ine nature, and not by the
necessity of the nature and essence of a triangle--in fact, that the
necessity of a triangle's essence and nature, in so far as they are
conceived of as eternal verities, depends solely on the necessity of the
Divine nature and intellect, we then style God's will or decree, that
which before we styled His intellect. Wherefore we make one and the same
affirmation concerning God when we say that He has from eternity decreed
that three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, as when
we say that He has understood it.

Hence the affirmations and the negations of God always involve necessity
or truth; so that, for example, if God said to Adam that He did not wish
him to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it would have
involved a contradiction that Adam should have been able to eat of it,
and would therefore have been impossible that he should have so eaten,
for the Divine command would have involved an eternal necessity and
truth. But since Scripture nevertheless narrates that God did give this
command to Adam, and yet that none the less Adam ate of the tree, we
must perforce say that God revealed to Adam the evil which would surely
follow if he should eat of the tree, but did not disclose that such evil
would of necessity come to pass. Thus it was that Adam took the
revelation to be not an eternal and necessary truth, but a law--that is,
an ordinance followed by gain or loss, not depending necessarily on the
nature of the act performed, but solely on the will and absolute power
of some potentate, so that the revelation in question was solely in
relation to Adam, and solely through his lack of knowledge a law, and
God was, as it were, a lawgiver and potentate. From the same cause,
namely, from lack of knowledge, the Decalogue in relation to the Hebrews
was a law, for since they knew not the existence of God as an eternal
truth, they must have taken as a law that which was revealed to them in
the Decalogue, namely, that God exists, and that God only should be
worshiped. But if God had spoken to them without the intervention of any
bodily means, immediately they would have perceived it not as a law but
as an eternal truth.

What we have said about the Israelites and Adam applies also to all the
prophets who wrote laws in God's name--they did not adequately conceive
God's decrees as eternal truths. For instance, we must say of Moses that
from revelation, from the basis of what