Against the Arians 16–23

“The Father,” it says, “has no beginning.” That is to say, the Son has one. For what necessity is there to assert of the Father what is known, unless as a prejudgment of the opinion that has taken up the opposite about the Son? “The Father,” it says, “has no beginning.” Who denies it? But I think the image too of the invisible and unbegotten God cannot have begun after God. Indeed, when Moses asked who he was, he answered: “I am who I am always.” For he always was, who is and always will be. Of whom John says: “What was from the beginning we have seen with our eyes.” And again: “We announce to you the eternal life which was with the Father”: surely also in the Father; for what was from him could not be outside him. And indeed, when it is said, “Time was in him,” it is not declared that he himself was in time. For the power of the eternal substance was not made by God but went forth from God; therefore he says: “And I came forth from the Father”; and: “I and the Father are one”; and: “He who sees me sees the Father too”; and: “I in the Father, and the Father in me”; and: “He who sent me is with me.” Therefore David too says: “With you is the beginning in the day of your power.” For the Word of God, that is, the Son of God, is before every beginning, with him from whom he is, and in him for whom there can be no beginning. We find indeed that Solomon said in the person of Wisdom (whom we maintain to be Christ): “The Lord created me, and before the age he founded me, and before the abyss I was begotten.” But it must not be believed on that account that God was made. For if he was made, he was not; if he was not, he will not be. And how is he God, for whom both conditions are prescribed so that he may not be God? But the Wisdom of God is declared born and created so that nothing besides God the Father himself, who is also the origin of his powers, should be believed to be in nature. For from that point it could rightly be said: “Wisdom created from him and in him,” from whom that only-begotten and blessed birth shone forth from him. Whoever, then, proves that the Father was at some time without Word, without wisdom, without reason, without power, without Spirit, has proved that the Son was not with the Father and in the Father before every beginning. Yet I do not know whether the Father, lacking these powers, could be called God. For not only God, who is perfect in his eternity, but not even any creature will stand if it is not complete according to its kind. For something cannot be what it is not; and it will not be, if what it ought to be is lacking to it. So the whole was lacking to the Father, if anything was lacking of the whole. And it was lacking, if his Son, that is, the fullness of his powers, is not without beginning; and this opinion must necessarily pass over into one side or the other of blasphemy by a profane and sacrilegious definition. For either the Father must be believed to have been allotted a beginning together with his Son, since he could not be without the Son, that is, without his powers; and the author of this beginning of theirs will be some third God, I know not who; or, if he alone is said to be without beginning until the begetting of the Son, he must be said to have been imperfect. For imperfect, if he began to have what before he did not have. But he who ought always to be perfect ought always to have all things, because whatever has taken up the whole admits no increase.

“The Father,” they say, “has no beginning, is invisible, is immortal, is impassible.” They propose these things so as to ascribe their contraries to the Son. For whatever they deny of the Father they confess of the Son; and if he is proved to have a beginning, rightly he is mortal, rightly passible. It ought indeed to be prejudged that the other kinds of passions also do not fit the Son, once the first appearance of their proposition, which gave a beginning to the Word of God, has been destroyed. Yet lest anything be distrusted, let us go over the other things that are profanely proposed. For as the other things subject to this definition cannot be ascribed to one who has no beginning, so, if he is found akin to one of them, it is fair that those too which had been defended should be dissolved. “The Father,” it says, “is invisible.” As if we ever found that the Son was visible without transfiguration, before, obedient to the Father, he became bodily from eternity. For although he was seen by Abraham, and Jacob, and Moses, and Isaiah, and Ezekiel, yet the quality of that seeing is explained: for he is reported to have been seen in sleep, and in a mirror, and in a riddle. Indeed, to Moses, when he asked to see him knowingly, he said: “No one can see my face; for no one who sees it will live.” So in this place let them either contend that the Father spoke, who says he is invisible; or, if they do not deny that it was the Son, let them know that he spoke, and that he was invisible in his own nature, as Word, as Spirit. Indeed the same Scripture testifies how the invisible God was seen. For it reports that God spoke with him as with a friend, face to face. And then it adds that Moses asked to see his face; which surely, if he had seen it, he would not at once have asked to see. Jacob indeed says: “I saw the Lord face to face, and my soul was saved”; but how was he saved by seeing that face which kills if it is seen? And how had the Lord shown his face, which he afterwards said could not be seen, except on the condition we stated above, namely in a mirror and in a riddle, in a dream and a vision? This, then, is how he took on that visible matter when it pleased him, but at once remained invisible; because it must be that, if he is taught to be visible, he is not from him whom we confess to be invisible.

