On the Trinity

The rule of truth requires that first of all we believe in God the Father and Lord Almighty, that is, the most perfect Maker of all things, who hung the heavens on high, made the earth firm as a mass set low, poured out the seas in flowing water, and arranged all these things, both adorned and filled with their own fitting furnishings. For in the firmament of heaven he raised the light-bearing risings of the sun; he filled the gleaming globe of the moon with monthly increases of its orb to comfort the night; he kindled the rays of the stars with the varied flashes of their twinkling light; and he willed that all these should go round the whole circuit of the world in their lawful courses, to produce for the human race days, months, years, signs, seasons, and benefits. On the earth, too, he raised the highest mountains to a peak, sank the valleys into the depths, spread out the plains evenly, and usefully appointed herds of animals for the various services of men. He also made firm the oaks of the forests, to be of use to human needs; he brought forth crops for food; he unsealed the mouths of springs and poured them into flowing rivers. After this, so that he should not fail to provide even for the delight of the eyes, he clothed all things with the varied colors of flowers for the pleasure of those who behold them. In the sea itself too, though it was wonderful both in size and in usefulness, he fashioned many kinds of creatures, now of moderate, now of vast body, bearing witness by the variety of what he established to the skill of the Artisan. Not content with these, lest the roaring and running of the waters should seize an element not its own, to the loss of its human possessor, he enclosed its boundaries with shores: so that when the roaring flood and the wave foaming from the deep gulf came up to them, it would turn back upon itself and not go beyond the limits allowed it, keeping the laws prescribed: so that man might keep the divine laws all the more, since even the elements had kept them.

After this he also set man over the world, and indeed man made to the image of God, into whom he put mind and reason and prudence, so that he might be able to imitate God. Though the first beginnings of his body were earthly, yet his substance was breathed in from a heavenly and divine breath. And when he had given all things into his service, he willed that he alone should be free. And lest freedom, once unbound, should in turn fall into danger, he laid down a command, by which man was taught, not that there was evil in the fruit of the tree, but he was forewarned that evil would come if by chance man's will should lead him to despise the law he had been given. For he had to be free, lest the image of God should unfittingly be a slave; and a law had to be added, lest liberty, unbridled, should break out even to contempt of the Giver: so that he might receive, as a consequence, both fitting rewards and deserved punishments, having as his own whatever he had chosen to pursue, by the movement of his mind, in one direction or the other. From this, mortality, through envy indeed, comes back upon man himself: though he could have escaped it by obedience, he ran into it while, following perverse counsel, he hastened to become God. Yet God nonetheless tempered his punishment mercifully, in that not so much he himself as his labors are cursed upon the earth. For the fact that he is sought for does not come from ignorance, but shows the hope of man's future finding and salvation in Christ; and the fact that he is kept from touching the tree of life does not come down from the malicious spite of envy, but is done lest, living forever, unless Christ had first forgiven his sins, he should carry about with him, to his own punishment, a sin forever undying.

And yet in the higher parts too, that is, even above the firmament itself, which are not visible to our eyes today, he had earlier established angels, ordered spiritual Powers, set Thrones and Authorities over them, and founded many other immense spaces of the heavens and infinite works of mysteries, so that this world, immense though it is, appears to be rather almost the last of God's works among bodily things than the only one. For the regions that lie beneath the earth are not themselves empty of ordered and arranged powers. For there is a place to which the souls of the godly and the ungodly are led, already feeling a foretaste of the judgment to come: so that we might see the overflowing greatness of his works in every part, not shut up within the bosom of this world, spacious as it is, as we have said, but might also be able to contemplate the depths and heights even beneath the world itself; and so, having considered the greatness of his works, we might worthily marvel at the Artisan of so vast a structure.

Above all these he himself contains all things, leaving nothing empty outside himself, and he has left no room for a God superior to him (as some think). Since he has enclosed all things in the bosom of his perfect greatness and power, he is always intent upon his work: he passes through all things, moves all things, gives life to all things, beholds all things, and joins discordant matter into a harmony of elements, so that out of unlike elements one world has been made firm, bound together in such a union that it cannot be dissolved by any force, except when he alone who made it orders it to be dissolved, in order to provide other and greater things for us. For we read that he contains all things, and therefore nothing could exist outside him. Since he has no origin at all, he consequently experiences no end: unless perhaps (which God forbid) he began to exist at some time, and is not above all things, but, having begun to exist after something, is below that which existed before him, found to be less in power since he is marked as later even in time. For this reason, then, he is always immeasurable, because nothing is greater than he; always eternal, because nothing is older than he. For what is without origin can be preceded by nothing, since it is not subject to time. Therefore he is immortal, not failing in the end of a final dissolution. And since whatever is without origin is without law, he shuts out the measure of time, since he feels himself debtor to no one.

Concerning him, then, and the things that are his and in him, neither can the mind of man worthily conceive what they are, how great they are, and of what kind, nor does the eloquence of human speech put forth a power of speech equal to his majesty. For all eloquence is rightly dumb, and every mind is too small, to conceive and to express his majesty. For he is greater than the mind itself, and it cannot be conceived how great he is, lest, if he could be conceived, he should be less than the human mind by which he could be grasped. He is greater also than all speech and cannot be expressed, lest, if he could be expressed, he should be less than human speech, by which, when he is expressed, he could be encompassed and gathered up. For whatever is thought about him will be less than he; and whatever is uttered will be less than he when compared with him. We can in some measure perceive him in silence, but we cannot unfold him in speech as he is. For if you call him Light, you name his creature rather than himself; you have not expressed him. If you call him Power, you name and set forth his might rather than himself. If you say Majesty, you have described his honor rather than himself. And why should I make a long matter of it by running through each item? I will explain the whole at once. Whatever you say of him at all, you will have explained some attribute and power of his rather than himself. For what can you fittingly say or think of him who is greater than all words and all thoughts? Except that in one way (and this in so far as we can, as we grasp it, as it is permitted to understand) we shall grasp with the mind what God is, if we think of him as being that whose quality and greatness cannot be understood and cannot even come into thought itself. For if the sharpness of our eyes is dulled at the sight of the sun, so that our gaze cannot look at the orb itself, overcome by the brightness of the rays that meet it, the sharpness of the mind suffers the same in every thought of God: the more it strains to contemplate God, the more it is blinded by the very light of its thought.

For what can you fittingly say (to repeat myself) of him who is loftier than all loftiness, higher than all height, deeper than all depth, brighter than all light, clearer than all clearness, more splendid than all splendor, stronger than all strength, mightier than all might, more beautiful than all beauty, truer than all truth, braver than all bravery, greater than all majesty, more powerful than all power, richer than all riches, wiser than all wisdom, kinder than all kindness, better than all goodness, more just than all justice, more merciful than all mercy? For all kinds of excellence must necessarily be less than him who is both the God and the Father of all excellences; so that it may truly be said that God is that which is such that nothing can be compared with it. For he is above all that can be said. For he is a kind of Mind, begetting and filling all things, which, without any beginning or end of time, governs by supreme and perfect reason the causes of things, naturally linked together, for the benefit of all.

This God, then, we acknowledge and know, the Maker of all things: Lord because of his power, and Father because of his creating. This is he, I say, who spoke and all things were made; who commanded and all things came forth; of whom it is written, “In wisdom you have made all things”; of whom Moses says, “God in heaven above and on the earth below”; who, according to Isaiah, measured the heaven with his palm and the earth with his fist; who looks on the earth and makes it tremble; who holds the circle of the earth and those who dwell in it as locusts; who weighs the mountains in a balance and the groves in scales, that is, by the sure judgment of the divine ordering; and, lest the mass, lying unevenly, should easily fall into ruin if it were not balanced with equal weights, he evened out this burden of the earthly bulk with due measure. It is he who says through the prophet, “I am God, and there is none besides me.” It is he who declares through the same prophet, “For I will not give my majesty to another”, so as to exclude all heathens and heretics together with their fabrications, proving that he is not God who has been made by the hand of an artisan, nor he who has been fashioned by the invention of a heretic. For he is not God for whose existence an artisan must be sought. And he further added through the prophet, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth the footstool of my feet: what house will you build for me, or what is the place of my rest?”, to show that a temple cannot hold him whom the world cannot hold; and he says this not to boast of himself but for our knowledge. For he does not desire from us the glory of greatness, but wishes, as a Father, to confer on us religious wisdom.

And further, wishing to draw our wild spirits, swollen and harsh with rustic savagery, to gentleness, he says, “And upon whom will my Spirit rest, but upon the humble and quiet, and him who trembles at my words?”, so that man may in some measure know how great God is, while he learns to fear him through the Spirit that is given. In the same way, wishing still more to come to our knowledge and stirring our minds to worship him, he said, “I am the Lord, who made light and created darkness”, so that we should not suppose some nature or other to be the artisan of those alternations by which nights and days are governed, but should rather acknowledge God (as was truer) as their Maker. Since we cannot see him with the gaze of our eyes, we learn of him from the greatness, power, and majesty of his works. “For his invisible things,” says the apostle Paul, “from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things that have been made; his eternal power also and divinity”, so that the human mind, learning hidden things from things manifest, might from the greatness of the works it sees contemplate with the eyes of the mind the greatness of the Artisan. Of him the same apostle says, “Now to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory.” For he who has surpassed the greatness of thought has escaped the gaze of the eyes. “For,” he says, “from him and through him and in him are all things.” For by his command all things exist, so that they are from him; and by his word they are ordered, so that they are through him; and all things fall back under his judgment, so that, while they wait in him for liberty, when corruption has been laid aside, they may be seen to have been called back to him.

He is the one whom the Lord rightly declares alone to be good; to whose goodness the whole world is witness, which he would not have established had he not been good. For if all things are very good, then consequently and rightly the things established, being good, have proved their Establisher good; and things that come from a good Establisher cannot be other than good. Hence let all evil be far from God. For it cannot be that he should be the originator or the artisan of any evil work who claims for himself the name of the perfect one, of Father and of Judge, especially since he is the avenger and judge of every evil work; for evil does not befall man from any other source than his having departed from the good God. And this is marked in man himself: not because it was necessary, but because he himself so willed. From this it has plainly appeared both what evil is, and it has shone out clearly, so that envy should not seem to be in God, from whom evil would then have arisen.

This God, then, is always like himself; he never turns or changes himself into any forms, lest by change he should seem to be mortal as well. For the change of alteration is understood to be a portion of a kind of death. Therefore no addition of any part or honor ever comes to him, lest anything should ever seem to have been lacking to the perfect one; nor is any loss incurred in him, lest he should seem to have taken on a step toward mortality. But what he is, he always is; and who he is, he himself always is; and of what kind he is, of that kind he always is. For increases show an origin, and losses prove death and destruction. And therefore he says, “I am God, and I have not changed”, always keeping his condition, since what is unborn cannot be changed. For whatever that is in him which is God must always exist, so that he may always be God, preserving himself by his own powers. And therefore he says, “I am who I am.” For what is has this name because it always keeps the same quality of itself. For change takes away that name “is”: for whatever is at some time changed is shown to be mortal by the very fact that it is changed. For it ceases to be what it had been, and consequently begins to be what it was not. Therefore his condition rightly remains always in God, since, without the loss of alteration, he is always both like and equal to himself. For what is not born cannot be changed either: only those things come into change which are made or begotten, since things that once were not learn to be by being born, and therefore by being born to be changed. But those things that have neither birth nor maker have shut out change from themselves, since they do not have an origin, in which lies the cause of change.

Therefore he is also declared to be one, since he has no equal. For God, whatever God can be, must be supreme. But whatever is supreme must be supreme precisely because it is beyond compare. And therefore he must be alone and one, to whom nothing can be compared, since he has no equal. For there cannot be two infinite beings, as the very nature of things dictates. And whatever has neither origin at all nor end is infinite. For whatever has taken up the whole excludes the beginning of another. For if it did not contain all that is, whatever it is, then, being found within that by which it is contained, and so found less than that by which it is contained, it would cease to be God, brought under the power of another by whose greatness, as the lesser, it had been enclosed; and so what contained it would rather have begun to be God. From this it follows that no proper name of God can be spoken, since he cannot even be conceived. For what is contained in a name is whatever is grasped from the condition of its nature. For a name is the meaning of that thing which could be grasped from the name. But when the one we are speaking of is such that he cannot fittingly be gathered up even by the understanding itself, how will he be worthily pronounced by the word of a name, since, being beyond understanding, he must also be above the meaning of a name? So when God, for certain reasons and occasions, adds and puts forward his name, we should know that it is not so much a proper appellation that has been expressed, as a certain meaning that has been set, to which men may have recourse and so be able to obtain God's mercy by it.

He is therefore both immortal and incorruptible, experiencing no loss at all, and no end. For because he is incorruptible, he is therefore immortal; and because he is immortal, he is surely incorruptible: each is entwined with the other in mutual connection, and carried forward to the state of eternity in alternating linkage, immortality coming down from incorruption and incorruption coming from immortality.

