On the Christian Faith 4.12–5.2

They are also accustomed to raise this objection in order to separate the divinity of the Father and of the Son, because the Lord said in the Gospel: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser”; and they say that the vinedresser and the vine are of different natures, and that the vine is in the vinedresser’s power. So you would have the Son, according to his divinity, be like a vine, so that without the cultivator he is worth nothing and can be abandoned or cut back; and do you build a false charge on the letter, because the Lord said that he was a vine, signifying the mystery of his incarnation? Yet if you want us to argue from the letter, I too confess, indeed I profess, that the Son called himself a vine. For woe to me if I deny the mystery of the salvation of all! How, then, would you have it taken that the Son of God called himself a vine? If you take it as said according to the divine substance, and believe that as there is a difference between the vinedresser and the vine, so there is a difference of divinity between the Father and the Son, you do a double injury to the Son and a double injury to the Father. To the Son, because if according to his divinity he is inferior to the vinedresser, then by your assertion he must also be reckoned inferior to the apostle Paul; for Paul too said that he was a cultivator, as you have it: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.” Do you want Paul, then, to be better than the Son of God? There you have one injury. The other is that if the Son is the vine according to the substance of the eternal generation, since he said, “I am the vine, you are the branches,” that divine generation too will seem to be of one substance with us. But “who is like you among the gods, O Lord?” as it is written. And again in the psalm: “For who in the clouds shall be equal to the Lord? Or who shall be like God among the sons of God?” Nor do you disparage the Son alone, but also the Father. For if the whole prerogative of the Father’s power lies in the name of vinedresser, then, since Paul too is a cultivator, you certainly make the Apostle equal to the Father, though you deny that the Son is equal to him. Next, since it is written, “But neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase,” you will place the summit of the Father’s majesty in a name which you see is weak. For if he who plants and he who waters is nothing, but God who gives the increase, see what your impiety is trying to assert: that the Father is to be despised under the name of vinedresser, and that some God must be sought who gives increase to the Father’s work. Impiously, then, do they think that the power of God the Father is to be preferred because of the name of vinedresser, in which the Father shares a common title with man. And what is excellent in his being preferred, as you heretics would have it, to a Son whose divine substance does not differ from the human condition? For if you think that the Son was called a vine according to the divine substance, you judge him not only liable to corruption and to the uncertainties of the elements, but also a sharer only in human nature; for the vine and the branches are of one nature; so that the Son of God would seem not to have taken flesh through the mystery of the incarnation, but to have taken his beginning from the flesh. But I will say plainly that his flesh, though by a new mystery of birth, was of one nature with us, and that this is the mystery of our salvation, not the beginning of the divine generation. For he is a vine because he bears my sufferings; since, leaning on him, the human condition, frail before, has grown up with the abundant fruits of a renewed devotion. But if the pomp of the vinedresser delights you, tell me, please, who it is who spoke in the prophet: “Lord, make it known to me, that I may know; then I saw their thoughts. I was led like an innocent lamb to be sacrificed, and I did not know; they devised a plan against me, saying: Come, let us put wood into his bread.” For if it is the Son who speaks of the mystery of his future incarnation (since it is impious to believe it of the Father), it is certainly the Son who says earlier: “I planted you a fruitful vine; how have you turned into the bitterness of a strange vine?” So you see that the Son too is the vinedresser, of one name with the Father, of one work, of one dignity and substance. So if the Son is both vinedresser and vine, we certainly take “vine” according to the mystery of the incarnation. But he not only said that he was a vine; through the prophetic voice he also called himself a cluster, at the time when Moses, at the Lord’s command, sent spies to the valley of the cluster. What is that valley but the lowliness of the incarnation and the fruitfulness of the passion? And I think he is called a cluster because from that vine transplanted out of Egypt, that is, from the family of the Jews, a fruit useful to the world shone forth. Certainly no one can refer the cluster to the divine generation; or whoever does so leaves nothing else but that we should believe that cluster to be born of the vine. So the fool ascribes to the Father what he blames in the Son. But if it can no longer be doubted that the Son of God was named a vine according to the incarnation, you see according to what mystery the Lord said: “For the Father is greater than I.” For when he had said this just before, he immediately added: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser,” so that you might recognize that the Father is greater in this respect; because as the vinedresser is of the vines, so the Father is the cultivator of the Lord’s flesh, which could both grow with age and be cut back by the passion; so that the shade of the cross, spread out with saving arms, might shelter the whole human race from the harmful heat of worldly pleasures.

