Against the Arians

If I did not see that fraud of diabolical subtlety which, having seized the minds of almost everyone, both persuades them of heresy as if it were right faith and condemns right faith as if it were heresy, I would not speak at all, dearest brothers, about what has lately come to us in writing. For it was enough for a small conscience to hold what it believes, judging that it would be more right to guard its own than to discuss what is foreign and strange. But since, as we said, either heresy must be accepted for us to be called Catholics, or we shall not truly be Catholics if we do not reject heresy, we come down by necessity to this condition of a treatise: it befits us to bring into the open the diabolical poison hidden under the modesty of religious reverence, so that the evil that lies hidden under the appearance of simple words may be detected, and, the lie being uncovered, the truth that was shut in may breathe again. For what is foreign must be destroyed so that ours may be believed; and I see that ours cannot be believed as the only thing to be believed unless that has been destroyed. So, although I can hardly bring before the public conscience a heresy blinded by diabolical fraud, yet while I speak of it I will prove myself a Catholic by giving the pledge of my faith: proved, as I hope, to God first, then to my own conscience, but also to be proved to those whom neither fear nor worldly ambition has overcome.

Beginning, then, from the very head of this unfaith, not faith, and running next through the whole body, we shall prove that many things have been gathered in by the fraud of a common profession, things which we plainly cannot accept, and some without any semblance of shame. For one God is put forward, not without fraud, and two gods are not simply denied; but the name of substance is utterly forsworn precisely so that the Son may be cut off from the Father; and then his birth is declared unknown, though, if it is believed to be as it is, from the Father, it is well enough known by its very confession. The Father is said to be greater than the Son, not by the difference by which the Father is greater than the Son as Father, but greater in all the goods of divine glory: and if the Son is less in these, it will not be granted that he is in the Father, since his eternal blessedness will receive nothing into itself but what is its own. Nor is anything God’s own unless it is full and perfect; nor again will the Father deign to be in one in whom he cannot be wholly. The Father is said not to have a beginning, so that the Son may be believed to have one, not with reference to an author but with reference to time. But I suppose that one to whom a beginning is so ascribed will not be denied to be liable to an end. Then the Son is said to be subject to the Father, not as a son to a father but as a slave to a master, though we read that a slave cannot be heir. Finally, when he is reported to be subject to God with every creature, the Father is proclaimed invisible and immortal, so that, of course, the Son lies under the contraries of these. If, then, we refute each of these by speaking not with human presumption but with divine authority, it will follow that the Catholic faith stands on that side which receives God such as he ought to be who is God.

“It is agreed,” it says, “that there is one God.” They may seem to argue by slanderous conjectures and to twist the holiness of a simple faith by malicious interpretation. But we must look back to Ursacius and Valens and Potamius, because they have often confessed one God in these same words with crafty fraud. I have received nothing as simple in this profession of faith, which at first glance flatters with heretical subtlety, to deceive the unskilled, the credulous, the unwary, just as honey commends a cup of poison. “It is agreed,” it says, “that there is one God, the almighty Father.” None of us denies it, because none of us is ignorant of it; but (as can be proved from their own treatises) we say that in this place they have confessed not so much one God as one almighty Father. For with the same consistency they do not want the Son to be this, and yet they confess the Son as God. I suppose they will not deny that they have taken up a second; and therefore they are free, in this unfaith of theirs, not faith, to speak of one God the Father rather than of one God. Although in the whole body of their profession they do not deny our Lord himself in such a way as not to destroy him as God, that is, so as to call him Lord only in name, the name by which we too are accustomed to be called. “I said: You are gods.” By this name Moses too was once endowed: “I will make you,” he says, “a god to Pharaoh.” Let no one then think that the Catholic profession is completed by these words, if we both confess one God the Father and do not deny the Son as God. For God the Father can be called one God in such a way that he is one Father, not one God. And the Son can be called God in such a way that he is not God.

“We know,” it says, “that there cannot be two gods, nor ought they to be preached.” This we never utter from our mouth, two gods. For if God is not one and true, he is not God. But we must notice with what definition this is laid down, for what unfaith all this is prepared, into what sacrilege these words that they share with us burst out. For at once they state why they denied two gods: “Because God himself says: I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” By this definition of a bad interpretation the Son is separated from the Father so far, and placed below the almighty God, that both the condition of birth and the weakness of humanity are made common to him and to us. Then they add: “The God of all is one God”; by which saying the Lord is absolutely denied to be God; for he is made subject to God the Father not by the name of Son but by the condition of a creature. And, I suppose, in this place apostolic authority will be claimed, so that Christ may be said to be God rather than be God, because he said: “And God gave him the name which is above every name.” And also that of the Lord himself, denying that he is true God, when he says: “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God”; and: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but one, God.” You will hear further: “Why do you not seek honour from the one and only God?” “But of the day and hour no one knows except the Father alone.” O blind guides! O you deceived by worldly ambition! not distinguishing the twofold state of the Lord’s power, each differing in its own property; and whatever was said of his manhood you apply to God, so that God himself is joined to the weakness of man.

