On the Incarnation of the Lord, against Nestorius

When I had lately finished the little books of the spiritual Conferences, which are notable for their thought rather than their style (since the speech of my inexperience was unequal to the lofty thought of the holy men), I had thought, and had almost decided, after the shame of having exposed my ignorance, to settle myself in the harbor of silence in such a way that, as far as lay in me, I might atone by the modesty of saying nothing for the boldness of my talkativeness. But you have overcome my purpose and resolve by your praiseworthy zeal and your most commanding affection, my Leo, my venerable and admired dear friend, ornament of the Roman church and of the divine ministry. You draw me out of that retreat of silence I had planned into a public and fearful judgment, and you compel me, while I still blush for what is past, to undertake new things; and though I have been unequal even to lesser tasks, I am forced by you to be equal to greater ones.

For even in those little works by which, through the small offering of my poor talent, we sacrificed to God, I would not have attempted to undertake or take upon myself anything unless I had been drawn by the command of a bishop. And so through you the dignity of my speech and pen has grown. For we who earlier, under orders, spoke of the Lord’s pursuits, are now required by you to speak of the very incarnation of the Lord and of his majesty. Thus we who earlier were brought into the holy place of the temple as if by the hand of a priest, now under your leading and with your help penetrate, as it were, into the holy of holies.

A great honor, but a perilous undertaking, since the palm of entering the inner sanctuary and of the divine reward cannot be won unless the enemy is overcome. So you require and command me to join my feeble hands in battle against a new heresy and a new enemy of the faith, and to stand, as they say, with open mouth against the heavy jaws of a deadly serpent: namely, so that the prophetic power and the divine strength of the gospel word, with me as its charmer, may burst asunder the dragon that rises with winding coils against the churches of God. I obey your entreaty, I obey your command.

For I prefer to trust you about myself rather than myself, especially since the love of Jesus Christ my Lord, who commands this very thing in you also, enjoins it on me along with you. It remains that you ask the accomplishment of the task you have ordered from him through whom you gave the order. For now it is your cause rather than mine that is at stake here; it is your judgment rather than my service that is in danger. For whether I am equal to your command or not, the very principle of obedience and humility excuses me to some degree, except that there is all the more merit in my compliance if there is less in my ability.

For we easily satisfy anyone’s command out of abundance; but great and wonderful is the service of one who has in his wish what he does not have in his strength. So this matter is yours, the business is yours, the work concerns your honor. Pray and entreat that your choice may not be put in danger by my lack of skill, and that, if we do not answer to so great an expectation, you may not seem to have commanded badly through lack of judgment, even though I obey well through the indulgence granted to obedience.

The tales of the poets relate that the hydra once, when its heads were cut off, grew back more numerous and grew through its own losses, so that by a new and unheard-of wonder, as the monster multiplied through its own deaths, loss was a kind of gain: whatever the sword of the one cutting it severed, a monstrous fruitfulness doubled. At last the energetic attacker who had begun that cutting, laboring and sweating, after his strength had so often been spent in vain, armed the force of war with the skill of counsel: bringing fire, as they say, he cut off with a burning sword the manifold brood of that portentous body, and so, when its marrow had been burned within and he had seared the rebellious veins of its wicked fertility, the monstrous births at last ceased. In the same way heresies in the churches bear the likeness of that hydra which the inventions of the poets devised. For these too hiss against us with deadly tongues, these too cast lethal venom, and these too grow again when their heads are cut off. But because the medicine must not cease while the disease rises again, and the greater the sickness, the more urgent must be the cure, the Lord our God is able to bring it about that what the falsehood of the pagans invented about the death of that hydra, the truth should accomplish in the battles of the churches, and that the fiery sword of the Holy Spirit should so burn out all the marrow of this pernicious brood in extinguishing the new heresy that at last its monstrous fruitfulness may cease to give birth, as its veins die.

For these shoots of monstrous seed are not new in the churches. The crop of the Lord’s field has always put up with these burrs and briars, and in it there has constantly sprung up the shoot of the choking tares. From here sprang the Ebionites, from here the Sabellians, from here the Arians, from here finally the Eunomians and Macedonians, from here the Photinians and Apollinarians, and the other thorns of the churches and the thistles that choke the good crop. The first of them, Ebion, by asserting the Lord’s incarnation too strongly, stripped it of union with the Godhead. After him Sabellius, bursting out into schism from the opposite of the earlier heresy, by contending that there is no distinction between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, mixed together, as far as lay in him, the holy and ineffable Trinity in a blasphemous confusion. Then followed the impiety of the Arian perversity which we mentioned, which, so as not to seem to mix the holy persons, said that there are different and unlike substances in the Trinity. Eunomius, after him but of very much the same wickedness, though he asserted that the divine Trinity is like itself, still contended that it is different from itself, admitting likeness but excluding equality. Macedonius too, blaspheming with irremediable impiety against the Holy Spirit, though he said that the Father and the Son are of the same substance, yet by calling the Holy Spirit a creature became guilty against the whole Godhead, because nothing in the Trinity can be wronged without injury to the whole Trinity. Photinus, though he called Jesus, who was born of the virgin, God, wrongly invented that the beginning of God was the same as the beginning of the man. Apollinaris, understanding without due thought the man united to God, wrongly believed that he did not have a human soul, because it is no smaller error to add to the Lord Jesus Christ what does not belong to him than to take away what does. For whatever is said of him otherwise than as it is, even if it seems an honor, is an injury. So each of them, producing a heresy out of the opposite of a heresy, held things all different from one another, but all opposed to the faith. Lately too, that is, in our own days, we have seen a poisonous heresy spring up from the greatest city of the Belgae, of certain error but uncertain name, because, having arisen with a new head from the ancient stock of the Ebionites, it is very doubtful whether it ought to be called old or new. For it was new in its defenders but old in its errors. It blasphemously claimed that our Lord Jesus Christ was born a mere man, and that his coming afterwards to the honor and power of God belonged to human merit, not to divine nature; and that therefore he did not always have Godhead itself by the property of the divinity united to him, but earned it afterwards as the reward of his labor and suffering. Since it blasphemed that our Lord and Savior was not born God but was taken up by God, it was of course a neighbor to this heresy that has now appeared, its sister, as it were, and of the same blood: in time it stood midway between the two, agreeing both with the Ebionites and with these recent ones, but joined to both by its perversity. There may be some other things in it like those we have already mentioned, but it would be long to recount them all. For we have taken up now not a recital of things past but a refutation of new ones.

One thing, however, we think must not be passed over, which was peculiar and proper to that heresy just mentioned, which had descended from the Pelagian error. Certain people, saying that Jesus Christ, a mere man, lived without any contagion of sin, went so far as to assert that men can be without sin if they wish. (For they thought it followed that, if Jesus Christ as a mere man had been without sin, all men too could be without God’s help whatever that man, being a mere man, could be without fellowship with God.) And so they made no difference between any man and our Lord Jesus Christ, since any man by his own effort and industry could earn what Christ had earned by zeal and toil. The result was that, bursting out into a greater and more monstrous madness, they said that our Lord Jesus Christ came into this world not to bring redemption to the human race but to give examples of good actions, so that men, following his discipline and walking by the same road of virtue, might arrive at the same rewards of virtue. As far as lay in them, they emptied out the whole gift of the holy coming, the whole grace of the divine redemption, since they said that men could obtain by living what God had brought about for human salvation by dying. They added also that our Lord and Savior became Christ after his baptism and God after his resurrection, assigning the one to the mystery of the anointing and the other to the merit of the passion. Hence the author of this heresy, which is now no longer new, who contends that our Lord and Savior was born a mere man, notices that he is saying exactly what the Pelagians said before, and that it follows from his error that, since he asserts that Jesus Christ lived without sin as a mere man, he blasphemes that all men too can be without sin by themselves, and, following that example, says that the Lord’s redemption was not necessary, since men can reach the heavenly kingdom, as they say, by their own effort alone. Nor is this doubtful: the thing itself declares it plainly. For this is why he fosters the complaints of the Pelagians by his intercessions and asserts their cause in his writings, why he subtly, or to speak more truly, craftily, acts as their patron and supports a wickedness akin to his own with wicked affection: he knows of course that he is of the same mind and the same spirit, and therefore he grieves that the heresy akin to him has been cut off from the church, knowing it to be joined to him in perversity.

Yet since those who had descended from that stock of pestilent thorns have by God’s help and goodness already been healed, we must pray the Lord our God now also that, since that former heresy and this new one agree with each other in some things, he may grant a like good outcome to like evil beginnings. For Leporius, then a monk and now a presbyter, who, descending as we said from the teaching, or rather the depravity, of Pelagius, was in Gaul among the first or among the greatest defenders of the said heresy, was admonished by us and corrected by God, and so splendidly condemned the persuasion he had wrongly conceived that his correction is almost no less admirable than the unharmed faith of many, since the first thing is not to fall into error at all, the second to renounce it well. Coming to himself, then, he not only confessed his error, with grief but without shame, in Africa, where he was then and is now, but also sent letters of his confession and lament to practically all the cities of Gaul, so that where his straying had first been known his correction might also be known, and those who had earlier been witnesses of his error might afterwards be the same witnesses of his correction.

From his confession, or rather lament, we have thought it right to insert some passages for a twofold reason: that the correction of these people might be both a testimony for us and an example for those who waver, and that those who had not blushed to follow their error might not blush to follow their amendment, and, as they were sick with a like sickness, so they might be healed with a like remedy. Having recognized the perversity of his opinion and seen the light of the faith, he began thus, writing to the bishops of Gaul: “I do not know, my venerable lords and most blessed bishops, what I should first accuse in myself, and I do not find what I should first excuse in myself. Inexperience and pride, foolish simplicity together with harmful persuasion, zeal with lack of restraint, and, to speak more truly, a faith weak through its own diminishing, were all so received and strong in me at once, that it is a confusion to me to have obeyed so many and such great things, and an amazing cause of thanks that I have been able to cast these same things out of my mind.” And after a little he adds: “If then, not grasping this power of God and wise in our own sense and reasoning, as though God seemed to be doing things beneath him, we say that the man was born with God in such a way that we give separately to God alone the things that are God’s and separately assign to the man alone the things that are man’s, we most plainly introduce a fourth person into the Trinity and begin to make of the one Son of God not one but two Christs, which may our Lord and God Christ himself avert from us. Therefore we confess our Lord and God Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, who was begotten of the Father for himself before the ages, and who in time was made man for us of the Holy Spirit and Mary ever virgin, God born. And confessing both substances, of the flesh and of the Word, we always receive with the pious belief of faith one and the same God and man, inseparable; and from the time he took flesh we say that all things that were God’s passed over to the man, so that all things that were the man’s came to God. In this sense the Word was made flesh: not that by conversion or any change he began to be what he was not, but that by the power of the divine dispensation the Word of the Father, never departing from the Father, deigned to become properly man, and the Only-begotten was incarnate by that secret mystery which he himself knows (for it is ours to believe, his to know). And so God the Word himself, receiving all that belongs to man, is man, and the man assumed, receiving all that belongs to God, cannot be anything other than God. Yet because he is said to be incarnate and mixed, no lessening of his substance is to be understood. God knows how to be mixed without corruption of himself and yet to be truly mixed, and to receive in such a way that no increase is added to him, just as he knows how to pour himself in whole so that no loss befalls him. Let us not then, by conjecture after the visible proofs of experience suited to the understanding of our weakness, as with equal creatures entering into one another, think that God and man were blended and that out of such a confusion of flesh and Word some sort of body was made. Far be it from us to believe that, by a kind of fusion, as in a smelting, the two natures were reduced into one substance; for a blending of that kind is the corruption of both parts. For God, who contains and is not contained, penetrates and is not penetrated, fills and is not filled, who is everywhere at once whole and everywhere diffused, by the inpouring of his power has mercifully mingled with human nature.” And after a little: “There is born for us, then, properly of the Holy Spirit and Mary ever virgin, God and man, Jesus Christ the Son of God; and so the Word and the flesh become one in each other, such that, while each substance remains naturally in its own perfection, without prejudice to itself the divine things communicate with the humanity and the human things share in the divinity; and he is not God one and man another, but the same one who is God is also man, and in turn the man who is also God, Jesus Christ, is named and truly is the one Son of God. And so we must always hold and believe that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, true God, whom we confess always with the Father and equal to the Father before the ages, became from the time he took flesh God and man, and we must not deny it; nor may we say that, as if advancing toward God by stages and times, he was of one condition before the resurrection and of another after it, but that he was always of the same fullness and power.” And again a little later: “But because the Word of God, graciously taking up man, came down into man, and through the taking up by God the man went up into the Word, the whole God the Word was made whole man. For it was not God the Father who was made man, nor the Holy Spirit, but the Only-begotten of the Father. And therefore one person is to be understood of the flesh and the Word, so that we may believe faithfully and without any doubt that one and the same Son of God, always inseparable, of twin substance, also called a giant, in the days of his flesh both truly did always all the things that are man’s and truly possessed always the things that are God’s; for even though he was crucified out of weakness, yet he lives by the power of God.”

This confession of his, then, which is the faith of all catholics, was approved by all the bishops of Africa, from where he was writing, and by all those of Gaul, to whom he was writing; and no one at all has yet appeared who disliked this faith without the charge of unbelief, because it is a mark of avowed impiety to deny proven piety. The consent of all alone, then, ought now to suffice to refute the heresy, because the authority of all is the manifestation of undoubted truth, and the reasoning is complete where no one dissents. So if anyone tries to think against this, his assertion is not so much to be heard at first sight as his perversity condemned, because one who attacks the judgment of all carries with him a prejudgment of condemnation, and one who overturns what all have established has no right to a hearing. For once the truth has been confirmed by all, whatever comes against it must by that very fact be known at once to be falsehood, because it dissents from the truth; and therefore this alone is fitting and sufficient for a sentence of condemnation against it, that it disagrees with the judgment of the truth. Yet since the speech of reason does no harm to reason, and truth always shines the more for being sifted, and it is better for those in error to be corrected by the healing of discussion than condemned by the severity of censure, the old heresy in the new heretics must be cured, as far as lies in us, with God’s help, so that, health being restored by the holy mercy, their healing may give testimony to the holy faith rather than their condemnation an example of just severity. Only may the Truth itself be present to the discussion and the speech about itself, and by that goodness by which God deigned to come to men may it help human errors; for it was above all for this that he willed to be born on earth and in man, so that there might no longer be room for falsehood.

Since in the first book we set out beforehand certain things by which to prove that the new heretic sprouts from the roots of an ancient heresy, the just condemnation of the earlier heretics ought indeed to be enough for him to receive the sentence of just condemnation. For since he has the same roots and springs up out of the same trenches, he has already been sufficiently condemned in his authors; especially since those who most recently before these men wrongly followed this very thing that they assert have rightly condemned it, so that the examples of their own people, either of those who were corrected or of those who were condemned, ought to suffice them abundantly. For if they can be corrected, they have a cure in the corrections of their own people; if they cannot be corrected, they have a sentence in the condemnation of their own people. Yet lest we be thought to want to use a prejudgment rather than a judgment against them, let us bring their pestilent proposition, or rather blaspheming madness, into the open, taking in all things the shield of faith and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: so that the same sword of the divine word which earlier cut off the head of the ancient dragon in the old serpents may cut it off now too, as it rises again, in the new snakes. For since their error is the same as that of the others, the cutting off of the others ought to count as the cutting off of these. And because the snakes, born again, are breathing pestilent breath in the church of the Lord and making some waste away by their hissing, a fresh medicine must be joined to the ancient cures because of the new sicknesses, so that, even if what was done earlier does not avail to cure the illness, what we are doing now may avail for the health of the sick.

You say, then, heretic, whoever you are, who deny that God was born of the virgin, that Mary the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ cannot be called Theotokos, that is, Mother of God, but Christotokos, that is, mother only of Christ, not of God. “For no one,” you say, “gives birth to one older than herself.” About this so foolish argument, since you think the birth of God must be judged by fleshly understanding and believe the mystery of majesty must be assessed by human reasonings, we will argue later, if God grants. Meanwhile let us now prove by divine witnesses both that Christ is God and that Mary is Mother of God. Hear, then, the angel of God speaking to the shepherds of the birth of God: “To you is born today a Savior, who is Christ the Lord, in the city of David.” So that you would not understand only a man in Christ, he added for you the names Lord and Savior, so that you would in no way doubt that one whom you recognized to be Savior is God, and, since the power of saving belongs only to divine might, you would not hesitate that one in whom you had learned the power of saving is of divine power. But this may perhaps seem too little to your unbelief, because the angel called him Lord and Savior rather than God or Son of God, although of course you most impiously deny to be God the one you confess to be Savior. Hear also the archangel Gabriel announcing to the virgin Mary: “The Holy Spirit,” he says, “will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore also what will be born of you will be called holy, the Son of God.” You see how, about to announce the birth of God, he first set out the works of the Godhead. For “the Holy Spirit,” he says, “will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” Speaking most beautifully, the angel unfolded the majesty of the divine work by the divinity of his words. For the Holy Spirit, sanctifying the inward parts of the virgin and breathing into them the power of his Godhead, inserted himself into and mingled himself with human nature, and made his own what had been foreign to him, taking it, that is, by his own power and majesty. And lest human weakness perhaps not hold firm at the entry of the Godhead, the power of the Most High strengthened the virgin, venerable to all, so as to make firm her bodily weakness by the protection of his shadow poured around her, so that human frailty, upheld by the divine overshadowing, would not fail in accomplishing the unspeakable sacrament of the holy conception. “The Holy Spirit,” then, he says, “will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” If, then, the one to be born of the holy virgin was only a mere man, why was there so great a message of a holy coming? Why so great a preparation of the Godhead itself? If a man was simply being born of a man and flesh of flesh, a command or the divine will alone could surely have sufficed for that. For if, to make the heavens, to found the earth, to create the sea, and finally the seats and thrones and angels and archangels and principalities and powers, if, finally, to create the whole heavenly host and those innumerable thousands of thousands of the divine armies, the will and command of God alone sufficed for him, since “he spoke, and they were made; he commanded, and they were created,” why did what was enough for the creation of all divine things seem too little for the conception, as you say, of one man, and why did the power and majesty of God think too little for the birth of one little infant what sufficed for the founding of all earthly and heavenly things? But this of course is the point: all those works had been done by God’s command, but the birth was not to be done except by his coming, because God could not be conceived by a human being unless he gave himself, nor be born unless he slipped in himself. And therefore the archangel announced that the holy majesty would come upon the virgin, so that, since so great a thing could not be done through human agency, he might say that the majesty of the one who would be in the birth would be present in the conception. And therefore the Word, the Son, comes down; the majesty of the Holy Spirit is present; the power of the Father overshadows: so that in the sacrament of the holy conception there might be the cooperation of the whole Trinity. “Therefore,” he says, “also what will be born of you will be called holy, the Son of God.” He did well to add “therefore,” to show that these things would follow because those had been set before them, and that because God had come upon her in the conception, therefore God would be in the birth. So he gave the reason for so great a thing to the girl who did not know it, saying in effect: because the Holy Spirit will come upon you and because the power of the Most High will overshadow you, therefore also what will be born will be called holy, the Son of God. That is to say: lest you be ignorant of this preparation for so great a thing, this sacrament of so great a mystery, the whole majesty of God will come into you because the Son of God will be born of you. What more can be doubted here, or what more can be said? He said that God would come upon her and that the Son of God would be born. Ask now, if you please, either how the Son of God is not God, or how she who brought forth God cannot be Theotokos, that is, Mother of God. These things alone, then, ought to suffice you; indeed, these things ought to suffice you to the full.

But since testimonies of the holy birth are abundantly at hand, as all these things were written precisely so as to be its witnesses, let us look, at least in some small portion, at the announcement of God in the Old Testament also, so that you may understand that the future birth of God from a virgin was not announced only when it was done, but was foretold from the very beginning of the world: truly so, that, since an ineffable work was to be done, the announcement of the future, always sent ahead, might in time remove unbelief in the present events. The prophet Isaiah says, then: “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and they will call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us.” What room is there here, unbeliever, for doubt? The prophet said that a virgin would conceive: a virgin conceived. That a son would be born: a son was born. That he would be called God: he is called God, for he is called by the name that is his nature. So since the Spirit of God said that he would be called God, the one who has made himself a stranger to sharing in this divine name proves himself empty of the Spirit of God. “Behold,” then, he says, “a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and they will call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us.” But perhaps this is where the evasion of the unbeliever will turn, to say that what the prophet said, that he would be called God, pertains not so much to the majesty of the Godhead as to the giving of a name. But what are we to make of the fact that Christ is nowhere called by this name in the Gospels, and yet the Spirit of God cannot be said to have lied through the prophet? What then does this mean? That you should understand, of course, that that prophecy foretold the name of the Godhead, not of the flesh. For since in the Gospel the man united to God received another name, it necessarily follows that the one was the name of the man, the other of the Godhead. But let us go further and summon other testimonies of the truth to prove the truth; for where God is concerned, the Godhead is proved by nothing better than by its own witnesses. The same prophet, then, says elsewhere: “A son is born to us, a little one is given to us, whose rule is upon his shoulder; and his name will be called Messenger of great counsel, Mighty God, Father of the world to come, Prince of peace.” As above the prophet said he would be called Emmanuel, so here he says he will be called Messenger of great counsel and Mighty God and Father of the world to come and Prince of peace, though we nowhere read in the Gospels that he was called by these names: so that we understand that these are names not of the flesh but of the Godhead, and that the name in the Gospels is that of the man assumed, this that of the unbegotten power, and that, because God was to be born in man, the names themselves were divided by the holy dispensation so as to give the flesh the name of a man and the Godhead the name of God. “His name,” then, he says, “will be called Messenger of great counsel, Mighty God, Father of the world to come, Prince of peace.” Here, heretic, whoever you are, here that prophet full of the divine Spirit did not, after the pattern of your assertion, compare the one who was born to a cast statue and a lifeless image. For “a son,” he says, “is born to us, a little one is given to us, whose rule is upon his shoulder; and his name will be called Messenger of great counsel, Mighty God.” So that you would not understand the one he announced as God to be other than the one who was born in the flesh, he added the term for birth, saying: “A son is born to us, a little one is given to us.” You see how many words the prophet used to show the reality of a bodily birth. For he called him both born and a little one, so that the term of littleness might express more clearly the meaning of a child that is born. Foreseeing without doubt this perversity of blaspheming heretics, the divine Spirit here showed to the whole world, by the very names of things, the God who was being born, so that even if a heretic sought to blaspheme he could find no room at all for blasphemy. “A son,” then, he says, “is born to us, a little one is given to us, whose rule is upon his shoulder; and his name will be called Messenger of great counsel, Mighty God, Father of the world to come, Prince of peace.” He taught that this little one who was born is both Prince of peace and Father of the world to come and Mighty God. Where is there room for evasion? This little one who was born cannot be separated from the God who was born in him: for the one he called born he named Father of the world to come; the one he called a little one he foretold to be Mighty God. Where can you turn, heretic? Everything is fenced in and shut; there is no way out anywhere. It remains that necessity at last begin to confess the error which the will refused to understand. But not content with these, which suffice, let us ask what the Holy Spirit said also through another prophet: “Will a man fasten his God,” he says, “that you fasten me?” So that the prophecies might be clearer, what the prophet sang of the Lord’s passion he foretold as if from the mouth of the very one of whom he spoke: “Will a man fasten his God, that you fasten me?” Does not the Lord our God seem to you, I ask, to have said this as if led to the cross: Why, I ask, do you not recognize me as your Redeemer? Why do you not know God clothed with flesh for us? Do you prepare death for your Savior? Do you lead the author of life to death? It is your God whom you hang up, your God whom you crucify. What error, I ask, is this, or what madness? “Will a man fasten his God, that you fasten me?” You see how this voice is in a way the voice of the very things that were done. Do you seek anything more express or more plain? You see how the holy testimonies have followed the Lord Jesus Christ, born in the flesh, from his very cradle, so to speak, up to the cross which he endured, since the one whom you read elsewhere to be God born in the flesh you see here as God fastened on the cross. And therefore by the prophet he is called God both there where he was born and, most plainly, there where he was crucified, so that the taking of flesh might in no way prejudice the dignity of the Godhead, nor the lowliness of the body or the insult of the passion break down the honor of the majesty; whereas the condescension of so humble a birth and the goodness of one who suffered so kindly ought rather to increase in us our love and worship of him, since it is the greatest and most monstrous crime that he should have less honor among us because he spent more love.

