Against Praxeas

In various ways the devil has rivaled the truth. Sometimes he has tried to shake it by defending it. He champions one only God, the almighty maker of the world, so as to make a heresy even out of the oneness. He says that the Father himself came down into the virgin, was himself born of her, himself suffered; in short, that he himself is Jesus Christ. The serpent forgot himself: for when he tempted Jesus Christ after John's baptism, he approached him as the Son of God, sure that God had a Son, even from the very Scriptures out of which he was then building his temptation: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread”; and again, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written that he has given his angels charge over you” (he, that is, the Father) “that they may lift you up in their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone.” Or will he reproach the Gospels with a lie, saying: “Let Matthew and Luke see to it; but I approached God himself, I tempted the Almighty himself face to face; that is why I approached, that is why I tempted. But if he had been the Son of God, I would never have deigned to tempt him”? But he himself is rather a liar from the beginning, and so is any man he has suborned of his own, like Praxeas. For this man was the first to bring this kind of perversity from Asia to Roman soil, a restless man in other ways too, and puffed up besides with boasting of martyrdom on account of a mere, simple, short spell of tedium in prison; when, even if he had handed over his body to be burned, he would have gained nothing, not having the love of God, whose spiritual gifts he also fought against. For when the bishop of Rome was already acknowledging the prophecies of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, and on the strength of that acknowledgment was bestowing peace on the churches of Asia and Phrygia, this same man, by asserting falsehoods about these prophets and their churches and by defending the authority of his predecessors, forced him both to recall the letters of peace already sent out and to desist from his purpose of receiving the spiritual gifts. So Praxeas did two pieces of the devil's business at Rome: he drove out prophecy and brought in heresy; he put the Paraclete to flight and crucified the Father. Praxeas' tares had sprouted here too, sown over the good seed while many slept in the simplicity of their doctrine; then, exposed through the one God chose, they even seemed to have been pulled up. In fact the teacher had given a written guarantee of his amendment, and the document remains with the psychics, among whom the matter was then transacted. From then on, silence. And we, indeed, were afterwards separated from the psychics by our acknowledgment and defense of the Paraclete. But those tares had then shaken out their seed everywhere. For some time it lay hidden, with a cunning vitality, through hypocrisy, and now it has broken out afresh. But it will be rooted out afresh too, if the Lord wills, in this season of respite; if not, on its own day all the adulterous crops will be gathered and burned with the other stumbling blocks in unquenchable fire.

So, after a time, the Father born and the Father suffering, God himself, the Lord Almighty, is proclaimed as Jesus Christ. We, however, always, and now the more as being better instructed by the Paraclete, the guide into all truth, believe indeed in one only God, yet under this dispensation, which we call “economy”: that the one only God has also a Son, his own Word, who has proceeded from him, “through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made.” We believe that he was sent by the Father into the virgin and born of her, man and God, Son of Man and Son of God, and named Jesus Christ; that he suffered, died, and was buried according to the Scriptures, and was raised by the Father, and taken back into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead; who thereafter, according to his promise, sent from the Father the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. That this rule has come down from the beginning of the gospel, even before any of the earlier heretics, let alone before Praxeas, a man of yesterday, will be proved both by the lateness of all heretics and by the very novelty of Praxeas of yesterday. By this, against all heresies alike, let it be settled in advance from now on that whatever is first is true, and whatever is later is adulterated. But without prejudice to this prescription, room must still be given everywhere to discussion as well, for the instruction and protection of some; if only so that each perversity may not seem to be condemned without examination, by prejudgment; this one above all, which thinks it possesses the pure truth, since it thinks that the one only God cannot be believed in otherwise than by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are the very selfsame. As if in this way too the One were not all, since all are from the One, that is, through unity of substance; while nevertheless the mystery of the economy is guarded, which arranges the unity into a trinity, setting out three, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit: three, however, not in condition but in degree, not in substance but in form, not in power but in aspect; yet of one substance and one condition and one power, because there is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned under the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. How they admit of number without division, the following discussion will show.

For all the simple people, not to call them unwise and uneducated, who always form the majority of believers, since the rule of faith itself transfers them from the many gods of the world to the one and true God, not understanding that he is indeed to be believed as one, but together with his economy, take fright, because they presume that the economy, with its number and arrangement of a trinity, is a division of the unity; whereas the unity, deriving the trinity from itself, is not destroyed by it but administered. So they are forever tossing it about that two and three are preached by us, while they presume that they are worshipers of one God; as if unity gathered together irrationally did not also make heresy, and trinity rationally weighed did not establish truth. “We hold the monarchy,” they say; and even Latins pronounce the very sound so vocally and so skillfully that you would think they understand the monarchy as well as they pronounce it. But I, if I have picked up anything of either language, know that monarchy means nothing else than single and unique rule; yet monarchy does not, because it belongs to one, prescribe that he whose it is should either not have a son, or have made himself his own son, or not administer his monarchy through whom he will. Indeed I say that no dominion is so much one's own, so singular, so much a monarchy, that it is not also administered through other persons closely connected with it, whom it has itself provided as its officers. And if he whose monarchy it is has a son as well, it is not at once divided and does not cease to be a monarchy if the son too is taken as a sharer in it; but it belongs chiefly to him from whom it is communicated to the son, and while it is his, it is still a monarchy, being held together by two who are so united. So if the divine monarchy too is administered through so many legions and armies of angels, as it is written, “A thousand thousands stood before him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand ministered to him,” and has not therefore ceased to belong to one, so as to cease to be a monarchy, because it is managed through so many thousands of powers: how is it that God should seem to suffer division and dispersion in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, who have been allotted the second and third place, and who are so closely sharers in the Father's substance, when he does not suffer them in so great a number of angels, and those indeed so foreign to the Father's substance? Do you reckon the members, the pledges, the instruments, the very power and entire wealth of the monarchy as its overthrow? Not rightly. I would rather you exercised yourself on the sense of the thing than on the sound of the word. For you must understand the overthrow of the monarchy to be this: when another dominion, with a condition and state of its own, and therefore a rival, is brought in over it; when another god is introduced against the Creator; then it is wrong, when there are more gods, as with the Valentinians and the Prodicians; then it is the overthrow of the monarchy, when it means the destruction of the Creator.

For my part, since I derive the Son from no other source than the substance of the Father, doing nothing without the Father's will, having received all power from the Father, how can I, as a matter of faith, destroy the monarchy, which I preserve in the Son as handed down to the Son by the Father? Let this be said by me of the third degree too, since I think the Spirit comes from no other source than from the Father through the Son. See, then, whether it is not rather you who destroy the monarchy, since you overturn its arrangement and dispensation, set up in as many names as God has willed. And it remains in its own condition, even though a trinity is brought in, so much so that it has even to be restored to the Father by the Son, since the apostle writes of the final end: “when he has delivered the kingdom to God and the Father. For he must reign until God puts his enemies under his feet”; that is, according to the psalm: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet”; “but when all things have been subjected to him, except him who subjected all things to him, then he too will be subjected to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all.” We see, then, that it does no harm to the monarchy that it is now with the Son, since it is both in its own condition with the Son and will be restored with its own condition to the Father by the Son. So no one will destroy it on this account if he admits the Son, to whom it is established that it was handed down by the Father, and by whom it is at some time to be restored to the Father. By this one passage of the apostolic letter we could already have shown that the Father and the Son are two, not only from the names of Father and Son but also from the fact that he who delivered the kingdom and he to whom he delivered it, and likewise he who subjected and he to whom he subjected, must necessarily be two.

But since they want the two to be one, so that the Father and the Son are held to be the same, the whole question of the Son must also be examined: whether he is, and who he is, and how he is; and so the matter itself will claim its own form from the Scriptures and from the interpretations that support them. Some say that Genesis too begins thus in Hebrew: “In the beginning God made for himself a Son.” Since this is not firm, other arguments lead me from God's own arrangement, in which he was before the founding of the world, up to the generation of the Son. For before all things God was alone, himself his own world and place and all things; alone, however, because there was nothing else outside him. Yet not even then was he alone; for he had with him what he had in himself, namely his Reason. For God is rational, and Reason was first in him, and so all things are from him. This Reason is his own thought; the Greeks call it logos, a word by which we also mean “speech” (sermo); and so it is now customary among our people, through simple translation, to say that the Word (Sermo) was in the beginning with God, whereas “Reason” is the more fitting term, because from the beginning God was rational, not word-bearing, and because the Word itself, consisting in Reason, shows Reason to be prior, as its own substance. Yet even so it makes no difference. For although God had not yet sent out his Word, he still had him within himself, with and in his Reason itself, silently thinking and arranging with himself the things he was soon to say through the Word. For thinking and arranging with his Reason, he made that into Word which he was handling by word. That you may understand this more easily, recognize it first from yourself, as from the image and likeness of God: that you too have reason in yourself, you who are a rational animal, made not only by a rational craftsman but also given life from his substance. See how, when you silently commune with yourself in reason, this very thing happens within you, reason meeting you together with word at every movement of your thought, at every impulse of your mind. Whatever you think is word; whatever you perceive is reason. You must speak it in your mind, and while you speak, you have the word as your partner in conversation, in which this very reason is present, by which, thinking with it, you speak, and through which, speaking, you think. So the word is, in a way, a second within you. How much more fully, then, is this so in God, whose image and likeness you too are reckoned to be? So I may, not rashly, have laid down beforehand that even then, before the founding of the universe, God was not alone, having in himself both Reason and, in Reason, the Word, which he had made second to himself by stirring it within himself.

