Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/79

Rh of God. When we speak of the incarnation, we do not mean an individual, historical fact, but the eternal connexion of the ideal and actual. Cause and effect, as has already appeared, cannot be separated in God; they are implied in his single creative will. This union is revealed in the incarnation, by which the Word of God passed from the region of cause to that of effects, and descended into the sensible world. It was not a temporal act, but the expression of the necessary reciprocity of temporal and eternal, the immanent relation of God and the world. It is the supreme theophany. ''By it the light to which no man can approach opened access to every intellectual and reasonable creature. . . . In Him the visible things and the invisible, that is to say, the world of sense and the world of thought, were restored and recalled to unspeakable unity, now in hope, hereafter in fact; now in faith, hereafter in sight; now by inference, hereafter in experience; already effected in the manhood which he assumed, hereafter to be fulfilled in all men without distinction.''

This restoration of the world is the great subject of the Scot s fifth book. The fourth division of nature is its return to primal unity. The body of man is restored to the elements; these elements coalesce in the resurrection into a new body; and this turns to spirit, the spirit reverts to its original causes, the causes to God. For God shall be all things in all things, when there shall be nothing but God alone. Is this restoration asserted of man alone or also of his brother animals? of the good or also of the evil? finally, of the individual or only of the race ? To these three questions John has his answer. The first gives him no difficulty. Immortality holds good not only of man, but of the whole animated creation. He will conclude this on a priori grounds : the lower animals have their natural virtues, they have souls, albeit irrational. But the decisive argument is that man is simply