On the Christian Faith 4.5–4.8

How is it that the Son can do nothing of himself? Let us ask what it is that he cannot do. There are many kinds of impossibility. There is something impossible by nature; and there is something that is possible by nature but impossible through weakness. There is also a third: something possible by strength of body and mind but impossible through lack of skill or of authority. There is also that which, by the determination of an unchangeable purpose and the constancy of will and friendship, cannot be changed. But so that we may observe these more clearly, let our discussion be guided by examples. It is impossible for a bird to acquire any learning or art of wisdom; it is impossible also for a stone to go anywhere; for it is impossible for a stone to be moved unless it is moved by the motion of another; a stone, then, cannot move itself and pass from its place. Nor can an eagle be trained in human learning. You have one kind, in which the cause of impossibility is nature. It is impossible also for a weak man to do the works of a strong one; but here there is another cause of impossibility; for what he can do by nature, he cannot do through weakness. The cause of this impossibility, then, is weakness. This is another kind of impossibility, since he is kept from the possibility of acting by the weakness of the body. There is also a third cause of impossibility, by which, even if someone could do something by nature and strength of body, he still cannot do it through lack of skill or of authority, as one untaught, or a slave. Which, then, of these causes of impossibility that we have listed (setting the fourth aside for the moment) do you think suits the Son of God? Is he by nature without sense and immovable, like a stone? He is indeed a stone, a ruin for the impious, a cornerstone for the faithful; but not without sense, he upon whom the affections of believing peoples, who have sense, are built. Not an immovable rock: “For they drank from the rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” The Father’s work, then, is not impossible to Christ through difference of nature. Do we perhaps think something impossible to him through weakness? But he was not weak who healed the weaknesses of others by a word of command. Did he seem weak when he commanded the paralytic, “Take up your bed and walk,” and was already assigning him the tasks of a healthy man while the man was still praying for a remedy for his weakness? Was the Lord of hosts weak when he gave light to the blind, raised up the bent, raised the dead, when the effect of his healing ran ahead of our prayers, when he cured those who prayed and the touch of his fringe cleansed them? Unless, perhaps, impious men, you thought that was weakness when you saw his wounds. They were indeed wounds of the body, but there was no weakness in that wound from which the life of all was flowing, and the prophet said: “By his bruise we are healed.” Was he who was not weak in his wound weak in his majesty? How, I ask? When he commanded demons and forgave the guilty their sins, or when he asked the Father? Here perhaps they may say: “How are the Father and the Son one, if the Son now commands, now prays?” They are one, and he both commands and prays; but neither when he commands is he alone, nor when he prays is he weak. He is not alone, because whatever the Father does, the Son also does likewise; he is not weak, because although he was made weak in the flesh for our sins, yet that was in him the chastisement of our peace, as it is written, not a weakness of his majesty. Indeed, so that you may know that he asks as man and commands by his divinity, you have in the Gospel that he said to Peter: “I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail.” But to the same Peter, who had said above, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” he answered: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church; and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” Could he, then, not strengthen the faith of one to whom he was giving a kingdom by his own authority, whom he declared the foundation of the Church when he called him rock? Consider, then, when he asks and when he commands. He asks when he is shown about to suffer; he commands when he is believed to be the Son of God. We already see, then, that two kinds of impossibility do not apply, since the power of God can be neither without sense nor weak. Do you bring forward the third, that he can do nothing without a master, as one unskilled, or without a lord, as a slave? Then you lied, Lord Jesus, when you called yourself both master and lord; and you deceived your disciples when you said, “You call me master and lord, and you say well; for so I am.” But you, the Truth, would not deceive, least of all those whom you called friends. Yet if they set you apart as unskilled from the craftsman, let them see that they are saying that skill was lacking to you, that is, to the Wisdom of God; still, they cannot separate the unity of substance between you and the Father. For it is lack of knowledge, not nature, that separates the craftsman from the unskilled; but in the Father there is no mere craftsmanship, nor in you any lack of wisdom; for Wisdom is not unwise. So if in the Son there can be neither a nature without sense, nor weakness, nor lack of skill, nor servitude, let them consider that the Son is one with the Father in both nature and majesty, and that the Power does not differ from the Father in operation, since whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise; for no one can do the same work likewise that another has done unless he has no inequality of operation and has the unity of the same nature. Still I ask what it is that the Son cannot do of himself unless he sees the Father doing it; and foolishly I put forward examples from humbler things: “I have become foolish; you compelled me.” For what is more foolish than to discuss arguments about the majesty of God, which promote questions rather than the edification of God which is in faith? But let arguments answer arguments: to them their words, to us love, which is in God, from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned. So, to undermine so inept a proposition, I am not ashamed to draw even ridiculous examples. How, then, does the Son see the Father? A horse sees a picture, which by nature it cannot imitate: certainly the Son does not see in that way. A child sees the works of a grown man but cannot imitate them: certainly the Son of God does not see in that way either. So if the Son, through the secret communion of the same nature with the Father, can both see and act invisibly, and through the fullness of divinity carry out whatever he wills, what remains but that we believe that, through the inseparable unity of power, the Son does nothing but what he sees the Father doing; because, through incomparable love, the Son does nothing of himself, since he wills nothing that the Father does not will? And this certainly belongs not to weakness but to unity.

