Hymns on Faith

Notes

1. or, his soul
2. §. 5.
3. See R. lv. §. 2. Vol. ii. p. 471, c. ‘Behold images in a mirror, which neither is empty nor can be emptied of forms! Behold the Eternal Essence, which is not crowded nor can be crowded by the creatures, like a mirror! Types from the creatures are we not able to bring that they should shape it before our eyes. It is laden with all things, yet wearieth not; for though full it be, yet is it as it were empty. A great wonder this! It filleth all things with its Essence, and there is room in It. Who can suffice for all that is within It? How like to It is the mind which though not empty hath in it room for all sciences? Let the mouth confess its own weakness, and not be ashamed that its littleness is overcome by Him. One Name hath the Eternal, &c.’ as above, p. 132. Here St. E. evidently contemplates the memory or the mind as capable of retaining a vast multiplicity of impressions or ideas, as a type of the Father. Nyssen c. Ar. et Sab. Mai C. Nov. viii. p. 8. “Perhaps you will say,’ if the Father as being perfect filleth all things, what sort of remnant is there left for the Son, who is perfect, to contain?’ To this I answer, that it is One Another that They are capable of receiving and containing. For I, He says, am in the Father, and the Father is in Me. But as They that contain Each Other, would be equal in greatness to Each Other, you will certainly be desirous to be told, how They are to be in Each Other: for the One must be [you will say] comprised by the Other, and consequently that which is comprised, in that which compriseth; but the latter will not be again itself comprised by the former. Fancy not that God hath any void in Himself, wherein that which is comprised is received. For in the case of men this must be allowed, seeing we are not such as to contain others, or to go into another.....But in God’s case something of the following sort must be conceived: As in the soul of a man two sciences or more coming together may coexist, medicine say, and philosophy, and as many others as are not straitened in the mind and space of the soul, which though numerous have room enough, and may give up the whole to each other, [the text is corrupt here,] although they fill up the soul, and though one does not go beyond the bounds of the other; in such way as to yield to the most enquiring of men the appearance of a single essence, since they are situate and being in one and the same mind—as these differ from each other, inasmuch as medicine is one thing and philosophy another; so the Father and the Son, being contained in the same place, and capable of receiving one another, and being One, differ One from the Other in Person only and title, but exist in One Another.” Pseudo- Athan. c. Sab. Greg. §. 11. “When they see such a multitude of wisdoms about one intellect, let them reflect that these exist not in space; for what must a man have been in magnitude to have sufficed for the reception of so many things, if it was in separate places that he had each of his cognitions.....let us then turn our mind to what are above us, and in themselves incorporeal, to wit, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, which need not places, nor are discriminate by places; and let no one on this account venture to suppose that either Father, Son, or Holy Spirit has no existence.....Thus the Trinity, having a real existence, is inseparably united together.....and exhibits one and the same form, of the Father who is seen in the Son, and of the Son who is perceived in the Spirit, &c.” These passages will enable us to see what St. E. has before his mind. The memory retains ideas, which make up the sum of its wisdom: if it was able at one moment actually to represent to itself the whole amount of its cognitions, the image of them, when in scientific arrangement, would be a perfect image of itself—would correspond exactly to itself, and match with every part of itself, as if occupying the whole of the same space which it occupies. In proportion as it does so, the memory generating thought is a type of God begetting His Word. St. Aust. de Trin. xi. §. 11. “When we think, from that form which the memory retains, there is in the glance of him that thinketh, expressed and shaped by recollecting, that form which is, as it were, the offspring of that which the memory retains. But neither is the one a real parent, nor the other a real offspring,” &c.
