Against Praxeas 11–17

You will have to prove from the Scriptures as plainly as we prove it that he made his own Word into his Son. For if he calls him Son, and the Son will be none other than the one who came forth from him, and the Word came forth from him, this will be the Son, not he himself from whom he came forth. For he himself did not come forth from himself. But you make him also come forth from himself, which God, even if he could have done it, still did not do. Or produce a proof like mine, which I demand: that is, show that the Scriptures show the same one as Son and Father, just as with us the Father and the Son are shown distinctly; distinctly, I say, not dividedly. Just as I bring forward the saying of God, “My heart has poured forth an excellent Word,” so you in reply must produce somewhere that God said, “My heart has poured forth myself as an excellent Word,” so that he is himself both the one who poured forth and what he poured forth, himself both the one who put forth and the one who was put forth, if he is himself both Word and God. See, I put forward that the Father said to the Son, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” If you want me to believe that he himself is Father and Son, show me it declared elsewhere thus: “The Lord said to himself, ‘I am my Son; today I have begotten myself’”; and likewise, “Before the morning star I begot myself”; and, “I the Lord established myself as the beginning of my ways for my works; and before all the hills I begot myself”; and whatever other sayings there are of this kind. Whom was God, the Lord of the universe, afraid of, that he did not declare it so, if that was how things were? Or was he afraid of not being believed if he had simply declared himself both Father and Son? One thing, however, he did fear: to lie; he feared himself and his own truth. And so, believing God to be truthful, I know that he declared things not otherwise than he had arranged them, and did not arrange them otherwise than he declared them. You, on the other hand, would make him a liar and a cheat and a deceiver of this faith, if, being himself his own Son, he gave the person of the Son to another; since all the Scriptures show both the demonstration and the distinction of the Trinity, from which our prescription too is derived: that he who speaks, he of whom he speaks, and he to whom he speaks cannot be seen as one and the same, since neither perversity nor deceit befits God, that, being himself the one to whom he spoke, he should speak rather to another and not to himself. Hear, then, other sayings too of the Father about the Son, through Isaiah: “Behold my Son, whom I have chosen, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased; I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will announce judgment to the nations.” Hear also what he says to him: “It is a great thing for you to be called my Son, to establish the tribes of Jacob and to turn back the dispersion of Israel; I have set you as a light of the nations, that you may be salvation to the end of the earth.” Hear now also the sayings of the Son about the Father: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to men.” Likewise to the Father in the psalm: “O God, Lord, do not forsake me until I declare your arm to every generation to come”; likewise in another: “Lord, why are they multiplied who press upon me?” And indeed almost all the psalms that bear the person of Christ represent the Son speaking to the Father. Notice too the Spirit speaking, as a third person, of the Father and the Son: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet’”; likewise through Isaiah: “Thus says the Lord to my Lord Christ”; likewise through the same prophet, to the Father about the Son: “Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? We announced concerning him: like a little child, like a root in thirsty ground, and he had no form or glory.” These are a few out of many. For we do not aim to unroll all the Scriptures, since even in single passages there are testimonies to the full majesty and authority. We have a greater contest in the discussions. In these few passages, then, yet plainly, the distinction of the Trinity is set out: for there is the one who declares, the Spirit; and the Father, to whom he declares; and the Son, of whom he declares. So too the other sayings spoken by the Spirit, now to the Father about the Son or to the Son, now to the Son about the Father or to the Father, establish each person in its own individuality.