Even if we read of his wrath, and have certain indignations of his described, and know of hatreds reported of him, we do not understand these to have been reported after the pattern of human vices. For all these things, though they can corrupt man, cannot in any way impair the divine power. Such passions will rightly be said to be in men, but will not rightly be judged to be in God. For man can be corrupted by them, because he can be corrupted; God cannot be corrupted by them, because he cannot be corrupted at all. These things, then, have their own force to exert, but where passible matter is present, not where impassible substance is present. For the fact that God is angry does not come from any fault in him; he does it for our healing. For he is merciful even when he threatens, since by these things men are called back to what is right. For those who lack reason for an honorable life need fear, so that those who have abandoned reason may at least be moved by terror. And therefore all these wraths of God, or hatreds, or whatever else is of this kind, since they are put forward for our healing (as the facts show), have come from design, not from fault, and do not come down from weakness; and for that reason they can have no power to corrupt God. For the diversity of the materials of which we are made commonly stirs up in us the discord of anger, which corrupts us; this cannot be in God, either from nature or from fault, since he is certainly not understood to be built up from bodily parts joined together. For he is simple, and without any bodily compounding; whatever that is which he alone knows himself to be, he is wholly that, since he has been called Spirit. And therefore those things which in men are faulty and corrupting, since men are angered through the corruptibility of the body itself and of matter, cannot exert the force of corruptibility in God, since, as we have said, they have come not from fault but from reason.

And although the heavenly Scripture often turns the divine countenance into a human form, when it says, “The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous”; or when it says, “The Lord God smelled an odor of sweet fragrance”; or when tablets written by the finger of God are handed to Moses; or when the people of the children of Israel are set free from the land of Egypt by a strong hand and a lofty arm; or when it says, “For the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things”; or when the earth is said to be the footstool of God's feet; or when it says, “Incline your ear and hear”: we who say that the Law is spiritual do not enclose the measure or shape of the divine majesty within these outlines of our body, but spread it out without any limit over the plains (so to speak) of its boundless greatness. For it is written: “If I go up into heaven, you are there; if I go down to the underworld, you are present; and if I take my wings and go away across the sea, there your hand will lay hold of me and your right hand will hold me fast.” For we recognize the reasoning of divine Scripture from the adjustment of its arrangement. For the prophet then still spoke of God in parables, suited to the stage of faith at that time, not as God was, but as the people were able to grasp. That these things are said of God in this way, then, is to be charged not to God but rather to the people. So too the people are permitted to set up a tabernacle, and yet God is not shut up and contained within the tabernacle; so too a temple is built, and yet God is by no means fenced in within the narrow bounds of a temple. It is not God, then, who is limited, but the understanding of the people that is limited; not God who is narrow, but the understanding of the people's reason that is narrow.

Finally, in the Gospel the Lord said, “The hour will come when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem”; and he gave the reason, saying, “God is Spirit; and therefore those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.” There, then, it is the workings of God that are shown by the members, not the outward form of God or bodily outlines that are set out. For when eyes are described, it is expressed that he sees all things; and when an ear, it is put forward that he hears all things; and when a finger, a certain meaning of his will is disclosed; and when nostrils, his perception of prayers as though of fragrances is shown; and when a hand, it is proved that he is the author of every creature; and when an arm, it is declared that no nature can resist his strength; and when feet, it is explained that he fills all things and that there is nothing where God is not. For neither members nor the functions of members are necessary to him at whose will alone, even unspoken, all things both serve and are present. For why should he require eyes, who is Light? Or why should he seek feet, who is everywhere? Or why should he wish to walk, when there is nowhere outside himself to which he could go? Or why should he want hands, whose silent will is the artisan for establishing all things? Nor does he need ears, who knows even unspoken wishes. Or for what reason should he seek a tongue, for whom to think is to command? These members were necessary to men, not to God, because man's purpose would have been ineffective had the body not carried out his thought; but to God they are not necessary, since works not only follow his will without any effort, but the works themselves come forth at once together with the will. Rather, he is himself wholly eye, because he wholly sees; wholly ear, because he wholly hears; wholly hand, because he wholly works; and wholly foot, because he is wholly everywhere. For whatever he is, he is wholly equal and wholly everywhere. For whatever is simple has no diversity of itself within itself. For only those things fall into a diversity of members which come by birth into dissolution. But things that are not compounded cannot suffer this. For what is immortal, whatever it is, is itself one and simple and eternal. And therefore, because it is one, it cannot be dissolved; since whatever is itself placed beyond the rule of dissolution is freed from the laws of death.

But as for the Lord's saying that God is Spirit, I think that Christ spoke thus of the Father meaning that something still more should be understood than that God is Spirit. For although in his Gospel he reasons with men so as to increase their understanding, yet he too still speaks of God to men in such a way as they are still able to hear or grasp, although, as we have said, he strives to make them advance devoutly in the knowledge of God. For we find it written that God has been called Love; yet the substance of God is not expressed by this as Love. And that he has been called Light; yet the substance of God is not in this either; but all this has been said of God so far as it can be said. So that rightly, when he has been called Spirit, he has not been called all that he is; but when the mind of man, by understanding, has advanced as far as Spirit itself, having itself now been turned into spirit, it may be able to infer through the Spirit that God is something still greater. For that which he is, as he is, can neither be spoken by human speech, nor perceived by human ears, nor gathered by human senses. For if the things that God has prepared for those who love him neither eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man or the mind itself perceived, of what kind and how great is he who promises these things, to understand which both the mind and the nature of man have failed?

Finally, if you take Spirit as the substance of God, you will have made God a creature. For every spirit is a creature. God, then, will now have been made. Just so, if according to Moses you take God to be Fire, by calling him a creature you will have described something established, and will not have taught of the Establisher. But these things are figurative expressions rather than what he actually is. For in the Old Testament God is called Fire so that fear may be struck into a sinful people, since he is shown as Judge. And in the New Testament he is declared to be Spirit, so that he may be proved to be the restorer and creator of those dead in their sins, through this goodness of the pardon bestowed on believers.

This God, then, leaving aside the fables and fabrications of the heretics, the church knows and worships. To him all nature, invisible as well as visible, always bears witness; him the angels adore, the stars marvel at, the seas bless, the lands revere, and all the regions of the underworld look up to; him every human mind perceives, even if it does not express him. At his command all things are set in motion: springs gush, rivers glide, waves rise, all things bring forth their young, the winds are made to blow, rains come, the seas are stirred, all things everywhere pour out their fruitfulness. He established for the first-formed a special world of eternal life, a paradise in the East; he planted the tree of life, and likewise set another tree, of the knowledge of good and evil; he gave a command; he fixed a sentence against transgression. He preserved Noah, most righteous, from the dangers of the flood because of his innocence and faith; he translated Enoch; he chose Abraham into the fellowship of friendship; he protected Isaac; he increased Jacob; he set Moses as leader over the people; he rescued the groaning children of Israel from the yoke of slavery; he wrote the Law; he led the offspring of the fathers into the land of promise; he instructed the prophets by the Spirit; and through all these he promised his Son, Christ; and when he had pledged that he would give him, he sent him. Through him he willed to come to our knowledge, and he poured out upon us the wide bosom of his mercy, conferring the rich Spirit on the needy and the outcast. And because he is, of his own accord, both generous and good, lest this whole world, turned away, should dry up without the rivers of his grace, he willed that apostles, the instructors of our race, should be sent into the whole world through his Son, so that the human creation might recognize its Establisher, and, if it chose to follow, might have one whom, instead of “God,” it could now call Father in its prayers.

His providence has run, and runs, not only through individual men, but also through cities and states themselves, whose end was foretold by the voices of the prophets; indeed, even through the whole world itself, whose end, plagues, diminishings, and punishments he has described because of its unbelief. And lest anyone should think that this untiring providence of God does not reach even to the smallest things: “Of two sparrows,” says the Lord, “one will not fall without the Father's will; and even the hairs of your head are all numbered.” His care and providence did not allow the clothes of the Israelites to wear out, nor even the cheapest shoes on their feet to be worn through, nor even the trousers of the captive youths to be burned. And not without reason: for if he, containing all things, has embraced all things (and all things and the whole consist of individual parts), then his care must consequently reach to each single thing, since his providence reaches to the whole, whatever it is.

Hence it is that he sits above the Cherubim, that is, he presides over the variety of his works, the living creatures set beneath his throne holding rule above the rest, with a crystal covering everything above, that is, with the heaven overspreading all things. This, at God's command, had been made solid into a firmament from the flowing matter of the waters, so that as strong ice, dividing the middle of the waters that once covered the earth, it might bear on a kind of back the weight of the upper water, its forces strengthened by the frost. For wheels also lie beneath, that is, the seasons, by which all the members of the world are always turning; such feet were added so that these things do not stand forever but pass away. And they are studded with eyes over all their limbs: for the works of God must be contemplated with a watchful gaze. In their bosom there is fire in the midst of coals: either because this world hastens to the fiery day of judgment; or because all the works of God are fiery, not dark, but full of vigor; or also lest, since they had arisen from earthly beginnings, they should grow sluggish by nature from the stiffness of their origin, the warm nature of an inner spirit was added to all, which, joined with cold bodies, might show an equal balance in all for the enjoyment of life. This, then, according to David, is the chariot of God. “For the chariot of God,” he says, “is multiplied ten thousandfold”, that is, innumerable, infinite, immeasurable. For under the yoke of the natural law given to all, some things are drawn back as if reined in by bridles, others urged on as if spurred with loosened reins. For this world is God's chariot, which the angels themselves and the stars draw together with all things; and we see them, though their courses vary, yet bound by fixed laws, drawing toward the goals of the time appointed for them: so that we too, marveling at both the Artisan and his works, may rightly be glad now to cry out with the Apostle: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out!” and the rest.

The same rule of truth teaches us to believe, after the Father, also in the Son of God, Christ Jesus, the Lord our God, but the Son of God: of this God who is both one and alone, the Maker, namely, of all things, as has already been set out above. For this Jesus Christ, the Son (I will say it again) of this God, we both read to have been promised in the Old Testament and observe to have been manifested in the New Testament, fulfilling the shadows and figures of all the mysteries by the presence of the truth made bodily. For both the ancient predictions and the Gospels testify that he is the son of Abraham and no less the son of David. Genesis itself speaks of him when it says, “To you I will give it, and to your seed.” It speaks of him when it shows a man wrestling with Jacob. Of him, when it says, “A ruler shall not fail from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until he comes to whom it has been promised, and he will be the expectation of the nations.” Moses speaks of him when he says, “Provide another whom you may send.” The same Moses speaks of him when he testifies, saying, “God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers: hear him as you would me.” Of him, when he says, “You will see your life hanging night and day, and will not believe it.” Isaiah speaks of him: “A rod will come forth from the root of Jesse, and a flower will rise from his root.” Of the same, when he says, “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son.” Of him, when he places the healings to come from him, saying, “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will hear; then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb will be eloquent.” Of him, when he sets out the powers of his patience, saying, “His voice will not be heard in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench.” Of him, when he described his Gospels: “And I will make with you an everlasting covenant, the holy and faithful things of David.” Of him, when he prophesies that the nations would believe in him: “Behold, I have set him as a beginning and a commander to the nations. Nations that have not known you will call upon you, and peoples that do not know you will flee to you.” Of the same, when he cries out concerning his passion, saying, “As a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is voiceless, so he did not open his mouth in his humiliation.” Of him, when he described the blows and wounds of his scourging: “By his bruise we have been healed”; or his humiliation: “And we saw him, and he had no form nor honor; a man in the stroke, and knowing how to bear weakness.” Or that the people would not believe: “All day long I have stretched out my hands to an unbelieving people.” Or that he would rise from the dead: “And in that day there will be the root of Jesse, and he who will rise to rule the nations; in him the nations will hope, and his rest will be honor.” Or when it speaks of the time of the resurrection: “We shall find him prepared as at dawn.” Or that he would sit at the Father's right hand: “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet.” Or when he is placed as possessor of all things: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.” Or when he is shown as the Judge of all: “O God, give your judgment to the king, and your righteousness to the king's son.” I will not pursue in this place more of the things announced about Christ, which are well known to all the heretics, and still better to those who hold the truth.

But I give this warning: that no other Christ was to be expected in the Gospel than this one, promised beforehand by the Creator in the writings of the Old Testament; especially since the things foretold of him have been fulfilled, and the things fulfilled had been foretold. So that I may rightly say, truly and firmly, to the Christ of those heretics who reject the authority of the Old Testament, some Christ or other, invented and made up and painted over out of old wives' tales: Who are you? Where are you from? By whom were you sent? Why did you choose to come now? Why like this? Or how were you able to come? Or why did you not go to your own, unless you proved that you have no people of your own, since you come to those who belong to another? What have you to do with the Creator's world? What have you to do with the Maker's man? What have you to do with the formation of a body, from which you snatch the hope of resurrection? Why do you come to another's servant, and wish to entice another's son? Why do you try to snatch me from my Lord? Why do you drive me to blaspheme against the Father and to be impious? Or what am I to obtain from you in the resurrection, when I do not receive myself back, since I lose my body? If you wish to save, you should have made a man to whom you could give salvation. If you desire to rescue me from sin, you should earlier have granted me not to sin. What support from the law do you carry about with you? What testimony of a prophetic voice do you have? Or what solid thing can I promise myself from you, when I see that you came as a phantom and not in solidity? What, then, have you to do with the shape of a body, if you hate the body? Indeed, you will be convicted of carrying about the substance of the body you hate, since you were willing to take up even its shape. For you ought to have hated the imitation of a body if you hated its reality. For if you are another, you ought to have come otherwise, lest you be called the Creator's son if you had even the image of flesh and body. Surely, if you hated birth because you hated the Creator's union of marriage, you ought to have refused even the imitation of a man, who is born through the Creator's marriages.

