On the Trinity, Book 3

The Lord's words, I in the Father, and the Father in Me, confuse many minds, and naturally so, since the powers of human reason cannot give them any intelligible meaning. It seems impossible for one object to be both inside and outside another, or that these Beings (since it is established that the Beings we are discussing, though They do not dwell apart, keep their separate existence and condition) can contain One Another reciprocally, so that One should permanently envelop, and also be permanently enveloped by, the Other, whom He nevertheless envelops. This is a problem that human understanding will never solve, and human research will never find an analogy for this condition of Divine existence. But what man cannot understand, God can be. I do not mean that the fact that God makes this assertion makes it immediately intelligible to us. We must think for ourselves and come to know the meaning of the words, I in the Father, and the Father in Me; but this will depend on how well we grasp the truth that reasoning based on Divine truths can establish its conclusions, even when they seem to contradict the laws of the universe.

To solve this most difficult problem as easily as possible, we must first master what the Divine Scriptures teach about the Father and the Son, so that we can speak more precisely, as people dealing with familiar and accustomed matters. The eternity of the Father, as we concluded after full discussion in the last Book, transcends space, and time, and appearance, and all the forms of human thought. He is outside and inside all things; He contains all and can be contained by none; He cannot change by increase or decrease; He is invisible, incomprehensible, full, perfect, eternal, deriving nothing He has from another, but, if anything is derived from Him, still complete and self-sufficient.

So He, the Unbegotten, before time existed, begot a Son from Himself: not from any pre-existing matter, for all things are through the Son; not from nothing, for the Son is from the Father's own self; not by way of childbirth, for in God there is neither change nor emptiness; not as a piece of Himself cut or torn off or stretched out, for God is without passions and without body, and only a being capable of suffering and having a body could be treated that way, and, as the Apostle says, in Christ all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily. Incomprehensibly and beyond words, before time or worlds, He begot the Only-begotten from His own unbegotten substance, giving His whole Divinity to that Birth through love and power. So He is the Only-begotten, perfect, eternal Son of the unbegotten, perfect, eternal Father. But the properties He has as a result of the Body He took are the fruit of His goodwill toward our salvation. For He, being invisible and bodiless and incomprehensible as the Son of God, took on Himself as much matter and lowliness as was needed to bring Him within the range of our understanding, and perception, and contemplation. It was a stooping down to our weakness rather than a surrender of His own proper attributes.

So He, being the perfect Father's perfect Son, the Only-begotten Offspring of the unbegotten God, who has received everything from Him Who possesses everything, being God from God, Spirit from Spirit, Light from Light, says boldly, The Father in Me, and I in the Father. For as the Father is Spirit, so the Son is Spirit; as the Father is God, so the Son is God; as the Father is Light, so the Son is Light. So the properties that are in the Father are the source of those the Son is endowed with; that is, He is wholly Son of Him Who is wholly Father: not brought in from outside, for before the Son nothing existed; not made from nothing, for the Son is from God; not partially a son, for the fullness of the Godhead is in the Son; not a Son in some respects, but in all; a Son by the will of Him who had the power, in a way that He alone knows. What is in the Father is also in the Son; what is in the Unbegotten is also in the Only-begotten. The One is from the Other, and the Two of Them are a Unity: not Two made One, but One in the Other, for what is in Both is the same. The Father is in the Son, for the Son is from Him; the Son is in the Father, because the Father is His only Origin; the Only-begotten is in the Unbegotten, because He is the Only-begotten from the Unbegotten. So Each is in the Other mutually, for as all is perfect in the Unbegotten Father, so all is perfect in the Only-begotten Son. This is the Unity that is in Son and Father, this the power, this the love; our hope, and faith, and truth, and way, and life is not to dispute the Father's powers or to belittle the Son, but to revere the mystery and majesty of His birth; to set the unbegotten Father above all rivalry, and to count the Only-begotten Son as His equal in eternity and might, confessing about God the Son that He is from God.

