Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/78

60 conclusions. The truth lay, he felt, in a double form: we can only express our thoughts about God by contradictions; we affirm and deny the same things of him, and so aim at a higher harmony in which the contradictions of our human understanding are reconciled. For the mystery of the divine Trinity ''passes the endeavours of human reason and even the purest understandings of celestial essences. We infer from the essence of the things that are, that it exists; from the wonderful order of things, that it is wise; from their motion, that it is life. As, saith saint Dionysius the Areopagite, 'The highest and causal essence of all things cannot be signified by any signification of words or names, or of any articulate voice.' For it is neither unity nor trinity, such as can be contemplated by the purest human, by the clearest angelical, understanding''. . . . ''Chiefly for the sake of those who demand a reason for the Christian faith. . . have these symbolical words been religiously discovered and handed down by the holy theologians. . . . Beholding, in so far as they were enlightened by the divine Spirit, the one unspeakable cause of all things, and the one beginning, simple and undivided and universal, they called it Unity; but seeing this unity not in singleness or barrenness, but in a marvellous and fertile multiplicity, they have understood three substances of unity.''

John Scotus traces this trinity in unity in the nature of the universe,—in the Creator, the idea, and the fact of things; in another aspect, in ούσία, δύναμις, and ένέρΎεια. and in its final resolution into unity. He traces also its reflexion in man, in reason, understanding, and sense. For m man is the summing up of nature: he has both a heavenly being and a sensible being, combines the highest and the lowest elements. He is the meeting-point between creation and Creator, and this meeting is summed up in the two-fold nature of Christ. As all nature is contained in man, so all humanity is contained in the Word