And for this reason you want this twofold state to seem not joined but confused, as even one of you, that is, the letter of Potamius sent from East to West, asserts that, the flesh and spirit of Christ having been coagulated through the blood of Mary and reduced into one body, God was made passible. This so that no one might believe him to be from him who is well enough agreed to be impassible. You have made, then, out of the Spirit of God and the flesh of man some third thing: for he is not truly God either, if he ceases to be the Word (for he was made flesh); nor truly man, because he is not properly flesh, for he was the Word; and so from both he is now neither. He, I say, he it was who against this poison distinguished each of his substances by the property of its feelings. For the Spirit in him governs its own things, that is, the powers and works and signs; and the flesh carried out its own passions. He desired food when he was tempted by the devil; he thirsted at the well of Samaria, although the prophet’s voice says: “The eternal God will neither thirst nor hunger.” What more? From the feeling of a man he wept for Lazarus and for Jerusalem; finally he was troubled unto death. But what he expressed by feeling, did he not also testify by words? For he says to Nicodemus: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the spirit is spirit”; and: “The flesh,” he says, “is weak, the spirit is willing.” So the spirit does not become flesh, nor the flesh spirit, as these excellent teachers would have it, so that our Lord and God would have been made passible from this mixture of substances. And they want him to be called passible precisely so that he may not be believed impassible as well.

But why is it necessary to search higher things and to expose and publish to common judgment the inward poison as it comes out through arguments, when the light-shunning serpent, unrolling its coils through winding paths and advancing tortuously, has at last betrayed what and how great it is, and, sprinkling its venom more freely than usual, has poured it all out alike in its victories? From the bishops an edict goes out: “Let no one say one substance”: that is, let no one preach in the church that there is one power of the Father and the Son. What have you done, O men of blessed memory, who gathered from all parts of the world at Nicaea and, having studied the sacred volumes, made the perfect rule of the Catholic faith in carefully considered words, giving to right believers the right hands of a common faith, and to those in error a pattern of believing? See your labour, see to what your anxious care has fallen back, by which, as far as lay in you then, you killed by a Catholic profession the seeds of the rising evil! It is forbidden to preach in the church the very thing that alone you decreed ought to be preached in the church to detect heresies. What you approved is taken away, and what you condemned is brought in: because the lie could not be established unless the truth were destroyed. The truth, indeed, is not subject to destruction, and, as it is, it will always endure uncorrupted; but it has punished, as if violated, those who laid sacrilegious hands on themselves.

“Let no one say one substance.” What sacrilege, what crime is in this word, on what side does it strike the Catholic faith? Is it by the sound of the word, or by the interpretation of the thing itself? I am not mistaken: the interpretation is free of fault. For substance is said of that which always is of itself, that is, which subsists by its own power within itself; and this power belongs to the one and only God. But I think that even those who deny it are not ignorant that this name is used and familiar in the divine volumes. For David says in the person of Christ: “I am stuck in the mire of the deep, and there is no substance.” And again: “My substance is in the lower parts of the earth.” And: “My substance is always before you.” And: “My substance is as nothing before you.” “Let the usurer search out all his substance.” And Solomon’s saying too: “Your substance,” he says, “and your sweetness.” And Jeremiah: “If they had stood in my substance.” And in Proverbs: “The substance of the rich man is a fortified city.” And in the same: “Fathers divide house and substance among their sons.” Tobit too: “If you have abundant substance,” he says. And the same: “Son, give alms from your substance.” John too: “Whoever has the substance of the world.” And in the Gospel: “… from my substance.” We have gathered these examples together so that that saying might not capture the unlearned which they have testified: that substance was not preached because it was found nowhere in the divine Scriptures. If, then, neither the word substance itself is new to the sacred writings, nor does its interpretation have any crime, it remains for us to examine for what cause this name is rejected. And examining, we find that they reject not the name, but the force of the name. If this shines out clearly, the standing of the name will be secure with us when it is looked into, and their meaning will be at fault, who, while they seek novel ways of profane understanding, have departed from the right boundary of the Gospels.