This power and this arrangement of the divine mind is shown in the Scriptures under the name of Sophia (Wisdom) as well. For what is wiser than the Reason or Word of God? So hear Wisdom too, established as a second person: “First the Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works, before he made the earth, before the mountains were set in place; and before all the hills he begot me”: that is, founding and begetting me in his own mind. Then recognize her standing by him in the very work: “When he prepared the heavens,” she says, “I was present with him; and when he made strong the clouds above over the winds, and when he set firm the fountains of what is under heaven, I was with him, fitting things together; I was the one in whom he rejoiced; and daily I delighted in his presence.” Now, as soon as God willed to bring forth into their own substances and forms the things he had arranged within himself with the Reason and Word of Wisdom, he first put forth the Word himself, having in himself his inseparable companions, Reason and Wisdom, so that all things might be made through him through whom they had been thought out and arranged, indeed already made, so far as God's mind was concerned. For this was what they lacked: to be known and held openly too, in their own forms and substances.

Then, therefore, the Word himself also takes his own form and adornment, sound and voice, when God says, “Let there be light.” This is the perfect birth of the Word, when he proceeds from God: first established by him for thought, under the name of Wisdom, “The Lord established me as the beginning of his ways”; then begotten for effect, “When he prepared the heavens, I was present with him”; thereafter, making him his Father, from whom by proceeding … he became the Son, the firstborn, as begotten before all things, and only-begotten, as alone begotten from God, properly from the womb of his own heart, as the Father himself also testifies: “My heart has poured forth an excellent Word.” To him, rejoicing in his turn, the Father, likewise rejoicing in his presence, says, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you,” and, “Before the morning star I begot you.” So also the Son, in his own person, confesses the Father under the name of Wisdom: “The Lord established me as the beginning of his ways for his works; and before all the hills he begot me.” For if here Wisdom seems to say that she was established by the Lord for his works and ways, while elsewhere it is shown that all things were made through the Word and without him nothing was made, as again, “By his Word the heavens were made firm, and all their powers by his Spirit” (that is, by the Spirit who was in the Word), it is clear that it is one and the same power, now under the name of Wisdom, now under the title of Word, which received the beginning of the ways for God's works and which made the heavens firm, through which all things were made and without which nothing was made. No more on this, as though it were not the Word himself, under the name of Wisdom and of Reason and of the whole divine mind and spirit, who became the Son of God, from whom he was begotten by going forth. “So,” you say, “you grant that the Word is some substance, built up of spirit and the imparting of Wisdom?” Certainly. For you will not have him be substantive in reality through a property of substance, lest he should be seen to be a thing and a kind of person, and so, being constituted as second to God, be able to make two, Father and Son, God and the Word. “For what is a word,” you say, “but voice and sound of the mouth, and, as the grammarians teach, air struck, intelligible to the hearing, but otherwise something empty and void and incorporeal?” But I say that nothing empty and void could have come forth from God, since it was not put forth from what is empty and void; nor could that lack substance which proceeded from so great a substance and made such great substances; for he himself made the things that were made through him. How could it be that he is nothing, without whom nothing was made; that, being empty, he made solid things, being void, full things, being incorporeal, corporeal things? For although something can sometimes be made different from that through which it is made, nothing can be made through that which is void and empty. Is the Word of God, then, a void and empty thing, he who is called the Son? He who is himself named God? “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is written, “You shall not take the name of God in vain.” This is certainly he who, “being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God.” In what form of God? Surely in some form, not in none. For who will deny that God is body, although “God is spirit”? For spirit is body of its own kind, in its own form. And if even those invisible things, whatever they are, have with God their own body and their own form, by which they are visible to God alone, how much more will that which was sent forth from his own substance not be without substance! Whatever, then, the substance of the Word was, that I call a person, and for it I claim the name of Son; and while I acknowledge the Son, I maintain that he is second to the Father.

Here, if anyone thinks I am introducing some probolē, that is, a putting forth of one thing from another, as Valentinus does, producing Aeon after Aeon from an Aeon, I will first say to you: the truth does not refrain from using this word, and the thing it means, and its sense, because heresy also uses it; rather, heresy took from the truth what it could build into its own falsehood. Was the Word of God put forth, or not? Take your stand here with me. If he was put forth, recognize the probolē of the truth, and let heresy look to it, if it has imitated something of the truth. The question now is who uses a thing and its word, and how. Valentinus distinguishes and separates his probolae from their author, and places them so far from him that the Aeon does not know the Father; in fact it longs to know him and cannot, and is even almost swallowed up and dissolved into the rest of the substance. With us, however, the Son alone knows the Father, and has himself revealed the Father's bosom, and has heard and seen all things with the Father, and speaks what he has been commanded by the Father; and he has accomplished not his own will but the Father's, which he knew from nearby, or rather from within. For “who knows the things that are in God, except the Spirit who is in him?” The Word is built of spirit and, so to speak, the Spirit is the body of the Word. So the Word is both always in the Father, as he says, “I am in the Father,” and always with God, as it is written, “And the Word was with God,” and never separated from the Father or other than the Father, since “I and the Father are one.” This will be the probolē of the truth, the guardian of unity, by which we say that the Son was put forth from the Father, but not separated. For God put forth the Word, as the Paraclete also teaches, as a root puts forth a shoot, a spring a river, the sun a ray. For these forms too are probolae of the substances from which they come. And I would not hesitate to call the shoot the son of the root, the river the son of the spring, the ray the son of the sun; for every origin is a parent, and everything brought forth from an origin is offspring; much more the Word of God, who has also received the name of Son in the proper sense. Yet the shoot is not cut off from the root, nor the river from the spring, nor the ray from the sun, any more than the Word from God. So, according to the pattern of these examples, I confess that I speak of two, God and his Word, the Father and his Son. For the root and the shoot are two things, but joined; the spring and the river are two aspects, but undivided; the sun and the ray are two forms, but cohering. Everything that comes forth from something must be second to that from which it comes forth, yet it is not therefore separated. And where there is a second, there are two; and where there is a third, there are three. For the Spirit is third from God and the Son, as the fruit from the shoot is third from the root, and the channel from the river third from the spring, and the point of light from the ray third from the sun. Yet nothing is estranged from the source from which it draws its own properties. So the Trinity, running down from the Father through degrees that are intertwined and connected, does not stand in the way of the monarchy at all, and protects the condition of the economy.

Keep hold everywhere of this rule, which I have professed, by which I testify that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are inseparable from one another, and so you will recognize what is said and how. For see, I say that the Father is one, the Son another, and the Spirit another (every uneducated or perverse person takes this saying wrongly, as if it sounded like diversity and from diversity implied a separation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; but I say it of necessity, since they contend that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are the same, flattering the monarchy against the economy); yet the Son is other than the Father not by diversity but by distribution, other not by division but by distinction; because the Father and the Son are not the same, differing from each other even in measure. For the Father is the whole substance, while the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole, as he himself confesses: “Because the Father is greater than I.” By him he is also sung in the psalm as made a little lower than the angels. So the Father too is other than the Son, being greater than the Son; the one who begets is other than the one begotten, the one who sends other than the one sent, the one who makes other than the one through whom it is made. It is well that the Lord too, using this word of the person of the Paraclete, indicated not division but arrangement: “I will ask the Father,” he says, “and he will send you another Advocate, the Spirit of truth”; thus the Paraclete is other than himself, as we say the Son is other than the Father, so that he might show the third degree in the Paraclete, as we show the second in the Son, out of regard for the economy. Does not the very fact that they are called Father and Son mean that the one is other than the other? For surely all things will be what they are called, and will be called what they will be; and the difference of names cannot be confused at all, since neither can that of the things whose names they will be. “Yes, yes; no, no; for whatever is more than this is from the evil one.”