4. R. lv. §. 1.
5. All types of this kind are necessarily very imperfect, and therefore an attempt to draw out the author’s meaning, must not be construed into an attempt to understand the thing itself. God’s wisdom is nothing else than the contemplation of Himself, (see Thomassin de Trin. ii. 21. §. 4.) which contemplation in reality, and not as we are obliged to conceive of it, is identical with Himself: in begetting the Son, therefore, God begetteth Wisdom; because the whole of the Father’s Substance is given to the Son.....the Son’s Substance may be said, in our gross way of conceiving things, to be coextensive with the Father’s. A really scientific arrangement of the objects contained in the memory under ‘names,’ which are oral, or thoughts which are mental words, exhausts those objects entirely: the substance of the memory, and the substance of the thought, or discursive act of the mind, by which they are generated from the memory in a scientific form, are also at the time coextensive, or if perfect, would be so. In this way then the memory, and the thought, or discourse, or word, form a type of the Father and the Son: though the Son is in the Father, and thought in the memory, it is not in the way of a local indwelling that they coinhere in each other—In the next §. perhaps he passes (see p. 234, f. g.) from a type of the Trinity to one of the Incarnation, and takes the memory in a less definite sense, as an energy of the soul, shewing that not even the soul and far less God is circumscribed by a body. See Leontius, (p. 416, quoted ab. p. 167, n. h.) who charges the Nestorians with deriving their notions of God’s uncircumscribed Nature from what is locally uncircumscribed, and so attempting to prove the impossibility of God and Man being compounded in Christ.
6. The following passage from R. xxix. adv. Hæres. will throw light on the text by putting before the reader some of the wonders relating to memory and sleep in other words. “Leave every thing, oh mind unseen, and gather thyself into thyself: do thou enquire of thyself in thyself, where thou art in sleep: with thyself, or, with every thing? Art then thou awake, the thou that wert in the dream? and how is it that thou knowest not that thou wert in thyself? Did any other clothe thee? then how camest thou not to perceive it? Or how, if the devil clothed thee in the night, didst thou perceive of what kind he was, when his nature is so subtle? and how is a devil, though akin to the body, (see n. b. p. 267.) more subtle than the mind? Why [in your theory] the devil is the dregs of that principle of darkness: but if the dregs thereof be more subtle than the mind, who is to be able to grasp a nature so refined as that? Speak and declare, thou intellect, and soul between the two, and body likewise, harmonious three! why have ye not been equal to the force of a single demon? and, instead of one of you prevailing as should have been the case, see, between you all three ye have not perceived, when he put you asleep, and threw you into slumber, and made you astonied, and scattered your thoughts! Sleep, that vapour when it takes the body, ascends into the mind, and the devil proveth to be awake therein though akin to the body, and the intellect to be asleep therein though alien from it. But and if it be not the evil one that deludeth you, who then is it that maketh you to sin in what happens at night, which Moses hath written of and reproved also? Who again with multitudinous abominations frayeth you? If the wicked one it is not that doth mock you in your dreams, is the Good One therefore never mingled in your visions? and how is it that there have been and still are in the time of your sleep the visions of your dreams? since the body is what resteth, who is it that moveth and goeth forth without a frame, and soweth without a field, and sinneth without free-will, (comp. St. Austin’s Confess. x. §. 