On the Trinity, Book 6

I have ventured to attack this wild and godless heresy, which asserts that the Son of God is a creature, with full knowledge of the dangers and passions of the time. Great numbers of Churches, in almost every province of the Roman Empire, have already caught the plague of this deadly doctrine; error, persistently taught and falsely claiming to be the truth, has become ingrained in minds that vainly imagine they are loyal to the faith. I know how hard it is to move the will to a thorough recantation when zeal for a mistaken cause is encouraged by a sense of numbers and confirmed by the sanction of general approval. A deluded multitude can be approached only with difficulty and danger. When the crowd has gone astray, it is ashamed to turn back, even when it knows that it is in the wrong. It demands respect for its numbers, and has the confidence to insist that its folly be counted as wisdom. It assumes that its size proves its opinions correct; and so a falsehood that has won general belief is boldly claimed to have established its own truth.

For my own part, what has led me on is not only the claim my vocation makes on me, the duty I owe the Church as a bishop to preach the Gospel diligently. My eagerness to write has grown as the numbers endangered and enslaved by this heretical theory have grown. The thought of the multitudes who might be saved held a rich prospect of joy: if they could know the mysteries of the right faith in God, and abandon the blasphemous principles of human folly, desert the heretics and surrender themselves to God; if they would leave the bait with which the fowler snares his prey, and soar upward in freedom and safety, following Christ as Leader, the prophets as instructors, the apostles as guides, and accepting the perfect faith and sure salvation in the confession of the Father and the Son. In this way, obeying the words of the Lord, Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him, they would be setting themselves to honor the Father by the honor they pay to the Son.

For recently the infection of a deadly evil has spread among mankind, and its ravages have dealt destruction and death on every side. The sudden ruin of cities struck to the ground by earthquake with their people inside them, the terrible slaughter of recurring wars, the widespread death toll of an irresistible plague, have never done such fatal harm as the spread of this heresy throughout the world. For God, to Whom all the dead are alive, destroys only those who destroy themselves. Those who deny Him cannot expect even judgment from Him Who is to be the Judge of all, Whose Majesty will temper with mercy the punishment assigned to the mistakes of ignorance; they can expect only denial.

For this mad heresy does deny; it denies the mystery of the true faith by means of statements borrowed from our confession, which it uses for its own godless ends. The confession of their false belief, which I have already quoted in an earlier book, begins as follows: We confess one God, alone unmade, alone eternal, alone unoriginate, alone true, alone possessing immortality, alone good, alone mighty. So they parade the opening words of our own confession, which reads, One God, alone unmade and alone un-originate, so that this semblance of truth may serve as an introduction to their blasphemous additions. For after a great many words expressing an equally insincere devotion to the Son, their confession continues, God's perfect creature, but not as one of His other creatures, His Handiwork, but not as His other works. And again, after a stretch in which true statements are scattered here and there to veil their impious aim of alleging, as they try to prove by sophistry, that He came into existence out of nothing, they add, He, created and established before the worlds, did not exist before He was born. And finally, as though every point of their false doctrine, that He is to be regarded neither as Son nor as God, were guarded against every assault, they continue: As to such phrases as from Him, and from the womb, and I went out from the Father and have come, if they are understood to mean that the Father extends a part and, as it were, a development of that one substance, then the Father will be of a compound nature and divisible and changeable and corporeal, according to them; and so, as far as their words go, the incorporeal God will be subjected to the properties of matter. But since we are now about to cover the whole ground once more, this time using the language of the Gospels as our weapon against this most godless heresy, it has seemed best to repeat the whole heretical document here, in the sixth book, though we have already given a full copy of it in the fourth, so that our opponents may read it again and compare it, point by point, with our reply, and so be forced, however reluctant and argumentative they are, by the clear teaching of the Evangelists and Apostles, to recognize the truth. The heretical confession reads as follows:

