti personas intersit (n. 1-5) aitque illius explanationes utilissimas multis fore (n. 6). DOMINO SANCTO AC BEATISSIMO PAPAE AUGUSTINO, CONSENTIUS. Fides Scripturis magis quam rationibus accommodanda. 1. Iam quidem sancto, mihique cunctis animi virtutibus admirando, fratri tuo Alipio episcopo genus petitionis meae brevi sermone suggesseram, sperans precum mearum ut apud te esse adiutor dignaretur. Sed quia praesentiam mihi tuam ea, quae ad villam ire compulit, causa fraudavit, malui litteris precem inserere, quam exspectationem animi fluctuare; maxime cum id quod postulo, si mihi concedi oportere perspexeris, adiuvare sensum tuum altissima mysteria perscrutantem, loci ipsius, ut arbitror, in quo nunc consistis, valeat solitudo. Ego igitur cum apud memetipsum prorsus definierim, veritatem rei divinae ex fide magis quam ex ratione percipi oportere; si enim fides sanctae Ecclesiae ex disputationis ratione, non ex credulitatis pietate apprehenderetur, nemo praeter philosophos atque oratores beatitudinem possideret. Sed quia placuit Deo, qui infirma mundi huius elegit ut confundat fortia, per stultitiam praedicationis salvare credentes 1, non tam ratio requirenda de Deo, quam auctoritas est sequenda sanctorum. Nam profecto neque Ariani, qui Filium, quem genitum confitemur, minorem putant, in hac impietate persisterent, neque Macedoniani Spiritum sanctum, quem neque genitum neque ingenitum credimus, quantum in ipsis est a divinitatis arce detruderent, si Scripturis sanctis magis quam suis ratiocinationibus accommodare fidem mallent. Augustini magisterio Consentius fidit. 2. Tamen tu, vir admirabilis, si tibi ille Pater noster, solus conscius secretorum, qui habet clavem David 2, serenissimi cordis obtutu coelorum machinam penetrare concessit, et revelata, ut scriptum est, facie gloriam Domini speculari 3, in quantum tibi ille qui huiusmodi cogitationem dedit, promendi dederit facultatem, enuntia nobis aliquam ineffabilis substantiae portionem, et imaginem similitudinis eius ipso adiuvante exprimere, in quantum potes, verbis enitere; quoniam nisi tu tantae rei dux ac magister adfueris, velut lippientibus oculis prospicere in eam tanti luminis repercussa fulgore cogitatio nostra formidat. Intra ergo in illam, quae nostros arcet intuitus, mysteriorum Dei obscurissimam nubem; quaestiunculas in quibus absolvendis me errare cognosco, qui auctoritatem Sanctitatis tuae fide magis sequi volo, quam rationis corde conceptae falsa imagine depravari, primum in memetipso, dehinc in libris corrige. De duabus in Christo naturis. 3. Ego siquidem in circumspecta admodum simplicitate audiens credensque Dominum Iesum Christum lumen esse de lumine, sicut scriptum est: Bene nuntiate diem de die, salutare eius 4.; et in Sapientia Salomonis: Candor est enim lucis aeternae 5; credebam Deum, quod licet credere ut dignum est non valebam, tamen esse inaestimabilis cuiusdam lucis infinitam magnitudinem, cuius nec qualitatem aestimare, nec quantitatem metiri, nec speciem fingere, quamquam sublime cogitans mens humana sufficeret; tamen esse illud quiddam, quidquid est, cui adsit incomparabilis forma, inaestimabilis pulchritudo, quam etiam carnalibus oculis saltem Christus aspiciat. Cum ergo circa finem primi libri, sicut procul dubio meminisse dignaris, cupiens comprobare Dominum Iesum Christum, id est hominem assumptum, ita divinam possidere potentiam, ut materia carnis humanae quam susceperat, permaneret, quam in illis visceribus nihil aliud quam infirmitatem perisse docuissem, illius mihi nodus quaestionis obiectus est. Si, inquit, homo ille quem assumpsit Christus, in Deum versus est, ergo localis esse non debuit: cur ergo post resurrectionem dixit: Noli me tangere, nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum 6? Dei Trinitas et Unitas. 4. Ego igitur elaborans approbare ubique esse Christum virtute, non opere; divinitate, non carne; de unitate Dei et personarum trinitate huiusmodi verba conscripsi: Deus, inquam, unus est, et personae tres sunt. Deus indiscretus est, personae discretae sunt. Deus intra omnia, trans omnia est, ultima includit, media implet, summa transcendit, ultra universa et per universa diffunditur: personae autem sibi constantes, proprietate secernuntur, non confusione miscentur. Deus ergo unus est, et ubique est; quia et alius praeter illum non est, et locus non est vacuus ubi esse alius possit. Plena sunt Deo omnia, et praeter Deum nihil est. Ipse est in Patre, ipse in Filio, ipse in Spiritu sancto: ac per hoc, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus sanctus non plures dii, sed ipse unus est Deus; et non est ipse Pater qui est Filius, nec Filius qui est Spiritus sanctus. Pater in Filio est, Filius in Patre, in utroque Spiritus sanctus; quia in tribus numero, non ordine, id est