Nor, then, is the Son contumacious, to speak also of the fourth kind; for the Son, the Counselor, did nothing that does not agree with the will of the Father. Indeed the Father saw what the Son made, and approved it, because it was very good. For so you have it in Genesis: “And God said: Let there be light, and there was light; and God saw the light, that it was good.” Did the Father say here, “Let there be such light as I myself made,” or “Let there be light, which had not been before”? Or did the Son ask what kind he should make? No; he made it as he willed, of such a kind as the Father willed so fully that he approved it. It is a new work of the Son, then. Next, if, according to the interpretations of the Arians, it is held against the Son that he did what he saw, he who according to the Scriptures did even what he had not seen and gave being to things that were not, what do they say of the Father, who praised what he had seen, as though he could not foresee the things that were to be made? Likewise, then, the Son sees the Father’s work as the Father sees the Son’s work; nor does he praise it as another’s, but recognizes it as his own: “For whatever the Father does, the Son also does likewise,” so that you may perceive that the work of the Father and of the Son is the same. The Son, then, does nothing but what the Father approves, the Father praises, the Father wills, because he is wholly from the Father; not like a creature, which commits many things and, by eagerness and the slip of sin, often offends the will of its author. The Son, then, does nothing but what pleases the Father; because there is one will, one judgment, one true love, the effect of one operation. … “The Son can do nothing of himself except what he sees the Father doing”: having first said, “Whatever he does, the Son also does likewise,” he added: “For the Father loves the Son.” So what Scripture said, that he “cannot,” it referred to the unity of an inseparable and undivided love. But if love is inseparable by nature, as it truly is, then the operation too is certainly inseparable by nature; and it is impossible that the Son’s work should not agree with the Father’s will, since what the Son works the Father also works, and what the Father works the Son also works, and what the Son speaks the Father also speaks, as it is written: “My Father, who abides in me, he speaks; and the works that I do, he does.” For the Father founded nothing without his power and wisdom, for he made all things in wisdom, as it is written: “You made all things in wisdom.” Nor did God the Word make anything without the Father. He does not work without the Father; not without the Father’s will did he offer himself to that sacred passion as the saving victim for the whole world; not without the Father’s will did he raise the dead. Indeed, when he was about to raise Lazarus, he lifted up his eyes and said: “Father, I thank you that you have heard me; and I knew that you always hear me; but I said it because of the crowd standing around, that they may believe that you sent me”; so that, although he spoke from his having taken on the person of the incarnate man, he nevertheless expressed the unity of the Father’s will and operation; because the Father hears all, sees all that the Son wills. The Father, then, sees the Son acting and hears him willing. Indeed he had not asked, and yet he said that he had been heard. Nor can it be thought that the Father does not hear what the Son wills; and so that you may know that he is always heard by the Father, not as a servant nor as a prophet but as Son: “And I knew,” he says, “that you always hear me; but I said it because of the crowd standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.” For this reason, then, he gives thanks: so that we should not believe the Father and the Son to be the same, when we hear that the work of the Father and of the Son is the same. For so that you might know that he did not give thanks as one weak, but as the Son of God who always claims divine power for himself, he cried: “Lazarus, come out.” This is certainly the voice of one who commands, not of one who prays.