“Who, then, is the faithful and wise servant, whom his lord has set over his household, to give them food in due season? Blessed is that servant whom his lord, when he comes, finds so doing.” This is no ordinary servant; he must be someone great. Let us consider who he is. It is Peter, chosen by the judgment of the Lord himself to feed the flock, who was found worthy to hear three times: “Feed my little lambs, feed my lambs, feed my sheep.” And so by feeding Christ’s flock well with the food of faith he wiped out the fault of his former fall. And for this reason he is told three times to feed, and asked three times whether he loves the Lord, so that he might confess three times the one whom he had denied three times before the cross. Blessed too is that servant who can say: “I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, for you were not yet able”; for he knew how to feed each one. Which of us can do this? Which of us can truly say, “I became weak to the weak, that I might win the weak”? And yet he, so great a man, chosen by Christ for the care of the flock, to heal the weak and tend the sick, drives the heretic from the fold entrusted to him immediately after one correction, lest the scab of one stray sheep should infect the whole flock with its spreading sore. He also commands that foolish questions and disputes be avoided. What, then, shall we do, set unawares among the new tares of an old harvest? If we keep silent, we shall seem to give way; if we contend, there is reason to fear that we too may be judged carnal. For it is written about questions of this kind, which breed strife: “But the servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but be gentle toward all, apt to teach, patient, correcting with modesty those who oppose”; and elsewhere: “If anyone is contentious, we have no such custom, nor have the churches of God.” For this reason it was my intention to write something, so that without any clamor our writings might answer the impiety of the heretics for us. So, august Emperor, I am preparing to begin this fifth book; for it was right that the fourth book should end with that discussion of the vine, lest we should seem to have heaped up that same book with a tumult of questions rather than filled it with the fruit of the spiritual vine; nor was it fitting that the vintage of faith should be left incomplete while so many disputes were still overflowing. In the fifth book, then, we set out the inseparable divinity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, setting aside for the time being a fuller discussion of the Holy Spirit, prompted by the teaching of the Gospel reading, so that we may lend out to human hearts at interest the five talents of faith entrusted to us, as by the allotment of these five books; lest perhaps, when the Lord comes and finds his money hidden in the ground, he should say to me: “Wicked and lazy servant, you knew that I reap where I do not sow and gather where I have not scattered; you ought, then, to have entrusted my money to the bankers, so that on my coming I might have received what is mine”; or as it is in another book: “And I,” he says, “on coming would certainly have demanded it with interest.” Pardon me, then, if the boldness of so long a discourse offends anyone. Regard for my office compels me to lend out what we have received: “We are stewards of the heavenly mysteries.” We are ministers, not all equally, but “to each,” it says, “as the Lord gave. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.” Let each, then, strive to be able to receive his reward according to his own labor; “for we are,” as the Apostle said, “God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.” Blessed, then, is he who sees such interest on his loan; blessed too he who beholds the fruits of his work; blessed also he who builds on the foundation of faith gold, silver, and precious stones. You are everything to us, you who hear or read these things: you are the lender’s interest (interest of the word, not of money); you are the farmer’s harvest; you are the builder’s gold, silver, and precious stones. In your merits lies the sum of the priestly labor; in your souls the fruit of the bishop’s work shines out; in your progress the Lord’s gold gleams and his silver is multiplied, if you hold fast the divine words; for “the words of the Lord are pure words, silver tried in the fire, proved for the earth, purified seven times.” You, then, will make the lender rich and the farmer fruitful; you will prove the architect skillful. I do not say this arrogantly, since what I pray for is not so much mine as yours. O that I might be allowed to say of you with confidence at that time: “Lord, you gave me five talents, and see, I have gained five more,” and show the precious talents of your virtues! “For we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” These are the talents that the Lord commands to be lent out spiritually; or the