So he is either Father or Son; and just as day and night are not the same, so the Father and the Son are not the same, so that both should be one and each the other, as these most empty Monarchians would have it. “He made himself his own Son,” they say. On the contrary, the Father makes the Son, and the Son the Father; and those who are made from one another can in no way be made by themselves for themselves, so that the Father should make himself his own Son and the Son present himself as his own Father. What God has established, he himself also keeps. The Father must have a Son in order to be Father, and the Son a Father in order to be Son. But to have is one thing, to be another. For example, to be a husband I must have a wife; I shall not myself be my wife. So also, to be a father, I shall have a son; I shall not myself be my son; and to be a son I shall have a father; I shall not myself be my father. For I shall be these things if I have what makes me them: a father if I have a son, a son if I have a father. But if I am myself one of these, I no longer have what I myself shall be: neither a father, because I shall myself be the father, nor a son, because I shall myself be the son. And inasmuch as I must have the one and be the other, to that extent, if I am both, I shall not be the one, since I do not have the other. For if I am myself the son who is also the father, I no longer have a son, but am myself the son. And not having a son, since I am myself the son, how shall I be a father? For I must have a son to be a father. So I am not a son either, since I have no father, who makes a son. Likewise, if I am myself the father who is also the son, I no longer have a father, but am myself the father. And not having a father, since I am myself the father, how shall I be a son? For I must have a father to be a son. So I shall not be a father, since I have no son, who makes a father. This will be the whole cleverness of the devil: to exclude the one by the other, and, while shutting both up into one under favor of the monarchy, to cause neither to be held, so that he is not Father, since he has no Son, and he is not Son, since likewise he has no Father; for while he is Father, he will not be Son … So they hold the monarchy who hold neither Father nor Son. “But nothing is difficult for God”: who does not know this? And “things impossible with the world are possible with God”: who is ignorant of it? And “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise”: we have read it all. “So,” they say, “it was not difficult for God to make himself both Father and Son, contrary to the form handed down for human affairs. For it was not difficult for God, against nature, to make a barren woman bear, or a virgin either.” Certainly nothing is difficult for God. But if we use this maxim so recklessly in our presumptions, we shall be able to invent anything we like about God, as if he had done it because he could have done it. But it is not to be believed that because he can do all things he has therefore also done what he has not done; we must ask whether he has done it. God could, if he had wished, have fitted man with wings for flying, as he gave them to kites; yet, because he could, he did not therefore do it. He could also have extinguished Praxeas and all the heretics together at once; yet, because he could, he did not extinguish them. On this reasoning there will be something difficult for God too, namely whatever he has not done, not because he could not, but because he would not. For with God, to be able is to will, and not to be able is not to will. But what he has willed, he both could and has shown. So, since if he willed to make himself his own Son he could, and since if he could he did, you will prove that he could and willed only when you have proved that he did.

You will have to prove from the Scriptures as plainly as we prove it that he made his own Word into his Son. For if he calls him Son, and the Son will be none other than the one who came forth from him, and the Word came forth from him, this will be the Son, not he himself from whom he came forth. For he himself did not come forth from himself. But you make him also come forth from himself, which God, even if he could have done it, still did not do. Or produce a proof like mine, which I demand: that is, show that the Scriptures show the same one as Son and Father, just as with us the Father and the Son are shown distinctly; distinctly, I say, not dividedly. Just as I bring forward the saying of God, “My heart has poured forth an excellent Word,” so you in reply must produce somewhere that God said, “My heart has poured forth myself as an excellent Word,” so that he is himself both the one who poured forth and what he poured forth, himself both the one who put forth and the one who was put forth, if he is himself both Word and God. See, I put forward that the Father said to the Son, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” If you want me to believe that he himself is Father and Son, show me it declared elsewhere thus: “The Lord said to himself, ‘I am my Son; today I have begotten myself’”; and likewise, “Before the morning star I begot myself”; and, “I the Lord established myself as the beginning of my ways for my works; and before all the hills I begot myself”; and whatever other sayings there are of this kind. Whom was God, the Lord of the universe, afraid of, that he did not declare it so, if that was how things were? Or was he afraid of not being believed if he had simply declared himself both Father and Son? One thing, however, he did fear: to lie; he feared himself and his own truth. And so, believing God to be truthful, I know that he declared things not otherwise than he had arranged them, and did not arrange them otherwise than he declared them. You, on the other hand, would make him a liar and a cheat and a deceiver of this faith, if, being himself his own Son, he gave the person of the Son to another; since all the Scriptures show both the demonstration and the distinction of the Trinity, from which our prescription too is derived: that he who speaks, he of whom he speaks, and he to whom he speaks cannot be seen as one and the same, since neither perversity nor deceit befits God, that, being himself the one to whom he spoke, he should speak rather to another and not to himself. Hear, then, other sayings too of the Father about the Son, through Isaiah: “Behold my Son, whom I have chosen, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased; I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will announce judgment to the nations.” Hear also what he says to him: “It is a great thing for you to be called my Son, to establish the tribes of Jacob and to turn back the dispersion of Israel; I have set you as a light of the nations, that you may be salvation to the end of the earth.” Hear now also the sayings of the Son about the Father: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to men.” Likewise to the Father in the psalm: “O God, Lord, do not forsake me until I declare your arm to every generation to come”; likewise in another: “Lord, why are they multiplied who press upon me?” And indeed almost all the psalms that bear the person of Christ represent the Son speaking to the Father. Notice too the Spirit speaking, as a third person, of the Father and the Son: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet’”; likewise through Isaiah: “Thus says the Lord to my Lord Christ”; likewise through the same prophet, to the Father about the Son: “Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? We announced concerning him: like a little child, like a root in thirsty ground, and he had no form or glory.” These are a few out of many. For we do not aim to unroll all the Scriptures, since even in single passages there are testimonies to the full majesty and authority. We have a greater contest in the discussions. In these few passages, then, yet plainly, the distinction of the Trinity is set out: for there is the one who declares, the Spirit; and the Father, to whom he declares; and the Son, of whom he declares. So too the other sayings spoken by the Spirit, now to the Father about the Son or to the Son, now to the Son about the Father or to the Father, establish each person in its own individuality.

If the number of the Trinity still scandalizes you, as though it were not joined in simple unity, I ask: how does one who is one and single speak in the plural, “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” when he ought to have said, “Let me make man in my image and likeness,” as being one and single? And in what follows too, “Behold, Adam has become like one of us,” he deceives or jests, if, being one and alone and single, he spoke in the plural. Or was he speaking to the angels, as the Jews interpret it, since they too do not acknowledge the Son? Or was it because he himself was Father, Son, and Spirit that he presented himself as plural and spoke to himself in the plural? No; it was because there was already attached to him a second person, his Word, and a third, the Spirit in the Word, that he spoke in the plural, “let us make,” and “our,” and “us.” For with whom was he making man, and to whom was he making him like? With the Son, who was to put on man, and the Spirit, who was to sanctify man, he was speaking, as with ministers and witnesses, from the unity of the Trinity. In fact the Scripture that follows distinguishes between the persons: “And God made man; in the image of God he made him.” Why not “his own,” if the one who was making was one, and there was no one in whose image he was making him? But there was one in whose image he was making him, namely the Son's, who, being to become man more surely and truly, had caused the man who was then to be formed from clay to be called his image, the image and likeness of the true man. But in the earlier works of the world too, how is it written? First, indeed, when the Son had not yet appeared: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”: the Word himself, that is, the true light, which enlightens man coming into this world, and through him the light of the world too. From then on, however, with Christ the Word assisting and ministering, God willed a thing to be made, and God made it: “And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament,’ and God made the firmament”; “and God said, ‘Let there be lights,’ and God made the greater and the lesser light.” And the rest, surely, the same one made who made the former, that is, the Word of God, “through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made.” And if he too is God, according to John, “The Word was God,” you have two: one who says that it should be made, another who makes it. And how you should understand “another” I have already declared: in the sense of person, not of substance; for distinction, not for division. For though I everywhere hold one substance in three cohering, yet I must, by the necessity of the sense, call him who commands and him who makes different. For he would not command if he were himself making it while he commanded it to be made through the one he was then commanding; or else, if he were one, he would be about to command himself, or to make it without a command, since he would not have waited to command himself.

“So,” you say, “if God spoke and God made, if one God spoke and another made, two gods are preached.” If you are so obstinate, think so for the moment; and that you may think so still more, hear two gods named in the psalm as well: “Your throne, O God, is forever; … the scepter of your kingdom; you have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore God, your God, has anointed you.” If he speaks to God, and affirms that God is anointed by God, here too he affirms two gods. So too Isaiah, to the person of Christ: “The Sabaeans, men of stature, will pass over to you and follow after you, bound in their hands, and will worship you, because God is in you; for you are our God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel.” For here too, by saying “God is in you” and “you are God,” he sets forth two: the one who was in Christ, and Christ himself. More still, you will find as many in the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”: one who was, and another with whom he was. And I read the name of Lord too of two: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.’” And Isaiah says this: “Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” For he would have said “your arm,” not “the arm of the Lord,” if he had not wanted the Lord the Father and the Lord the Son to be understood. Even more ancient, Genesis: “And the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from heaven from the Lord.” Either deny that these things are written, or who are you, that you should think they are not to be taken as they are written, especially those that have their sense not in allegories and parables but in definite and simple statements? But if you side with those who at that time did not bear with the Lord when he showed himself to be the Son of God, so that they might not believe him to be God, remember with them that it is written, “I said, ‘You are gods and sons of the Most High,’” and, “God stood in the assembly of gods”; so that, if Scripture did not fear to call gods men made sons of God through faith, you may know that it has much more rightly conferred the name of God on the true and only Son of God. “So,” you say, “I will challenge you to preach today too, consistently, on the authority of these Scriptures, two gods and two lords.” God forbid. For we, who by the grace of God examine both the times and the occasions of the Scriptures, above all as disciples of the Paraclete, not of men, do indeed define two, the Father and the Son, and now three with the Holy Spirit, according to the principle of the economy, which makes number (lest, as your perversity alleges, the Father himself should be believed to have been born and to have suffered, which it is not permitted to believe, since it has not been so handed down); yet we never utter from our mouth “two gods” and “two lords”: not as if the Father were not God, and the Son God, and the Spirit God, and each one Lord; but because in former times two gods and two lords were preached for this reason, that when Christ came he might both be recognized as God and called Lord, since he is the Son of God and Lord. For if a single person of God and Lord were found in the Scriptures, Christ would rightly not have been admitted to the name of God and of Lord (for no other was preached besides one God and Lord), and it would have come about that the Father himself seemed to have come down, since one God and one Lord was read, and his whole economy would have been obscured, which was foreseen and dispensed as the substance of faith. But when Christ came and was recognized by us as the very one who had formerly made the number, having become second to the Father and, with the Spirit, third, and when the Father too was more fully made known through him, the name of God and Lord was brought back into unity, so that, since the nations were passing over from the multitude of idols to the one only God, a difference might also be established between the worshipers of one Godhead and of many. For Christians had to shine in the world as sons of light, worshiping and naming one who is both God and Lord, the light of the world. Otherwise, if, from the knowledge by which we know that the name of God and Lord belongs to the Father and the Son and the Spirit, we called them gods and lords, we would have put out our torches, and become more timid even toward martyrdom, having every opportunity of escape open to us, by swearing at once by gods and lords, as some heretics do, whose gods are many. So I will not speak of gods at all, nor of lords, but I will follow the apostle: if the Father and the Son are to be named together, I will call the Father God and name Jesus Christ Lord. But Christ, when named by himself, I shall be able to call God, as the same apostle says: “of whom is Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever.” For I will call a ray of the sun, taken by itself, the sun; but when I name the sun whose ray it is, I will not at once call the ray the sun too. For I will not make two suns. Yet I will count the sun and its ray as two things and two aspects of one undivided substance, just as I count God and his Word, the Father and the Son.

