On the Trinity 7.33–8.6

The Lord did not leave the teaching of so great a mystery uncertain or doubtful, nor did he abandon us in the error of an ambiguous understanding. And let us hear him revealing all knowledge of this faith to the apostles. For he says: “I am the way and the truth and the life: no one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you know my Father also; and from now on you will know him, and you have seen him. Philip said to him: Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us. Jesus said to him: Have I been with you so long, and you do not know me? Philip, he who has seen me has seen the Father also. How can you say, Show us the Father? Do you not believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak from myself; but the Father who abides in me, he does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe because of the works themselves.” He who is the way does not lead us into wandering and pathless places, nor does he who is the truth mock us with falsehoods, nor does he who is the life leave us in the error of death. And since he himself established these kind names of his dispensation for our salvation, so that as the way he might lead us into the truth, and as the truth establish us in life, we must learn what he shows to be the mystery of obtaining that life. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” The road to the Father is through the Son. And we must ask whether this is through the admonition of teaching or through faith in his nature: for we can be seen to come to the Father through the Son's teaching rather than through confessing the Father's divinity in him. Let us seek, then, the sense of understanding in what follows. For faith is to be entered upon not from our own choice, but from the force of the words.

For this follows: “If you know me, you know my Father also.” The man Jesus Christ is seen: and how, if he himself is known, will the Father be known, when the apostles recognize in him the form of their own nature, that is, of man, and God, free from bodily flesh, cannot be known in this weakness of bodily flesh? But the Lord, confirming in the mystery of the body he assumed the nature of the Father's divinity in himself, kept this order: “If you know me, you know my Father also; and from now on you will know him, and you have seen him.” He separated the time of seeing from the time of knowing. For the one he said was to be known, he said had already been seen: so that, from the time of this revelation, they might receive knowledge of the nature long seen in him.

But the newness of the words disturbed the apostle Philip. A man is seen. He confesses himself the Son of God; he declares that when he is known the Father is known. He says the Father has been seen, and is to be known because he has been seen. The weakness of the human mind does not grasp this, and the profession of such different things does not win belief: that he who was then seen is now to be known, when having seen is knowledge; that if the Son is known, the Father is also known; when the Son himself, according to man, gave knowledge of himself as bodily, both seen and touched, while the nature of the man seen, so different from the Father, does not provide knowledge of the Father from him; and the Son had often testified that the Father was seen by no one. Philip, then, broke out, asking the Lord with apostolic familiarity and constancy: “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Faith is not now in danger, but this is an error of ignorance. For the Lord had said that the Father had been seen and was from now on to be known; but the Apostle had not understood that he had been seen. So he did not deny that he had been seen, but asked that he be shown to him; nor did he desire a showing as of bodily contemplation, but asked for a demonstration for understanding the one who had been seen. For he had seen the Son in the form of a man, but did not know how he had seen the Father through him. For to his saying, “Lord, show us the Father,” so that the showing might be a demonstration for understanding rather than for seeing, he added: “and it is enough for us.” Faith was not taken from the saying; rather a demonstration for knowing was asked, which would be enough for faith in the saying, since through the Lord's profession there was no uncertain authority for believing. And the request to show the Father arose from this, that he had been said to have been seen and to be known because he had been seen. Nor was it shameless to ask for the showing of one who had been seen.

The Lord, then, answered Philip's words thus: “Have I been with you so long, and you do not know me, Philip?” He rebukes the Apostle's ignorance in knowing him, since he had said above that when he was known the Father too was known. But what is it that he complains he was not known for so long? Namely, that when he was known, the divinity of the Father's nature in him should have been understood. For since the things he did were proper to God: walking on the waves, commanding the winds, accomplishing, with faith in the deeds, an incomprehensible change of wine and increase of bread, putting demons to flight, driving out diseases, repairing the losses of bodies, correcting defects of birth, forgiving sins, giving life back to the dead; and since one in the flesh did these things and professed himself the Son of God amid them: from this arose the whole complaint, that in the mystery of a human birth the nature of God, which did these things in the man assumed, was not understood.