We confess one God, alone unmade, alone eternal, alone unoriginate, alone possessing immortality, alone good, alone mighty, Creator, Ordainer and Disposer of all things, unchangeable and unalterable, righteous and good, God of the Law and the Prophets and the New Testament. We believe that this God gave birth to the Only-begotten Son before all worlds, through Whom He made the world and all things; that He gave birth to Him not in appearance but in truth, according to His own will, so that He is unchangeable and unalterable, God's perfect Creature, but not as one of His other creatures, His Handiwork, but not as His other works; not, as Valentinus maintained, that the Son is a development of the Father, nor, as Manichaeus declared of the Son, a consubstantial part of the Father, nor, as Sabellius has it, making two out of One, Son and Father at once, nor, as Hieracas has it, a light from a light, or a lamp with two flames, nor as if He was previously in existence and afterwards born, or created anew, to be a Son, a notion that you yourself, blessed Pope, have often condemned publicly in the Church and in the assembly of the brothers. But, as we have affirmed, we believe that He was created by the will of God before times and worlds, and has His life and existence from the Father, Who gave Him a share in His own glorious perfections. For when the Father gave Him the inheritance of all things, He did not in doing so deprive Himself of the attributes that are His without origin, since He is the source of all things.

So there are three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God, for His part, is the Cause of all things, utterly unoriginate and separate from all; while the Son, put forth by the Father outside time, and created and established before the worlds, did not exist before He was born, but, born outside time before the worlds, came into being as the Only Son of the Only Father. For He is neither eternal, nor co-eternal, nor co-uncreated with the Father, nor does He have an existence alongside the Father, as some say who posit two unborn principles. But God is before all things, since He is indivisible and the beginning of all. Therefore He is before the Son also, as indeed we have learned from you in your public preaching. Since, then, He has His being from God, along with His glorious perfections and His life, and is entrusted with all things, for this reason God is His Source. For He rules over Him as His God, since He is before Him. As to such phrases as from Him, and from the womb, and I went out from the Father and have come, if they are understood to mean that the Father extends a part and, as it were, a development of that one Substance, then the Father will be of a compound nature and divisible and changeable and corporeal, according to them; and so, as far as their words go, the incorporeal God will be subjected to the properties of matter.

Who can fail to see here the slimy windings of the serpent's track: the coiled adder, its strength gathered for the strike, hiding the deadly weapon of its poisonous fangs within its folds? Soon we shall stretch it out and examine it, and expose the venom of this hidden head. For their plan is first to win us over with certain sound statements, and then to inject the poison of their heresy. They speak pleasant words to us in order to do us secret harm. Yet among all their plausible professions, I nowhere hear God's Son called God; I never hear sonship attributed to the Son. They say much about His having the name of Son, but nothing about His having the nature. That is kept out of sight, so that He may seem to have no right even to the name. They make a show of unmasking other heresies to hide the fact that they are heretics themselves. They strenuously insist that there is One only, One true God, so that they may strip the Son of God of His true and personal Divinity.

And so, although in the last two books I have proved from the teaching of the Law and Prophets that God and God, true God and true God, true God the Father and true God the Son, must be confessed as One true God, by unity of nature and not by confusion of Persons, I must also cite the teaching of the Evangelists and Apostles to present the faith completely. I must show from them that true God, the Son of God, is not of a different, alien nature from the Father's, but possesses the same Divinity while having a distinct existence through a true birth. And indeed, I cannot think that any soul is so senseless as to imagine that, although we know God's self-revelations, we cannot understand them; or, if they can be understood, would not want to understand them, or would dream that human reason can devise improvements on them. But before I begin to discuss the facts contained in these saving mysteries, I must first humble the pride with which these heretics denounce the names of other heresies. I shall hold this clever cloak for their own impiety up to the light. I shall show that this very means of hiding the deadliness of their teaching serves instead to reveal and betray it, and gives a widely effective warning of the true character of this honeyed poison.

