On the Trinity 8–13

This God, then, leaving aside the fables and fabrications of the heretics, the church knows and worships. To him all nature, invisible as well as visible, always bears witness; him the angels adore, the stars marvel at, the seas bless, the lands revere, and all the regions of the underworld look up to; him every human mind perceives, even if it does not express him. At his command all things are set in motion: springs gush, rivers glide, waves rise, all things bring forth their young, the winds are made to blow, rains come, the seas are stirred, all things everywhere pour out their fruitfulness. He established for the first-formed a special world of eternal life, a paradise in the East; he planted the tree of life, and likewise set another tree, of the knowledge of good and evil; he gave a command; he fixed a sentence against transgression. He preserved Noah, most righteous, from the dangers of the flood because of his innocence and faith; he translated Enoch; he chose Abraham into the fellowship of friendship; he protected Isaac; he increased Jacob; he set Moses as leader over the people; he rescued the groaning children of Israel from the yoke of slavery; he wrote the Law; he led the offspring of the fathers into the land of promise; he instructed the prophets by the Spirit; and through all these he promised his Son, Christ; and when he had pledged that he would give him, he sent him. Through him he willed to come to our knowledge, and he poured out upon us the wide bosom of his mercy, conferring the rich Spirit on the needy and the outcast. And because he is, of his own accord, both generous and good, lest this whole world, turned away, should dry up without the rivers of his grace, he willed that apostles, the instructors of our race, should be sent into the whole world through his Son, so that the human creation might recognize its Establisher, and, if it chose to follow, might have one whom, instead of “God,” it could now call Father in its prayers.

His providence has run, and runs, not only through individual men, but also through cities and states themselves, whose end was foretold by the voices of the prophets; indeed, even through the whole world itself, whose end, plagues, diminishings, and punishments he has described because of its unbelief. And lest anyone should think that this untiring providence of God does not reach even to the smallest things: “Of two sparrows,” says the Lord, “one will not fall without the Father's will; and even the hairs of your head are all numbered.” His care and providence did not allow the clothes of the Israelites to wear out, nor even the cheapest shoes on their feet to be worn through, nor even the trousers of the captive youths to be burned. And not without reason: for if he, containing all things, has embraced all things (and all things and the whole consist of individual parts), then his care must consequently reach to each single thing, since his providence reaches to the whole, whatever it is.

Hence it is that he sits above the Cherubim, that is, he presides over the variety of his works, the living creatures set beneath his throne holding rule above the rest, with a crystal covering everything above, that is, with the heaven overspreading all things. This, at God's command, had been made solid into a firmament from the flowing matter of the waters, so that as strong ice, dividing the middle of the waters that once covered the earth, it might bear on a kind of back the weight of the upper water, its forces strengthened by the frost. For wheels also lie beneath, that is, the seasons, by which all the members of the world are always turning; such feet were added so that these things do not stand forever but pass away. And they are studded with eyes over all their limbs: for the works of God must be contemplated with a watchful gaze. In their bosom there is fire in the midst of coals: either because this world hastens to the fiery day of judgment; or because all the works of God are fiery, not dark, but full of vigor; or also lest, since they had arisen from earthly beginnings, they should grow sluggish by nature from the stiffness of their origin, the warm nature of an inner spirit was added to all, which, joined with cold bodies, might show an equal balance in all for the enjoyment of life. This, then, according to David, is the chariot of God. “For the chariot of God,” he says, “is multiplied ten thousandfold”, that is, innumerable, infinite, immeasurable. For under the yoke of the natural law given to all, some things are drawn back as if reined in by bridles, others urged on as if spurred with loosened reins. For this world is God's chariot, which the angels themselves and the stars draw together with all things; and we see them, though their courses vary, yet bound by fixed laws, drawing toward the goals of the time appointed for them: so that we too, marveling at both the Artisan and his works, may rightly be glad now to cry out with the Apostle: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out!” and the rest.