If the number of the Trinity still scandalizes you, as though it were not joined in simple unity, I ask: how does one who is one and single speak in the plural, “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” when he ought to have said, “Let me make man in my image and likeness,” as being one and single? And in what follows too, “Behold, Adam has become like one of us,” he deceives or jests, if, being one and alone and single, he spoke in the plural. Or was he speaking to the angels, as the Jews interpret it, since they too do not acknowledge the Son? Or was it because he himself was Father, Son, and Spirit that he presented himself as plural and spoke to himself in the plural? No; it was because there was already attached to him a second person, his Word, and a third, the Spirit in the Word, that he spoke in the plural, “let us make,” and “our,” and “us.” For with whom was he making man, and to whom was he making him like? With the Son, who was to put on man, and the Spirit, who was to sanctify man, he was speaking, as with ministers and witnesses, from the unity of the Trinity. In fact the Scripture that follows distinguishes between the persons: “And God made man; in the image of God he made him.” Why not “his own,” if the one who was making was one, and there was no one in whose image he was making him? But there was one in whose image he was making him, namely the Son's, who, being to become man more surely and truly, had caused the man who was then to be formed from clay to be called his image, the image and likeness of the true man. But in the earlier works of the world too, how is it written? First, indeed, when the Son had not yet appeared: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”: the Word himself, that is, the true light, which enlightens man coming into this world, and through him the light of the world too. From then on, however, with Christ the Word assisting and ministering, God willed a thing to be made, and God made it: “And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament,’ and God made the firmament”; “and God said, ‘Let there be lights,’ and God made the greater and the lesser light.” And the rest, surely, the same one made who made the former, that is, the Word of God, “through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made.” And if he too is God, according to John, “The Word was God,” you have two: one who says that it should be made, another who makes it. And how you should understand “another” I have already declared: in the sense of person, not of substance; for distinction, not for division. For though I everywhere hold one substance in three cohering, yet I must, by the necessity of the sense, call him who commands and him who makes different. For he would not command if he were himself making it while he commanded it to be made through the one he was then commanding; or else, if he were one, he would be about to command himself, or to make it without a command, since he would not have waited to command himself.

“So,” you say, “if God spoke and God made, if one God spoke and another made, two gods are preached.” If you are so obstinate, think so for the moment; and that you may think so still more, hear two gods named in the psalm as well: “Your throne, O God, is forever; … the scepter of your kingdom; you have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore God, your God, has anointed you.” If he speaks to God, and affirms that God is anointed by God, here too he affirms two gods. So too Isaiah, to the person of Christ: “The Sabaeans, men of stature, will pass over to you and follow after you, bound in their hands, and will worship you, because God is in you; for you are our God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel.” For here too, by saying “God is in you” and “you are God,” he sets forth two: the one who was in Christ, and Christ himself. More still, you will find as many in the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”: one who was, and another with whom he was. And I read the name of Lord too of two: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.’” And Isaiah says this: “Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” For he would have said “your arm,” not “the arm of the Lord,” if he had not wanted the Lord the Father and the Lord the Son to be understood. Even more ancient, Genesis: “And the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from heaven from the Lord.” Either deny that these things are written, or who are you, that you should think they are not to be taken as they are written, especially those that have their sense not in allegories and parables but in definite and simple statements? But if you side with those who at that time did not bear with the Lord when he showed himself to be the Son of God, so that they might not believe him to be God, remember with them that it is written, “I said, ‘You are gods and sons of the Most High,’” and, “God stood in the assembly of gods”; so that, if Scripture did not fear to call gods men made sons of God through faith, you may know that it has much more rightly conferred the name of God on the true and only Son of God. “So,” you say, “I will challenge you to preach today too, consistently, on the authority of these Scriptures, two gods and two lords.” God forbid. For we, who by the grace of God examine both the times and the occasions of the Scriptures, above all as disciples of the Paraclete, not of men, do indeed define two, the Father and the Son, and now three with the Holy Spirit, according to the principle of the economy, which makes number (lest, as your perversity alleges, the Father himself should be believed to have been born and to have suffered, which it is not permitted to believe, since it has not been so handed down); yet we never utter from our mouth “two gods” and “two lords”: not as if the Father were not God, and the Son God, and the Spirit God, and each one Lord; but because in former times two gods and two lords were preached for this reason, that when Christ came he might both be recognized as God and called Lord, since he is the Son of God and Lord. For if a single person of God and Lord were found in the Scriptures, Christ would rightly not have been admitted to the name of God and of Lord (for no other was preached besides one God and Lord), and it would have come about that the Father himself seemed to have come down, since one God and one Lord was read, and his whole economy would have been obscured, which was foreseen and dispensed as the substance of faith. But when Christ came and was recognized by us as the very one who had formerly made the number, having become second to the Father and, with the Spirit, third, and when the Father too was more fully made known through him, the name of God and Lord was brought back into unity, so that, since the nations were passing over from the multitude of idols to the one only God, a difference might also be established between the worshipers of one Godhead and of many. For Christians had to shine in the world as sons of light, worshiping and naming one who is both God and Lord, the light of the world. Otherwise, if, from the knowledge by which we know that the name of God and Lord belongs to the Father and the Son and the Spirit, we called them gods and lords, we would have put out our torches, and become more timid even toward martyrdom, having every opportunity of escape open to us, by swearing at once by gods and lords, as some heretics do, whose gods are many. So I will not speak of gods at all, nor of lords, but I will follow the apostle: if the Father and the Son are to be named together, I will call the Father God and name Jesus Christ Lord. But Christ, when named by himself, I shall be able to call God, as the same apostle says: “of whom is Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever.” For I will call a ray of the sun, taken by itself, the sun; but when I name the sun whose ray it is, I will not at once call the ray the sun too. For I will not make two suns. Yet I will count the sun and its ray as two things and two aspects of one undivided substance, just as I count God and his Word, the Father and the Son.

