On the Flesh of Christ 9–19

We further maintain that nothing received from something else, so as to be other than that from which it was received, is so different that it does not suggest where it was received from. No material is without witness to its origin, even if it is changed into a new property. Certainly this very body of ours, moulded from clay (a truth that has passed even into the fables of the nations), confesses the origin of both elements: earth by its flesh, water by its blood. For although the appearance of the quality is different (this is what it means for one thing to be made from another), still, what is blood but reddened moisture? what is flesh but earth in its own shape? Consider the qualities one by one: muscles like clods, bones like rocks, even certain pebbles around the nipples. Look at the tough ties of the sinews like trailing roots, the branching courses of the veins like winding streams, the down like moss, the hair like turf, and the very treasures of marrow hidden deep within like the ores of the flesh. All these signs of an earthly origin were in Christ too; and they are what hid him as Son of God, for he was thought to be only a man for no other reason than that he stood forth in the human substance of a body. Or else show something heavenly in him, begged from the Great Bear, the Pleiades, and the Hyades. For the things we have listed are witnesses of earthly flesh in his case as in ours. But I find nothing new, nothing foreign. In fact it was only at his words and deeds, at his teaching and power alone, that they were astonished at Christ the man. A novelty of flesh in him would also have been noticed and held a miracle. But it was precisely the unremarkable condition of earthly flesh that made his other deeds remarkable, when they said, “Where did this man get this teaching and these signs?” This was the cry even of those who despised his appearance. So far was his body from having even human comeliness, let alone heavenly brightness. Even if the prophets were silent among us about his lowly appearance, his very sufferings and the very insults speak. The sufferings proved his flesh human; the insults proved it uncomely. Would anyone have dared to scratch a new kind of body with the tip of a fingernail, or to defile its face with spittle, unless it invited it? Why do you call heavenly a flesh which you have no grounds for understanding to be heavenly? Why do you deny that it is earthly, when you have grounds for recognizing it as earthly? He hungered under the devil, thirsted with the Samaritan woman, wept over Lazarus, trembled at death (“For the flesh,” he says, “is weak”), and at last shed his blood. These, I suppose, are heavenly signs! But how, I say, could he have been despised and have suffered, as I said, if anything of heavenly nobility had shone out in that flesh? From this, then, we prove that there was nothing from the heavens in it, precisely so that it could be despised and suffer.

I turn to others, equally wise in their own eyes, who maintain that Christ's flesh was made of soul, because the soul was made flesh; so the flesh is soul too, and as the flesh is of soul, so the soul is of flesh. Here too, then, I ask for the reasons. If Christ took a soul upon himself in order to save the soul, because it would not be saved except through him, by being in him, I do not see why in putting on flesh he made that flesh of soul, as though he could not save the soul otherwise than by its being made flesh. For since he saves our souls, which are not only not fleshly but even separated from flesh, how much more could he bring to salvation the soul which he himself took up, even if it were not fleshly? Again, since they presume that Christ came forth to set free not the flesh but our soul alone, first, how absurd it is that, meaning to free the soul alone, he made it into the kind of body he was not going to free! Next, if he had undertaken to free our souls through the soul he bore, he ought to have borne ours too, that is, of our form, whatever the hidden form of our soul is, yet not fleshly. Otherwise he did not free our soul, if he had a fleshly one; for ours is not fleshly. Further, if he did not free ours, because he freed a fleshly one, it is nothing to us, since he did not free ours. But neither did a soul that was not ours, being fleshly, need freeing; for it was not in danger, if it was not ours, that is, not fleshly. But it is agreed that it was freed. Therefore it was not fleshly, and it was ours, if it was the one to be freed, since it was in danger. So now, if the soul in Christ was not fleshly, neither can the flesh have been made of soul.