41.) and when awakened is ashamed? But if no evil is with your dreams mingled, then they are your own, how foul soever. But if ye perceive not who it was that put them there, are we to say that it was Satan who was awake and plunged you into slumber? A body have ye become to him, and he a mind to you, and ye have both of you at once forfeited your own natures! Dregs have become refined! the child of sleep wakeful! the mind asleep! the intellect a dead thing! the corpse hath become a soul! and the living body one not so! and the body hath been found to be awake while it is with Satan, who in its sleep hath made it to sin! and mind and intellect are found to have been put to silence with the soul their sister! But if dreams were Satan’s own, who is it that has scattered the memory of the dream away when one is awaked, in the soul, the intellect, and mind? and how comes he not to be satisfied with the former ones wherewith he deluded them, whom though of wakeful and spiritual nature he yet made dead, but to have returned and clothed them again therewith when awaked and alive? By their memories he begins to make them remember their dreams, and by their words their visions he begins to recount, and by their interpretations examines and expounds their own dreams to their own selves! Who is it that would not be astounded at this confusion? who that would not be awed at this commixture? who that is equal to comprehending this discreteness? how that it is one, and how that it is many; knowing, and yet knowing not; perceiving, and yet discerning not; forgetfulness, yet memory; himself, yet not himself; if asleep, he is awake; if dead, alive; if quiet, yet of wide wandering; if entranced, yet a prophet; the prophecy of his sleep in his awaked estate he expounded; he is with his essence, and is not with his soul; he is in himself, yet not in himself; for lo! while lying down he runneth about! is it he who goeth forth and cometh? or is it another that cometh and entereth into it? What report is to be given of the emotions which take place in a dream, which stirreth the limbs and maketh the eyes weep real tears in a dream which is not real? If we say it is real; behold it is not wholly so! if we say it is false; behold it is not wholly lost! Lo, their guilt is the same, because their dream is the same: amidst their great quietness their wrestling is great! &c. &c.” Comp. vol. i. p. 412. quoted in p. 268, n. c. Vol. iii. p. 480, d. e. and Leont. c. Nest. i. 14. who notices that matter, unless animate, does not sleep.
7. S. is awake
8. S. [Syriac]: see p. 166, n. e. The passage just quoted will illustrate his meaning here: when he speaks of the soul as between the mind and the body he uses it in the sense which St. Paul gives to it in the phrase σῶμα ψυχικὸν, 1 Cor. xv. 44. Passages of this kind must not be understood as if the fathers held the animating principle in man to be compounded of two distinct essences, viz. mind or spirit, and soul: the mode of speaking is borrowed from Scripture, e.g. 1 Thess. v. 23. and implies only the predominance of earthly or heavenly objects of contemplation in a man’s soul, not that the essences which constitute his person themselves are transmuted into any new essence; for, at that rate, 1 Thess. v. 23. would imply the existence of three different essences, of which one (viz. the body) we know cannot be preserved in its integrity, ὁλόκληρον, till Christ’s coming. See Greg. Nyss. Antirrh. c. Apoll. 46. Aust. de C. D. xiii. 23. Isid. Pelus. lib. iv. ep. 125. It is observable that St. E.’s language, as quoted in n. c. is less guarded than in the text, the former work being probably written before the times of Apollinaris, as he speaks in it of our Lord’s Baptism as having taken place 300 years ago, p. 496, b. from which however no very definite conclusion as to the date of the whole work can be drawn.
9. See Dan. 2, 3. &c.
10. R. l. §. 1.
11. R. lxiv. §. 3.
12. Comp. Pearl iii. §. 4. R. xxv. §. 1. R. xxxiii. §. 1. The Syriac word here answers precisely to the Greek λόγος, and may mean discourse, either in the mind, or, discourse in words. Thus far then our word ‘discourse’ sufficiently expresses it; but since the words ῥῆμα and ‘sermo’ were dropped as names for the Word of God, because calculated to give a Sabellian impression, it would not be fitting to use the term ‘discourse’ of the Son. Hence some little confusion arises in the translation, as we do not use the term ‘word’ of the discourse in the mind. The points of resemblance between the type and Prototype, on which St. E. here dwells, are its mysterious coinherence in and coextension with the mind, the generation from the mind without passion or partition, and its incomprehensibleness. Numerous passages from the Fathers upon this type will be found in Petav. de Trin. vi. 2. vii. 14. Thomassin ibid. tr. ii. 18—20. The latter well observes, 21. §. 2. ‘Hinc lubet admirari stupendam illam consensionem Scripturarum cum illa sive ratione sive philosophiâ defæcatissimâ, quæ interdum superne nobis allucet, et cujus nonnullas scintillas in Gentilium libris, sed multo magis in sanctorum Patrum monumentis deprehendere est.’
13. S. word R. lii. §. 2.