Such are the powers in God: powers that our methods of reasoning cannot comprehend, but of which our faith is convinced on the sure evidence of His action. We will find examples of this action in the bodily sphere as well as in the spiritual, showing itself not as an analogy that might illustrate the Birth, but as a deed marvelous yet comprehensible. On the wedding day in Galilee, water was made wine. Do we have words to tell, or senses to determine, what methods produced the change by which the tastelessness of water disappeared and was replaced by the full flavor of wine? It was not a mixing; it was a creation, and a creation that was not a beginning but a transformation. A weaker liquid was not produced by mixing in a stronger element; an existing thing perished and a new thing came into being. The bridegroom was anxious, the household in confusion, the harmony of the wedding feast in danger. Jesus is asked for help. He does not get up or busy Himself; He does the work without effort. Water is poured into the jars, and wine is drawn out in the cups. What the pourer's senses tell him contradicts what the drawer's senses tell him. Those who poured expect water to be drawn; those who draw think wine must have been poured in. The time in between cannot account for any gain or loss of character in the liquid. The way it was done baffles sight and sense, but the power of God is plain in the result.

In the case of the five loaves, a miracle of the same kind stirs our wonder. By their increase five thousand men and countless women and children are saved from hunger; how it happens escapes our powers of observation. Five loaves are offered and broken; while the Apostles are dividing them, a succession of newly created portions passes through their hands, they cannot tell how. The loaf they are dividing grows no smaller, yet their hands are always full of pieces. The speed of the process baffles sight; you follow with your eye a hand full of portions, and meanwhile you see that the contents of the other hand have not diminished, and all the while the heap of pieces grows. The carvers are busy at their task, the eaters hard at work; the hungry are satisfied, and the fragments fill twelve baskets. Neither sight nor sense can discover how so remarkable a miracle was done. What did not exist is created; what we see is beyond our understanding. Our only recourse is faith in God's omnipotence.

There is no deception in these miracles of God, no subtle pretense meant to please or to deceive. These works of the Son of God were not done from any desire to show off; He Whom countless myriads of angels serve never deluded mankind. What could He need from us, when through Him everything we have was created? Did He demand praise from us, who are now heavy with sleep, now glutted with lust, now laden with the guilt of rioting and bloodshed, now drunk from carousing — He Whom Archangels, and Dominions, and Principalities, and Powers praise in heaven without sleep or pause or sin, with everlasting and unwearied voice? They praise Him because He, the Image of the Invisible God, created all their host in Himself, made the worlds, established the heavens, appointed the stars, fixed the earth, and laid the foundations of the deep; because in later time He was born, conquered death, broke the gates of hell, won for Himself a people to be His fellow heirs, and lifted flesh from corruption up to the glory of eternity. So there was nothing He might gain from us that could lead Him to take on the splendor of these mysterious and inexplicable works, as though He needed our praise. But God foresaw how human sin and folly would be led astray, and knew that unbelief would dare to pass judgment even on the things of God, and so He overcame presumption with signs of His power that must give even the boldest of us pause.

For there are many of those wise men of the world whose wisdom is folly with God, who contradict our proclamation of God from God, True from True, Perfect from Perfect, One from One, as though we taught impossible things. They pin their faith on certain conclusions they have reached by a process of logic: Nothing can be born of one, for every birth requires two parents, and If this Son is born of One He has received a part of His Begetter: if He is a part, then Neither of the Two is perfect, for something is missing from Him from Whom the Son came, and there cannot be fullness in One Who consists of a portion of Another. So Neither is perfect, for the Begetter has lost His fullness, and the Begotten has not acquired it. This is the wisdom of the world that God foresaw even in the prophet's days and condemned through him in the words, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and reject the understanding of the prudent. And the apostle says: Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the inquirer of this world? Has God not made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. For the Jews seek signs, and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