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.”

If I do not settle this point by questions from the Old Scripture, I will take confirmation of our interpretation from the New Testament, so that you may not claim for the Father whatever I ascribe to the Son. For see, both in the Gospels and in the apostles I find a visible and an invisible God, under a clear and personal distinction of the condition of each. John, as it were, cries out: “No one has ever seen God”; not in former times either, of course, for he removed the question of time by saying that God has never been seen. The apostle too confirms concerning God: “whom no man has seen, nor can see,” because, of course, he who sees him will die. Yet the same apostles testify that they have seen and handled Christ. Now if Christ himself is both Father and Son, how was he both seen and unseen? To bring this difference of seen and unseen into one, who on the other side will not argue that both are rightly said, visible in the flesh but invisible before the flesh, so that the same one is the Father invisible before the flesh who is also the Son visible in the flesh? But if the same one was invisible before the flesh, how is he found to have been seen in former times, before the flesh? Likewise, if the same one is visible after the flesh, how is he now also declared invisible by the apostles? Unless because one is he whom the flesh made more fully visible, though he had been seen in a riddle before, namely the Word, who was also made flesh; and another he whom no one has ever seen, namely the Father, whose Word he is? Let us look, then, at whom the apostles saw. “What we have seen,” says John, “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life.” For the Word of life was made flesh, heard and seen and handled because flesh, he who before the flesh was only the Word, in the beginning with God the Father, not the Father. For though the Word is God, yet, because he is God from God, he is “with God,” and because with the Father, with the Father. “And we saw his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten from the Father”: of the Son, that is, the visible one, glorified by the invisible Father. And so, since he had called the Word of God God, lest he should assist the presumption of the adversaries, as though he had seen the Father himself, to distinguish between the invisible Father and the visible Son he adds besides, for good measure: “No one has ever seen God.” What God? The Word? But “we have seen and heard and handled concerning the Word of life” was said before. Which God, then? The Father, of course, with whom the Word was God. The only-begotten Son, who himself declared the bosom of the Father, was himself both heard and seen and, lest he be believed a phantom, even handled. Him Paul too beheld, yet he did not see the Father. “Have I not,” he says, “seen Jesus?” And when he himself also called Christ God, “of whom are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever,” he too shows that God the Son, that is, the Word of God, is visible, since he who was made flesh is called Christ. But of the Father he says to Timothy: “whom no man has seen, nor can see,” amplifying it further: “who alone has immortality and dwells in light unapproachable,” of whom he had also said above, “to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God”; so that we might ascribe the contrary to the Son himself, mortality and approachability, whom he testifies died according to the Scriptures and was seen last of all by himself, through an approachable light, of course; though he himself did not experience even that without danger to his sight, nor did Peter, John, and James without danger to their reason, who would, I believe, have died on the spot if they had seen not the glory of the Son, who was to suffer, but the Father. For “no one shall see God and live.” If this is so, it is clear that he who was seen at the end was always seen from the beginning, and that he who was not seen from the beginning was not seen at the end either; and so there are two, the seen and the unseen. It was the Son, then, who was always seen, the Son who always conversed with men, the Son who always acted, by the authority and will of the Father; since “the Son can do nothing of himself unless he sees the Father doing it”: doing it, that is, in his mind. For the Father acts by mind, and the Son, who is in the Father's mind, seeing, brings it to completion. So all things were made through the Son, and without him nothing was made.

And do not think that only the works of the world were made through the Son, but also the things done by God from then on. For the Father, who loves the Son and has given all things into his hand, loves him from the beginning and has given them from the beginning, from the time when the Word was with God and the Word was God. To him has been given all power by the Father in heaven and on earth; “the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son,” yet from the beginning. For by saying “all power” and “all judgment,” and that all things were made through him and all things given into his hand, he allows no exception of time, since they will not be all things unless they are things of all time. So it is the Son who judged from the beginning too, dashing down the proudest tower and confusing the languages, punishing the whole world by the violence of the waters, raining fire and sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah, God from God. For it was he who always came down to converse with men, from Adam down to the patriarchs and prophets, in vision, in dream, in mirror, in riddle, preparing from the beginning the course he was to follow to the end. So he was always learning, even as God, to converse with men on earth, being none other than the Word who was to be flesh. And he was learning in order to lay a foundation of faith for us, so that we might more easily believe that the Son of God had come down into the world, knowing that something of the kind had been done in former times too. For as they were written for our sake, so they were done for our sake, “on whom the ends of the ages have come.” So he already knew human feelings too, being about to take on the very substances of man, flesh and soul, questioning Adam as if he did not know, “Where are you, Adam?”; repenting that he had made man, as if he had not foreknown; testing Abraham, as if ignorant of what is in man; offended with the same people, and reconciled; and whatever else the heretics seize on as unworthy of God, to destroy the Creator, not knowing that these things befitted the Son, who was to undergo even human sufferings, thirst and hunger and tears, and birth itself and death itself, being for this reason made a little lower than the angels by the Father. But what even the heretics will not reckon fitting for the Son of God, you bring upon the Father himself, as if he had lowered himself for us, when Scripture says that one was made lower by another, not himself by himself. And if one was crowned with glory and honor, and another crowned him, the Father, surely, crowned the Son. Besides, how could it be that God Almighty, that invisible one, whom no man has seen or can see, he who dwells in light unapproachable, he who does not dwell in things made with hands, at whose sight the earth trembles and the mountains melt like wax, who grasps the whole world in his hand like a nest, whose throne is heaven and the earth his footstool, in whom is every place while he is not in a place, who is the outermost boundary of the universe, that he, the Most High, should have walked in paradise in the evening looking for Adam, and shut the ark after Noah went in, and rested under the oak with Abraham, and called Moses from the burning bush, and appeared as the fourth in the Babylonian king's furnace (although he was called Son of Man), in image, of course, and mirror and riddle? These things would not have been credible even of the Son of God if they had not been written; perhaps they are not credible of the Father even though they are written; the Father whom these people bring down into Mary's womb, set before Pilate's judgment seat, and shut up in Joseph's tomb. Here, then, their error appears. For, not knowing that from the beginning the whole order of the divine arrangement has run its course through the Son, they believe that it was the Father himself who was seen, who met with men, who acted, who suffered thirst and hunger (against the prophet who says, “The eternal God will not thirst, nor hunger at all”; how much less will he die or be buried!), and so that one God, namely the Father, always did … what was done through the Son,

they thought it easier that the Father had come in the Son's name than that the Son had come in the Father's; though the Lord himself says, “I have come in my Father's name,” and likewise to the Father himself, “I have made your name known to men,” and Scripture agrees: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” that is, the Son in the Father's name. And the Father's names are God Almighty, the Most High, the Lord of hosts, the King of Israel, He Who Is. As the Scriptures so teach, we say that these belonged to the Son as well, that the Son came in them and always acted in them, and so made them known to men in himself. “All that the Father has,” he says, “is mine.” Why not his names too? So when you read of God Almighty, the Most High, the God of hosts, the King of Israel, and He Who Is, see whether the Son too is not shown by them: God Almighty in his own right, as the Word of God Almighty and as having received power over all; the Most High, as exalted by God's right hand, as Peter proclaims in Acts; Lord of hosts, because all things have been subjected to him by the Father; King of Israel, because the lot of that nation fell to him in particular; likewise He Who Is, since many are called but are not. And if they want the Father's name to be Christ's also, they will hear about it in its place. Meanwhile let this be my ready answer against what they bring forward from John's Apocalypse too: “I am the Lord, who is and who was and who is coming, the Almighty,” and anywhere else they think the title “God Almighty” does not fit the Son also. As if he who is to come were not … almighty, when the Son of the Almighty is as much almighty as the Son of God is God.

