On the Flesh of Christ 20–25

What sort of twisting is yours, that you seek to remove the very syllable “of” (ex), assigned to the office of a preposition, and to use another instead, which is not found in the holy Scriptures in this matter? You say he was born through a virgin, not of a virgin, and in a womb, not of a womb, because the angel too said to Joseph in the dream, “For what is born in her is of the Holy Spirit”; he did not say “of her”. But surely, even if he had said “of her”, he would have been saying “in her”; for what was of her was in her. So it comes to the same thing when he says “in her” and “of her”, because what was in her was of her. But it is well that Matthew says the same, tracing the Lord's descent from Abraham down to Mary: “Jacob,” he says, “begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Christ is born.” And Paul too imposes silence on these grammarians: “God sent his Son, made of a woman.” Through a woman, or in a woman? This indeed is the more forceful, in that he says “made” rather than “born”; for he would more simply have said “born”. But by saying “made” he both sealed “The Word was made flesh” and asserted the reality of the flesh made of the virgin. The psalms too will support us in this matter; not those of Valentinus, the apostate, heretic, and Platonist, but those of David, the most holy and most accepted prophet. He sings of Christ among us, and through him Christ himself sang of himself. Take Christ, and hear the Lord speaking to God the Father: “For you are the one who tore me from my mother's womb.” That is one. “And my hope from my mother's breasts; upon you I was cast from the womb.” That is another. “And from my mother's womb you are my God.” That is another. Now let us contend over the meanings themselves. “You tore me,” he says, “from the womb.” What is torn away except what adheres, what is fixed and bound to that from which it must be torn in order to be removed? If he did not adhere to the womb, how was he torn away? If he who was torn away adhered, how could he have adhered unless, being of the womb, he was joined to his source in the womb by that umbilical cord, the offshoot, as it were, of his sheath? Even when one foreign thing is glued to another, it so grows into one flesh and one body with that to which it is glued that when it is torn away it takes with it something from the body from which it is torn, a kind of trace of the broken unity and of the mutual bond. Further, what breasts of his mother does he name? Without doubt those he sucked. Let midwives, doctors, and natural philosophers answer on the nature of breasts: whether they are accustomed to flow otherwise than after the womb's experience of generation, when the veins then carry that store of lower blood to the breast and in the very transfer cook it into the kinder substance of milk. That is why, during the time of nursing, the monthly flow ceases. But if the Word was made flesh of itself, not by sharing with the womb, the womb having done nothing, performed nothing, undergone nothing, how did it pour its fountain into the breasts, which it does not change except by having it? And it could not have blood to supply for milk, if it did not have the causes of that blood, namely the tearing away of its own flesh. What was new in Christ's being born of a virgin is plain: only this, that it was of a virgin, for the reason we have set out, namely that our regeneration might be virgin, spiritually sanctified from all defilements through Christ, himself a virgin even in the flesh, as born of a virgin's flesh.

If, then, they contend that it befitted the novelty that, as the Word of God was not made flesh from a man's seed, so neither from a virgin's flesh, why should the whole novelty not be this: that flesh not born of seed came forth from flesh? Let me come still closer to grips. “Behold,” he says, “a virgin shall conceive in the womb.” Conceive what? The Word of God, surely, not a man's seed; and certainly in order to bear a son. For “she shall bear a son,” he says. So as the conceiving was hers, so what she bore is hers, although what she conceived was not hers. On the other hand, if the Word was made flesh of itself, then it conceived and bore itself, and the prophecy is void. For the virgin did not conceive or bear, if whatever she bore from the Word conceived is not her own flesh. Will only this voice of the prophet be made void? Or also that of the angel, announcing the virgin's conception and delivery? Or indeed all Scripture that speaks of the mother of Christ? For how is she mother, except because he was in her womb? But he took nothing from her womb that would make her the mother in whose womb he was. A foreign flesh does not owe her this name. Only flesh that is the daughter of the womb calls the womb “mother”; and it is not the daughter of the womb if it was born of itself. Elizabeth, then, will be silent too, carrying the prophet, an infant already aware of his Lord, and filled besides with the Holy Spirit. For she says without reason, “And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” If Mary carried Jesus in her womb not as a son but as a guest, how does she say, “Blessed is the fruit of your womb”? What fruit of the womb is this, which did not sprout from the womb, did not put down root in the womb, does not belong to her whose womb it is, and which is surely the fruit of the womb, Christ? Or, since he is the flower from the rod that came forth from the root of Jesse (the root of Jesse being the race of David, the rod from the root Mary, descended from David, the flower from the rod Mary's son, who is called Jesus Christ), will he himself also be the fruit? For the flower is the fruit, since through the flower and from the flower every fruit is brought on to be fruit. What then? They deny to the fruit its flower, to the flower its rod, and to the rod its root, so that the root may not claim for itself, through the rod, the ownership of what comes from the rod, the flower and fruit; for every step of a lineage is reckoned from the last back to the first, so that now they may know that the flesh of Christ belongs not only to Mary but also to David through Mary, and to Jesse through David. That is why God swears to David that this fruit from his loins, that is, from the posterity of his flesh, will sit on his throne. If from the loins of David, how much more from the loins of Mary, on whose account it was in the loins of David?