We do not, then, acknowledge that Christ of the heretics who was (as they say) in appearance and not in truth: for he would have done nothing true of the things he did, if he himself was a phantom and not the truth. Nor him who did nothing of our body in himself, since he received nothing from Mary, and so would not have come to us, since he did not appear in our substance. Nor him who, as other heretics have held, chose an ethereal or starry flesh, lest we should understand any salvation of ours to be in him, if we did not recognize in him also the solidity of our body. Nor any other at all who, out of the fabrications of the heretics, bore some other body of fables. For both the Lord's birth and his very death refute all these. For “the Word,” says John, “became flesh and dwelt in us”; so that rightly our body was in him, since indeed the Word took up our flesh. And blood flowed from his hands and feet, and from his very side, so that he might be proved to share our body, since he dies by the laws of our mortality. And since, raised again, he is proved by the wounds of that very body to be in the same substance of body in which he died, he showed in his own flesh the laws of our resurrection too, he who restored in his resurrection the body he had received from us. For the law of resurrection is laid down when Christ is raised in the substance of the body as the pattern for the rest. For when it is written that flesh and blood do not obtain the kingdom of God, it is not the substance of the flesh that is condemned, which was built up by divine hands so that it should not perish; but only the guilt of the flesh is rightly rebuked, which through man's willful rashness has run riot against the rights of the divine law. For in baptism and in the dissolution of death, the flesh, taken away, returns to salvation, since, having laid aside the mortality of its crime, it is called back to the state of innocence.

But lest, from our asserting that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God the Creator, was manifested in the substance of a real body, we should seem to have given a hand to, or supplied material for argument to, other heretics who in this place maintain that he was only and solely a man, and therefore wish to prove him a bare and solitary man, we do not so speak of the substance of his body as to say that he was merely a man; but rather, since the divinity of the Word was mingled in that very union, we hold that he is also God according to the Scriptures. For it is a great danger to call the Savior of the human race, the Lord and Prince of the whole world, to whom all things have been handed over and all granted by his Father, through whom all things were established, all created, all ordered, the King of all ages and times, the Prince of all the angels, before whom there is nothing except the Father, only a man, and to deny him divine authority in these things. For this insult of the heretics will overflow even onto God the Father himself, if God the Father could not beget God the Son. But the blindness of heretics will set no prescription against the truth. Nor, because they hold one thing about Christ and do not hold another, see one thing and do not see the other, will that which they do not see be snatched from us by means of that which they see. For they consider the frailties in him as of a man, but do not reckon the powers in him as of God; they recall the weaknesses of the flesh, but shut out the powers of the divinity. If this proof from the weaknesses of Christ succeeds so far as to prove him a man from his weaknesses, the proof of divinity gathered in him from his mighty works will succeed so far as to assert that he is also God from his works. For if the sufferings show human frailty in him, why should the works not assert divine power in him? Lest, if this does not succeed in asserting him God from his mighty works, neither should the sufferings succeed in showing him to be also man from them. For whatever law is laid down for either side will be found to hold for both. For there will be a danger that he cannot be shown a man from his sufferings either, if he cannot also be proved God from his mighty works. One must not, then, lean to one side and flee from the other, since whoever excludes one portion of the truth will not hold the complete truth.

For Scripture announces Christ as God just as much as it announces God himself as man; it has described Jesus Christ as man just as much as it has also described Christ the Lord as God. For it does not set him forth as the Son of God only, but also of man; nor does it speak of him only as of man, but is accustomed to present him also as of God: so that, since he is from both, he is both; lest, if he were only one, he could not be the other. For just as nature itself has prescribed that he must be believed to be man who is from man, so the same nature prescribes that he must be believed to be God who is from God: lest, if he were not also God, though he is from God, he would no longer be man either, though he was from man; and so both would be endangered in each, since the one is convicted of having lost credibility through the other. Let those, then, who read that Christ Jesus, the son of man, is man, read also that the same one has been called both God and the Son of God. For just as, as man, he is of Abraham, so, as God, he is also before Abraham himself. And just as, as man, he is the son of David, so, as God, he is called David's Lord. And just as, as man, he was made under the law, so, as God, he is declared Lord of the sabbath. And just as, as man, he undergoes sentence, so, as God, he is found to hold judgment over the living and the dead. And just as, as man, he is born after the world, so, as God, he is said to have existed before the world. And just as, as man, he was begotten of the seed of David, so, as God, the world is said to have been established through him. And just as, as man, he comes after many, so, as God, he is before all. And just as, as man, he is lower than others, so, as God, he is greater than all. And just as, as man, he ascended into heaven, so, as God, he had earlier come down from there. And just as, as man, he goes to the Father, so, as the Son obedient to the Father, he will come down from there. So if the lowly things in him prove his human frailty, the majestic things in him affirm his divine power. For it is a danger, when you read both, to have believed not both but only one. Therefore, since both are read in Christ, let both be believed, so that faith may be true only if it is also complete. For if, of the two, one ceases to be held by faith and only one, and that the lesser, is taken up to be believed, then, the rule of truth having been thrown into confusion, this rashness will not have brought salvation, but in place of salvation will have kindled a great danger of death from the loss of faith.

Why, then, should we hesitate to say what Scripture does not hesitate to express? Why will the truth of faith falter where the authority of Scripture has never faltered? For see, the prophet Hosea says in the person of the Father: “I will no longer save them by bow, nor by horses, nor by horsemen; but I will save them in the Lord their God.” If God says that he saves in God, and God does not save except in Christ, why then should man hesitate to call Christ God, whom he observes to have been set forth as God by the Father through the Scriptures? Indeed, if God the Father does not save except in God, no one can be saved by God the Father unless he has confessed Christ as God, in whom and through whom the Father promises that he will give salvation: so that rightly whoever acknowledges him to be God will find salvation in Christ, God; and whoever does not recognize him to be God will have lost the salvation that he could find nowhere else than in Christ, God. For just as Isaiah says, “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel”, which is interpreted “God with us”, so Christ himself says, “Behold, I am with you until the consummation of the age.” He is therefore God with us; indeed, much more, he is also in us. Christ is with us: he is therefore the one whose name is “God with us,” since he is also with us. Or is he not with us? How then does he say that he is with us? He is therefore with us. And because he is with us, he has been called Emmanuel, that is, “God with us.” Because, then, God is with us, he has been called “God with us.”

The same prophet says: “Be strong, you weakened hands and feeble knees; be comforted, you faint-hearted in mind; be strong, do not fear: behold, our God will render judgment; he himself will come and save us: then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will hear; then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb will be eloquent.” If the prophet says that these signs, which have been done, would come at the coming of God, then either let them acknowledge Christ as the Son of God, at whose coming and by whom these signs of healing were done; or, overcome by the truth of Christ's divinity and rushing into another heresy, since they will not confess Christ as Son of God and God, let them confess that he is the Father. For, shut in by the voices of the prophets, they can no longer deny that Christ is God. What, then, will they answer, when the signs said to come at the coming of God are those that were done at the coming of Christ? In what way do they take Christ as God? For they can no longer deny him God. As the Father? Or as the Son? If as the Son, why do they deny that the Son of God is God? If as the Father, why do they not follow those who seem to hold blasphemies of that kind? Except that for us, in this contest for the truth against them, this suffices for the present: that, convicted in whatever way, they confess Christ to be God as well, whom they wished to deny as God.

Through the prophet Habakkuk he says: “God will come from the south, and the Holy One from the shady and thickly wooded mountain.” Whom do they want to come from the south? If they say that God the Father Almighty has come, then God the Father comes from a place, by which place he is also enclosed, and he is contained within the narrow bounds of some dwelling; and now, as we have said, through these men the sacrilegious Sabellian heresy takes bodily form, since Christ is believed to be not the Son but the Father; and, in a new fashion, while he is strictly asserted by them to be a bare man, through them in turn Christ is proved to be the Father, God Almighty. But if Christ, who through the Scriptures is also called God, is born in Bethlehem, whose surveyed region faces the southern quarter of the sky, then rightly this God is described as coming from the south, since he was foreseen as going to come from Bethlehem. Let them choose, then, which of the two they want: that he who comes from the south is the Son, or the Father; for it is God who is said to be coming from the south. If the Son, why do they hesitate to call Christ God as well? For Scripture says that it is God who is to come. If the Father, why do they hesitate to join with the rashness of Sabellius, who says that Christ is the Father? Except that, whether they call him Father or Son, they must, however unwillingly, abandon their heresy, they who are accustomed to say that Christ is only a man: since, compelled by the facts themselves, they begin to proclaim him God, whether they choose to call him Father or Son.

And so John too, describing the birth of Christ, says: “The Word became flesh and dwelt in us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” For his name is also called the Word of God, and not without reason. “My heart,” it says, “has uttered a good word”; and this Word it then calls by the name of King, adding, “I speak my works to the King.” For through him all works were made, and without him nothing was made. “For whether Thrones,” says the Apostle, “or Dominions, or Virtues, or Powers, visible and invisible, all things consist through him.” And this Word is he who came to his own, and his own did not receive him. For the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. And this Word was in the beginning with God, and the Word was God. Who then would hesitate, when it is said at the end, “The Word became flesh and dwelt in us”, to declare without hesitation that Christ, whose birth it is, is man because he became flesh, and God because he is the Word of God; especially when he observes that the Gospel Scripture has joined both these substances in the one concord of Christ's birth?

For he it is who “as a bridegroom comes forth from his chamber; he has exulted as a giant to run his course; his going forth is from the height of heaven, and his return even to its height.” Since it is even to the height, “no one has ascended into heaven except he who came down from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven.” Repeating this very thing he says: “Father, glorify me with that honor which I had with you before the world was.” And if this Word came down from heaven as a bridegroom to the flesh, so that, by taking up flesh, the Son of man might be able to ascend to the place from which the Son of God, the Word, had come down, then rightly, since by mutual connection both the flesh bears the Word of God and the Son of God takes up the frailty of the flesh, going up with the flesh, his bride, to the place from which he had come down without the flesh, he now receives that glory which he is shown to have had before the founding of the world, and so he is most plainly proved to be God. And nonetheless, since the world itself is reported to have been established after him, he is found to have created it through himself; and by this very fact both the glory and the authority of divinity are proved in him through whom the world was made.

If, when it belongs to none but God to know the secrets of the heart, Christ beholds the secrets of the heart; if, when it belongs to none but God to forgive sins, the same Christ forgives sins; if, when it belongs to no man to come from heaven, he came down by coming from heaven; if, when this saying can belong to no man, “I and the Father are one”, Christ alone utters this saying from the consciousness of his divinity; if, finally, the apostle Thomas, instructed by all the proofs and facts of Christ's divinity, says in answer to Christ, “My Lord and my God”; if the apostle Paul also writes in his letters, “of whom are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever”; if the same man declares that he was appointed an apostle not by men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ; if the same contends that he did not learn the Gospel from men or through man, but received it through Jesus Christ: then rightly Christ is God.

Therefore in this matter one of two things must hold. For since it is plain that all things were made through Christ, either he is before all things, since all things are through him, and so rightly he is also God; or, because he is man, he is after all things, and so rightly nothing was made through him. But we cannot say that nothing was made through him, since we observe it written that all things were made through him. He is not, then, after all things; that is, he is not only man, who is after all things, but also God, since God is before all things. For he is before all things because all things are through him; lest, if he were only man, nothing would be through him; or, if all things are through him, he is not only man: since if he were only man, not all things would be through him, indeed nothing would be through him. What then do they answer? That nothing is through him, so that he may be only man? How then are all things through him? Therefore he is not only man, but also God, since all things are through him; so that we must rightly understand that Christ is not only man, who is after all things, but also God, since all things were made through him. For how could you call him either only man, when you see him also [as God], or [only God,] when you see him also in the flesh? Except that, since both are observed, both are rightly to be believed.

And yet the heretic still hesitates to say that Christ is God, though he sees him proved God by so many facts and sayings. If Christ is only man, how did he, coming into this world, come to his own, when a man made no world? If Christ is only man, how is the world reported to have been made through him, when it is reported that the world was not made through man, but man was established after the world? If Christ is only man, how is Christ not only from the seed of David, but the Word became flesh and dwelt in us? For although the first-formed man was not from seed either, yet the first-formed man was not compounded from the union of the Word and flesh: for he is not the Word become flesh and dwelling in us. If Christ is only man, how does he who came from heaven testify to what he has seen and heard, when it is agreed that man cannot come from heaven, since he cannot be born there? If Christ is only man, how are things visible and invisible, Thrones, Virtues, and Dominions, reported to have been created through him and in him, when the heavenly Virtues could not have been made through a man, since they must have existed before man himself? If Christ is only man, how is he present everywhere when called upon, when this is not the nature of man but of God, to be able to be present in every place? If Christ is only man, why is a man invoked in prayers as Mediator, when the invocation of a man is judged ineffective for granting salvation? If Christ is only man, why is hope placed in him, when hope in man is declared accursed? If Christ is only man, why may Christ not be denied without the destruction of the soul, when it is declared that a sin committed against a man can be forgiven?

If Christ is only man, how does John the Baptist testify and say, “He who comes after me has been set before me, because he was before me”? For if Christ is only man, born after John, he could not be before John, unless he preceded him in that he is God. If Christ is only man, how is it that whatever the Father does, the Son also does likewise, when man cannot do works like the heavenly works of God? If Christ is only man, how is it that as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son to have life in himself? For after the example of God the Father a man cannot have life in himself, since he is not glorious in eternity, but has been made in the material of mortality. If Christ is only man, how does he say, “I am the bread of eternal life, who came down from heaven”, when a man, himself mortal, can neither be the bread of life, nor have come down from heaven, since no material of frailty was established in heaven? If Christ is only man, how does he say that no one has ever seen God the Father except him who is from God; he has seen God? For if Christ is only man, he could not have seen God, because no one among men has seen God; but if, being from God, he saw God, he wished to be understood as more than man, since he saw God. If Christ is only man, why does he say, “What if you should see the Son of man ascending where he was before?” Now he ascended into heaven; he was therefore there, since he returns to where he was before. And if he was sent from heaven by the Father, he is certainly not only man: for man, as we have said, could not come from heaven. It was not, then, as man that he was there before; but he ascended to where he had not been. But the Word of God, which was there, came down: the Word, I say, of God, and God, through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made. It was not, then, as man that he came thus from heaven; but the Word of God, that is, God, came down from there.