For instance, these heretics claim that the Son of God is not from God; that God was not born from God out of, and in, the nature of God. To this end, after solemnly bearing witness to One God, alone true, they refrain from adding The Father. And then, to escape confessing one true Godhead of Father and Son by denying the true birth, they go on, Not, as Valentinus maintained, that the Son is a development of the Father. In this way they think they can discredit the birth of God from God by calling it a development, as though it were a form of the Valentinian heresy. For Valentinus was the author of foul and foolish fantasies; alongside the chief God, he invented a whole household of deities and countless powers called eons, and taught that our Lord Jesus Christ was a development mysteriously brought about by a secret act of will. The faith of the Church, the faith of the Evangelists and Apostles, knows nothing of this imaginary development, sprung from the brain of a reckless and senseless dreamer. It knows nothing of the Depth and Silence and the three times ten eons of Valentinus. It knows only One God the Father, from Whom are all things, and One Jesus Christ, our Lord, through Whom are all things, Who is God born from God. But it occurred to them that He, in being born as God from God, neither took anything away from the Divinity of His Author nor was Himself born as anything other than God; that He became God not by a new beginning of Deity but by birth from the existing God; and that every birth appears, as far as human faculties can judge, to be a development, so that even that birth might be regarded as a development. And these considerations have led them to attack the Valentinian heresy of development as a means of destroying faith in the true birth of the Son. For the experience of ordinary life leads worldly wisdom to suppose that there is no great difference between a birth and a development. The human mind, dull and slow to grasp the things of God, needs to be constantly reminded of the principle I have stated more than once, that analogies drawn from human experience do not apply perfectly to the mysteries of Divine power; that their only value is that this comparison with material objects gives the spirit enough of a notion of heavenly things for us to rise, as by a ladder of nature, to an understanding of the majesty of God. But the birth of God must not be judged by the kind of development that takes place in human births. When One is born from One, God born from God, the circumstances of human birth help us grasp the fact; but a birth that presupposes intercourse and conception and time and labor can give us no clue to the Divine method. When we are told that God was born from God, we must accept as true that He was born, and be content with that. We shall, however, discuss the truth of the Divine birth in its proper place, as the Gospels and the Apostles set it out. Our present task has been to expose this device of heretical ingenuity, this attack on the true birth of Christ, disguised as an attack on a so-called development.

And then, continuing this same fraudulent assault on the faith, their confession goes on like this: Nor, as Manichaeus declared of the Son, a consubstantial part of the Father. They have already denied that He is a development, to escape admitting His birth; now they bring in, labeled with the name of Manichaeus, the doctrine that the Son is a portion of the one Divine substance, and deny it, in order to overturn the belief in God from God. For Manichaeus, the furious opponent of the Law and Prophets, the energetic champion of the devil's cause and blind worshiper of the sun, taught that That which was in the Virgin's womb was a portion of the one Divine substance, and that by the Son we must understand a certain piece of God's substance which was cut off and appeared in the flesh. And so they make the most of this heresy, that in the birth of the Son there was a division of the one substance, and use it as a means of evading the doctrine of the birth of the Only-begotten, and the very name of the unity of substance. Because it is sheer blasphemy to speak of a birth resulting from division of the one substance, they deny any birth at all; every form of birth falls under the condemnation they pass on the Manichaean notion of birth by severance. And again, they abolish the unity of substance, both name and thing, because the heretics hold that the unity is divisible; and they deny that the Son is God from God, by refusing to believe that He truly possesses the Divine nature. Why does this mad heresy profess a pretended reverence, a senseless anxiety? The faith of the Church does, as these insane promoters of error remind us, condemn Manichaeus, for she knows nothing of the Son as a portion. She knows Him as whole God from whole God, as One from One, not severed but born. She is certain that the birth of God involves neither impoverishment of the Begetter nor inferiority in the Begotten. If this is the Church's own invention, reproach her with the follies of a falsely claimed wisdom; but if she has learned it from her Lord, confess that the Begotten knows how He was begotten. She has learned these truths from God the Only-begotten: that Father and Son are One, and that the fullness of the Godhead dwells in the Son. And so she loathes this attribution to the Son of a portion of the one substance; and, because she knows that He was truly born of God, she worships the Son as the rightful Possessor of true Divinity. But for now, let us postpone our full answer to these several allegations, and hurry through the rest of their denunciations.