Let them delete, then, the testimonies of the demons too, who proclaim Jesus the son of David; but they will not be able to delete the testimonies of the apostles, if those of the demons are unworthy. First of all Matthew himself, the most faithful commentator of the gospel, as a companion of the Lord, began in this way for no other reason than to make us acquainted with the fleshly origin of Christ: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” As the lineage flows from these springs of origin and the order is brought down step by step to the birth of Christ, what else is described but the very flesh of Abraham and David, handing itself on through each generation until it reaches the virgin and brings in Christ; indeed, Christ himself is brought forth from the virgin. Paul too, as disciple and master and witness of the same gospel, being an apostle of that same Christ, confirms that Christ was from the seed of David according to the flesh, his own flesh surely. So the flesh of Christ is from the seed of David. If it is from the seed of David by way of Mary's flesh, then it is from Mary's flesh, since it is from the seed of David. However you twist the saying, either what is from the seed of David is from the flesh of Mary, or what is from the flesh of Mary is from the seed of David. The same apostle settles this whole controversy by defining Christ as the seed of Abraham; and if of Abraham, then much more of David, as the more recent. For, going back over the promise of blessing for the nations in the name of Abraham, “And in your seed all the nations will be blessed,” he says, “He did not say ‘to seeds’, as of many, but ‘to your seed’, as of one, which is Christ.” We who read and believe these things, what quality of flesh ought we and can we recognize in Christ? Surely no other than Abraham's, since Christ is Abraham's seed; nor other than Jesse's, since Christ is the flower from the root of Jesse; nor other than David's, since Christ is the fruit from David's loins; nor other than Mary's, since Christ is from Mary's womb; and, higher still, no other than Adam's, since Christ is the second Adam. It follows, then, that either they must contend that those men had spiritual flesh, so that the same condition of substance was passed down to Christ, or they must grant that the flesh of Christ was not spiritual, since it is not traced from a spiritual stock.

But we recognize that the prophetic word of Simeon, spoken over the Lord when he was still a newborn infant, is being fulfilled: “Behold, this one is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that will be spoken against.” For the sign is that of Christ's birth, according to Isaiah: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son.” We recognize, then, the sign that is spoken against: the conception and childbearing of the virgin Mary, about which these Academics say, “She bore and did not bear, a virgin and not a virgin”—as though, even if it had to be said that way, it would not be more fitting for us to say it. For she bore, since it was from her own flesh; and she did not bear, since it was not from a man's seed; a virgin, as far as a husband is concerned; not a virgin, as far as childbirth is concerned. Yet not in such a way that she therefore did not bear, and was therefore a virgin who was not a virgin, because she was not a mother from her own womb. But with us nothing is doubtful, nothing twisted into a two-edged defence. Light is light, and darkness is darkness, and Yes is yes, and No is no; whatever is more than this is from evil. She bore who bore; and if as a virgin she conceived, in her childbearing she was married. For she was married by the very law of the opened body, in which it made no difference whether the force of the male was let in or let out; the same sex unsealed it. This, in short, is the womb on account of which it is also written of others: “Every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord.” Who is truly holy but the Son of God? Who properly opened a womb but he who opened one that was closed? For all others, marriage opens it. So hers was the more opened, because it was the more closed. Indeed she should rather be called not a virgin than a virgin, having become a mother by a kind of leap before she was a wife. And what more needs to be discussed on this? When on this reasoning the apostle declared that the Son of God was born not of a virgin but of a woman, he acknowledged the nuptial experience of the opened womb. We do read in Ezekiel of that cow which bore and did not bear. But see whether the Holy Spirit, foreseeing you even then, did not mark you out by this saying, you who would dispute over Mary's womb. Otherwise he would not have spoken doubtfully against his own plainness, when Isaiah says, “She will conceive and bear.”

For what Isaiah hurls in rebuke of these very heretics—above all, “Woe to those who make sweet bitter and darkness light”—marks out, of course, those who do not keep even these words in the light of their proper meanings: that the soul is nothing other than what it is called, and flesh nothing other than what is seen, and God no other than the one who is preached. That is why, looking ahead to Marcion too, he says, “I am God, and there is no other besides me.” And when elsewhere he says the same thing in the same way, “Before me there was no God,” he strikes at those genealogies of the Aeons of the Valentinians, whatever they are. And the words “Born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh and of a man, but of God,” answered Ebion. Likewise, “Even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel to you other than we have, let him be anathema,” takes aim at the demonic inspiration of Philumene, the virgin of Apelles. Certainly, “Whoever denies that Christ has come in the flesh, this one is antichrist.” By declaring flesh bare and absolute and by the plain name of its own nature, he strikes all who dispute about it. Just as, by defining Christ himself as one, he shakes the arguers for a many-shaped Christ, who make one Christ and another Jesus; one who slipped away from the midst of the crowds, another who was held fast; one who shone on the secluded mountain in the circle of the cloud before three witnesses, another who was passible, without glory, for everyone else; one great-souled, another trembling; finally, one who suffered, another who was raised—by which they also assert that their own resurrection is in another flesh. But it is well that the same one who suffered will come from heaven, the same who was raised will appear to all. And those who pierced him will see and recognize him—that is, the very flesh on which they vented their rage, without which he himself can neither exist nor be recognized. So let those blush too who affirm that the flesh sits in heaven empty of feeling, like a sheath with Christ drawn out of it; or who say flesh and soul are the same thing; or say he is only soul, but flesh no longer.

But so much for the present subject. For I think the proof that Christ's flesh was born of the virgin and was human has now been sufficiently set out. That alone, once discussed, could have been enough, without engaging the particular opinions of the other side; yet we challenged them, over and above, both in their arguments and in the Scriptures they use, so that, by having proved what Christ's flesh was and from where, and what it was not, we might have ruled in advance against them all. And so that the resurrection of our flesh, to be defended in another book, may have its conclusion drawn from this common preface, it will have here its groundwork, now that it is clear what kind of thing it was that rose in Christ.