On the Trinity, Book 1

When I was looking for an occupation suited to the powers of human life and righteous in itself, whether prompted by nature or suggested by the researches of the wise, through which I might reach some result worthy of the Divine gift of understanding that has been given to us, many things occurred to me that people generally thought made life both useful and desirable. Above all, the thing that now, as always in the past, is considered most desirable came to my mind: leisure combined with wealth. Yet the one without the other seemed more a source of evil than an opportunity for good, for leisure in poverty feels almost like exile from life itself, while wealth held amid anxiety is an affliction in itself, made worse by the deeper humiliation that anyone must suffer who loses, after having them, the things people most wish for and seek. And yet, although these two include the highest and best of the luxuries of life, they do not seem far removed from the ordinary pleasures of the animals that roam through shady places rich in grass, enjoying both their freedom from toil and the abundance of their food. For if this is considered the best and most perfect way for a human being to live, it follows that we share one goal with the whole unreasoning animal world, though our range of feelings differs, since all of them, in the generous provision and complete leisure that nature gives, have full scope for enjoyment without anxiety about possessions.

I believe that most people have rejected for themselves and condemned in others this acceptance of a thoughtless, animal life for one reason only: nature herself has taught them that it is unworthy of human beings to think of themselves as born only to gratify their greed and their laziness, brought into life for no high aim of glorious deeds or noble accomplishment, and that this very life was given without any power to progress toward immortality. Such a life, indeed, we would then confidently say did not deserve to be considered a gift of God, since, racked by pain and loaded with trouble, it wears itself out on itself from the blank mind of infancy to the wandering mind of old age. I believe that people, prompted by nature herself, have raised themselves through teaching and practice to the virtues we call patience, self-control and forbearance, convinced that right living means right action and right thought, and that Immortal God has not given life only for it to end in death; for no one can believe that the Giver of good has granted the pleasant sense of being alive only so that it may be darkened by the gloomy fear of dying.

And yet, although I could not charge with folly and uselessness their advice to keep the soul free from blame, and to avoid the troubles of life by foresight, escape them by skill or endure them with patience, I still could not regard these men as guides able to lead me to the good and happy Life. Their rules were commonplaces, on the mere level of human impulse; animal instinct could not fail to understand them, and anyone who understood them but disobeyed would have fallen into a madness lower than the unreason of animals. Besides, my soul was eager not only to do the things whose neglect brings shame and suffering, but to know the God and Father Who had given this great gift, to Whom, it felt, it owed its whole self, Whose service was its true honor, on Whom all its hopes were fixed, and in Whose lovingkindness, as in a safe home and harbor, it could rest amid all the troubles of this anxious life. It burned with a passionate desire to grasp Him or to know Him.

Some of these teachers put forward large households of doubtful deities and, persuaded that divine beings engage in sexual activity, told of births and lineages passing from god to god. Others claimed that there were greater and lesser gods, ranked according to their power. Some denied that any gods existed at all, and limited their reverence to a nature that, in their opinion, owes its existence to vibrations and collisions led by chance. Many others, on the other hand, followed the common belief in affirming that a God exists, but declared Him careless of and indifferent to human affairs. Still others worshiped, in the elements of earth and air, the actual bodily and visible forms of created things; and finally, some made their gods live inside images of men or of animals, tame or wild, of birds or of snakes, and shut up the Lord of the universe and Father of infinity in these narrow prisons of metal, stone or wood. These, I was sure, could not be teachers of truth, for although they agreed in the absurdity, the foulness and the impiety of their rites, they disagreed about the basic articles of their senseless belief. My soul was torn among all these claims, yet it kept pressing along that profitable road that leads unfailingly to the true knowledge of God. It could not believe that it was fitting to attribute to God neglect of a world He Himself had created, or that deities with sex, and lines of those who beget and those who are begotten, were compatible with the pure and mighty nature of the Godhead. No, it was sure instead that what is Divine and eternal must be one, without distinction of sex, for what exists of itself cannot have left outside itself anything greater than itself. So omnipotence and eternity belong to One alone, for omnipotence admits no degrees of strength or weakness, and eternity admits no before or after. In God we must worship absolute eternity and absolute power.

While my mind was dwelling on these and many similar thoughts, I happened upon the books that, according to the tradition of the Hebrew faith, were written by Moses and the prophets, and in them I found these words spoken by God the Creator testifying about Himself: 'I Am Who I Am, and again, He who is has sent me to you.' I confess that I was amazed to find in them a statement about God so exact that it expressed, in the terms best suited to human understanding, an unattainable insight into the mystery of the Divine nature. For no property of God that the mind can grasp is more characteristic of Him than existence, since existence in the absolute sense cannot be said of anything that will come to an end or of anything that has had a beginning; and He who now unites unbroken being with the possession of perfect happiness could not have been nonexistent in the past, nor can He be nonexistent in the future, for whatever is Divine can neither come into being nor be destroyed. Therefore, since God's eternity is inseparable from Himself, it was worthy of Him to reveal this one thing, that He is, as the assurance of His absolute eternity.