But leaving these things, which can in no way be fully unfolded because, like the immensity of his benefits, the telling of them has no limit, it is time to consult about him his strongest and plainest witness, the apostle Paul; for he can tell us everything about God most faithfully, from whose breast God always spoke. Thus, then, the chosen teacher of the Gentiles, sent to destroy the error of pagan superstition, testifies of the grace and coming of the Lord our God: “The grace of God our Savior,” he says, “has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly desires, we should live soberly and godly and justly in this world, awaiting the blessed hope and the coming of the glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.” “The grace of God our Savior,” he says, “has appeared.” He used a word well suited to show the coming of a new grace and a new birth. For by saying “has appeared” he expressed the rising of the new grace and the nativity, since the gift of the new grace began to appear from the moment God appeared born in the world. So with a worthy and fitting word, pointing as with a finger, he showed this light of the new grace. For that is most rightly said to have appeared which is shown by the sudden light, as it were, of an appearing; as we read in the Gospels that the star appeared to the Magi from the East, and in Exodus: “The angel,” it says, “appeared to Moses in the fire of the flame of the bush.” For in all these and other holy visions Scripture thought it right above all to use this word, saying that those things appeared which shone with unwonted brightness. So the apostle too, knowing the coming of the heavenly grace which appeared at the rising of the holy nativity, expressed it by the word for a shining appearance, so as to say that that appeared which beamed with the splendor of a new light. “The grace of God our Savior,” then, “has appeared.” Can you raise any objection here about an ambiguity of names, as if to say that Christ is one thing and God another, so as to pull the Savior away from the majesty of his name and separate the Lord from the Godhead? See, here the vessel of God speaks from God, and testifies by the plainest preaching that the grace of God appeared from Mary. And lest you perhaps say that it was not God who appeared from Mary, he at once added the name of Savior, so that you might believe to be God, born of Mary, the one whom you cannot deny was born Savior, according to that word: “For to you is born today a Savior.” O wonderful teacher, truly given to the Gentiles by God! Knowing that this madness of heretical depravity would come, which would turn the names of God into a quarrel and would not fear to cavil against God about his own names, he put the name of God first, lest the heretic separate the name of Savior from the Godhead: so that the name of God, set first, might claim for itself all the names that followed, and that no one, in the following words, might believe Christ to be a mere man whom he had learned from the very first word to be God. “Awaiting,” says the same apostle, “the blessed hope and the coming of the glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.” That teacher of divine wisdom surely saw that, against the insidious snares of devilish cunning, simple teaching alone does not suffice unless he armed the holy preaching of the faith with the defense of caution. And therefore, having put the name of God and Savior above, he added here “Jesus Christ,” lest you perhaps think the name of Savior alone not enough to signify the Lord Jesus Christ, and not understand that the same Jesus Christ is God whom you had learned to be God the Savior. What then does he say? “Awaiting,” he says, “the blessed hope and the coming of the glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.” Nothing of the names of our Lord is lacking here: you see here God and Savior and Jesus and Christ. But seeing all these, you perceive that all are in God. You have heard “God,” but “Savior”; you have heard “God,” but “Jesus”; you have heard that he is God, but “Christ.” What the Godhead has joined in unity cannot be separated by this difference of names. Whichever of them you inquire into, you find the same. The Savior is God, Jesus is God, Christ is God: all this that you hear is plural in naming but one in power; since the Savior is God and Jesus God and Christ God, it is plain to understand that all these are distinguished by name but joined in majesty. And when you hear most plainly that the one God is named in each, you can surely understand plainly that there is one God in all. And so you may no longer look for a difference of power from the unlikeness of the Lord’s names, nor make a difference of person from a variety of names. You may not say: “Christ was born of Mary, and not God,” for the apostle proclaims: “God.” You may not say: “Jesus was born of Mary, and not God,” for the apostle testifies: “God.” You may not say: “The Savior was born, and not God,” for the apostle affirms: “God.” There is nowhere for you to turn: whichever of the Lord’s names you take, what you name is God. There is nothing for you to say, nothing to bring forward, nothing to touch with wicked falsehood. In impious unbelief you can find something not to believe; in the opportunity for cavil you find nothing to deny.

Although we began a little above to speak of the divine and saving grace of our Lord, I want us to say something more on the same matter from the holy readings. We read in the Acts of the Apostles that the apostle James rebuked in this way those who, while receiving the gospel, still held that the yoke of the old law must be borne: “Why,” he says, “do you tempt God, to put a yoke on the necks of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, just as they are.” The apostle certainly says that the gift of this grace was given through Jesus. Answer me now, if you please: do you think this grace, which was given for the salvation of all, was given by a man or by God? If by a man, Paul, the vessel of God, cries out against you: “The grace of God our Savior has appeared”; for he teaches that this grace belongs to a divine gift, not to human weakness. And indeed even if holy testimony were not at hand, the truth of the thing itself would be testimony, because frail and earthly things cannot provide the possession of an everlasting and immortal good, nor can anyone give another what he himself lacks, or bestow an abundance of something of which he admits he suffers want. So you must not deny that the grace was given by God. God, then, is the one who gave it; and it was given through the Lord Jesus Christ; therefore the Lord Jesus Christ is God. And if he is, as he is, God, then she who bore God is Theotokos, that is, Mother of God; unless perhaps you want to go on to so ridiculous a contradiction of blasphemy as to deny that she of whom God was born is the Mother of God, when you cannot deny that the one who was born is God. But let us see what the gospel of God also thought of this same grace of our Lord. “Grace and truth,” it says, “came through Jesus Christ.” If Christ was a mere man, how did these come through Christ? Whence divine power in him, if, as you say, there was only the human condition in him? Whence heavenly bounty, if earthly poverty? For no one can bestow what he does not have. Therefore Christ, giving divine grace, had what he gave. For no one can sustain the difference between these things, so utterly opposed to one another, as to suffer at the same time the want of the needy and to possess the munificence of the giver. And therefore the apostle Paul, knowing that all the treasures of heavenly riches are in Christ, rightly writes to the churches: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” Having often taught already that the same one is God who is Christ, and that the whole majesty of the Godhead is in him, and that all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in him bodily, he rightly now prays for the grace of Christ alone without adding the name of God, because he knows that all the grace of God is contained in the grace of Christ. “The grace,” then, he says, “of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” I ask you, heretic, whoever you are: when Paul wrote this to the churches, what was he praying for those to whom he wrote? For “the grace,” he says, “of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.” If Jesus Christ was a mere man, then he too, wishing the grace of Christ to be given to the churches, was wishing the grace of a man to be given, and in saying “the grace of Christ be with you” he was saying this: the grace of a man be with you, the grace of flesh be with you, the grace of bodily weakness, the grace of human frailty. Or why would he name the grace of that person at all if he were wishing the grace of a man? For there was no reason for wishing where there was nothing to be wished for, nor should one pray that his grace come to them if he did not have, as you say, the substance of the very grace that was wished for. So you see that these things are utterly foolish and ridiculous; or rather not ridiculous, but to be wept over. For things that are ridiculous to some lighter people are to be wept over by the pious and faithful, because over the folly of your unbelief they shed tears of love, and over the senselessness of another’s impiety they have tears of their own piety. Let us then at last come to our senses and take breath, because this way of thinking lacks not only wisdom but also the Spirit, being plainly both empty of spiritual wisdom and a stranger to the Spirit of salvation.

But perhaps you say that this grace of our Lord Jesus Christ of which the apostle writes was not born with him but poured into him afterwards by an inflowing of the Godhead, because the Lord Jesus Christ himself, the man whom you call “mere,” is said by you not to have been born with God but to have been taken up by God afterwards, and therefore that grace was given to that man at the same time as the Godhead. Nor do we say anything other than that the divine grace came down with the Godhead, since divine grace belongs to God and is in a way the bounty of the Godhead itself and the gift of its generous favors. So the difference between us might perhaps be thought to be one of time rather than of substance, since the Godhead which we say was born with the Lord Jesus, you say was poured in afterwards. But the point is this: denying that the Godhead was born with the Lord, you cannot faithfully confess it afterwards either, because one and the same thing cannot be impious in part and be proved pious in part, and the same thing cannot be partly of faith and partly of faithlessness. First, then, I ask you this: do you call the Lord Jesus Christ, who was born of the virgin Mary, the son of man only, or the Son of God as well? For we, that is, the faith of all catholics, we all, I say, both believe and understand and know and confess both: that he is the son of man, because he was born of a human being, and the Son of God, because he was conceived of the Godhead. Do you, then, assert both, that is, that he is Son of God and of man, or only of man? If only of man, the apostles cry out against you, the prophets cry out against you, finally the Holy Spirit himself, by whom the conception was made, cries out against you. Your most shameless mouth is overwhelmed by all the testimonies of the divine letters, overwhelmed by the holy witnesses of the sacred volume, overwhelmed finally by the very gospel of God as by a divine hand; and that great Gabriel, who by the power of his word restrained the unbelieving voice in Zechariah, much more condemned with his own mouth your blasphemous and impious voice when he said to the virgin Mary, the Mother of God: “The Holy Spirit,” he says, “will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore also what will be born of you will be called holy, the Son of God.” You see that, before Jesus Christ became son of man according to the flesh, he was proclaimed Son of God; for the virgin Mary, who was to bear the Lord, conceived when the Holy Spirit came down into her and the power of the Most High worked with him. And by this you understand that the origin of our Lord and Savior is from the same source as his conception; and since he was born when the whole fullness of the Godhead came down upon the virgin, he could not have been son of man had he not first been Son of God. And therefore the angel of God, sent to announce the birth of the holy rising, after first telling the sacrament of the conception, gave a name to the very offspring, saying: “Therefore also what will be born of you will be called holy, the Son of God.” Jesus Christ, then, is the Son of God, because he was both begotten of the Godhead and conceived of the Godhead. And if the Son of God, then without doubt God. And if God, then not lacking the grace of God; for he never lacked that which he himself made: for “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

All grace, then, all virtue, all power, all Godhead, and finally the whole fullness of the Godhead and of his majesty were always with him and in him: whether in heaven or on earth, whether in the womb or at birth, nothing of God was ever lacking to God. For the Godhead was always with God, never separated from him by place or by time. For God is everywhere whole, everywhere perfect, not divided, not changed, not lessened, because nothing can ever be added to God or taken away; for as the Godhead has no increase, so it has no lessening. The same one, then, was on earth who was in heaven, the same in the lowly as in the highest, the same in the smallness of man as in the majesty of God. And therefore the apostle, naming the grace of Christ, rightly named the grace of God, because Christ was everything that God is: at the very conception of the man all the power of God, all the Godhead, all the fullness of the Godhead had come. For from the same source came the whole perfection of the Godhead in him as his origin. For that man was never without God, since he had received from God that very thing which he was. This first, then, like it or not, you cannot deny: that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God, since the archangel cries out in the Gospels: “What will be born of you will be called holy, the Son of God.” And this once established, know that whatever you read of Christ you read of the Son of God; whatever you read of the Lord or of Jesus belongs to the Son of God. For all these names of his name the Son of God; all these titles of his proclaim the Son of God. And therefore, recognizing in all of these, whichever you hear, a name of the Godhead, since you see that in all of them you must understand the Son of God, argue, if you please, how you can separate God from the Son of God.

Writing to the Romans, that divine teacher of the churches, when he was rebuking, or rather lamenting, the unbelief of the Jews, that is, of his brothers, used these words: “I could wish,” he says, “that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brothers, who are my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belong the adoption of sons and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the law and the worship and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever.” O the affection of a most faithful apostle and a most dutiful kinsman, who with inestimable love wishes to die both for his kinsmen as their neighbor and for his disciples as their teacher! And what, after all, was his reason for wishing to die? One only: that they might live. And in what did their life consist? In this, of course, as he himself says: that they should recognize as God the Christ born according to the flesh of their own flesh. And therefore the apostle grieved the more, because they did not understand the one born of Israel, whom they ought to love the more as sprung from their own. “Of whom,” he says, “is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever”: he says, that is, that the Christ born of them according to the flesh is God over all, blessed forever. You do not deny that Christ was born of them according to the flesh; but the same one who was born of them is God. Why do you go around? Why do you evade? The apostle says that Christ, born of Israel according to the flesh, is God: show when he was not. “Of whom,” he says, “is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all.” You see that, since the apostle has joined this in unity, God cannot be separated from Christ at all. For as the apostle proclaims that Christ is of them, so he affirms that God is in Christ. You must either deny both or confess both. Christ is said to have been born of them according to the flesh, but the same is proclaimed by the apostle God in Christ. Hence also elsewhere: “For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” This can in no way be divided one from the other. Either deny that Christ was born of them, or confess that God in Christ was born of the virgin, who, he says, “is God over all, blessed forever.”

The name of God alone could abundantly have sufficed for the faithful to indicate the majesty of the Godhead; but by adding “God over all, blessed,” he shut out the blasphemy of a faithless assertion, so that none of the impious might take the name of God, which is sometimes granted even to men temporarily by a gift of the divine dispensation, to the injury of the supreme Godhead and fit it to comparisons insulting to God; as, for example, what God says to Moses: “I have made you a god to Pharaoh,” or that word: “I said, You are gods,” since these plainly carry the meaning of a name granted. For where he says “I said,” it is not so much a name of power as the speech of the one speaking. And where he says “I have made you a god to Pharaoh,” it set forth not the Godhead of the receiver but the power of the giver. For since he said “I have made,” what is signified is surely the power of God who gave, not the nature of Godhead in him who received. But when it is said of our God and Lord Jesus Christ, “who is God over all, blessed forever,” the thing is at once proved in the word and the thing meant by the word is shown in the name, because the name of God in the Son of God is not the meaning of an adoption granted but the truth and property of nature.

“Therefore,” the same apostle says, “from now on we know no one according to the flesh; even if we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.” All the writings of the holy word agree well with one another, and in every part, even where they do not sound alike in the form of the words, they still agree in the force of the things; as in this saying: “Even if we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.” For the witness of the present saying confirms the earlier one, where he said: “Of whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever.” There he put “of whom is Christ according to the flesh,” here “even if we have known Christ according to the flesh”; there “who is God over all,” here “we no longer know Christ according to the flesh.” The form of the words is different, but the force of the thing is one. For the same one whom there he proclaims, born according to the flesh, to be God over all, here he affirms that he no longer knows according to the flesh: because the same one whom he had known born in the flesh he confesses to be God forever, and therefore he does not know him according to the flesh, because he is God over all, blessed forever. And so there “who is God over all” means “we no longer know Christ according to the flesh,” and here “we no longer know Christ according to the flesh” means “who is God, blessed forever.” So the apostolic preaching climbs, as it were, to a higher step of teaching; and though it agrees with itself in sense in both places, it confirms the sacrament of perfect faith with a more express statement, saying: “Even if we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer”; that is, because before we knew him as both man and God, and now only as God. For since the weakness of the flesh has ceased, we now know nothing in him but the power of the Godhead, because all in him is the power of the divine majesty, where the weakness of human frailty has ceased to be. By this testimony, then, he set out the whole mystery both of the flesh assumed and of the perfect Godhead. For in saying “even if we have known Christ according to the flesh” he spoke of the sacrament of God born in the flesh; and in adding “now we know him so no longer” he explained the force of the weakness laid aside. And so that knowing of the flesh belongs to the meaning of the man, and the not knowing to the honor of the Godhead. For this is to say: we knew Christ according to the flesh as long as there was something to be known according to the flesh; now we know him so no longer, since it has ceased to be. For the nature of the flesh has been transferred into a spiritual substance, and what had once been man’s has become wholly God’s. And therefore we do not know Christ according to the flesh, because, the bodily weakness having been swallowed up by the divine majesty, nothing has remained in the holy body from which weakness of flesh could be recognized in him. And thus whatever had before been of twofold substance has become of one power, since there is surely no doubt that Christ, who was crucified out of our weakness, lives wholly by the divine majesty.

Proclaiming this in the whole body of his writings, the apostle rightly says also, writing to the Galatians: “Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father.” You see how well the earlier and present passages agree. There he says: “Now we no longer know Christ according to the flesh”; here he says: “Not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ.” It is plain how here too he teaches the same as above. For by saying that he was sent not through man, he says this: we do not know Christ according to the flesh. And therefore: I was sent not through man but through Christ, because being sent through Christ I was sent not through man but through God. For the name of man no longer falls on him in whom the Godhead has claimed the whole. And therefore, having said that he was sent not from men nor through man but through Jesus Christ, he rightly added “and God the Father,” that is, indicating that he was sent by God the Father and by God the Son. In them, though because of the mystery of the holy and ineffable generation there are two persons, of the one begetting and of the one begotten, there is yet one power of God who sends. And therefore, saying that he was sent by God the Father and God the Son, he showed a number of two in the persons, but taught one power in the sending.

“But through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.” That excellent and admirable teacher, knowing that the Lord Jesus Christ must be proclaimed true man as well as true God, always proclaims the majesty of the Godhead in him in such a way as never to give up the confession of the incarnation: shutting out both the phantom of Marcion by a true incarnation and the poverty of Ebion by a perfect Godhead, so that through neither perversity of blasphemy should the Lord Jesus Christ be believed either a man entirely without God or God without man. Rightly, then, the apostle, proclaiming that he was sent by God the Son as well as by God the Father, at once added the confession of the Lord’s incarnation, saying: “who raised him from the dead,” teaching that the true body of the incarnate God was raised from the dead, according to that word: “even if we have known Christ according to the flesh,” rightly adding: “yet now we know him so no longer.” For he says that he knows him according to the flesh in this, that he was raised from the dead; but that he no longer knows him according to the flesh in this, that, the frailty of the flesh having ceased, he knows him to be only in the power of God: a faithful and well-qualified witness for proclaiming the Lord’s Godhead, who, chastened from heaven at the beginning of his calling, not only believed by the faith of his mind in the majesty of the Lord Jesus Christ risen from the dead but also proved it with his bodily eyes.

Hence also, speaking before King Agrippa and the other judges of the world, he says: “As I was going to Damascus with the authority and permission of the chief priest, at midday, O king, I saw on the road a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining around me and all who were with me; and when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad. And I said: Who are you, Lord? And the Lord said to me: I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.” You see that the apostle rightly said he no longer knew according to the flesh the one whom he had seen in such brightness of majesty. For when, in his very prostration, he had seen that radiance of divine light which he could not bear, this voice followed: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” And when he asked who it was, the Lord answered with this plain indication of his person: “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.” You, you, I say, heretic, I now question, you I address: do you believe the apostle about himself or not? Or, if you think that too little, do you believe the Lord about himself or not? If you believe, the question is finished; for you must believe what we believe. For with the apostle we say, “even if we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer”: we do not insult Christ, we do not separate the flesh from God, and we believe that the whole of what Christ is, is in God. If, then, you believe the same as we believe, you must confess the same sacraments of faith. But if you dissent from us, if you believe neither the churches nor the apostle nor finally God himself about himself, show us, in what the apostle saw, what is flesh and what is God. For I can distinguish nothing here. I see an ineffable illumination, I see an inexpressible brightness, I see a splendor unbearable to human frailty, the majesty of God shining with an inestimable light beyond what mortal eyes can bear. What division is there here, what separation? In the voice we hear Jesus, in the majesty we see God: what does this mean but that we should believe God and Jesus to be in one and the same substance? Yet I want to say something more to you about this same thing. Tell me, I ask, if what then appeared to the apostle in his ignorance should now appear to you as you persecute the catholic faith: if that brightness surrounded you, unexpecting and secure, and the splendor of immense light struck you down, shaken and terrified, and you lay in the darkness of your eyes and of your errors, darkness that an immense and unspeakable dread of mind increased; tell me, I beg, when the fear of imminent death was pressing on you and the terror of the majesty threatening from above was bearing down, if you too heard in such confusion of mind that name, worthy of your faithlessness: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” and when you asked who it was, the answer came from heaven: “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting”: what would you say? “I don’t know; I don’t yet fully believe; I want to deliberate further with myself whom I should think you to be who speak from heaven, who overwhelm me with the brightness of your Godhead, whose voice I hear and whose majesty I cannot bear. I must examine this matter, whether you are to be believed or not, whether you are Christ or God, whether God alone or in Christ, whether Christ alone or in God. I want this distinction subtly observed and carefully considered, what you are to be believed, what you are to be judged. For I do not want to lose anything of my duty, so that, while I despise you as a man, I should pay you any divine honor.” If, then, you lay prostrate on the ground as Paul, then apostle, lay, and, overshadowed by the brightness of the divine light, were breathing your last, perhaps you would say these things, perhaps you would yap these things with the chatter of idle talkativeness. But what are we to make of the fact that the apostle then thought otherwise? When he had fallen trembling and half dead, he did not think he should pretend any longer, did not think he should deliberate further, and it was enough for him that, admonished by unspeakable experience, he knew to be God the one whom in his ignorance he had believed to be a man. He did not pretend, did not delay, did not keep his wrongly conceived error suspended by faithless deliberation; but having heard from heaven the name of Jesus his Lord, he answered with the voice of one submissive as a servant, trembling as one scourged, devoted as one converted: “What shall I do, Lord?” And so by his most ready and devoted faith he at once earned this, that he would never lack the one whom he faithfully believed, and that he to whom he had passed over in heart should himself pass over into his heart, as the apostle himself says of himself: “Do you seek a proof of the Christ who speaks in me?”

Here, heretic, I want you to explain to me whether this one whom the apostle says spoke within him is man or God. If man, how could the body of another speak in his heart? If God, then Christ is no longer man but God; for since Christ spoke in the apostle, and none but God could speak in him, then it was Christ as God who spoke in him. So you see that nothing can now be said here, and no disjunction or division can be made between Christ and God, because God is wholly in Christ and Christ wholly in God. No separation can be admitted here, no rending; there is only one simple confession, only one pious, only one sound: to adore, to love, to worship Christ as God. But do you want to know still more fully and abundantly that there is no distance between God and Christ, and that the same one is to be understood to be God who is Christ? Hear the apostle speaking to the Corinthians: “For we must all,” he says, “be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive what belongs to the body, according to what he has done, whether good or evil.” And in another place, writing to the Roman church, he says: “We shall all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written: As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.” You see, then, that the judgment seat of God will be one and the same as that of Christ. Understand, then, without doubt that Christ is God, and where you see that the substance of Christ and of God is inseparable, recognize also that the person is inseparable; unless perhaps, because the apostle said in one letter that we must be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ and in another before the judgment seat of God, you will make two judgment seats and think that some are to be judged by Christ and others by God. But these are trifling and mad notions, madder than madmen’s. Recognize, then, the Lord of all; recognize the God of the universe; recognize in the judgment seat of God the judgment seat of Christ; recognize in the judgment seat of Christ the judgment seat of God; love life, love your salvation, love him by whom you were created, fear him by whom you will be judged. For like it or not, you must be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ; and, setting aside the blasphemy of impiety and the singsong of faithless words, if you think the judgment seat of God is other than that of Christ, you will come before the judgment seat of Christ and you will find by an unanswerable proof that the very judgment seat of God is that of Christ, and that in Christ the Son of God is the whole majesty of the Son of God and the power of God the Father. “For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son as they honor the Father.” For whoever denies the Father denies the Son also; “everyone who denies the Son does not have the Father; whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.” Learn, then, that the honor of the Father and the Son is inseparable, their dignity inseparable, and that the Son cannot be honored without the Father, nor the Father without the Son. But no one can honor God and the Son of God except in Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, because he cannot have the very spirit of honoring God except in the Spirit of Christ, as the apostle says: “But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him.” And again: “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is it that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who rose again.” You see, then, even if you do not wish it, that there is no difference at all either between the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ or between the judgment of God and the judgment of Christ. Choose which you prefer, for one or the other must happen: either you will understand by faith that Christ is God, or you will come to know God in Christ by condemnation.

But let us look at the rest that follows. Writing to the church of the Corinthians, the same Paul, teacher of all the churches, of whom we spoke above, said this: “The Jews,” he says, “ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles, but to those who are being saved, Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” O most valiant teacher of the faith! As he taught the churches, even in this place it seemed too little to him to say that Christ is God unless he had added “crucified,” so that, for the most open and strong teaching of the faith, he might proclaim the same one whom he called crucified to be the wisdom of God. So he used no subtlety or circumlocution of words, nor in preaching the Lord’s gospel was he ashamed of the name of the cross of Christ. And though it was a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles to hear of God born, to hear of God embodied, to hear of God suffering, to hear of God crucified, he did not, because of the impiety of the Jews’ stumbling, weaken the force of his own piety, nor, because of the unbelief of others’ foolishness, lessen the strength of his faith; but openly, steadfastly, bravely he proclaimed the one whom a mother had borne, whom men had killed, whom a lance had pierced, whom a cross had stretched out, to be the power and wisdom of God, “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.” Yet what was a stumbling block and foolishness to some was to others the power and wisdom of God. For with the difference of persons went a difference of understanding; and what a foolish distrust, without sound understanding and incapable of the true good, had denied, a wise faith felt within the very recesses of the soul to be holy and saving.

Tell me, then, heretic, enemy indeed of all, but chiefly of yourself, to whom the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ is both a stumbling block with the Jews and foolishness with the Gentiles, who reject the sacraments of true salvation both by the stumbling of the one and by the stupidity of the other: why was the preaching of the apostle Paul either foolishness to the pagans or a stumbling block to the Jews? Could it have offended men if he too had taught, as you assert, that Christ was a mere man? To whom could his birth, his passion, his cross, his death have been incredible or hard? Or what new or unheard-of thing would Paul’s preaching have contained if he had said that Christ was a man who suffered what the human condition endures everywhere every day among men? But this of course was what Gentile foolishness would not receive and what Jewish unbelief rejected: that the apostle said that Christ, whom they, like you, thought a mere man, was God. This of course was what the mind of the impious refused, what the ears of the faithless could not bear: that in the man Jesus Christ the birth of God was proclaimed, the passion of God asserted, the cross of God announced. This of course was hard, this incredible, because it was incredible to human hearing that something unheard of had happened to the divine nature. So you are safe with such an assertion and teaching, since your preaching will never be foolishness to the Gentiles or a stumbling block to the Jews: you will never be crucified with Peter by Jews and Gentiles, or stoned with James, or beheaded with Paul, for your preaching does not carry their offense. You assert that a mere man was born, a mere man suffered. You need not fear that they will harm you by persecution, since you confirm them by your preaching.