There is also another rule that supports us in claiming that the Father and the Son are two: the one that has laid down that God is invisible. For when Moses in Egypt desired to see the Lord, saying, “If then I have found favor before you, show yourself to me, that I may see you and know you,” he said, “You cannot see my face; for no man shall see my face and live”; that is, he who sees it will die. Yet we find that God was seen by many, and yet none of those who had seen him died; seen, that is, according to men's capacities, not according to the fullness of the Godhead. For the patriarchs are said to have seen God, like Abraham and Jacob, and the prophets, like Isaiah and Ezekiel, and yet they did not die. Either, then, they ought to have died if they had seen him (for “no one shall see God and live”), or, if they saw God and did not die, Scripture lies in saying that God said, “If a man sees my face, he shall not live.” Or, if Scripture does not lie, either when it presents God as unseen or when it presents him as seen, then the one who was seen will be another, since the same one cannot be defined as invisible who was seen; and it will follow that we understand the Father to be invisible because of the fullness of his majesty, and recognize the Son as visible because of the measure of his derivation; just as we are not permitted to gaze on the sun as regards the very sum of its substance, which is in the heavens, but we bear its ray with our eyes because of the tempered strength of the portion that reaches from there to the earth. Here someone on the other side will want to contend that the Son too is invisible, as Word and as Spirit, and, while claiming one condition for Father and Son, rather to confirm that Father and Son are one and the same. But we have said that Scripture supports the difference by distinguishing visible and invisible. They will add this too to the argument: that if it was the Son who was then speaking to Moses, he himself declared that his face was visible to no one, because he himself, of course, was the invisible Father under the name of the Son. And by this they want the same one to be taken as both visible and invisible, in the same way as the same one is both Father and Son; since a little before, too, before he denies his face to Moses, it is written that the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, “as a man speaks to his friend”; no less than Jacob too: “I have seen God,” he says, “face to face.” So the visible and the invisible are the same; and because the same one is both, the Father himself too is invisible, inasmuch as he is also the Son, visible. As if our exposition of Scripture applied to the Son in his visibility with the Father set aside! For we say that the Son too, in his own name, is invisible so far as he is the Word and Spirit of God, by the condition of his substance; but that he was visible before the flesh in the way in which he says to Aaron and Miriam: “If there is a prophet among you, I will make myself known to him in a vision and speak to him in a dream; not as with Moses: mouth to mouth will I speak to him, in appearance,” that is, in reality, “and not in a riddle,” that is, not in an image; as the apostle too says: “Now we see as through a mirror, in a riddle, but then face to face.” So, since he reserves for Moses the sight of himself and conversation face to face for the future (for this was afterwards fulfilled in the seclusion of the mountain, when, as we read in the Gospel, Moses was seen talking with him), it is clear that in former times God, that is, the Son of God, was always seen in a mirror and a riddle and a vision and a dream, by the prophets and patriarchs as well as by Moses himself up to then. And the Lord himself, if he did perhaps speak face to face, yet not so that a man should see his face, except perhaps in a mirror, in a riddle. In fact, if the Lord had spoken to Moses in such a way that Moses knew his face at close quarters, how is it that at once and on the spot he desires to see his face, which he would not desire if he had seen it? How likewise does the Lord deny that his face can be seen, which he had shown, if indeed he had shown it? Or what is the face of God, the sight of which is denied? If there was one that was seen (“I saw God,” says Jacob, “face to face, and my life was preserved”), there must be another face which kills if it is seen. Or was the Son indeed seen (even if face to face, yet this very thing in a vision, a dream, a mirror, and a riddle, since the Word and Spirit cannot be seen except in an imaginary form), while he calls the invisible Father his face? For who is the Father? Will he not be the face of the Son, by reason of the authority which he obtains as begotten of the Father? For is it not fitting to say of some greater person, “That man is my face,” and, “He gives me countenance”? “The Father,” he says, “is greater than I.” So the Father will be the face of the Son. For what does Scripture say? “The Spirit of his person is Christ the Lord.” So if Christ is the person of the Father's Spirit, he rightly declared the one whose Spirit's person he was, that is, the Father, to be his face, by reason of their unity. A marvel indeed, whether the Father can be taken as the face of the Son, he who is his head! For “the head of Christ is God.”