For such a statement of God's infinity the words 'I Am Who I Am' were clearly enough; but we also needed to grasp the working of His majesty and power. For while absolute existence belongs to Him alone Who, remaining eternally, had no beginning in any past however remote, we hear another statement worthy of Himself coming from the eternal and Holy God, Who says, Who holds the heaven in His palm and the earth in His hand, and again, Heaven is My throne and the earth is the footstool of My feet. What house will you build for Me, or what will be the place of My rest? The whole heaven is held in the palm of God, the whole earth grasped in His hand. The word of God, useful as it is even to the passing thought of a pious mind, reveals a deeper meaning to the patient student than to someone who hears it for a moment. For this heaven that is held in the palm of God is also His throne, and the earth that is grasped in His hand is also the footstool beneath His feet. This was not written so that we would conclude from throne and footstool, metaphors drawn from the posture of someone sitting, that He is extended in space like a body, for what is His throne and footstool is also held in the hand and palm of that infinite Omnipotence. It was written so that in all things born and created God might be known within them and outside them, overshadowing and indwelling, surrounding all and permeating all; for palm and hand, which hold, reveal the might of His control from outside, while throne and footstool, by supporting someone seated, show that outward things are subject to One within them Who, Himself outside them, encloses all in His grasp, yet dwells within the external world that is His own. In this way God, from within and from without, controls the universe and corresponds to it; being infinite, He is present in all things, and in Him Who is infinite all things are included. My soul, absorbed in the pursuit of truth, delighted in devout thoughts like these. For it seemed that the greatness of God so far exceeded the mental powers of His handiwork that however hard the limited human mind might strain in the risky effort to define Him, the gap did not shrink between the finite nature that struggled and the boundless infinity that lay beyond its knowledge. I had come to understand this through reverent reflection of my own, but I found it confirmed by the words of the prophet: Where shall I go from Your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from Your face? If I go up into heaven, You are there; if I go down into hell, You are there also; if I have taken my wings before dawn and made my home in the farthest parts of the sea (You are there). For there Your hand shall guide me and Your right hand shall hold me. There is no space where God is not; space does not exist apart from Him. He is in heaven, in hell, beyond the seas, dwelling in all things and enveloping all. So He embraces the universe and is embraced by it, confined to no part of it but pervading all of it.

So, although my soul took joy in perceiving this majestic and unfathomable Mind, because it could worship so limitless an Infinity as its own Father and Creator, it sought with an even more eager desire to know the true appearance of its infinite and eternal Lord, so that it might be able to believe that this immeasurable Deity was clothed in splendor fitting the beauty of His wisdom. Then, while the devout soul was baffled and lost through its own weakness, it caught from the prophet's voice this admirably expressed standard of comparison for God: By the greatness of His works and the beauty of the things that He has made, the Creator of worlds is rightly discerned.⁠a The Creator of great things is supreme in greatness, and the Creator of beautiful things supreme in beauty. Since the work surpasses our thoughts, the Maker must surpass all thought. So heaven and air and earth and seas are beautiful, and the whole universe is beautiful too, as the Greeks agree, who call it κόσμος, that is, order, because of its beautiful arrangement. But if our thought can appreciate this beauty of the universe by a natural instinct — an instinct like the one we see in certain birds and animals whose voice, though it lies below the level of our understanding, still has a meaning clear to them though they cannot put it into words, and in which, since all speech expresses some thought, there is a meaning plain to themselves — must not the Lord of this universal beauty be recognized as Himself most beautiful amid all the beauty that surrounds Him? For although the splendor of His eternal glory overwhelms our mind's best powers, the mind cannot fail to see that He is beautiful. We must truly confess that God is most beautiful, with a beauty that, though it surpasses our understanding, forces itself on our perception.

So my mind, full of these findings that it had reached by its own reflection and by the teaching of Scripture, rested with confidence, as if on some peaceful watchtower, on that glorious conclusion. It recognized that its true nature made it capable of one kind of homage to its Creator and no other, whether greater or less: namely, the homage of being convinced that His greatness is too vast for our understanding but not for our faith. For a reasonable faith is related to reason and accepts its help, even though that same reason cannot cope with the vastness of eternal Omnipotence.

Beneath all these thoughts lay an instinctive hope, which strengthened my affirmation of the faith, of some perfect blessedness in the life to come, to be earned by devout thoughts about God and an upright life; the reward, so to speak, that awaits the victorious warrior. For true faith in God would go unrewarded if the soul is destroyed by death and extinguished when bodily life ends. Even unaided reason argued that it was unworthy of God to bring man into an existence that has some share of His thought and wisdom, only to await the sentence of life taken away and of eternal death; to create him out of nothing to take his place in the World, only so that once he has taken it he may perish. For on the only rational theory of creation, its purpose was that things that did not exist should come into being, not that things that exist should cease to be.