Before I establish what I promised, however, I must meet what is put forward on the other side. For they say that the name of substance is indeed found in the divine volumes, but that it does not at once refer to the same kind of thing that is brought in by us: for there, by the word substance, either power or divinity is signified. Then when we too claim one substance of the Father and the Son, what else do we preach than equal riches in both, namely of one divinity? Of which riches the Apostle says: “God has made known the riches of his glory,” which is Christ. And we say that both have one power, of which the same Apostle says: “Christ is the power of God.” And this power, because it needs no outside help, is called substance, as we said above: whatever owes its being to itself. So we say nothing new in this word, nothing foreign, nothing unfitting to the divinity, even if it is carried over into any part of its meaning. But (as I had begun to say) this whole question of the name belongs to another grievance: it is not the word but the force of the word that displeases. For with what ears could they accept that one substance of the Father and the Son is preached, that is, honour, dignity, glory, power, majesty, common to both with equal truth, they who separate the Son from the Father and, the substances being divided, set each forth living in his own property, rejecting the communion of divinity? Here, then, is the grievance of blasphemy, here the sacrilegious pain, at receiving one God in the Father and the Son. For though the authors of this poison are dead, their crimes and teaching do not die. Those authors, I say, separated the Son from the Father so far as to utter with sacrilegious mouth that the Son of God was indeed created and founded before the ages, but received living and being from the Father; and that he was before he was born; and that he was indeed God, but not true God. To the successors of this unfaith, not faith, through whom the inheritance of evils creeps on, one substance rightly displeases, which they ask to have removed as a stumbling block and a divorce of unity, not knowing that only those are to be called Catholics …

But who could bear with equanimity that they hold as uncertain the birth of one whom they assert for certain to have a beginning? Either both must be held hidden, because they are of one time, or both must be known. For the one can neither be known nor be unknown without the other. “The Son has a beginning,” it says, “but his birth is hidden.” Is it not unjust? Who disclosed the birth? Why did he keep silent? Indeed, how is the birth known which is asserted to be unknown? But in this place men empty of all good hope appeal to the authority of the prophet who says: “Who will declare his generation?” not understanding that already then they were foreseen by the prophetic Spirit who were going to give a beginning to the Word of God, that is, to the Son of God. “Who,” it says, “will declare his generation?” That is to say: no man will be able. For no one could, except himself, who, expounding the bosom of the Father, revealed to us principally the secrets of his own birth. For we read that it was said in the same sense: “Who knows the mind of the Lord?” But again we are taught: “Except the Spirit who is in him.” “Who will declare his generation?” That is to say: let no one dare to declare what he cannot. And why will no one be able? Because he is not only from him and with him, but also in him who has no birth. For, begotten of the unbegotten, he was born with those goods of divine glory which were with the unbegotten; and did the Father, the same unbegotten, cease to have what he begot, by having in himself the same one whom he begot? So his birth is declared indescribable because through it he was not conceived, but the Son is perfect God from God the Father; because, according to the Scriptures, we have spoken of the Son as from him, and with him, and in him.

So that no one may be disturbed by the variety of meanings, an account must be given of what was said, and, so that the propositions are not confused, briefly. “From him” refers to the author; “with him” to the only-begotten; “in him” to the birth of the substance. This is heard in all. Hold the mysteries of the divine dispensation. You know enough. “Who,” it says, “will declare his generation?” For who could declare according to nature a birth that is against nature? For he alone is born who is conscious of his own birth. For he, understanding by nature the origin for which goods were prepared, was in the Father by the very condition by which he was born. “Who,” it says, “will declare his generation?” And they add that it was disclosed to no one, because it is known, of course, to the Father alone. That is to say, without the fraud of subtle words: “The Father indeed begot the Son, but no one knows from where.” For likewise the Jews said: “We know that God spoke to Moses; but as for this man, we do not know where he is from.” For although they sometimes agree with us in common words, and some things they say seem simple enough to throw the infamy of heretical depravity over us, yet since nearly all their words come against the true faith, the fewer must be understood by the more; especially since if anything is accepted that comes against the faith, it is the loss of the whole faith. “No one knows,” it says, “how the Son was begotten, except the Father alone.” What then does that saying mean, since the Lord, not wishing us to be ignorant of this, says: “I came forth from the Father,” and “from the bosom of the Father”? Alas! Why did he not wish us to be ignorant, who follow the darkness of ignorance? And certainly he did not wish it, so that, the author being known to us, the question of his status might be removed. For there was no need to ask who, how, or of what kind he was, once we knew where he was from. But if in this place it is put forward that this is confirmed by the Lord’s own saying: “No one knows the Father except the Son, nor does anyone know the Son except the Father,” we must listen, so that they may not defraud the divine definition. For it follows: “and he to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” For what can be revealed is not wholly hidden. For it is revealed, if anyone is worthy of revelation.