The same rule of truth teaches us to believe, after the Father, also in the Son of God, Christ Jesus, the Lord our God, but the Son of God: of this God who is both one and alone, the Maker, namely, of all things, as has already been set out above. For this Jesus Christ, the Son (I will say it again) of this God, we both read to have been promised in the Old Testament and observe to have been manifested in the New Testament, fulfilling the shadows and figures of all the mysteries by the presence of the truth made bodily. For both the ancient predictions and the Gospels testify that he is the son of Abraham and no less the son of David. Genesis itself speaks of him when it says, “To you I will give it, and to your seed.” It speaks of him when it shows a man wrestling with Jacob. Of him, when it says, “A ruler shall not fail from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until he comes to whom it has been promised, and he will be the expectation of the nations.” Moses speaks of him when he says, “Provide another whom you may send.” The same Moses speaks of him when he testifies, saying, “God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers: hear him as you would me.” Of him, when he says, “You will see your life hanging night and day, and will not believe it.” Isaiah speaks of him: “A rod will come forth from the root of Jesse, and a flower will rise from his root.” Of the same, when he says, “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son.” Of him, when he places the healings to come from him, saying, “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will hear; then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb will be eloquent.” Of him, when he sets out the powers of his patience, saying, “His voice will not be heard in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench.” Of him, when he described his Gospels: “And I will make with you an everlasting covenant, the holy and faithful things of David.” Of him, when he prophesies that the nations would believe in him: “Behold, I have set him as a beginning and a commander to the nations. Nations that have not known you will call upon you, and peoples that do not know you will flee to you.” Of the same, when he cries out concerning his passion, saying, “As a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is voiceless, so he did not open his mouth in his humiliation.” Of him, when he described the blows and wounds of his scourging: “By his bruise we have been healed”; or his humiliation: “And we saw him, and he had no form nor honor; a man in the stroke, and knowing how to bear weakness.” Or that the people would not believe: “All day long I have stretched out my hands to an unbelieving people.” Or that he would rise from the dead: “And in that day there will be the root of Jesse, and he who will rise to rule the nations; in him the nations will hope, and his rest will be honor.” Or when it speaks of the time of the resurrection: “We shall find him prepared as at dawn.” Or that he would sit at the Father's right hand: “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet.” Or when he is placed as possessor of all things: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.” Or when he is shown as the Judge of all: “O God, give your judgment to the king, and your righteousness to the king's son.” I will not pursue in this place more of the things announced about Christ, which are well known to all the heretics, and still better to those who hold the truth.

But I give this warning: that no other Christ was to be expected in the Gospel than this one, promised beforehand by the Creator in the writings of the Old Testament; especially since the things foretold of him have been fulfilled, and the things fulfilled had been foretold. So that I may rightly say, truly and firmly, to the Christ of those heretics who reject the authority of the Old Testament, some Christ or other, invented and made up and painted over out of old wives' tales: Who are you? Where are you from? By whom were you sent? Why did you choose to come now? Why like this? Or how were you able to come? Or why did you not go to your own, unless you proved that you have no people of your own, since you come to those who belong to another? What have you to do with the Creator's world? What have you to do with the Maker's man? What have you to do with the formation of a body, from which you snatch the hope of resurrection? Why do you come to another's servant, and wish to entice another's son? Why do you try to snatch me from my Lord? Why do you drive me to blaspheme against the Father and to be impious? Or what am I to obtain from you in the resurrection, when I do not receive myself back, since I lose my body? If you wish to save, you should have made a man to whom you could give salvation. If you desire to rescue me from sin, you should earlier have granted me not to sin. What support from the law do you carry about with you? What testimony of a prophetic voice do you have? Or what solid thing can I promise myself from you, when I see that you came as a phantom and not in solidity? What, then, have you to do with the shape of a body, if you hate the body? Indeed, you will be convicted of carrying about the substance of the body you hate, since you were willing to take up even its shape. For you ought to have hated the imitation of a body if you hated its reality. For if you are another, you ought to have come otherwise, lest you be called the Creator's son if you had even the image of flesh and body. Surely, if you hated birth because you hated the Creator's union of marriage, you ought to have refused even the imitation of a man, who is born through the Creator's marriages.