And therefore, rebuking them that, though he had done these things so long, he had not been recognized, he said to those asking him to show them the Father: “He who has seen me has seen the Father also.” He does not mean bodily contemplation and the sight of fleshly eyes, but the sight of those eyes of which he had said: “Do you not say, There are still four months, and the harvest comes? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are white for harvest.” Neither the time allows nor the signification of fields white for harvest permits anything earthly and bodily to be understood here; but he ordered the eyes of understanding to be lifted to behold the blessedness of perfected fruits, as now when he says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father also.” For what is fleshly from the Virgin's childbearing does not serve to behold the form and image of God in him; nor is the appearance of the man assumed an example for seeing the nature of the incorporeal God. But God is recognized in him, if indeed by any he himself has been recognized, from the power of his nature; and God the Son, understood, brings it about that the Father too is understood: since he is an image in such a way as not to differ in kind but to signify his author. For other images, made of different metals, colors, materials, or arts, render the appearances of those whose images they have been made. But can lifeless things, so as to be true images, be made equal to living ones, and painted, carved, or cast things to natural ones? But the Son is not the Father's image in that way: because he is the living image of the living one, and, being born from him, has no diversity of nature, and, differing in nothing, holds the power of the nature from which he does not differ. That he is an image, then, serves so that the birth of the only-begotten God signifies God the Father; and signifies him in such a way that he himself is the form and image of the invisible God; and through this he does not lose the likeness united with the nature, because he does not lack the power of the nature.

And hence comes this: “Have I been with you so long, and you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father also. How can you say, Show us the Father? Do you not believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” No other speech about the things of God has been left to human eloquence besides the word of God: all the rest is narrow, enclosed, entangled, and obscure. If anyone wishes to show this in other words than those in which it was said by God, either he himself does not understand, or he leaves his readers nothing to understand. The Lord said, when he was asked to show the Father, “He who has seen me has seen the Father also.” To change this is the part of an antichrist, to deny it the part of a Jew, not to know it the part of a pagan. But perhaps the understanding of the sense is at fault. Let there be a fault in our faith if obscurity remains in God's words. For the saying does not signify a solitary one, and yet the profession teaches an undifferentiated nature. For the Father seen in the Son can be neither a single one nor an unlike one: because, he being seen through this one, they are neither not one in the profession of the mystery, nor one person. And I ask what the Lord is believed to have signified when he says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father also.” You do not hold union, where the addition of the Father's name is signified by the conjunction itself. For when it says “the Father also,” the understanding of a single and unique one is excluded. And what remains, except that the Father was seen through the Son through the united likeness of nature? And lest this be left uncertain for our faith, the Lord added: “How can you say, Show us the Father?” For what need was left of not knowing the Father, or of showing him to those who did not know, when the Father had been seen in the Son?

And he was seen so truly, from the property of nature, since the one born and the one begetting are one by lack of difference and in the kind of truth, that this word of the Lord followed: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” That the Father and the Son are inseparable through natural likeness we cannot teach in any words but the Son's. For the Son, who is the way and the truth and the life, does not here play with theatrical mimes by changing names and appearances, so that in the man assumed he names himself Son of God, but in nature is God the Father, and, one and alone, now pretends by a change of persona to be in another. So he is not himself solitary, now son to himself, now professing himself father to himself, and bringing in names of nature where nature is absent. The simplicity of the words here is different: for the Father is Father, and the Son is Son. But in these names and realities there is nothing new, nothing different, nothing foreign in itself. For the truth of nature keeps its property: that what is from God is God, and birth is neither a lessening nor a difference; since the Son does not subsist in a nature external and unlike to God the Father, nor did the Father acquire anything foreign to himself for the birth of the Only-begotten, but rather granted all that is his without loss to the giver. And so he neither lacks the nature of God, since he is God from nowhere but from God; nor differs from God, since he himself is nothing other than God: because both the birth of God subsists in the Son, and through the birth of God the nature of God has not lost from itself what God is. The Father, then, is in the Son, and the Son in the Father, God in God: not by a double conjunction of compatible kinds, nor by the engrafting nature of a more capacious substance (for by bodily necessity what is outer cannot become inner to the things contained); but by the birth of a living nature from a living one; since the reality does not differ, since birth does not make the nature of God degenerate, since God is born from God as nothing other than God, since in them there is nothing new, nothing foreign, nothing separable, since it is impious to believe two gods in the Father and the Son, sacrilegious to preach the Father and the Son as a single God, and blasphemous to deny that God from God are one in the likeness of kind.