So the Son of God, having charge of mankind, was first made man, so that men might believe in Him; so that He might be a witness to us, sprung from ourselves, of things Divine, and preach to us, weak and carnal as we are, about God the Father through the weakness of the flesh, so fulfilling the Father's will, just as He says, I did not come to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. It was not that He Himself was unwilling, but that He might show His obedience as the result of His Father's will, for His own will is to do His Father's. This is the will to carry out the Father's will that He testifies to in the words: Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, so that Your Son may glorify You; just as You have given Him power over all flesh, so that to whatever You have given Him, He may give eternal life. And this is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Him Whom You sent, Jesus Christ. I have glorified You on earth, having accomplished the work You gave Me to do. And now, Father, glorify Me with Your own Self with the glory that I had with You before the world existed. I have revealed Your Name to the men whom You have given Me. In a few short words He has revealed the whole task to which He was appointed and assigned. Yet those words, few and short as they are, are the true faith's safeguard against every suggestion of the devil's cunning. Let us briefly consider the force of each separate phrase.

He says, Father the hour has come; glorify Your Son, so that Your Son may glorify You. He says that the hour, not the day nor the time, has come. An hour is a fraction of a day. What hour can this be? The hour, of course, that He speaks of at the time of His passion, to strengthen His disciples: The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. This, then, is the hour in which He prays to be glorified by the Father, so that He Himself may glorify the Father. But what does He mean? Does One who is about to give glory expect to receive it? Does One who is about to confer honor ask for something for Himself? Does He need the very thing He is about to repay? Here let the world's philosophers, the wise men of Greece, block our path and spread their nets of syllogism to entangle the truth. Let them ask How? And from where? And Why? When they can find no answer, let us tell them it is because God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. That is why we in our foolishness understand things incomprehensible to the world's philosophers. The Lord had said, Father, the hour has come; He had revealed the hour of His passion, for these words were spoken at that very moment; and then He added, Glorify Your Son. But how was the Son to be glorified? He had been born of a virgin; from cradle and childhood He had grown to manhood; through sleep and hunger and thirst and weariness and tears He had lived a man's life; even now He was about to be spat on, scourged, crucified. And why? These things were ordained to assure us that in Christ there is true man. But the shame of the cross is not ours; we are not sentenced to the scourge, nor defiled by spitting. The Father glorifies the Son; how? Next He is nailed to the cross. Then what followed? The sun, instead of setting, fled. How so? It did not withdraw behind a cloud, but abandoned its appointed orbit, and all the elements of the world felt the same shock of Christ's death. The stars in their courses, to avoid complicity in the crime, put themselves out to escape seeing the scene. What did the earth do? It trembled under the weight of the Lord hanging on the tree, protesting that it was powerless to hold Him who was dying. Yet surely rock and stone will not refuse Him a resting place. Yes, they are torn and split, and their strength fails. They must admit that the rock-hewn sepulchre cannot imprison the Body that awaits its burial.

And next? The centurion of the cohort, the guard of the cross, cries out, Truly this was the Son of God. Creation is set free by the mediation of this Sin-offering; the very rocks lose their solidity and strength. Those who had nailed Him to the cross confess that truly this is the Son of God. The outcome proves the assertion true. The Lord had said, Glorify Your Son. By that word Your, He had asserted that He was God's Son not in name only, but in nature. Multitudes of us are sons of God; He is Son in another sense. For He is God's true and own Son, by origin and not by adoption, not in name only but in truth, born and not created. So, after He was glorified, that confession touched the truth; the centurion confessed Him the true Son of God, so that no believer might doubt a fact that even the servant of His persecutors could not deny.