But Scripture confuses them, so that they do not easily perceive this sharing of the Father's names in the Son, whenever it lays down that there is one only God; as if the same Scripture had not also put forward two gods and lords, as we showed above. “So,” they say, “since we find two and one, both are therefore one and the same, both Son and Father.” But Scripture is in no danger, so that you need to come to its rescue with your argument lest it seem to contradict itself. It has its reason both when it lays down one only God and when it shows two, Father and Son; and it is sufficient for itself. It is agreed that the Son is named by it. For without prejudice to the Son it can rightly have defined as one only God the one whose Son he is. For he who has a Son does not cease to be himself the only one, in his own name, that is, whenever he is named without the Son. And he is named without the Son when he is defined in the first place as the first person, who had to be set forth before the Son's name, since the Father is known first, and after the Father the Son is named. So there is “one God, the Father,” and “there is no other besides him.” In saying this he does not deny the Son, but another God; and the Son is not other than the Father. In fact, look at what follows declarations of this kind, and you will find that their definition generally concerns the makers and worshipers of idols, so that the oneness of the Godhead drives out the multitude of false gods, while still having the Son; who, as he is undivided and inseparate from the Father, is to be reckoned in the Father, even if not named. Indeed, if he had named him, he would have separated him, saying thus: “There is no other besides me, except my Son.” For he would have made even the Son another, by excepting him from the others. Suppose the sun said, “I am the sun, and there is no other besides me, except my ray”: would you not have noted the absurdity, as if the ray were not reckoned in the sun? So, that there is no other God besides himself is said because of idolatry … both of the nations and of Israel; also because of the heretics, who, as the nations make idols with their hands, so they themselves make them with words, that is, another God and another Christ. So even when he declared himself one, the Father was acting on behalf of the Son, so that Christ should not be believed to have come from another God, but from him who had said beforehand, “I am God, and there is no other besides me,” who shows himself to be the only one, but with the Son, with whom he “alone stretched out the heavens.”

If any seize on this saying of his too as an argument for singleness, “I stretched out the heavens alone,” he means alone with regard to the other powers, guarding in advance against the conjectures of the heretics who will have it that the world was built by angels and various powers, and who make the Creator himself either an angel or someone suborned for other external things, such as the works of the world, and even ignorant of them. Or if he stretched out the heavens alone in the sense in which these heretics perversely presume, as a single individual, then that Wisdom is not admitted who says, “When he prepared the heavens, I was present with him.” And Isaiah said, “Who has known the mind of the Lord, and who has been his counselor?”: none, that is, except Wisdom, who was present with him, yet in him, and fitted all things together with him, not ignorant of what he was doing. And by “except Wisdom” he means except the Son, who is the wisdom and power of God according to the apostle, and who alone knows the Father's mind. For “who knows the things that are in God, except the Spirit who is in him?” Not one outside him. There was, then, one who made God not alone, except alone apart from the others. Then the Gospel too would have to be rejected, which says that all things were made by God through the Word and without him nothing was made. And unless I am mistaken it is written elsewhere too: “By his Word the heavens were made firm, and all their power by his Spirit.” And the Word, the power and wisdom of God, will himself be the Son. So if all things were made through the Son, then in stretching out the heavens too through the Son he did not stretch them out alone, except in the sense in which he is alone apart from the others. And indeed he immediately speaks of the Son: “Who else has overthrown the signs of the ventriloquists and the divinations from the heart, turning the wise backward and making their counsel foolish, establishing the words of his Son?”; that is, by saying, “This is my beloved Son; hear him.” So by adding the Son he is himself the interpreter of how he stretched out the heavens alone: alone, that is, with the Son, as he is one with the Son. Accordingly, this will also be the Son's saying: “I stretched out the heavens alone”; because the heavens were made firm by the Word, because the heavens were prepared with Wisdom assisting in the Word, and all things were made through the Word, it is fitting that the Son also alone stretched out the heavens, since he alone ministered to the Father's work. It will be he too who says, “I am the first, and for what is to come, I am.” The Word was first of all things, of course: “In the beginning was the Word,” in which beginning he was put forth by the Father. But the Father, having no beginning, as put forth by no one, as unbegotten, cannot be seen as “first.” He who was always alone could have no order. So if they have thought that the Father and the Son must be believed to be the same in order to vindicate one God, his oneness is safe, since, though he is one, he also has a Son, who is equally included in the same Scriptures. If they do not want the Son to be reckoned second to the Father, lest the second should make two gods be spoken of, we have shown that two gods and two lords are also mentioned in Scripture; and yet, lest they be scandalized at that, we have given the reason why they are not called two gods or lords, but why the Father and the Son are two; and this not from separation of substance but from arrangement, since we declare the Son undivided and inseparate from the Father, other not in condition but in degree; who, though he is called God when named by himself, does not therefore make two gods but one, by the very fact that he has to be called God from the unity of the Father.

But we must still take pains to beat back their arguments, if they pick out anything from the Scriptures for their opinion, refusing to look at the rest, which itself keeps the rule, and that without prejudice to the oneness of the Godhead and the condition of the monarchy. For just as in the Old Testament they hold to nothing but “I am God, and there is no other besides me,” so in the Gospel they cling to the Lord's answer to Philip, “I and the Father are one,” and, “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” and, “I am in the Father and the Father in me.” To these three passages they want the whole instrument of both Testaments to give way, when the fewer ought to be understood according to the more. But this is the peculiarity of all heretics. For because there are only a few things they can find in the forest, they defend the few against the many and take up the later against the earlier. But the rule established for every matter from the beginning, in the earlier and the more numerous passages, lays down the law for the later ones too, and for the fewer.

See, then, how many passages even in the Gospel lay down the law for you before Philip's question and before any argument of yours. And first of all, John the evangelist's very preface shows at once what he was before who was to become flesh: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; he was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made.” For if these words may not be taken otherwise than as they are written, then beyond doubt one is shown who was from the beginning, and another with whom he was; one the Word of God, another God (though the Word too is God, but as Son of God, not as Father); one through whom are all things, another from whom are all things. How we say “another” we have already often stated: in saying “another” we must mean “not the same,” but “not the same” not as though separated; other by arrangement, not by division. It was he, then, who was made flesh, not the one whose Word he was. His glory was seen as of the only-begotten from the Father, not as of the Father. It was the only-begotten who declared the bosom of the Father; the Father did not declare his own bosom. For it goes before: “No one has ever seen God.” He too is pointed out by John as the Lamb of God, not the one whose Lamb he is called. Certainly always the Son of God, but not the one whose Son he is. This Nathanael at once perceived about him, as Peter too did elsewhere: “You are the Son of God.” And he himself confirms that they perceived it rightly, answering Nathanael, “Because I said, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe?” and declaring Peter blessed, to whom flesh and blood had not revealed what he had perceived, but the Father who is in heaven. By this saying he established the distinction of both persons: of the Son on earth, whom Peter had recognized as the Son of God, and of the Father in heaven, who had revealed to Peter what he had recognized. When he went into the temple, he called it his Father's house, as the Son. When he speaks to Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world,” he says, “that he gave his only-begotten Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” And again: “For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him; he who believes in him is not judged; he who does not believe in him is already judged, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God.” And John, when some asked him about Jesus, why he baptized, said: “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand; he who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not believe in the Son of God will not see God, but the wrath of God will remain on him.” Whom did he show to the Samaritan woman? If the Messiah, who is called Christ, then certainly he showed himself as the Son, not the Father, he who elsewhere too is called Christ, the Son of God, not the Father. Then to the disciples: “It is my food,” he says, “to do the will of him who sent me, and to complete his work.” And to the Jews about the healing of the paralytic: “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” “My Father” and “I,” says the Son. In fact, for this reason the Jews wanted all the more to kill him, not only because he broke the Sabbath but because he called God his Father, making himself equal to God. Then he said to them: “The Son can do nothing of himself, unless he sees the Father doing it; for whatever he does, the Son also does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he does, and he will show him greater works than these, so that you may marvel. For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom he will. For the Father does not judge, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent the Son. Amen, amen, I say to you: he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but passes from death to life. Amen I say to you that the hour will come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and when they hear it they will live. For as the Father has eternal life in himself, so he has given the Son to have eternal life in himself, and has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man”: through the flesh, that is, as he is also Son of God through his Spirit. He adds further: “But I have a greater testimony than John's; for the works which the Father has given me to accomplish, these very works bear witness about me that the Father has sent me; and the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me.” And by adding, “You have never heard his voice or seen his form,” he confirms that in former times it was not the Father but the Son who was seen and heard. In fact he says, “I have come in my Father's name, and you have not received me.” So the Son was always in the name of God, the King, the Lord Almighty, and the Most High. And to those who asked what they ought to do, he answered, “That you believe in him whom God has sent.” He declares too that he is the bread which the Father gave from heaven; that all that the Father gives him comes to him, and he will not cast it out, because he had come down from heaven not to do his own will but the Father's; and that the Father's will is that whoever sees the Son and believes in him should obtain life and resurrection; that no one can come to him unless the Father draws him; and that everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to him; adding here too, “not that anyone has seen the Father,” to show that it is the Father's Word through which they are taught. And when many went away from him, and he offered his apostles the chance to go away too, if they wished, what did Simon Peter answer? “To whom shall we go? You have the words of life, and we believe that you are the Christ.” That he was the Father, or the Father's?