But to return to what came before and to conclude what we proposed: the Son, as the Word, does the will of the Father. This word of ours is certainly uttered; it is syllables, it is sound; and yet it does not differ from our sense and mind, and what we hold in our inner affection we signify as by the testimony of a word that acts. But our speech does not work; only the Word of God works, which is neither uttered nor what they call endiathetos, but which works and lives and heals. Do you want to know what kind of Word he is? Hear the one who says: “For the Word of God is living and strong and effective, and sharper and more piercing than any sharpest sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow.” You hear, then, that the Son of God is the Word, and do you separate him from the Father’s will and power? You hear that he lives, you hear that he heals: do not, then, compare him with our word. For if our word speaks of things it has not seen with sight nor heard with hearing, and yet speaks of things known through certain inner mysteries of human nature, how is he not impious who, in regard to the divinity, demands in the Word of God a kind of bodily sight and hearing, and thinks that the Son can do nothing of himself except what he has seen the Father doing; although, through the unity of the same substance, as we have said, the same willing, the same not willing, and the same power are in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy Spirit? But if men, though generally distinct in the quality of their senses, nevertheless agree in pursuing one purpose, what is it fitting for us to think of God the Father and the Son, when the divine substance possesses what human love imitates? Let us suppose, however, as they wish, that the Son does what he sees the Father doing, as from a pattern. Even this certainly belongs to the same substance; for no one can carry out the imitation of another’s operation unless he has the unity of the same nature.

It is ridiculous, august Emperor, that some are accustomed to use this too as an objection, to show the inequality of God the Father and the Son: they say that the Father is almighty because he begot a Son, but deny that the Son is almighty, saying that he could not beget. But see how savage impiety, like the dialectic of the philosophers, refutes itself. For by this question either they must confess with their own voice that the Son is coeternal with the Father, or, if they ascribe some beginning in time to the Son, they must attribute a beginning of power to the Father too. So when they deny that the Son is almighty, they begin to assert (what is wicked to say) that the Father began to be almighty through the Son. For if the Father is almighty through begetting, then either the Son is coeternal with the Father, because if the Father is always almighty, the Son too is everlasting; or, if there was a time when the Son was not everlasting, then there was a time when the Father was not almighty. For when they want to say that the Son began at some time, they fall back into this: that they say that the Father’s power too did not always exist, but began from the generation of the Son. So, while they desire to disparage the Son of God, they grant him more, so that against all right they seem to declare him the author of the Father’s power; whereas the Son says, “All that the Father has is mine,” that is, not what he himself handed over to the Father, but what he received from the Father by right of generation. And so we say that the Son is the everlasting power; if, then, his power and divinity are everlasting, his might too is certainly everlasting. He who disparages the Son, then, disparages the Father, offends piety, and violates love. Let us honor the Son, in whom the Father is well pleased; for it pleases the Father that the Son in whom he is well pleased should be praised. Yet let us answer their contention, lest we should seem to have escaped the odium of the question by a kind of epilogue. “The Father begot,” they say; “the Son did not beget.” What argument for inequality is there here? For generation belongs to the Father’s property, not to power; and natural affection makes equal, it does not separate. Indeed, in the very experience of our weakness we know that it often happens that the weak have sons and the stronger do not; slaves have them, and masters do not; the poor have them, and those who are powerful do not. But if they say that this too is weakness, because men want to have sons and cannot, then, although human things are not to be compared with divine, let them understand that even among men themselves, to have sons or not to have them is a matter not of power but of the property of fatherhood; and that it is not in the power of our will to beget, but in the condition of the body; for if it were a matter of power, the more powerful would certainly have many. So to have sons or not to have them is not a matter of power. Is it a matter of nature? If you think it a weakness of nature, and compare yourselves with human examples, the nature of the Father is the same as that of the Son. So either you call him the true Son, and then in disparaging the Son you disparage the Father through the unity of the same nature (for as the Father is God by nature, so also is the Son; but the Apostle says that the gods are not gods by nature but are so called); or, if you deny that he is the true Son, that is, of the same nature, then he was not begotten; and if the Son was not begotten, the Father did not beget. It follows, then, according to your opinion, that God the Father is not almighty, because he could not beget, if he did not beget the Son but created him. But since the Father is almighty, and according to your opinion only the begetter is almighty, he certainly begot the Son; he did not create him. But indeed he is to be believed rather than you. He says, “I have begotten,” and he says it often, the witness of his own generation. There is, then, no weakness of nature or of power in Christ because he did not beget; for generation, as