What follows is this: Nor, as Sabellius has it, making two out of One, Son and Father at once. Sabellius holds this in willful blindness to the revelation of the Evangelists and Apostles. But what we see here is not one heretic honestly denouncing another. It is the wish to leave no point of union between Father and Son that prompts them to reproach Sabellius for dividing an indivisible Person; a division that does not result in the birth of a second Person, but cuts the One Person into two parts, one of which enters the Virgin's womb. But we confess a birth; we reject this confusion of two Persons in One, while still clinging to the Divine unity. That is, we hold that God from God means unity of nature; for that Being Who became God by a true birth from God can draw His substance from no other source than the Divine. And since He continues to draw His being from God, as He drew it at first, He must remain true God forever; and so They Two are One, for He Who is God from God has no nature but the Divine, and no origin but the Divine. But the reason this blasphemous Sabellian confusion of two Persons into One is condemned here is that they want to rob the Church of her true faith in Two Persons in One God. But now I must examine the remaining instances of this perverted ingenuity, to save myself from the reputation of a judge who censures sincere inquirers, moved more by dislike than by genuine fear. I shall show, from the terms with which they close their confession, the deadly conclusion they have skillfully arranged to be its inevitable outcome.

Their next clause is: Nor, as Hieracas has it, a light from a light, or a lamp with two flames, nor as if He was previously in existence, and afterwards born, or created anew, to be a Son. Hieracas ignores the birth of the Only-begotten, and, completely unaware of the meaning of the Gospel revelations, talks of two flames from one lamp. This matched pair of flames, fed by the supply of oil in one bowl, is his illustration of the substance of Father and Son. It is as though that substance were something separate from Either Person, like the oil in the lamp, which is distinct from the two flames though they depend on it for their existence; or like the wick, of one material throughout and burning at both ends, which is distinct from the flames, yet supplies them and connects them. All this is a mere delusion of human folly, which has trusted itself, and not God, for knowledge. But the true faith asserts that God is born from God, as light from light, which pours itself out without diminishing itself, giving what it has yet keeping what it gave. It asserts that by His birth He was what He is, for as He is, so He was born; that His birth was the gift of the existing Life, a gift that did not lessen the store from which it was taken; and that They Two are One, for He from Whom He is born is what He Himself is, and He who was born has neither another source nor another nature, for He is Light from Light. It is to draw people's faith away from this true doctrine that this lantern or lamp of Hieracas is thrown in the faces of those who confess Light from Light. Because the phrase has been used in a heretical sense, and condemned both now and in earlier days, they want to persuade us that there is no true sense in which it can be used. Let heresy abandon these groundless fears at once, and stop claiming to be the protector of the Church's faith on the strength of a reputation for zeal so dishonestly earned. For we allow nothing bodily, nothing lifeless, a place among the attributes of God; whatever is God is perfect God. In Him there is nothing but power, life, light, blessedness, Spirit. That nature contains no dull, material elements; being immutable, it has no incongruities within it. God, because He is God, is unchangeable; and the unchangeable God begot God. Their bond of union is not something outside Themselves, as it is with two flames, or with two wicks of one lamp. The birth of the Only-begotten Son from God is not a prolongation in space, but a begetting; not an extension, but Light from Light. For the unity of light with light is a unity of nature, not an unbroken continuation.

And again, what a wonderful example of heretical ingenuity this is: Nor as if He were previously in existence, and afterwards born or created anew, to be a Son. God, since He was born from God, was certainly not born from nothing, nor from things that do not exist. His birth was the birth of the eternally living nature. Yet, though He is God, He is not identical with the pre-existing God; God was born from God Who existed before Him; in and by His birth He shared the nature of His Source. If we are speaking words of our own, all this is mere irreverence; but if, as we shall prove, God Himself has taught us how to speak, then we are bound to confess the Divine birth in the sense God has revealed. And it is this unity of nature in Father and Son, this ineffable mystery of the living birth, that the madness of heresy is struggling to banish from belief when it says, Nor as if He were previously in existence, and afterwards born, or created anew, to be a Son. Who is senseless enough to suppose that the Father ceased to be Himself; that the same Person Who had previously existed was afterwards born, or created anew, to be the Son? That God disappeared, and that His disappearance was followed by an emergence in birth, when in fact that birth is evidence of the continuous existence of its Author? Or who is so insane as to suppose that a Son can come into existence other than through birth? Who is so devoid of reason as to say that the birth of God resulted in anything other than God being born? The eternal God was not born, but God was born from the eternal God; the nature given in that birth was the very nature of the Begetter. And God by His birth, which was from God into God, received, because His was a true birth, not newly created things but things that were and are the permanent possession of God. So it is not the pre-existent God who was born; yet God was born, and began to exist, out of and with the properties of God. And so we see how heresy, throughout this long prelude, has been treacherously leading up to this most blasphemous doctrine. Since its aim is to deny God the Only-begotten, it starts with what claims to be a defense of truth, and goes on to assert that Christ is born not from God but out of nothing, and that His birth is due to the Divine decree of creation from the non-existent.