And lest the gospel faith should receive this mystery as doubtful and ambiguous, the Lord kept this order in his teaching: “Do you not believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak from myself; but the Father who abides in me, he does his works.” By what other words, I ask, could or can the property of nature in the Father and the Son be shown than by these very words, the signification of birth being brought forward in all of them? For when he says, “The words that I speak to you I do not speak from myself,” he did not remove his person, nor deny that he is Son, nor hide in himself the nature of the Father's power. For while he himself speaks, he speaks abiding in substance; but while he does not speak from himself, he testifies to the birth of God from God the Father in him. He himself is inseparable from him and in a wholly alike unity of nature: because, though he speaks from him, he himself nevertheless speaks. For one who does not speak from himself and yet speaks cannot fail to exist while he speaks; and while he does not speak from himself, he shows that what he speaks is not his alone. For he added: “But the Father who abides in me, he does his works.” For the Father to abide in the Son is not a mark of a single and unique one; but for the Father to work through the Son is not a mark of one different or external. Just as it is not a mark of one person not to speak from oneself what one speaks, nor again of one foreign and separable to speak through the one speaking; but this is the mystery of those who are one. And both are not other, who are in each other through the property of nature: whose unity is this, that the one speaking does not speak from himself, and the one who does not speak from himself does not fail to speak. And since he had taught that the Father both speaks and works in him, he established faith in this perfect unity, saying: “But the Father who abides in me, he does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe because of the works themselves.” The Father works in the Son; but the Son too works the Father's work.

So that, then, the Father might not be believed to work and speak in the Son by the effectiveness of power, and not by the property of nature that comes by birth, he says: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me.” What is this, I ask: “Believe me”? Surely it refers to what was said: “Show us the Father.” Faith is confirmed by the command to believe, the very faith that had asked the Father to be shown. For it had not been enough to say, “He who has seen me has seen the Father also,” unless he extended our understanding so far that, while we knew the Father in the Son, we should remember that the Son is in the Father: lest a transfusion of one into the other be thought of, rather than a unity of the same nature in both through generation and birth. The Lord, then, wants to be believed, lest the consciousness of faith be endangered through the dispensation of the man assumed. Certainly, if flesh, body, and passion bring any ambiguity, let it at least be believed by the works that God is in God, and God from God, and that they are one: since by the power of nature each is in the other and neither is without the other; since the Father loses nothing of his own in the Son, and the Son takes from the Father all that makes him Son. This is not the condition of bodily natures, that they should be in each other, that they should have the perfect unity of a subsisting nature, that the abiding birth of the Only-begotten should be inseparable from the truth of the Father's divinity. This is proper to the only-begotten God alone; this faith lies in the mystery of a true birth; this is the work of spiritual power, that to be and to be in should not differ; and to be in not as one thing in another, like a body in a body, but to be and subsist in such a way as to be in one who subsists, and to be in in such a way as to subsist oneself. For each, subsisting, is therefore not without the other, since, according to generation and birth, the nature of the one subsisting is not other. Hence comes this: “I and the Father are one,” and, “He who has seen me has seen the Father also,” and, “I am in the Father and the Father in me”: because the birth does not differ or degenerate, because the nature of the birth completes the mystery of one divinity in the Father and the Son, since the Son of God is nothing other than God. And therefore the generation of the Only-begotten is not counted as two gods: because the Son of God, being born God, displayed in himself the nature of the God who begot him.