If Christ is only man, how does he say: “Even if I testify about myself, my testimony is true, because I know where I have come from and where I am going; you do not know where I have come from or where I am going; you judge according to the flesh”? See, here too he says that he will return to the place from which he testifies that he came before, sent, that is, from heaven. He came down, then, from where he came, just as he goes to the place from which he came down. Hence, if Christ were only man, he would not have come from there, and therefore would not be going away there either, since he would not have come from there. But by coming from where man cannot come, he showed that he had come as God. But the Jews, ignorant and unskilled regarding this very descent, have made these heretics their heirs, to whom it is said, “You do not know where I come from and where I am going; you judge according to the flesh.” These men, like the Jews, holding that Christ's birth was only fleshly, have believed Christ to be nothing other than a man, not considering this: that since man could not come from heaven so as rightly to be able to return there, he who came down from where man could not come is God.

If Christ is only man, how does he say, “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world”? Now if every man is from this world, and Christ is therefore in this world, is he then only man? Far from it. But consider what he says: “I am not of this world.” Does he then lie when he says he is not of this world, if he is only man? Or if he does not lie, he is not of this world. He is not, then, only man, since he is not of this world. But lest it should be hidden who he was, he declared where he was from: “I,” he says, “am from above”; that is, from heaven, from where man cannot come, for he was not made in heaven. He who is from above, then, is God, and therefore is not of this world; although in a certain way he is also of this world, and so Christ is not only God, but also man. So that rightly, just as he is not of this world according to the divinity of the Word, so he is of this world according to the frailty of the body he took up: for he is man joined with God, and God united with man. But Christ here leaned now to one side, that of his divinity alone, because Jewish blindness looked only at the fleshly side in Christ; and so in the present passage, passing over in silence the frailty of the body, which is of the world, he spoke only of his divinity, which is not of the world: so that, as far as they had leaned toward believing him only a man, so far Christ might draw them to consider his divinity, that they might believe him God; wishing, leaving aside for the moment any mention of his human lot, to overcome their unbelief about his divinity by setting his divinity alone against it.

If Christ is only man, how does he say, “I came forth from God and have come”, when it is agreed that man was made by God, not that he proceeded from God? But as man did not proceed from God, so the Word of God did proceed, of whom it was said, “My heart has uttered a good Word.” And since it is from God, rightly it is also with God. And since it was not uttered to no purpose, rightly it makes all things. “For all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made.” But this Word, through whom all things were made, [is God]. “And the Word,” it says, “was God.” God, then, proceeded from God, since the Word who proceeded is God who proceeded from God. If Christ is only man, how does he say, “If anyone keeps my word, he will not see death forever”? What else is not seeing death forever than immortality? And immortality is the companion of divinity, because divinity is immortal and immortality is the fruit of divinity. But every man is mortal, and immortality cannot come from what is mortal. Therefore immortality cannot be born from Christ, if he is a mortal man. But “Whoever keeps my word,” he says, “will not see death forever.” Therefore the word of Christ grants immortality, and through immortality divinity. And if one who is himself mortal cannot make another immortal, but this word of Christ both shows and grants immortality, then surely he who grants immortality is not only man, for if he were only man he could not grant it; but by granting divinity through immortality, he proves himself God by offering divinity, which he could not grant unless he were God.

If Christ is only man, how does he say, “Before Abraham I am”? For no man can exist before him from whom he himself comes; nor can it be that anyone existed before him from whom he took his origin. But Christ, though he is from Abraham, says that he is before Abraham. Either, then, he lies and deceives, if he who was from Abraham did not exist before Abraham; or he does not deceive, if he is also God, since he existed before Abraham. And had he not been so, then, since he was from Abraham, he could not have been before Abraham. If Christ is only man, how does he say, “And I know them, and my own follow me; and I give them eternal life, and they will never perish forever”? But since every man is bound by the laws of mortality, and therefore cannot preserve himself forever, much less will he be able to preserve another forever. Yet Christ promises that he will give salvation forever; if he does not give it, he is a liar; if he gives it, he is God. But he does not deceive, for he gives what he promises. He is God, then, who offers everlasting salvation, which a man, who cannot preserve himself, will not be able to grant to another.

If Christ is only man, what does he mean by saying, “I and the Father are one”? For how are “I and the Father one”, unless he is both God and the Son? He can be called one with him because he is from him, and because he is his Son, and because he is born from him, since he is found to have proceeded from him, by which he is also God. When the Jews thought this offensive and believed it blasphemous, because by these words he had shown that he, Christ, was God, and therefore had run together for stones and were eager to hurl blows of rocks at him, he boldly refuted his opponents by the example and testimony of the Scriptures. “If,” he says, “he called them gods to whom the words of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken, do you say of him whom the Father sanctified and sent into this world, ‘You blaspheme,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?” By these words he did not deny that he was God; on the contrary, he affirmed that he was God. For since those to whom the words of God came are without doubt said to be gods, much more is he God who is found better than all of them. And nonetheless he fittingly refuted the slanderous charge of blasphemy by a lawful distinction: for he wished to be understood as God in such a way that he would be understood as the Son of God, and not the Father himself. For he said that he had been sent, and showed that he had displayed many works from the Father; by which he wished to be understood not as the Father but as the Son; and in the last part of his defense he made mention of the Son, not the Father, saying, “You say, ‘You blaspheme,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” So as far as the charge of blasphemy is concerned, he says he is the Son, not the Father; but as far as concerns his divinity, by saying, “I and the Father are one”, he proved himself to be the Son and God. He is God, then; but God in such a way that he is the Son, not the Father.

If Christ is only man, how does he himself say, “And everyone who lives and believes in me will not die forever”? But one who believes in a solitary and bare man is said to be accursed; whereas here one who believes in Christ is declared not accursed, but never to die. Hence, if he is only man, as the heretics would have it, how will whoever believes in him not die forever, since he who trusts in man is held to be accursed? Or if he is not accursed, but rather destined, as we read, to the attainment of eternal life, then Christ is not only man but also God: whoever believes in him both lays down the danger of the curse and comes to the fruit of righteousness.

If Christ is only man, how does he say that the Paraclete will take from what is his the things he is to announce? For the Paraclete does not receive anything from man; rather the Paraclete offers knowledge to man. Nor does the Paraclete learn things to come from man; rather the Paraclete instructs man about things to come. Therefore, either the Paraclete did not receive from Christ, a man, what he announces, since a man can give nothing to the Paraclete, from whom man himself must receive; and in this place Christ is deceiving and misleading when he says that the Paraclete will receive from him, a man, the things he will announce: or he does not deceive us, as indeed he does not deceive, and the Paraclete received from Christ what he announces. But if he received from Christ what he announces, then Christ is greater than the Paraclete, since the Paraclete would not receive from Christ unless he were less than Christ. And the Paraclete, being less than Christ, proves by this very fact that Christ, from whom he received what he announces, is also God; so that the testimony to Christ's divinity is great, since the Paraclete, found to be less than Christ, takes from him what he hands on to the rest. For if Christ were only man, Christ would receive from the Paraclete what he was to say, not the Paraclete from Christ what he was to announce.

If Christ is only man, why did he lay down for us such a rule of believing as to say, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the one and true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”? If he had not wished to be understood as God too, why did he add, “and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”, unless he wished to be received as God as well? For if he did not wish to be understood as God, he would have added, “and the man Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” But as it is, he did not add it, and Christ did not present himself to us as man only, but joined himself to God, so that through this conjunction he might wish to be understood as God also, as he is. We must therefore believe, according to the rule laid down, in the Lord, the one true God, and consequently in him whom he sent, Jesus Christ, who would never, as we have said, have joined himself to the Father unless he wished to be understood as God too; for he would have separated himself from him if he had not wished to be understood as God. For he would have placed himself only among men, if he knew himself to be only man; and he would not have joined himself with God if he did not know himself to be God as well. As it is, he is silent about the man, since no one doubts that he is man; and he rightly joins himself to God, in order to lay down for those who would believe the formula of his divinity.

If Christ is only man, how does he say, “And now honor me with the glory which I had with you before the world was”? If before the world was he had glory with God and held glory with the Father, he existed before the world; for he would not have had glory unless he himself, who could hold glory, had existed first. For no one can have anything unless he who holds something has himself existed before. But Christ has glory before the founding of the world; therefore he existed before the founding of the world. For unless he had existed before the founding of the world, he could not have had glory before the founding of the world, since he himself would not have existed. But a man, who came after the world, could not have had glory before the founding of the world; yet Christ had it; therefore he existed before the world. He was not, then, only man, who existed before the world: he is therefore God, since he existed before the world and held glory before the world. Nor let this be said to be predestination, since it is not written; or let those who think so add it. But woe is written to those who add, as also to those who take away; so what cannot be added cannot be said. Predestination, then, which is not written, being set aside, Christ existed in substance before the founding of the world. For he is the Word through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made. For even if he is said to be glorious in predestination, and the predestination existed before the founding of the world, then let order be kept, and a great number of men will be destined to glory before him. For by that destination Christ will be understood to be less than the others, since he is marked as later than they. For if this glory was in predestination, Christ received this predestination to glory last of all: for Adam will be seen to have been predestined before him, and Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and Abraham, and all the rest. For since with God the order of all persons and things has been arranged, many will be said to have been predestined before this predestination of Christ to glory. And on this reckoning Christ, who is found to be better and greater and older even than the angels themselves, is detected to be less than other men. Either, then, let all these things be taken away, so that divinity may be taken from Christ; or, if these things cannot be taken away, let the heretics give back to Christ his own divinity.

What if Moses follows this same rule of truth, and has handed it down to us at the beginning of his writings, so that we may learn that all things were created and founded through the Son of God, that is, through the Word of God? For he says what John says, what the others say; indeed, John and the others are understood to have received from him what they say. For if John says, “All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made”; and the prophet declares, “I speak my works to the King”; and Moses presents God commanding first that light be made, the heaven made firm, the waters gathered, the dry land shown, fruit called forth according to its seeds, living creatures produced, lights and stars set in the heaven: he shows that no other was then present with God, to whom these works were commanded to be done, than he through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made. And if this is the Word of God (for “my heart has uttered a good word”), he shows that the Word was in the beginning, and that this Word was with the Father, and moreover that the Word was God, and that all things were made through him. But this Word became flesh and dwelt in us, namely Christ, the Son of God; and since we both receive him afterwards as man according to the flesh, and see him before the founding of the world as the Word of God and God, we rightly, according to the ordering of the Old and New Testaments, both believe and hold Christ Jesus to be God and man.

What if the same Moses presents God saying, “Let us make man to our image and likeness”, and below, “And God made man; to the image of God he made him; male and female he made them”? If, as we have already shown, it is the Son of God through whom all things were made, surely it is the Son of God through whom man also was established, for whose sake all things were made. But when God commands that man be made, it is God who is reported to make man; and the Son of God makes man, namely the Word of God, through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made. And this Word became flesh and dwelt in us: therefore Christ is God. Man, then, was made through Christ, as through the Son of God. But God made man to the image of God; he who made man to the image of God is therefore God; Christ therefore is God. So that rightly the authority of the Old Testament does not waver concerning the person of Christ, since it is propped up by the manifestation of the New Testament; nor is the power of the New Testament cut off, since its truth rests on the roots of the Old Testament. Hence those who presume Christ, the Son of God and of man, to be only man and not also God act against the Testament both Old and New, since they corrupt the authority and truth of both the Old and New Testaments.

What if the same Moses everywhere presents God the Father as immeasurable and without end, not one who is enclosed by place, but one who encloses every place; not one who is in a place, but rather in whom every place is; containing all things and embracing all, so that rightly he neither comes down nor goes up, since he himself both contains and fills all things; and yet nonetheless he presents God coming down to the tower that the sons of men were building, seeking to look at it, and saying, “Come”; and then, “Let us go down and confound their tongues there, so that each may not hear the voice of his neighbor”? Whom do they suppose to have come down here to that tower, seeking then to visit those men? God the Father? Then he is now enclosed by place; and how does he himself embrace all things? Or does he mean that an angel came down with angels, saying, “Come”, and then, “Let us go down and confound their tongues there”? But in Deuteronomy we observe that these things are reported of God, and that God said them, where it is written: “When he scattered the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the nations according to the number of the angels of God.” Neither, then, did the Father come down, as the matter shows; nor did an angel command these things, as the facts prove. It remains, then, that he came down of whom the apostle Paul says: “He who came down is the same who ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”, that is, the Son of God, the Word of God. But the Word of God became flesh and dwelt in us: this will be Christ: Christ therefore will be declared God.