If I do not settle this point by questions from the Old Scripture, I will take confirmation of our interpretation from the New Testament, so that you may not claim for the Father whatever I ascribe to the Son. For see, both in the Gospels and in the apostles I find a visible and an invisible God, under a clear and personal distinction of the condition of each. John, as it were, cries out: “No one has ever seen God”; not in former times either, of course, for he removed the question of time by saying that God has never been seen. The apostle too confirms concerning God: “whom no man has seen, nor can see,” because, of course, he who sees him will die. Yet the same apostles testify that they have seen and handled Christ. Now if Christ himself is both Father and Son, how was he both seen and unseen? To bring this difference of seen and unseen into one, who on the other side will not argue that both are rightly said, visible in the flesh but invisible before the flesh, so that the same one is the Father invisible before the flesh who is also the Son visible in the flesh? But if the same one was invisible before the flesh, how is he found to have been seen in former times, before the flesh? Likewise, if the same one is visible after the flesh, how is he now also declared invisible by the apostles? Unless because one is he whom the flesh made more fully visible, though he had been seen in a riddle before, namely the Word, who was also made flesh; and another he whom no one has ever seen, namely the Father, whose Word he is? Let us look, then, at whom the apostles saw. “What we have seen,” says John, “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life.” For the Word of life was made flesh, heard and seen and handled because flesh, he who before the flesh was only the Word, in the beginning with God the Father, not the Father. For though the Word is God, yet, because he is God from God, he is “with God,” and because with the Father, with the Father. “And we saw his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten from the Father”: of the Son, that is, the visible one, glorified by the invisible Father. And so, since he had called the Word of God God, lest he should assist the presumption of the adversaries, as though he had seen the Father himself, to distinguish between the invisible Father and the visible Son he adds besides, for good measure: “No one has ever seen God.” What God? The Word? But “we have seen and heard and handled concerning the Word of life” was said before. Which God, then? The Father, of course, with whom the Word was God. The only-begotten Son, who himself declared the bosom of the Father, was himself both heard and seen and, lest he be believed a phantom, even handled. Him Paul too beheld, yet he did not see the Father. “Have I not,” he says, “seen Jesus?” And when he himself also called Christ God, “of whom are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever,” he too shows that God the Son, that is, the Word of God, is visible, since he who was made flesh is called Christ. But of the Father he says to Timothy: “whom no man has seen, nor can see,” amplifying it further: “who alone has immortality and dwells in light unapproachable,” of whom he had also said above, “to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God”; so that we might ascribe the contrary to the Son himself, mortality and approachability, whom he testifies died according to the Scriptures and was seen last of all by himself, through an approachable light, of course; though he himself did not experience even that without danger to his sight, nor did Peter, John, and James without danger to their reason, who would, I believe, have died on the spot if they had seen not the glory of the Son, who was to suffer, but the Father. For “no one shall see God and live.” If this is so, it is clear that he who was seen at the end was always seen from the beginning, and that he who was not seen from the beginning was not seen at the end either; and so there are two, the seen and the unseen. It was the Son, then, who was always seen, the Son who always conversed with men, the Son who always acted, by the authority and will of the Father; since “the Son can do nothing of himself unless he sees the Father doing it”: doing it, that is, in his mind. For the Father acts by mind, and the Son, who is in the Father's mind, seeing, brings it to completion. So all things were made through the Son, and without him nothing was made.