Now, then, this knowledge is not covered by reason of secrecy, since it is revealed for a reason; and it follows that, if we are unworthy of the knowledge, God is not to be held unjust when he punishes ignorance; but he would not punish it if he had not given knowledge. And he gave it through the Holy Spirit. Indeed, “The Spirit of truth,” he says, “will declare to you all truth.” When he says “all truth,” certainly he excepts nothing. This is the Spirit of knowledge and truth, through whom Solomon says of the Lord’s birth: “What wisdom is, and how it came to be, I will relate, and I will search it out from the beginning of its birth.” So through the same Spirit we can find what we seek. For the Apostle too says: “God has revealed it to us through his Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. No one knows what is in God except the Spirit of God”; and since the same Apostle proves that this Spirit dwells in us, we can through the same Spirit enter into the secrets of God. And surely: “Seek,” he says, “and you will find; ask, and it will be given you; knock, and it will be opened to you.” And again: “Father, what you have hidden from the wise you have revealed to little ones”: to us, surely, to whom the Lord says: “To you it is given to know the mystery of God”; that mystery, surely, of which the Apostle says: “Which before was not made known to the sons of men, but now has been revealed to his saints.” Revealed plainly. For he showed the surpassing riches of his glory in kindness toward us from Christ, who himself is the glory of God the Father; he himself the true offspring of the Unbegotten. This is: “No one knows how the Son was begotten.” No one, surely, but of those in whom, as the Lord says, his word finds no place; as also for the Jews, to whom the same Lord says: “You do not know where I come from and where I go, because you judge according to the flesh.” For how is it no one, if the Father says: “My heart has uttered a good word”? How no one, if the Son says: “I came forth from the mouth of the Most High”? Do not seek further, and you have nothing more to ask; for you know the whole, because what is said is the whole. “From the mouth,” he says, “of the Most High I came forth.” For this is the perfect birth of the Word, that is, a beginning without beginning. This is a rising that has a beginning in birth, but not in being. For from God unbegettable came forth God begotten, one from one, true from true, full from full; and so by being born in those things which always were, what was born of the unconceived did not begin to be, nor does he who is co-begotten by nature with the timeless Father have time. For it is written: “God is spirit”; and from God an eternal one was born. So he is of that nature in which eternity consists. The Son, therefore, is not imperfect, though born, because he was born from the perfect; nor is he who begot diminished, because he begot from himself. For the whole gave the whole, so that according to the power of the Spirit the whole might be in the whole.

But now the evil teachers no longer keep within the secrets of their art, and they stand against the truth and by the truth itself, having horns like a lamb and speaking like dragons. Wishing, then, to cut the Son from the Father and set him below God, they appeal to the Gospel: “The Father,” he says, “is greater than I.” And how greater? At once they define it with heretical presumption: in honour, glory, dignity, majesty. If this is so, why is it commanded that all should honour the Son as they honour the Father? If this is so, then we blaspheme daily in the thanksgivings and the offerings of the sacrifices, confessing these things as common to the Father and the Son; because, of course, the Son cannot not have all that is the Father’s, since he himself is wholly in the Father. Indeed John says: “No one has ever seen God, except the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father.” And so he says: “All that is yours is mine, and mine is yours”; and: “The Son can do nothing of himself”; and: “I have not come to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.” This is certainly not a confession of weakness but an assertion of unity. For he had said both against weakness and for unity: “He who sent me is with me”; and: “The Father who dwells in me does his works”; and: “The words that I speak are not mine, but the Father’s.” Whatever, then, is taken from the Son will be taken from the Father too. For neither does anything without the other, because neither can be without the other. Nor is the Son Son unless he has a Father, nor the Father Father unless he has a Son. “The Father,” he says, “is greater than I.” But the fullness of the same divinity is in the Son. Indeed the Apostle says: “As many as are the promises of God, in him is the Yes.” Do the obediences of the Son, then, dissolve the status of his divinity? For all that is God in Christ is dissolved if it is understood to be of another majesty; and it will be of another if the Father is greater in majesty. And this majesty, since it is one, namely of the one God, cannot but be perfect: if imperfect, it is unequal; and unequal, if it is less than another.