See, the same Moses reports in another place that God was seen by Abraham. And yet the same Moses hears from God that no man sees God and lives. If God cannot be seen, how was God seen? Or if he was seen, how can he not be seen? For John too says, “No one has ever seen God.” And the apostle Paul: “Whom no man has seen or can see.” But Scripture certainly does not lie: therefore God was truly seen. From this it can be understood that it was not the Father who was seen, who has never been seen, but the Son, who is accustomed both to come down and to be seen because he came down. For he is the image of the invisible God, so that the limitation and frailty of the human condition might already then grow accustomed to seeing God the Father one day in the image of God, that is, in the Son of God. For human frailty had to be nourished step by step and by increases through the image toward that glory, so that it might one day be able to see God the Father. For great things are dangerous if they are sudden. For even the light of the sun, coming suddenly after darkness, will not show day to unaccustomed eyes by its excessive brightness, but will rather cause blindness. Lest this happen to the harm of human eyes, the darkness is broken up and scattered little by little, and the rising of that luminary, climbing imperceptibly by moderate increases, gradually accustoms the eyes of men to bear its whole orb by the increase of its rays. So, then, Christ too, that is, the image of God and the Son of God, is looked upon by men in so far as he could be seen. And therefore the frailty and limitation of the human lot is fed, drawn forward, and brought up through him, so that one day, having grown used to beholding the Son, it may be able to see even God the Father himself as he is; lest, struck by the sudden and unbearable brightness of his majesty, it should be cut off, so that it could not see God the Father whom it has always longed for. Hence it is the Son who is seen here; and the Son of God is the Word of God; and the Word of God became flesh and dwelt in us; and this is Christ. What reason, in the name of mischief, is there for doubting that he should be called God, who is understood to be proved God in so many ways?

And if an angel meets Hagar, Sarah's maidservant, driven out and put to flight from the house, at a spring of water on the road to Shur, asks the reasons for her flight and hears them, and after this offers her counsels of humility; moreover gives her hope of the name of mother, pledges and promises that from her womb there would be much seed, and that Ishmael was to be born of her, and besides discloses the place of his dwelling and describes his way of life: and if Scripture presents this angel as both Lord and God (for he would not have promised the blessing of seed unless he had been an angel and God): let the heretics consider what they make of this passage. Was this one whom Hagar saw the Father, or not? For he is set down as God. But far be it from us to call God the Father an angel, lest he be subject to another whose angel he would be. But they will say it was an angel: how then will he be God, if he was an angel? since this name has never been granted to angels. Unless it is that the truth shuts us in from both sides to this conclusion: that we must understand it to have been the Son of God, who, since he is from God, is rightly called God, because he is the Son of God; and since he is subject to the Father and the announcer of the Father's will, he has been declared the Angel of great counsel. Therefore, if this passage does not fit the person of the Father, lest he be called an angel, nor the person of an angel, lest he be declared God, but it does suit the person of Christ that he should be both God, because he is the Son of God, and an angel, because he is the announcer of the Father's arrangement: the heretics ought to understand that they act against the Scriptures, who, though they say they believe Christ to be an angel, are unwilling to declare him God as well, whom they read in the Old Testament to have often come to visit the human race.

Moses further adds that God was seen by Abraham at the oak of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent at noon; and that nonetheless, when he had seen three men, he called one of them Lord; and when he had washed their feet, he offers loaves baked in the ashes, with butter and an abundance of milk, and urges them to stay as guests and eat. After this he hears that he is to be a father; he learns that Sarah his wife would bear him a son; he comes to know of the end of the Sodomites, which they deserved to suffer; and he learns that God had come down because of the outcry of Sodom. If in this passage they wish the Father to have been seen at that time, received as a guest together with two angels, then the heretics have believed the Father visible. But if it was an angel, when one of three angels is called Lord, why is an angel called God, which is not usual? Unless, so that his proper invisibility may be given back to God the Father, and his proper limitation left to the angel, it will be believed that none other than the Son of God, who is also God, was seen by Abraham and received as a guest. For he was rehearsing in a mystery what he was to be: made Abraham's guest, he was to be among Abraham's sons; and he washed the feet of those sons, to prove that he was the same, repaying to the sons the due of hospitality which their father had once lent to him. Hence too, lest there should be any doubt that it was he who had been Abraham's guest, it is written in the account of the end of the Sodomites: “The Lord rained fire and sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord out of heaven.” So too the prophet says in the person of God: “I overthrew you as the Lord overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.” The Lord, then, overthrew Sodom; that is, God overthrew Sodom; but in the overthrow of Sodom the Lord rained fire from the Lord. And this Lord was the God seen by Abraham; and this God is Abraham's guest, seen, surely, because he was touched. But since the Father, being invisible, was surely not seen then either, the one who was seen and received and welcomed as a guest was he who is accustomed to be touched and seen. And this is the Son of God, the Lord who rained sulphur and fire from the Lord on Sodom and Gomorrah. And this is the Word of God; and the Word of God became flesh and dwelt in us; and this is Christ. It was not, then, the Father who was Abraham's guest, but Christ; nor was it the Father who was then seen, but the Son; and it was Christ who was seen. Rightly, then, Christ is both Lord and God, who was seen by Abraham for no other reason than that before Abraham himself God the Word was begotten from God the Father.

Further, the same Angel and God, it says, comforts and visits the same Hagar when she had been put out of Abraham's house with the boy. For when she had left the infant in the wilderness because the water in the skin had run out, and the boy had cried out and raised weeping and wailing, “And God heard,” says Scripture, “the voice of the boy from the place where he was.” Having reported that it was God who heard the infant's voice, it added: “And the Angel of the Lord called Hagar herself from heaven”, stating that he was an angel whom it had called God, and declaring him Lord whom it had set down as an angel; and this Angel and God further promises Hagar greater comfort, saying: “Do not fear; for I have heard the voice of the boy from the place where he was. Rise, take the boy, and hold him: for I will make him a great nation.” If this angel is only an angel, why does he claim for himself the right to say, “For I will make him a great nation”, when this kind of power is surely God's and cannot be an angel's? Hence he who can do this is also confirmed to be God; for, to prove this very thing, Scripture immediately adds: “And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of living water, and she went and filled the skin from the well and gave it to the boy; and God was with the boy.” If, then, this God was with the boy who opened Hagar's eyes so that she saw a well of living water and drew water because of the pressing need of thirst; and this God, called an angel, calls her from heaven, when earlier, hearing the voice of the crying boy, he was rather God: he is understood to be none other than one who is both angel and God. Since this cannot be fitting and suitable to the Father, who is only God, but can be fitting to Christ, who has been declared not only God but also Angel, it plainly appears that it was not the Father who then spoke to Hagar there, but rather Christ, since he is God, to whom the name of angel also belongs, inasmuch as he was made the Angel of great counsel; and he is Angel in that he makes known the bosom of the Father, as John declares. For if John himself says that this same one who makes known the Father's bosom, the Word, became flesh so that he might make known the Father's bosom, then rightly Christ is shown by the Scriptures to be not only man but also angel, and not angel only but also God, and is believed by us to be so: lest, if we will not accept that it was Christ who then spoke to Hagar, we either make an angel God, or count God the Father Almighty among the angels.

What if we read in another place likewise that God is set down as an angel? For when Jacob was complaining to his wives Leah and Rachel of their father's injustice, and telling them that he now wished to go back and return to his own land, he also brought in the authority of his dream, reporting that at that time the Angel of God had said to him in a dream: “Jacob, Jacob.” “And I,” he says, “said, What is it? Look, he said, with your eyes, and see the he-goats and rams mounting the sheep and the she-goats, speckled, white, and spotted, and ash-colored and sprinkled. For I have seen all that Laban has done to you. I am the God who appeared to you in the Place of God, where you anointed for me a standing stone, and vowed a vow to me there. Now therefore rise, and depart from this land, and go into the land of your birth, and I will be with you.” If the Angel of God says these things to Jacob, and the Angel himself goes on to say, “I am the God who appeared to you in the Place of God”, we see without any hesitation that this one is set down not only as an angel but also as God, since he says that the vow was made to himself by Jacob in the Place of God, and he does not say “in my place.” There is, then, a Place of God, and this one too is God. But there it is simply written “in the Place of God”; for it is not said “in the place of the Angel and God,” but only “of God”; whereas he who makes these promises is said to be both God and Angel; so that rightly there is a distinction between him who is called only God and him who is declared not simply God but also Angel. Hence, if such great authority cannot here be taken to belong to any other angel, so that he should confess himself to be God as well and testify that the vow was made to him, but only to Christ, to whom a vow can be vowed, not because he is an angel only, but because he is God: it is plain that he cannot be taken to be the Father, but the Son, God and Angel. And if this is Christ, as it is, he runs a grave danger who calls Christ only a man, or only an angel, taking from him the power of the divine name which he has often received from the faith of the heavenly Scriptures, which often call him both Angel and God.

To all these is added this too: that just as the divine Scripture has often set him down as both Angel and God, so it sets him down as both man and God, the same divine Scripture expressing what he was to be, and already then painting in an image what he was to be in the truth of substance. “For Jacob,” it says, “remained alone, and a man wrestled with him until morning; and he saw that he could not prevail against him, and he touched the breadth of Jacob's thigh, while he wrestled with him and Jacob with him; and he said to him, Let me go, for the morning star has risen. And he said, I will not let you go unless you bless me. And he said, What is your name? And he said, Jacob. And he said to him, Your name will no longer now be called Jacob, but Israel will be your name: for you have prevailed with God, and are mighty with men.” And it adds further: “And Jacob called the name of that place Vision of God: for I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved. And the sun rose upon him; soon he passed the Vision of God; but he limped on his thigh.” A man, it says, wrestled with Jacob. If a solitary man, who is he? Where is he from? Why does he struggle and wrestle with Jacob? What had come between them? What had been done? What was the reason for so great a struggle and so great a contest? Why, besides, is Jacob, who is found strong enough to hold the man with whom he wrestled, found to have asked a blessing from the one he was holding because the morning star was already rising, unless it is that this struggle was prefigured, which was to take place between Christ and the sons of Jacob, and which is said in the Gospel to have been accomplished? For against this man the people of Jacob wrestled, and in that wrestling the people of Jacob were found stronger, since they won the victory of their iniquity against Christ; and at that time, because of the crime they committed, they began, uncertain and slipping, to limp most grievously in the walk of their own faith and salvation: and though they were found superior in condemning Christ, they nonetheless need his mercy, they nonetheless need his blessing.

But this man who wrestled with Jacob says, “Your name will no longer now be called Jacob, but Israel will be your name.” And if Israel is “a man seeing God,” the Lord was elegantly showing that he who was then wrestling with Jacob was not only man but also God. Jacob surely saw God, with whom he wrestled, even though in the wrestling he was holding a man. And so that there might be no further doubt, he himself set down the interpretation, saying, “For you have prevailed with God, and are mighty with men.” For this reason the same Jacob, now understanding the force of the mystery and perceiving the authority of him with whom he had wrestled, called the name of that place where he wrestled Vision of God. He added moreover the reasons to offer an interpretation of “Vision of God”: “For I have seen God,” he says, “face to face, and my soul has been saved.” He saw God, with whom he wrestled as with a man: and he held the man as victor, but asked a blessing as from God, as the lesser. So he wrestled with God and with man; and thus this wrestling was prefigured there, but was accomplished in the Gospel between Christ and the people of Jacob; and in it, though the people were found superior, they were found the lesser, since they were proved guilty. Who will hesitate to acknowledge that Christ, in whom this figure of the wrestling was fulfilled, is not only man but also God, since the very figure of the wrestling seems to have proved him both man and God?

And yet even after this the same divine Scripture does not cease to call the Angel God and to declare God an Angel. For when this same Jacob was about to bless Manasseh and Ephraim, the sons of Joseph, placing his hands crosswise on the boys' heads, he says, “God, who has fed me from my youth to this day, the Angel who delivered me from all evils, bless these boys.” And he so far sets down as the same the Angel whom he had called God, that at the end of his words he put the person of whom he spoke in the singular, saying, “bless these boys.” For if he had wished one to be understood as God and another as the Angel, he would have included two persons in the plural number; as it is, he set down the singular number of one person in the blessing, by which he wished the same one to be understood as God and Angel. But God the Father cannot be understood here; but Christ can be understood as God and Angel. And Jacob signified him as the author of this blessing by placing his hands crosswise over the boys, as though Christ were their father, showing by the way he laid his hands the figure and form of the passion to come. Let no one, then, who does not hesitate to call Christ an Angel, hesitate to declare him God as well, since he understands that this same one was invoked as both God and Angel for the blessing of these boys, a blessing arranged by the mystery of the passion in the figure of the hands.

But if some heretic, stubbornly struggling against the truth, should wish to understand an angel in the proper sense in all these examples, or contend that it must be so understood, he too must be broken by the strength of the truth on this point. For if, since all things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth are subject to Christ, even the angels themselves, together with all the other things that are subject to Christ, are called gods, then by right Christ is also God. And if any angel subject to Christ can be called a god, and if this is said and uttered without blasphemy, much more surely can this belong to Christ himself, the Son of God, that he be declared God. For if an angel who is subject to Christ is proclaimed a god, much more, and more firmly, will Christ, to whom all the angels are subject, be said to be God. For it does not fit nature that what is granted to the lesser should be denied to the greater. So if an angel is less than Christ, and an angel is called a god, more consequently is Christ said to be God, who is found greater and better not than one angel but than all the angels.

And if God stood in the assembly of gods, and in their midst God judges between gods; and Christ several times stood in the synagogue; then Christ stood in the synagogue as God, judging, that is, the gods to whom he says, “How long will you accept the persons of men?”, accusing, that is, the men of the synagogue who did not exercise just judgments. Further, if those who are rebuked and blamed are nevertheless seen for some reason to obtain this name without blasphemy, so as to be called gods, much more will he be held to be God who, by the authority of the same reading, is shown not only to have stood as God in the assembly of gods, but also to judge and decide between gods. And if those who fall like one of the princes are nevertheless called gods, much more will he be said to be God who not only does not fall like one of the princes, but even conquers the author and prince of wickedness himself. What reason is there, in the name of mischief, that, when they read that this name was given even to Moses, where it is said, “I have set you as God to Pharaoh”, it should be denied to Christ, who is found to have been appointed not God to Pharaoh, but Lord and God of the whole creation? And to Moses this name was given sparingly, to Christ lavishly; to Moses by measure, to Christ above all measure altogether. “For the Father,” it says, “does not give by measure to the Son: for the Father loves the Son.” To Moses for a time, to Christ without time; for he received the power of the divine name both over all things and for all time. And if one who received power over a single man nonetheless obtains this name of God without hesitation, in the smallness of the power given him, how much more will he be believed to have obtained the authority of this name who has power even over Moses himself?