We do not, then, acknowledge that Christ of the heretics who was (as they say) in appearance and not in truth: for he would have done nothing true of the things he did, if he himself was a phantom and not the truth. Nor him who did nothing of our body in himself, since he received nothing from Mary, and so would not have come to us, since he did not appear in our substance. Nor him who, as other heretics have held, chose an ethereal or starry flesh, lest we should understand any salvation of ours to be in him, if we did not recognize in him also the solidity of our body. Nor any other at all who, out of the fabrications of the heretics, bore some other body of fables. For both the Lord's birth and his very death refute all these. For “the Word,” says John, “became flesh and dwelt in us”; so that rightly our body was in him, since indeed the Word took up our flesh. And blood flowed from his hands and feet, and from his very side, so that he might be proved to share our body, since he dies by the laws of our mortality. And since, raised again, he is proved by the wounds of that very body to be in the same substance of body in which he died, he showed in his own flesh the laws of our resurrection too, he who restored in his resurrection the body he had received from us. For the law of resurrection is laid down when Christ is raised in the substance of the body as the pattern for the rest. For when it is written that flesh and blood do not obtain the kingdom of God, it is not the substance of the flesh that is condemned, which was built up by divine hands so that it should not perish; but only the guilt of the flesh is rightly rebuked, which through man's willful rashness has run riot against the rights of the divine law. For in baptism and in the dissolution of death, the flesh, taken away, returns to salvation, since, having laid aside the mortality of its crime, it is called back to the state of innocence.

But lest, from our asserting that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God the Creator, was manifested in the substance of a real body, we should seem to have given a hand to, or supplied material for argument to, other heretics who in this place maintain that he was only and solely a man, and therefore wish to prove him a bare and solitary man, we do not so speak of the substance of his body as to say that he was merely a man; but rather, since the divinity of the Word was mingled in that very union, we hold that he is also God according to the Scriptures. For it is a great danger to call the Savior of the human race, the Lord and Prince of the whole world, to whom all things have been handed over and all granted by his Father, through whom all things were established, all created, all ordered, the King of all ages and times, the Prince of all the angels, before whom there is nothing except the Father, only a man, and to deny him divine authority in these things. For this insult of the heretics will overflow even onto God the Father himself, if God the Father could not beget God the Son. But the blindness of heretics will set no prescription against the truth. Nor, because they hold one thing about Christ and do not hold another, see one thing and do not see the other, will that which they do not see be snatched from us by means of that which they see. For they consider the frailties in him as of a man, but do not reckon the powers in him as of God; they recall the weaknesses of the flesh, but shut out the powers of the divinity. If this proof from the weaknesses of Christ succeeds so far as to prove him a man from his weaknesses, the proof of divinity gathered in him from his mighty works will succeed so far as to assert that he is also God from his works. For if the sufferings show human frailty in him, why should the works not assert divine power in him? Lest, if this does not succeed in asserting him God from his mighty works, neither should the sufferings succeed in showing him to be also man from them. For whatever law is laid down for either side will be found to hold for both. For there will be a danger that he cannot be shown a man from his sufferings either, if he cannot also be proved God from his mighty works. One must not, then, lean to one side and flee from the other, since whoever excludes one portion of the truth will not hold the complete truth.