two denarii of the New and Old Testament, which that Samaritan of the Gospel left for the healing of the wounds of the man stripped by robbers. Nor, brothers, am I greedy in my prayer, wishing for this so as to be set over many things; your progress is reward enough for me. Would that I may not be found unworthy of what I have received! I do not demand what is greater than I am, which is to be given to better men; although you, Lord, are accustomed to say, “But I will give to this last as to you.” Let him receive power over ten cities who deserves it. Let him be such as Moses, who wrote the ten words of the Law. Let him be Jesus son of Nave, who subdued five kings and received the Gibeonites in surrender, so as to be a type of the man of that name who was to come, by whose command all bodily delights would be overcome and the nations converted, so that they would follow the faith of Jesus Christ rather than their former pursuits and desires. Let him be David, whom the young women met singing: “Saul has slain his thousands, David his ten thousands.” It is enough for me if I am not thrust out into the outer darkness, like him who hid the talent entrusted to him in the earth of his own flesh; like the ruler of the synagogue and the other rulers of the Jews, who buried the oracles of God entrusted to them in the earth of their own body, and, intent on the delights of the flesh, sank the heavenly interest as into the pit of a proud heart. Let us not, then, keep the Lord’s money hidden in the lurking places of the flesh, nor lay up that pound in a napkin; but like good bankers, with a certain sweat of mind and body, let us always weigh it out with a fair and ready heart, so that “the word may be near, in your mouth and in your heart.” This is the word of God; it is the precious talent by which you are redeemed. This is the money to be often counted out on the tables of souls, so that by frequent use the sound of the coins may go out into all the world, by which eternal life is gained. “And this is eternal life,” which you bestow, almighty Father, “that we may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Hence let the Arians notice how impious they are, who raise questions for us out of our hope and our prayer. And since they are accustomed above all to cry out from this text, saying that Christ is separated from the only and true God, let us refute their impious interpretations as well as we can. For in this place they ought rather to understand that this is the profit, this the reward of perfect virtue, this the divine and incomparable gift: that we should know Christ with the Father, and not separate the Son from the Father, as Scripture does not separate them. For this serves the unity rather than the distance of the divine power, that the knowledge of the Father and of the Son gives us one reward, one honor; and no one can have this reward but he who has known both the Father and the Son; for as the knowledge of the Father, so the knowledge of the Son gains eternal life. So, as at the very beginning the Evangelist joined the Word with God the Father in devout confession, saying, “And the Word was with God,” so here too, in writing the Lord’s words, “That they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,” he certainly joined the Father and the Son by that conjunction, so that no one may separate Christ, the true God, from the majesty of the Father; for a conjunction never separates. And so by saying, “That they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,” he both struck down the Sabellians and shut out the Jews, those, that is, who heard him speaking; lest the former should think the Father the same as the Son, if he had not added “and Christ,” or the latter should separate the Son from the Father. But I ask why they do not think that it should be understood and gathered from what precedes that, since he first set down “the Father, the only true God,” we should understand also “Jesus Christ, the only true God”? For it could not have been expressed otherwise, lest he should seem to speak of two gods; for neither do we speak of two gods, and we confess the Son to be of the same divinity with the Father. So we ask on what ground of divinity they think a distance is made here: do they deny that Christ is God? But they cannot deny it. Do they deny that he is true God? But let them say, if they deny that he is true, whether they judge him to be a false God or one so called in name only. For according to the Scriptures God is either true, or only so called, or false: true, like the Father; so called, like the saints; false, like demons and idols. Let them say, then, with what confession they designate the Son of God: whether they think that the name of God has been falsely assumed, or that, as in one called God only in name, there is merely an inspiration of divinity. I do not think they will say that the name was falsely assumed, so as to involve themselves in