But to free themselves from the questions of the Old Testament, they take confirmation of this assertion from the New Testament. For the Lord and God, speaking of the Father, said that no one had seen the image of the Father; and if the Son himself is the image of the Father, as the Apostle proves, he denies that he was visible by saying that no one had seen the image of the Father. And so he says: “You know neither me nor my Father.” And here he certainly confirms that two are unknown, two, however, as unseparated. For if they had known him, they would have known the Father too; because through their indivisibility neither could be known or unknown without the other. A similar reasoning follows about mortal and passible. For if the Son has no beginning, since he always was and is in him to whom no beginning is given; nor is visible, who remains in the bosom of the invisible: then he is to be held neither mortal nor passible, in that part of his substance by which he is God. For we know that the Spirit of God suffered nothing in its own right, because God is impassible, because God is spirit. We know that all that suffering belonged properly to the flesh and soul, that is, to the man; in which man, when he suffered, the Son of God was also present, cleaving by nature to the Father (from whom he had come), and keeping the bond of unity: he bore man on earth and was not absent from heaven. So he is called mediator, so the trustee of both substances. The Spirit of God, then, is not passible, though he suffered in his man; whom he did not desert even in the passion, so as to grant him the ability to suffer. Unless this is accepted, the reasoning of our faith will not stand, since it would give the weakness of a man to him whom they do not deny to be God. For if he is both said to have a beginning, and taught to be visible, and brought in as mortal, I do not see how he differs from a man, over whom passions of this kind reign.

“We confess,” they say, “the Son of God, God from God, light from light.” It may seem sacrilegious to harass a perfect profession of the Catholic faith with malicious argument; but it must not be conceded that what they do not hold with us should be taken from us by means of what they do hold with us. We acknowledge, then, and receive with reverence the words of the common faith; but what shall we do? This is how the insane teaching of the Ariomaniacs hands it down. For it too, saying God from God, light from light, makes from God another God, from light another light, so that the Son is from the Father and not in the Father; that is, that, made God by God, he is not the only-begotten in God. But what more is needed here, when writings are held of some of those who lately sent us this excellent faith, in which, while saying God from God, light from light, they nevertheless taught by heretical argument that he was separated from the Father and wholly cut off? They say that the Son of God himself took up from Mary a man through whom he suffered with him. Closing everything, then, with a fitting end, they confessed in writing what they had conceived in mind, the writing answering to their meaning and unlocking their hidden poisons: saying, namely, that the Son of God took up from Mary a man through whom he suffered with him. First, I do not see why they preferred to say “co-passible” rather than freely confess “passible.” As if to suffer with were anything other than to suffer. But further, if God is impassible, surely he is also incapable of suffering with. So he no more suffered with than he suffered, in that condition by which he is God. Indeed the Apostle says: “He suffered from weakness,” surely of the flesh (for the flesh is weak, the spirit willing); “but he lives by the power of God”: surely from himself. For he himself is the power of God, having life in himself. So we believe that our Lord consisted of two substances, namely human and divine; and that he was immortal in the divine as he was mortal in that which was human: born from the one, proved from the other; immortal from the one, mortal from the other. Indeed the same Apostle says: “Christ died”: that is, the anointed; for this name is derived from anointing. If, then, nothing other than the flesh was anointed, then only the flesh is said to have died whenever Christ is declared to have died.

But if anyone wishes to force one of two things from us, that either we define one God singularly, if we confess one, or freely declare two, if we call both the Father God and the Son God, let this be known before all: that we say neither one with prejudice nor two; because we say one in two, at the Lord’s own suggestion: “I and the Father are one,” so that two might be believed in one power. For he did not say, as though from one person of Father and Son, as if the Son were affirming himself to be the Father: “I am my own son”; and: “Today I have begotten myself”; and: “Before the morning star I begot myself”; and: “The Lord created me the beginning of my ways”; and: “Before the ages he founded me”; and: “I and the Father am one.” But, making the mystery known by a distinction, not a division, of persons, he says: “I in the Father, and the Father in me”; “I and the Father are one”; and: “He who sees me sees the Father too.” For the Son of the Father is seen, the true image and express figure of his substance, that is, the Word of God, not the sound of a voice but a substantive thing, and corporeal through substance. For what he made from so great a substance did not consist without substance. Nothing, then, empty from what is full, nothing void from what is solid: because the Word of God, the Spirit of God, Christ, is equipped; and, to put it more plainly, he is the body of the Word: for spirit is body, but body of its own kind. For spirit is invisible and incomprehensible. Yet is God an empty and void thing? For God is spirit. Indeed: “No one knows,” he says, “what is in God except the spirit that is in him.” We read indeed: “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counsellor?” No one, surely, but no one apart from his own spirit; since the prophet calls the spirit wise, an architect, and a wonderful counsellor; and not without reason. For the same spirit is the Word and Wisdom of God, in whose person Solomon says: “When he was preparing heaven, I was present with him”; and: “I was with him,” he says, “and he rejoiced in me.” So it is not that he had no counsellor, since through him were made all things that were made. Indeed, though the same is the Wisdom and the Word of God and the Spirit of God, yet the offices of the individual names are declared. Wisdom was present with the Father as he founded all things; by his Word the heavens were made firm, and by the spirit of his mouth all their power. It is clear, then, that one and the same came now under the name of spirit, now under the title of wisdom.