But perhaps some may suppose that He lacked the glory He prayed for, and that His expecting to be glorified by a Greater is evidence of a lack of power. Who, indeed, would deny that the Father is the greater: the Unbegotten greater than the Begotten, the Father than the Son, the Sender than the Sent, He who wills than He who obeys? He Himself will be His own witness: The Father is greater than I. It is a fact we must recognize, but we must take care that, for unskilled thinkers, the majesty of the Father does not obscure the glory of the Son. Such obscuring is ruled out by this same glory the Son prays for; for the prayer, Father glorify Your Son, is completed by, So that the Son may glorify You. So there is no lack of power in the Son, Who, when He has received this glory, will repay it in glory. But why, if He was not in need, did He make the prayer? No one asks except for something he needs. Or can it be that the Father too is in need? Or has He given His glory away so recklessly that He needs the Son to return it to Him? No; the One has never been in need, nor has the Other needed to ask, and yet Each will give to the Other. So the prayer for glory to be given and paid back is neither a robbery of the Father nor a belittling of the Son, but a demonstration of the power of one Godhead residing in Both. The Son prays to be glorified by the Father; the Father considers it no humiliation to be glorified by the Son. The exchange of glory given and received proclaims the unity of power in Father and in Son.

Next we must determine what this glorifying is and where it comes from. God, I am sure, is subject to no change; His eternity admits no defect or improvement, no gain or loss. It is the character of Him alone that what He is, He is from everlasting. What He is from everlasting, His nature makes it impossible for Him ever to cease to be. How then can He receive glory, a thing He fully possesses and of which His store does not diminish, when there is no fresh glory He can obtain, and none He has lost and can recover? We are brought to a standstill. But the Evangelist does not fail us, though our reason has shown its helplessness. To tell us what return of glory the Son was to make to the Father, he gives the words: Just as You have given Him power over all flesh, so that to whatever You have given Him He may give eternal life. And this is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom You have sent. The Father, then, is glorified through the Son by being made known to us. And the glory was this: that the Son, made flesh, received from Him power over all flesh, and the charge of restoring eternal life to us, short-lived beings burdened with the body. Eternal life for us was the result not of work done but of innate power; the glory of that eternity was to be gained not by a new creation, but simply by knowledge of God. Nothing was added to God's glory; it had not decreased, and so could not be replenished. But He is glorified through the Son in the sight of us, ignorant, exiled, defiled, dwelling in hopeless death and lawless darkness; glorified in that the Son, by virtue of the power over all flesh which the Father gave Him, was to give us eternal life. It is through this work of the Son that the Father is glorified. So when the Son received all things from the Father, the Father glorified Him; and in turn, when all things were made through the Son, He glorified the Father. The return of glory given lies in this: all the glory the Son has is the glory of the Father, since everything He has is the Father's gift. For the glory of one who carries out a charge adds to the glory of Him Who gave it, the glory of the Begotten to the glory of the Begetter.

But what does eternal life consist of? His own words tell us: That they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom You have sent. Is there any doubt or difficulty here, or any inconsistency? It is life to know the true God; but bare knowledge of Him does not give it. What, then, does He add? And Jesus Christ Whom You have sent. In You, the only true God, the Son pays the honor due to His Father; by adding, And Jesus Christ Whom You have sent, He joins Himself with the true Godhead. The believer draws no line between the Two in his confession, for his hope of life rests in Both, and indeed the true God is inseparable from Him Whose Name follows in the creed. So when we read, That they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom You have sent, these terms Sender and Sent are not meant, under any appearance of distinction or discrimination, to convey a difference between the true Godhead of Father and of Son, but to guide us to the devout confession of Them as Begetter and Begotten.

And so the Son glorifies the Father fully and finally in the words that follow, I have glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do. All the Father's praise comes from the Son, for every praise given to the Son is praise of the Father, since all that He accomplished is what the Father had willed. The Son of God is born as man; but the power of God is in the virgin-birth. The Son of God is seen as man; but God is present in His human actions. The Son of God is nailed to the cross; but on the cross God conquers human death. Christ, the Son of God, dies; but all flesh is made alive in Christ. The Son of God is in hell; but man is carried back to heaven. The praise we bring to Him from Whom Christ's Godhead comes will match our praise of Christ for these works of His. These are the ways in which the Father glorifies the Son on earth; and in return the Son, by works of power, reveals Him from Whom He is to the ignorance of the pagans and to the foolishness of the world. This exchange of glory, given and received, implies no increase of the Godhead, but means the praise offered for the knowledge granted to those who had lived in ignorance of God. What, indeed, could there be that the Father, from Whom are all things, did not richly possess? In what was the Son lacking, in Whom all the fullness of the Godhead had been pleased to dwell? The Father is glorified on earth because the work He had commanded is finished.