For Scripture announces Christ as God just as much as it announces God himself as man; it has described Jesus Christ as man just as much as it has also described Christ the Lord as God. For it does not set him forth as the Son of God only, but also of man; nor does it speak of him only as of man, but is accustomed to present him also as of God: so that, since he is from both, he is both; lest, if he were only one, he could not be the other. For just as nature itself has prescribed that he must be believed to be man who is from man, so the same nature prescribes that he must be believed to be God who is from God: lest, if he were not also God, though he is from God, he would no longer be man either, though he was from man; and so both would be endangered in each, since the one is convicted of having lost credibility through the other. Let those, then, who read that Christ Jesus, the son of man, is man, read also that the same one has been called both God and the Son of God. For just as, as man, he is of Abraham, so, as God, he is also before Abraham himself. And just as, as man, he is the son of David, so, as God, he is called David's Lord. And just as, as man, he was made under the law, so, as God, he is declared Lord of the sabbath. And just as, as man, he undergoes sentence, so, as God, he is found to hold judgment over the living and the dead. And just as, as man, he is born after the world, so, as God, he is said to have existed before the world. And just as, as man, he was begotten of the seed of David, so, as God, the world is said to have been established through him. And just as, as man, he comes after many, so, as God, he is before all. And just as, as man, he is lower than others, so, as God, he is greater than all. And just as, as man, he ascended into heaven, so, as God, he had earlier come down from there. And just as, as man, he goes to the Father, so, as the Son obedient to the Father, he will come down from there. So if the lowly things in him prove his human frailty, the majestic things in him affirm his divine power. For it is a danger, when you read both, to have believed not both but only one. Therefore, since both are read in Christ, let both be believed, so that faith may be true only if it is also complete. For if, of the two, one ceases to be held by faith and only one, and that the lesser, is taken up to be believed, then, the rule of truth having been thrown into confusion, this rashness will not have brought salvation, but in place of salvation will have kindled a great danger of death from the loss of faith.

Why, then, should we hesitate to say what Scripture does not hesitate to express? Why will the truth of faith falter where the authority of Scripture has never faltered? For see, the prophet Hosea says in the person of the Father: “I will no longer save them by bow, nor by horses, nor by horsemen; but I will save them in the Lord their God.” If God says that he saves in God, and God does not save except in Christ, why then should man hesitate to call Christ God, whom he observes to have been set forth as God by the Father through the Scriptures? Indeed, if God the Father does not save except in God, no one can be saved by God the Father unless he has confessed Christ as God, in whom and through whom the Father promises that he will give salvation: so that rightly whoever acknowledges him to be God will find salvation in Christ, God; and whoever does not recognize him to be God will have lost the salvation that he could find nowhere else than in Christ, God. For just as Isaiah says, “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel”, which is interpreted “God with us”, so Christ himself says, “Behold, I am with you until the consummation of the age.” He is therefore God with us; indeed, much more, he is also in us. Christ is with us: he is therefore the one whose name is “God with us,” since he is also with us. Or is he not with us? How then does he say that he is with us? He is therefore with us. And because he is with us, he has been called Emmanuel, that is, “God with us.” Because, then, God is with us, he has been called “God with us.”

The same prophet says: “Be strong, you weakened hands and feeble knees; be comforted, you faint-hearted in mind; be strong, do not fear: behold, our God will render judgment; he himself will come and save us: then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will hear; then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb will be eloquent.” If the prophet says that these signs, which have been done, would come at the coming of God, then either let them acknowledge Christ as the Son of God, at whose coming and by whom these signs of healing were done; or, overcome by the truth of Christ's divinity and rushing into another heresy, since they will not confess Christ as Son of God and God, let them confess that he is the Father. For, shut in by the voices of the prophets, they can no longer deny that Christ is God. What, then, will they answer, when the signs said to come at the coming of God are those that were done at the coming of Christ? In what way do they take Christ as God? For they can no longer deny him God. As the Father? Or as the Son? If as the Son, why do they deny that the Son of God is God? If as the Father, why do they not follow those who seem to hold blasphemies of that kind? Except that for us, in this contest for the truth against them, this suffices for the present: that, convicted in whatever way, they confess Christ to be God as well, whom they wished to deny as God.