But let us see something more about this very thing. Christ, then, according to the apostle, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. What have you to answer? Where can you turn? You can neither get out from here nor go further. Christ is the wisdom of God and the power of God. He, I say, whom the Jews hunted down, whom the Gentiles mocked, whom you yourself persecute with them; he, I say, who is foolishness to the pagans and a stumbling block to the Jews and both to you; he, I say, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. What can you do? Perhaps you will stop your ears so as not to hear: the Jews too did this when the apostle preached. Do what you will, Christ is in heaven and in God, and with him and in him in the regions above, in whom he was also in the regions below. You cannot now persecute him with the Jews; but still you do the one thing you can: you persecute him in the faith, you persecute him in the church, you persecute him with the dart of an impious opinion, you persecute him with the sword of a depraved doctrine. Perhaps you do something more than some of the old Jews: you persecute Christ now, after even those who had persecuted him came to believe. But perhaps you think it a lesser crime because you can no longer lay hands on him. No less, I say, no less grievous to him is that persecution in which the impious persecute him in his own people. But the name of the Lord’s cross offends you: this has always offended the Jews too. You shudder to hear that God suffered: this too the error of the Gentiles mocked. I ask now, then, in what part you differ from them, since you agree with them in this perversity. But I, so far from lessening this preaching of the holy cross, this preaching of the Lord’s passion, increase it as far as my wish and my means allow. For I will proclaim the one who was crucified to be not only the power and wisdom of God, than which nothing is greater, but also the Lord of the whole Godhead and majesty; all the more because in this my speech is the teaching of God, as the apostle says: “We speak wisdom among the perfect: yet a wisdom not of this world nor of the rulers of this world, who are being destroyed; but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, which is hidden, which God predestined before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this world knew; for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of majesty; but as it is written: What eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him.” You see how briefly the apostolic word has said great things. He says that he speaks wisdom, but a wisdom which only the perfect know and the wise of the world do not know. For he says that this is the wisdom of God, covered by a divine mystery and predestined before all ages for the glory of the saints, and therefore known only to those who savor God but wholly unknown to the rulers of this world. And he added the reason by which to prove both things he had said: “For if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of majesty. But as it is written: What eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him.” You see, then, that the wisdom of God hidden in a mystery and predestined before the ages was unknown to those who crucified the Lord of majesty, but known to those who received him. He rightly says that the wisdom of God was hidden in a mystery, because no man’s eye could ever see, or ear hear, or heart think that the Lord of majesty would be born of a virgin, or come in the flesh, or be subjected to the suffering of every punishment and insult. But as no one could ever grasp these gifts of God by himself while they were hidden in a mystery, so blessed is he who has known them revealed; hence whoever have not recognized it must be counted among the rulers of the world, and whoever have recognized it among the wise of God. He, then, who denies God born in the flesh does not recognize him; therefore you too who deny do not recognize him. But do what you will, deny as impiously as you please, we believe the apostle more. And why do I say the apostle? We believe God more; for we believe him through the apostle, being sure that he spoke in the apostle. The divine word says that the Lord of majesty was crucified by the rulers of this world; you deny it. Those too who were crucifying him denied that they were crucifying God. So those who confess have their share with the apostle who confesses; you must have your portion with the persecutors. What more, then, can be said here? The apostle says that the Lord of majesty was crucified. Change this if you can; separate Jesus from God now, if you are able. You certainly cannot deny that Christ was crucified by the Jews; but it is the Lord of majesty who was crucified. Therefore you must either deny that Christ was fastened to the cross, or confess that God was fastened to it.

But perhaps it offends you that I speak so long with the testimonies of one apostle, chiefly Paul. He whom God chose is fit enough for me. For I am not ashamed to have as witness of my faith the one whom God willed to be teacher of the whole world. Yet to fall in with your wish in this, since you perhaps think I have no others whose testimonies I can use, hear Martha in the Gospel proclaiming the perfect sacrament of human salvation and everlasting blessedness. For what does she say? “Yes, Lord, I have believed that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who have come into this world.” Learn true faith from a woman, learn the confession of eternal hope. Yet you have great comfort: do not be ashamed to learn the sacrament of salvation from one from whom God did not refuse to receive testimony.

But if perhaps the authority of a greater person pleases you (though neither the person nor the sex of anyone whose confession of the sacrament gives authority ought to displease, because, however lowly someone’s condition or rank, the strength of faith knows no lessening), let us question not some beginner, a little boy whose training is raw, or a woman whose faith may perhaps seem a beginner’s, but that highest one, disciple among the disciples and teacher among the teachers, who, steering the helm of the Roman church, held the primacy of the priesthood as he did of faith. Tell us, then, tell us, we beg, Peter, prince of the apostles, tell how the churches ought to believe in God. For it is right that you, taught by the Lord, should teach us and open to us the door whose key you received. Shut out all who are digging under the heavenly house, and turn away those who try to enter through counterfeit holes and unlawful approaches, because it is certain that no one can enter the door of the kingdom except one for whom the key placed by you in the churches has unlocked it. Tell us, then, how we ought to believe in Jesus Christ and to confess the Lord of all. You will answer, no doubt: “Why do you consult me about how the Lord should be confessed, when you have how I myself confessed him? Read the Gospel, and you will not look for my person, since you have my confession; or rather you have my person there where you have my confession, because, since my person would have no authority without the confession, the confession itself is the authority of my person.” Tell us, then, evangelist, tell us the confession; tell the faith of the chief apostle: did he confess Jesus as a man only or as God, did he say there was only flesh in him or did he proclaim the Son of God? When the Lord Jesus Christ asked whom the disciples believed and confessed him to be, Peter, first of the apostles, answered, one for all; for the answer of one held what the faith of all held; but it was fitting that the first should answer, so that the order of answering might be the same as the order of honor, and that he who came first in age might come first in confession. What then does he say? “You are,” he says, “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” I must use a simple and rustic question to refute you, heretic. Tell me, I ask, who was that one to whom Peter answered so? You cannot deny it was Christ. I ask, then: the Christ whom you name, is he man or God? Man, no doubt, you say. For your whole heresy comes from this, that you deny Christ is the Son of God. And therefore you also say that Mary is Christotokos and not Theotokos, because she is mother of Christ and not of God. You assert, then, that Christ is only man, not God, and therefore son of man, not of God. What then did Peter answer to this? “You are,” he says, “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” This Christ whom you assert to be only son of man, he testifies to be Son of God. Whom do you want us to believe, you or Peter? I suppose you are not so shameless as to dare to put yourself before the first of the apostles, although what is there that you would not dare? Or how would you not despise an apostle, you who could deny God? “You are,” then, he says, “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Has this anything ambiguous or obscure in it? It is a simple and open confession only: it proclaims Christ the Son of God. Perhaps you deny that it was said? But the evangelist testifies to it. Or do you say that the apostle lies? But it is an abominable falsehood to accuse an apostle of falsehood. Or do you perhaps contend that this was said of some other Christ? But that is a new kind of monstrous invention. What remains, then? One thing only: that, since what is written is read and what is read is true, at last, constrained by force or by necessity, since you cannot build up falsehood, you should stop attacking the truth.

Yet since I have used the testimony of the chief apostle, by which he himself confessed the Lord Jesus Christ as God in his presence, let us see how the one whom he confessed approved his confession; for it is much more than what the apostle said if God himself praised his saying. When the apostle said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” what did the Lord and Savior answer? “Blessed are you,” he says, “Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but the Spirit of my Father who is in heaven.” If you dislike using an apostle’s testimony, use God’s. For by praising what was said, God added his own authority to the apostle’s saying, so that, though that saying came from the apostle’s mouth, God, who approved it, made it his own. “Blessed are you,” he says, “Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but the Spirit of my Father who is in heaven.” So in the apostle’s saying you see the testimony of the Holy Spirit, of the Son who was present, and of God the Father. What more, then, or what like it do you seek? The Son praised it, the Father was present, the Holy Spirit revealed it. The apostle’s saying, then, is the testimony of the whole Godhead, because a saying must have the authority of the one from whom it came. “Blessed,” then, he says, “are you, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but the Spirit of my Father who is in heaven.” If, then, flesh and blood did not reveal or inspire these things to Peter, you now understand who has inspired you. If the Spirit of God taught him who confessed Christ to be God, you see that you, who could deny it, have been taught by the spirit of a demon.

But what other words follow that saying of the Lord by which he praised Peter? “And I tell you,” he says, “that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” You see that Peter’s saying is the faith of the church. Therefore one who is not held by the faith of the church must be outside the church. “And to you,” says the Lord, “I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” This faith earned heaven; this faith received the keys of the heavenly kingdom. Understand what awaits you: you will not be able to enter the door of this key, you who have denied the faith of this key. “And the gates of hell,” he says, “will not prevail against you.” The gates of hell are the faith, or rather the faithlessness, of heretics. For as far as hell is from heaven, so far is the one who denies from the one who has confessed Christ as God. “Whatever you bind,” he says, “on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven also.” The perfect faith of the apostle received in a way a power of the Godhead, so that what he bound or loosed on earth would be bound or loosed in heaven. You, then, who come against the faith of the apostle, since you see that you are already bound on earth, it remains that you know you are bound in heaven too. But it would be long to go through each of these things, which by their number make a very long and copious discussion, even if they are mentioned briefly and concisely.

But I want to add to you one more testimony of an apostle, so that you may understand that what followed after the passion agrees with what was done before the Lord’s passion. When the Lord had come in among the gathering of his disciples through closed doors and wished to make the reality of his body plain to the apostles, the apostle Thomas touched his flesh, handled his side, examined the wounds, and found out fully the reality of the body that was shown him: and what did he cry out? “My Lord and my God.” Did he say what you say: a man and not God, Christ and not the Godhead? He surely touched the body of his Lord, and answered that he was God. Did he bring in any distinction of man and God, or did he call that flesh theodochos, as you say, that is, an image receiving the Godhead, or, after the manner of your impiety, say that the one he touched was to be worshiped not for his own sake but for the sake of the one he had received into himself? But perhaps the apostle of God did not know this subtlety of your distinction and lacked the elegance and difference of your judgment, being, of course, a rustic and inexperienced man, unacquainted with the art of dialectic, ignorant of philosophical disputation, one for whom the teaching of his Lord was abundantly enough and who knew nothing at all except what he had learned from the Lord’s teaching. And therefore his speech was heavenly doctrine, his faith a divine instruction: he had not learned, as you do, to separate the Lord from his body, and he did not know at all how to tear God away from himself; holy, sincere, pious, having a skilled innocence, an unharmed faith, an uncorrupted knowledge, a mind simple yet shrewd, a wisdom with perfect simplicity, free of all evil, ignorant of all corruption, immune from all heretical perversity, and one who expressed in himself the form of the divine teaching, all that he had learned and held. So he, rustic and unskilled as you perhaps think, now shuts you in with a short answer and crushes you with a few words. What, then, did the apostle Thomas touch when he came to handle God? Christ, no doubt. And what did he cry out? “My Lord and my God.” Go now, if you can, and separate Christ from God; change this saying, if you are able; bring dialectical disputation, bring worldly prudence and that foolish wisdom with its wordy cunning; turn yourself into every shape and draw in whatever you can by wit or by art. Say what you like, do what you like: you can find no way out of here unless you confess that what the apostle touched is God. And indeed, if you could in any way, you would perhaps like to change the telling of the gospel story, so that Thomas the apostle would not be read to have touched the Lord’s body nor to have called Christ the Lord God. But what is written in the gospel of God can in no way be changed. For “heaven and earth will pass away, but the words of God will not pass away.” For see, even now that Thomas the apostle, who then bore witness, cries out to you: “Jesus whom I touched is God; he whose limbs I handled is God. I did not hold something bodiless, or feel something that cannot be touched; I did not touch a spirit with my hand, so that I could be believed to have said only of that, ‘He is God.’ For a spirit, according to my Lord’s word, does not have flesh and bones. I touched the body of my Lord, I handled flesh and bones, I put my fingers into the place of the wounds, and of Christ my Lord whom I had handled I cried out: My Lord and my God. For I do not know how to make a difference between Christ and God; I will not put sacrilegious opinions between Jesus and God; I do not know how to tear my God away from himself. Away from me, whoever thinks otherwise, whoever speaks otherwise. I have known Christ to be nothing other than God. This I held with my fellow apostles, this I handed on to the churches, this I preached to the nations, this I cry out to you too: Christ is God, Christ is God.” A sound mind thinks nothing else, a sound faith says nothing else; the Godhead cannot be torn from itself. And since whatever Christ is, is God, nothing can be found in God but God.

What do you say now, heretic? Are these testimonies of faith enough even for supreme unbelief, or must something more be added? And what can be added after the prophets and the apostles, unless perhaps, as the Jews once demanded, you too demand that a sign from heaven be given you? But to you who ask this, the answer then given to them must be given: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, and no sign will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” And surely this sign could have sufficed you, even along with the Jews who crucified him, so that you might believe in our Lord God taught by this one thing, by which even those who had persecuted him came to believe. Yet since we have mentioned a heavenly sign, I will show you from heaven a sign such that not even the demons ever contradicted it, when, compelled by the very necessity of the truth, though they saw that Jesus was in a body, they still cried out that he was what he was, God. What, then, does the evangelist say of the Lord Jesus Christ? “When he had been baptized,” he says, “he went up at once from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit coming down like a dove and coming upon him. And behold, a voice from heaven, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” What do you say to this now, heretic? Does the saying displease you, or the person of the speaker? The meaning of the address certainly needs no interpretation, nor does the dignity of the one speaking need any commending of the words: it is God the Father who spoke; what was said is plain. Will you be able to utter so shameless or so sacrilegious a word as to say that God the Father is not to be believed even about his only-begotten Son? “This,” then, he says, “is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” But perhaps you will try to say, such is your madness, that this was said of the Word, not of Christ. Tell me, then, who was it that was being baptized? The Word or Christ? Flesh or spirit? You certainly cannot deny that it was Christ. That man, then, born of man and God, conceived when the Holy Spirit came down into the virgin and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, and so son of man and of God: he, as you cannot deny, was baptized. If, then, he was baptized, he was also the one named, because the one named was surely the one who was baptized. “This,” he says, “is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Can anything be said more meaningfully or more expressly? Christ was baptized, Christ went up from the water, when Christ was baptized the heavens were opened, for Christ the dove came down, upon Christ the Holy Spirit stood in bodily form, Christ the Father named. If you dare deny that this was said of Christ, it remains for you to contend that Christ was not baptized, nor did the Spirit come down, nor did the Father speak. But the truth itself presses and bears down on you, so that, even if you will not confess it, you still cannot deny it. For what does the evangelist say? “When he had been baptized he went up at once from the water.” Who was baptized? Christ, surely. “And behold,” he says, “the heavens were opened to him.” To whom but the one who was baptized? To Christ, surely. “And he saw the Spirit of God coming down like a dove and coming upon him.” Who saw? Christ, of course. On whom did it come down? On Christ, surely. “And a voice came from heaven, saying.” About whom? About Christ, of course. For what follows? “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” So that it might be shown for whom all those things had been done, the voice followed, saying: “This is my beloved Son.” That is to say: this is the one for whom all these things were done; for this is my Son. For him the heavens were opened, for him my Spirit came, for him my voice was uttered: for this is my Son. In saying, then, “This is my Son,” whom did he mean? Surely the one whom the dove touched. Whom, then, did the dove touch? Christ, of course. Therefore Christ is the Son of God. I have kept my promise, I think. You see, then, heretic, a sign given you from heaven, indeed not one but many, each unique. For you have one in the opening of heaven, another in the descent of the Spirit, a third in the voice of the Father. All of these most plainly declare Christ to be God, because the unbarring of the heavens shows him God, the descent upon him of the Holy Spirit proves him God, and the Father’s address confirms him God. For heaven would not have opened except in honor of its Lord, nor would the Spirit have come down in bodily form except upon the Son of God, nor would the Father have declared him Son unless he were truly Son; especially with these signs of divine birth, which not only confirm the truth of pious faith but also exclude the depravity of impious opinion. For with the ineffable magnificence of the divine saying, when the Father had expressly and meaningfully said “This is my Son,” he added also what followed, namely “beloved” and “in whom I am well pleased.” Surely, as through prophecy he had already proclaimed him Mighty God and great God, so here, saying “my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” he added to the name of his own Son the name also of a Son beloved and well-pleasing to him, so that the addition of the names might signify the property of the divine nature and that this might belong in a special way to the honor of the Son of God which had befallen no man at all. And so, just as these things were proper and peculiar in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, that the heavens were opened, that God the Father in the sight of all touched him, as it were with his own hand, through the dove that came and stood by him, and pointed him out, as it were with his finger, saying “This is my Son,” so this too was proper and unique to him, that he is named in a special way beloved and in a special way well-pleasing to the Father, so that special additions might show the special meaning of his nature, and the property of the names might confirm the property of the only-begotten Son, which the honor of the signs before it had already proved. But let this now be the end of this book. For this saying of God the Father cannot be increased or equaled by human words. For us God the Father himself is by himself a fit enough witness of our Lord Jesus Christ his Son, saying: “This is my Son.” If you think these words of God the Father are to be contradicted, you must be contradicted by him who, by the plainest declaration, made him known to the whole world as his Son.

Now that three books have been completed, like most faithful and richly furnished witnesses, since their truth has been enriched not only by human but also by divine testimonies, they could indeed abundantly suffice us for the proof of our case through divine authority, since divine authority by itself suffices for its own cause. Yet because the whole series of the holy volumes is full of these testimonies, where there are as many witnesses as sentences, or rather where holy Scripture itself is in a way one single testimony of the divine mouth, we have thought some things should still be added, not because proof requires it but because of the wealth and abundance of material, so that whatever was not necessary for defense might all serve for ornament. Since, then, in the earlier books we proved the Lord Jesus Christ to be God while he was in the flesh and on earth, not only by prophetic and apostolic testimonies but also by those of the Gospels and of angels, let us now show that he who was born in the flesh was always God even before he took flesh; so that you may understand, from the testimonies of the divine volumes agreeing and as it were crying out together, that you must believe the same one to be both man and God after his bodily birth whom you believe to be God alone before his bodily birth; and that the one who after the virgin’s childbearing was God in the body is the same who before the virgin’s childbearing was God the Word. Learn, then, first from the apostle, the teacher of the whole world, that he who is without beginning, God, the Son of God, was made son of man at the end of the world, that is, in the fullness of times. For he says: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.” Tell me now, then: before the Lord Jesus Christ was born of his mother Mary, did God have a Son or not? You cannot deny that he had. For the Son is never without the Father, nor the Father without the Son, because, just as the Son is so called from the Father, so the Father is so called from the Son.

You see, then, that when the apostle says “God sent his Son,” his own, surely, his own, to use the apostle’s very words, God sent his own Son. For he neither sent some other’s son, since he is said to have sent his own, nor could he have sent at all if there was no one to be sent. “He sent,” then, he says, “his Son, made of a woman.” Therefore, because he sent him, he sent one who existed; and because he sent his own, he sent not another’s but his own. Where now, then, is that argument of earthly cunning of yours: “No one gives birth to one older than herself”? Is not the Lord older than Mary? Is not the Son of God older than the daughter of man? Is not God, finally, older than man himself, since surely no man exists except from God? You see, then, that Mary bore not only one older than herself, not only, I say, one older than herself, but her own maker; and bringing forth her begetter she became parent of her parent. For as ready as it was for God to give birth to man, so ready was it for him to be born himself; as easy as it was to make man be born, so easy was it for himself to be born of man. For the power of God is not hemmed in within his own person, so that what is lawful for him in all things should not be lawful for him in himself; and he who in the nature of his Godhead has it that as God he can do all things should not have it in his own person alone that he can be God in man. Setting aside and rejecting, then, the trifling and perishable stupidities of earthly argument, we must believe the simple testimony and naked truth alone, and give credit about God only to those witnesses whom God sent and in whom he himself, so to speak, preached about himself. For it is right that we believe him about the knowledge of himself, since everything we know about him is his; for God could not be known by man unless he himself had given the knowledge of himself. And therefore it is just that we believe him entirely about what we know of him, since all that we know is his; because if we do not believe him from whom we know, the result is that we know nothing at all, while we do not believe him through whom we know.

Since, then, the preceding testimony made plain that God sent his Son, and that he who was always Son of God became son of man, let us see whether the same apostle said anything like this testimony elsewhere, so that the truth, already shining of itself, may shine more with a doubled light of testimonies. The same apostle, then, says: “God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” You surely see that the apostle did not say anything by chance or with an unconsidered word, such that he would let pass what he had once said, since chance or thoughtlessness could not befall one in whom the fullness of divine counsel and speech dwelt. What, then, does he say? “God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” He repeats the same, he drives home the same, saying: “God sent his Son.” That outstanding and admirable teacher, knowing that the whole sacrament of the catholic faith is contained in this, that the Lord should be believed to have been born in the flesh and the Son of God to have been sent into this world, cries out this again and again, saying: “God sent his Son.” Nor is it surprising if he, specially sent to preach the gospel of the coming of God, proclaimed it so, since even before the law the lawgiver himself cried out, saying: “I pray, Lord, provide another whom you may send,” which is read much more plainly in the books of the Hebrews: “I pray, Lord, send him whom you will send.” The holy prophet, having in himself the longing of the whole human race, was asking God the Father, as with the voices of all human flesh, that the one who was to be sent by the Father for the redemption and salvation of all might be sent as quickly as possible, saying: “I pray, Lord, send him whom you will send.” “God sent,” then, he says, “his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” Rightly, when he said that he was sent in the flesh, he excluded from him the sin of the flesh. For “God sent,” he says, “his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh”; that is, so that in the true taking of flesh it might be recognized that there was no reality of sin, and that as far as the body is concerned the reality might be understood, as far as sin is concerned only the likeness of sin. For since all flesh is sinful, but he had flesh without sin, he had in himself the likeness of sinful flesh while he was in the flesh, but lacked the reality of sin, because he was without sin. “God sent,” then, he says, “his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.”

Do you want to know how rightly the apostle preached this? Hear how it flowed into the apostle’s mouth as if from the very mouth of God, when the Lord says: “For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” See, the Lord himself, as you see, declares that he was sent by God the Father for the salvation of the human race. But if you think it should be declared more plainly which Son God sent to save men (although his own and only-begotten Son is only one, and when he is said to have sent his Son, he is shown to have sent his only-begotten), hear the prophet David pointing out most plainly the one who was sent for human salvation. “He sent,” he says, “his Word, and healed them.” Can you turn this to the flesh, so as to say that only a man was sent by God to heal the human race? Surely you cannot. For the prophet David, with all the holy Scriptures, cries out against you, saying: “He sent his Word, and healed them.” You see, then, that the Word was sent to heal men; because, though healing was given through Christ, still it was the Word of God in Christ that healed all things through Christ. And so, Christ and the Word of God having been united through the sacrament of the incarnation, Christ and the Word of God became one Son of God out of both. The apostle John, wishing to declare this openly, said: “God sent his Son as Savior of the world.” You understand how he joined God and man by an inseparable bond. For Christ, who was born of Mary, is without doubt called Savior, according to that word: “For to you is born today a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” But here he names as Savior that very Word of God which was sent, saying: “God sent his Son as Savior of the world.”

It is plain, then, that through the sacrament of the Word of God united with man, the Word that was sent to save is called Savior, and the Savior born in the flesh is called Son of God through his fellowship with the Word; and so, the majesty of each name being undivided, because God is united with man, whatever is man and God is wholly called God. And therefore the same apostle rightly added: “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and the love of God is perfected in him.” He declares that one truly believes, he asserts that one is full of divine love, who believes that Jesus is the Son of God; and he testifies that the Son of God is the Word of God; and so he wants the only-begotten Word of God and Jesus Christ the Son of God to be understood as wholly one and the same. But do you want to know more fully that, although Christ according to the flesh was truly born a man of man, yet because of the ineffable unity of the sacrament by which man is united with God there is no distance at all between Christ and the Word? Hear the Lord’s gospel, or rather hear God himself speaking of himself: “This,” he says, “is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Above you heard that the Word of God was sent to heal men; here you hear that the one who was sent is Jesus Christ. Separate this, if you can, when you see that the unity of Christ and the Word is so great that not only is the Word said to be united with Christ, but because of that very unity Christ is now said to be the Word.

But perhaps you think this does not shine out enough, not because it shines too little, but because darkened unbelief always makes darkness for itself even in the light. Hear, then, the apostle embracing in a few words the whole sacrament of the Lord’s unity. “One,” he says, “is our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” Good Jesus, how great is the authority in your words! For what your servants say through you is yours. See how much this saying of the apostle embraces in a few words. “One,” he says, “is our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” Did he use any roundabout words to preach the sacrament of so great a mystery, or treat what he wanted us to understand in the narration of a long speech? “One,” he says, “is our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” With a simple and brief utterance he taught the secret of so great a majesty, with this confidence: he knew that his speech in the matter of God needed no long arguments, and that the Godhead gives credibility to his words. For when the proof lies in the authority of the speaker, showing the thing alone suffices to confirm what is said. “One,” then, he says, “is the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” Consider where you have read of the Word of the Father what you read of Christ. “All things,” says the gospel, “were made through him, and without him nothing was made.” The apostle says that all things are through Christ; the gospel says that all things are through the Word. Do the holy writings contradict each other? Surely not; but both the apostle, who said that all things were created through Christ, and the evangelist, who related that all things were made through the Word, want one and the same to be understood. Hear, I say, what God the Word of God declared about himself. “No one,” he says, “has ascended into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven.” And again: “What if you see,” he says, “the Son of Man ascending where he was before?” He said that the Son of Man had been in heaven; he related that the Son of Man came down from heaven. What is it? What are you muttering? Deny this, if you can. But you ask for the reason of the saying? I will not give it for now. God said it; God spoke: for me his word is the highest reason. I put away arguments, I put away disputations: the person of the speaker alone suffices me for belief. I may not doubt the truth of the saying, I may not deliberate. Why should I ask how what God said is true, when I ought not to doubt that what God has said is true? “No one,” he says, “has ascended into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven.” Surely the Word of the Father was always in heaven. And how did he relate that the Son of Man was always in heaven? Understand, then, that he taught that the one who was always Son of God is Son of Man, since he affirms that the one who lately came to be son of man was always in heaven. To this is added something greater: that the same Son of Man, that is, the Word of God, who he said had come down from heaven, he testifies to be in heaven even when he is speaking on earth. For “no one,” he says, “has ascended into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven.” Who, I ask, is it who says this? Christ, surely. And where was he when he was speaking? On earth, of course. And how does he testify both that he came down from heaven when he was born and that he is in heaven while he speaks, and say that he himself is the Son of Man, when surely none but God could come down from heaven, and while speaking on earth he could not be in heaven except by the infinity of God? Notice at last, then, and grasp that the Son of Man is the same as the Word of God, because he is son of man in that he is truly born of man, and Word of God in that the same one who speaks on earth remains always in heaven. And so it belongs to the human birth that he truly calls himself son of man, and to the divine infinity that he never at all withdraws from heaven. And therefore the apostle rightly taught, after the pattern of the divine words (“For he who descended,” he says, “is the same also who ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”), that the one who descended is the same who ascended. But none could come down from heaven but the Word of God, who, “being in the form of God, emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, made in the likeness of men, and found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even the death of the cross.” The Word of God, then, came down from heaven, and the Son of Man ascended; yet he says that the one who ascended is the one who descended. So you see that the Son of Man is the same as the Word of God.