So this Word, when he was in the form of God, built up by the power of wisdom and reason and spirit, that is, possessing the whole power of God, did not make himself equal to God the Father, but, taking the form of a slave, humbled himself even to death. For he had put on what could serve, what could die: namely the man, whom, raised up, he presented to heaven, so that as the second Adam he might restore by obedience what the first had lost by transgression. If anyone, then, still asks of the Apostle about the Lord’s status, that is, about the quality of his singular substance, which is joined by nature to its author, let him hear in brief what the same Apostle thought when he spoke of the unsearchable ways of God the Father and the mysteries long hidden. “From him,” he says, “and through him, and in him are all things.” When “through him” is said, I recognize that the Son is meant: for I have read, “Through him all things.” When “in him” is declared, there is nothing new; for in him the beginnings of all seeds have consisted. But when “from him” is said, certainly it looks to the Father as the author of all things. And if this is so, as it is, how will the reasoning stand for those who join distinct things, that is, who refer all to one, since one is he from whom are all things, and another he through whom are all things, because one is unbegotten, the other only-begotten, unless on another condition by which it is rightly said both that all things are from the Son, since he from whom are all things is in his heart by nature, and that all things are through the Father, since he through whom are all things is always in him? For the Father acts by thought, but the Son, who is the thought in the Father, seeing, accomplishes. So it must not be believed that the Apostle spoke rashly; but it must be believed that he did not believe this, namely that the Son of God according to the flesh was made what he was not, while according to the spirit he is what he was; because what always was cannot not have been.

We must hold, then, to the reasoning that creeps along a steep and narrow path, with precipices lying on this side and that, which, blinded by diabolical fraud, offer level and easy ground so as to plunge those who stray into ruin. For if we name one God singularly, excluding the word of a second person, we approve the madness of that heresy which asserts that the Father himself suffered. If we admit number with division, we are joined with the Arians, who assert that God was made by God and that a new substance came to be from nothing. We must hold, then, as we said, to the rule that confesses the Son in the Father and the Father in the Son; which, keeping one substance in two persons, acknowledges the dispensation of the divinity. So the Father is God, and the Son is God, because the Son is God in God the Father. If this makes a stumbling block for anyone, let him hear from us that the Spirit is from God; because he who has a second person in the Son has also a third in the Holy Spirit. Indeed the Lord says: “I will ask my Father, and he will give you another advocate.” So the Spirit is other than the Son, as the Son is other than the Father. So there is a third person in the Spirit, as a second in the Son: yet the one God is all, the three are one. This we believe, this we hold, because this we have received from the prophets; this the Gospels have spoken to us; this the apostles handed down; this the martyrs confessed by their suffering; to this we cling with minds of faith; and against this, even if an angel from heaven should preach, let him be accursed.

But I am not unaware that, all these things having been discussed and set out in the light of public understanding, the name of Hosius, a most aged priest and of a faith always ready, is being prepared against us as a kind of battering ram, by which the rashness of contradiction may be driven back. But to those who raise this engine against us I reply in a very short speech. No prejudgment can be made by his authority, because either he is in error now, or he was always in error. For the world knows what he held until this age, with what firmness at Sardica and in the proceedings at Nicaea he assented and condemned the Arians. What if he now thinks otherwise, and whatever he formerly condemned is defended, and what he defended is condemned? I say again, no prejudgment is made against me by his authority. For if he believed wrongly for almost ninety years, I will not believe that after ninety he thinks rightly. Or if he is right now, what is to be thought of those who departed this world sealed with the same faith in which he himself was? What would be pronounced about him himself, if he had fallen asleep before this synod? So, as we said above, the authority of a prejudged opinion will be worth nothing, because it stands against itself. And indeed we read: “The righteousness of the righteous will not save him on whatever day he goes astray.” Amen.