Yet my soul was weighed down with fear both for itself and for the body. It kept a firm conviction and a devout loyalty to the true faith about God, but had come to harbor a deep anxiety about itself and about the bodily dwelling that, it thought, must share its destruction. While it was in this state, in addition to its knowledge of the teaching of the Law and Prophets, it learned the truths taught by the Apostle in the Gospel — In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made. What was made in Him is life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness to the light. That was the true light, which gives light to every man who comes into this world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own things, and those who were His own did not receive Him. But to all who received Him He gave power to become sons of God, to those who believe in His Name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the Only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. Here the soul advances beyond what its natural abilities can reach and is taught more about God than it had dreamed. For it learns that its Creator is God from God; it hears that the Word is God and was with God in the beginning. It comes to understand that the Light of the world was dwelling in the world and that the world did not know Him; that He came to His own possession and those who were His own did not receive Him; but that those who do receive Him advance, by virtue of their faith, to become sons of God, born not of the embrace of the flesh nor of the conception of the blood nor of bodily desire, but of God; finally, it learns that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and that His glory was seen, a glory that, as of the Only-begotten from the Father, is perfect through grace and truth.

In this my soul, trembling and distressed, found a hope wider than it had imagined. First came its introduction to the knowledge of God the Father. Then it learned that the eternity, infinity and beauty that it had attributed to its Creator by the light of natural reason belonged also to God the Only-begotten. It did not scatter its faith among many deities, for it heard that He is God from God; nor did it fall into the error of attributing a different nature to this God from God, for it learned that He is full of grace and truth. Nor did my soul see anything contrary to reason in God from God, since He was revealed as having been God with God in the beginning. It saw that very few attain the knowledge of this saving faith, though its reward is great, for even His own did not receive Him, though those who receive Him are raised to be sons of God by a birth not of the flesh but of faith. It also learned that this sonship to God is not a compulsion but a possibility, for while the Divine gift is offered to all, it is not an inheritance stamped on us inevitably but a prize awarded to a willing choice. And so that this very truth, that whoever wills may become a son of God, would not stagger our weak faith (for what we desire most but expect least is what we find hard to hope for because of its very greatness), God the Word became flesh, so that through His Incarnation our flesh might reach union with God the Word. And so that we would not think that this incarnate Word was someone other than God the Word, or that His flesh was of a body different from ours, He dwelt among us so that by His dwelling He might be known as the indwelling God, and by His dwelling among us be known as God incarnate in no other flesh than our own, and moreover, though He had condescended to take our flesh, as not stripped of His own attributes; for He, the Only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, fully possesses His own attributes and truly has ours.

My soul gladly welcomed this lesson in the Divine mysteries, now drawing near to God through the flesh, called to new birth through faith, entrusted with freedom and power to win the heavenly regeneration, aware of the love of its Father and Creator, sure that He would not annihilate a creature He had called out of nothing into life. And it could judge how far these truths are above the mental vision of man; for the reason that deals with the ordinary objects of thought can conceive of nothing as existing beyond what it perceives within itself or can create out of itself. My soul measured the mighty works of God, carried out on the scale of His eternal omnipotence, not by its own powers of perception but by a boundless faith; and so it refused to disbelieve, just because it could not understand, that God was in the beginning with God and that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, but kept in mind the truth that with the will to believe would come the power to understand.

And so that the soul would not stray and linger in some delusion of pagan philosophy, it receives this further lesson in perfect loyalty to the holy faith, taught by the Apostle in inspired words: Beware that no one robs you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, and not according to Christ; for in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you are made full in Him, Who is the Head of all principality and power; in Whom you were also circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands, in putting off the body, of the flesh, but with the circumcision of Christ; buried with Him in Baptism, in which you have also risen again through faith in the working of God, Who raised Him from the dead. And you, when you were dead in sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive with Him, having forgiven you all your sins, blotting out the bond that was against us by its ordinances, which was contrary to us; and He has taken it out of the way, nailing it to the Cross; and having put off the flesh He made a public show of powers, triumphing over them through confidence in Himself. Steadfast faith rejects the empty subtleties of philosophical inquiry; truth refuses to be defeated by these treacherous devices of human folly and enslaved by falsehood. It will not confine God within the limits that bounded our ordinary reason, nor judge Christ according to the rudiments of the world, Christ in Whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and in such a way that the utmost efforts of the earthly mind to understand Him are baffled by that immeasurable Eternity and Omnipotence. My soul judged Him to be One Who, drawing us upward to share in His own Divine nature, has loosened, from then on, the bond of bodily observances; Who, unlike the Symbolic Law, has initiated us into no rites of mutilating the flesh, but Whose purpose is that our spirit, circumcised from vice, should purify all the natural faculties of the body by abstaining from sin, so that we, buried with His Death in Baptism, may return to the life of eternity (since regeneration to life is death to the former life), and, dying to our sins, be born again to immortality, so that just as He abandoned His immortality to die for us, we should awaken from death to immortality with Him. For He took on Himself the flesh in which we have sinned, so that by wearing our flesh He might forgive sins; a flesh He shares with us by wearing it, not by sinning in it. He blotted out the sentence of death through death, so that by a new creation of our race in Himself He might sweep away the penalty set by the former Law. He let them nail Him to the cross so that He might nail all the curses to which the world is condemned to the curse of the cross and abolish them. He suffered as man to the utmost so that He might put powers to shame. For Scripture had foretold that He Who is God would die; that the victory and triumph of those who trust in Him lay in the fact that He, Who is immortal and cannot be overcome by death, was to die so that mortals might gain eternity. These deeds of God, done in a way beyond our understanding, cannot, I repeat, be understood by our natural faculties, for the work of the Infinite and Eternal can be grasped only by an infinite intelligence. So, just as the truths that God became man, that the Immortal died, that the Eternal was buried, do not belong to the rational order but are a unique work of power, so on the other hand it is an effect not of intellect but of omnipotence that He Who is man is also God, that He Who died is immortal, that He Who was buried is eternal. We, then, are raised together by God in Christ through His death. But since in Christ there is the fullness of the Godhead, we have in this a revelation of God the Father joining in raising us in Him Who died; and we must confess that Christ Jesus is none other than God in all the fullness of the Deity.