we have often said, is referred not to the height of power but to the property of nature. For if the Father is almighty because he has a Son, then he could have been more almighty if he had more. Or did his power fail after one generation? But I will show that Christ too has sons, whom he begets daily, but by that generation, or rather regeneration, which belongs to power, not to nature; for adoption belongs to power, generation to property. Scripture itself has taught us this; for John says that “he was in this world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own did not receive him. But as many as received him, to them he gave power to become sons of God, to those who believe in his name.” We have learned, then, that his making us sons of God belongs to his power; but the divine oracles declare that generation belongs to property; for the Wisdom of God says, “I came forth from the mouth of the Most High,” that is, not compelled but free, not subject to a power, but born in the secret of generation, with the privilege of dominion and the right of power. Indeed, of the same Wisdom, that is, of the Lord Jesus, the Father says elsewhere: “From the womb, before the morning star, I begot you.” He said this certainly not to declare a bodily womb, but to show the property of true generation. For if you refer it to a bodily womb, then the almighty Father begot with pain and conception. But far be it from us to measure God by the weakness of the body. There is a kind of womb, the secret of the Father’s substance, an inner hidden place, which neither Angels nor Archangels nor Powers nor Dominions nor any nature of creatures could penetrate. For the Son is always with the Father and always in the Father: with the Father through the undivided distinction of the eternal Trinity, in the Father through the unity of the divine nature. Who, then, is this judge of the divinity, to examine the Father and the Son, the one as to why he begot, the other as to why he did not beget? No one condemns his little slave or his maidservant for not begetting; these men condemn Christ for not begetting, for they condemn him in their opinion when they disparage him. Nor between spouses is love diminished or merit disparaged because they have not had children; these men diminish Christ’s power because he did not beget. “Why,” they say, “is the Son not Father?” Because the Father is not Son either. “Why did this one not beget?” Because that one was not begotten either. The Son does not have less because he is not Father, nor does the Father have less because he is not Son. For the Son said, “All that the Father has is mine.” So truly does generation belong to the Father’s property and not to a right of power. There is in the substance of the Trinity, incomprehensible and ineffable, a certain undivided distinction. For we have received a distinction of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, not a confusion; a distinction, not a separation; a distinction, not a plurality. By a divine and wonderful mystery, then, we receive the Father as always abiding, the Son always, the Holy Spirit always; not two Fathers, not two Sons, not two Spirits. “For there is one God the Father, from whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus, through whom are all things, and we through him.” One Lord Jesus, born of the Father, and therefore only-begotten. One also is the Holy Spirit, as the same Apostle said. So we receive, so we read, so we hold. We know the distinction; we do not know the secrets; we do not discuss the causes; we keep the mysteries. It is an unworthy thing that those who do not have the power of their own begetting should arrogate to themselves the examination of the divine generation and claim authority over it. Let them deny, then, that the Son is equal to the Father because the Son did not beget; let them deny that the Son is equal to the Father because he has a Father. If they said this of men, some of whom want to have sons and cannot, we would think it an insult; as if, even between two men equal in honor, the one who does not have sons were denied to be equal to the one who has. And the same thing seems grievous even among men, that someone should be thought lesser because he has a father. Unless perhaps they think that Christ, as one set in a household, is grieved that he has not been emancipated by his Father and does not have the power of administering the patrimony. But Christ is not bound by family rites, he who destroyed all such rites. Yet, however they wish, let them answer whether the generation is true, and whether the true Son was born of God the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, or born of another substance. For if they say, “of the Father,” that is, of the substance of God, we agree; for they say that the Son is of the substance of the Father. So since he is of one substance, he is certainly of one power. But if the Son is of another substance, how is the Father almighty and the Son not almighty? For what is the greater excellence, if God made a Son from another substance, when the Son too made sons of God from no other substance? So the Son is of one substance with the Father, or of one power. Their question, then, is cold, because they cannot judge Christ; rather, because he prevails when he is judged. Yet these who raise this question deserve their own judgment. For if the Son is not equal to the Father because he did not beget a son, then let those who sow questions of this kind, if they do not have sons, confess that they set even their own slaves above themselves, since they cannot be equal to those who have sons. But those who have sons, let them not think that merit is assigned to themselves, but to the right of their sons. This question, then, does not stand, that the Son cannot be equal to the Father because the Father begot a Son and the Son himself begot none. For a spring begets a river, and the river does not beget a spring from itself; and light begets radiance, not radiance light; and the nature of radiance and light is one.