And therefore, following the teaching of the divine word, we must now say fearlessly and without hesitation both that the Son of Man came down from heaven and that the Lord of majesty was crucified; because, according to the sacrament of the body he took, the Son of God became son of man, and in the son of man the Lord of majesty was crucified. And why say more? It would be long to say much about each point; for the day will fail me if I try to gather or explain everything that can be brought forward on this matter. For one who wished to do so would have to turn over and reread the whole of Scripture. For what is there that does not concern this, since everything was written for its sake? So some things must be said briefly and concisely, so that they can be said at all, and some listed rather than explained, and losses, so to speak, redeemed by losses, since it is fitting to pass over some things quickly so that we need not keep silent about nearly all. “The Son of Man,” then, says the Savior in the gospel, “came to save what was lost”; and the apostle: “It is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the first”; and John the evangelist too: “He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.” You see, then, that Scripture proclaims in one place that the Son of Man, in another that Jesus Christ, in another that the Word of God came into the world. Understand, then, that there is a difference of names, not of things, and that under the different form of the names there is one power. For although the one who came into the world is named now Son of Man, now Son of God, that is, the Word, yet one is meant under both names.

For since, according to the evangelist, the one through whom the world itself was made came into the world, and the one who is God, Creator of the world, became son of man, it makes no difference what he is named in each case, since he is understood to be God in all. For his condescension or his will does not prejudice his Godhead; rather it proves the Godhead itself the more, because whatever he willed, that he was. Therefore, because he willed it, he came into the world; because he willed it, he was born man; and because he willed it, he was called son of man. For all these, as they are names, so they are powers of God. Difference of name did not lessen the force of power in him. Whatever he has been called, in all he is one. Though there may be some difference in the form of the names, in the force of the names there is only one majesty.

But since so far we have used chiefly the witnesses of the Gospels and the apostles, as new ones, let us now bring forward old ones from the prophets, mixing new with old at times, so that all may understand that holy Scripture, with its whole body, as it were, cried out as with one mouth that the Lord would come in the flesh. That outstanding and admirable prophet Jeremiah, then, rich both in the gift of God and in testimony, to whom alone almost it fell to be sanctified before he was born, says: “This is our God; no other will be reckoned beside him. He found every way of discipline and gave it to Jacob his servant and to Israel his beloved. After this he was seen on earth and lived among men.” “This,” then, he says, “is our God.” You see that God is shown by the prophet as with a pointing hand and indicated as with a signifying finger. For “this,” he says, “is our God.” Tell me, then: what God was the prophet then showing by these signs and indications? The Father? And what need was there to show him whom all believed they knew? For the Jews, who lived under the law of God, were not then ignorant of God. But surely the aim was that they should know the Son of God as God. And therefore the prophet rightly said that the one who had found all discipline, that is, had given the law, would be seen on earth, that is, would come in the flesh: so that, since the Jews did not doubt that the one who had given the law was God, they might recognize that the one who would come in the flesh was God, when they heard that the one whom they believed to be God the lawgiver would be seen among men by taking human flesh; the same one also promising his own coming through the prophet: “For I myself who spoke, behold, I am here.” “No other,” then, says holy Scripture, “will be reckoned beside him.” Beautifully here the prophet, foreseeing perverse doctrines, shut out every thought of heretical perversity, saying: “No other will be reckoned beside him.” For this is the one born of God into God, whose command the work of the universe followed, whose will is the origin of things, whose order is the fabric of the world, who spoke all things and they were made, commanded all things and they were created. This, then, is the one who spoke to the patriarchs, dwelt in the prophets, was conceived of the Spirit, born of the virgin, seen in the world, lived among men, nailed the bond of sins to the wood of the cross, triumphed in himself over the powers hostile and opposed to us, killed death, gave all the faith of rising again, and by the glory of his own body destroyed the corruption of human flesh. These things, then, are peculiar to the one Lord Jesus Christ; and therefore no other will be reckoned beside him, because he alone, in this uniqueness of glory and blessedness, is God born of God. This, then, was the purpose of the prophetic teaching at that time: that the only-begotten Son of God the Father should be learned by all, and that, hearing that no other god is reckoned beside the Son, they should recognize that there is one God in Father and Son. “After this,” he says, “he was seen on earth and lived among men.” You see that here the coming and birth of the Lord are plainly indicated. For was the Father, who is read to be visible to the Son alone, ever seen on earth, or born in the flesh, or did he live among men? Surely not. You understand, then, that all these things were said of the Son of God. For since the prophet said that God would be seen on earth, and no other than the Son was seen on earth, the prophet without doubt said this of no other than the one of whom the event afterwards proved it was said. For since he said that God would be seen, he could truly say this of no other than the one who was truly seen afterwards. But enough of this. Let us now pass to other things. “The labor of Egypt,” says the prophet Isaiah, “and the merchandise of Ethiopia, and the Sabeans, tall men, will pass over to you and be your servants; they will walk after you, bound in fetters, and they will worship you and pray to you, for God is in you, and there is no God besides you. For you are our God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel, the Savior.” How well the divine writings always agree with one another! For the former prophet said “This is our God,” this one “You are our God.” In the one is divine teaching, in the other human confession. The one set forth the person of a master teaching, the other the person of a people confessing. For picture Jeremiah the prophet teaching daily in the church, as he does, and saying of the Lord Jesus Christ, “This is our God”: what else would the whole church answer, as it does, than what the other prophet said to the Lord Jesus, “You are our God,” so that past ignorance can rightly be joined to present confession, the people saying: “You are our God, and we did not know it”? For those who before, held by demonic superstitions, did not know God, can rightly say, once converted to the faith: “You are our God, and we did not know it.”

But if you would rather have this proved to you from the person of the Jews, consider the peoples of the Jews here and there turning to the faith and recognizing the Lord after that unhappy ignorance and impious persecution, and see whether they can rightly say: “You are our God, and we did not know it.” But I add something else, so as to prove this to you not only from Jews who confess but also from those who deny. Ask the Jews who still persist in sacrilege whether they know or believe in God: they will certainly confess that they know and believe. But ask, on the other hand, whether they believe in the Son of God: they will surely deny and blaspheme. You see, then, that the prophet spoke of the one whom the Jews have always not known and still do not know, not of the one whom they think they believe and confess. And therefore those from among the Jews who come to faith after ignorance can rightly say: “You are our God, and we did not know it.” For those who believe after ignorance rightly say that they did not know the one whom, while still not believing, they contend they do not know. For it is plain that, confessing after their ignorance, they say they formerly did not know the one whom, while denying, they still do not know.

“The labor,” he says, “of Egypt and the merchandise of Ethiopia and the Sabeans, tall men, will pass over to you.” No one doubts that in these names of different nations the coming of the nations that would believe is signified. And you cannot deny that the nations passed over to Christ, since, having taken the name of Christians, they passed over to the Lord Jesus Christ not only by faith but by the very name; for since they are called what they are, what was the work of faith became the sacrament of the name. “To you,” he says, “they will pass over, and they will be yours, and they will walk after you bound in fetters.” As there are bonds of constraint, so there are bonds of love, according to what the Lord says: “I drew them with the bonds of love.” For truly great are these bonds and of an unspeakable love, so that those who are bound by them rejoice in their chains. Do you want to know that this is true? Hear the apostle rejoicing and exulting in his bonds when he says, “I therefore, a prisoner in the Lord, beseech you,” and this: “I beseech you, being such a one as Paul the old man, and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus.” See how much he rejoiced in the merit of his bonds, by whose example he even called others on. And there is no doubt that in those in whom there is one love of the Lord there is one affection for the Lord’s binding, according to that word: “The multitude of those who believed had one heart and one soul.” “They will worship you,” he says, “and pray to you, for God is in you, and there is no God besides you.” The apostle plainly expounded the prophet’s saying when he said: “For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” “In you,” then, he says, “is God, and there is no God besides you.” Rightly the prophet, saying “God is in you,” showed not only the one who was present but also the one who was in the one present: distinguishing the one dwelling from the one in whom he dwelt by indicating the natures, not by denying the unity.

“You are,” he says, “God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel, the Savior.” Although Scripture has already shown by many clear signs of whom it was speaking, it still expressed the name of Christ most plainly in the name of Savior; for the Savior is the same as Christ, as the angel says: “For to you is born today a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” For no one doubts that Jesus in Hebrew means Savior, as the angel testifies to the holy virgin Mary, saying: “And you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” And lest you perhaps say that he was proclaimed Savior in the way it was said of others, “And the Lord raised up for them a savior, Othniel the son of Kenaz,” and again, “And he raised up for them a savior, Ehud the son of Gera,” he added: “for he will save his people from their sins.” But it is not within human power to redeem a people from the captivity of sin; that is possible only for the one of whom it was said: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sin of the world.” For the others saved a people not their own but God’s, and not from sins but from enemies.

“You are,” then, he says, “our God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel, the Savior.” Who do you think says this more, to whom do you judge it more fitting, Jews or Gentiles? If Jews, the Jews certainly did not know Christ, according to that word: “But Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me,” and that: “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.” If Gentiles, it is plain that the Gentile world, held by idols, did not know Christ, though it did not know the Father either; yet even if it knows him now, it knows him only through Christ. You see, then, that whether the believing people be from the Gentiles or from the Jews, each rightly says for itself: “You are our God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel, the Savior”; because both the Gentiles, worshiping idols before, did not know God, and the Jews, denying the Lord, did not know the Son of God. And so both the one and the other rightly say of Christ: “You are our God, and we did not know it”; because those who did not believe did not know God, as those who denied the Son of God did not know him. If, then, Christ is to be believed as the truth speaks, as the Godhead declares, as finally Christ himself, who is both, proclaims, why, unhappy madness, do you strive to put something between Christ and God? Why do you seek to separate his body from the Son of God and try to divide God from himself? You tear apart what is united and separate what is joined. Believe the Word of God about God; for there is no way you could better confess the Godhead of God than by confessing it in the very words by which the Godhead taught itself. Know, then, according to the prophet, that the Lord himself is God, who found every way of discipline, who was surely both seen on earth and lived among men. He brought the light of faith into the world; he showed the light of salvation. For “God is the Lord, and he has shone upon us.” Believe him, then, love him, confess him; because when, as it is written, “every knee shall bow to him, of things in heaven, on earth and under the earth, and every tongue shall confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father,” like it or not, you will not be able to deny that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. For this is the perfect strength of a perfect confession: always to confess God and the Lord Jesus Christ in the glory of God the Father.

We said in the first book that that heresy, the disciple and imitator of the Pelagian heresy, tried and fought in every way to have the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, born of the virgin, believed to be only a mere man, who, having afterwards taken the way of virtue, obtained by living piously and devoutly that through this holiness of life he became worthy to have the divine majesty join itself to him; and so, the dignity of his holy origin wholly shut out from him, only the choice of merits was left to him. They strove and labored for this, that, with him sent as it were among the common people of all and gathered as it were into the crowd of the human race, they might say that all men can earn by a life of good deeds whatever he earned by living well: a pestilent and deadly assertion, which, taking from God what is true and promising men what is false, is guilty in both respects of a wicked and damnable lie, since it both does God the injury of sacrilege and leads men into the hope of a false presumption, by a most perverse and impious assertion giving mortality what it did not have and taking from God what he had. From this deadly and ruinous depravity, then, this recent heresy which has now arisen, stirring up the ashes, as it were, to new life, has kindled a new fire from the old embers: for it asserts that the Lord Jesus Christ was born a mere man. And therefore what need is there for us to ask whether in its consequences there is the perversity that is in the very head of this one crime? It is surely superfluous to wait to see in its later parts what it is, when at its very beginning it has left no reason for waiting at all. For what reason is there to inquire whether, like the earlier heresy, it promises the same things to man, when, which is a most monstrous crime, it takes the same things from God, so that it is almost impious, when we see what has gone before, to ask what follows? As if any reason could be brought forward in the consequences by which one who has denied God could prove himself not impious. The new heresy, then, as we have often said, says that the Lord Jesus Christ was born of the virgin only a mere man, and that therefore Mary should be called Christotokos, not Theotokos, because she is the mother of Christ, not of God. Moreover, to its sacrilegious assertion it adds arguments as perverse as they are trifling, saying: “No one gives birth to one older than herself.” As if the birth of the only-begotten of God, foretold by the prophets, announced beforehand from the ages, were to be handled or judged by human reasonings! Or as if the virgin Mary herself, heretic, whoever you are, whom you slander about her childbearing, had done and accomplished what was done by her own powers, so that human weakness could be objected against her in so great a matter and so great a work! If, then, anything in this matter was done by the work of man, look for human reasons; but if all that was done is the power of God, why do you look at human impossibility where you see divine effecting? But of this more fully later. Now let us follow out what we began to set out a little before, so that all may know that you are looking for fire in Pelagian ashes and stirring up old embers with new blasts of sacrilege.

You say, then, that Christ was born a mere man. This surely is what that heresy of Pelagian impiety, which we plainly showed in the first book, also proclaimed: that Christ was born a mere man. You add, moreover, that the Lord of all himself, Jesus Christ, should be called a theodochos image, that is, not God but the receiver of God; that is, so that you think he should be honored not for his own sake, because he is God, but because he receives God into himself. This too that heresy I mentioned before asserted: that Christ is to be worshiped not for his own sake, as being God, but because by good and pious acts he earned to have God in himself. So you see that you are vomiting Pelagian poison and hissing with a Pelagian spirit. Hence it is fitting that you should seem not so much to be judged as already judged, because, since you hold the same error, you must also be believed to deserve the same condemnation: not to mention for now that, by comparing God to an imperial statue, you have burst out into such impiety of sacrilege and blasphemy that you seem quite rightly to have outdone in this madness even Pelagius himself, who outdid almost everyone in impiety.

You say, then, that Christ should be called a theodochos image, that is, honored not for his own sake, because he is God, but because he has received God into himself. In this way, then, you assert that there is no difference between him and all the holy men who have been, since all holy men surely had God in them; for we are not ignorant that God was in the patriarchs and spoke in the prophets. Finally we believe that not only the apostles and martyrs, I say, but also all the saints and servants of God have the Spirit of God in them, according to that word: “For you are the temple of the living God, as God said: For I will dwell in them”; and again: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells in you?” And so all these are theodochoi, and in this way you say that all are entirely like Christ and equal to God. But far be this impiety of an abominable error, that the maker should be compared with what he made, the Lord with his servants, the God of things on earth and in heaven with earthly frailty, and that this injury should be done him out of his own benefits, that, because he deigns to dwell in man, he should therefore be said to be the same as a man.

Rather, the difference between him and all the saints is that between a dwelling and the one who dwells in it; for that it is dwelt in belongs not to the dwelling but to the dweller, in whose choice are both the building of the dwelling and its use, that is, both to make the dwelling itself when he wishes, and, when he has made it, to deign to dwell in it. “Do you seek a proof,” says the apostle, “of the Christ who speaks in me?” And elsewhere: “Do you not know that Christ Jesus is in you, unless perhaps you are reprobate?” And again: “that Christ may dwell in the inner man through faith in your hearts.” You see what difference there is between the apostolic teaching and your blasphemy. You say that God dwells in Christ as in a man; he testifies that Christ himself dwells in men, which surely, as you say, flesh and blood cannot do; so that he is proved God by the very thing by which you deny him to be God. For since you do not deny that the one who dwells in a man is God, we must most plainly believe to be God the one whom you know to dwell in men. All, then, whether patriarchs or prophets or apostles or martyrs or finally all the saints, did have God in themselves, and all were made sons of God, and all were theodochoi, but surely in a very different and unlike way. For all who believe in God are sons of God by adoption, but the Only-begotten alone is Son by nature. He was not begotten by the Father from any matter, because everything and all the matter of things is through the only-begotten Son of God; not from nothing, because from the Father; not as an offspring, because there is nothing empty and changeable in God; but ineffably and inconceivably God the Father begot his Only-begotten from what was unbegotten in himself; and so from the unbegotten, supreme and everlasting Father there is the only-begotten, supreme and everlasting Son, to be held the same in the flesh as he is held in the spirit, to be believed the same in the body as he is believed in majesty. For when he was to be born in the flesh he made no division or splitting of himself, so that some part of himself was born while some part was not, or that something of the Godhead came upon him afterwards that was not born in him. For according to the apostle all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ bodily; not that it dwelt at one time and did not dwell at another, nor that it came to be afterwards and was not before; otherwise we fall back into that impiety of the Pelagian heresy, so as to say that God, dwelling in Christ from a certain time, came upon him when he had earned by his life and conduct that the power of the Godhead should dwell in him. These things belong to men, then, to men, not to God: that, as far as human weakness can, they should humble themselves before God, submit themselves to God, make themselves a dwelling of God, and earn by faith and piety to have God as guest and dweller; because as anyone is fit for God’s gift, so divine grace rewards him, and as anyone is thought worthy of God, so he enjoys God’s coming, according to that promise of the Lord: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father and I will come to him and make our dwelling with him.” But very different is the case and reckoning with Christ, in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily, and who so has the fullness of the Godhead in himself that he bestows on all from his fullness; who, with the fullness of the Godhead dwelling in him, himself dwells in each of the saints as he judges them worthy of his dwelling, and so gives to all from his fullness that he himself continues always in his fullness; who, even when he was on earth in his body, was nevertheless present in the souls of all the saints, and filled heaven, earth, sea, and finally the whole universe with the infinity of his power and majesty, and was so wholly in himself that the whole world could not contain him; because, however great and ineffable are the things that were made, none is so capacious and immense that it can contain its maker.

This, then, is the one of whom the prophet says: “For God is in you, and there is no God besides you. For you are our God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel, the Savior”; who was afterwards surely seen on earth and lived among men; of whom also the prophet David says in his person: “From my mother’s womb you are my God,” showing surely that that man of the Lord was never without union with God, since in him, at once in the very womb of the virgin, the fullness of the Godhead dwelt. So too the same prophet says elsewhere: “Truth has sprung from the earth, and righteousness has looked down from heaven,” so that we might understand that, when the Son of God looked down from heaven, that is, when righteousness came and descended, there was born from the flesh of the virgin not the phantom of a body but the truth. For he is the truth, according to that testimony of the Truth himself: “I am the truth and the life.” Since, then, in the earlier books we proved this truth, that is, that the Lord Jesus Christ, born of the virgin, is God, now, as we began in the book just before, let us show that the one who was to be born of the virgin was always foretold as God. The prophet Isaiah, then, says: “Cease from the man whose breath is in his nostrils; for in what is he reckoned?” or, as it is more truly and plainly in the Hebrew: “for he is reckoned the Most High.” Beautifully, by saying “cease,” he expressed in a word of forbidding the restlessness of persecution. “Cease,” he says, “from the man whose breath is in his nostrils, for he is reckoned the Most High.” Did he not in one and the same sentence speak both of the taking of a human body and of the truth of God? “Cease,” he says, “from the man, for he is reckoned the Most High.” Does he not seem to you, I ask, to be openly addressing the Lord’s persecutors, saying: Cease from the man whom you persecute, because this man is God, and though he appears in the lowliness of human flesh, he still remains in the height of divine magnificence? Rightly the prophet, saying “Cease from the man whose breath is in his nostrils,” pointed out a man by a most certain mark of a human body, fearlessly indeed and confidently, as one who asserted the truth of the man as steadfastly as that of God; because this is the true and catholic faith, to believe that the Lord Jesus had the substance of a true body as he had the truth of perfect Godhead. Unless perhaps you think there is something doubtful in his having put “the Most High” for God; whereas it is surely the custom of holy Scripture to say “the Most High” for God, as that of the prophet: “The Most High uttered his voice, and the earth was moved”; and: “You alone are the Most High over all the earth.” Isaiah too: “For thus says the high and lofty One, who inhabits eternity.” In these it is plainly to be understood that, since there he put “the Most High” without adding “God,” here too he named God by the name “Most High.” Since, then, the divine word through the prophet plainly foretold the Lord Jesus Christ as both man and God, let us see whether the new testimonies too agree and harmonize with the old.

“That which was from the beginning,” says the apostle John, “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life; and the life was made manifest, and we have seen and testify and announce to you the eternal life which was with the Father and appeared to us.” You see how the old are strengthened by the recent, and the confirmation of new preaching follows the ancient foretelling. Isaiah said: “Cease from the man whose breath is in his nostrils, for he is reckoned the Most High”; and John: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled.” The one said that a man would be persecuted by the Jews; the other proclaimed a man handled by human hands. The one foretold that the same one whom he had announced as man was God Most High; the other related that the one whom he taught to have been handled by men was always God in the beginning. It is most evident, then, that both made the Lord Jesus Christ known as both man and God, because afterwards the same was man who was always God, and therefore man and God, because the man himself is God. “That which was,” then, he says, “from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life; and the life was made manifest, and we have seen and testify and announce to you the eternal life which was with the Father and appeared to us.” You see by how many signs, in how many ways, how various, how manifold, that most beloved apostle, most devoted to God, conveys the sacrament of the divine incarnation. First, he testifies that the one who was always in the beginning was seen in the flesh. Then, lest what he had said was heard and seen should seem too little to the unbelieving, he confirmed that he was also handled, that is, touched and felt by his own hands and others’, rightly excluding by the manifesting of the flesh assumed the opinion of the Marcionite and Manichaean error, so that no one should believe that a phantom was seen by men when the apostle had proclaimed the reality of a body handled by himself. Then he added the Word of life and the life made manifest, that he had seen this, announced this, testified to this: at once fulfilling the duty of faith and striking terror into unbelief, so that, since he testified that he was preaching, one who refused to hear would have himself to blame for his own danger. “We announce to you,” he says, “the eternal life which was with the Father and appeared to us.” He taught that what was always with the Father appeared to men, that what was always in the beginning was seen by men, that what was the Word of life without beginning was handled by human hands. You see in how many ways, how various, how manifold, how indivisible, how open, he set out the sacrament of the flesh united with God, so that no one can say either one at all who does not mention both. This the apostle himself also says most plainly elsewhere: “For Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, and forever.” This surely is what he said in the earlier testimony: “That which was from the beginning, this our hands have handled”: not that the Spirit could be handled of itself, but because the Word, made flesh, was handled in a way in the man to whom it had been united. And therefore Jesus is the same yesterday and today, that is, the same before the beginning of the world as in the flesh, the same in the past as in the present, the same also forever, because the same through all things who was before all things; and all this is the Lord Jesus Christ.

And how is the same one before the rising of the world who lately arose? Because, of course, the same one who lately arose in man was God before the rising of all things; and therefore Christ is called all that God is, because the unity of Christ and God is so great that no one at all can now either, saying Christ, not say God in the name of Christ, or, saying God, not name Christ in the name of God. And so, the sacrament of each substance having been wholly united by the majesty of the holy birth, whatever there was, that is, man and God, became wholly God. Hence the apostle Paul, seeing with the opened eyes of faith the whole secret of the inexplicable majesty in Christ, spoke thus, inviting the peoples who recognize the benefits of God to give thanks to God: “Giving thanks,” he says, “to the Father, who has made us worthy of a share in the lot of the saints in light, who has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption, the remission of sins; who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or powers: all things were created through him and in him, and he is before all, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he may hold the first place; for in him it pleased all the fullness to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things to himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, whether things in heaven or things on earth.” Does this too need any added interpretation, when it is expressed so copiously and plainly that it has in itself not only the faith of the things but also the clearness of explanation? For he bids us give thanks to the Father, adding a great reason for giving thanks: that he has made us worthy of the portion of the saints, and, rescued from the power of darkness, transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption, the remission of sins; who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, because in him and through him all things were created, of which, as he is the maker, so he is also the governor. And what after this? “He is,” he says, “the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead.” Scripture calls resurrection a kind of generation, because, as generation creates life, so resurrection begets to life. Hence too resurrection itself is called regeneration, according to that testimony of the Lord: “Amen I say to you, that you who have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of his majesty, you also will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” He calls firstborn from the dead, then, the one whom above he proclaimed Son and image of the invisible God. And who is the image of the invisible God but the Only-begotten, the Word of God? And how is the one who is called the image and Word of the invisible God said to have risen from the dead? And what is added further? “That in all things,” he says, “he may hold the first place, for in him it pleased all the fullness to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things to himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, whether things in heaven or things on earth.” Does the creator of all need primacy over all, or does he who made them need primacy over the things made by himself? Or can it be said of the Word that it pleased all the fullness to dwell in one who is the firstborn from the dead, when surely he, the only-begotten Son of God, the Word of God before the beginnings of all things, having the invisible Father in himself, so had all fullness in himself before that he himself was the fullness of all? And what finally? “Making peace,” he says, “through the blood of his cross, whether things in heaven or things on earth.” He showed most plainly of whom he was speaking, whom he had named firstborn from the dead. For were all things reconciled and pacified through the blood of the Word or the Spirit? Surely not. For nothing of suffering could befall the impassible nature, nor could blood be shed except a man’s, nor could anyone die but a man. And yet the same one who in what follows is said to have died is above proclaimed the image of the invisible God. How, then, is this? Because, of course, the apostles took every care that no division should seem to be in Christ, and that the Son of God united in the son of man should not begin through wandering interpretations to have two persons, and that he who was one in himself should not become double in us through depraved and impious opinions. And therefore beautifully and wonderfully the apostolic preaching came down from the only-begotten Son of God himself to the son of man united to the Son of God, so that the speech of the teaching should run its course as the very order of things did, continuing everything by an inseparable connection and as it were by a bridge, so that without any division or gap at all you would find at the end of time the one you read of at the beginning of the world, and, admitting no distraction of impious splitting, would believe one Son of God in the flesh and in the spirit; since the apostolic teaching so united God and man through the sacrament of the bodily birth that it showed you the same one reconciling all things on the cross whom it had proclaimed, before the beginning of the world, the image of the invisible God.