In this calm assurance of safety my soul gladly and hopefully took its rest, and feared the interruption of death so little that death seemed only a name for eternal life. And the life of this present body was so far from seeming a burden or affliction that it was regarded the way children regard their alphabet, sick people their medicine, shipwrecked sailors their swim, young men the training for their profession, and future commanders their first campaign; that is, as a bearable submission to present necessities, carrying the promise of a blissful immortality. And beyond this, I began to proclaim the truths in which my soul had a personal faith, as a duty of the office of bishop that had been laid on me, using my office to promote the salvation of all people.

While I was occupied in this way, certain fallacies came to light from rash and wicked men, hopeless for themselves and merciless toward others, who made their own feeble nature the measure of the might of God's nature. They claimed, not that they had risen to an infinite knowledge of infinite things, but that they had brought all knowledge, previously undefined, within the scope of ordinary reason, and had fixed the limits of the faith. Yet the true work of religion is a service of obedience; and these were men careless of their own weakness, reckless about Divine realities, who set out to improve on the teaching of God.

Leaving aside the empty inquiries of other heretics— about whom, however, I will not be silent when the course of my argument gives occasion — there are those who tamper with the faith of the Gospel by denying, under the cover of loyalty to the One God, the birth of God the Only-begotten. They claim that there was an extension of God into man, not a descent; that He Who was Son of Man for the time that He took our flesh had not been Son of God before, nor was He then; that there was no Divine birth in His case, but an identity of Begetter and Begotten; and (to maintain what they consider perfect loyalty to the unity of God) that there was an unbroken continuity in the Incarnation, the Father extending Himself into the Virgin and Himself being born as His own Son. Others, on the contrary (heretics, because there is no salvation apart from Christ, Who in the beginning was God the Word with God), deny that He was born and declare that He was merely created. Birth, they hold, would confess Him to be true God, while creation proves His Godhead unreal; and although this explanation is a fraud against the faith in the unity of God when taken as an accurate definition, they still think it may pass as figurative language. They lower His true birth, in name and in belief, to the level of a creation, to cut Him off from the Divine unity, so that, as a creature called into being, He may not claim the fullness of the Godhead, which is not His by a true birth.

My soul has been burning to answer these insane attacks. I recall that the very center of a saving faith is the belief not merely in God, but in God as a Father; not merely in Christ, but in Christ as the Son of God; in Him, not as a creature, but as God the Creator, born of God. My main aim is to refute, by the clear statements of prophets and evangelists, the insanity and ignorance of men who use the unity of God (in itself a pious and profitable confession) as a cover for denying either that in Christ God was born, or else that He is true God. Their purpose is to isolate a solitary God at the heart of the faith by making Christ, though mighty, only a creature; because, as they claim, a birth of God widens the believer's faith into a trust in more gods than one. But we, divinely taught to confess neither two Gods nor a solitary God, will cite the evidence of the Gospels and the prophets for our confession of God the Father and God the Son, united, not confused, in our faith. We will not admit that They are identical, nor allow, as a compromise, that Christ is God in some imperfect sense; for God, born of God, cannot be the same as His Father, since He is His Son, nor can He be different in nature.

And you whose warm faith and passion for a truth unknown to the world and its philosophers will prompt you to read me must remember to avoid the feeble and baseless guesses of earthly minds, and in a devout willingness to learn must break down the barriers of prejudice and half-knowledge. The new faculties of the regenerate intellect are needed; each person must have his understanding enlightened by the heavenly gift given to the soul. First he must take his stand on the sure ground [substantia = ὑποστάσει] of God, as holy Jeremiah says, so that, since he is to hear about that nature [substantia], he may expand his thoughts until they are worthy of the theme, not setting some arbitrary standard for himself, but judging as one judges of infinity. And again, though he knows that he shares in the Divine nature, as the holy apostle Peter says in his second Epistle, he still must not measure the Divine nature by the limits of his own, but must gauge God's statements about Himself by the scale of His own glorious self-revelation. For the best student is the one who does not read his own thoughts into the book but lets it reveal its own; who draws its sense out of it and does not import his own into it, nor force on its words a meaning he had decided was the right one before he opened its pages. Since, then, we are to speak about the things of God, let us take it as given that God has full knowledge of Himself, and bow with humble reverence to His words. For He Whom we can know only through His own statements is the fitting witness about Himself.