Next let us see what this glory is that the Son expects to receive from the Father; then our explanation will be complete. The next words are, I have glorified You on the earth, having completed the work that You have given Me to do. And now, Father, glorify Me with Your own Self with the glory that I had with You before the world existed. I have revealed Your name to men. So it is through the Son's works that the Father is glorified, because He is recognized as God, as the Father of God the Only-begotten, Who for our salvation willed that His Son be born as a man, and born of a virgin; the Son Whose whole life, brought to completion in the Passion, was in keeping with the humiliation of the virgin birth. So, because the Son of God, all-perfect and born from everlasting in the fullness of the Godhead, had now become Man by incarnation and was ready for His death, He prays to be glorified with God, just as He was glorifying His Father on the earth; for at that moment the powers of God were being glorified in the flesh before the eyes of a world that did not know Him. But what is this glory with the Father that He looks for? It is, of course, the glory He had with Him before the world existed. He had the fullness of the Godhead; He still has it, for He is God's Son. But He Who was the Son of God had also become the Son of man, for The Word became flesh. He had not lost what He was before, but He had become what He had not been; He had not given up His own position, yet He had taken on ours; He prays that the nature He had assumed may be raised to the glory He had never renounced. Therefore, since the Son is the Word, and the Word became flesh, and the Word was God, and was in the beginning with God, and the Word was Son before the foundation of the world, this Son, now incarnate, prayed that the flesh might be to the Father what the Son had been. He prayed that the flesh, born in time, might receive the splendor of the everlasting glory, so that the corruption of the flesh might be swallowed up and transformed into the power of God and the purity of the Spirit. It is His prayer to God, the Son's confession of the Father, the plea of the flesh in which all will see Him on Judgment Day, pierced and bearing the marks of the cross; the flesh in which His glory was shown in advance on the Mount, in which He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God, in which Paul saw Him and Stephen worshiped Him.

So the name Father has been revealed to men; the question arises, What is this Father's own name? Yet surely the name of God has never been unknown. Moses heard it from the bush, Genesis announces it at the beginning of the history of creation, the Law has proclaimed it and the prophets have praised it, the history of the world has made mankind familiar with it; even the heathen have worshiped it under a veil of falsehood. Men have never been left ignorant of the name of God. And yet, in actual truth, they were ignorant of it. For no one knows God unless he confesses Him as Father, Father of the Only-begotten Son, and also confesses the Son as a Son not by any partition or extension or procession, but born of Him, as Son of Father, ineffably and incomprehensibly, and keeping the fullness of the Godhead from which and in which He was born as true and infinite and perfect God. This is what the fullness of the Godhead means. If any of these things is lacking, there will not be the fullness that was pleased to dwell in Him. This is the Son's message, His revelation to men in their ignorance. The Father is glorified through the Son when men recognize that He is the Father of so Divine a Son.

The Son, wishing to assure us of the truth of this, His Divine birth, has appointed His works to serve as an illustration, so that from the ineffable power displayed in ineffable deeds we may learn the lesson of the ineffable birth. For instance, when water was made wine, and five loaves fed five thousand men, besides women and children, and twelve baskets were filled with the leftover pieces, we see a fact though we cannot understand it; a deed is done though it baffles our reason; the process cannot be followed, though the result is obvious. It is folly to pry in a spirit of faultfinding when the matter we are inquiring into is one we cannot get to the bottom of. For just as the Father is ineffable because He is Unbegotten, so the Son is ineffable because He is the Only-begotten, since the Begotten is the Image of the Unbegotten. We have to form our idea of an image by using our senses and language; and we must form our idea of what the image represents by the same means. But in this case we, whose faculties can deal only with visible and tangible things, are straining after the invisible and striving to grasp the intangible. Yet we feel no shame and do not reproach ourselves with any irreverence when we doubt and criticize the mysteries and powers of God. How is He the Son? Where is He from? What did the Father lose by His birth? From what portion of the Father was He born? So we ask; yet all the while the evidence of works has been confronting us, works done to assure us that God's action is not limited by our power to understand His methods.