Through the prophet Habakkuk he says: “God will come from the south, and the Holy One from the shady and thickly wooded mountain.” Whom do they want to come from the south? If they say that God the Father Almighty has come, then God the Father comes from a place, by which place he is also enclosed, and he is contained within the narrow bounds of some dwelling; and now, as we have said, through these men the sacrilegious Sabellian heresy takes bodily form, since Christ is believed to be not the Son but the Father; and, in a new fashion, while he is strictly asserted by them to be a bare man, through them in turn Christ is proved to be the Father, God Almighty. But if Christ, who through the Scriptures is also called God, is born in Bethlehem, whose surveyed region faces the southern quarter of the sky, then rightly this God is described as coming from the south, since he was foreseen as going to come from Bethlehem. Let them choose, then, which of the two they want: that he who comes from the south is the Son, or the Father; for it is God who is said to be coming from the south. If the Son, why do they hesitate to call Christ God as well? For Scripture says that it is God who is to come. If the Father, why do they hesitate to join with the rashness of Sabellius, who says that Christ is the Father? Except that, whether they call him Father or Son, they must, however unwillingly, abandon their heresy, they who are accustomed to say that Christ is only a man: since, compelled by the facts themselves, they begin to proclaim him God, whether they choose to call him Father or Son.

And so John too, describing the birth of Christ, says: “The Word became flesh and dwelt in us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” For his name is also called the Word of God, and not without reason. “My heart,” it says, “has uttered a good word”; and this Word it then calls by the name of King, adding, “I speak my works to the King.” For through him all works were made, and without him nothing was made. “For whether Thrones,” says the Apostle, “or Dominions, or Virtues, or Powers, visible and invisible, all things consist through him.” And this Word is he who came to his own, and his own did not receive him. For the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. And this Word was in the beginning with God, and the Word was God. Who then would hesitate, when it is said at the end, “The Word became flesh and dwelt in us”, to declare without hesitation that Christ, whose birth it is, is man because he became flesh, and God because he is the Word of God; especially when he observes that the Gospel Scripture has joined both these substances in the one concord of Christ's birth?

For he it is who “as a bridegroom comes forth from his chamber; he has exulted as a giant to run his course; his going forth is from the height of heaven, and his return even to its height.” Since it is even to the height, “no one has ascended into heaven except he who came down from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven.” Repeating this very thing he says: “Father, glorify me with that honor which I had with you before the world was.” And if this Word came down from heaven as a bridegroom to the flesh, so that, by taking up flesh, the Son of man might be able to ascend to the place from which the Son of God, the Word, had come down, then rightly, since by mutual connection both the flesh bears the Word of God and the Son of God takes up the frailty of the flesh, going up with the flesh, his bride, to the place from which he had come down without the flesh, he now receives that glory which he is shown to have had before the founding of the world, and so he is most plainly proved to be God. And nonetheless, since the world itself is reported to have been established after him, he is found to have created it through himself; and by this very fact both the glory and the authority of divinity are proved in him through whom the world was made.

If, when it belongs to none but God to know the secrets of the heart, Christ beholds the secrets of the heart; if, when it belongs to none but God to forgive sins, the same Christ forgives sins; if, when it belongs to no man to come from heaven, he came down by coming from heaven; if, when this saying can belong to no man, “I and the Father are one”, Christ alone utters this saying from the consciousness of his divinity; if, finally, the apostle Thomas, instructed by all the proofs and facts of Christ's divinity, says in answer to Christ, “My Lord and my God”; if the apostle Paul also writes in his letters, “of whom are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever”; if the same man declares that he was appointed an apostle not by men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ; if the same contends that he did not learn the Gospel from men or through man, but received it through Jesus Christ: then rightly Christ is God.

Therefore in this matter one of two things must hold. For since it is plain that all things were made through Christ, either he is before all things, since all things are through him, and so rightly he is also God; or, because he is man, he is after all things, and so rightly nothing was made through him. But we cannot say that nothing was made through him, since we observe it written that all things were made through him. He is not, then, after all things; that is, he is not only man, who is after all things, but also God, since God is before all things. For he is before all things because all things are through him; lest, if he were only man, nothing would be through him; or, if all things are through him, he is not only man: since if he were only man, not all things would be through him, indeed nothing would be through him. What then do they answer? That nothing is through him, so that he may be only man? How then are all things through him? Therefore he is not only man, but also God, since all things are through him; so that we must rightly understand that Christ is not only man, who is after all things, but also God, since all things were made through him. For how could you call him either only man, when you see him also [as God], or [only God,] when you see him also in the flesh? Except that, since both are observed, both are rightly to be believed.