The blessed apostle Paul, sketching the pattern for appointing a bishop and forming by his precepts an entirely new man for the church, taught that this was, so to speak, the sum of the virtues perfected in him, when he said: "Holding fast the word that accords with the teaching of the faith, so that he may be able to exhort to sound teaching and to refute those who contradict it. For there are many who are not submissive, empty talkers and deceivers." He shows in this way that the qualities proper to discipline and conduct are of use for the merit of the priestly office only if the things necessary for the knowledge of teaching and defending the faith are not lacking among the rest. For it does not at once make a good and useful priest either merely to act blamelessly or merely to preach with knowledge: the blameless man profits only himself unless he is learned, and the learned man is without the authority of his teaching unless he is blameless. The apostle's word does not merely fit a man for life in this world by precepts of uprightness and honour, nor, on the other hand, does it train a scribe of the synagogue for the law by knowledge of doctrine; it forms the perfect leader of the church with the perfect goods of the greatest virtues, so that his life may be adorned by his teaching and his teaching by his life. Accordingly he instructed Titus himself, to whom he was writing, with this rule for perfecting religion: "In all things show yourself an example of good works, teaching the sound word with reverence, beyond reproach, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing base or evil to say of us." This teacher of the Gentiles, chosen as master of the church from the consciousness of Christ speaking and dwelling in him, was not unaware that the contagion of diseased speech would spread, and that the corruption of pestilent teaching would rage against the soundness of the words of the faithful, sinking the plague of its impious understanding down to the very seat of the soul and creeping on as a deep-seated evil. For of these he says: "whose talk creeps on like a cancer," infecting the health of the mind it has invaded by a contagion always hidden and stealing upon it. For this reason he wanted the bishop to have the teaching of sound speech, a conscience in the faith, and skill in exhortation, holding firm against impious, lying, and mad contradictions. For there are many who, feigning faith, are not submissive to the faith, and who make a faith for themselves rather than receive one, puffed up with the mind of human vanity, savouring what they want and unwilling to savour what is true; whereas the truth of wisdom is this, sometimes to savour what you would rather not. A speech of folly follows this wisdom of the will, for what is foolishly thought must also be foolishly preached. And how great an evil is foolish preaching to those who hear it, when they are led astray into an opinion of folly under the appearance of wisdom? Therefore the apostle kept this order concerning them, saying: "For there are many who are not submissive, empty talkers and deceivers." They must be contradicted, then: insolent impiety, vain-talking insolence, and seductive vain talk; and contradicted through soundness of teaching, truth of faith, and sincerity of words, so that there may be a sincerity of truth and a truth of soundness.

My reason for recalling this saying of the apostle now is that men perverse in mind, deceitful in profession, empty in hope, and viperous in speech lay on us the necessity of contradicting them, while under the appearance of religion they insinuate deadly teachings, diseased interpretations, and corrupt wills into the simplicity of their hearers. Among them they set aside the sincerity of the apostolic preaching and work so that the Father may not be father, the Son may not be son, God may not be God, and faith may not be faith. Resisting their mad lies, we have now carried our answer so far that, having shown from the Law God and God, and true God in true God, we then showed from the teachings of the Gospels and the apostles the perfect and true birth of the only-begotten God, and finally, in the same course of our preaching, taught that the Son of God is true God and of a nature not different from the Father. Thus the faith of the church confesses neither a solitary God nor two gods, since the birth of God does not allow a solitary God, and a perfect birth does not admit the names of different natures in two gods. Our concern in refuting their empty talk is twofold: first, to teach what is holy, perfect, and sound, so that our speech does not wander through turns and windings and, emerging from devious and straying burrows, seek the truth rather than show it; then to lay open to the conscience of all that the very things they fit to an appearance of flattering truth by the subtleties of empty and deceitful opinions are ridiculous and absurd. It is not enough for us to have taught what is pious unless it is understood to be most pious through the refutation of what is impious.