You ask how the Son was born, as the Spirit teaches? I will put a question to you about bodily things. I do not ask how He was born of a virgin; I ask only whether her flesh suffered any loss as it brought His flesh to readiness for birth. Certainly she did not conceive Him in the ordinary way, or undergo the shame of human intercourse, in order to bear Him: yet she bore Him, complete in His human Body, without losing her own completeness. Surely piety requires us to regard as possible with God something that we see became possible through his power in the case of a human being.

But you, whoever you are, who would search into the unsearchable and in all seriousness form an opinion on the mysteries and powers of God — I turn to you for advice and beg you to enlighten me, an unskilled and simple believer in all that God says, on a circumstance I am going to mention. I listen to the Lord's words and, since I believe what is recorded, I am sure that after His Resurrection He repeatedly presented Himself in the Body to be seen by crowds of unbelievers. In any case, He did so for Thomas, who had protested that he would not believe unless he touched His wounds. His words are, Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe. The Lord stoops even to the level of our feeble understanding; to satisfy the doubts of unbelieving minds He works a miracle of His invisible power. You who criticize the ways of heaven, explain His action if you can. The disciples were in a closed room; they had been meeting and holding their assembly in secret since the Passion of the Lord. The Lord presents Himself to strengthen Thomas's faith by meeting his challenge; He gives him His Body to feel and His wounds to touch. Indeed, anyone who wants to be recognized as having suffered wounds must produce the body in which those wounds were received. I ask at what point in the walls of that closed house the Lord entered bodily. The Apostle has recorded the circumstances with careful precision; Jesus came when the doors were shut, and stood in their midst. Did He pass through bricks and mortar, or through solid woodwork, substances whose very nature is to bar the way? For there He stood, bodily present; there was no suspicion of deception. Let your mind's eye follow His path as He enters; let your intellectual vision go with Him as He passes into that closed dwelling. There is no breach in the walls, no door has been unbolted; yet look, He Whose might no barrier can resist stands in their midst. You are a critic of invisible things; I ask you to explain a visible event. Everything stays as solid as it was; no body can work its way through the gaps in wood and stone. The Lord's Body does not disperse itself to come together again after vanishing; yet where does He come from, He Who is standing in their midst? Your senses and your words are powerless to account for it; the fact is certain, but it lies beyond the reach of human explanation. If, as you say, our account of the Divine birth is a lie, then prove that this account of the Lord's entrance is a fiction. If we assume that an event did not happen because we cannot discover how it was done, we make the limits of our understanding the limits of reality. But the certainty of the evidence proves our denial false. The Lord stood in a closed house in the midst of the disciples; the Son was born of the Father. Do not deny that He stood there because your puny wits cannot work out how He got there; give up a disbelief in God the Only-begotten and perfect Son of God the Unbegotten and perfect Father that rests only on the inability of sense and speech to comprehend the transcendent miracle of that birth.

What is more, the whole order of nature would support us against the impiety of doubting the works and powers of God. And yet our disbelief takes up arms even against obvious truth; in our fury we strive to pull even God down from His throne. If we could, we would climb to heaven by bodily strength, throw into confusion the ordered courses of sun and stars, upset the ebb and flow of the tides, stop rivers at their source or make their waters flow backward, and shake the foundations of the world, in the utter irreverence of our rage against the fatherly work of God. It is just as well that our bodily limitations keep us within more modest bounds. Certainly there is no hiding the harm we would do if we could. In one respect we are free; and so with blasphemous insolence we distort the truth and turn our weapons against the words of God.

