CHAPTER XXIII

THIS Good art Thou, O Thou God the Father; this Good is Thy Word, that is, Thy Son. For there can be nothing else in the Word whereby Thou utterest Thyself but what Thou art, nor anything greater or less than Thou art; because Thy Word is as true as Thou art truthful. And therefore He is as Thou art, the very Truth; not another Truth than Thyself: and Thou art so utterly without complexity in Thy nature that of Thee there cannot be born anything that is other than what Thou Thyself art. This same Good is the one mutual Love which is between Thee and Thy Son, that is, the Holy Spirit proceeding from both. For the same Love is not unequal to 39Thee or to Thy Son, because Thou lovest Thyself and Him, and He Himself and Thee with a Love as great as Thou art and as He is; nor can that be other than Thou and than He which is not unequal to Thyself and to Him; nor from Thy supreme simplicity of nature can there proceed anything which is other than that from which it proceedeth. But that which each Person is, that the whole Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, is at once; because each by Himself is nothing else than the supremely simple Unity and the supremely one Simplicity, which cannot be multiplied nor can be now one thing and now another. For there is one thing necessary;⁴⁶⁴⁶   Porro unum est necessarium, But one thing is needful, the words of our Lord to Martha in Luke x. 41. St Anselm takes hold of the word, thinking of its philosophical sense, in which it is the opposite of contingent, and means what cannot be, so to speak, thought away, but must always be supposed to exist to account for the being of anything else; and is thus applied to God, as the ultimate Reality at the back of everything. And so he interprets the Gospel saying here of the unity of God, the necessary Being. and doubtless this is that one thing necessary, that wherein is all good, nay rather, which is all good, the one wholly and solely Good.