Good and wise men by nature and study prepare themselves wholly for gaining either the thing or the time of some blessed hope, so that their readiness may fall short of their expectation in nothing. So these men, crazed with heretical fury, take the greatest care to labour with all the ingenuity of their impiety against the truth of the pious faith, so that against those who are religious they may excel in being irreligious, may outdo the hope of our life by the despair of theirs, and may spend more thought on falsehood than we apply teaching to truth. Against the pious professions of our faith they have worked out these contradictions of their impious unbelief: first they ask whether in our faith God is one; then they add whether Christ also is God; finally, whether the Father is greater than the Son. So when they have heard in our profession that God is one, they use it to make Christ not God. They do not ask about the Son whether he is God; by asking about Christ they want only this, that he not be Son. Catching a man of simple faith, they drive him by faith in one God away from confessing Christ as God, since God would no longer be one if Christ too had to be confessed as God. And with what subtlety of worldly cleverness they argue here, when they say: "If he is one, whoever else is seen to be will no longer be; and if there is another, this one will no longer be one, since nature does not allow one where there is another, or another where there is one." Then, when they have deceived the readiness of the believer and hearer by the art of this crafty assertion, they fit to it what they now obtain as by an easier road: that Christ is God by name rather than by nature, because this general name in him in no way destroys faith in one God, which alone is true. And through this the Father is greater than the Son, because, the nature being different, since there is only one God, the Father is greater by the property of his nature; and this one is called son, a creature subsisting by the will of God, because he is less than the Father; and he is not God, because the one God does not allow another God to be, and what is less must be of a nature foreign to him who is greater than it. And how ridiculous they are in this, laying down rules for God, when they assert that nothing can be born from one, because the birth of all things is from the union of two, and that the unchangeable God cannot give from himself any birth to one born, since what does not change is not subject to addition, and the nature of a solitary and single being has nothing in it of the condition of begetting.

But we, having attained the gospel and apostolic faith through spiritual teachings and pursuing the hope of blessed eternity in the confession of the Father and the Son, after showing from the Law the mystery of God and God, neither going beyond the faith in one God nor failing to preach Christ as God, took from the Gospels this order of reply: to teach the true birth of the only-begotten God from God the Father, because through it he would be both true God and not foreign to the nature of the one true God. So he could neither be denied to be God nor himself be called another God, because the birth made him God, and the nature in him of the one God from God did not separate him into a second God. And although the common sense of understanding drove us to this, that the names of natures should not be set against each other within the same nature, and that those whose being does not differ in kind should not fail to be one, yet it pleased us to show this from the professions of our Lord himself. He, after often declaring one God to our faith and hope, in order to confirm the mystery of one God while professing and proving himself also God, said: "I and the Father are one," and "If you know me, you know my Father also," and "He who has seen me has seen the Father," and "The Father who abides in me, he does his works," and "Believe me that the Father is in me and I in the Father; but if not, believe because of the works themselves." He expressed his birth in the name of the Father; he teaches that the Father is known when he is known; he confesses the unity of nature when the Father is seen in his being seen; he testifies that he is inseparable from the Father when, abiding in the Father, the Father abides in him; he holds the confidence of his consciousness when he asks to be believed in these sayings on account of the working of power. So in this most blessed faith of a perfect birth every error, both of two gods and of a single God, is extinguished, since those who are one are not one person, and he who is not the one person does not differ from him who is in such a way that the two are not one.

Since the heretics cannot deny these things, said and understood so absolutely, they still corrupt them by the most foolish lie of their impiety in order to deny them. For the words "I and the Father are one" they try to refer to the agreement of unanimity, so that there is in them a unity of will, not of nature; that is, so that they are one not through what they are but through willing the same thing. And they fit to this defence of theirs what is in the Acts of the Apostles: "Now the multitude of those who believed had one soul and heart," so that the diversity of souls and hearts becomes a unity, one heart and soul, through agreement of the same will. Or what is written to the Corinthians: "He who plants and he who waters are one," so that, since their ministry toward salvation and the advance of the same mystery does not differ, there is a unity of will in the two. Or what the Lord said, asking the Father for the salvation of the nations that would believe in him: "I do not pray for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they all may be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us." So, since men cannot be poured back into God, nor come together into one undistinguished mass, their being one is from unity of will, since they all do what pleases God and come together by movements of mind that do not disagree with each other; and thus it is not nature that makes them one, but will.

He plainly cannot be wise who does not know God. And since Christ is Wisdom, he who either does not know Christ or hates him must be outside wisdom: like these men, who would have the Lord of majesty, the King of the ages, and the only-begotten God be a creature of God rather than his Son; and while they lie foolishly, they are still more foolish in defending their lie. Postponing for a little the property of the unity that is in God the Father and God the Son, they must be refuted from the very texts they use.