And whose teaching does he call it, at which they marveled? His own or the Father's? Likewise, when they were debating among themselves whether he was the Christ (not, surely, the Father, but the Son), he says, “You know me, and where I am from; and I have not come of myself, but he who sent me is true, whom you do not know; I know him, because I am with him.” He did not say, “because I am he, and I sent myself,” but, “he sent me.” Likewise when the Pharisees had sent men to seize him: “A little while longer,” he says, “I am with you, and I go to him who sent me.” And when he denies that he is alone (“but I,” he says, “and the Father who sent me”), does he not show two, as much two as inseparate? Indeed, this was the whole of what he was teaching: that there are two, inseparate. For, citing the law that confirms the testimony of two men, he adds: “I bear witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me.” But if he were one, being the same both Son and Father, he would not use the support of the law, which requires faith in the testimony not of one but of two. Likewise, asked where his Father was, answering that neither he nor his Father was known to them, he spoke of two who were unknown; and that if they had known him, they would have known the Father; not as though he himself were Father and Son, but because, by reason of their inseparability, neither can be recognized or unknown without the other. And Scripture, interpreting from outside, notes that they did not understand what he had said about the Father (“He who sent me,” he says, “is true, and what I have heard from him, that I speak to the world”), though they ought to have recognized that the Father's words were in the Son, since they read in Jeremiah, “And the Lord said to me, ‘Behold, I have put my words in your mouth,’” and in Isaiah, “The Lord gives me the tongue of instruction, to know when I ought to speak a word”; as he himself says again: “Then you will know that I am he, and that I speak nothing of myself, but as the Father taught me, so I speak; because he who sent me is with me”: and this also to testify that the two are inseparable. Likewise, in the dispute with the Jews, reproaching them for wanting to kill him, he says: “I speak what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have seen with your father”; and, “Now you want to kill a man who has told you the truth, which he heard from God”; and, “If God were your Father, you would have loved me; for I came forth from God and have come.” (And yet we do not separate them, although he said he came forth, as some seize on the occasion of this saying; for he came forth from the Father as a ray from the sun, a stream from a spring, a shoot from a seed.) And: “I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father”; and, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing; it is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say that he is your God, and you do not know him; but I know him. And if I were to say, ‘I do not know him,’ I would be a liar like you; but I know him and keep his word.” And when he adds, “Abraham saw my day and was glad,” he certainly shows that it was the Son, not the Father, who was seen by Abraham in former times. Likewise, over the blind man, he says that he must do the works of the Father; and after restoring his sight he says to him, “Do you believe in the Son of God?” And when the man asked who he was, by pointing to himself he certainly pointed to the Son, in whom he had said one must believe. Then he declares that he is known by the Father and the Father by him, and that he is loved by the Father because he lays down his life, since he had received this commandment from the Father. And when asked by the Jews whether he was the Christ (that is, of God; for to this day the Jews hope for the Christ of God, not for the Father himself, since it was never written that the Christ who is to come is the Father), he says, “I tell you, and you do not believe; the works that I do in my Father's name bear witness about me.” What testimony? That he was the very one they were asking about, that is, the Christ of God. Also, of his sheep … that no one would snatch them out of his hand, “for what the Father,” he says, “has given me is greater than all; and I and the Father are one.” Here, then, these fools, or rather blind men, want to take their stand, not seeing, first, that “I and the Father” signifies two; next, at the end, that “are” is not from one person, since it is said in the plural; then, that he says “we are one thing” (unum), not “we are one person” (unus). For if he had said “we are one person,” he might have helped their opinion; for unus seems to signify the singular number. Further, when he calls two of the masculine gender “one” with a neuter word, which does not concern singleness but unity, likeness, conjunction, the love of the Father, who loves the Son, and the obedience of the Son, who obeys the Father's will, by saying “I and the Father are one” he shows that there are two, whom he makes equal and joins together. So he adds too that he had shown them many works from the Father, none of which deserved stoning. And lest they should think that they ought to stone him because he wanted himself to be understood as God himself, that is, the Father, since he had said, “I and the Father are one,” showing himself God as Son of God, not as God himself, he says: “If it is written in the law, ‘I said, you are gods,’ and Scripture cannot be broken, do you say of him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You blaspheme,’ because he said, ‘I am the Son of God’? If I do not do the works of my Father, do not believe me; but if I do them, and you will not believe me, believe at least for the works' sake; and know that I am in the Father and the Father in me.” It is through the works, then, that the Father will be in the Son and the Son in the Father; and so through the works we understand that the Father and the Son are one. So thoroughly did he persist in impressing all this, that two should still be believed in one power; since otherwise the Son could not be believed in unless two were believed in.

After this, Martha, confessing him to be the Son of God, erred no more than Peter and Nathanael; though even if she had erred, she would at once have learned. For see: when he was about to raise her brother from the dead, the Lord, looking up to heaven and to the Father, said, “Father” (the Son, of course), “I thank you that you always hear me; I said it because of these crowds standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.” And in the trouble of his soul: “And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour; but for this purpose I came to this hour; but, Father, glorify your name,” in which the Son was: “I have come,” he says, “in my Father's name.” Then (though the Son's voice to the Father had been enough), see, the Father answers from heaven, for good measure: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” How many persons do you see, most perverse Praxeas, if not as many as there are voices? You have the Son on earth; you have the Father in heaven. This is not separation but divine arrangement. We know, indeed, that God is even within the abysses and is present everywhere, but by power and authority, and the Son, as inseparable, is with him everywhere. Yet in the economy itself the Father willed that the Son should be held to be on earth and himself in heaven, whither the Son himself too looked up when he prayed and made requests of the Father, whither he taught us too, lifted up, to pray: “Our Father, who are in heaven,” though he is also everywhere. The Father willed this to be his seat: “heaven” … “is my throne.” … He made the Son a little lower than the angels by sending him down to earth, yet intending to crown him with glory and honor by taking him back into heaven. This he was already granting him by saying, “I have glorified, and I will glorify.” The Son makes his request from earth, the Father promises from heaven. Why do you make both Father and Son liars? If either the Father spoke from heaven to the Son when he himself was the Son on earth, or the Son prayed to the Father when he himself was the Father in heaven, how could it be that the Son should make a request of himself by asking the Father, if the Son was the Father; or again that the Father should make a promise to himself by promising the Son, if the Father was the Son? Even if we spoke of two divided, as you keep alleging, it would be more tolerable to preach two divided than one God who turns his coat. So the Lord then declared to these people: “This voice has come not for my sake but for yours,” that these too might believe in both Father and Son, each in his own names and persons and places. But further, Jesus cries out and says: “He who believes in me does not believe in me but in him who sent me” (since it is through the Son that one believes in the Father, and the Father is the Son's authority for believing); “and he who beholds me beholds him who sent me.” How? Because, of course, “I have not spoken of myself, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a command, what to say and what to speak” (for “the Lord gives me the tongue of instruction, to know when I ought to speak a word”); “what I speak, I speak as the Father told me.” How these things were said, John the evangelist, so dear a disciple, certainly knew better than Praxeas; and so he says of his own understanding: “Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that all things had been given him by the Father, and that he had come forth from God and was going to God.” But Praxeas will have it that the Father himself came forth from himself and went away to himself, so that the devil put into Judas' heart the betrayal not of the Son but of the Father himself. That turns out well neither for the devil nor for the heretic, since the devil did not even work the betrayal in the Son for his own good. For it was the Son of God who was betrayed, who was in the Son of Man, as Scripture adds: “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.” Which God? Certainly not the Father, but the Father's Word, who was in the Son of Man, that is, in the flesh; in which, although Jesus had already been glorified before (by power and word), “and God,” he says, “will glorify him in himself”: that is, the Father will glorify the Son, whom he has in himself, even though sent down to earth, and was soon to glorify him through the resurrection, when death had been overcome.

There were certainly some who did not understand even then, since Thomas too was unbelieving for a while. “Lord,” he says, “we do not know where you are going; and how can we know the way?” And Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known the Father also; but from now on you know him and have seen him.” And now we come to Philip, who, roused by the hope of seeing the Father, and not understanding how he had heard that the Father was seen, says, “Show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” And the Lord: “O Philip, have I been with you so long, and you have not known me?” As whom does he say he ought to have been known by them (for this alone needs to be discussed): as the Father, or as the Son? If as the Father, let Praxeas teach how Christ, having lived with them so long, could ever have been, I do not say understood, but even supposed to be the Father. For us all the Scriptures, old and new, define Christ as the Son of God. This was preached in former times; this was declared by Christ himself, and indeed by the Father himself, openly acknowledging the Son from heaven and glorifying the Son: “This is my Son,” and, “I have glorified, and I will glorify”; this the disciples believed, this the Jews did not believe. Wishing this to be believed by them, he named the Father every hour, set the Father before himself, and honored the Father. If this is so, then it was not the Father who had lived with them so long that they had not known, but the Son; and the Lord, reproaching them for not knowing the one they had not known, certainly wanted that one to be recognized whom he had reproached them for not recognizing so long, that is, the Son. And now it can be seen how it was said, “He who sees me sees the Father also”: in the same way, namely, as above, “I and the Father are one” (why? “because I came forth from God and have come”); and, “I am the way; no one comes to the Father except through me”; and, “No one comes to me unless the Father draws him”; and, “All things have been handed over to me by the Father”; and, “As the Father gives life, so does the Son”; and, “If you have known me, you have known the Father also.” For by these sayings he had shown himself to be the Father's vicar, through whom the Father might be both seen in deeds and heard in words and known in the Son, who carries out the Father's deeds and words; because the Father is invisible, as Philip too had learned in the law and ought to have remembered: “No one shall see God and live.” And so he is rebuked for desiring to see the Father as if he were visible, and is taught that he becomes visible in the Son from his mighty works, not from a presentation of his person. In fact, if he wanted the Father to be understood as the same as the Son, by saying, “He who sees me sees the Father,” how is it that he adds, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” He should have added, “Do you not believe that I am the Father?” Or why did he press the point, if he did not make plain what he wanted understood, namely that he was the Son? Rather, by saying, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” he pressed it so that he should not be thought to be the Father because he had said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father also,” which he never wanted to be thought, he who always professed that he was the Son and had come from the Father. So he both made plain the conjunction of the two persons, so that the Father should not be desired separately, as if visible to sight, and so that the Son should be held as the representative of the Father; and he nonetheless explained this too, how the Father was in the Son and the Son in the Father: “The words,” he says, “that I speak to you are not mine” (because they are the Father's, of course); “but the Father, abiding in me, does the works.” So through the mighty works and the words of teaching, the Father, abiding in the Son, is seen through those things through which he abides, and through him in whom he abides; and from this very fact the individuality of each person appears, when he says, “I am in the Father, and the Father in me.” And so: “Believe,” he says. What? “That I am the Father”? I do not think that is written, but: “that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe for the works' sake”: the works, that is, through which the Father was seen in the Son, not by sight but by understanding.

