De docta ignorantia

Since indeed we have now been advanced by such reasonings with undoubting faith unto this point, that hesitating in nothing we firmly hold the premises to be most true, we add in subjoining that the fullness of time is past unto Jesus ever blessed, the firstborn of every creature.

For from those things which he himself, existing as man, divinely wrought above man, and from others which he himself, found truthful in all things, affirmed concerning himself, with those also who conversed with him bearing witness in their blood, with invariable constancy long since proved by infinite infallible arguments, we justly assert that he is the one whom every creature to come in time awaited from the beginning, and who through the prophets had foretold that he would appear in the world. For he came to fulfill all things, since he himself by his will restored all unto health, and taught all the hidden and secret things of wisdom as one powerful above all, taking away sins as God, raising the dead, transmuting nature, commanding spirits, sea, and winds, walking upon the water, establishing the law in the fullness of supplement unto all laws. In whom according to the testimony of that most singular preacher of the truth, Paul, illuminated from above in rapture, we have the perfection of all, redemption and remission of sins; who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature, for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, dominations, principalities, or powers. All things were created through him and in him, and he is before all, and all things stand in him, and he is the head of the body of the Church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that he himself hold primacy in all things, for in him it pleased that all fullness dwell, and through him all things be reconciled unto him.

Such indeed and many other testimonies of the saints are borne concerning him, since he himself is God and man; in whom that humanity itself is united in the divinity itself unto the Word, so that it would subsist not in itself, but in him, after humanity in the highest degree and every fullness could not otherwise be, except in the divine person of the Son.

And unto this, that above all our intellectual comprehension as in learned ignorance we may conceive this person, who united man unto himself, ascending in our intellect let us consider that, since God is through all things in all, and all things through all in God, as we showed above in a certain place, then, since these must be considered together copulatively, namely that God is in all, that all are in God, and since the divine being itself is of supreme equality and simplicity, hence God, as he is in all, is not in them according to degrees as communicating himself gradually and particularly. But all things cannot be without gradual diversity. Hence in God they are according to themselves with diversity of degrees. Hence since God is in all, so that all are in him, it is manifest that God without his own change is in unity in the equality of being all things with the maximal humanity of Jesus, since the maximal man cannot otherwise than maximally be in him, and thus in Jesus, who is thus the equality of being all things, as in the Son in divine things, who is the middle person, the eternal Father and the Holy Spirit exist, and all things as in the Word, and every creature in that highest and most perfect humanity universally enfolding all creatable things, so that all fullness dwells in him. We are led equally unto these things by this example: sensitive cognition is a certain contracted cognition, on account of which sense attains only particulars. Intellectual cognition is universal, on account of which with respect to the sensitive it exists as absolute and abstracted from particular contraction. But sensation is variously contracted unto various degrees, through which contractions the various species of animals arise according to degrees of nobility and perfection, and although it does not ascend unto the simply maximal degree, as we showed above, yet in that species which is actually supreme in the genus of animality, namely the human, there sense makes such an animal, which is so animal that it is also intellect. For man is his own intellect, where the sensitive contraction is in a certain way supposted in the intellectual nature, the intellectual nature exists, a certain divine separate abstract being, with the sensitive remaining temporal and corruptible according to its own nature. Hence, as far as is allowed by a remote similitude, so must it be considered in Jesus, where humanity is supposted in the divinity, since otherwise it could not be in its maximal fullness.

For the intellect, since with sense it is most perfect existing wholly in act, cannot be personally supposted except in the divine intellect, which alone is all things in act. For the intellect in all men is all things, growing gradually from possibility into act, so that the greater it is, the less it is in potency. But the maximal, since it is the limit of all potency of intellectual nature, existing fully in act, can in no way exist without being intellect in such a way that it is also God, who is all in all, as if, were the polygon inscribed in the circle the human nature, and the circle the divine; if that polygon must be maximal, than which it cannot be greater, it would in no way subsist in finite angles through itself, but in the circular figure, so that it would not have its own figure of subsisting, even intellectually separable from that circular and eternal figure.

But the maximality of the perfection of human nature is attended in substantial and essential things, e.g. that it have intellect, which the other corporeal things serve, and hence the most perfect man must not be eminent in accidentals, except in respect of the intellect. For it is not required that he be either giant or dwarf or of this or that magnitude, color, figure, and so of the rest of accidentals; but this only is necessary, that the body decline from extremes in such a way that it is the fittest instrument of the intellectual nature, which it obeys and complies with without resistance, murmuring, and fatigue.

Our Jesus, in whom all the treasures of knowledge and wisdom, even while he appeared in the world, were hidden, as light in darkness, is believed to have had unto this end of the most eminent intellectual nature a most apt and most perfect body, as it was handed down to memory by the most holy witnesses of his conversation.