But we meet another argument of theirs, when we ask why Christ, by taking a flesh made of soul, should seem to have had a fleshly soul. “God,” they say, “was eager to display the soul visibly to men by making it a body, the soul that had previously been invisible, by nature seeing nothing, not even itself, because of the hindrance of this flesh, so that it was even disputed whether the soul was born or not. So the soul was made body in Christ, so that we might see it being born and dying and, what is more, rising again.” And what sort of thing was this, that the soul should be shown to itself or to us through flesh, when it could not be known through flesh, so that it was shown by becoming the very thing in which it lay hidden, the flesh? He took on darkness, evidently, in order to be able to shine! First, then, let us consider on this point whether the soul had to be shown in this way; and then whether they allege it to have been wholly invisible before, as being incorporeal, or as having some kind of body of its own. And yet, when they call it invisible, they make it bodily, as having something that is invisible. For if it has nothing invisible, how can it be called invisible? But it cannot even exist unless it has something through which it exists. And since it exists, it must have something through which it exists. If it has something through which it exists, this will be its body. Everything that exists is a body of its own kind. Nothing is incorporeal except what does not exist. Since, then, the soul has an invisible body, he who had undertaken to make it visible would surely have acted more worthily by making visible that part of it which was held to be invisible; for here too neither falsehood nor weakness befits God: falsehood, if he showed the soul as something other than it was; weakness, if he could not show what it was. No one who wants to show a man puts a helmet or a mask on him. But this was done to the soul, if, turned into flesh, it put on a surface not its own. And even if the soul is reckoned incorporeal, so that by some hidden force of reason the soul is indeed something but not a body, whatever the soul is, it was not impossible for God, and it suited his purpose better, to show it by some new form of body rather than by this one common to all and already otherwise known; lest he should have been eager for no reason to make the soul visible from invisible, only to leave it open to these very questions through its being defended as human flesh. But Christ could not be seen among men except as a man. Give Christ, then, his due credit: that, having willed to walk as a man, he showed a soul also of human condition, not by making it flesh, but by clothing it with flesh.

Suppose now that the soul was shown through flesh, if it is agreed that it had to be shown in some way, that is, as unknown to itself and to us. Although in this the distinction is empty, as though we were something apart from the soul, when all that we are is soul. In fact without the soul we are nothing; we do not even bear the name of man, but of corpse. If, then, we are ignorant of the soul, the soul is ignorant of itself. So it remains only to examine whether the soul was ignorant of itself in this respect, so that it had to become known in some way. The nature of the soul, I think, is sentient. So nothing that has a soul is without sensation, and nothing sentient is without a soul. And to put it more forcefully, sensation is the soul of the soul. Since, then, the soul provides sensation to all things, and itself perceives the senses, not to say the qualities, of all things, who can think it likely that it was not allotted a sense of itself from the beginning? How could it know what it needs from time to time, by the necessity of natural things, if it does not know its own quality, which is what needs anything? This, indeed, can be recognized in every soul, I mean knowledge of itself, without which no soul could have managed itself. And I think it all the more fitting that man, the only rational animal, has been allotted a soul that makes him a rational animal, being itself rational first of all. Further, how is the soul rational, which makes man a rational animal, if it does not know its own reason, being ignorant of itself? But so far is it from ignorance that it knows its author and judge and its own state. Before it has learned anything about God, it names God. Before it admits anything about his judgement, it says it commends itself to God. Though it hears nothing more often than that there is no hope after death, it wishes good or ill on each one who has died. This is followed out more fully in the little book we wrote On the Testimony of the Soul. Otherwise, if the soul was ignorant of itself from the beginning, it ought to have learned nothing from Christ except what it was like. But in fact it learned from Christ not its own likeness, but salvation. That is why the Son of God came down and took on a soul: not that the soul might know itself in Christ, but that it might know Christ in itself. For it is not by ignorance of itself that it is in danger as to salvation, but by ignorance of God's word. “The life,” he says, “was made manifest,” not the soul. And, “I came,” he says, “to save the soul”; he did not say “to show” it. We were ignorant, no doubt, that the soul, though invisible, is born and dies, unless it was displayed bodily! We were plainly ignorant that it will rise with the flesh. This will be what Christ made manifest. But even this he made manifest in himself no otherwise than in some Lazarus, whose flesh was not made of soul, nor, therefore, his soul of flesh. What more, then, has become known to us about the constitution of the soul, formerly unknown? What was invisible about it that required visibility through flesh?

The soul was made flesh so that the soul might be shown. Was the flesh then also made soul, so that the flesh might be manifested? If the flesh is soul, it is no longer soul but flesh. If the soul is flesh, it is no longer flesh but soul. Where there is flesh, then, and where there is soul, it has become one or the other. Indeed, if they are neither, while each becomes the other, it is surely most perverse that when we name flesh we should understand soul, and when we mean soul we should interpret it as flesh. Everything will be in danger of being taken otherwise than it is, and of losing what it is while being taken otherwise, if it is named otherwise than it is. Faithfulness in names is the safeguard of properties. Even when qualities are changed, they take possession of their own names. For example, clay, when baked, receives the name of pot; and it does not share the name of its former kind, because it does not share that kind either. So too the soul of Christ, if made flesh, cannot but be what it has been made, and not be what it was, having been made something else. And since we have used an example close at hand, we shall use it more fully. Certainly a pot made from clay is one body, and has one name, the name of one body. It cannot be called both pot and clay, because what it was, it is not, and what it is not does not cling to it. So neither does the soul cling. Therefore the soul made flesh is a uniform solidity, a total singleness, an undivided substance. But in Christ we find soul and flesh set forth with simple and plain names, that is, soul as soul and flesh as flesh, never soul as flesh or flesh as soul, as they should have been named if they had been so; and each substance is even spoken of by him separately, surely because of the distinction of two qualities, soul apart and flesh apart. “My soul,” he says, “is troubled even to death”; and, “The bread which I shall give for the salvation of the world is my flesh.” Further, if the soul had been flesh, there would be one thing in Christ, a fleshly soul or a flesh of soul. But when he distinguishes the kinds, flesh and soul, he shows two. If two, then not one; if not one, then neither a fleshly soul nor a flesh of soul. For soul-flesh or flesh-soul is one thing. Unless he bore apart another soul besides the one that was flesh, and carried about another flesh besides the one that was soul! But if there was one flesh and one soul, the one sorrowful even to death, the other the bread for the salvation of the world, the number of two substances, each distinct in its own kind, is safe, and it excludes the single kind of a fleshly soul.