And then again, after an interval designed to prepare us for what is coming, their heresy launches this assault —While the Son, put forth outside time, and created and established before the worlds, did not exist before He was born. This He did not exist before He was born is a form of words by which the heresy flatters itself that it gains two ends: support for its blasphemy, and a screen for itself if its doctrine is put on trial. Support for its blasphemy, because if He did not exist before He was born, He cannot be of one nature with His eternal Origin. He must have His beginning out of nothing if He has no powers except those that began with His birth. And a screen for its heresy, because if this statement is condemned, it provides a ready answer. He who did exist, it will be said, could not be born; since He was already in existence, He could not possibly come into being by going through the process of birth, for the very meaning of birth is the entry into existence of the being that is born. Fool and blasphemer! Who imagines birth in the case of Him Who is the unborn and eternal? How can we think of God, Who is, being born, when being born implies the process of birth? It is the birth of God the Only-begotten from God His Father that you are trying to disprove, and your purpose was to escape confessing that truth by means of this He did not exist before He was born: the confession that God, from Whom the Son of God was born, existed eternally, and that it is from His enduring nature that God the Son draws His existence through birth. If, then, the Son is born from God, you must confess that His is a birth from that enduring nature; not a birth of the pre-existing God, but a birth of God from the pre-existent God.

But the fiery zeal of this heresy is such that it cannot keep itself from bursting out in passion. In its effort to prove, in keeping with its assertion that He did not exist before He was born, that the Son was born from the non-existent, that is, that He was not born from God the Father to be God the Son by a true and perfect birth, it ends its confession by rising in rage and hatred to the highest possible pitch of blasphemy: As to such phrases as from Him, and from the womb, and I went out from the Father and have come, if they are understood to mean that the Father extends a part, and, as it were, a development of that one substance, then the Father will be of a compound nature and divisible and changeable and corporeal, according to them; and so, as far as their words go, the incorporeal God will be subjected to the properties of matter. Defending the true faith against the falsehoods of heresy would indeed be a toilsome and difficult task if we had to follow their trains of thought as far as they have plunged into the depths of godlessness. Fortunately for our purpose, it is shallowness of thought that has bred their eagerness to blaspheme. And so, while it is easy to refute the folly, it is hard to correct the fool, for he will neither think his way to right conclusions himself nor accept them when someone else offers them. Yet I trust that those who are chained by error through pious ignorance, not through willful folly bred of conceit, will welcome correction. For our demonstration of the truth will give convincing proof that heresy is nothing but folly.

You said in your folly, and you still repeat it today, unaware that your wisdom is defiance of God, As for phrases such as from Him, and from the womb, and I went out from the Father and have come, I ask you, Are these phrases words of God, or are they not? They certainly are His; and since God speaks them about Himself, we are bound to accept them exactly as they were spoken. We will speak about the phrases themselves, and the precise force of each, in the proper place. For now I will only put this question to the intelligence of every reader: When we see From Himself, are we to take it as meaning From someone else, or From nothing, or are we to accept it as the truth? It is not From someone else, for it is From Himself; that is, His Godhead has no source other than God. It is not From nothing, for it is From Himself; this declares the nature from which His birth comes. It is not Himself, but From Himself; this states that They are related as Father and Son. And next, when the revelation From the womb is given, I ask whether we can possibly believe that He is born from nothing, when the truth of His birth is clearly shown in terms borrowed from bodily functions. It is not because He has bodily members that God records the generation of the Son in the words, I bore You from the womb before the morning star. He uses language that helps our understanding, to assure us that His Only-begotten Son was ineffably born of His own true Godhead. His purpose is to train human faculties up to the knowledge of the faith by clothing Divine truths in words that describe human circumstances. So when He says, From the womb, He is teaching us that His Only-begotten was born in the Divine sense, and did not come into existence through creation out of nothing. And lastly, when the Son said, I went out from the Father and have come, did He leave any doubt whether His Divinity was derived from the Father or not? He went out from the Father; that is, He had a birth, and the Father, and no one else, gave Him that birth. He testifies that the One from Whom He says He came is the Author of His being. The proof and interpretation of all this will be given later.