I could indeed sift through the treatments of all the heavenly Scriptures and stir up, so to speak, a huge forest of evidence concerning this aspect of Christ's divinity, were it not that my purpose is not so much to speak against this heresy as to set out briefly the rule of truth concerning the person of Christ. Yet, though I hasten to other matters, I do not think I should pass over what the Lord expressed in the Gospel to signify his majesty, saying, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.” Or when in another place and passage he declares, “I have power to lay down my life and to take it up again: for this command I have received from the Father.” For who is it that says he can lay down his life, or can recover his life again, because he has received this command from the Father? Or who says that he can raise again and rebuild the destroyed temple of his body, unless it is that that Word who is from the Father, who is with the Father, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made, the imitator of the Father's works and powers, the image of the invisible God, who came down from heaven, who testified to what he had seen and heard, who came not to do his own will but rather to do the Father's will, by whom he had been sent for this very purpose, that, made the Angel of great counsel, he might unlock for us the laws of heavenly secrets, and who, the Word made flesh, dwelt in us: that this Christ, from us, is proved not only man, because he is the Son of man, but also God, because he is the Son of God?

And if Christ has also been called by the Apostle the firstborn of all creation, how could he be the firstborn of all creation, unless it is that, according to his divinity, the Word proceeded from God the Father before all creation? If the heretics will not accept this, they will be forced to show that Christ the man is the firstborn of all creation, which they will not be able to do. Either, then, he is before all creation, so as to be the firstborn of all creation, and is not only man, since man is after all creation; or he is only man, and is after all creation. And how is he the firstborn of all creation, unless it is that the Word, which is before all creation and therefore the firstborn of all creation, becomes flesh and dwells in us, that is, takes up this man who is after all creation, and so dwells in us with him and in him, so that neither is the man taken away from Christ nor the divinity denied? For if he is only before all creation, the man in him has been taken away; but if he is only man, the divinity, which is before all creation, has been cut off. Both, then, are allied in Christ, both joined, and both connected. And rightly, since there is in him something that surpasses creation, the concord of divinity and humanity is seen to be pledged in him. For this reason he who is declared to have been made the Mediator of God and men is found to have united God and man in himself.

And if the same Apostle reports of Christ that, having put off the flesh, he disgraced the powers, triumphing over them openly in himself, he surely did not say to no purpose “having put off the flesh,” unless he wished it to be understood that he put it on again in the resurrection. Who, then, is this one who put off and put on again? Let the heretics inquire. For we know that the Word of God put on the substance of flesh, and that the same put off again that same material of the body, which he took up again in the resurrection and resumed like a garment. But Christ would neither have put off nor put on the man if he had been only man. For no one is ever either stripped of himself or clothed with himself. For whatever is stripped off or put on from elsewhere must necessarily be something else. Hence rightly it was the Word of God who put off the flesh and in the resurrection put it on again; and put it off because he had put it on in his birth. And so in Christ it is God who puts on, and he must also have put off; therefore he who puts on must likewise put off. And the man is put on and put off, as a kind of tunic of a woven body. And therefore, consequently, it was, as we have said, the Word of God who is found now to have put on, now to have put off. For this is what was foretold in the blessings: “He will wash his robe in wine, and his cloak in the blood of the grape.” If the robe in Christ is the flesh, and the cloak is the body itself, let it be asked who he is whose body is the cloak and whose flesh is the robe. For to us it is plain that the flesh was the robe and the body the cloak of the Word, who washed the substance of the body and cleansed the material of the flesh with blood, that is, with wine, by the passion on the side of the man he had taken up. Hence, inasmuch as he is washed, he is man, because the cloak that is washed is flesh; but he who washes is the Word of God, who, in order to wash the cloak, became the taker-up of the cloak. Rightly, from the substance which was taken up to be washed, he is declared man; just as from the authority of the Word who washed, he is shown to be God.

But why, though we seem to be hastening to another part of the discussion, should we pass over that passage in the Apostle? “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, made in the likeness of men, and found in bearing as a man: he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even the death of the cross; therefore God also exalted him above all, and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus is in the glory of God the Father.” “Who, though he was in the form of God,” he says. If Christ were only man, he would have been described as in the image of God, not in the form of God. For we know that man was made to the image, not to the form, of God. Who, then, is this who, as we have said, was in the form of God? An angel? But we do not read of the form of God even among the angels; except that this one, preeminent and noble above all, the Son of God, the Word of God, the imitator of all his Father's works, since he himself works just as his Father does, is (as we have put it) in the form of God the Father. And rightly he has been declared to be in the form of God, since he himself is above all things and holds divine power over every creature, and is God after the example of the Father; yet he obtained this very thing from his own Father, that he should be both God and Lord of all, and God begotten and brought forth from him after the form of God the Father.

This one, then, though he was in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God. For though he remembered that he was God from God the Father, he never compared or set himself beside God the Father, mindful that he was from his Father, and that he had the very thing that he is because the Father had given it. Hence, finally, both before taking up the flesh, and also after taking up the body, and moreover after the resurrection itself, he rendered, and renders, all obedience to the Father in all things. By this it is proved that he never thought divinity a kind of robbery, so as to make himself equal to God the Father; but on the contrary, obedient and subject to his every command and will, he was content even to take up the form of a servant (that is, to become that man), and the substance of flesh and body, which he took up by being born, coming as it did from the slavery of the sins of the fathers and of man: and at that time he also emptied himself, since he did not refuse to take up the frailty of the human condition. For if he had been born only a man, he would not have been emptied by this: for a man, when he is born, is increased, not emptied; for when he begins to be what he could not have had when he did not exist, he is, as we have said, not emptied but rather increased and enriched. But if Christ is emptied in being born, by taking the form of a servant, how is he only man? Of him it would more truly have been said that he was enriched when he was born, not emptied; except that the authority of the divine Word, resting for a while in order to take up the man, and not exercising itself with its own powers, lowers itself for a time and lays itself down, while it bears the man whom it took up. He empties himself when he descends to injuries and insults, when he hears unspeakable things and experiences unworthy ones. Yet an excellent fruit of this humility is at once present. For he received the name that is above every name, which we certainly understand to be none other than the name of God. For since it belongs to God alone to be above all things, it follows that the name that is above all belongs to him who is above all things, God. That, then, is the name which is above every name; and it follows that this name belongs to him who, though he was in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God. For if Christ were not God, every knee of things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth would not bend at his name; nor would things visible or invisible, or every creature of all things, be subject or placed beneath a man, since they would remember that they existed before man. Hence, since Christ is said to be in the form of God, and is shown to have emptied himself into birth according to the flesh, and is declared to have received from the Father the name that is above every name, and every knee of things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth is shown to bend and bow at his name, and this very thing is asserted to serve the glory of God the Father: it follows that he is not only man because he became obedient to the Father unto death, even the death of the cross; but from these higher things, which proclaim the divinity of Christ, the Lord Christ Jesus is also shown to be God, which the heretics do not wish.

At this point I may also gather arguments from the side of other heretics. It is a firm kind of proof that is taken even from an opponent, so that the truth is proved even by the enemies of the truth themselves. For it is so plain that he is presented in the Scriptures as God that many of the heretics, moved by the greatness and truth of his divinity, stretching his honors beyond measure, have dared to proclaim or think him not the Son but God the Father himself. Though this is against the truth of the Scriptures, it is nevertheless a great and outstanding argument for the divinity of Christ, who is so truly God, but as the Son of God born from God, that many heretics (as we have said) have taken him as God in such a way that they thought he should be declared not the Son but the Father. Let them consider, then, whether he is God whose authority has so moved some that they thought him, as we said above, to be God the Father himself: confessing the divinity in Christ in an unbridled and extravagant way, the plain divinity of Christ driving them to this, that whom they read to be the Son they thought to be the Father, because they perceived him to be God.

Other heretics too have so embraced the plain divinity of Christ as to say that he was without flesh, and have taken away from him the whole man that he took up, lest they should impair in him the power of the divine name if they associated a human birth with him, as they supposed. We do not approve this; but we bring it forward as an argument that Christ is so truly God that some, removing the man, have thought him only God, while some have believed him to be God the Father himself: whereas the reasoning and balance of the heavenly Scriptures show Christ to be God, but as the Son of God, and, since the Son of man was also taken up by God, to be believed to be man as well. For if he was coming to man in order to be the Mediator of God and men, he had to be with man, and the Word had to become flesh, so that in himself he might fasten together the concord of earthly and heavenly things alike, joining in himself the pledges of both parties and uniting God to man and man to God; so that rightly the Son of God, by taking up flesh, might become the Son of man, and the Son of man, by receiving the Word of God, might become the Son of God. This most profound and hidden mystery, destined before the ages for the salvation of the human race, is found fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ, God and man, by which the human race might be brought to the fruit of eternal salvation.

But the material of this heretics' error has arisen, I think, from this: that they suppose there is no difference between the Son of God and the Son of man, lest, if a distinction were made, Jesus Christ should easily be proved both man and God. For they want the same one, that is, the man, the son of man, to be seen as also the Son of God, so that the man and flesh, that frail substance, may be said to be the same as the Son of God himself. Hence, since no distinction is drawn between the son of man and the Son of God, but the son of man himself is claimed as the Son of God, Christ, only a man, is asserted to be the same as the Son of God. By this they strive to shut out “The Word became flesh and dwelt in us” and “You will call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us.” For they put forward and hold out the things reported in the Gospel of Luke, from which they try to assert not what is, but only what they wish to be: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore also the holy thing that will be born of you will be called the Son of God.” If, then, they say, the angel of God says to Mary, “the holy thing that will be born of you,” the substance of flesh and body is from Mary; and he declared that this substance, that is, this holy thing that was begotten of her, is the Son of God: the man himself, they say, and that flesh of the body, which was called holy, is itself the Son of God. So that when Scripture says “holy thing,” we should understand Christ, the son of man, to be a man; and when it sets forth “Son of God,” we ought to perceive not a man but God.

But the divine Scripture easily convicts and uncovers the frauds and thefts of the heretics. For if it were only thus, “The Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the holy thing that will be born of you will be called the Son of God,” perhaps we would have to struggle against them in another way, and other arguments would have to be sought and other weapons taken up, by which to overcome their snares and tricks. But since Scripture itself, abounding in heavenly fullness, strips itself of the slanders of these heretics, we easily rest on what is written and overcome these errors without any hesitation. For it did not say, as we have already set out, “therefore the holy thing that will be born of you,” but added a conjunction: for it says, “therefore also the holy thing that will be born of you,” to show that it is not principally this holy thing that is born of her, that is, this substance of flesh and body, that is the Son of God, but consequently and in the second place; while principally the Son of God is the Word of God, incarnate through that Spirit of whom the angel says, “The Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” For this is the legitimate Son of God, who is from God himself; who, in taking up this holy thing, both joins the Son of man to himself and draws and carries him over to himself, and by his connection and mingling makes him united with himself and makes him the Son of God, which he was not by nature: so that the principal title to this name “Son of God” is in the Spirit of the Lord, who came down and came; and the consequence of the name is in the Son of God and man; and rightly, consequently, this one was made the Son of God, since he is not principally the Son of God.

And therefore the angel, seeing this arrangement and unfolding this order of the mystery, not confusing everything so as to leave no trace of distinction, set down a distinction, saying, “Therefore also the holy thing that will be born of you will be called the Son of God”: lest, if he had not dispensed this distribution with its due balances, but had left it mingled in confusion, he should truly have given the heretics occasion to declare that the Son of man, as man, is the same as the Son of God and of man. But as it is, setting out part by part the order and reasoning of so great a mystery, he plainly expressed it by saying, “and the holy thing that will be born of you will be called the Son of God,” proving that the Son of God came down, and that he, taking up the Son of man into himself, consequently made him Son of God, since the Son of God associated and joined him to himself; so that the Son of man, adhering in birth to the Son of God, might hold by that very mingling, as lent and borrowed, what he could not possess from his own nature. And so by the angel's voice a distinction was made, which the heretics do not want, between the Son of God and the Son of man, yet with their union; pressing them to understand Christ, the Son of man, as a man, and also to receive the Son of God, and the man as Son of God, that is, the Word of God (as it is written), as God: and therefore to acknowledge Christ Jesus the Lord, connected (so to speak) from both, woven and compounded from both, and united in the same concord of both substances by the fastening of a mutual covenant one to the other, as man and God, by the truth of the Scripture that says this very thing.

