[745]. Finis omnium: “bonorum” understood.
[746]. Gen. i. 26.
[747]. Gen. i. 27, 28.
[748]. Imago.
[749]. Similitudo.
[750]. Cf. 1 John iii. 2.
[751]. Cf. John xvii. 24, cf. 21.
[752]. Ex simili unum fieri.
[753]. Jerome, in his Epistle to Avitus, No. 94, has the passage thus: “Since, as we have already frequently observed, the beginning is generated again from the end, it is a question whether then also there will be bodies, or whether existence will be maintained at some time without them when they shall have been annihilated, and thus the life of incorporeal beings must be believed to be incorporeal, as we know is the case with God. And there is no doubt that if all the bodies which are termed visible by the apostle, belong to that sensible world, the life of incorporeal beings will be incorporeal.” And a little after: “That expression, also, used by the apostle, ‘The whole creation will be freed from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God’ (Rom. viii. 21), we so understand, that we say it was the first creation of rational and incorporeal beings which is not subject to corruption, because it was not clothed with bodies; for wherever bodies are, corruption immediately follows. But afterwards it will be freed from the bondage of corruption, when they shall have received the glory of the sons of God, and God shall be all in all.” And in the same place: “That we must believe the end of all things to be incorporeal, the language of the Saviour Himself leads us to think, when He says, ‘As I and Thou are one, so may they also be one in us’ (John xvii. 21). For we ought to know what God is, and what the Saviour will be in the end, and how the likeness of the Father and the Son has been promised to the saints; for as they are one in Him, so they also are one in them. For we must adopt the view, either that the God of all things is clothed with a body, and as we are enveloped with flesh, so He also with some material covering, that the likeness of the life of God may be in the end produced also in the saints; or if this hypothesis is unbecoming, especially in the judgment of those who desire, even in the smallest degree, to feel the majesty of God, and to look upon the glory of His uncreated and all-surpassing nature, we are forced to adopt the other alternative, and despair either of attaining any likeness to God, if we are to inhabit for ever the same bodies, or if the blessedness of the same life with God is promised to us, we must live in the same state as that in which God lives.” All these points have been omitted by Rufinus as erroneous, and statements of a different kind here and there inserted instead (Ruæus).
[754]. Ad unitatis proprietatem.