After Philip, and the whole substance of this question, which continues to the end of the Gospel, in the same kind of discourse in which the Son is distinguished in his own individuality, he promises that when he has ascended to the Father he will ask the Father for the Paraclete too, and will send him, and indeed “another.” But we have already explained in what sense “another.” Further: “He will take from what is mine,” he says, just as he himself takes from what is the Father's. So the connection of the Father in the Son and of the Son in the Paraclete makes three who cohere, one from another. These three are one thing, not one person, as it was said, “I and the Father are one,” with regard to unity of substance, not to singleness of number. Run through the rest, and you will find that the one you believe to be the Father is called the Father's vine, and the Father the vinedresser; so that the one you think was on earth is again recognized by the Son as in heaven, when, looking up there, he commends his disciples to the Father. And even if it is not revealed in this Gospel, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” and, “Father, into your hands I lay down my spirit,” yet after the resurrection and the glory of death overcome, when the necessity of all humiliation had been set aside, when he could now have shown himself to be the Father to so faithful a woman, who approached to touch him out of love, not out of curiosity nor out of the unbelief of Thomas, he says: “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brothers” (and in this too he shows himself to be the Son; for he would have called them sons if he had been the Father) “and tell them: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God.” The Father to the Father, and God to God? Or the Son to the Father, and the Word to God? Why, too, does the very close of the Gospel set its seal on these writings, if not, “that you may believe,” he says, “that Jesus Christ is the Son of God”? So whatever of these passages you may think can serve you to prove that the Father and the Son are the same, you are struggling against the defining statement of the Gospel. For they were not written so that you might believe that Jesus Christ is the Father, but the Son.

Because of a single saying of Philip's and the Lord's answer to him we seem to have run through John's Gospel, so that one saying should not overturn so many plain declarations before and after it, a saying which must be interpreted in accordance with all of them rather than against all of them, and even against its own meaning. But to bring in now the other Gospels, which confirm faith in the Lord's birth: it is enough that he who was to be born of the virgin was defined as the Son of God by the very angel who announced him: “The Spirit of God will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore what will be born of you will be called holy, the Son of God.” They will want to argue here too, but the truth will prevail. “Of course,” they say, “the Son of God is God, … and the power of the Most High is the Most High”; and they are not ashamed to suggest what, if it were so, would have been written. For whom was he afraid of, that he should not openly declare, “God will come upon you, and the Most High will overshadow you”? But by saying “the Spirit of God” (although the Spirit of God is God …), yet not naming God directly, he wished to be understood a portion of the whole, which was to pass into the name of the Son. This Spirit of God will be the same as the Word. For as, when John says, “The Word was made flesh,” we also understand the Spirit in the mention of the Word, so here too we recognize the Word also under the name of the Spirit. For the Spirit is the substance of the Word, and the Word is the operation of the Spirit, and the two are one. Otherwise John will declare one who was made flesh, and the angel another who was to be flesh, if the Spirit is not also the Word and the Word the Spirit. As, then, the Word of God is not the one whose Word he is, so neither is the Spirit, even if he is called “of God,” the one whose Spirit he is called. Nothing that belongs to someone is itself the one to whom it belongs. Clearly, when something is from someone and is his in that it is from him, it can be of such a kind as he is himself, from whom it is and whose it is. And so the Spirit is God and the Word is God, because from God, yet not the very one from whom he is. And if God from God, as a substantive thing, will not be God himself, but God to this extent, that he is from the substance of God himself, and as a portion of the whole, much more will the power of the Most High not be the Most High himself, since it is not even a substantive thing, as the Spirit is; just as neither wisdom nor providence is. For these too are not substances but accidents of a substance, and power is an accident of the Spirit and will not itself be the Spirit. So when these things, whatever they are, the Spirit of God, the Word, and the power, were brought into the virgin, what is born of her is the Son of God. This he himself also testifies in these Gospels, from boyhood: “Did you not know,” he says, “that I must be in my Father's house?” This Satan too knew about him in the temptations: “If you are the Son of God”; this the demons too thereafter confess: “We know who you are, the Son of God.” He himself worships the Father. He does not deny that he was recognized by Peter as the Christ of God. Rejoicing in the Spirit, he says to the Father, “I confess to you, Father, that you have hidden these things from the wise.” Here too he affirms that the Father is known to no one but the Son. And as the Son of the Father he will confess before the Father those who confess him and deny those who deny him; he introduces the parable of the son, not of the father, sent into the vineyard after several servants and killed by the wicked tenants, and avenged by the father; he himself does not know the day and the last hour, known to the Father alone; he appoints a kingdom for his disciples, as he says it was appointed for himself by the Father; he has power to ask the Father for legions of angels for help if he wished; he cries out that God had forsaken him; he lays his spirit in the Father's hands; and after the resurrection he promises to send his disciples the promise of the Father; and last of all he commands them to baptize into the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, not into one. For we are dipped not once but three times, at each name, into each person.

But why should I linger on things so plain, when I ought to engage those points by which they try to overshadow what is plain? For, hemmed in on every side by the distinction of Father and Son, which we arrange while their conjunction remains, as of sun and ray and of spring and river, yet through the undivided number of two and three, they try nonetheless to interpret it differently, to suit their own opinion, so as to distinguish both, Father and Son, equally within one person, saying that the Son is the flesh, that is, the man, that is, Jesus; and the Father the Spirit, that is, God, that is, Christ. And those who contend that the Father and the Son are one and the same now begin to divide them rather than unite them. For if Jesus is one and Christ another, the Son will be one and the Father another, since the Son is Jesus and the Father Christ. Such a monarchy they perhaps learned from Valentinus. But this suggestion of theirs too, making Jesus and Christ two, has already been beaten back by what was discussed before: that the one they make the Father has been called the Word of God, or the Spirit of God, and the power of the Most High. For these are not the one whose they are said to be, but are from him and his. And yet on this point they will be refuted another way too. “See,” they say, “it was proclaimed by the angel: ‘Therefore what will be born will be called holy, the Son of God.’ It was flesh that was born; so it will be the flesh that is the Son of God.” No, it was said of the Spirit of God. For certainly the virgin conceived of the Holy Spirit, and what she conceived she bore; so what was to be born was what had been conceived, that is, the Spirit, whose name also will be called Emmanuel, which is interpreted, “God with us.” But flesh is not God, so that it should have been said of it, “It will be called holy, the Son of God,” but he who was born in it, God, of whom the psalm too says, “For God was born a man in her, and built her by the will of the Father.” What God was born in her? The Word, and the Spirit, who was born with the Word by the Father's will. So, since the Word is in the flesh, this too must be asked: how the Word was made flesh, whether as if transfigured into flesh, or as having put on flesh. Rather, as having put it on. For God must be believed to be unchangeable and incapable of being reshaped, as being eternal. But transfiguration is the destruction of what was before. For whatever is transfigured into something else ceases to be what it had been and begins to be what it was not. But God neither ceases to be nor can be anything else. And the Word is God, and “the word of the Lord remains forever,” namely by continuing in its own form. And if it does not admit of being transfigured, it follows that it must be understood to have been made flesh in this way: in that it comes to be in the flesh and is manifested and seen and handled through the flesh; for the other passages too require it to be taken so. For if the Word became flesh by transfiguration and change of substance, Jesus will then be one substance made of two, of flesh and spirit, a kind of mixture, like electrum from gold and silver; and he begins to be neither gold, that is, spirit, nor silver, that is, flesh, since the one is changed by the other and a third thing is produced. Then Jesus will not be God, for the Word that was made flesh has ceased to be; nor man, for what was the Word is not properly flesh. So from both, while it is neither, it is a third thing, far other than either. But we find him set forth directly as both God and man, as this very psalm suggests, “For God was born a man in her, and built her by the will of the Father”; certainly in every respect Son of God and Son of Man, without doubt differing according to each substance in its own individuality, since the Word is nothing but God, and the flesh nothing but man. So the apostle too teaches of both his substances: “who was made,” he says, “of the seed of David”; this will be the man and Son of Man; “who was defined as Son of God according to the Spirit”; this will be God and the Son of God. We see a twofold condition, not confused but conjoined, in one person, God and man, Jesus (of Christ I defer speaking); and the individuality of each substance is so fully preserved that the Spirit carried out in him its own acts, that is, miracles and works and signs, and the flesh underwent its own sufferings: hungry under the devil, thirsty with the Samaritan woman, weeping for Lazarus, troubled even to death, and at last dead. But if it were a third thing, blended from both, like electrum, there would not appear such distinct proofs of each substance; rather, the Spirit would have done fleshly things and the flesh spiritual ones by exchange, or neither fleshly nor spiritual things but those of some third form, from the blending. Indeed, either the Word would have died or the flesh would not have died, if the Word had been converted into flesh; for either the flesh would have been immortal or the Word mortal. But since both substances acted distinctly, each in its own condition, therefore each had its own works and its own end. Learn, then, with Nicodemus, that what is born in the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Flesh does not become spirit, nor spirit flesh. Clearly they can be in one. Of these Jesus consisted: of flesh, man; of Spirit, God. The angel then declared him Son of God with respect to that part in which he was Spirit, reserving for the flesh that it should be called Son of Man. So the apostle too, calling him the mediator between God and men, confirmed that he is of both substances. Lastly: you who interpret the Son of God as the flesh, show who the Son of Man is. Or will he be the Spirit? But you want the Spirit to be held to be the Father himself, because “God is spirit”; as if there were not also the Spirit of God, just as the Word is God and also the Word of God.