But meanwhile let us see what grounds these men have for the confidence with which they forbid us to accept as true what God says about Himself; statements whose authenticity they do not deny. What more grievous insult could human folly and insolence hurl at God's self-revelation than to condemn it by correcting it? For not even doubt and criticism satisfy them. What could be more grievous than this profane handling and disputing of the nature and power of God? Than the presumption of saying that if the Son is from God, then God is changeable and corporeal, since He has extended or developed a part of Himself to be His Son? Why this anxiety to prove that God is immutable? We confess the birth, we proclaim the Only-begotten, because God has taught us so. You, in order to banish the birth and the Only-begotten from the faith of the Church, confront us with an unchangeable God, incapable by His nature of extension or development. I could point to instances of birth, even among natures belonging to this world, that would refute this wretched delusion that every birth must be an extension. And I could save you from the error that a being can come into existence only at the cost of loss to the one that begets it, for there are many examples of life passed on from one living creature to another without bodily intercourse. But it would be impious to deal in proofs when God has spoken, and the height of madness to deny His authority to give us a faith, when our very worship confesses that He alone can give us life. For if life comes through Him alone, must He not be the Author of the faith on which that life depends? And if we consider Him an untrustworthy witness about Himself, how can we be sure of the life He gives?

For you, most godless of heretics, attribute the birth of the Son to an act of creative will; you say that He is not born from God, but that He was created and came into existence by the Creator's choice. And the unity of the Godhead, as you interpret it, will not allow Him to be God, for since God remains One, the Son cannot retain His original nature in the state into which He has been born. Through creation, you say, He has been given a substance different from the Divine, although, being in some sense the Only-begotten, He is superior to God's other creatures and works. You say that He was raised up so that He in turn might perform the task entrusted to Him of raising up the created world, but that His birth did not give Him the Divine nature. According to you, He was born in the sense that He came into existence out of nothing. You call Him a Son, not because He was born from God, but because He was created by God. For you recall that God has considered even holy men worthy of this title, and you think it is given to the Son in exactly the same sense in which the words, I have said, You are Gods, and all of you sons of the Most High, were spoken; that is, that He bears the name through the Giver's condescension, and not by right of nature. So in your eyes He is Son by adoption, God by gift of the title, Only-begotten by favor, First-born in date, in every sense a creature, in no sense God. For you hold that His generation was not a birth from God in the natural sense, but the beginning of the life of a created substance.

And now, Almighty God, I must first ask You to forgive my excessive indignation and allow me to address You; and next, to grant me, dust and ashes though I am, yet bound to You in loyal devotion, freedom of speech in this debate. There was a time when I, poor wretch, did not exist, before my life and consciousness and personality began to exist. I owe my life to Your mercy; and I do not doubt that in Your goodness You gave me my birth for my good, for You, Who have no need of me, would never have made the beginning of my life the beginning of evil. And then, when You had breathed the breath of life into me and given me the power of thought, You taught me to know You through the sacred books given to us by Your servants Moses and the prophets. From them I learned Your revelation that we must not worship You as a solitary God. For their pages taught me of God, not different from You in nature but One with You in a mysterious unity of substance. I learned that You are God in God, not by any mingling or confusion but by Your very nature, since the Divinity that is Yourself dwells in Him Who is from You. But the true doctrine of the perfect birth revealed that You, the Indwelt, and You, the Indweller, are not One Person, and yet that You dwell in Him Who is from You. And the voices of Evangelists and Apostles repeat the lesson, and the very words that fell from the holy mouth of Your Only-begotten are recorded, telling how Your Son, God the Only-begotten from You the Unbegotten God, was born of the Virgin as man to fulfill the mystery of my salvation; how You dwell in Him by virtue of His true generation from You, and He in You because of the nature given in His enduring birth from You.

