A mark in the wrong place can make the Word something other than God, and a mind full of pictures can fail to think what has no picture. Augustine opens the third book of On Christian Doctrine by sending the prepared reader to the ambiguities of Scripture. Where the words themselves are unclear, punctuation and pronunciation are tested first by the rule of faith, then by the context, and, if both are silent, left to the reader’s discretion. The heretical pointing that stops before “the Word was God” is refused. Paul’s strait between two is settled by the word that follows. In the Confessions he confesses that he once called matter formless while still filling it with foul and horrible forms. He could sooner think that the formless was nothing than conceive what lay between form and nothing. What he reached was mutability, able to receive shapes, and already something. Aquinas asks what the Son assumed, and in what order. A true earthly body, and a true human mind. What was not assumed would not have been healed. Soul and flesh were taken at one instant, the soul the medium of congruity, not a step that came earlier in time.

Today’s Readings:

Augustine — On Christian Doctrine, Book 3, Chapters 1–2 (Sections 1–5) Augustine — The Confessions, Book 12, Chapter 6 (Section 6) Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica, Part 3, Questions 5–6 (Articles 1–4 and 1–4)

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