a more open crime of impiety, and betray themselves by suggesting that a false name of God was given to Christ, as to demons and idols. But if they think he is called God because he had an inspiration of divinity, as many holy men did (for Scripture called those gods to whom the word of God came), then they do not set him above men but think him comparable with men, so as to think that he has only what he himself gave to men, when he said to Moses, “He has made you a god to Pharaoh.” Hence also it is said in the psalm: “I said, you are gods.” And yet Paul excludes this opinion of the sacrilegious, when he says: “For even if there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth.” He did not say, “there are gods,” but “there are those who are called gods.” But Christ, as it is written, “is the same yesterday and today.” “Is,” he says; that is, not only in name but also in truth. And it is well written, “He is the same yesterday and today,” so that the impiety of Arius could find no room to build up its sacrilege. For when he read in the second psalm the Father saying to the Son, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you,” he noted “today,” not “yesterday,” and referred to the eternity of the divine generation what was said of the assumption of flesh, as Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles: “And we announce to you the promise made to our fathers, that God has fulfilled it for our children by raising up the Lord Jesus Christ, as it is written in the second psalm: You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” So the Apostle, filled with the Holy Spirit, to crush that savagery, says: “He is the same yesterday and today and for ever”: yesterday, because of his eternity; today, because of his taking a body. Christ, then, is, and always is; for he who is, always is. And Christ always is, of whom Moses says: “He who is has sent me.” Gabriel was, Raphael was, the angels were; but those who at some time were not are by no means said in the same sense always to be. But Christ, as we read, was not “is and is not,” but in him was “is”; so that to be belongs truly to God alone, who always is. So if they do not dare to call him God in name only, and to call him false is a greater impiety, it remains that he is true God, not unlike his true Father but equal to him. Since he justifies and sanctifies whom he will, not taking the power of sanctifying from outside but having it himself, how is he not true God? For the Apostle certainly called him true God who was God by nature, as you have it: “For then,” he says, “not knowing God, you served those who by nature were not gods”; that is, those who could not be true gods, since this by no means belonged to them by nature.

But we have abundantly proved in the earlier books, from readings of the Scriptures, that Christ is true God. So if Christ, as has been shown, is true God, let us ask on what ground, when they read that the Father is the only true God, they want to separate the Son from the Father. If they say that the Father alone is true God, they cannot deny that the Son too, alone, is God the Truth, because Christ is the truth. Is the truth less than the true, when according to the formation of names “true” is generally named from “truth,” as “wise” from “wisdom” and “just” from “justice”? We do not think this of the Father and the Son, because nothing is lacking to the Father, since the Father is true; and the Son, because he is the truth, is equal to the true. But so that they may know that when they read “alone,” the Son is by no means to be separated from the Father, let them remember that it was said by God in the prophets: “I alone stretched out the heaven.” And certainly the Father did not stretch it out without the Son. For the Son himself, who is the wisdom of God, says: “When he prepared the heaven, I was there with him.” And Paul confirms that it was said of the Son: “In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth, and the heavens are the works of your hands.” Whether, then, the Son made the heaven, as the Apostle wanted it to be understood, and he certainly did not stretch out the heaven alone without the Father; or whether, as you have in Proverbs, “God by wisdom founded the earth, and prepared the heavens by understanding,” it is shown that neither did the Father alone make the heavens without the Son, nor the Son without the Father; and yet he who stretched out the heaven is called “alone.” How truly this too is to be understood of the Son, that he is called “alone,” though he is believed never to have done anything without the Father’s knowledge, you have elsewhere as well, where it is written: “Who alone stretches out the heaven, and walks on the sea as on a pavement.” For the Gospel of the Lord taught us that it was not the Father but the Son who walked on the sea, when Peter asked him, saying, “Lord, command me to come to you.” But the prophecy itself is also a