personis, non virtute discretis, unus atque indivisibilis habitat Deus. Omnia quae Patris sunt, Filii sunt; et quae Filii sunt, Patris sunt; et quae utriusque sunt, Spiritus sancti sunt: quia non quasi aequalem, sed eamdem, id est unicam, non separatam possident substantiam Deitatis; et ideo vel maiestate, vel aetate, alter alterum non praecedit, quia dividi quod plenum est non potest, nec est in plenitudine aliquid, quod possit plenitudinem separare, et maiorem uni, minorem alteri facere portionem. In personis autem non ita est; quia Patris persona non est Filii, nec Filii persona eadem est Spiritus sancti. Una virtus est, quam trina possidet virtus; una substantia est, in qua tria sunt quae subsistunt. Pater ergo, et Filius, et Spiritus sanctus maiestate ubique sunt, quia unum sunt; personis tantum apud se sunt, quia tres sunt. Et reliqua huiusmodi texens, rem eousque deduxi, ut praesentes quidem et ubique esse personas, sed illam, quae supra coelos, trans maria, ultra inferos, una atque eadem est maiestate, firmarem. Ex quo intellegi debere monstrabam, hominem quem Christus assumpsit, in Deum quidem versum susceptam non amisisse naturam, non tamen quasi quartam credi posse personam. Num Dei essentia cogitari possit. 5. Sed tu, vir, cui coelum, ut arbitror, ipsum subtilitate cogitationum intrare concessum est; verax etenim est qui ait; Beati mundo corde, quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt 7; super omnia sidera ad ipsam contemplationem altitudinem mundi cordis attollis, ais non tamquam aliquod corpus debere cogitari Deum. Nam etiamsi quispiam animo lucem millies quam huius solis clariorem intensioremque confingat, nullam illic Dei similitudinem comprehendi posse, quia corpus est omne quod cerni potest: sed sicut iustitiam vel pietatem corpoream cogitare non possumus, nisi aliqua forte nobis feminea corpora gentili vanitate fingamus; ita et Deum sine aliqua phantasiae simulatione in quantum possumus cogitandum. Mihi autem, qui subtilitatem disputationis tepido percipere admodum corde vix possum, videbatur nihil vivum secundum substantiam inesse iustitiae: ideoque non possum adhuc Deum, id est, viventem naturam, iustitiae similem cogitare; quia iustitia non in se, sed in nobis vivit; imo potius nos secundum iustitiam vivimus, ipsa vero iustitia per se nequaquam vivit, nisi forte non huius humanae aequitatis, sed illa quae Deus est, sola asseratur esse iustitia. Compluribus Augustini explanationes profuturae. 6. Unde confirmari me ex omnibus non solum praesentibus verbis, sed etiam pleniori epistola velim. Neque enim fas est ut nostri tantum pedes ab ista in qua multi ingredimur, erroris via, te monente revocentur. Cum enim multi in illis in quibus habitamus insulis, dum recto ad viam pergunt aggere, in tramitem tortuosi huius erroris incurrerint, eritne aliquis illic Augustinus, cuius auctoritati cedant, cuius doctrinae credant, cuius ingenio superentur? An forte ex illo paternitatis affectu mavis me occulta commonitione dirigere, quam velut comitem pravi itineris increpare? Sed mihi pro utilitate animae, magis quam pro saeculi laude currere cupienti, non est inutilis, ac proinde etiam non amara coargutio tua; maxime cum et mihi et caeteris vitam simul laudemque paritura sit. Nemo siquidem tam iniustus esse, ut arbitror, potest, qui me ex eo quod aliquando devia sum secutus, stultitiae denotare malit quam ex eo quod recta delegerim, prudenter iudicare cunctetur. Neque enim stulti aestimandi sunt, quos Paulus apostolus, ne in incertum currerent admonebat dicens: Sic currite ut comprehendatis 8: quapropter via ista quam currimus, non solum relinquenda nobis, verum etiam intercludenda atque praecidenda est, ne forte etiam eos fallaci dilectionis simulatione frustretur. Tu enim non editorum iam a me librorum lector, sed probandorum emendator, ni fallor, electus es. Nam in illa epistola, quam in illis meis libellis velut praefatiunculam praetuli, huiusmodi verba conscripta sunt: "Placuit, inquam, fluctuantem fidei nostrae cymbam beati Augustini episcopi stabilire sententia." Cur ergo, vir doctrinae huius quae in Christo est, culmen, arguere palam corrigendum de caetero filium dubitas, cum sententiae tuae anchora nisi morsum altius presserit, nos certius stabilire non possit? Non enim levis aut culpata quaestio, in qua non solum nihil profecit, verum etiam sicut, a te fortissime dictum est, idololatriae crimen caecitas nostrae cogitationis incurrit. Hanc a te caute prudenterque discuti vellem, ut doctrinae tuae ingeniique serenitas ita nebulam nostrae mentis abstergat, ut quod nunc cogitare non possumus, intellegentiae a te lumine declaratum, oculis cordis videre valeamus. Incolumis ac beatus in aeternum, mei memor coelestia regna possideas, domine sancte ac beatissime papa.