If, in discussing the nature and birth of God, we cite certain analogies, no one should suppose that such comparisons are perfect and complete. There can be no comparison between God and earthly things, yet the weakness of our understanding forces us to look for illustrations from a lower sphere to explain what we mean about loftier themes. The course of daily life shows how our experience in ordinary matters enables us to draw conclusions about unfamiliar subjects. So we must regard any comparison as helpful to human beings rather than as a description of God, since it suggests, rather than exhausts, the sense we are looking for. Nor should such a comparison be thought too bold when it sets bodily and spiritual natures side by side, things invisible and things that can be touched, since it openly admits that it is a necessary aid to the weakness of the human mind, and asks to be spared the condemnation that an imperfect analogy deserves. On this principle I go on with my task, intending to use the terms God supplies, yet coloring my argument with illustrations drawn from human life.

First, I have laid out the plan of the whole work so as to serve the reader through the logical order in which its books are arranged. I have resolved to publish no half-finished, ill-considered treatise, so that its disorderly arrangement would not resemble the confused clamor of a mob of peasants. And since no one can climb a cliff unless there are jutting ledges to help him on his way to the summit, I have set down here in order the main outlines of our ascent, leading our difficult course of argument up the easiest path; not cutting steps into the face of the rock, but leveling it into a gentle slope, so that the traveler may reach the heights almost without feeling any effort.

After this first book, then, the second explains the mystery of the Divine birth, so that those who are to be baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit may know the true Names, and not be confused about their sense but accurately informed about fact and meaning, and so receive full assurance that in the words used they have the true Names, and that those Names contain the truth.

After this short and simple discussion of the Trinity, the third book makes further progress, slow but sure. Citing the greatest instances of His power, it brings within the reach of faith's understanding that saying, in itself beyond our comprehension, which Christ speaks about Himself: I in the Father and the Father in Me. So truth beyond the dull understanding of human beings is the prize of a faith equipped with reason and knowledge; for we may not doubt God's Word about Himself, nor can we suppose that devout reason is incapable of grasping His might.

The fourth book begins with the doctrines of the heretics, and disowns any part in the fallacies by which they are slandering the faith of the Church. It publishes the unbelieving creed that a number of them have recently put forward, and exposes the dishonesty, and therefore the wickedness, of their arguments from the Law for what they call the unity of God. It sets out the whole evidence of the Law and the Prophets to demonstrate that it is impious to assert the unity of God in a way that excludes the Godhead of Christ, and treason to claim that if Christ is God the Only-begotten, then God is not one.

The fifth book replies to the heretical assertions in the order in which they were made. They had falsely declared that they followed the law in the sense they gave to the unity of God, and that they had proved from it that the true God is one Person; and they did this to rob the Lord Christ of His birth through their conclusion about the One true God, since birth is the evidence of origin. In answer I assert, step by step, what they deny; for from the Law and the Prophets I demonstrate that there are neither two gods nor one isolated true God, without either perverting faith in the Divine unity or denying the birth of Christ. And since they say that the Lord Jesus Christ was created rather than born, and bears the Divine Name as a gift and not by right, I have proved His true Divinity from the Prophets in such a way that, once He is acknowledged as true God, the assurance of His inherent Godhead will hold us fast to the certainty that God is One.

The sixth book reveals the full deceitfulness of this heretical teaching. To win credit for their assertions they denounce the impious doctrine of heretics: namely of Valentinus, and Sabellius and Manichaeus and Hieracas, and take over the godly language of the Church as a cover for their blasphemy. They criticize and alter the language of these heretics, correcting it into a vague resemblance to orthodoxy, in order to suppress the holy faith while appearing to denounce heresy. But we state clearly what the language and the doctrine of each of these men are, and clear the Church of any complicity or fellowship with condemned heretics. We condemn those of their words that deserve condemnation, and accept those that call for our humble acceptance. In this way we prove the Divine Sonship of Jesus Christ, which they deny most strenuously, by the witness of the Father, by Christ's own assertion, by the preaching of the Apostles, by the faith of believers, by the cries of devils, by the contradiction of the Jews, which is itself a confession, and by the recognition of the heathen who had not known God; and all this to rescue from dispute a truth about which Christ left us no excuse for ignorance.

Next the seventh book, starting from the basis of a true faith now attained, gives its verdict in the great debate. First, armed with its sound and indisputable proof of the impregnable faith, it takes part in the conflict raging between Sabellius and Hebion and these opponents of the true Godhead. It takes issue with Sabellius over his denial of the pre-existence of Christ, and with his opponents over their assertion that He is a creature. Sabellius overlooked the eternity of the Son, but believed that true God worked in a human body. Our present adversaries deny that He was born, assert that He was created, and fail to see the works of true God in His deeds. We believe what both sides dispute. Sabellius denies that it was the Son who was working, and he is wrong; but he proves his case triumphantly when he claims that the work done was the work of true God. The Church shares his victory over those who deny that true God was in Christ. But when Sabellius denies that Christ existed before the worlds, his opponents prove conclusively that Christ's activity is from everlasting, and we are on their side in this refutation of Sabellius, who recognizes true God, but not God the Son, in this activity. And our two previous adversaries join forces to refute Hebion, the second demonstrating the eternal existence of Christ, while the first proves that His work is the work of true God. So the heretics overthrow one another, while the Church, against Sabellius, against those who call Christ a creature, and against Hebion, bears witness that the Lord Jesus Christ is true God of true God, born before the worlds and born as man in later times.

