Against Praxeas 5

But since they want the two to be one, so that the Father and the Son are held to be the same, the whole question of the Son must also be examined: whether he is, and who he is, and how he is; and so the matter itself will claim its own form from the Scriptures and from the interpretations that support them. Some say that Genesis too begins thus in Hebrew: “In the beginning God made for himself a Son.” Since this is not firm, other arguments lead me from God's own arrangement, in which he was before the founding of the world, up to the generation of the Son. For before all things God was alone, himself his own world and place and all things; alone, however, because there was nothing else outside him. Yet not even then was he alone; for he had with him what he had in himself, namely his Reason. For God is rational, and Reason was first in him, and so all things are from him. This Reason is his own thought; the Greeks call it logos, a word by which we also mean “speech” (sermo); and so it is now customary among our people, through simple translation, to say that the Word (Sermo) was in the beginning with God, whereas “Reason” is the more fitting term, because from the beginning God was rational, not word-bearing, and because the Word itself, consisting in Reason, shows Reason to be prior, as its own substance. Yet even so it makes no difference. For although God had not yet sent out his Word, he still had him within himself, with and in his Reason itself, silently thinking and arranging with himself the things he was soon to say through the Word. For thinking and arranging with his Reason, he made that into Word which he was handling by word. That you may understand this more easily, recognize it first from yourself, as from the image and likeness of God: that you too have reason in yourself, you who are a rational animal, made not only by a rational craftsman but also given life from his substance. See how, when you silently commune with yourself in reason, this very thing happens within you, reason meeting you together with word at every movement of your thought, at every impulse of your mind. Whatever you think is word; whatever you perceive is reason. You must speak it in your mind, and while you speak, you have the word as your partner in conversation, in which this very reason is present, by which, thinking with it, you speak, and through which, speaking, you think. So the word is, in a way, a second within you. How much more fully, then, is this so in God, whose image and likeness you too are reckoned to be? So I may, not rashly, have laid down beforehand that even then, before the founding of the universe, God was not alone, having in himself both Reason and, in Reason, the Word, which he had made second to himself by stirring it within himself.