What is this hopeless quagmire of error into which You have plunged me? For I have learned all this and have come to believe it; this faith is so ingrained in my mind that I have neither the power nor the wish to change it. Why deceive an unhappy man like this, and ruin a poor wretch in body and soul by deluding him with falsehoods about You? After the Red Sea had been divided, the splendor on the face of Moses as he came down from the Mount deceived me. In Your presence he had gazed upon all the mysteries of heaven, and I believed what he said about You, dictated by You. And David, the man found to be after Your own heart, has betrayed me to destruction, and Solomon, who was thought worthy of the gift of Divine Wisdom, and Isaiah, who saw the Lord of Sabaoth and prophesied, and Jeremiah, consecrated in the womb before he was formed to be the prophet of nations to be rooted out and planted, and Ezekiel, the witness of the mystery of the Resurrection, and Daniel, the beloved man, who had knowledge of the times, and the whole holy company of the Prophets; and Matthew too, chosen to proclaim the whole mystery of the Gospel, first a tax collector, then an Apostle, and John, the Lord's close friend, and therefore worthy to reveal the deepest secrets of heaven, and blessed Simon, who after his confession of the mystery was made the foundation stone of the Church and received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and all his companions who spoke by the Holy Spirit, and Paul, the chosen vessel, changed from persecutor into Apostle, who as a living man stayed under the deep sea and ascended into the third heaven, who was in Paradise before his martyrdom, whose martyrdom was the perfect offering of a flawless faith; all of them have deceived me.

These are the men who taught me the doctrines I hold, and I am so deeply steeped in their teaching that no antidote can free me from their influence. Forgive me, God Almighty, that I am powerless to change and willing to die in this belief. These propagators of blasphemy, as they seem to me, are a product of these last times, too modern to be of any use to me. It is too late for them to correct the faith I received from You. Before I had ever heard their names, I had put my trust in You, had received regeneration from You and become Yours, as I still am. I know that You are omnipotent; I do not expect You to reveal to me the mystery of that ineffable birth, which is a secret between You and Your Only-begotten. Nothing is impossible for You, and I do not doubt that in begetting Your Son You exerted Your full omnipotence. To doubt it would be to deny that You are omnipotent. For my own birth teaches me that You are good, and so I am sure that in the birth of Your Only-begotten You withheld no good gift from Him. I believe that all that is Yours is His, and all that is His is Yours. The creation of the world is evidence enough to me that You are wise; and I am sure that Your Wisdom, Who is like You, must have been begotten from You. And in my eyes You are truly One God; I will never believe that in Him Who is God from You there is anything that is not Yours. Judge me in Him, if it is a sin in me that, through Your Son, I have trusted too well in the Law and the Prophets and the Apostles.

But this wild talk must stop; the rhetoric that exposes heretical folly must give way to the hard work of framing arguments. In this way, I trust, those among them who are capable of being saved will turn toward the true faith taught by the Evangelists and Apostles, and recognize Him Who is the true Son of God, not by adoption but by nature. For the plan of our reply must be first to prove that He is the Son of God, and therefore fully endowed with the Divine nature whose possession constitutes His Sonship. For the chief aim of the heresy we are considering is to deny that our Lord Jesus Christ is true God and truly the Son of God. Many proofs assure us that our Lord Jesus Christ is, and is revealed to be, God the Only-begotten, truly the Son of God. His Father bears witness to it, He Himself asserts it, the Apostles proclaim it, the faithful believe it, devils confess it, Jews deny it, the heathen recognized it at His passion. The name of God is given to Him by right of absolute ownership, not because He has been admitted to share the title with others. Every work and word of Christ surpasses the power of those who bear the title of sons; the foremost lesson we learn from all that stands out most in His life is that He is the Son of God, and that He does not hold the name of Son as a title shared with a large company of friends.

