Against Praxeas 14

There is also another rule that supports us in claiming that the Father and the Son are two: the one that has laid down that God is invisible. For when Moses in Egypt desired to see the Lord, saying, “If then I have found favor before you, show yourself to me, that I may see you and know you,” he said, “You cannot see my face; for no man shall see my face and live”; that is, he who sees it will die. Yet we find that God was seen by many, and yet none of those who had seen him died; seen, that is, according to men's capacities, not according to the fullness of the Godhead. For the patriarchs are said to have seen God, like Abraham and Jacob, and the prophets, like Isaiah and Ezekiel, and yet they did not die. Either, then, they ought to have died if they had seen him (for “no one shall see God and live”), or, if they saw God and did not die, Scripture lies in saying that God said, “If a man sees my face, he shall not live.” Or, if Scripture does not lie, either when it presents God as unseen or when it presents him as seen, then the one who was seen will be another, since the same one cannot be defined as invisible who was seen; and it will follow that we understand the Father to be invisible because of the fullness of his majesty, and recognize the Son as visible because of the measure of his derivation; just as we are not permitted to gaze on the sun as regards the very sum of its substance, which is in the heavens, but we bear its ray with our eyes because of the tempered strength of the portion that reaches from there to the earth. Here someone on the other side will want to contend that the Son too is invisible, as Word and as Spirit, and, while claiming one condition for Father and Son, rather to confirm that Father and Son are one and the same. But we have said that Scripture supports the difference by distinguishing visible and invisible. They will add this too to the argument: that if it was the Son who was then speaking to Moses, he himself declared that his face was visible to no one, because he himself, of course, was the invisible Father under the name of the Son. And by this they want the same one to be taken as both visible and invisible, in the same way as the same one is both Father and Son; since a little before, too, before he denies his face to Moses, it is written that the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, “as a man speaks to his friend”; no less than Jacob too: “I have seen God,” he says, “face to face.” So the visible and the invisible are the same; and because the same one is both, the Father himself too is invisible, inasmuch as he is also the Son, visible. As if our exposition of Scripture applied to the Son in his visibility with the Father set aside! For we say that the Son too, in his own name, is invisible so far as he is the Word and Spirit of God, by the condition of his substance; but that he was visible before the flesh in the way in which he says to Aaron and Miriam: “If there is a prophet among you, I will make myself known to him in a vision and speak to him in a dream; not as with Moses: mouth to mouth will I speak to him, in appearance,” that is, in reality, “and not in a riddle,” that is, not in an image; as the apostle too says: “Now we see as through a mirror, in a riddle, but then face to face.” So, since he reserves for Moses the sight of himself and conversation face to face for the future (for this was afterwards fulfilled in the seclusion of the mountain, when, as we read in the Gospel, Moses was seen talking with him), it is clear that in former times God, that is, the Son of God, was always seen in a mirror and a riddle and a vision and a dream, by the prophets and patriarchs as well as by Moses himself up to then. And the Lord himself, if he did perhaps speak face to face, yet not so that a man should see his face, except perhaps in a mirror, in a riddle. In fact, if the Lord had spoken to Moses in such a way that Moses knew his face at close quarters, how is it that at once and on the spot he desires to see his face, which he would not desire if he had seen it? How likewise does the Lord deny that his face can be seen, which he had shown, if indeed he had shown it? Or what is the face of God, the sight of which is denied? If there was one that was seen (“I saw God,” says Jacob, “face to face, and my life was preserved”), there must be another face which kills if it is seen. Or was the Son indeed seen (even if face to face, yet this very thing in a vision, a dream, a mirror, and a riddle, since the Word and Spirit cannot be seen except in an imaginary form), while he calls the invisible Father his face? For who is the Father? Will he not be the face of the Son, by reason of the authority which he obtains as begotten of the Father? For is it not fitting to say of some greater person, “That man is my face,” and, “He gives me countenance”? “The Father,” he says, “is greater than I.” So the Father will be the face of the Son. For what does Scripture say? “The Spirit of his person is Christ the Lord.” So if Christ is the person of the Father's Spirit, he rightly declared the one whose Spirit's person he was, that is, the Father, to be his face, by reason of their unity. A marvel indeed, whether the Father can be taken as the face of the Son, he who is his head! For “the head of Christ is God.”