“But,” they say, “Christ bore an angel.” For what reason? For the reason for which he bore man too? Then the reason for Christ's bearing man must apply here. The salvation of man was the reason, namely to restore what had perished. Man had perished; man had to be restored. For Christ to bear an angel there is no reason of the kind. For although destruction is reckoned for the angels in the fire prepared for the devil and his angels, restoration was never promised them. Christ received from the Father no commission about the salvation of angels. What the Father neither promised nor commanded, Christ could not carry out. For what purpose, then, did he bear an angel too, unless as a strong bodyguard with whom to work man's salvation? As though the Son of God were not able by himself to free man, who had been thrown down by a single, solitary serpent! Then there is no longer one God, nor one Saviour, if there are two craftsmen of salvation, and one of them needing the other. Or was it so that he might free man through an angel? Why then did he come down to do what he was going to accomplish through an angel? If through an angel, why himself too? If through himself, why the angel too? He was indeed called “the angel of great counsel”, that is, messenger, a name of office, not of nature. For he was to announce to the world the great design of the Father, namely the restoration of man. Yet he is not therefore to be understood as an angel in the sense of some Gabriel or Michael. For the son too is sent by the lord of the vineyard to the tenants, as the servants were, to ask for the fruits; but the son will not on that account be counted one of the servants because he took over the servants' office. I would more readily say, if at all, that the Son himself is an angel, that is, the Father's messenger, than that there is an angel in the Son. But since it was said of the Son himself, “You made him a little lower than the angels,” how will he seem to have put on an angel, when he was made lower than the angels by becoming man, as flesh and soul and Son of Man? But as Spirit of God and power of the Most High, can he be held lower than the angels, being God and Son of God? So, as surely as he was made less than the angels in bearing man, so surely was he not made so in bearing an angel. This opinion might suit Ebion, who makes Jesus a mere man, only from the seed of David, that is, not also Son of God; somewhat more glorious than the prophets, no doubt, so that he would say there was an angel in him as in Zechariah. Except that Christ never said, “And the angel who spoke in me said to me.” Nor did he use that daily formula of all the prophets, “Thus says the Lord.” For he himself was the Lord, openly pronouncing on his own authority, “But I say to you.” What more is there to say? Hear Isaiah crying out: “Not an angel nor an envoy, but the Lord himself saved them.”

Valentinus too, by heretical privilege, was free to invent a spiritual flesh of Christ. Anyone who would not believe it human could make it up as anything he liked; since (and this is said to all of them) if it was not human nor from man, I do not see from what substance Christ declared himself man and Son of Man: “But now you seek to kill a man who has told you the truth,” and, “The Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.” For Isaiah says of him: “A man in affliction, and knowing how to bear weakness.” And Jeremiah: “And he is a man, and who has known him?” And Daniel: “And upon the clouds, as it were a Son of Man.” The apostle Paul too: “The mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Likewise Peter in the Acts of the Apostles: “Jesus of Nazareth, a man appointed for you by God”: a man, surely. These alone ought to have been enough, by way of prescription, as testimony to a flesh that is human and taken from man, and not spiritual, just as it is not made of soul, nor starry, nor imaginary, if heresies could exist without zeal and contrivance for contention. For, as I have read in the work of someone from Valentinus' little faction, first they do not think that an earthly and human substance was formed for Christ, lest the Lord be found inferior to the angels, who were not of earthly flesh; next, that a flesh like ours would have had to be born like ours, not of the Spirit nor of God, but of the will of a man. “And why of incorruption rather than of corruption? And why, if his flesh rose and was taken up into heaven, is ours, equal to it, not taken up at once? Or why was his flesh, equal to ours, not likewise dissolved into the earth?” The heathen too used to turn such things over: “So was the Son of God emptied into such humility?” and “If he rose as an example of our hope, why has nothing of the kind been proved in our case?” The heathen rightly say such things; but rightly the heretics too. For what difference is there between them, except that the heathen believe by not believing, while the heretics do not believe by believing? They read, in fact, “You made him a little lower than the angels,” and they deny the lower substance of Christ, who declares himself not a man but a worm, who had neither form nor beauty, but his form was ignoble, despised below all men, a man in affliction and knowing how to bear weakness. They acknowledge a man mixed with God, and deny the man. They believe that he died, and they maintain that what died was born of incorruption, as if corruption were something other than death. “But our flesh too ought to have risen at once.” Wait. Christ has not yet crushed his enemies, so as to triumph over his enemies together with his friends.