“Then,” they say, “if Christ is not only man but also God, and Scripture reports that Christ died for us and was raised, then Scripture teaches us to believe that God died; or if God does not die, and Christ is reported to have died, Christ will not be God, since God cannot be taken to have died.” If they ever understood, or had understood, what they read, they would never speak so dangerously at all. But the madness of error is always headlong; and it is nothing new if those who have abandoned the lawful faith go down even to dangerous things. For if Scripture set forth Christ as only God, and no association with human frailty were mingled in him, their twisted argument might rightly have had some force here: “If Christ is God, and Christ died, then God died.” But since Scripture establishes him, as we have often shown, not only as God but also as man, it follows that what is immortal must be held to have remained incorrupt. For who does not understand that the divinity is impassible, but human frailty passible? Since, then, Christ is understood to be mingled and united both from what is God and from what is man (for the Word became flesh and dwelt in us), who would not easily recognize of himself, without any teacher or interpreter, that it was not what is God in Christ that died, but what is man in him that died? For what if the divinity in Christ does not die, but only the substance of the flesh is extinguished, when in other men too, who are not flesh only but flesh and soul, the flesh alone suffers the assault of destruction and death, while the soul is seen to be incorrupt and outside the laws of destruction and death? For this is what the Lord himself said when he urged us to martyrdom and to contempt of all human power: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” And if the immortal soul cannot be killed or slain in anyone else, though the body and the flesh alone can be slain, how much more surely could the Word of God and God in Christ not be slain at all, when only the flesh and the body were killed? For if the soul in any man has this nobility of immortality, that it cannot be slain, much more does the nobility of the Word of God have this power, that it cannot be killed. For if the power of men fails to slay the sacred power of God, and if human cruelty fails to slay the soul, much more must it fail to slay the Word of God. For since the soul itself, which was made through the Word of God, is not killed by men, much more surely will the Word of God be believed unable to be destroyed. And if the bloody savagery of men can do no more against men than to kill only the body, how much more surely will it have no more power in Christ than to kill the body only: so that, since from this it is gathered that nothing but the man in Christ was slain, it is evident that the Word in him was not brought down to mortality. For if Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are agreed to have been only men, are plainly alive (for “all these,” it says, “live to God”; nor did death, which dissolved their bodies, destroy the soul in them; for it could exercise its right over bodies, but had no power to exercise it over souls; for one thing in them was mortal and therefore dead, another immortal and therefore understood not to be extinguished, and for this reason they were declared and said to live to God): much more surely could death in Christ have power against the material of the body alone, but could not exercise itself against the divinity of the Word. For the power of death is broken where the authority of immortality intervenes.

But taking occasion from the fact that Christ is proved by the sacred authorities of the divine writings to be not only man but also God, other heretics break out and contrive to shake the standing of religion in Christ, wishing by this very fact to show that Christ is God the Father, since he is asserted to be not only man but is also proclaimed God. For they speak thus: “If God is proclaimed to be one, and Christ is God, then,” they say, “if the Father and Christ are one God, Christ will be called the Father.” In this they are proved to err, not knowing Christ but approving the sound of a name: for they will not have him be the second person after the Father, but the Father himself. Since they are easily answered, a few things will be said.

For who would not acknowledge that the person of the Son is second after the Father, when he reads what was said by the Father next to the Son, “Let us make man to our image and likeness”; and after this the report, “And God made man; to the image of God he made him”? Or when he holds in his hands: “The Lord rained fire and sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord out of heaven”? Or when it is said to Christ, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you; ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession”? Or when that longed-for scribe too says, “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet”? Or when, unfolding the prophecies of Isaiah, he finds it written thus: “Thus says the Lord to Christ my Lord”? Or when he reads, “I did not come down from heaven to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me”? Or when he finds it written, “For he who sent me is greater than I”? Or when he considers the text, “I go to my Father and your Father, my God and your God”? Or when he has, placed with the rest, “But in your law it is written that the testimony of two is true; I testify about myself, and the Father who sent me has testified about me”? Or when a voice is given from heaven: “I have both glorified, and will glorify”? Or when Peter answers and says, “You are the Son of the living God”? Or when the Lord himself approves the mystery of this revelation, and says, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven”? Or when Christ himself says, “Father, glorify me with that honor which I had with you before the world was made”? Or when the same says, “Father, I knew that you always hear me; but I said it because of those standing around, that they may believe that you have sent me”? Or when the definition of the rule is laid down by Christ himself, and it is said, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the one and true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I have glorified you on earth; I have finished the work which you gave me”? Or when the same likewise asserts and says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father”? Or when his sitting at the Father's right hand is attested both by the prophets and by the apostles?

And I should be making it very long if I tried to gather all the sayings on this side; since the divine Scripture, of the New Testament no less than the Old, everywhere shows him born of the Father, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made, who has always obeyed and obeys the Father, always having power over all things, but as handed over, as granted, as bestowed on him by his own Father. For what can be so evident that he is not the Father but the Son, as that he is set forth as obedient to God the Father? Lest, if he were believed to be the Father, Christ should be said to be subject to another God the Father.

But since they often urge against us that passage where it was said, “I and the Father are one”, we will beat them on this too just as easily. For if Christ were the Father, as the heretics think, he ought to have said, “I, the Father, am one.” But when he says “I” and then brings in the Father, saying “I and the Father,” he separates and distinguishes the distinctness of his own person, that is, of the Son, from the Father's authority, not only in the sound of the name, but also in the order of the power as arranged; for he could have said, “I, the Father,” if he had been conscious of being the Father. And since he said “one” (unum), let the heretics understand that he did not say “one person” (unus). For “one” put in the neuter signifies the concord of fellowship, not the unity of a person. For he is said to be “one thing,” not “one person,” since it is not referred to number but is expressed with reference to fellowship with another. Finally he adds, saying “are,” not “am,” to show by saying “are,” and “the Father,” that there are two persons. And the “one” that he says pertains to concord, to the same mind, and to the very fellowship of love; so that rightly the Father and the Son are one through concord, through love, and through affection. And since he is from the Father, whatever he is, he is the Son; yet the distinction remains, so that he who is the Son is not the Father, because neither is he who is the Father the Son. For he would not have added “are” if he had been conscious that he, the one and solitary Father, had become the Son.

Finally, the apostle Paul also knew this unity of concord, yet with a distinction of persons. For when he wrote to the Corinthians, he said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth. But he who plants and he who waters are one.” And who would not understand that Apollos is one and Paul another, not that Apollos and Paul are the same and identical? Finally, the offices of each are set out as different: one who plants and another who waters. Yet the apostle Paul set forth these two, not as being one person, but as being one thing; so that Apollos is one and Paul is another, as far as the distinction of persons is concerned, but as far as concord is concerned, both are one. For when two have one mind, one truth, one faith, one and the same religion, one fear of God too, they are one, even if they are two; they are the same, since they think the same. For those whom the account of person divides from each other, the account of religion in turn brings together. And though they are not the same identical individuals, since they feel the same, they are the same; and though they are two, they are one, having fellowship in faith, even if they bear diversity in their persons.

Finally, when Jewish ignorance had been stirred by these words of the Lord, and rashly inflamed even to stones, so that they ran about and said, “We do not stone you for a good work, but for blasphemy, and because you, though you are a man, make yourself God,” the Lord set down a distinction in giving his reason, showing how he had called himself God or wished to be understood as God. “Do you say of him,” he says, “whom the Father sanctified and sent into this world, ‘You blaspheme,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?” Here too he said that he has a Father. He is therefore the Son, not the Father; for he would have confessed himself the Father if he had been conscious of being the Father; and he sets forth that he was sanctified by his Father. Since, then, he receives sanctification from the Father, he is less than the Father; and consequently, being less than the Father, he is the Son. For if he had been the Father, he would have given sanctification, not received it. And now, by professing that he received sanctification from the Father, by the very fact that he proves himself less than the Father in receiving sanctification from him, he has shown himself to be the Son, not the Father. Moreover, he says that he was sent, so that by this obedience by which the Lord Christ came, sent, he might be proved to be not the Father but the Son, who would surely have sent if he had been the Father; but the Father was not sent, lest the Father, in being sent, should be proved subject to another God. And yet after this he adds what would dissolve all ambiguity whatever and extinguish the whole controversy of error. For he says in the last part of his speech: “You say, ‘You blaspheme,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” If, then, the Lord plainly testifies that he is the Son, not the Father, it is an example of great rashness and enormous madness to stir up a controversy about divinity and religion against the testimony of Christ the Lord himself, and to say that Christ Jesus is the Father, when one sees that he has proved himself not the Father but the Son.

I will further add that passage too, in which, while the heretic rejoices as if in some eye of his own truth and light, which he has in fact lost, he may recognize the whole blindness of his error. For again and again he objects that it was said, “Have I been with you so long, and you do not know me? Philip, he who has seen me has seen the Father also.” But let him learn what he does not understand. Philip is blamed, and rightly and deservedly, for having said, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” For when had he heard or learned from Christ that Christ was the Father? On the contrary, he had often heard and often learned rather that he was the Son, not the Father. For when the Lord said, “If you have known me, you have known my Father too, and from now on you know him and have seen him,” he had not said this in order to be understood as the Father himself; but because whoever has approached the Son of God deeply and fully, with all faith and all devotion, will in every way come to the Father through the Son in whom he so believes, and will see him. “For no one,” he says, “can come to the Father except through me.” And therefore he will not only come to God the Father and know the Father himself, but he ought also to hold it so, and so to take it for granted in heart and mind, as if he had already known and seen the Father.

For the divine Scripture often announces things not yet done as done, because they are going to be so; and things that are certainly to happen it does not foretell as future but narrates as done. Thus, when in the times of the prophet Isaiah Christ had not yet been born, he said, “For a child has been born to us”; and when there had not yet been an approach to Mary, he said, “And I went in to the prophetess, and she conceived and bore a son.” And when Christ had not yet made known the bosom of the Father, he declared, “And his name will be called the Angel of great counsel.” And when he had not yet suffered, he proclaimed, “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter.” And when the cross as yet was nowhere, he said, “All day long I have stretched out my hands to an unbelieving people.” And when he had not yet been given drink with insult, he said, “In my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” And when he had not yet been stripped, he said, “For my clothing they cast lots; and they counted my bones; they dug through my hands and feet.” For the divine Scripture, foreseeing, speaks as done of what it knows will be, and speaks as completed of what it holds as future, which will come without doubt. And therefore the Lord said in the present passage, “From now on you know him, and have seen him.” For he was saying that the Father would be seen by whoever had followed the Son; not as though the Son himself were the Father who was seen, but because whoever chose to follow him and be his disciple would obtain as a reward the power to see the Father. For he is also the image of God the Father; and to this is added that as the Father works, so the Son also works. And the Son is the imitator of all the Father's works, so that each one may hold himself as though he had already seen the Father, since he sees him who in all his works always imitates the invisible Father.

But if Christ is himself the Father, how does he at once add and say, “Whoever believes in me will himself do the works that I do, and will do greater than these, because I go to the Father”? And he further joins on: “If you love me, keep my commandments; and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate.” After this he also joins on: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word; and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.” He also added this: “But that Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send, will teach you and remind you of all that I have said.” He further puts forward this passage, to show that he is the Son, and rightly adds and says: “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I go to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.” And what when he also joins on this: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser: every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every fruitful one he cleanses, so that it may bear more fruit”? He presses on further and adds: “As the Father has loved me, so I too have loved you: remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love.” Further he urges and says: “But I have called you friends, because all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” He adds this too: “But they will do all these things to you because of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.” The Lord would never have added these things after those, bearing clear witness that he is not the Father but the Son, if he had been conscious of being the Father or wished to be understood as the Father; except that he wished to express this: that each one ought already to hold, when he sees the image of God the Father through the Son, that he has seen the Father; since each one who believes in the Son is trained in the contemplation of the image, so that, grown used to seeing divinity in the image, he may be able to advance and grow even to the perfect contemplation of God the Father almighty. And since whoever has drunk this in with heart and mind, and has believed that it will be so in every respect, may hold the Father whom he will see as though he had already in some way seen him, and may hold it here already as though he possessed what he knows for certain he will have.

But if he had been the Father himself, why did he promise as a future reward what he had already granted and given? For since he says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”, he is found to promise the contemplation and sight of the Father; therefore he had not yet given it: for why would he promise it if he had already given it? For he would have given it if he were the Father; for he was being seen and touched. But when Christ himself, while he is being touched and seen, nonetheless promises and says that whoever is pure in heart will see God, by this very fact he proves that he is not the Father, since, while present and being seen, he promised that whoever was pure in heart would see the Father. It was, then, not the Father but the Son who made these promises: because he who was the Son promised what was yet to be seen; and his promise would have been pointless had he not been the Son. For why did he promise the pure in heart that they would see the Father, if those who were present were already then seeing Christ, the Father? But because he was the Son, not the Father, rightly the Son, as the image of God, was then seen; and the Father, as invisible, is promised and marked out to the pure in heart, that he may be seen. Let this suffice, then, to have been said even against this heretic: a few things out of many. For a field, and a wide and spacious one, will open if we choose to pursue this heretic more fully; since in these two passages, deprived, as it were, of his eyes, which have been dug out, he has been wholly overcome in the blindness of his doctrine.

For the order of reason and the authority of the faith, the Lord's words and writings having been set out, admonish us after these things to believe also in the Holy Spirit, promised of old to the church but given at the appointed opportunities of the times. For he was promised through the prophet Joel, but given through Christ. “In the last days,” he says, “I will pour out of my Spirit upon my servants and my handmaids.” And the Lord says: “Receive the Holy Spirit: whose sins you forgive, they will be forgiven; and whose you retain, they will be retained.” This Holy Spirit the Lord Christ at one time calls the Paraclete, at another declares to be the Spirit of truth. He is not new in the Gospel, nor was he given in a new way; for this same Spirit both accused the people in the prophets and provided advocacy for the Gentiles in the apostles. For the former deserved to be accused because they had despised the Law; and those of the Gentiles who believe deserve to be helped by the patronage of the Spirit, because they are eager to come to the law of the Gospel. There is indeed a difference in him in the kinds of his offices, because in the times there is a different reason for things; yet he who acts thus is not on that account different, nor is he another when he acts thus; but he is one and the same, dividing his offices according to the times and the occasions and records of events.