The Son has said, Father, I have revealed Your Name to men. What reason is there for denunciation or fury here? Do you deny the Father? Why, the Son's primary purpose was to enable us to know the Father. But in fact you do deny Him when you say the Son was not born of Him. Yet why should He have the name of Son if He is, like others, an arbitrary creation of God? I could stand in awe of God as Creator of Christ as well as Founder of the universe; it would be an exercise of power worthy of Him to be the Maker of the One Who made Archangels and Angels, things visible and things invisible, heaven and earth and the whole creation around us. But the work the Lord came to do was not to enable you to recognize the omnipotence of God as Creator of all things, but to enable you to know Him as the Father of the Son Who speaks to you. In heaven there are Powers besides Himself, mighty and eternal Powers; there is only one Only-begotten Son, and the difference between Him and them is not a mere difference in degree of might, but that they were all made through Him. Since He is the true and only Son, let us not make Him a bastard by claiming that He was made out of nothing. You hear the name Son; believe that He is the Son. You hear the name Father; fix it firmly in your mind that He is the Father. Why surround these names with doubt and ill will and hostility? The things of God have names that truly indicate the realities; why force an arbitrary meaning on their obvious sense? Father and Son are spoken of; do not doubt that the words mean what they say. The goal and purpose of the revelation of the Son is that you should know the Father. Why frustrate the labors of the Prophets, the Incarnation of the Word, the Virgin's labor, the effect of miracles, the cross of Christ? It was all spent on you, it is all offered to you, so that through it all Father and Son may be revealed to you. And you replace the truth with a theory of arbitrary action, of creation or adoption. Turn your thoughts to the warfare, the conflict Christ waged. He describes it this way: Father, I have revealed Your Name to men. He does not say, You have created the Creator of all the heavens, or, You have made the Maker of the whole earth. He says, Father, I have revealed Your Name to men. Accept the knowledge your Savior gives you. Be sure that there is a Father Who begot and a Son Who was born; born of the Father, Who is, in the truth of His Nature. Remember that what is revealed is not the Father shown to be God, but God shown to be the Father.

You hear the words, I and the Father are one. Why do you rip and tear the Son away from the Father? They are a unity: an absolute Existence having all things in perfect communion with that absolute Existence from Whom He has His being. When you hear the Son say, I and the Father are one, adjust your view of the facts to the Persons; accept the statement that Begetter and Begotten make about Themselves. Believe that They are One, just as They are also Begetter and Begotten. Why deny the common nature? Why call the true Divinity into question? You hear again, The Father in Me, and I in the Father. The Son's works demonstrate that this is true of Father and of Son. Our science cannot enclose one body in another, or pour one into another like water into wine; but we confess that in Both there is equality of power and fullness of the Godhead. For the Son has received all things from the Father; He is the Likeness of God, the Image of His substance. The words, Image of His substance, distinguish between Christ and the One from Whom He has His being, but only to establish Their distinct existence, not to teach a difference of nature; and Father in Son and Son in Father means that the perfect fullness of the Godhead is in Both. The Father is not diminished by the Son's existence, nor is the Son a mutilated fragment of the Father. An image implies an original; likeness is a relative term. Now nothing can be like God unless it has its source in Him; a perfect likeness can be reflected only from what it represents; an accurate resemblance rules out assuming any element of difference. Do not disturb this likeness; make no separation where truth shows no difference, for He Who said, Let us make man in our image and likeness, by the words Our likeness revealed the existence of Beings, Each like the Other. Do not touch, do not handle, do not pervert. Hold fast to the Names that teach the truth; hold fast to the Son's declaration about Himself. I would not want you to flatter the Son with praises you invent yourself; all is well with you if you are content with the written word.

