The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
This one supreme God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, a Trinity in
Unity, three Persons and one God. Now Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
with all their divine attributes and perfections (excepting their
personal properties, which the Schools call the 'modi subsistendi',
that one is the Father, the other the Son, and the other the Holy
Ghost, which cannot be communicated to each other) are whole and
entire in each Person by a mutual consciousness; each feels the other
Persons in himself, all their essential wisdom, power, goodness,
justice, as he feels himself, and this makes them essentially one, as
I have proved at large.
Will not the Arian object, "You admit the 'modus subsistendi' to be a
divine perfection, and you affirm that it is incommunicable. Does it not
follow therefore, that there are perfections which the All-perfect does
not possess?" This would not apply to Bishop Bull or Waterland.
Sect. V. p. 102.
St. Austin in his sixth book of the Trinity takes notice of a common
argument used by the orthodox fathers against the Arians, to prove the
co-eternity of the Son with the Father, that if the Son be the Wisdom
and Power of God, as St. Paul teaches (1 'Cor'. i.) and God was never
without his Wisdom and Power, the Son must he co-eternal with the
Father. * * * But this acute Father discovers a great inconvenience in
this argument, for it forces us to say that the Father is not wise,
but by that Wisdom which he begot, not being himself Wisdom as the
Father: and then we must consider whether the Son himself, as he is
God of God, and Light of Light, may be said to be Wisdom of Wisdom, if
God the Father be not Wisdom, but only begets Wisdom.
The proper answer to Augustine is, that the Son and Holy Ghost are
necessary and essential, not contingent: and that 'his' argument has a
still greater inconvenience, as shewn in note p. 98.
Ib. pp. 110-113.
But what makes St. Gregory dispute thus nicely, and oppose the common
and ordinary forms of speech? Did he in good earnest believe that
there is but one man in the world? No, no! he acknowledged as many men
as we do; a great multitude who had the same human nature, and that
every one who had a human nature was an individual man, distinguished
and divided from all other individuals of the same nature. What makes
him so zealous then against saying, that Peter, James and John are
three men? Only this; that he says man is the name of nature, and
therefore to say there are three men is the same as to say, there are
three human natures of a different kind; for if there are three human
natures, they must differ from each other, or they cannot be three;
and so you deny Peter, James, and John to be [Greek: homooúsioi], or
of the same nature; and for the same reason we must say that though
the Father be God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, yet there are
not three Gods, but [Greek: mía theótaes], one Godhead and Divinity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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