Moreover, out of a lust for arguing in the manner of the heretical mind, that Alexander has made room for himself, as though we asserted that Christ put on flesh of earthly origin in order to abolish the flesh of sin in himself. Even if we said this, we would defend our opinion by some reasoning or other, only not with such madness as he supposed, as though we held that Christ's very flesh was abolished in him as sinful; since we remember that it sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven, and proclaim that it will come from there in the splendour of the Father's glory. So we cannot call it abolished, just as we cannot call sinful or abolished the flesh in which there was no deceit. What we maintain is that it was not the flesh of sin that was abolished in Christ but the sin of the flesh; not the material but its nature; not the substance but the guilt; according to the authority of the apostle, who says, “He abolished sin in the flesh.” For elsewhere too he says that Christ was “in the likeness of the flesh of sin”: not that he took a likeness of flesh, as an image of a body and not its reality, but he wants us to understand a likeness of sinful flesh, because the flesh of Christ, itself not sinful, was equal to that which had sin, equal in kind, not in the fault of Adam. From this we also confirm that there was in Christ that flesh whose nature in man is sinful, and that sin was abolished in it in this way: that in Christ it is held without sin, although in man it was not held without sin. For it would suit neither Christ's purpose, in abolishing the sin of the flesh, not to abolish it in that flesh in which the nature of sin was, nor his glory. For what great thing would it be, if he redeemed the blemish of sin in a better flesh, of another nature, that is, not sinful? “Then,” you say, “if he put on ours, Christ's flesh was sinful.” Do not tie up a meaning that can be unfolded. By putting on ours he made it his own; by making it his own he made it not sinful. For the rest, let this be said to all who think that our flesh was not in Christ because it was not from a man's seed: let them remember that Adam himself was made into this flesh not from a man's seed. As earth was turned into this flesh without a man's seed, so the Word of God too could pass into the material of the same flesh without the curdling of seed.

But dismissing Alexander with his syllogisms, which he twists in his arguments, and with the psalms of Valentinus too, which he inserts with great impudence as though from some competent author, let us now direct the engagement along a single line: whether Christ received flesh from the virgin, so that it may be established in this way above all that it was human, if he drew its substance from a human womb. Although it is already clear from the name of man, from the state of its quality, from the sense of its handling, and from the outcome of its suffering, that it was human. But first of all the reason must be set out which governed the Son of God's being born of a virgin. He who was to consecrate a new birth had to be born in a new way; and of this birth the Lord was foretold by Isaiah as about to give a sign. What is that sign? “Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son.” So the virgin conceived and bore Emmanuel, God with us. This is the new birth: man is born in God. In this man God was born, taking the flesh of the ancient seed without the ancient seed, so that he might reform it with new seed, that is, spiritually, cleansed and with the filth of antiquity shut out. But this whole novelty, as in all things, was prefigured in the old, the Lord being born as man through a virgin by a reasoned plan. The earth was still virgin, not yet pressed by labour, not yet subdued by sowing; from it, we are told, man was made by God into a living soul. So if the first Adam is so reported, rightly the next, or last, Adam, as the apostle called him, was likewise brought forth by God from earth, that is, from flesh not yet unsealed for generation, into a life-giving spirit. And yet, lest the mention of the name Adam be idle for me: why was Christ called Adam by the apostle, if his manhood was not of earthly origin? But here too reason defends it: God recovered his image and likeness, which the devil had captured, by a rival operation. For into Eve, while still a virgin, had crept the word that built death; into a virgin likewise had to be brought the Word of God that built life, so that what had gone to ruin through that sex might be brought back to salvation through the same sex. Eve had believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel. The fault that Eve committed by believing, Mary blotted out by believing. “But Eve conceived nothing in her womb at that time from the devil's word.” Indeed she did conceive. For from then on, so that she should give birth in abasement and in pain, the devil's word was a seed to her. In the end she brought forth a devil, the fratricide. Mary, on the contrary, bore him who would one day save Israel, his brother according to the flesh and his murderer. So God brought down his Word, the good brother, into the womb, to erase the memory of the evil brother. Christ had to come forth for man's salvation from the place into which man, already condemned, had entered.