No one can doubt that we have taken the course of true reverence and sound doctrine when, after proving from the Law and the Prophets first that Christ is the Son of God, and next that He is true God, and this without breaking the mysterious unity, we go on to support the Law and the Prophets with the evidence of the Gospels, and prove from them too that He is the Son of God and Himself true God. Once His right to the Name of Son is demonstrated, it is the easiest of tasks to show that the Name truly describes His relation to the Father; though in fact universal usage regards the granting of the name of son as convincing evidence of sonship. But, to leave no loophole for the trickery and deceit of these slanderers of the true birth of God the Only-begotten, we have used His true Godhead as evidence of His true Sonship; to show that He Who (as all confess) bears the Name of Son of God is actually God, we have cited His Name, His birth, His nature, His power and His assertions. We have proved that His Name accurately describes Him, that the title of Son is evidence of birth, that in His birth He kept His Divine Nature, and with His nature His power, and that this power showed itself in conscious and deliberate self-revelation. I have set down the Gospel proofs of each separate point, showing how His self-revelation displays His power, how His power reveals His nature, how His nature is His by birthright, and how His title to the name of Son comes from His birth. So every whisper of blasphemy is silenced, for the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, by the witness of His own mouth, has taught us that He is, as His Name, His birth, His nature and His power declare, true God of true God in the true sense of Deity.

While the two books before it have been devoted to confirming faith in Christ as Son of God and true God, the eighth book is taken up with proving the unity of God, showing that this unity is consistent with the birth of the Son, and that the birth brings no duality into the Godhead. First it exposes the sophistry with which these heretics have tried to avoid, though they could not deny, confessing the real existence of God, Father and Son; it demolishes their helpless and absurd plea that passages such as, And the multitude of those who believed were of one soul and heart, and again, He who plants and He who waters are one, and I do not pray for these only, but also for those who shall believe in Me through their word, so that they may all be one, even as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, so that they also may be in Us, express a unity of will and mind, not of Divinity. By considering the true sense of these texts we show that they involve the reality of the Divine birth; and then, setting out the whole series of our Lord's self-revelations, we display, in the language of the Apostles and in the very words of the Holy Spirit, the whole and perfect mystery of the glory of God as Father and as Only-begotten Son. Because there is a Father we know that there is a Son; in that Son the Father is shown to us, and from this comes our certainty that He is born the Only-begotten and that He is true God.

In matters essential to salvation it is not enough to put forward the proofs that faith supplies and finds sufficient. Arguments we have not tested may mislead us into misunderstanding the meaning of our own words, unless we go on the offensive by exposing the hollowness of the enemy's proofs, and so establish our own faith on the demonstrated absurdity of his. So the ninth book is devoted to refuting the arguments by which the heretics try to invalidate the birth of God the Only-begotten; heretics who ignore the mystery of the revelation hidden from the beginning of the world, and forget that the Gospel faith proclaims the union of God and man. To support their denial that our Lord Jesus Christ is God, like God and equal with God as Son with Father, born of God and by right of His birth existing as true Spirit, they usually appeal to such words of our Lord as, Why do you call Me good? No one is good except One, that is, God. They argue that by rebuking the man who called Him good, and by asserting that only God is good, He excludes Himself from the goodness of the God Who alone is good and from the true Divinity that belongs only to One. Their blasphemous reasoning links another text with this one, And this is eternal life, that they should know You the only true God, and Him Whom You sent, Jesus Christ. Here, they say, He confesses that the Father is the only true God, and that He Himself is neither true nor God, since this recognition of an only true God is limited to the Possessor of the attributes named. And they claim to be quite clear about His meaning in this passage, since He also says, The Son can do nothing of Himself, but only what He has seen the Father doing. The fact that He can only copy is said to be evidence that His nature is limited. There can be no comparison between Omnipotence and One whose action depends on the previous activity of Another; reason itself draws an absolute line between power and the lack of power. That line is so clear that He Himself has openly declared about God the Father, The Father is greater than I. So frank a confession silences every objection; it is blasphemy and madness to assign the dignity and nature of God to One who disclaims them. He is so utterly lacking in the qualities of true God that He actually bears witness about Himself, But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but God only. A son who does not know his father's secret must, because of his ignorance, be alien from the father who knows; a nature limited in knowledge cannot share in the majesty and might that alone is free from the tyranny of ignorance.