Finally the apostle Paul says: “Having the same Spirit, as it is written, I believed, therefore I have spoken; we too believe, and therefore we speak.” It is one and the same Spirit, then, who is in the prophets and in the apostles; except that there he was for a moment, here always. For there he was not in them so as to be always in them; here, so as to remain in them always. There he was distributed in moderation, here poured out whole; there given sparingly, here lent generously; yet not shown forth before the Lord's resurrection, but bestowed after Christ's resurrection. For he said, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth.” And: “When that Advocate comes whom I will send to you from my Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from my Father.” And: “If I do not go away, that Advocate will not come to you; but if I go away, I will send him to you.” And: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” And since the Lord was about to go away into the heavens, he necessarily gave the Paraclete to the disciples, lest he should leave them as orphans in some way, which was not at all fitting, and abandon them without an advocate and a kind of guardian.

For he it is who strengthened their hearts and minds, who marked out the mysteries of the Gospel, who was in them the enlightener of divine things; strengthened by whom, they feared neither prisons nor chains for the name of the Lord, but even trod underfoot the powers and tortures of the world, armed now, that is, and strengthened by him, having in themselves the gifts which this same Spirit distributes and directs to the church, the bride of Christ, as her ornaments. For he it is who appoints prophets in the church, instructs teachers, directs tongues, works powers and healings, does wonderful works, grants discernment of spirits, bestows governments, suggests counsels, and orders and arranges whatever other gifts of grace there are; and so makes the Lord's church perfect and complete everywhere and in all things. He it is who in the form of a dove, after the Lord was baptized, came upon him and remained, dwelling in Christ alone full and whole, not cut short in any measure or portion, but distributed and sent in all his overflowing abundance; so that from him others might obtain a certain first taste of graces, the source of the whole Holy Spirit remaining in Christ, so that from him the veins of gifts and works might be drawn, the Holy Spirit dwelling abundantly in Christ. For this is what Isaiah, prophesying, already said: “And there will rest upon him,” he says, “the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and piety, and the Spirit of the fear of God will fill him.” And the very same he says in another place in the person of the Lord himself: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; because he has anointed me, he has sent me to preach the gospel to the poor.” Likewise David: “Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows.” Of him the apostle Paul says: “For whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ is not his.” And: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

He it is who works the second birth from the waters, a kind of seed of the divine race, and the consecrator of the heavenly birth, the pledge of the promised inheritance, and as it were a kind of bond of eternal salvation; who makes us God's temple and makes us his house; who intercedes before the divine ears for us with unutterable groanings, fulfilling the offices of an advocate and rendering the services of defense; given as an indweller in our bodies and the worker of holiness: who, doing this in us for eternity, leads our bodies forth to the resurrection of immortality, while he accustoms them to be mingled in him with heavenly power and to be joined with the divine eternity of the Holy Spirit. For our bodies are trained in him and through him to advance to immortality, while they learn to govern themselves with moderation according to his decrees. For he it is who desires against the flesh, because the flesh fights against him. He it is who restrains insatiable desires, breaks immoderate lusts, extinguishes unlawful passions, conquers burning impulses, rejects drunkenness, repels avarice, puts to flight luxurious revelings, binds together love, binds fast affections, repels sects, sets out the rule of truth, refutes heretics, drives the wicked out, and guards the Gospels. Of him the same Apostle says: “For we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God.” Of him he exults and says: “And I think that I too have the Spirit of God.” Of him he says: “And the Spirit of the prophets is subject to the prophets.” Of him he reports: “But the Spirit says plainly that in the last times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, doctrines of demons, of those speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared.” No one established in this Spirit ever says “Jesus is accursed”; no one has denied that Christ is the Son of God, or repudiated God the Creator; no one utters any words of his own against the Scriptures; no one lays down other and sacrilegious decrees; no one writes up different laws. Whoever blasphemes against him has no forgiveness, not only in this world but not even in the world to come. He it is who in the apostles bears witness to Christ, in the martyrs shows the steadfast faith of religion, in virgins encloses the admirable continence of sealed chastity, in the rest guards the laws of the Lord's teaching uncorrupted and undefiled; he destroys heretics, corrects the perverse, convicts unbelievers, exposes pretenders, corrects the wicked too, and guards the church uncorrupted and inviolate in the holiness of perpetual virginity and truth.

Let these things, then, concerning the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, be said by us briefly and set down concisely, and not drawn out in a long discussion. For they could have been extended more widely and drawn out in a fuller discussion, since the whole Old and New Testament could be brought in as testimony that the true faith is so. But since the heretics, always struggling against the truth, are accustomed to drag the sincere tradition and the catholic faith into controversy, being scandalized at Christ because he is asserted to be God both through the Scriptures and believed by us to be so, we must rightly (so that every heretical slander may be removed from our faith) so argue concerning Christ's being God as not to hinder the truth of Scripture, nor yet our faith, by which one God is both proclaimed through the Scriptures and held and believed by us. For both those who say that Jesus Christ is God the Father himself, and those who would have him be only man, have snatched the origins and causes of their error and perversity from this: that, noticing it is written that God is one, they thought they could hold that view in no other way than by thinking that Christ must be believed either only man or else God the Father. For they are accustomed to gather up their slanders thus, as they strive to prove their own error. Those who say that Jesus Christ is the Father put forward this: “If God is one, and Christ is God, Christ is the Father, since God is one; if Christ is not the Father, since Christ the Son is also God, two Gods would seem to have been brought in, contrary to the Scriptures.” But those who contend that Christ is only man reason from the opposite side thus: “If the Father is one and the Son another, and the Father is God and Christ is God, then there is not one God, but two gods are brought in together, the Father and the Son; and if God is one, it follows that Christ is man, so that rightly the Father is the one God.” Truly the Lord is crucified as if between two thieves, as he was once fixed to the cross; and so he receives the sacrilegious reproaches of these heretics from either side.

But neither the holy Scriptures nor we give them causes of perdition and blindness, if they either will not or cannot see what is plainly set in the midst of the divine writings. For we both know and read and believe and hold that there is one God, who made heaven and earth alike, since we neither know another nor shall ever be able to know one, since there is none. “I am God,” he says, “and there is none besides me, righteous and saving.” And in another place: “I am the first and the last, and besides me there is no God. Who is like me?” And: “Who has measured heaven with his palm, and the earth with his fist? Who has hung the mountains in a balance, and the groves in scales?” And Hezekiah: “That all may know that you alone are God.” Moreover the Lord himself: “Why do you ask me about the good? God alone is good.” The apostle Paul too: “Who alone,” he says, “has immortality, and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.” And in another place: “Now a mediator is not of one; but God is one.” But as we hold and read and believe this, so we must pass over no part of the heavenly Scriptures; since we must in no way refuse even those marks of Christ's divinity that are set down in the Scriptures, lest, by corrupting the authority of the Scriptures, we be held to have corrupted the integrity of the holy faith. Let us then believe this also, since it is most faithful: that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is our Lord and God; since “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” And: “The Word became flesh and dwelt in us.” And: “My Lord and my God.” And: “Of whom are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever.”

What, then, shall we say? Does Scripture set forth two Gods? How then does it say that God is one? Or is Christ not God as well? How then was it said to Christ, “My Lord and my God”? Unless, then, we hold all this with due reverence and lawful reasoning, we shall rightly be believed to have given the heretics a scandal; not, surely, from any fault of the heavenly Scriptures, which never deceive, but from the presumption of human error by which they chose to be heretics. And first of all this must be turned back on those who presume to raise against us the dispute about two Gods. It is written, and they cannot deny it, that there is one Lord. What then do they think of Christ: that he is Lord, or that he is not Lord at all? But they do not doubt at all that he is Lord; so if their reasoning is true, there are now two Lords. How then, according to the Scriptures, is there one Lord? And Christ is called the one Teacher; yet we read that the apostle Paul too is a teacher. There is no longer, then, one Teacher; for by this reasoning we infer two teachers. How then, according to the Scriptures, is Christ the one Teacher? In the Scriptures God is called the one who is good; but in the same Scriptures Christ too is set down as good. If they infer rightly, then, there is not one who is good, but two who are good. How then, according to the faith of the Scriptures, is one said to be good? But if they do not think that the fact that there is one Lord can in any way be impaired by the fact that Christ too is Lord; nor that there is one Teacher, by the fact that Paul too is a teacher; nor that there is one who is good, by the fact that Christ too has been called good: let them understand by the same reasoning that the fact that God is one cannot be impaired by the fact that Christ too has been declared God.

God the Father, then, the Founder and Creator of all things, who alone knows no origin, invisible, immeasurable, immortal, eternal, is one God; to whose greatness, majesty, and power nothing can, I will not say be preferred, but even be compared. From him, when he himself willed, the Word, the Son, was born: who is not understood as the sound of struck air or the tone of a voice forced from the lungs, but is recognized in the substance of a power brought forth from God. The secrets of his sacred and divine birth neither an apostle has learned, nor a prophet discovered, nor an angel known, nor a creature recognized; they are known to the Son alone, who has known the Father's secrets. This one, then, since he is begotten of the Father, is always in the Father. But I say “always” in such a way as to prove him not unborn but born. Yet he who is before all time must be said to have been always in the Father; for no time can be assigned to him who is before time. For he is always in the Father, lest the Father should not always be Father. Yet the Father also in a certain sense precedes him, since it is necessary that he should in some way be prior, inasmuch as he is Father. For he who knows no origin must in some manner go before him who has an origin. At the same time the Son is less, since he knows that he is in the Father, having an origin because he is born; and he is in some way near to the Father in his birth (though he has an origin inasmuch as he is born), since he is born of that Father who alone has no origin.

This one, then, when the Father willed, proceeded from the Father; and he who was in the Father proceeded from the Father; and he who was in the Father, because he was from the Father, was afterwards with the Father, because he proceeded from the Father: that divine substance, namely, whose name is the Word, through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made. For all things are after him, because they are through him. And rightly he is before all things, but after the Father, since all things were made through him; he proceeded from him by whose will all things were made. God, certainly, proceeding from God, constituting a second person after the Father, as Son; but not taking from the Father this, that he is one God. For if he had not been born, then, as unborn, compared with him who was unborn, equality being shown in both, he would make two unborn, and therefore would make two Gods. If he had not been begotten, then, compared with him who was not begotten and found equal, the two not begotten would rightly have produced two Gods; and so Christ would have produced two Gods. If he had been found without origin like the Father, and himself the beginning of all things like the Father, he would have made two beginnings and consequently would have shown us two Gods as well. Or if he too were not the Son, but a Father begetting another Son from himself, rightly, compared with the Father and marked as equally great, he would have made two Fathers, and therefore would have proved two Gods as well. If he had been invisible, compared with the Invisible and declared equal, he would have shown two invisibles, and therefore would have proved two Gods as well. If incomprehensible, if whatever else belongs to the Father, then, we say, he would rightly have raised the controversy about two Gods which these men invent. But as it is, whatever he is, he is not from himself, because he is not unborn; but he is from the Father, because he is begotten: whether as he is the Word, or as he is the Power, or as he is the Wisdom, or as he is the Light, or as he is the Son, and whatever of these he is, since he is from no other source than, as we said above, from the Father, owing his origin to his Father, he could not make a discord of divinity by the number of two Gods, since he took his origin by being born from him who is the one God. In this way, since he is both only-begotten and firstborn from him who has no origin, there is one beginning and head of all things. Therefore he asserted one God, whom he proved to be under no beginning or starting point, but rather the start and beginning of all things.

But the Son does nothing of his own will, nor acts by his own counsel, nor comes of himself, but obeys all his Father's commands and precepts: so that, although his birth proves him the Son, yet his compliant obedience declares him the minister of the Father's will, from whom he is; and so, while he renders himself obedient to the Father in all things, though he too is God, yet by his obedience he shows the one God the Father, from whom he also drew his origin. And therefore he could not make two Gods, because neither did he make two origins, since he received the beginning of his birth before all time from him who has no origin. For since that which is unborn is the beginning for the rest (that is, God the Father alone, who is outside origin, from whom he who is born exists), since he who is born of him rightly comes from him who has no origin, proving that to be the beginning from which he himself is: even though he who is born is God, he nonetheless shows one God, whom he who is born proved to be without origin. He is, then, God, but begotten for this very purpose, that he might be God. He is also Lord, but born of the Father for this very purpose, that he might be Lord. He is also Angel, but destined by his Father as Angel to announce the great counsel of God. His divinity is so handed down that he does not seem, either by dissonance or by inequality of divinity, to have produced two Gods. For since all things have been made subject to him as Son by the Father, while he himself, with the things subject to him, is made subject to his Father, he is proved to be the Son of his Father, but is found to be both Lord and God of all the rest. Hence, since all things put beneath him are handed over to him who is God, and the Son refers back to the Father all things made subject to him as received, he gives back again to the Father the whole authority of divinity; the one God is shown to be the true and eternal Father, from whom alone this power of divinity is sent forth, and, handed over and directed also into the Son, returns again to the Father through the communion of substance. The Son, indeed, is shown to be God, to whom divinity is seen to have been handed over and extended; and yet nonetheless the Father is proved to be the one God, since step by step, by a reciprocal course, that majesty and divinity, sent back by the Son himself, returns and is turned back again to the Father who had given it; so that rightly God the Father is the God of all, and the beginning even of his own Son, whom he begot as Lord; while the Son is God of all the rest, since God the Father set over all him whom he begot. So Christ Jesus, the Mediator of God and men, having from his own Father power over every creature made subject to him, inasmuch as he is God, with the whole creation subject to him, found in concord with God his Father, has briefly proved his Father to be the one and only and true God, while there remains in him that for which he was also heard.