Sharing in the Light

I do not think it will go against the plan of this work if I state again, as briefly as I can, what we hold about the immortality of rational beings. Anyone who shares in something is beyond question of one being and nature with everything else that shares in the same thing. For example, all eyes share in light, and so all eyes that share in the light are of one nature; but although every eye shares in the light, one sees more clearly and another more dimly, so that not every eye has an equal share of it. In the same way, all hearing takes in voice or sound, and so all hearing is of one nature; but each person hears more quickly or more slowly, according to how clear and sound his hearing is. [a]

Now let us move on from these illustrations drawn from the senses to the things the mind grasps. Every mind that shares in the light of understanding must without doubt be of one nature with every other mind that shares in the same way in that same light. So if the heavenly powers share in that light of understanding — that is, in the divine nature — because they share in wisdom and holiness, and if human souls have shared in that same light and that same wisdom, then the two are of one nature and one being with each other. And since the heavenly powers are imperishable and immortal, the being of the human soul will be immortal and imperishable as well.

And not only that. The nature of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit — in whose light of understanding alone every created thing has any share at all — is imperishable and eternal. So it is altogether consistent, and necessary, that every being which shares in that eternal nature should last forever, imperishable and eternal; and so the eternity of God’s goodness may be recognized in this too, that those who receive its benefits are themselves eternal. But just as in the examples above there was a difference in how the light was shared, the beholder’s glance being duller or sharper, so a difference is to be noted in how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are shared in, varying with the eagerness or the capacity of the mind.

If that were not so, we would have to ask whether it would not seem an insult to God to say that a mind capable of receiving God can suffer the destruction of its own being — as if the very fact that it can perceive and understand God were not enough to keep it in existence forever. And that is all the more so because, even when through neglect the mind falls away from a pure and complete reception of God, it still carries within it certain seeds of restoration and of renewal to a better understanding, since the “inner” man, who is also called the “rational” man, is renewed after “the image and likeness of God, who created him.” And so the prophet says, “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before you.”

If anyone dares to say that the one who was made after the image and likeness of God can decay in his very being, then in my judgment this insult reaches all the way to the Son of God himself, since Scripture calls him the image of God. Or else whoever holds such a view must be attacking the authority of Scripture, which says that man was made in the image of God. [g]

And in man the traces of the divine image are plainly to be found — not in any feature of the body, which decays, but in wisdom of mind, in justice, in moderation, in virtue, in wisdom, in discipline; in short, in the whole company of the virtues, which belong by nature to the being of God and which can come into a man by effort and by imitating God. The Lord points to this in the Gospel as well, when he says, “Be merciful, then, as your Father also is merciful,” and, “Be perfect, as your Father also is perfect.” This shows clearly that all these virtues are always in God, and that they can never come to him or go from him, while men acquire them only slowly, and one at a time. And so by these means men seem to have a kind of kinship with God.

And since God knows all things, and nothing among the things the mind grasps is in itself hidden from him — for God the Father alone, and his only Son, and the Holy Spirit not only know the things they have created, but know themselves as well — a rational understanding may also come to a fuller knowledge, moving on from small things to great and from things seen to things unseen. For it is set in a body, and it works its way up from the very things the senses take in, which are bodily, to the things the mind grasps.

But in case it should seem out of place for us to say that the things the mind grasps cannot be reached by the senses, let us use the example of Solomon, who says, “You will also find a divine sense.” By this he shows that the things the mind grasps are to be searched out not by a bodily sense but by another sense, which he calls “divine.” It is with this sense that we must look at each of the rational beings we have listed above; with this sense the words we speak are to be understood, and the statements we set down in writing are to be weighed. For the divine nature knows even the thoughts we turn over inside us in silence. And on the matters we have spoken of, and on the others that follow from them, our views are to be formed according to the rule laid down above.