So we expose the blasphemous misunderstanding they have arrived at by distorting and perverting the meaning of Christ's words. We account for those words by stating what kind of questions He was answering, at what times He was speaking, and what partial knowledge He was choosing to impart; we let the circumstances explain the words, and do not force the circumstances into consistency with the words. In this way each discrepancy, for instance between The Father is greater than I, and I and the Father are One, or between No one is good except One, that is, God, and He who has seen Me has seen the Father also, or a difference as wide as that between Father, all things that are Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and That they may know You, the only true God, or between I in the Father and the Father in Me, and But of the day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but the Father only, is explained by distinguishing between gradual revelation and the full expression of His nature and power. Both are utterances of the same Speaker, and setting out the real force of each group will show that Christ's true Godhead is not in the least impaired because, to form the mystery of the Gospel faith, the birth and Name of Christ were revealed gradually, and under conditions of occasion and time that He chose.

The purpose of the tenth book is in harmony with the faith. For since, in the folly they count as wisdom, the heretics have twisted some of the circumstances and sayings of the Passion into an insolent contradiction of the Divine nature and power of the Lord Jesus Christ, I am compelled to prove that this is a blasphemous misinterpretation, and that the Lord Himself had these things put on record as evidence of His true and absolute majesty. In their parody of the faith they deceive themselves with words such as, My soul is sorrowful even to death. He, they think, must be far removed from the blissful and passionless life of God: He over Whose soul this crushing fear of approaching calamity brooded, Who under the pressure of suffering even humbled Himself to pray, Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass away from Me, and certainly gave the appearance of fearing to endure the trials from which He prayed to be released; Whose whole nature was so overwhelmed by agony that in those moments on the Cross He cried, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? He was forced by the bitterness of His pain to complain that He was forsaken; He, left without the Father's help, gave up His Spirit with the words, Father, into Your hands I commend My Spirit. The fear that gripped Him at the moment of dying, they say, made Him entrust His Spirit to the care of God the Father: the very hopelessness of His own condition forced Him to commit His Soul to the keeping of Another.

Their folly is as great as their blasphemy, and they fail to notice that Christ's words, spoken under similar circumstances, are always consistent; they cling to the letter and ignore the purpose of His words. There is the widest difference between My soul is sorrowful even to death, and From now on you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power; and likewise between Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass away, from Me, and The cup that the Father has given Me, shall I not drink it? and further between My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? and Truly I say to you, Today you shall be with Me in Paradise, and between Father, into Your hands I commend My Spirit, and Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing; and their narrow minds, unable to grasp the Divine meaning, plunge into blasphemy in trying to explain them. There is a broad distinction between anxiety and a mind at ease, between haste and the prayer for delay, between words of anguish and words of encouragement, between despair for oneself and confident pleading for others; and the heretics show their impiety by ignoring the assertions of Deity and the Divine nature of Christ, which account for the one class of His words, while they focus their attention on the deeds and words that refer only to His ministry on earth. So I have set out all the elements contained in the mystery of the Soul and Body of the Lord Jesus Christ; all have been searched out, none suppressed. Next, casting the calm light of reason on the question, I have assigned each of His sayings to the class its meaning belongs to, and so have shown that He also had a confidence that never wavered, a will that never faltered, an assurance that never murmured, and that, when He commended His own soul to the Father, this included a prayer for the pardon of others. So a complete presentation of the teaching of the Gospel interprets and confirms all (and not only some) of the words of Christ.

And so — for not even the glory of the Resurrection has opened the eyes of these lost men and kept them within the clear bounds of the faith— they have forged a weapon for their blasphemy out of a pretended reverence, and have even twisted the revelation of a mystery into an insult to God. From the words, I ascend to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God, they argue that since that Father is as much ours as His, and that God is also ours and His, His own confession that He shares that relation to the Father and to God with us excludes Him from true Divinity, and subordinates Him to God the Creator, Whose creature and inferior He is, as we are, although He has received adoption as a Son. What is more, we must not suppose that He has any of the characteristics of the Divine nature, since the Apostle says, But when He says all things are put in subjection, this does not include Him Who subjected all things to Him; for when all things have been subjected to Him, then He Himself shall also be subjected to Him Who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all. For, as they say, subjection is evidence that the subject lacks power and that the sovereign has it. The eleventh book is devoted to a reverent discussion of this argument; it proves from these very words of the Apostle not only that subjection is no evidence of a lack of power in Christ but that it is actually a sign of His true Divinity as God the Son; and that the fact that His Father and God is also our Father and God is an infinite advantage to us and no degradation to Him, since He Who was born as Man and suffered all the afflictions of our flesh has gone up on high to our God and Father, to receive His glory as Man, our Representative.