Again, we must not put such blind confidence in the human intellect as to imagine that we have complete knowledge of the objects of our thought, or that the ultimate problem is solved as soon as we have formed a symmetrical and consistent theory. Finite minds cannot conceive the Infinite; a being that depends on another for its existence cannot attain perfect knowledge either of its Creator or of itself, for its consciousness of itself is colored by its circumstances, and limits are set that its perception cannot pass. Its activity is not self-caused but comes from the Creator, and a being dependent on a Creator possesses none of its faculties perfectly, since its origin lies outside itself. So by an inexorable law it is folly for that being to say that it has perfect knowledge of anything; its powers have limits it cannot change, and only while it is deluded into thinking that its petty bounds are coextensive with infinity can it make the empty boast of possessing wisdom. For it is incapable of wisdom, since its knowledge is limited to the range of its perception and shares the weakness of its dependent existence. And so this masquerade of a finite nature boasting that it possesses the wisdom that springs only from infinite knowledge earns the scorn and ridicule of the Apostle, who calls its wisdom folly. He says, For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the Gospel, not in the language of wisdom, so that the cross of Christ would not be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will reject the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the inquirer of this world? Has God not made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God, God decided to save those who believe through the foolishness of preaching. For the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the weakness of God is stronger than men, and the foolishness of God is wiser than men. So all unbelief is foolishness, for it takes whatever wisdom its own finite perception can reach and, measuring infinity by that petty scale, concludes that what it cannot understand must be impossible. Unbelief is the result of incapacity engaging in argument. Men are sure that an event never happened because they have made up their minds that it could not happen.

So the Apostle, familiar with the narrow assumption of human thought that what it does not know is not true, says that he does not speak in the language of knowledge, so that his preaching would not be in vain. To keep from being regarded as a preacher of foolishness, he adds that the word of the cross is foolishness to those who perish. He knew that the unbelievers held that the only true knowledge was what made up their own wisdom, and that, since their wisdom was aware only of matters within their narrow horizon, the other wisdom, which alone is Divine and perfect, seemed foolishness to them. So their foolishness actually consisted in the feeble imagination that they mistook for wisdom. That is why the very things that are foolishness to those who perish are the power of God to those who are saved; for the saved never use their own inadequate faculties as a measure, but attribute the omnipotence of heaven to the Divine activities. God rejects the wisdom of the wise and the understanding of the prudent in this sense: precisely because they recognize their own foolishness, salvation is granted to those who believe. Unbelievers pass the verdict of foolishness on everything that lies beyond their understanding, while believers leave it to the power and majesty of God to choose the mysteries in which salvation is given. There is no foolishness in the things of God; the foolishness lies in the human wisdom that demands signs and wisdom from God as the condition of belief. It is the foolishness of the Jews to demand signs; they have a certain knowledge of the Name of God through long acquaintance with the Law, but the offense of the cross repels them. The foolishness of the Greeks is to demand wisdom; with Gentile folly and human philosophy they look for the reason why God was lifted up on the cross. And because these things have been hidden in a mystery out of consideration for the weakness of our mental powers, this foolishness of Jews and Greeks turns into unbelief; for they denounce as unworthy of reasonable belief truths that their minds are inherently incapable of understanding. But because the world's wisdom was so foolish — for earlier, through God's wisdom, it did not know God; that is, the splendor of the universe and the wonderful order He planned for His handiwork taught it no reverence for its Creator — God was pleased through the preaching of foolishness to save those who believe, that is, to make everlasting life the lot of mortals through faith in the cross, so that the self-confidence of human wisdom might be put to shame, and salvation found where men had thought foolishness lived. For Christ, Who is foolishness to Gentiles and an offense to Jews, is the Power of God and the Wisdom of God; because what seems weak and foolish to human understanding in the things of God surpasses the thoughts and powers of earth in true wisdom and might.

And so the action of God must not be scrutinized by human faculties; the Creator must not be judged by those who are the work of His hands. We must clothe ourselves in foolishness so that we may gain wisdom; not in the foolishness of reckless conclusions, but in the foolishness of a modest awareness of our own weakness, so that the evidence of God's power may teach us truths that the arguments of earthly philosophy cannot reach. For when we are fully aware of our own foolishness and have felt the helplessness and poverty of our reason, then through the counsels of Divine Wisdom we will be initiated into the wisdom of God, setting no limits to boundless majesty and power and not tying the Lord of nature down to nature's laws, sure that for us the one true faith about God is the faith of which He is both the Author and the Witness.