But in this place what Matthew reports will applaud you: the Son of Man, as though private, of course, and lesser. Read in the same Matthew that the Son will come in the majesty of the Father; of which coming Luke too says: “When the Son of Man comes,” he says, “with his glory and the Father’s.” So when this is said, the Son is not so much called lesser in majesty by you as he is denied to be God. He, I say, he of whom Solomon says: “He is the brightness of eternal light, and the spotless mirror of God’s majesty.” Plainly a spotless mirror. For he keeps the face of God, and, faithfully expressing its form, he has rendered the full image of the Father. And what more of his status, in which the Lord Christ recognized himself? “The Father,” he says, “is greater than I.” Rightly greater, because he alone is the author without author. Indeed the Apostle says of the Son: “In him dwells all the fullness of divinity bodily.” So, as the Son is in the Father, so too the Father is perfect in the Son. Indeed, when our Lord said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, he added: “He will receive from what is mine.” Just as John, when he had said, “We announce to you the eternal life which was with the Father,” added: “This life is in his Son.” And so, though both, each of them, are perfect, yet there is one perfect God in the two. “The Father,” he says, “is greater than I.” Rightly greater, because he himself did not descend into the Virgin; which Sabellius would not have, with whom the Father and the Son are not both, that is, one person with two names; though he would hear the voice of the Father through Isaiah: “Behold my Son whom I have chosen; I will put my Spirit upon him”; and then recognize the Son speaking through the same prophet: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.” Foreseeing this heresy, the Lord said: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” Certainly he did not say: “I am the Father, and I in me”; but: “I in the Father and the Father in me”: by which saying he crushed two heresies, the Sabellian and the Arian. He taught that the Father and the Son are not one person, as Sabellius holds, nor two substances, as Arius holds, but (as the Catholic faith confesses) one substance and two persons.

But why is there need of arguments, when the Lord himself has pronounced with a definitive sentence: “Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise”? How likewise, if he cannot aspire to the height of that fatherly glory? Rather, because he can, John rightly says: “Without him nothing was made.” And the Lord himself says: “I and the Father are one.” One, surely, by nature: because what was in the Son of Man remained also in the bosom of the Father. Indeed: “You know me,” he says, “and you know where I am from; and I have not come of myself, but he who sent me is true, whom you do not know. I know him, because I am with him, and he sent me”; and: “I am not alone,” he says, “but I and he who sent me, the Father”; and: “As the Father knows me, I also know the Father.” But I do not know whether the Son could know the Father, if the Son was allotted a beginning. For the begotten could not know the unbegotten before he was begotten. So then he does not know the Father as he is known by the Father; and a lie must be ascribed to him (which ought not to befall the Lord), and rightly ascribed, if his assertion does not stand by reason. But it will not stand unless he is the one who not only came forth from the Father but both is and always was in the Father. “The Father,” he says, “has given all things into his hand.” How all things, unless all time too? And how all time, if he is not without beginning? For however much you say he was born before all time, yet since you want him who was born to have begun at some point, and what was made not to have been, I do not know how you defend that he obtained from the Father all things, and all time.

“The Son,” it says, “is subject to the Father together with all those things which the Father himself has subjected to him.” You cover this poisoned venom with a veil of choice words. We constantly preach what we have heard from our fathers; and you, then, do not abandon the teaching of your fathers. They, I say, said freely that the God of heavenly glory is not true God but a perfect creature of God. You, however, holding the same with abrupt blasphemy, avoiding the words, pursue ambiguities to deceive the simple and unwary. For you profess that the Son is subject to the Father not by the name of Father or Son, as the holy and Catholic Church says, but (as we said above) by the condition of a creature. For when you say that the Son is subject to the Father “together with all those things which the Father subjected to him,” do you not number him in the order of creatures that were established in time? For according to you our God and Lord has nothing more than every creature except that he is first in number, except that those things also serve him with which he serves. For he too is a slave, if he serves; and though he is Lord of some, he is Lord by will: if he was made Lord by the will of the Lord, he serves in this very thing, that he was commanded to command. This is what you say secretly, and your fathers said freely: that the Son of God was brought forth by the Father without time, and was not founded before he was born. What, I ask, is this dullness of heart? What forgetfulness of hope? Rather, what so mad and blasphemous a confession, calling him God whom you have compared with all the things that were made from nothing? This is both to mock the Son with a false name of divinity, if he is said to be in word what is denied in heart; and to brand God the Father a liar, when he says: “I am who I am”; and: “I am the only Lord”; and: “My glory I will not give to another”; and: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God”; and: “Do not ask my name; God is my name.” If, then, there is one God, this name belongs to one. But will he still be one unless the Son is God in God the Father? And rightly the Lord, in accord with the prophet who had said, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” says: “I have come in the name of my Father.” What is the name of the Father, if not the name of God and Lord? which John recognized in the Son when he said: “Who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”

“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.