In this treatise we have followed the course we know is followed in every branch of education. First come easy lessons and a familiarity with the groundwork of the subject, slowly gained by practice; then the student may put to the test, in the business of life, the training he has received. So the soldier, once he has mastered his drills, can go out to battle; the advocate ventures into the conflicts of the courts once he is skilled in the pleadings of the school of rhetoric; the sailor who has learned to navigate his ship in the landlocked harbor of his home can be trusted amid the storms of open seas and distant regions. That is how we have proceeded in this most serious and difficult science, in which the whole faith is taught. First came simple instruction for the untaught believer in the birth, the name, the Divinity and the true Divinity of Christ; since then we have quietly and steadily advanced until our readers can demolish every plea of the heretics; and now at last we have pitted them against the adversary in the present great and glorious conflict. Human minds are powerless to grasp the idea of an eternal birth with the ordinary resources of unaided reason, but by studying things Divine they come to understand mysteries that lie beyond the range of ordinary thought. They can explode the paradox about the Lord Jesus that draws all its strength and its appearance of force from a short-sighted pagan philosophy: the paradox that asserts, There was a time when He was not, and He was not before He was born, and He was made out of nothing; as though His birth proved that He had previously not existed and came into being at a given moment, and God the Only-begotten could thus be subjected to the concept of time, as if the faith itself [by conferring the title of 'Son'] and the very nature of birth proved that there was a time when He was not. Accordingly they argue that He was born out of nothing, on the grounds that birth means granting being to what previously had no being. We proclaim in answer, on the evidence of the Apostles and Evangelists, that the Father is eternal and the Son eternal, and demonstrate that the Son is God of all with an absolute, not a limited, pre-existence; that these bold assaults of their blasphemous logic — He was born out of nothing, and He was not before He was born— are powerless against Him; that His eternity is consistent with sonship, and His sonship with eternity; that He was not uniquely exempt from birth but had a birth from everlasting, for while birth implies a Father, Divinity is inseparable from eternity.

Ignorance of prophetic language and lack of skill in interpreting Scripture have led them to pervert the point and meaning of the passage, The Lord created Me for a beginning of His ways for His works. They labor to establish from it that Christ is created, rather than born, as God, and so shares the nature of created beings, though He surpasses them in the manner of His creation, and has no glory of Divine birth but only the powers of a transcendent creature. In reply, without bringing in any new considerations or preconceived opinions, we will make this very passage of Wisdom display its own true meaning and purpose. We will show that the fact that He was created for the beginning of the ways of God and for His works cannot be twisted into evidence about the Divine and eternal birth, because creation for these purposes and birth from everlasting are two entirely different things. Where birth is meant, birth and nothing but birth is spoken of; where creation is mentioned, the cause of that creation is named first. There is a Wisdom born before all things, and there is also a wisdom created for particular purposes; the Wisdom that is from everlasting is one, and the wisdom that has come into existence in the course of time is another.

Having thus concluded that we must reject the word 'creation' from our confession of faith in God the Only-begotten, we go on to set out the teachings of reason and piety about the Holy Spirit, so that the reader, whose convictions have been established by patient and earnest study of the preceding books, may have a complete presentation of the faith. This goal will be reached when the blasphemies of heretical teaching on this subject too have been swept away, and the pure and undefiled mystery of the Trinity that regenerates us has been fixed in terms of saving precision on the authority of the Apostles and Evangelists. People will no longer dare, on the strength of mere human reasoning, to rank among creatures that Divine Spirit, Whom we receive as the pledge of immortality and the source of fellowship with the sinless nature of God.

I know, Lord God Almighty, that I owe You, as the chief duty of my life, the devotion of all my words and thoughts to You. The gift of speech You have given me can bring me no higher reward than the opportunity to serve You by preaching You and displaying You as You are, as Father and Father of God the Only-begotten, to the world in its blindness and the heretic in his rebellion. But this is only the expression of my own desire; I must also pray for the gift of Your help and compassion, so that the breath of Your Spirit may fill the sails of faith and confession that I have spread, and a favoring wind may be sent to carry me forward on my voyage of instruction. We can trust the promise of Him Who said, Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you; and in our need we will pray for the things we need. We will bring untiring energy to the study of Your Prophets and Apostles, and we will knock for entrance at every gate of hidden knowledge, but it is Yours to answer the prayer, to grant what we seek, and to open the door on which we beat. Our minds are born with dull and clouded vision, and our feeble intellect is penned within the barriers of an impassable ignorance about things Divine; but the study of Your revelation lifts our soul to the comprehension of sacred truth, and submission to the faith is the path to a certainty beyond the reach of unaided reason.

And so we look to Your support for the first trembling steps of this undertaking, and to Your aid so that it may gain strength and prosper. We look to You to give us the fellowship of that Spirit Who guided the Prophets and the Apostles, so that we may take their words in the sense in which they spoke them and give every utterance its right shade of meaning. For we will speak of things they preached in a mystery: of You, God Eternal, Father of the Eternal and Only-begotten God, Who alone are without birth, and of the One Lord Jesus Christ, born of You from everlasting. We may not separate Him from You, or make Him one of a plurality of Gods, on any plea of difference of nature. We may not say that He is not begotten of You because You are One. We must not fail to confess Him as true God, since He is born of You, true God, His Father. So grant us precision of language, soundness of argument, grace of style and loyalty to truth. Enable us to speak the things we believe, so that we may confess, as the Prophets and Apostles have taught us, You, One God our Father, and One Lord Jesus Christ, and silence the contradiction of the heretics, proclaiming You as God, yet not solitary, and Him as God, in no unreal sense.