Although this was said by the apostle, it is the Lord’s teaching. For the same one said this in the apostle to Christians who said something very like it in the gospel in his own person to the Jews: “But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God. For I did not come of myself, but he sent me.” He shows himself both God and man: man in that he proclaims himself a man, God in that he affirms that he was sent. For he must have been with the one from whom he had come, and he had come from the one by whom he said he was sent. Hence too, when the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” he answered with a word most fitting to his eternity and majesty, saying: “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I am.” I ask, then, whose saying do you want this to be? Christ’s, surely, without doubt. And how did one who had been born at a recent time say that he was before Abraham? Through that Word of God to which he was wholly united, so that all might understand how great is the unity of Christ and God, since whatever God said in Christ the Godhead of the one united claimed wholly as its own. And rightly, conscious of his eternity, he answered the Jews then in the body with that word with which he had once spoken to Moses in the spirit. For here he says, “Before Abraham came to be, I am,” and to Moses: “I am who I am.” By the admirable magnificence of his word he proclaimed the eternity of the divine nature, because nothing can be said of God so fitting as that he is said always to be; for “to be” has neither a beginning in the past nor an end in the future. And therefore what best fits eternity is said most plainly of the nature of the eternal God. This the Lord Jesus Christ himself showed by the difference of his wording when he spoke of Abraham, saying: “Before Abraham came to be, I am.” Of Abraham he said “came to be,” but of himself “I am”; because coming to be belongs to time, being to eternity. And therefore he assigned “came to be” to human brevity, but “I am” to his own nature. And all this Christ said, who through the sacrament of man and God united was saying that he had already existed in him who always was.

The apostle too, wishing to make this clear and plain to all, spoke thus: “For Jesus, saving the people from the land of Egypt, afterwards destroyed those who did not believe.” And elsewhere: “Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them tempted him and perished by serpents.” And Peter, the chief of the apostles: “And now why do you tempt God, to put a yoke on the necks of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, just as they are.” We know without doubt that the people of God freed from Egypt, led on dry feet by great paths through the waters, and preserved through the vast wastes of the desert, were preserved by God alone, according to that word: “The Lord alone led them, and there was no foreign god with them.” And how does the apostle, with so many and such plain testimonies, proclaim both that the people of the Jews was freed from Egypt by Jesus and that Christ was then tempted by the Jews in the desert, saying: “Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them tempted him and perished by serpents”? The blessed apostle Peter also proclaims that all the saints who lived under the law of the Old Testament were saved through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Get out and escape from here, if you can, you, whoever you are, who, raging with a rabid and blasphemous spirit, think there is no difference at all between Adam and Christ, and who deny him to be God even after the virgin’s childbearing: show fully how you can prove that he was not God before his bodily birth either. For see, the apostle cries out that the people was saved from the land of Egypt by Jesus, that Christ was tempted in the desert by the unbelieving, and that our fathers too, that is, the patriarchs and prophets, were saved through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Deny these things if you can. Nor shall I wonder if you do so, so as to deny what we all read, you who have denied what we all believe. Understand, then, at last that even then Christ in God led the people out of Egypt, and Christ in God was tempted by the tempting people, and Christ in God saved all the righteous by the bounty of his grace; because through the unity of the sacrament God so passed into Christ and Christ into God that whatever God did Christ is said to have accomplished, and what Christ afterwards endured God is said to have endured. And therefore the prophet, saying, “There shall be no new god in you, nor shall you worship a foreign god,” was preaching with the same sense and spirit with which the apostle said that Christ led the people of Israel out of Egypt; so as to hold that the man born of the virgin was always in God through the unity of the sacrament. Otherwise, unless this is believed, either Christ is believed, with the heretics, not to be God at all, or certainly, against the prophet, to be a new god. But far be it from the catholic people of God to seem either to dissent from prophecy or to agree with heretics, and that the people of blessing should perhaps fall into that curse of being said to have put its hope in man. For whoever asserts that the Lord Jesus Christ was born a mere man must be liable to the curse twice, whether he believes in him or not. For if he believes, “cursed is he who puts his hope in man”; and if he does not believe, he is no less cursed, because, though he has not believed in a man, he has entirely denied God.

For this is what John, so dear to God, foreseeing it by the Lord’s revelation to him, said about the very one who spoke in him: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God; and everyone who dissolves Jesus is not from God; and this is the spirit of antichrist, of which you have heard that it comes, and now it is already in the world.” O the wonderful and singular goodness of God, who, like a most careful and most provident physician, foretold the diseases that would one day come into his church, and in foretelling the sickness gave the medicine by the very foretelling, so that all, recognizing the coming illness, might begin far off to avoid what they had learned was threatening. And therefore Saint John says: “Everyone who dissolves Jesus is not from God, and this is of antichrist.” Do you recognize, heretic, do you now recognize that he said these things of you openly and pointedly? For no one so dissolves Jesus as one who does not confess him to be God. For since the whole faith and the whole worship of the church consists in this, to confess Jesus as true God, who could dissolve his veneration and worship more than one who has denied all in him that we all worship? Beware, then, I beg you, beware lest anyone may even call you antichrist. Do you think I am abusing or cursing you? What I say is not mine. See, the evangelist says: “Everyone who dissolves Jesus is not from God, and this is of antichrist.” If you do not dissolve Jesus and do not deny God, no one can call you antichrist; but if you deny, why do you complain that anyone says you are antichrist? You yourself, you, I say, by denying, have said this of yourself. Do you want to know that this is true? Tell me, when Jesus was born of the virgin, what do you hold him to have been, man or God? If God only, you surely dissolve Jesus, since you deny that there was in him man united to God. If man, you dissolve him no less, since you blaspheme, as you do, that he was born only a man. Unless perhaps you think that you do not dissolve Jesus when you deny that he was God, you who would dissolve him even if you did not deny that a man was born with God. But perhaps you would like this made plainer by examples. Take one of each. The Manichaean is outside the church because he asserts that Jesus was God only; Ebion, because he asserts he was man only. For both denied and dissolved Jesus, the one by saying he was man alone, the other by saying he was only God; because, though they said different things, the impiety of the difference itself is equal. Except that, if there can be any distinction between the magnitude of evils, your blasphemy, which asserts that he was man alone, is more injurious than that which asserts he was God alone; because, though both are evil, it is more insulting to have robbed the Lord of what is divine than of what is human. This, then, alone is the catholic faith, this alone the true: to believe the Lord Jesus Christ to be man as he is God, and God as he is man. For “everyone who dissolves Jesus is not from God.” And to dissolve is this: to wish to break what is united in Jesus and to separate what is undivided. And what in Jesus is united and undivided? Man, of course, and God. Therefore he dissolves Jesus who has separated and broken these apart.

And therefore to every man who bursts out into this blasphemy and madness the Lord Jesus himself, in the gospel, cries out and protests for himself what he said to the Pharisees: “What God has joined, let man not separate.” Although there, where it was said by God, it seems to have been an answer on another matter, yet the depth of God, which was speaking no more of fleshly than of spiritual things, though it spoke of that, wished it to be understood rather of this. For since the Jews then believed what you say, that Jesus was only a man without God, when the Lord was asked about the partnership of marriage he taught not only about that but also about this, and, consulted about lesser matters, answered also about higher and greater ones, saying: “What God has joined, let man not separate.” That is: do not separate what God has joined in me; let human impiety not separate what the divine majesty has united in me. Do you want to know more fully that this is so? Hear the apostle discussing these very things of which the Savior taught then; who, as a teacher sent by God, set out, as far as the weakness of his hearers could then grasp, those very things which God had preached in a mystery. For when he was discussing fleshly marriage, about which the Savior had been asked in the gospel, he repeated those very testimonies of the old law which he had then used, so that it might be understood that one who used the same testimonies was expounding the same thing. Adding, moreover, lest anything seem lacking to the case, fleshly marriage too and the names of woman and man, whom he was urging to mutual affection, he put it thus: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church”; and again: “So husbands also ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.” You see how, joining the names of Christ and the church to the names of husband and wife, he drew all from a fleshly hearing to a spiritual understanding. For when he had said all this, he added the testimonies which the Lord had used in the gospel, saying: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh.” And what did he add after this, as with a great cry of protest? “This sacrament,” he says, “is great.” He removed and cut off from it entirely the fleshly understanding when he said that it is a wholly divine sacrament. And what did he add after these words? “But I speak,” he says, “in Christ and in the church.” When he had said “This sacrament is great,” he did not say, This is the explanation of the sacrament; but what? “But I speak in Christ and in the church”; that is to say: that indeed is a great sacrament, but I speak in Christ and in the church; that is, since perhaps not all can grasp that for the present, let them at least grasp this, which does not disagree with it or differ from it, because both are about Christ. But since they do not grasp those deeper things, let them at least know these easier ones, so that, when they have begun to grasp a readier understanding, they may be able to come to a higher one, and the attaining of the plainer thing now may afterwards be the way to the deeper.

What, then, is that great sacrament which is signified under the name of husband and wife? Let us ask the apostle himself, who, to teach the same thing elsewhere, used the words of the thing itself, saying: “And manifestly great is the sacrament of godliness, which was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, appeared to angels, was preached to the Gentiles, was believed in the world, was taken up in glory.” What, then, is that great sacrament which was manifested in the flesh? God, of course, born in the flesh, God seen in the body, who, as he was openly manifested in the flesh, so was openly taken up in glory. This, then, is the great sacrament of which he says: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh.” Who were the two in one flesh? God, of course, and the soul. For in the one flesh of the man which is united to God there are God and the soul, according to the word of the Lord himself: “No one can take my soul from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” So you see three things in this: God, flesh and soul. It is God who speaks, the flesh in which he speaks, the soul of which he speaks. For this reason, then, that man of whom the prophet says, “A brother does not redeem; a man will redeem,” who, as was said, ascended where he was before, and of whom we read, “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven,” for this reason, I say, left his father and mother, that is, God of whom he was born and that Jerusalem which is the mother of us all, and cleaved to human flesh as to his wife. And therefore of the father he expressly said “a man will leave his father,” but of the mother he did not say “his,” but only put “mother,” because she was not so much his mother as the mother of all believers, that is, of all of us. And he was joined to his wife, because, as husband and wife are one body, so the majesty of the Godhead and the flesh of man are united; and the two, that is, God and the soul, became one flesh, because, as that flesh had God dwelling in it, so it had also the soul dwelling together with God. This, then, is that great sacrament to which the apostle’s wonder calls us and the exhortation of the Godhead invites us to inquire; not foreign either to Christ and the church, as he himself says, “But I speak in Christ and in the church”; because the flesh of the church is the flesh of Christ, and in the flesh of Christ are God and the soul; and so the same thing is in Christ as in the church, because the sacrament that is believed in the flesh of Christ is held by faith also in the church.

This sacrament, then, which was both manifested in the flesh and appeared in the world and is preached to the Gentiles, many of the ancient saints, as they foresaw it in the spirit, also wished to see in the flesh. For “Amen,” says the Lord, “I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.” And therefore the prophet Isaiah says: “O that you would rend the heavens, Lord, and come down!” And David too: “Lord, bow your heavens and come down.” Moses also says: “Show me yourself, that I may see you plainly.” No one at all came nearer than Moses, as he received the law, to God speaking from the clouds, and to the very presence of the majesty; and how, when no one saw nearer things of God than he, did he still ask for plainer things, saying, “Show me yourself, that I may see you plainly”? Because, of course, he was praying for what the apostle said had been done in almost the same words: that the Lord should be manifested openly in the flesh, should appear openly in the world, should be taken up openly in glory, so that the saints might at last see with fleshly eyes all that they foresaw with spiritual ones.

Otherwise, if, as the heretic says, God was to be in the Lord Jesus Christ as in a statue and an instrument, that is, to dwell only as in a man and to speak as through a man, not so that he himself was the one dwelling and God was speaking from himself and his own body, then he had surely already dwelt in the saints in this way and spoken from the saints; in those very ones I mentioned above, who prayed for his coming, he was and spoke in this way. And what need was there for all to ask for what they had, if they were asking for what they had already received? Or why should they desire to see with their eyes what they held in their heart, especially since it is more to have something within oneself than to see it outside oneself? Or if God was to dwell in Christ as in all the saints, why should all the saints desire to see Christ rather than themselves? And if they were to see in the Lord Jesus the same thing they had in themselves, why would they not think it much more to have the same thing in themselves than to see it in another? But you err, unhappy madness, understanding, as the apostle says, neither what you say nor about what you make assertions. For all the prophets and saints received from God a certain portion of the divine Spirit, as far as they could receive it; but in Christ all the fullness of the Godhead dwelt and dwells bodily. And therefore all are far from the fullness of him from whose fullness they receive something; whose filling is Christ’s gift, because all would surely be empty unless he were the fullness of all.

This, then, all the saints wished for, this they prayed for, this they desired to see with their eyes as they knew it with soul and mind. And therefore the prophet Isaiah says: “O that you would rend the heavens and come down!” And Habakkuk too, announcing the same as the other wished for: “When the years draw near,” he says, “you will be shown; at the coming of the times you will be made known. God will come from Teman” (or, “God from the south”). David too: “God will come openly”; and again: “You who sit upon the cherubim, appear.” Some announced the coming which he granted to the world, others asked for it; some in a different form, but all with a like longing, understanding to some extent how great a thing they were praying for: that God, dwelling in God, remaining in the form and bosom of God, should empty himself, taking the form of a servant, and submit himself to undergo all the bitterness of sufferings and insults, suffer punishment for his benefits, and, what is most unbearable and most unworthy, receive death from the very ones for whom he himself would die. So all the saints, understanding this to some extent, to some extent, I say, understanding, because no one understands how great it is, asked with one voice and as it were in harmony together for the coming of God, knowing surely that in this lay the hope of all, in this the salvation of all was contained, because no one could free those in bonds unless he was free of bonds, no one could deliver sinners unless he was without sin. For no one can free anyone from something unless he is himself free of that from which another is freed by him. And therefore, since death had passed upon all, all needed life, so that, dying in Adam, they might live in Christ; because, though many were holy, many chosen and very close to God, none of them could be saved at all by themselves unless they had been saved by the Lord’s coming and redemption.

We read in the gospel that when five loaves had been set out at the Lord’s command a countless multitude of God’s people was filled; and yet how this was done neither speech can tell, nor estimation reckon, nor understanding conceive. So great and so incomprehensible is the force of divine power that, though we are aware of the deed itself, it is impossible for us to know the manner of the deed. For first, who could grasp how so small a number of loaves sufficed, I do not say for eating and filling, but even for the very dividing and serving, when there were many more thousands of people than loaves, almost more meals than there could be fragments from so many loaves? Abundance of things, then, was born from the word of the Lord; the work grew in the doing; and though what was seen was little, what was given became beyond estimating. Here, then, there is no room for conjecture, none for human estimation or reasoning. The only thing the minds of the faithful and wise may know in such a matter is that, however great and inestimable are the things done by God, even if they do not grasp them by understanding, they recognize that nothing is impossible for God. But of these so ineffable acts of divine power, which fit most rightly with the ineffable miracles of the holy birth, more fully later, as the matter requires.

Meanwhile, since we have mentioned the five loaves, we compare them, not unfittingly I think, with the five books we have already unrolled; for as they are equal in number, so they are not unlike in kind. For since those were of barley, these too, as far as our talent is concerned, may be called barley; though, enriched with holy testimonies, they cover saving wealth in contemptible wrappings, in this too not differing from those: for as those, being poor in appearance, became rich by blessing, so these also, though cheap in our talent, are precious by the holy admixture; and though they show outwardly the cheapness of barley from our speech, they have within the savor of the living bread from the Lord’s testimonies. It remains that, after the example of those, by the grace of the divine gift they should offer saving food from themselves to countless thousands, and, as those gave bodily strength to those who ate, so these should give spiritual health to those who read. And the Lord, whose gift this is as that was, is able to make those who are to be filled with this food not stray from the way, as by that food he made those who were filled not faint on the way. But since there, where a countless people of God was fed with little food indeed but a great gift, two fish are read to have been added to the five loaves, it is fitting that we too, who wish the food of a spiritual meal to be offered through us to all the peoples who follow God, should add to those five books, as to five loaves, two more little books, as two fish; praying you, Lord, beseeching you, that, seeing the effort of our duty and wish, you may give an effective work to a pious attempt; and since out of our obedience and affection we wish to match the number of those loaves and fish with the number of our books, may you transfer to these the power of that blessing; and you who reward our little writing with the gospel number, may you fill out the number too with the gospel fruit and grant these things as holy and wholesome food to all the peoples of your church, to every age and every sex. And if any have perhaps already been breathed upon by that deadly spirit of the venomous serpent, and with the state of their souls and minds corrupted are drawing pestilent diseases into their weakened veins, give to all the vigor of a sound mind, give full health of faith; so that, granting through these writings of our work the saving care of your gift to all, after the pattern of the food sanctified by you in the gospel, as by that eating you strengthened the hungry, so by this you may command the wasting to be healed.

Since, then, in all the earlier writings, I think, we have abundantly answered the heretic who denies God with the authority of divine testimonies, let us now come to the faith and force of the creed of Antioch, in which, since he himself was baptized and reborn, he must be refuted by his own professions and, so to speak, crushed by his own weapons. For this is the order: that, already overcome by holy testimonies, he should also be overcome, so to speak, by himself as witness. For there will be no need to act against him with other things when he has openly and plainly convicted himself. The text and faith of the creed of Antioch, then, is this: “I believe in one and only true God, the Father almighty, creator of all creatures visible and invisible; and in our Lord Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son and firstborn of all creation, born of him before all ages and not made, true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed and all things made; who for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried, and on the third day rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into the heavens, and will come again to judge the living and the dead,” and the rest. In the creed, which speaks the faith of all the churches, I want to know which you prefer to follow, the authority of men or that of God? Although I will not deal with you sternly or severely, so as to give you a choice of one thing only and, permitting one, refuse the other: I give both, I grant both. And what am I saying, I grant? I drag you to both, even if you are unwilling. For if you wish both to be in the creed, you must be wise willingly; if you do not wish it, you must be compelled unwillingly. For the creed, as you know, took its name from a collecting. For what in Greek is called symbolos is called in Latin collatio. And it is called a collecting because the faith of the whole catholic law was collected into one by the Lord’s apostles, and whatever is poured out in immense abundance through the whole body of the divine volumes is all gathered in the creed in perfect brevity, according to that word of the apostle: “Completing and shortening a word in equity, because a shortened word will the Lord make upon the earth.” This, then, is the shortened word which the Lord made, gathering the faith of both his Testaments into a few words and enclosing the sense of all the Scriptures in brief, founding his own from his own and accomplishing the force of the whole law in the most compendious brevity; providing in this, as a most loving father, for the negligence or the inexperience of some of his sons, so that a mind, however simple and inexperienced, should not have to labor to grasp what it can easily hold even in memory.

You see, then, that the authority of God is in the creed: for “a shortened word the Lord made upon the earth.” But perhaps you are looking for that of men. Not even that is lacking; for God made it through men. For as he built up that immense abundance of the holy Scriptures chiefly through his patriarchs and prophets, so he established the creed through his apostles and bishops; and whatever he spread out there through his own with ample and overflowing abundance, the same he here shut up through his own in the fullest brevity. Nothing, then, is lacking in the creed, which, founded from the writings of God through the apostles of God, has in itself, as far as authority is concerned, whatever belongs either to men or to God; although even what was done through men must be counted God’s, because it must be believed to belong not so much to those through whom it was done as to him who did it. “I believe,” then, says the creed, “in one and only true God, the Father almighty, creator of all creatures visible and invisible; and in our Lord Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son and firstborn of all creation, born of him before all ages and not made, true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed and all things made; who for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried, and on the third day rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into the heavens, and will come again to judge the living and the dead,” and the rest.

If you were a defender of the Arian or Sabellian heresy, and I were not using your own creed against you, I would still convict you by the authority of the holy testimonies, I would convict you by the voice of the law itself, I would convict you finally by the truth of the creed approved throughout the whole world. I would say that, even if you lacked understanding and sense, you ought at least to follow the consent of the human race, and not to value the perversity of a few wicked men above the faith of all the churches, which, founded by Christ and handed down by the apostles, would have to be considered nothing other than the voice and authority of God, having in itself the voice and mind of God. And what, finally, if I dealt with you so, what would you say? What would you answer? Would it not be this, I beg: that you were not so taught, not so trained; that something else was handed down to you by your parents, something else by your teachers and authorities; that you did not hear this in that conventicle of your fathers’ doctrine nor in the church of your profession; that, finally, the very text and wording of the creed handed down and taught to you contained something else; that you were baptized in it, reborn in it? Would you not say that you held what you had received, and lived in that in which you had learned you were regenerated? Saying these things, would you not, I ask, think you were using a very strong shield even against the truth? And truly, in a case however wicked, it would be no unsuitable defense, and one that would not absurdly give the cause of the error, if it did not join obstinacy to error. For since you would be holding what you had received from childhood, correction would have more to amend in your present error than severity to punish in the past. But now, since you were born in a catholic city, instructed in the catholic faith, regenerated by catholic baptism, can I deal with you as with an Arian or a Sabellian? Would that you had been one! I would grieve less over one born among evils than over one fallen from good things, less over faith never had than over faith lost, less over an old heretic than over a new apostate. For you would have brought less stain or plague upon the whole church, you would finally be less bitter to grief or grave as an example, if you could attack the church as a layman rather than as a bishop. So, as I said above, if you were a disciple and defender of the Sabellian or Arian or any other heresy, you would surely want to defend yourself by the example of your parents, the instruction of your teachers, the fellowship of your people, the faith of your creed. I ask nothing unjust of you, heretic, nothing unjust or hard: do this, born in the catholic faith, that you would have done for the sake of perversity. Hold the instruction of your parents, hold the faith of the church, hold the truth of the creed, hold the salvation of baptism. What sort of portent is in you, what sort of monster? Will you not do for yourself what others have done even for error? But we have gone far enough out to sea, and, following the force of our grief out of affection for a kindred city as if it were a favoring wind, while we were eager for the voyage, we have quite left the course of the straight way.

The creed, then, heretic, whose text we gave above, though it belongs to all the churches, because the faith of all is one, still belongs in a special way to the city and church of Antioch, that is, to the one in which you were born, in which you were instructed, in which you were reborn. The faith of this creed led you to the fountain of life, to the regeneration of salvation, to the grace of the Eucharist, to the communion of the Lord, and — why say more? O too grievous and mournful complaint! — to the office of the ministry also, to the height of the presbyterate, to the dignity of the episcopate. Do you think this, unhappy madness, a light or easy thing? Do you not see what you have done, into what abyss you have thrown yourself? Losing the faith of the creed, you have lost all that you had been: for the sacraments of your priesthood and of your salvation stood on the truth of the creed. Do you think that you have denied only it? You, you yourself, I say, you have denied. But perhaps you do not think you have denied. Let us look at the text of the creed, so that if you say what you said before you may not be refuted; but if things very different and contrary, you need not wait to be refuted by me, since you have condemned yourself. For if you now assert something other than is in the creed and other than you yourself said before, what remains but that you blame no one but yourself for your punishment, since you see that the sentence of all upon you is the same as your own? “I believe,” then, says the creed, “in one God, the Father almighty, creator of all creatures visible and invisible; and in the Lord Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son and firstborn of all creation, born of him before all ages and not made.” First of all you must answer to these words: do you confess this of Jesus Christ the Son of God or deny it? If you confess it, all is sound; if not, how do you now deny what you yourself confessed before? Choose, then, what you prefer; for one of the two must happen: either your own confession alone frees you, if it stands, or, if it is denied, your first confession condemns you. For you said in the creed, “I believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son and firstborn of all creation.” If the Lord Jesus Christ is the only-begotten and firstborn of all creation, then by your own confession he is without doubt God; for no other is only-begotten and firstborn of all creation but the only-begotten Son of God, who, as he is the firstborn of creatures, is also God the creator of all. And how do you assert that a mere man was born of the virgin, whom you confessed to have been God before the ages? Next, the creed says, “born of him,” that is, of the Father, “before all ages and not made.” The creed said this through you; you said this through the creed: that Jesus Christ was born of God the Father before the ages and not made. Does the creed say anything about these fantasies with which you now rave? Did you yourself say anything of them? Where here is the statue, where your instrument? Yours, I say: far be it that it should belong to anyone but you. Where is that view by which, affirming that the Lord Jesus Christ is like a statue, you think he is to be adored not because he is God but because he is an image of God, and, making the Lord of majesty an instrument, you blaspheme that he is to be honored not for his own sake but for the sake of the one who as it were breathes and sounds in him? You said in the creed that the Lord Jesus Christ was born of God the Father before all ages and not made. This surely fits only the only-begotten Son of God: that his birth is not a making, and that he is said to be only born, not made; because it is against the reason and honor of the thing itself that the maker of all should be believed to be a thing made, and so that the author of all things begun should himself have begun as all things began from him. And therefore he is said to be born, not made, because his birth is unique to him, not a common making; and since he is God born of God, the Godhead of the one begotten must have all that the greatness of the one begetting has.