Now, to answer more simply: it was not fitting for the Son of God to be born of human seed, lest, if he were wholly Son of Man, he should not also be Son of God, and should have nothing more than Solomon or more than Jonah; or else he would have to be believed in according to Ebion's opinion. Since, then, he was already of God, from the seed of God the Father, that is, the Spirit, in order that he might also be of man, it was fitting that he take only flesh from the flesh of man, without a man's seed. For the seed of a man was superfluous in one who had the seed of God. So, just as, before he was born of the virgin, he could have God as Father without a human mother, equally, when he was born of the virgin, he could have a human mother without a human father. So, in short, he is man with God, as the flesh of man is with the Spirit of God: the flesh without seed from man, the Spirit with seed from God. If, then, there was a reasoned plan for bringing forth the Son of God from a virgin, why should he not have received from the virgin the body which he brought forth from the virgin? “Because,” they say, “what he took from God is something else, since the Word was made flesh.” This saying attests what was made flesh; yet it does not run the risk that what was made flesh at once becomes something else and not the Word. Whether the Word was made flesh from flesh, or from the seed itself, let Scripture say. Since Scripture says only what was made, and not also from what it was made, it suggests that it was made from something else, not from itself. If not from itself but from something else, consider from this from what it is more fitting to believe that the Word was made flesh, if not from flesh, in which it was also made; or else because the Lord himself pronounced by way of judgement and definition: “What is born in the flesh is flesh,” because it is born of flesh. But if he said this only of man, and not also of himself, then plainly deny that Christ is man, and so maintain that it did not apply to him too. Yet he adds: “And what is born of the Spirit is spirit,” because God is Spirit, and he was born of God. This certainly applies to him all the more, if it applies also to those who believe in him. If, then, this refers to him, why not the former too? For you cannot divide them, this to him and the former to other men, you who do not deny both substances of Christ, flesh and spirit. Besides, if he had flesh as truly as spirit, when he speaks of the condition of the two substances which he himself bears, he cannot seem to have given a definition about his own spirit but about a flesh not his own. So, since he himself is of the Spirit of God, and God is Spirit, he is born of God; and being also of the flesh of man, he is man begotten in the flesh.

What, then, is the meaning of “Born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God”? This passage I shall rather use myself, once I have convicted its falsifiers. For they contend that it is written thus: “who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of a man, but of God,” as though it designated those mentioned just before, who believe in his name, in order to show that there exists that secret seed of the elect and spiritual which they claim for themselves. But how can this be, when all who believe in the name of the Lord are born, by the common law of the human race, of blood and of the will of the flesh and of a man, Valentinus himself included? So it is written in the singular, as of the Lord: “and he was born of God.” Rightly, because Christ is the Word of God, and with the Word of God the Spirit, and in the Spirit of God power, and whatever is of God. But as flesh he was not of blood nor of the will of flesh and of a man, because the Word was made flesh by the will of God. For the denial of our ordinary manner of birth refers to the flesh, not to the Word, because it was the flesh that was to be born in this way, not the Word. Yet in denying that he was born of the will of the flesh too, why did he not deny that he was born of the substance of flesh as well? For in denying “of blood” he did not reject the substance of the flesh, but the material of the seed, which is agreed to be the heat of the blood, changed by frothing into what curdles the woman's blood. For in cheese made with rennet, the substance that counts is the one the rennet binds together by its working, namely the milk. We understand, then, that what is denied is the Lord's birth from intercourse, which is what the will of a man and of the flesh suggests, not his birth by sharing in the womb. And why did he insist so emphatically that he was born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh or of a man, unless because his flesh was such that no one would have doubted it to be born of intercourse? Further, in denying birth from intercourse, he did not deny birth from flesh; rather he confirmed birth from flesh, because he did not deny it from flesh in the same way as he denied it from intercourse. I ask you: if the Spirit of God came down into the womb without sharing flesh from the womb, why did he come down into the womb? For the spiritual flesh could have been made outside it, much more simply outside the womb than within it. He would have entered for no purpose the place from which he took nothing. But he did not come down into the womb for no purpose. Therefore he took from it; for if he did not take from it, he came down into it for no purpose, especially if he was to become flesh of a quality that did not belong to a womb, namely spiritual.