Now about Christ. You make him the Father, most foolish man, who do not even consider the force of this name, if indeed Christ is a name and not rather a title; for it means “anointed.” And “anointed” is no more a name than “clothed” or “shod”; so “Christ” is something that attaches to the name. If Jesus were also called “clothed,” for some reason, as he is called Christ from the sacrament of anointing, would you likewise say that Jesus was the Son of God, but believe that “Clothed” was the Father? If Christ is the Father, the Father is anointed, and certainly by another. Or if by himself, prove it. But the Acts of the Apostles do not teach so, in that cry of the church to God: “For there gathered together in this city against your holy Son Jesus, whom you anointed, Herod and Pilate with the nations.” So they bore witness both that Jesus is the Son of God and that the Son was anointed by the Father. So Jesus will be the same as Christ, who was anointed by the Father, not the Father, who anointed the Son. So Peter too: “Let all the house of Israel therefore know most surely that God has made him both Lord and Christ,” that is, anointed, “this Jesus whom you crucified.” And John marks as a liar him who denies that Jesus is the Christ, and on the other hand says that everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. For this reason he also urges us to believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, so that we may have fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. So too Paul everywhere sets down God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. When he writes to the Romans, he gives thanks to God through our Lord Jesus Christ; when to the Galatians, he declares himself an apostle not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father. And you have, throughout his whole instrument, passages that speak in this way and set forth two, God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, and that Jesus himself is the Christ, the Son of God under the other name as well. For from then on, since both names belong to one, that is, to the Son of God, even the one without the other belongs to the same. And whether “Jesus” alone is set down, “Christ” is also understood, since Jesus is the anointed; or whether “Christ” alone, it is also Jesus, since Jesus is the one anointed. Of these names one is proper, which was given by the angel; the other is accidental, which attaches from the anointing; provided always that Christ is the Son, not the Father. Lastly, how blind is he who does not understand that even in the name of Christ another God is indicated, if he ascribes the name of Christ to the Father! For if Christ is God the Father, when he says, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God,” he certainly shows another Father and God above himself. Likewise, if the Father is Christ, there is another who “makes firm the thunder and creates the wind and announces to men his Christ.” And if “the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ,” there will be another Lord, against whose Christ the kings and rulers gathered. And if “thus says the Lord to my Lord Christ,” there will be another Lord who speaks to Christ the Father. And when the apostle writes, “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ may give you the spirit of wisdom and knowledge,” there will be another God of Christ Jesus, the giver of spiritual gifts. Certainly, not to wander through everything: he “who raised Christ” and will raise “our mortal bodies” too will be, as it were, another raiser than the Father who died and was raised, if Christ, who died, is the Father.

Let this blasphemy be silent, let it be silent! Let it be enough to say that Christ, the Son of God, died, and this because it is so written. For the apostle too, not without a sense of its weight, declaring that Christ died, added “according to the Scriptures,” so as to soften the harshness of the statement by the authority of the Scriptures and remove the stumbling block for the hearer. And since two substances are recognized in Christ Jesus, the divine and the human, and it is agreed that the divine is immortal while the human is mortal, it is clear in what sense he says he died: that is, as flesh and man and Son of Man, not as Spirit and Word and Son of God. In short, by saying “Christ died,” that is, the anointed one, he shows that what was anointed died, that is, the flesh. “Then,” you say, “when we say that the Father died, in the same sense as you say the Son did, we do not blaspheme against the Lord God; for we say that he died not in his divine but in his human substance.” But you do blaspheme, not only because you say the Father died, but also because you say he was crucified. For the curse on one crucified, which by the law belongs to the Son (since “Christ became a curse for us,” not the Father), you blaspheme against the Father by turning it onto the Father. But we, saying that Christ was crucified, do not curse him, but repeat the curse of the law; for the apostle did not blaspheme by saying it either. And as what may properly be said of someone is said without blasphemy, so it is blasphemy if it is said of one of whom it may not properly be said. “Then neither did the Father suffer with the Son.” That is, fearing direct blasphemy against the Father, they hope to lessen it in this way, conceding now that the Father and the Son are two: if the Son suffers, while the Father suffers with him. Fools in this too. For what is suffering with but suffering together with another? And if the Father is impassible, he is certainly incapable of suffering with; or if capable of suffering with, he is certainly passible. You grant him nothing even by your fear. You fear to call passible the one you call capable of suffering with. But the Father is as incapable of suffering with as the Son too is impassible, by the condition by which he is God. “But how, if the Son suffered, did not the Father suffer with him?” He is distinguished from the Son, not from God. For if a river is fouled by some turbidity, although one substance flows down from the spring and is not cut off from the spring, yet the river's injury will not reach the spring; and although it is the spring's water that suffers in the river, since it suffers not in the spring but in the river, it is not the spring that suffers but the river, which is from the spring. So too the Spirit of God, even if it could suffer in the Son, yet, since it would suffer not in the Father but in the Son, the Father would not be seen to have suffered. But it is enough that the Spirit of God suffered nothing in its own name, because, if it suffered anything, it suffered in the Son. … [It was another matter] for the Father to suffer with the Son in the flesh. … This has been discussed. No one will deny this, since we cannot suffer for God either unless the Spirit of God is in us, who also speaks from us the things of confession; not suffering himself, however, but granting us the ability to suffer.

Otherwise, if you press further, I can answer you more harshly and set you against the Lord's own declaration, so as to say: Why do you ask about this? You have him crying out in his passion, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” So either the Son was suffering, forsaken by the Father, and the Father, who forsook the Son, did not suffer; or, if it was the Father who was suffering, to what God was he crying out? But this voice of the flesh and soul, that is, of the man, not of the Word and Spirit, that is, not of God, was uttered in order to show that God is impassible, who so forsook the Son, in that he handed over his man to death. This the apostle too understood, writing, “If the Father did not spare the Son.” This Isaiah too declared before: “And the Lord handed him over for our sins.” So he forsook him by not sparing him; so he forsook him by handing him over. But otherwise the Father did not forsake the Son, into whose hands the Son laid his spirit. In fact, he laid it there and at once died; for while the spirit remains in the flesh, the flesh cannot die at all. So to be forsaken by the Father was, for the Son, to die. It is the Son, then, who both dies and is raised by the Father according to the Scriptures; the Son who ascended to the heights of heaven, who also descended to the depths of the earth. He sits at the Father's right hand, not the Father at his own. Him Stephen saw, when he was being stoned, still standing at God's right hand, to sit thereafter until the Father puts all his enemies under his feet. He also will come again on the clouds of heaven, just as he ascended. He meanwhile has poured out the gift he received from the Father, the Holy Spirit, the third name of the Godhead and the third degree of the majesty, the preacher of the one monarchy and also the interpreter of the economy, for anyone who has admitted the words of his New Prophecy, and the guide into all truth, which is in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit according to the Christian sacrament.

Besides, it is a matter of the Jewish faith to believe in one God in such a way as to refuse to count the Son with him, and after the Son the Spirit. For what difference will there be between us and them but this? What is the work of the gospel, what is the substance of the New Testament, which sets the law and the prophets as lasting until John, if from then on the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, believed as three, do not make one God? God willed so to renew the sacrament that he might be believed as one in a new way, through the Son and the Spirit, so that God might now be known openly in his own proper names and persons, who in former times too, though preached through the Son and the Spirit, was not understood. Let them look to it, then, these antichrists, who deny the Father and the Son. For they deny the Father when they say he is the same as the Son, and they deny the Son when they believe him to be the same as the Father, giving them what they are not and taking away what they are. But “whoever confesses” that Christ is the Son of God, not the Father, “God abides in him and he in God.” We believe the testimony of God, by which he testified concerning his Son: “He who does not have the Son does not have life.” And he does not have the Son who believes him to be other than the Son.