And do not think that only the works of the world were made through the Son, but also the things done by God from then on. For the Father, who loves the Son and has given all things into his hand, loves him from the beginning and has given them from the beginning, from the time when the Word was with God and the Word was God. To him has been given all power by the Father in heaven and on earth; “the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son,” yet from the beginning. For by saying “all power” and “all judgment,” and that all things were made through him and all things given into his hand, he allows no exception of time, since they will not be all things unless they are things of all time. So it is the Son who judged from the beginning too, dashing down the proudest tower and confusing the languages, punishing the whole world by the violence of the waters, raining fire and sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah, God from God. For it was he who always came down to converse with men, from Adam down to the patriarchs and prophets, in vision, in dream, in mirror, in riddle, preparing from the beginning the course he was to follow to the end. So he was always learning, even as God, to converse with men on earth, being none other than the Word who was to be flesh. And he was learning in order to lay a foundation of faith for us, so that we might more easily believe that the Son of God had come down into the world, knowing that something of the kind had been done in former times too. For as they were written for our sake, so they were done for our sake, “on whom the ends of the ages have come.” So he already knew human feelings too, being about to take on the very substances of man, flesh and soul, questioning Adam as if he did not know, “Where are you, Adam?”; repenting that he had made man, as if he had not foreknown; testing Abraham, as if ignorant of what is in man; offended with the same people, and reconciled; and whatever else the heretics seize on as unworthy of God, to destroy the Creator, not knowing that these things befitted the Son, who was to undergo even human sufferings, thirst and hunger and tears, and birth itself and death itself, being for this reason made a little lower than the angels by the Father. But what even the heretics will not reckon fitting for the Son of God, you bring upon the Father himself, as if he had lowered himself for us, when Scripture says that one was made lower by another, not himself by himself. And if one was crowned with glory and honor, and another crowned him, the Father, surely, crowned the Son. Besides, how could it be that God Almighty, that invisible one, whom no man has seen or can see, he who dwells in light unapproachable, he who does not dwell in things made with hands, at whose sight the earth trembles and the mountains melt like wax, who grasps the whole world in his hand like a nest, whose throne is heaven and the earth his footstool, in whom is every place while he is not in a place, who is the outermost boundary of the universe, that he, the Most High, should have walked in paradise in the evening looking for Adam, and shut the ark after Noah went in, and rested under the oak with Abraham, and called Moses from the burning bush, and appeared as the fourth in the Babylonian king's furnace (although he was called Son of Man), in image, of course, and mirror and riddle? These things would not have been credible even of the Son of God if they had not been written; perhaps they are not credible of the Father even though they are written; the Father whom these people bring down into Mary's womb, set before Pilate's judgment seat, and shut up in Joseph's tomb. Here, then, their error appears. For, not knowing that from the beginning the whole order of the divine arrangement has run its course through the Son, they believe that it was the Father himself who was seen, who met with men, who acted, who suffered thirst and hunger (against the prophet who says, “The eternal God will not thirst, nor hunger at all”; how much less will he die or be buried!), and so that one God, namely the Father, always did … what was done through the Son,

they thought it easier that the Father had come in the Son's name than that the Son had come in the Father's; though the Lord himself says, “I have come in my Father's name,” and likewise to the Father himself, “I have made your name known to men,” and Scripture agrees: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” that is, the Son in the Father's name. And the Father's names are God Almighty, the Most High, the Lord of hosts, the King of Israel, He Who Is. As the Scriptures so teach, we say that these belonged to the Son as well, that the Son came in them and always acted in them, and so made them known to men in himself. “All that the Father has,” he says, “is mine.” Why not his names too? So when you read of God Almighty, the Most High, the God of hosts, the King of Israel, and He Who Is, see whether the Son too is not shown by them: God Almighty in his own right, as the Word of God Almighty and as having received power over all; the Most High, as exalted by God's right hand, as Peter proclaims in Acts; Lord of hosts, because all things have been subjected to him by the Father; King of Israel, because the lot of that nation fell to him in particular; likewise He Who Is, since many are called but are not. And if they want the Father's name to be Christ's also, they will hear about it in its place. Meanwhile let this be my ready answer against what they bring forward from John's Apocalypse too: “I am the Lord, who is and who was and who is coming, the Almighty,” and anywhere else they think the title “God Almighty” does not fit the Son also. As if he who is to come were not … almighty, when the Son of the Almighty is as much almighty as the Son of God is God.