And there follows in the creed: “true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed and all things made.” And when you have said all this, remember that you have said all of it of the Lord Jesus Christ. For you have this in the creed: that you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God and firstborn of all creation, and after this and other things, “true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed.” How, then, is the same one God and not God, the same God and the same a statue, the same God and the same an instrument? These things do not agree or fit together in any way, heretic, so that you may call the same one God when you please and think him a figment when you please. You said in the creed “true God”; now you say “a mere man.” How can these suit and fit together, that the same should be supreme power and the same mere weakness, the same supreme majesty and the same mere mortality? These things do not agree in one and the same Lord, so that, dividing him between worship and insult, you honor him in the part you please and wrong him in the part you please. You said in the creed, when you received the sacrament of true salvation, that the Lord Jesus Christ is true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, creator of the ages, maker of all things. Where are you, alas, where are you who were then? Where is that faith? Where that confession? To what portents now, to what prodigies have you fallen back? What follies, what madness have ruined you? You have transferred the God of all power and majesty to lifeless matter and senseless figments. Your faith has made progress, no doubt, with time, progress with age, progress with priesthood! You have become worse as an old man than once as a little child, worse as a veteran than as a recruit, worse as a bishop than as a beginner; and you are not even a disciple since you began to be a teacher.

But let us see the rest that follows. The creed, having said that the Lord Jesus Christ is true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed and all things made, at once added this with an inseparable connection: “who for our sake,” it says, “came and was born of the virgin Mary.” He, then, who is true God, who is homoousios with the Father, who is creator of the ages, who is maker of all things, he, I say, came into the world and was born of the virgin Mary; according, of course, to that word of the apostle Paul: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.” You see how the sacraments of the creed agree with the holy Scriptures. The apostle proclaims that the Son of God was sent by the Father; the creed affirms that he came. For this followed: that our faith should confess that he came whom the apostle had taught was sent. Then the apostle says “made of a woman,” the creed “begotten of Mary.” You notice, then, that Scripture itself speaks in the creed, from which the creed testifies that it descended. And rightly the apostle, saying “made of a woman,” put “made” for “born,” by the custom of divine speech, in which “made” is put for “born,” according to that word: “In place of your fathers sons have been made to you”; or that: “Before Abraham was made, I am”; in which he is plainly known to have said, “before Abraham was born, I am,” showing the matter of birth by the name of making, because whatever no longer needs to be made has the effect of being made. “Who for our sake,” then, it says, “came and was born of the virgin Mary.” If a mere man was born of Mary, why is he said to have come? For no one comes except one who has in his being the ability to come. But one who had not yet received even being, how could he have the power to come? You see, then, that by the very word “coming” the one who comes is shown to have existed before, because no one would have had the power of coming except one for whom, from the very fact that he was, it could be possible to come. But the man did not exist at all before the conception: therefore he did not have it in himself to be able to come. It is certain, then, that God came, who, all-powerful in both respects, is able both to be and to come; who surely both came because he was, and always was because he could always come.

But why do we argue about a word when the things themselves shine out, and why do we look for indications of things in the text of the creed when the speech of things itself is in it? Let us repeat the confession of the creed and your own (for yours is the same as its, since by confessing it you made its confession yours), so that you may understand that you have transgressed not only against the creed but also against yourself. “I believe,” then, says the creed, “in one and only true God, the Father almighty, creator of all creatures visible and invisible; and in the Lord Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son and firstborn of all creation, born of him before all ages and not made, true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were framed and all things made; who for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary.” For our sake, then, says the creed, our Lord Jesus Christ came and was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried, and rose again according to the Scriptures. The churches are not ashamed to confess this; the apostles were not ashamed to preach it. You yourself, you yourself, I say, every word of whose is now sacrilege, who deny almost everything, did not deny all these things: that God was born, that God suffered, that God rose again. And what after this? Where have you rolled down to, what have you become, to what have you been reduced? What do you say, what do you vomit up? Something that, as someone says, “mad Orestes would swear was not the act of a sane man.” For what do you say? “Who, then, is the Son of God who was born of the Christotokos? For example, if we say, ‘I believe in God the Word, the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father, homoousios with the Father, who came down and was buried,’ does not the hearing itself at once receive a wound? God dead?” And again: “Can it be,” you say, “that one who was born before all ages should be born a second time, and that God?” If all these things could not happen at all, how does the creed of the churches say they happened? How did you yourself say so? Let us compare what you said before with what you say now. You said before: “I believe in God the Father almighty, and in Jesus Christ his Son, true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, who for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried.” But now what do you say? “If we say, ‘I believe in God the Word, the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father, homoousios with the Father, who came down and was buried,’ does not the hearing itself at once receive a wound?” The harshness and impiety of your saying could drive us to an unrestrained and heated rush of answering; but the reins of pious grief must be drawn in a little.

I consult you, then, I say, you yourself. Tell me, I ask, if any of the Jews or pagans denies the creed of the catholic faith, do you think he should be heard? Surely not. What if a heretic or apostate does the same? Much less, certainly, because it is more intolerable to abandon known truth than to deny it unknown. We see two persons, then, in you, a catholic and an apostate: first a catholic, now an apostate. Decide yourself which you think we should follow; for you cannot prefer one in yourself unless you yourself have condemned the other in yourself. You say, then, that the one you were before is condemned by you, that the catholic creed is condemned by you, that the confession of all is condemned, that the faith is condemned. And what then — O unworthy deed, O intolerable grief! — what are you doing in the catholic church, betrayer of catholics? Why do you pollute the assembly of the people, you who have denied the faith of the people? Besides this you have dared to stand at the altar, to mount the tribunal, to present your most shameless and most faithless mouth to the people of God, to occupy the chair, to take upon yourself the priesthood, to profess yourself a teacher. To teach Christians what? Not to believe Christ; to deny that he is God in whose temple they are. And after all this — O insanity, O madness! — you think yourself a teacher and a bishop, when you deny — O unhappy blindness! — that very one, I say, to be God whose priest you claim to be. But we are carried away by grief. What, then, does the creed say, or what did you yourself say in the creed? That the Lord Jesus Christ, true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, through whom the ages were created and all things made, this same one for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary. Since, then, you said that God was born of Mary, how do you deny that Mary is the Mother of God? Since you said that God came, how do you now deny that the one who came is God? You said in the creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God, I believe in true God of true God, homoousios with the Father, who for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried.” But now you say: “If we say, ‘I believe in God the Word, the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father, homoousios with the Father, who came down and was buried,’ does not the hearing itself at once receive a wound?” You see, then, that you utterly destroy and uproot the whole faith of the catholic creed, the whole faith of the catholic sacrament. O crime, O portent, as someone says, to be carried off to the ends of the earth! For this is said more rightly of you: that you should go to those wastes where you can find no one to destroy. Do you, then, think the faith of our salvation, the sacrament of the church’s hope, a wound to your hearing and your ears? And how was it that once, when you ran to baptism, you heard these sacraments with sound ears? How was it that, when the teachers of the churches taught you, your ears were not wounded? Then, surely, without any wound you performed the double office of mouth and ears, when you both spoke what you heard from them and heard yourself speaking. Where were these wounds of your ears then, where this wound of your hearing? Why did you not contradict and protest? But of course, at your choice and pleasure, you are a disciple of the church when you please, an enemy when you please; a catholic when you please, an apostate when you please. A worthy authority, no doubt, to drag the churches after you to whatever side you turn, whose will should be the law of our life, who should change the human race by your changeableness, so that, because you will not be what all are, all should be what you wish! An excellent authority, of course: because you are not what you were, the world should cease to be what it was!

But perhaps you say that you were a little child when you were reborn, and so could neither understand nor protest then. True: infancy prevented you from contradicting, you who as a man could have died for contradicting. For what if in that most faithful and devoted church of Christ, when the bishop was handing over the creed to the people of God, who responded and acclaimed, you had tried to mutter anything or protest? Would you perhaps have been heard, and not at once sent off to some destruction and extermination as a new kind of portent and monster? Not that that most pious and devout people of God would wish to be stained by the blood even of the most impious man, but because in great cities the people, burning with the love of God, when they see anyone rising against their God, usually cannot hold back the heat of their faith. But let it be so: as an infant, if indeed that is so, you could not contradict and protest against the creed. Why were you silent when you were older and stronger? You certainly grew and became a man and were placed in the church’s ministry. Through so many ages, then, through so many grades of office and dignity, the faith which you taught so long before was never understood by you. You know that you were certainly its deacon and presbyter: if the rule of salvation displeased you, why did you take the honor of a thing whose faith you did not approve? But, a provident man no doubt and a simple religious, you wished to steer between the two so as to keep both the faithlessness of a sacrilegious man and the dignity of a catholic.

The wound of your hearing, then, and the injury of your ears is God born and God suffering. And where is that saying of yours, apostle Paul: “But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”? What is the wisdom and power of God? God, surely. And he proclaims Christ, who was crucified, the power and wisdom of God. So if Christ is without doubt the wisdom of God, then Christ is without doubt God. “We preach,” then, he says, “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.” So the Lord’s cross, which was foolishness to the Gentiles and a stumbling block to the Jews, is both to you. For there is no greater foolishness than not to believe, nor a greater stumbling block than to refuse to hear. Their ears, then, were wounded at the preaching and passion of God, as yours are wounded now; they thought it a wound to their hearing, as you think; and this is why, when the apostle Paul preached Christ as God, at the name of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ they shut the ears of their heads, as you shut the ears of your mind. The impiety of both of you might seem equal in this respect, except that your crime is greater in this: they denied one in whom the passion still showed a man; you deny one whom the resurrection has already proved God. And therefore they persecuted him on earth; you persecute him even in heaven. Not only that, but this is more cruel and wicked: they denied through ignorance, you after faith; they not knowing the Lord, you having confessed him God; they in zeal for the law, you in the profession of a bishop; they him from whom they thought themselves strangers, you him whose priest you are. Shameful and unheard-of deed! You persecute with attacks the very one whose dignity you still use.

But you use, of course, a great argument of your faithlessness and impiety to deny and persecute the Lord God, saying: “The offspring must be homoousios with the one who bears it.” I do not yet say fully and declare that this need not be observed at all in the birth of God, because the birth itself belonged not to the one bearing but to the one born, and he was born as he willed, to whom it belonged that he should be born at all. Meanwhile, since you say that the offspring must be homoousios with the one who bears it, I say that the Lord Jesus Christ was homoousios with both his Father and his mother alike. For according to the difference of persons he gave back to each parent its own likeness. For according to the Godhead he was homoousios with the Father, but according to the flesh homoousios with his mother: not that the one who was homoousios with the Father is one and the one homoousios with the mother another, but that the same Lord Jesus Christ, born both man and God, had in himself the property of each parent, since in that he is man he gave back the likeness of his human mother, and in that he is God he had the reality of God the Father.

Otherwise, if the same Christ is not from Mary who was born from God, you without doubt make two Christs, according, of course, to that crime of Pelagian impiety which, asserting that a mere man was born of the virgin, said that he was the instructor of the human race rather than its redeemer, because he gave men not the redemption of life but an example of living, so that men following him, while doing similar things, might arrive at similar things. One, then, is the origin of your impiety, the same the root of your errors. They assert that a mere man was born of Mary, and you the same; they separate the son of man from the Son of God, and you the same. They say that the Savior became Christ through baptism, you that in baptism he was made a temple of God; they do not deny that he was made God after the passion, you deny it even after the ascension. In one thing only, then, does your perversity differ: that they seem to blaspheme the Lord on earth, you in heaven too. You have outdone those whom you imitate, we do not deny it, and gone beyond them: they at some point, as it were, stop denying God, you never. Although not even theirs is to be held a fully true confession, who give the Savior the honor of Godhead only after the passion, and, denying him God before, confess him afterwards; because, as it seems to me, whoever denies a part in God denies the whole, and whoever has not confessed that he always was denies always: as you too, even if today you called the Lord Jesus Christ, who was born of the virgin Mary, true God in heaven, yet unless you called him God always you would not truly confess him. But of course you do not want to change or vary your view in anything: the one you say was born a mere man you contend is not God even today. O new and unheard-of impiety! The one whom with the heretics you assert to be a man you do not even, with the heretics, confess to be God.

But still, as I had begun to say, this very point must be made clear: that two Christs are without doubt made by you. Tell me, I ask, you who separate Christ from the Son of God, how do you confess in the creed that Christ was born of God? For you say: “I believe in God the Father and in Jesus Christ his Son.” You have here, then, Jesus Christ the Son of God. But you say that it was not the same Son of God who was born of Mary. Therefore one Christ is from God, another from Mary. There are, then, two Christs in your view, since, not denying Christ in the creed, you assert that the Christ from Mary is other than the one you confess in the creed. But perhaps you say that Christ was not born of God. And how do you say in the creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God”? Either, then, you will deny the creed or confess Christ the Son of God. But if you confess in the creed Christ the Son of God, you must confess the same Christ from Mary to be the Son of God; or if you assert another Christ from Mary, you surely blaspheme that there are two Christs.

Yet even if your faithlessness and perversity is not shut in by this faith of the creed, are you not, I ask, overwhelmed by reason itself and the light of truth? Tell me, I ask, heretic, whoever you are — it is certainly a Trinity that we believe and confess, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. About the majesty of the Father and the Spirit there is no question; you cavil against the Son, in that you say that the one born of Mary is not the same as the one begotten of God the Father — tell me, then, since you do not deny that the only-begotten Son of God was born of God, whom do you want this one to be who was born of Mary? You say a mere man, according to what he himself said: “What is born of the flesh is flesh.” But one cannot be called a mere man who was not begotten by the law of human generation alone: for “what is born in her,” says the angel, “is of the Holy Spirit.” And this, though you deny practically all the sacraments of salvation, even you do not dare to deny. Since, then, he was born of the Holy Spirit, and one conceived by God’s inbreathing cannot be called a mere man, if he is not the one who, according to the apostle, emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and the Word made flesh, and humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, and who for our sake became poor, though he was rich, tell me then: who is the one both born of the Holy Spirit and conceived under God’s overshadowing? You say without doubt that he is another. There are two, then: the one begotten of God the Father in heaven, and the one conceived of Mary by God’s inbreathing. And so this one whom you bring in is a fourth, whom, though in words you call a mere man, you in fact confirm was not a mere man, so far as to confess, even if not as you ought, that he is honorable and venerable and to be adored. Since, then, both the Son of God who was born of the Father is to be adored and the one begotten of Mary through the Holy Spirit is to be adored, you make two to be honored and venerated, whom you divide from each other so far as to venerate each with his own honor. And by this you understand that, by denying and separating the Son of God from himself, you overturn, as far as lies in you, the whole sacrament of the Godhead. For while you try to insert a fourth person into the Trinity, you see that you have wholly denied the whole Trinity.

Since this is so, by denying the one Jesus Christ, the Son of God, you have denied everything. For this is the reckoning of the church’s sacrament and of the catholic faith, that one who denies part of the sacrament cannot confess part of it. For all things are so bound together and incorporated with each other that one cannot stand without another, and one who has denied one out of all gains nothing from having believed all the others. So if you deny that the Lord Jesus Christ is God, you must, by denying the Son of God, deny the Father too; because, according to the word of God himself, “one who does not have the Son does not have the Father, but one who has the Son has the Father also.” Denying the begotten, then, you deny the begetter too. And denying that the Son of God was born in the flesh, it follows that you deny that he was born in the spirit too, because the same one was born in the flesh who was first born in the spirit. Not believing, then, that he was brought forth in the flesh, you must not believe that he suffered either. And not believing his passion, what remains but that you deny his resurrection too, because faith in one raised comes from faith in one dead, and the reckoning of resurrection cannot stand unless faith in death has gone before? Denying, then, that he suffered and died, denying too that he rose from the underworld, it surely follows that you deny that he ascended, because the ascension could not be without the resurrection, and one who is not believed to have risen must not be believed to have ascended either, as the apostle says: “For he who descended is the same who ascended.” So, as far as lies in you, the Lord Jesus Christ neither rose from the underworld nor ascended into heaven, nor sat at the right hand of God the Father, nor will come at that awaited day of final examination, nor will judge the living and the dead.

You understand, then, unhappy and raging perversity, that you have wholly emptied out the whole faith of the creed, the whole force of hope and of the sacrament. And do you dare besides to stand in the church and think yourself a bishop, when you have denied all those things through which you began to be a bishop? Return, then, to the right way, take back your former mind, come to your senses at last if you were ever sensible, go back to yourself, if indeed there was once anything in you to which you may now return. Recognize the sacraments of your salvation, by which you were renewed, by which you were reborn. You need them no less now than you did then, so that through repentance they may now regenerate you, they that formerly begot you through the font. Hold the full order of the creed, hold the perfect truth of the faith: believe in God the Father, believe in God the Son, in one begetter and one begotten, the Lord of all, Jesus Christ, homoousios with the Father, born in the Godhead, born in the body, of a twofold birth but of one majesty, who, creator of all creatures, was the same born of the Father who was afterwards born of the virgin.

For his coming in the flesh and from the flesh was his rising, not a lessening; he was only born, not changed. For though, remaining in the form of God, he took the form of a servant, the weakness of the human condition did not weaken the nature of God; but with the power of the Godhead safe and whole, all that was done in the flesh of man was the advancement of the man, not a failing of the majesty. For since God was brought forth in human flesh, he was not born in the flesh so as not to remain God in himself, but so that, God remaining in himself, the man might be God. And therefore Martha, though she saw a man with fleshly eyes, still confessed God with spiritual ones, saying: “Yes, Lord, I have believed that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who have come into this world.” Therefore Peter, by the revelation of the Holy Spirit, though outwardly he looked on the Son of Man, still proclaimed the Son of God, saying: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Therefore Thomas, when he touched the flesh, believed he had touched God, saying: “My Lord and my God.” For all confessed one Christ, so as not to make two. Believe him, then, and believe so the Lord of all, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten and firstborn: the same creator of things as preserver of men, the same first founder of the whole world as afterwards redeemer of the human race; who, remaining with the Father and in the Father, homoousios with the Father, and, according to the apostle, taking the form of a servant, humbled himself to death, even the death of the cross; and according to the creed was born of the virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried, and on the third day rose again according to the Scriptures and ascended into heaven, and will come again to judge the living and the dead. For this is the true faith, this the true salvation: to believe the same God and Lord Jesus Christ both before all things and after all things; because, as it is written, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, and forever.” For in “yesterday” he shows all past time, in which before the beginning he was born of the Father; in “today” the span of this age, in which he was born again of the virgin, suffered and rose; and in his being called the same “forever” the immensity of all future eternity is meant.

But perhaps you say that, if I say that the same one was born of the virgin at the end of the ages who was born of God the Father before all things, I am calling God fleshly even before the beginnings of the world, since I say that the same one was afterwards man who was always God, and so that the man who was afterwards born always existed. I do not want you to be confused by this blindness of ignorance and this night of errors, so as to think that I assert that the man who was born of Mary existed before the beginnings of things, and that I proclaim God to have been always bodily even before the beginnings of the world. Not so, I say, I do not say so: not that the man was in God before he was born, but that God was afterwards born in the man. For that flesh which was born of the flesh of the virgin did not always exist; but God, who always existed, came from the flesh of the virgin in the flesh of a man. For “the Word was made flesh”: he did not bring flesh with him, but by the condescension of his Godhead united himself to the flesh of a man. For tell me: when or where was the Word made flesh, or where did he empty himself, taking the form of a servant, or where did he become poor, though he was rich, except in that holy womb of the virgin, where, as the Word of God is incarnate, it is said to be made flesh; as he is brought forth, he takes the form of a servant in reality; as he is fastened to the gibbet in the human condition, he becomes poor and is made needy by fleshly suffering, though he was rich in divine majesty? Otherwise, if, as you say, the Godhead came upon him after this, as upon one of the prophets and saints, then the Word was made flesh in those too in whom he deigned to dwell, then through each of them he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant; and so nothing new or special was done in Christ, nothing unique, nothing wonderful was in his conception or birth or death.

And yet, to return to what was said above, since all these things are as we have said, how is Jesus Christ, whom you assert to be only a man, read to have always existed even before he was born of the virgin, and proclaimed God even before the ages by prophets and apostles, as Paul says, “One Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things,” and also elsewhere, “For in Christ,” he says, “all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible”? The creed too, woven by human and divine authority alike, says: “I believe in God the Father and in the Lord Jesus Christ his Son,” and after other things, “true God of true God, through whom the ages were framed and all things made,” and again, “who for our sake came and was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified, and was buried.”

How, then, since by our own confession the Lord’s man did not exist at all before the virgin’s childbearing and conception, is Christ, who is called by you a mere man, proclaimed by the holy writings to be God without beginning, and how is so great a unity of man and God read that the man seems both to have been co-eternal with God before, and God afterwards to have suffered with the man, although neither is the man to be believed without beginning nor God passible? It is surely what we have already testified in the earlier writings: that God, united to the man, that is, to his own body, does not allow any distance to be made between the man and God by human opinion, and did not wish it to be admitted at all that the son of man should be believed by anyone to be one and the Son of God another; but in all the holy writings he so connects and incorporates the Lord’s man with God that no one can separate the man from God in time or God from the man in the passion. For if you look at time, you will always find the son of man with the Son of God; if at the passion, you will always find the Son of God with the son of man: Christ, the son of man and Son of God, being so united and undivided in himself that, as far as the voice of Scripture is concerned, neither can the man be separated from God in time nor God from the man in the passion. Hence that word: “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven”: where, though the Son of God was speaking on earth, he testified that the son of man was in heaven, and testified that the same son of man, whom he said would ascend into heaven, had first come down from heaven. Or that: “If you see the Son of Man ascending where he was before”: though he names the one born of man, he still testifies that he was always in the regions above. And the apostle too, if one looks at time, proclaims that all things were made through Christ: for “one,” he says, “is the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”; if at the passion, he indicates that the Lord of majesty was crucified: “For if they had known,” he says, “they would never have crucified the Lord of majesty.” And therefore the creed too, teaching that the only-begotten and firstborn Lord Jesus Christ is true God of true God, homoousios with the Father and creator of all, testifies that he was born of the virgin Mary and afterwards crucified and buried; so incorporating the Son of God and son of man, and uniting man and God, that no division can be made either in time or in the passion, since the same Lord Jesus Christ is taught to be both God through eternity of time and man through enduring the passion; and so, though neither should the man be called without beginning nor God passible, yet in the one Lord Jesus Christ the man is proclaimed eternal before and God dead. You see, then, that Christ is all, and his name signifies both natures, because, born both man and God, he so embraces all things in himself that nothing is known to be lacking in his name. Not, then, that before the virgin’s childbearing there was in the past the same eternity of the man as of God; but because God was united with the man in the virgin’s womb, it came about that in Christ the one cannot be named at all without the other.

Whatever, then, you say of the Lord Jesus, you say of the whole. For in the Son of God you will name the son of man, and in the son of man the Son of God, by the figure of synecdoche, by which the whole is understood from a part and a portion is named from the whole; as the holy Scriptures teach, in which the Lord, often using this figure while teaching about others, wished it to be understood so of himself too. For in the divine volumes days, or things, or men, or times are sometimes indicated in no other way: as when God foretells to Abraham that Israel would serve in Egypt for four hundred years, saying: “Know for certain that your seed will be a stranger in a land not its own, and they will subject them to slavery and afflict them for four hundred years”; whereas, if all the time from when God spoke is considered, there are more than four hundred years, but if only that during which they were slaves, less. Unless this time is understood by this figure, the word of God perhaps lies, which be far from Christian minds; but since from the time of the divine word the whole time of their life has more than four hundred years and the slavery much less than four hundred, it comes about that either a part can be understood from the whole or the whole from a part. Not unlike, too, is the meaning sometimes concerning days and nights, where, since one day is understood in both times, both times are shown in a part of one time. In this way, indeed, that which seems obscure about the time of the Lord’s passion is also opened up. For when the Lord foretold, after the example of the prophet Jonah, that the Son of Man would be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights, and after the sixth day of the week on which he was crucified he was among the dead only one day and two nights, how is the truth of the divine word found? By the figure of synecdoche, that is, so that the preceding night is referred to the day on which he was crucified, and the following day to the night on which he rose; and so, by adding the night that preceded to its day and the day that followed to its night, nothing is known to be lacking to the whole time, which is filled out from its part. The holy Scriptures teem with such examples of reasoning, but it would be long to mention them all. Thus when the psalm says, “What is man, that you are mindful of him?” the whole is understood from a part, since by naming one man the fullness of the human race is shown; thus also where Achab sinned the people is said to have sinned, a portion being indicated from the whole by naming all. John too, the Lord’s forerunner, says: “After me comes a man who was made before me, because he was before me.” How, then, does he indicate that one will come after him whom he shows to have been before him? For if this is understood of the man who was born afterwards, how was he before him? If of the Word, how does a man come after me, unless in the one Lord Jesus Christ both the later time of the man and the antiquity of the Word are shown? And so it comes about that one and the same Lord both was before him and came after him, because according to the flesh he is later than John and according to the Godhead before all; and therefore John, naming only a man, showed both the man and the Word, because, since the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was made complete both by man and by Word, in saying one thing of him he showed all. And why say more? The day will fail me, I think, if I try to collect or relate all that could be said of this; and what we have now said is enough, at least for this part of the matter, for the exposition of the creed, for the duty of the case, and for the measure of the book.