proof; for holy Job was prophesying the coming of the Lord, of whom he truly said that he would vanquish the great sea monster; and so it was done; for that deadly monster, the devil, he struck down and crushed in the last times, laid low by the venerable passion of his body. The Son, then, is the only and true God; for this prerogative is granted to the Son as well. For of no one who was created can it properly be said that he is alone. For how can one who shares the common lot of a creature be set apart from the rest as if alone? So man seems to be rational among all the living things of earth, yet he is not alone rational; for we know that the heavenly works of God are also rational; we confess that angels and archangels are rational. If, then, angels are rational, man is certainly not said to be alone rational. But they say that the sun can be called “alone,” because there is no other sun. But even the sun has much in common with the stars: it runs through the heaven, it is of that ethereal and heavenly substance, it is a creature, it is counted among all the works of God, with all of them it serves God, with all of them it blesses God, with all of them it praises him. It is not, then, properly called alone, because it is not set apart from the rest. So since no creature can be compared with the divinity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, which alone is not among all things but above all things (to reserve for the moment what is to be asserted of the Spirit), just as the Father is called the only true God, since he has nothing in common with the rest, so too the Son alone is the image of the true God, alone the right hand of the Father, alone the power and wisdom of God. The Son alone, then, acts as the Father does, for it is written: “Whatever I do, he does.” For since the work of the Father and of the Son is one, it is rightly said of the Father and the Son that God alone worked; hence also, when we speak of the Creator, we confess both the Father and the Son. For when Paul said, “Who served the creature rather than the Creator,” he denied neither that the Father is Creator, from whom are all these things, nor the Son, through whom are all things. To the Son, certainly, the saying “who alone has immortality” does not seem foreign. For how does he not have immortality, who has life in himself? He has it in his nature, he has it in his substance; and he has it not through a temporal grace but through his everlasting divinity; he has it not by gift, as a servant, but by the property of generation, as the coeternal Son; and he has it as the Father has: “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son also to have life in himself”; “as he has,” he says, “so he gave.” You learned above how he gave it, so that you might not think it a bounty of grace where there is the secret of generation. Since, then, there is no difference of life between the Father and the Son, how can it be thought that the Father alone has immortality and the Son does not? From this let them understand that here too the Son is not to be separated from the Father, the only true God; for they cannot prove that the Son is not the only and true God; especially since here either, as we have said, it is understood that Christ too is the only true God, or else one thing is to be understood as referring to the divinity of the Father and the Son, another to the incarnation of Christ; because knowledge is not perfect unless it confesses Jesus Christ both, according to his eternity, as the only-begotten, the true God, the Son of God, and, according to the flesh, as born of the Virgin. This same Evangelist taught us this elsewhere, saying: “Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.” Indeed, the very sequence of the reading teaches us how fitting it is to understand here the mystery of the incarnation too; for you have it thus: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son.” Certainly, since he mentions that the hour has come and asks to be glorified, how is it fitting to think that he spoke except according to the assumption of flesh? For the divinity has no moments of time prescribed for it, nor does eternal light need to be glorified. So in “the only true God, the Father” we understand the Son of God also as the only true God, according to the unity of divinity; and in the name of Jesus Christ, which he received when born of the Virgin, we recognize the mystery of the incarnation. But if, when they read that the Father is the only true God, they want to separate the Son, then, when they read of the Son’s incarnation, “This is the stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the head of the corner,” and further on, “There is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved,” do they think that the Father is to be separated from the benefit of imparting salvation to us? But neither is there salvation without the Father, nor eternal life without the Son.