Letter 7

7. To Gregory, his friend

Even then I was not unaware, when I wrote to your wisdom, that every utterance about God is less than the thought of the speaker, and less than the desire of the seeker, since speech is by nature too weak to serve the things conceived in the mind. If, then, our thought is weak, and our tongue weaker than our thought, what could we expect from what was said, but to be charged with poverty of words? Yet not on this account was it possible to pass over in silence what was sought. For there is a danger of betrayal in not readily rendering answers about God to those who love the Lord. Those things, then—whether they seem to be sufficient, or whether they need some more exact addition—require their own occasion for correction.

But for the present we exhort you, as indeed we have already exhorted, to give yourself wholly to the advocacy of the truth, and to those impulses which arise in your mind from God toward the establishment of the good, being content with these and seeking nothing further from us—we who, being far less than is supposed, by our own weakness rather harm the argument than add any strength to the truth through our advocacy.