What usually happens to those who, having already escaped the open sea, dread either the sandbanks stretched before the harbors or the rocks near the shores, has happened to me: having kept certain cavils of the heretics for the end, now that I have come to the goal of the labor undertaken, I begin to fear the very end I longed to reach. But, as the prophet says, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear what man may do to me.” Let us not fear the pits of the heretics laid in our way to ensnare us, nor the roads fenced here and there with bristling thorns; since these roughen the way more than they close it, we have labor in clearing them rather than fear of impossibility; for since they put themselves weakly in the way of us who keep a straight course, and bristle against travelers more than they hinder them, our duty and work has more to do in clearing than to fear from difficulty. So, putting our hand to that monstrous head of the deadly serpent, and wishing to handle all the limbs of its twisting body bound up in huge coils, we pray you again and again, Lord Jesus, to whom we have always prayed, that you would give us a word in the opening of our mouth for the destruction of strongholds, destroying reasonings and every height that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, so that we may take captive every understanding in obedience to you; for he truly becomes free who has begun to be your captive. Be present, then, to your own duty, your own work, to those who strive for you beyond the measure of their strength. Grant us to crush the gaping mouths of the new serpent and its necks swollen with deadly poisons, you who make the feet of believers tread unharmed upon serpents and scorpions, and walk upon the asp and the basilisk, and trample the lion and the dragon; and you grant, through the fearless boldness of steadfast innocence, that the infant at the breast should delight over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child put his hand into the den of the basilisk. Grant us too, then, to put harmless hands into the dens of this most monstrous and most wicked basilisk; and if in some holes already, that is, in the hiding places of human minds, it has had its lair, or laid its eggs, or left the track of its scaly trail, take away from all the filthy and deadly contagion of this most ruinous snake, draw out the uncleanness of faithlessness brought in, and cleanse with the winnowing fan of holy purification the souls besieged by stinking mire, so that dens of robbers may become houses of prayer, and that in those lodgings where now, as it is written, hedgehogs and onocentaurs and hairy creatures and monsters of various portents dwell, there may shine the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that is, the beauties of faith and religion. And as once, when the worship of idols was cast out and the images destroyed, you made temples of the virtues out of the shrines of demons, sending the shining rays of your light into the dens of serpents and scorpions, and turned lairs of errors and shamefulness into houses of ornament and beauty, so in all whose eyes the fog of heretical perversity has besieged pour in the light of your mercy and truth, so that, beholding at last with unbarred and pure light the great and saving sacrament of your incarnation, they may understand that you, brought forth into the world from that most holy womb of the spotless virgin, are true man, yet so as to recognize that you were always true God.

And before I begin to speak of the things I have not yet touched on in the earlier books, I think it right to try to discharge what I promised before, so that, the promise wholly fulfilled, I may begin to speak more freely of untouched matters when I have made good what I pledged. The new snake, then, hissing in the church of God to destroy faith in the holy birth, says: “No one gives birth to one older than herself.” First, then, I think you know neither what you are saying nor from what source you are saying it. For if you knew or understood from what source you were speaking, you would never judge the birth of the Only-begotten of God by the reasoning of a mortal’s petty opinion, nor try to prejudge one born outside the conception of human origin by human little definitions, nor object earthly impossibilities to the omnipotence of the Godhead, if you knew that nothing is impossible to God. “No one,” then, you say, “gives birth to one older than herself.” Tell me, I ask, about what cases you are speaking, about the natures of what living things you think you are defining? Do you think you are laying down a law for men or beasts, birds or cattle? For these and others of this kind are the ones of which this can be said. For none of these can beget one older than itself, because what has already arisen cannot return to be begotten by a new creation; and therefore no one gives birth to one older than herself, because neither can one beget an older; for the cause of giving birth comes only from the possibility of begetting. Do you, then, think that what must be considered in the arising of earthly animals must be considered in the birth of almighty God, and do you object the nature of the human condition to him who is himself the author of nature? You see, then, as I said above, that you do not know from what or of whom you speak, since you compare the thing made to the maker and, to judge the omnipotence of God, use the example of those things which would surely not exist themselves unless they had from God the very fact that they are. God, then, came as he willed, when he willed, and from whom he willed. Neither time nor person nor human custom nor the examples of things prejudiced him, because the law of creatures could not stand against him who is himself the creator of all, and to be able to do what he willed was ready to him, because power was at hand to his will. Do you want to know to some extent how great is the omnipotence of God? I believe God can do even with his creatures what you do not believe he could do with himself. For all living things that give birth to those later than themselves could much more easily give birth to those earlier, if only God commanded it. For even food and drink themselves, if that were the will of the Godhead, could be turned into certain conceptions and offspring. Waters, finally, which have flowed from the beginning of things and which all living things use alike, could be embodied in the womb and begotten, if God commanded it. For who has set a limit to the holy works or circumscribed divine power, or who, as it is written, will say to him, “What have you done?” If you deny that God can do all things, deny that one older could be born of Mary when God was born. But if nothing is impossible to God, why do you object impossibility in his own coming to him for whom you know nothing at all is impossible?

The second slanderous blasphemy, or blasphemous slander, of your perversity is that in which you say: “The offspring must be homoousios with the one who bears it.” It is not unlike the former; for it differs in words rather than in substance and kind. For when the birth of God is in question, you say the same thing, that one more powerful could not be born of Mary, as above, that one older could not be begotten. And therefore either take what was said above as answered about this too, or consider what is now to be said as answered about that too. You say, then: “The offspring must be homoousios with the one who bears it.” If you look at earthly creations, that is generally so; but if at the rising of God, why do you consider examples from nature in his birth, since the laws are subject to the lawgiver, not the lawgiver to the laws? Do you want to know more fully how not only impious but also absurd these cavils of yours are, the singsong of one who does not see the omnipotence of God at all? Tell me, I ask, you who think that like is born only of like, from where that countless multitude of quails was suddenly born once in the desert to feed the people of Israel. For we do not read that they were first brought forth by their mothers in some place, but brought in by a sudden coming. And that heavenly food itself, from where did it flow down into the camp of the Hebrews for forty years? Did manna beget manna? But these concern ancient miracles. What of new ones? With a few loaves and small fishes the Lord Jesus Christ fed countless crowds of the peoples following him in the desert more than once. The reason for the filling was not in the food. What invisible and secret cause filled the hungry, especially since much more was left over after their filling than had been set before their hunger? By what reckoning was this whole thing done, by what cause, that, while those eating took their fill, the food itself grew richer with unspeakable increase? We read that wine was born of water in Galilee. Tell me: how did an unlike nature beget a substance unlike its own quality, especially since — what fits the Lord’s birth most of all — the rise of a much nobler thing came from an inferior one? Tell me, then, how the excellent and wonderful taste of wine was born from that plainness of water? How was one thing drawn and another poured out? Did that cistern or well have such a nature as to change the waters drawn from it into the best wines? Or did the quality of the vessels or the industry of the servants do this? Surely none of these. And how is it that the reason of the deed is not grasped by the thought of the heart, while yet the truth of the deed is kept by firm knowledge? In the gospel mud was put on a blind man’s eyes, and when it was washed off eyes were born. Did water have such a nature as to give birth to eyes, or mud to create light? Surely none of these; especially since water gives nothing to a blind man, while mud can even harm those who see. And how did a thing with the power of harming in itself perform the office of remedy and health, and what usually harms the healthy become then as it were the servant of health? You say, then, that the power of God bestowed this, that God supplied the medicine, and that divine omnipotence accomplished all these things we have mentioned, since he is surely able both to found new things from unwonted ones, and to establish wholesome things from contrary ones, and to change things that lie in impossibility and inefficacy into the possibilities and effects of things.

Confess, then, about the rising of the Lord himself the same as about all things. Believe that God was born as he willed, whom you do not deny was able to do what he willed; unless perhaps you think that the power which was at hand to him for all other things failed him for himself, and that his omnipotence, which going forth from him penetrated all things, failed him for his own birth. Do you object to me in the Lord’s birth, “No one gives birth to one older than herself,” and say in the childbearing in which almighty God was born, “The offspring must be homoousios with the one who bears it”? As if you were dealing with some man by human laws, against whom you could object his own impossibility, whom you could shut in by earthly weakness. You say that the condition of being born is common to all, the law of begetting the same, and that what God forbade to happen to all could not happen at all to one man only in the whole human race. You do not understand of whom you speak, you do not see of whom you talk: because the author of all conditions is surely the law of all natures, through whom is whatever man can do and whatever he cannot, because he himself set the limit of both, both how far ability would reach and beyond what weakness would not go. How insanely, then, you object human impossibility to him to whom possibility itself is owed! If you judge the person of the Lord by earthly weaknesses and measure the omnipotence of God by human reasonings, you will surely find nothing in his bodily sufferings that seems fitting for God. For if it can seem likely that Mary could not give birth to God, who was older than she, how will it be likely that God was crucified by men? And yet the same God who was crucified foretold it himself: “Will a man fasten his God, that you fasten me?” If the Lord will not be thought to have been born of the virgin because the one being born was older than the one bearing him, how can God be believed to have had blood? And yet it is said to the elders of Ephesus: “Rule the church of God, which he acquired with his own blood.” Finally, how will the author of life be thought deprived of life? And yet Peter says: “You killed the author of life.” No one placed on earth can be in heaven. And how does the Lord himself say: “The Son of Man who is in heaven”? If, finally, you think that God was not born of the virgin because the offspring must be homoousios with the one who bears it, how will you believe that unlike things arose from unlike natures? Then, according to you, no wind suddenly brought the quails, no manna fell, no wine came from water, no many thousands of men were fed with little food, no light appeared to the blind man after the mud. But if all these things surely seem incredible and against reason unless they are believed to have been done by God, why do you deny in his birth what you confess in his works? Or could he not grant to his own rising and coming what he did not deny to human remedies and benefits?

It would be long and almost fabulous to say more on this matter. But still, to refute your folly and madness in saying that the offspring must be homoousios with the one who bears it, that is, that no creature can give birth to something unlike itself, I will bring forward examples from earthly things too, by which I may prove that many things are born of unlike ones: not that any comparison can or should be made in such a matter, but so that you may not doubt that in the holy birth that could happen which you see taking place even in these earthly and perishable things. We read that bees, as very small so most prudent and most skilful creatures, are produced and come forth from very different natures. For though they are creatures of wonderful ingenuity, abounding not only in sense but also in prudence, they are produced from certain flowers of plants that have been gathered. What greater example do you think should be brought in or taken? Living things are born from lifeless ones, sentient things from insentient ones. Who is the craftsman there, who the maker, who the former of bodies, who the breather of souls? Who, finally, gave the very sound by which they as it were speak to one another? Who fashioned and composed the neatness of their feet, the skill of their mouths, the elegance of their wings? Their ingenuity, anger, foresight, movement, calmness, concord, dissension, wars, peace, order, arrangement, duties, rule, all, finally, that they have as it were in common with the human race, by whose teaching or gift, by whose instruction and training did they receive? Did they obtain this from a father’s seed, or learn it in a mother’s womb and in maternal flesh? They know no womb and know no seed: only the flowers they have fed on are gathered into the hives, and from them, by an inestimable workmanship, bees come forth. There the wombs of mothers give nothing to offspring, nor are bees brought forth from bees: they are workers only, not begetters. Living creatures come forth from little flowers of plants: what likeness is there between plants and living creatures? Who the maker of these things is, I believe you understand. Go now and doubt whether the Lord could grant to his own birth what you see he has given even to the smallest things he has made. It may perhaps be superfluous to add anything after this and other things; yet let even unnecessary things be added as examples, to heap up the proof. We see the air suddenly covered with locusts and the lands filled. Bring out their seeds, bring out their births, bring out their mothers. For they come out, as you see, from where they are born. Lay down for all these things that their offspring must be homoousios with the one bearing it, and you will be found as ridiculous in these prescriptions as you are now mad in denying the Lord’s birth. And what after this? Do even you yourself think we should go further? Still we add something. It is beyond doubt that basilisk serpents are begotten from the eggs of the birds they call ibises in Egypt. What kinship and agreement is there between a bird and a serpent? Why is its offspring not homoousios with the one who bears it? And yet those that beget do not do all these things, nor do those born know them; they come about by hidden causes and by a certain inexplicable and manifold law of begetting nature. And will you object the petty prescriptions of earthly opinions to the birth of him, when you cannot even give the reason of those births which happen by his nod and command, whose choice does everything, whose command effects everything, against whom nothing could go, nothing stand, and for whom, in all that was to be done by power, to will was enough?

But it is time at last that we should uncover your remaining blasphemies too, more hidden and more insidious, since, as we would have preferred, we can no longer be ignorant of them, at least so that they may not catch the ignorant. You set down in a certain pestilent treatise of yours, saying: “Since man is the image of the divine nature, and the devil cast this down into corruption, God grieved for his image as an emperor for his statue, and restores the corrupted image; and without seed he formed from the virgin a nature like that of Adam, who was born without seed, and through a man he raises human nature: for since through a man came death, therefore through a man also the resurrection of the dead.” It is the custom, they say, of certain poisoners to mix honey with the poisons in the cups they prepare, so that harmful things may be hidden by sweet ones, and while someone is caught by the sweetness of the honey he is killed by the plague of the poison. So you too, saying, “Man is the image of the divine nature, and the devil cast this down into corruption, God grieved for his image as an emperor for his statue,” smear the rims of your pestilent cup, as it were, with a certain sweetness and as with honey, so that men drinking the cup offered, while they taste the alluring things, may not perceive the ruinous ones. You put forward the name of God so as to lie in the name of religion; you set holy things first so as to persuade perverse ones; and by confessing God you bring it about that you deny the very one you confess. For who does not see where you are going, what you are contriving? For you say: “God grieved for his image as an emperor for his statue, and restores the corrupted image; and without seed he formed from the virgin a nature like that of Adam, who is born without seed, and through a man he raises human nature: for since through a man came death, therefore through a man also the resurrection of the dead.” This, then, you have done with so much zeal, with so much effort, with flattering preambles, deceitful plotter: that, naming God in what comes first, you might arrive at a man in what follows, and afterwards fasten the insult of a mere man on the very one to whom you first gave the honor of God by a show of crafty humility. You say, then, that the divine goodness restored the image of God which the devil cast down into corruption: for “he restores,” you say, “the corrupted image.” How cunning already is this saying, “he restores the corrupted image,” namely, to persuade that there was nothing more in him in whom the image was restored than in the image itself to which the restoration was given! And so you want the Lord to be only the same as Adam, the restorer of the image nothing more than the falling image itself. Finally you prove by what follows what you are doing, what you are contriving, saying: “Without seed he formed a nature like that of Adam, who is born without seed, and through a man he raises human nature.” You assert that the Lord Jesus was like Adam in all things and his equal: that one, of course, without seed, and this one without seed; that one a man only, and this one a mere man. And so you see that you have carefully taken precautions and seen to it that the Lord Jesus Christ should not be thought greater in anything than Adam or perhaps better, since you have compared them with equal measures, so that you would think you were taking something from Adam if you had set God before him in anything.

“For since,” you say, “through a man came death, therefore through a man also the resurrection of the dead.” Do you try to prove your perversity and crime even by the apostle’s testimony, and defame the vessel of election with the contagion of your impiety, so that, because the author of your salvation is not understood by you, the apostle too should seem to have denied God? And yet, if you were pleased to use apostolic testimonies, why were you content with one of his and silent about all the rest, and did not at once add this: “Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ”; or this: “We speak wisdom among the perfect,” and after other things, “which none of the rulers of this world knew; for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of majesty”; or this: “For in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily”; and: “One Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”? Or do you, approving the apostle in part and rejecting him in part, receive him only where, according to the dispensation, he names Christ a man, and reject him where he names him God? For Paul does not deny that Jesus is a man, but he confesses the same man to be God, and so proclaims that resurrection came to the human race through a man as to affirm that in the man himself it was God who rose. For see whether he does not proclaim the one who rose to be God, who testifies that the one who was crucified is the God of majesty.

Yet, so as not to make the Lord Jesus one of the common people, as it were, you gave him some dignity, granting him honor as to a holy man, not Godhead as to true man and true God. For what do you say? “God formed the Lord’s incarnation: let us honor the theodochos form together with God as one form of the Godhead, as the inseparable statue of the divine will, as the image of the hidden God.” Above you said that Adam was the image of God; here you call Christ an image: that one a statue and this one a statue. But we must of course give you thanks for the honor of God, since you grant that the theodochos form is to be honored together with God! In this there is not so much honor as injury: for in this very thing you do not grant the Lord Jesus Christ the honor of the Godhead but deny it. For with the subtle art of impiety you say he is to be honored with God so as not to confess that he is God, and by this very thing by which you seem to have joined him you deceitfully separate him. For since you blaspheme that he is to be worshiped not as God but as it were honored together with God, you give him a joining of divine neighborhood so as to take away the reality of the Godhead. Most impious and most cunning enemy of God, you want to carry out the crime of one who denies under the name of one who confesses. “Let us honor him,” you say, “as the inseparable statue of the divine will, as the image of the hidden God.” The honor of our Creator and Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, has made great progress among us, no doubt, by his benefits! If we were redeemed by him from eternal destruction so that we might call our Redeemer a statue, we are surely striving to answer his kindness and goodness with worthy obedience and worthy worship, if we try even to take away the majesty which he did not refuse to humble for our sake.

But of course you excuse the insult done to the Lord by a show of honor added after, saying: “as the image of the hidden God.” In calling him an image you compare him to the human condition; in saying “of the hidden God” you take away from his most certain dignity. For “God,” says David, “will come openly, our God, and will not keep silent.” And he surely came and did not keep silent, who, before he himself said anything after his rising, declared his coming by earthly and divine witnesses alike, as the star points him out, as the Magi adore, as the angels announce. What more do you ask? His voice was still silent on earth and his honor was already crying out in heaven. Do you, then, say that God was hidden in him and is hidden? But the prophets did not foretell this, nor the patriarchs, nor finally the whole law. For they who foretold to all that he would come did not say that he would hide. You err, unhappy blindness, seeking grounds for blasphemy and not finding them. You say that he was hidden even after his coming; I prove that he was not hidden even before he came. For was the sacrament of God to be born of the virgin hidden from that outstanding patriarch, to whom a name meaning “the vision of God present” was given, who rose from the name of supplanter to the name of Israel? When he had recognized the mystery of the future incarnation from the struggle of the man wrestling with him, he said: “I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved.” What, I ask, had he seen, that he should believe he had seen God? Did God show himself to him among lightnings and thunders, or did the face of the Godhead show itself to him flashing from an opened heaven? None of these; on the contrary, he saw a man and recognized God. O truly worthy of the name he obtained, who by inner rather than outer eyes earned the dignity of the name given him by God! He saw a human form wrestling with him and declared that he saw God. He knew, of course, that that form of a man was the reality of God, because in the form in which God was then seen, in that form he would afterwards come in the reality of the form itself. Yet why should we wonder if so great a patriarch believed without doubt what God himself showed him so plainly by himself, as he says, “I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved”? What had God shown him of present Godhead so great that he should say the face of God had been shown him? For only a man, as it seemed, had appeared to him, whom he had even overcome in the struggle. But God was surely doing this through forerunning signs of things, so that there might be no one who would not believe that God was born of man, since the patriarch had already seen God in human form.

But why do I linger so long on one example, as if many were lacking? Could God, who was to come in the flesh, be hidden from men even then, when the prophet said of him openly, as it were to the whole human race, “Behold your God,” and elsewhere, “This is our God,” and that, “Mighty God, Father of the world to come, Prince of peace, and of his kingdom there will be no end”? And when he had already come, was it hidden that he had come from those who openly confessed that he had come? Was Peter ignorant of the coming of God when he said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”? Did Martha not know what she was saying or whom she believed, when she said, “Yes, Lord, I have believed that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who have come into this world”? Finally, did all who sought from him remedies for diseases or restoration of limbs or life for the dead ask it from the weakness of a man or from the omnipotence of God?

Finally, when the devil himself was tempting him with every round of enticements, every art of his wickedness, what did he suspect without knowing it, or what did he desire to know by tempting? Or what had moved him so much that he was looking for God in the lowliness of a man? Had he learned this from earlier proofs, or had he ever known God truly to have come in a human body? Surely not; but he was driven to suspicion and inquiry into this by great signs, great experiences of things and the voices of truth itself, as one who had once heard from John, “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sin of the world,” and again from the same, “I ought to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” The dove too, coming down from heaven and standing over the Lord’s head, had given itself as a plain and manifest pointer to God declared. A voice too, sent by God not in riddles or figures, had stirred him, saying: “You are my beloved Son; in you I am well pleased.” And therefore, though he saw a man outwardly in Jesus, he was searching out the Son of God, saying: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” Did the sight of a man take away from the devil the suspicion of Godhead, so that because he saw a man he believed he could not be God? Surely not: but what does he say? “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” He did not doubt that what he was searching out could be; his concern was about the truth, not a sense of security about its impossibility.

And yet he knew, of course, that the Lord Jesus Christ was born of Mary; he knew that he was wrapped in cloths and laid in a manger, that his littleness among human beginnings was poor and his infancy needy even of the usual services of the cradle; he did not doubt either that he had true flesh and was truly born a man. And why did this seem too little to him for security? Why did he believe that one whom he knew to be truly man could be God? Learn, then, unhappy madness, learn, insane and cruel impiety, learn at last even from the devil to be less faithless. He said, “If you are the Son of God”; you say, “You are not the Son of God.” What he asked, you deny. No one has yet been found except you who has gone beyond the impiety of the devil. What he confessed could be in the Lord, you do not believe could have been.

But perhaps he afterwards stopped and rested, and, his temptations having come to nothing, laid aside his suspicion because he did not find the result? On the contrary, it always remained in him, and even up to the Lord’s very cross the suspicion in him grew, heaped up by his own fears. Why say more? Not even then did he stop thinking him the Son of God, after he knew that so much was permitted to his persecutors against him. But the cunning enemy, seeing signs of the Godhead even amid the bodily sufferings themselves, was compelled to suspect God, even though he would rather he were a man; because, though he would rather believe what he wished, he was still driven by sure signs of things to what he feared. Nor is it surprising. For though he saw him spat upon and scourged and insulted and driven to the cross, he still saw divine powers abounding amid the very indignities of the insults, as the veil of the temple is torn, as the sun flees, as the day is darkened, as all things feel the power of the passion and even all things that do not know God recognize the work of the Godhead. And therefore the devil, seeing this and trembling, tried in every way to come to the knowledge of God even in the very consummation of the man, saying through those who had crucified him: “If he is the Son of God, let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe him.” He perceived, of course, that our Lord God was working the redemption of human salvation through the passion of his body, and that through it he himself was being destroyed and subjugated and we redeemed and saved; and therefore the enemy of the human race wanted by every means and every trick to bring to nothing what he knew was being done for the redemption of all. “If he is the Son of God,” he says, “let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe him”: so that the Lord, moved by the insult of words, might abandon the sacrament while avenging the injury. You see, then, that the Lord, even placed on the cross, is called Son of God; you see that they suspect what they name. Learn, then, as I said above, even from the persecutors themselves or from the devil to believe in the Son of God. Who has ever equaled demonic unbelief? Who has gone beyond it? He suspected him to be the Son of God even when he endured death; you deny it even when he has risen. He suspected him to be God, from whom he hid himself; you deny him to whom he proved himself.

You use the holy Scriptures against God, then, and try to make his own witnesses act against him. But how? Truly so that you become a transgressor not only against God but also against the testimonies themselves. Nor is it surprising if, since you cannot do what you want, you do the only thing you can: because you cannot turn the holy testimonies against God, you do what you can: you pervert them. For you say: “Then Paul too lies about Christ when he says, without mother, without genealogy.” I ask you, of whom do you want Paul to have said this? Of the Son and Word of God, or of Christ, whom you separate from the Son of God and blaspheme to be only a man? If of Christ, whom you call a mere man, how could a man be born without mother, without the genealogy of a mother’s origin? But if of the Word of God and Son of God, what are we to make of the fact that the same apostle, your witness, as you think, sacrilegious man, in the same place and the same testimony testifies that the one you assert to be without mother is also without father, saying: “without father, without mother, without genealogy”? It remains, then, that, using the apostle’s testimony, because you assert that the Son of God is without mother, you blaspheme that he is without father too. You see, then, into what precipice of impiety you have thrown yourself by your zeal for perversity and wickedness, so that, as no one has yet said from the ages except perhaps a madman, while you say that the Son of God had no mother you deny his Father too. And I do not know whether this is greater impiety or folly; for what is more stupid, what more foolish, than to put the name of son and want to keep silent about the name of father? But you say: “I neither keep silent about it nor deny it.” What madness, then, compelled you to put forward that testimony, where, while you say he had no mother, you seem to have denied his Father too? For since in the same testimony he is said to be without father as well as without mother, it must be that, if “without mother” can be understood there, he is believed to be without father in the same way in which he is understood there to be without mother. But that headlong madness for denying God did not understand this, which, when it put forward maimed what was written whole, did not see that, when the series of the holy volume was opened, its shameless and open lie could be refuted. O stupid madness of blasphemy, which, while it does not itself see what ought to follow, did not consider what could be read; as if, because it took away understanding from itself, it could take away reading from all, or as if all would lose the eyes of their heads for reading because it had already lost the eyes of the mind! Hear, then, heretic, what you have stolen; hear full and whole what you put forward weak and maimed. The apostle, wishing to make known to all the twofold birth of God, so as to show the Lord born both in Godhead and in the flesh, says: “without father, without mother.” For the one belongs properly to the birth of the Godhead, the other to that of the flesh; and as in the Godhead he is begotten without mother, so in the body without father. And so, though he is neither without father nor without mother, he is still to be believed without father and without mother, because if you look at his being born of the Father, he is without mother; if of his mother, without father. And so, in each birth having one and not having the other, he did not have both in either; because neither did the birth of the Godhead need a mother, and for the birth of the body he was sufficient to himself. “Without father,” then, says the apostle, “without mother, without genealogy.”

How does he say that the Lord was without genealogy, when the Gospel of Matthew began with the Savior’s genealogy, saying: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”? So according to the evangelist he has a genealogy, and according to the apostle he has none; because according to the gospel he has one from his mother, according to the apostle he has none from his Father. And therefore the apostle, saying “without father, without mother, without genealogy,” rightly said, where he set down that he was begotten without mother, that he was also without genealogy. And so in each birth of the Lord the writings of the gospel and of the apostle agree together, because according to the evangelist he has a genealogy, incarnate without father, and according to the apostle he has none, begotten Lord in the Godhead without mother; as Isaiah says: “But who will tell his generation?”

Why, then, heretic, did you not set down in this way, whole and uncorrupted, what you had read? You see, then, that the apostle set down that the Lord was born without mother in the same way as he set down that he was born without father, so that in the way in which he would be understood to be without father he would be known to be without mother, and as he certainly could not be believed to be without father, so he could not be understood to be without mother either. Why, then, heretic, did you not set down safe and unharmed what you had read in the apostle, but thrust in part and take away part, and steal the words of truth so that you could build up falsehood by crime? I see by whom you were led. For you must be believed to have the training of the one whose example you follow. For so the devil, tempting the Lord in the gospel, says: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways.” And when he had said this, he took away what is joined and follows, that is: “You will walk upon the asp and the basilisk, and you will trample the lion and the dragon.” Cunningly, of course, he set down the earlier words and took away the later: he set down the one to deceive, kept silent about the other so as not to condemn himself. For he knew that he himself was signified by the prophetic voice as the asp and the basilisk, the lion and the dragon. So you too, putting forward part and taking away part, set down the one, of course, to deceive, and take away the other, lest, if you set down the whole, you should yourself condemn your deceit. But it is time at last to pass on to further matters. For lingering too long on each point, while led by the desire for a copious answer, we exceed the measure even of a longer book.

You say, then, in another disputation, or rather in another blasphemy of yours: “And he separated the Spirit from the divine nature, who created his humanity. For it says that what was born of Mary is of the Holy Spirit. Who also filled with righteousness what was created; for it says: He appeared in the flesh, was justified in the Spirit. Likewise the one who made him to be feared by demons; for he says: I cast out demons by the Spirit of God. Who also made his flesh a temple; for I saw the Spirit descending like a dove and remaining on him. Likewise who granted him his lifting up into heaven; for it says: giving command to the apostles whom he chose, he was lifted up through the Holy Spirit. Finally, this one who granted such great glory to Christ …” Your whole blasphemy in these words, then, is this: that Christ had nothing of himself, and that not even he, as you say, a mere man, received anything from the Word, that is, from the Son of God, but that all in him was the gift of the Spirit. If, then, we show that all that you refer to the Spirit is his own, what remains but that the one whom you want understood to be a man because, as you say, he had everything from another, we should prove to be God because he had everything as his own? And we shall prove this not only by disputations or arguments but by the voice of the Godhead itself, because nothing testifies of God more rightly than divine things, and since nothing knows itself better than the majesty of God itself, nothing about God is more worthily believed than those things in which God himself is his own witness. First, then, what you say, that the Holy Spirit created his humanity, we could understand simply if we knew that you did not put it forward unfaithfully. For we do not deny that the Lord’s flesh was conceived of the Holy Spirit; but we say that the body was conceived with the cooperation of the Spirit in such a way that we still say that his man was created for himself by the Son of God, as the Holy Spirit himself says and testifies in the holy writings: “Wisdom has built herself a house.” You see, then, that what was conceived by the Holy Spirit was built and completed by the Son of God: not because the work of the Son of God is one thing and that of the Holy Spirit another, but because, through the unity of Godhead and majesty, the working of the Spirit is the building of the Son of God, and the building of the Son of God the cooperation of the Holy Spirit. And therefore we read not only that the Holy Spirit came upon the virgin but also that the power of the Most High overshadowed the virgin, so that, since Wisdom itself is the fullness of the Godhead, no one should doubt that, when Wisdom built herself a house, the whole fullness of the Godhead was present. But the unhappy madness of blasphemy, while it tries to separate Christ from the Son of God, does not see that it separates the nature of the Godhead wholly from itself; unless perhaps it believes that a house was built for him by the Holy Spirit because he himself was not fit and able to build a house for himself. But this is as ridiculous as it is mad: that one who is believed to have created by his nod the whole universe of heavenly and earthly things should be believed unable to build himself a body; especially since the power of the Holy Spirit is his power, and the Godhead and majesty of the Trinity is so united and inseparable that nothing at all can be understood in one person of the Godhead that could be separated from the fullness of the Godhead. This being laid down and understood, then, that according to the faith of holy Scripture, when the Holy Spirit came upon her and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, Wisdom built herself a house, the remaining blasphemies of your cavils are nothing. For there is no doubt that he did all things through himself and in himself, in whose name and faith the faith of believers too could do everything; for he did not need another’s help, when not even those who believed in his power needed it. And therefore what you say, that he was justified by the Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit made him to be feared by demons, and that his flesh was made a temple by the Spirit, and that he was lifted up into heaven by the Spirit, is all sacrilegious and mad: not because the unity and cooperation of the Spirit is to be believed absent from all these things that he did, since the Godhead is never absent from itself and the power of the Trinity was always in the Savior’s works, but because you want the Holy Spirit to have helped the Lord Jesus Christ as one needy and weak, granting him what he could not provide for himself. Learn, then, from the holy testimonies to believe in God and not to mix falsehood with truth, because the matter does not admit it and reason shudders at it, that the understanding of a demonic spirit should be mixed with divine testimonies.

First, then, what you say, that he filled with righteousness what was created, and what you want to prove by the apostolic testimony in which he says, “He appeared in the flesh, was justified in the Spirit”: you say both with an insane mind and a raging spirit; because you put forward that he was filled with righteousness by the Spirit in order to show the emptiness of the one to whom you assert that the filling with righteousness was given, and in using the apostolic testimony on this matter you steal the order and reason of the divine testimony. For it was not set down by the apostle as you have set it down, maimed and spoiled. For what does the apostle say? “And manifestly great is the sacrament of godliness, which was manifested in the flesh, was justified in the Spirit.” You see, then, that the apostle proclaimed that the mystery or sacrament of godliness was justified. For he was not so forgetful of his own words and teaching as to say that he lacked righteousness whom he himself always proclaimed to be righteousness, saying, “who became for us righteousness and sanctification and redemption”; and elsewhere: “But you were washed, but you were justified, but you were sanctified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” How far, then, is it from him that he needed filling with righteousness who filled all things with righteousness, and that his majesty should have lacked righteousness, whose very name justifies all things! You see, then, how foolish or how mad your blasphemy is, since you try to take away from the Lord our God what is always so largely poured out by him on all believers that it is never lessened in him by his constant bounty.

You say also that the Spirit made him to be feared by demons. Although the very abomination of the saying is quite enough for rejecting and refuting this, we still bring examples. Tell me, I ask, you who say that the demons’ fear of him was not his own but another’s, and want it to belong not to power but to gift: how did even his name have a power which he himself, as you say, lacked? How were demons cast out, the weak healed, the dead raised in his name? For the apostle Peter said to that lame man who sat at the Beautiful Gate of the temple: “In the name of Jesus Christ, rise and walk.” And again, in the city of Joppa, to the one who had lain paralyzed in bed for eight years: “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you; rise and make your bed.” Paul too said to the spirit of Python: “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ, come out of her”; and the demon came out of her. But understand from this how far such weakness was from our Lord: I say that not even those whom he made powerful through his name were weak, since we know that no demon or any sickness ever withstood any of the apostles after the Lord’s resurrection. How, then, did the Spirit make one to be feared who made others to be feared, or how was he weak in himself whose faith reigned over all things even through others? Finally, those who received power from God never used that power as their own, but referred it to him from whom they had received it, because the power itself could never have any force except through the name of the one who gave it. And therefore the apostles and all the ministers of God did nothing ever in their own name, but in the name and invocation of Christ, because the power itself received its strength from the place where it had its beginning, and could in no way be given through ministers unless it had come from its author. You, then, who want the Lord to have been the same as one of his servants (because, as the apostles had nothing except what they had received from their Lord, so you want the Lord himself to have had nothing except what he received from the Spirit, and so to have had what he had not as Lord but received it as a servant), tell me, then, how did he use that power as his own and not as received? For what do we read of him? “Rise,” he says to the paralytic, “take up your bed and go to your house.” And again, to the father praying for his son: “Go,” he says, “your son lives.” And that, where the only son of his mother was being carried to the tomb: “Young man, I say to you, rise.” Did he, then, as was the custom of those who received power from God, ask that power be given him to act by invoking the divine name? Why did he not work in the name of the Spirit, as the apostles worked in his name? Finally, what does the gospel declare of him? “He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes and Pharisees.” Or perhaps you want him to have been proud and arrogant, attributing to his own power the power which, as you say, he had received from God? But what are we to make of the fact that power never obeyed servants except through the name of its author, and could not have effect if the doer claimed anything of it for himself?

But why do we argue so long against raging blasphemy with arguments that are plain, but still lesser? Let us hear God himself speaking to the disciples: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.” And again: “In my name,” he says, “you will cast out demons.” Did he need another’s name to exercise power who made his own name to be power? But what is added further? “Behold,” he says, “I have given you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon all the power of the enemy.” He certainly says that he is meek, as he truly was, and humble of heart. And how did he command others to work in his name as the highest power, if he himself worked in another’s name; or give to others as his own what, as you would have it, he did not have unless he had received it from another? Tell me: which of the saints who received power from God worked in this way? Would not Peter have been believed insane, or John mad, or Paul out of his mind, if they had said to any of the sick, “Rise in our name,” or to the lame, “Walk in our name,” or to the dead, “Live in our name,” or to anyone, “We give you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon all the power of the enemy”? Understand, then, your madness from this very thing: that, as these words are mad if they come from human presumption, so you are most mad who do not understand that they belong to divine power. For you must confess one of two things: either that a man can both have and give divine power, or, if no man at all can do this, that it was God who could. For no one can bestow divine power by gift unless he has it by nature.

There follows in your blasphemy that his flesh was made a temple by the Spirit, because John said: “For I saw the Spirit descending from heaven and remaining on him.” Since you try to confirm your raging assertion even by divine testimonies, let us see for what reason the holy testimony said what you cite: “For I saw,” it says, “the Spirit descending like a dove and remaining on him.” Distinguish here, if you can, who is greater, who more honored: the one who was descending, or the one upon whom he descended? The one who conferred honor, or the one on whom honor was conferred? Where in the testimony does it sound that the Spirit made his flesh a temple, or in what does it lessen the honor of God if God himself came down to show God to the human race, since surely the one whose dignity was pointed out should not be understood to be less than the one who pointed out the dignity? But far be it to believe or to make any difference in the Godhead, because the same one Godhead and equal power excludes entirely the opinion of impious inequality. And therefore in this matter, though there is the person of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and the Son of God is the one upon whom he descends, the Spirit the one who descends, the Father the one who bears witness, none had more honor, none received any injury, but all overflows equally into the fullness of the Godhead, because any person in the Trinity contains in himself the honor of the whole Trinity. And therefore nothing more need be said here, except only to show the cause and origin of your impiety; because thorns and thistles, springing from their roots, betray their stock by their quality and show from what they are where they are born from. So you too, thorny offspring of the Pelagian heresy, show in the shoot what your father is reported to have had in the root. For he, as his disciple Leporius said, asserted that our Lord became Christ through baptism; you say that in baptism he was made a temple of God by the Spirit. The words are not wholly the same, but the perversity is wholly one.

You add to your aforesaid impieties this too, that the Spirit granted the Lord his lifting up into heaven: showing by your sacrilegious mind that you believe the Lord Jesus Christ was so weak and so needy that, unless the Spirit had lifted him into heaven, you would perhaps think he would still be on earth today. And to prove the saying you also bring a holy testimony: “For it says,” you say, “giving commands to the apostles whom he chose, he was lifted up through the Holy Spirit.” What shall I call you, what shall I think of you, who by corrupting the divine letters bring it about that the holy testimonies lose the force of testimonies? A new kind of boldness, which tries by the arguments of its wickedness to make truth seem to confirm falsehood! For it is not said in the Acts of the Apostles as you say. For what does Scripture say? “The things which Jesus began to do and to teach until the day on which, commanding the apostles through the Holy Spirit whom he had chosen, he was taken up.” This is of course a hyperbaton and is to be understood thus: “The things which Jesus began to do and to teach until the day on which he was taken up, commanding the apostles whom he had chosen through the Holy Spirit”; so that perhaps nothing more need be answered you on this point than the testimony itself, since the integrity of the testimony ought to suffice fully for the truth, if its corruption could be enough for falsehood. But still, you who think that the Lord Jesus Christ could not have ascended into heaven unless he were lifted up by the Spirit, tell me how he himself says: “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven”? Recognize, then, how ridiculously and foolishly you think that he could not ascend into heaven who, though he had come down to earth, is said never to have been absent from heaven; and whether it was possible for him, leaving the underworld, to ascend into heaven, for whom it was easy, even when placed on earth, always to remain in the heavens. And what of what he himself says: “I ascend to my Father”? Did he indicate that another’s help would come between in this ascension, he who showed the force of his own power in the very fact that he said he would ascend? David too says of the Lord’s ascension itself: “God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of the trumpet,” plainly setting out the majesty of the one ascending through the power of the ascension.

But let us see with what addition you finally close your preceding blasphemies: “who,” you say, “granted such great glory to Christ.” You name glory so as to insult. For in asserting that the Lord was granted glory, while you say he received it, you blaspheme that he lacked it. For your impious mind aims at this, that the bounty of the giver should show the need of the receiver. And — O your unhappy impiety! — where is that which the Godhead itself once foretold of the Lord Jesus Christ ascending into heaven, saying: “Lift up your gates, you princes, and the King of glory will come in”? And when, as divine speech usually does, it had answered itself as in the name of one asking, “Who is this King of glory?” it at once added: “The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle,” showing under the name of a battle fought the victory of the triumphant Lord. Then, when to complete the exposition of the matter it had repeated the text of the aforesaid words, it showed the majesty of the Lord entering heaven with this conclusion, saying: “The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory”: so that the taking of a body should not lessen the honor of the supreme Godhead, it taught that the same one was here Lord of hosts and King of heavenly glory whom above it showed as victor in the battle of the underworld. Go now and say that glory was granted to the Lord, when both the prophet said that he is the King of glory and he himself testified thus of himself: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory.” Fight against this if you can, and contradict it, so that, when he testifies that he has his own glory, you may say he received another’s; although we say that he has his own glory in such a way as not to deny that this very property of glory is common to him with the Spirit and the Father, because whatever God possesses belongs to the Godhead, and the kingdom of glory is so proper to the Son of God that it is not divided from the property of the whole Godhead.

But it is time at last to put an end to the book, or rather to the whole work, if I first add a few sayings of holy men and illustrious bishops, so that what we have already proved by the authority of the holy testimonies we may strengthen also by the faith of the present time. Hilary, a man of all virtues and ornaments, and distinguished in eloquence as in life, who grew as teacher and bishop of the churches not only through his own merits but also through the advance of others, and who stood so unmoved amid the storms of persecutions that by the strength of his unconquered faith he won even the dignity of a confessor, testifies in the first book On the Faith that the Lord Jesus Christ is true God of true God and was both born before the ages and afterwards begotten man. Likewise in the second book: “The one only-begotten God, set in the womb of the holy virgin, grows into the form of a little human body. He who contains all things and within whom all things are is brought forth by the law of human childbirth.” Likewise in the same book: “The angel is witness: the one who is born is God with us.” Likewise in the tenth book: “We have also taught the sacrament of God born into man from the childbearing of the virgin.” Likewise in the same: “For since God was born in man, he was not born so as not to remain God.” Likewise in the preface of his exposition of the Gospel according to Matthew: “For it was first necessary for us to recognize that the only-begotten God was born man for our sake.” Likewise in what follows: “that, in addition to what he was, God, he should be begotten man, what he then was not.” Likewise in the same: “Third, this too was fitting: that since God was begotten man in the world,” and the rest. These are few out of a good many; but you see even from what we have said that he openly and plainly proclaims God born of Mary. And where is that saying of yours, “A creature could not give birth to the Creator,” and “What is born of the flesh is flesh”? It would be long to say what fits each person; the sayings are to be listed rather than worked out, because they suffice of themselves for their own working out.

Ambrose, the outstanding bishop of God, who, never leaving the hand of the Lord, always shone like a gem on the finger of God, says in the book addressed to virgins: “My kinsman is white and ruddy: white because he is the splendor of the Father, ruddy because he is the offspring of a virgin. Remember, however, that in him the marks of the Godhead are older than the sacraments of the body. For he did not begin from the virgin, but he who was came into the virgin.” Likewise his own words on the Lord’s birthday: “See the miracle of the Lord’s mother: a virgin conceived, a virgin gave birth; a virgin when she was in labor, a virgin when pregnant, a virgin after childbirth; as it is said in Ezekiel: And the gate was shut and was not opened, because the Lord passed through it. Glorious virginity and splendid fruitfulness! The Lord of the world is born, and there is no groaning of one giving birth: the womb is emptied, the infant is received, and yet virginity is not violated. It was right that, when God was born, the merit of chastity should increase, and that what was whole should not be violated by the going out of him who had come to heal what was corrupt.” Likewise in the exposition of the Gospel according to Luke: “that she was chosen above all to give birth to God who was betrothed to a husband.” He certainly proclaims God born of the virgin; he names Mary the Mother of God. And where is that portentous and abominable word of yours, in which you say: “How can she be the mother of one foreign to her nature? But if she is called mother by them, what was born is humanity, not God”? See, an outstanding teacher of the faith both says that she who gave birth is a human being and teaches that the one born is God, and yet that this is not a cause of unbelief but a miracle of faith.

Jerome, teacher of catholics, whose writings shine through the whole world like divine lamps, says in the book to Eustochium: “The Son of God became son of man for our salvation. He waits ten months in the womb to be born, and he in whose fist the world is enclosed is contained in the narrowness of a manger.” Likewise his own words in the commentary on Isaiah: “For the Lord of hosts, who is the King of glory, himself came down into the virginal womb and went in and out by the eastern gate, which is always shut, of which Gabriel says to the virgin: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore what will be born of you, holy, will be called the Son of God; and in Proverbs: Wisdom has built herself a house.” Compare this, if you please, with your teaching, or rather blasphemy, in which you say: “For God is the creator of the months and not the offspring of months.” See, Jerome, a man of the greatest knowledge and of the most approved and purest teaching, in almost the same words in which you deny that the Son of God was the offspring of months, testifies that he was the offspring of months. For “he waits,” he says, “ten months in the womb to be born.” But perhaps the authority of this man seems small to you: think that all say the same and in the same words; because whoever does not deny that the Son of God was the offspring of a virgin confesses that he was the offspring of months.

Rufinus too, a man of Christian philosophy, no contemptible part of the church’s teachers, testifies thus in his exposition of the creed about the Lord’s birth: “For the Son of God is born of a virgin, not joined principally to flesh alone, but begotten with a soul mediating between the flesh and God.” Did he testify obscurely that God was born of man? Augustine, bishop of the town of Hippo Regius, says: “But that men might be born of God, God was first born of them: for Christ is God. And Christ, born of men, sought only a mother on earth, because he already had a Father in heaven; born of God, through whom we are made, and born of a woman, through whom we might be remade.” Likewise there: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Why, then, do you wonder that men are born of God? Look at God himself born of men.” Likewise in his letter to Volusian: “But both Moses himself and the other prophets most truly prophesied the Lord Jesus and gave him great glory. They announced that he would come not as their equal, nor as superior in the same power of miracles, but plainly as the Lord God of all, made man for men’s sake. He therefore also willed to do such things himself, lest it be absurd if he did not do himself what he had done through them. But still he had to do something of his own: to be born of a virgin, to rise from the dead, to ascend into heaven. Whoever thinks this too little for God, I do not know what more he expects.”

But perhaps, because these men we have listed lived in different parts of the world, they seem to you less approved in authority: a ridiculous thing indeed, because faith is not lessened by place, and what a man is, not where he is, must be considered; especially since religion unites all, and those who are in one faith are known to be also in one body. But still we will bring forward for you some from among the Easterners too whom you may not despise. Gregory, a most brilliant light of knowledge and teaching, who, though he died long ago, still lives in authority and faith, and though he is long absent in body from the churches, does not depart from them in voice and teaching, says: “When, then, God had come forth from the virgin in the human nature he had taken, existing as one out of two things contrary to each other, flesh and spirit, the one is taken up into God, the other bestows the grace of Godhead. O new and unheard-of mixture! O wonderful and unsearchable joining! He who was, becomes; and the creator is created; and he who is immeasurable is contained, the soul mediating between God and flesh; and he who makes all rich is made poor.” Likewise again, on the Epiphany: “But what is happening? What is being done concerning you, or for us? A certain new and unheard-of exchange of natures is accomplished, and God becomes man.” Likewise there: “And the Son of God began to be also son of man, not changed from what he was, for he is unchangeable, but taking what he was not, for he is merciful, so that he who could not be contained might be contained.” You see how splendidly and magnificently he so proclaims the majesty of the Godhead as to make known the condescension of the incarnation, knowing, as an admirable teacher of the faith, that in all these things which God bestowed on us in coming into the world there is a heap of benefits, not a lessening of honor; because whatever God has granted to man ought to increase our love for him, not lessen his dignity.

Athanasius, bishop of the city of Alexandria, an outstanding example of constancy and virtue, whom the storm of heretical persecution did not terrify but proved, and who, having a life always like a shining mirror, almost won the merit of martyrdom before he gained the dignity of a confessor: let us see what he thought of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the Lord’s mother. “This, then,” he says, “is the purpose and character of holy Scripture, as we have often said: that there is a twofold meaning in it concerning the Savior: that he always was God and is the Son, the Word and Light and Wisdom of the Father; and that afterwards for our sake he took flesh of the virgin Mary, the Theotokos, and became man.” Likewise after other things: “There were many saints, then, and clean from sin: Jeremiah was sanctified from the womb, and John, while in the womb, leaped with joy at the voice of Mary, the Theotokos.” He says that God, the Son of God, who, to speak the faith of all in his words, is the Word and Light and Wisdom of the Father, took flesh for our sake; and therefore he calls the virgin Mary Theotokos, because she is the Mother of God.

John, glory of the bishops of Constantinople, whose holiness reached the merits of martyrdom without any storm of pagan persecution, listen to what he thought and preached of the incarnation of the Son of God. “And him,” he says, “whom, if he had come in naked Godhead, neither heaven nor earth nor seas nor any creature could have borne, the unharmed womb of the virgin carried.” His faith and teaching, then, even if you did not know those of others, you ought to have followed and held, since it was out of love and longing for him that the devout people chose you as their bishop; because, when they took you as their bishop from the church of Antioch, from which they had earlier chosen him, they believed they would receive in you whatever they had ceased to have in him. Did not all these, I ask, say everything as if long ago by a prophetic spirit to refute your blasphemies? For you cry out that our Lord and Savior is Christ, not God; but they, that Christ the Lord is true God. You blaspheme that Mary is Christotokos, not Theotokos; they do not deny she is Christotokos in such a way as to recognize that she is Theotokos. Not only things but also the words of things are set against your blasphemies, so that we may plainly understand that long ago an impregnable defense was prepared by God against your blasphemies, to break with a wall of truth already built the force of heretical attack that would one day come. And do you, most impious and most shameless defiler of a splendid city, grievous and deadly contagion of a catholic and holy people, dare to stand and speak in the church of God, and with your blasphemies and raging words defame bishops of ever unharmed faith and catholic confession, saying that the people of the city of Constantinople err through the fault of their former teachers? Are you, then, the corrector of former bishops, the condemner of the ancient priests, more excellent than Gregory, more approved than Nectarius, more outstanding than John and all the other bishops of the Eastern cities, who, though not of the same name as those I have named, were still of the same faith? This suffices for this case; for when it is a question of faith, all are in this the same as the best, in that they share with the best.

Hence I too, humble and obscure in name as in merit, though I cannot claim a teacher’s place among the outstanding bishops of the city of Constantinople, still presume to the zeal and affection of a disciple. For I was adopted into the holy ministry by John, bishop of most blessed memory, and offered to God; and though I am absent in body, I am there in affection; and though I am not now mingled in presence with that most dear and most venerable people of God, I am joined in mind. And this is why, grieving and suffering with it, I have now burst out as with the voice of a common sorrow and grief, and, the one thing I could do, I have cried out through the tearful complaint of my little works as for the weakness of my own members and limbs. For if, according to the apostle, when a lesser part of the body suffers the greater suffers with it, how much more, when the greater suffers, ought the lesser to suffer with it! For it is most inhuman that in one and the same body the lesser members should not feel the weakness of the greater, when the greater feel that of the lesser. Hence I beseech and entreat all of you who live within the circuit of the city of Constantinople, my fellow citizens by love of country and brothers by unity of faith, to separate yourselves from that ravening wolf, as it is written, who devours the people of God as food of bread. “Do not touch nor taste” anything of his, because all these things are for destruction. “Come out from his midst and be separate, and do not touch what is unclean.” Remember your ancient teachers and bishops: Gregory, renowned throughout the world; Nectarius, distinguished for holiness; John, wonderful in faith and purity; John, I say, that John who truly, in the likeness of John the evangelist, both disciple and apostle of Jesus, always reclined, as it were, upon the Lord’s breast and affection. Remember him, I say, follow him, think on his purity, his faith, his teaching and holiness. Remember always him, your teacher and nurturer, in whose bosom and embrace, as it were, you grew up, who was the common teacher of me and you, whose disciples and training we are. Read his writings, hold his instruction, embrace his faith and merit. Though to attain this is great and difficult, still to follow it is beautiful and lofty, since not only the attainment of the highest things but even the imitation of them is praiseworthy; for hardly anyone wholly lacks a share of that to which he strives to climb and reach. Let him, then, always be in our mind and as it were before our eyes; let him dwell in our soul and thought; let him himself, finally, commend to you also these things written by me, because what I have written he taught me. And therefore believe these things to be not so much mine as his, because the stream comes from the spring, and whatever is thought to be the disciple’s should all be referred to the honor of the teacher. But you, above all and over all, God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, I beseech with equally suppliant voice and mind, that what we have written by the bounty of your gift you would make known by the gift of your love. And since, as the Lord our God, your Only-begotten, himself taught us, you so loved this world as to send your Only-begotten for the salvation of the world, grant this to your people whom you have redeemed: that concerning the incarnation of your only-begotten Son they may savor both your gift and his love; and that all may so understand and love that your Only-begotten, our Lord God, was born and suffered and rose again for us, that the condescension of the holy majesty may be the growth of our love, and that in the minds of all his lowliness may bring no lessening of honor but always beget an increase of love; and that we may all so piously and wisely understand the benefits of the holy mercy as to know that we owe our God the more, the more humble God made himself for us.