I will not weaken the evidence for this truth by mixing in words of my own. Let us hear the Father, when the baptism of Jesus Christ had taken place, speaking, as He often did, about His Only-begotten, to keep His visible body from misleading us into failing to recognize Him as the Son. His words are: This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased. Is the truth presented here in dim outline? Is the proclamation made in an uncertain voice? The promise of the Virgin birth brought by the angel from the Holy Spirit, the guiding star of the Magi, the reverence paid to Him in His cradle, the majesty, attested by the Baptist, of Him Who condescended to be baptized: all these are judged insufficient witness to His glory. The Father Himself speaks from heaven, and His words are, This is My Son. What does this evidence mean, given not by titles but by pronouns? Titles may be attached to names at will; pronouns are a sure indication of the persons they refer to. And here, in This and My, we have the clearest of indications. Note the true meaning and purpose of the words. You have read, I have begotten sons, and have raised them up; but you did not read there My sons, for He had begotten those sons for Himself by division among the Gentiles and from the people of His inheritance. And so that we would not suppose that the name Son was given to God the Only-begotten as an additional title, to signify His share by adoption in some joint inheritance, His true nature is expressed by the pronoun that gives the unmistakable sense of ownership. I will let you interpret the word Son, if you like, as meaning that Christ is one of a number, if you can produce an instance where it is said of another of that number, This is My Son. If, on the other hand, This is My Son is His own unique designation, why accuse the Father of making an unfounded claim when He asserts His ownership? When He says This is My Son, may we not paraphrase His meaning like this: He has given others the title of sons, but He Himself is My own Son; I have given the name to multitudes by adoption, but this Son is My very own. Do not look for another, or you may lose your faith that This is He. By gesture and by voice, by This, and My, and Son, I declare Him to you. And now what reasonable excuse is left for lack of faith? This, and nothing less than this, is what the Father's voice proclaimed. He willed that we not be left ignorant of the nature of Him Who came to be baptized so that He might fulfill all righteousness; He willed that by the voice of God we might recognize as the Son of God Him Who was visible as Man, to accomplish the mystery of our salvation.

And again, because the life of believers depended on confessing this faith — for there is no other way to eternal life than the assurance that Jesus Christ, God the Only-begotten, is the Son of God— the Apostles heard the voice from heaven once more repeating the same message, to strengthen this life-giving belief, the denial of which is death. When the Lord, clothed in splendor, stood on the Mountain with Moses and Elias at His side, and the three Pillars of the churches who had been chosen as witnesses to the truth of the vision and the voice, the Father spoke from heaven like this: This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased; hear Him. The glory they saw did not sufficiently attest His majesty; the voice proclaims, This is My Son. The Apostles cannot face the glory of God; mortal eyes grow dim in its presence. The trust of Peter and James and John fails them, and they fall prostrate in fear. But this solemn declaration, spoken from the Father's knowledge, comes to relieve them; He is revealed as His Father's own true Son. And beyond the witness of This and My to His true Sonship, the words are spoken, Hear Him. It is the witness of the Father from heaven, confirming the witness borne by the Son on earth; for we are told to hear Him. Though this recognition of the Son by the Father removes all doubt, we are also told to accept the Son's self-revelation. When the Father's voice commands us to show our obedience by hearing Him, we are ordered to place absolute confidence in the words of the Son. Since, then, the Father has shown His will in this message to us to hear the Son, let us hear what the Son has told us about Himself.

I can imagine no one so lacking in ordinary reason as to recognize in each of the Gospels the Son's confessions of the humiliation He submitted to in taking a body — as for instance His often repeated words, Father, glorify Me, and You shall see the Son of Man, and The Father is greater than I, and, more strongly, Now My soul is exceedingly troubled, and even this, My God, My God, why have You forsaken me? and many more, which I will speak of in due time — and yet, in the face of these constant expressions of His humility, to accuse Him of presumption because He calls God His Father, as when He says, Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted shall be rooted up, or, You have made my Father's house a house of merchandise. I can imagine no one foolish enough to regard His consistent assertion that God is His Father not as the simple truth sincerely stated from sure knowledge, but as a bold and baseless claim. We cannot denounce this constantly professed humility as an insolent demand for another's rights, a seizing of what is not His own, a usurping of powers that only God can wield. Nor, when He calls Himself the Son, as in, For God did not send His Son into this world to condemn the world, but so that the world through Him might be saved, and in, Do you believe in the Son of God? can we accuse Him of a presumption equal to that of calling God His Father. But what else is this but such an accusation, if we grant Jesus Christ the name of Son only by adoption? Are we not charging Him, when He calls God His Father, with daring to make a baseless claim? The Father's voice from heaven says, Hear Him. I hear Him saying, Father, I thank You, and Do you say that I blasphemed, because I said, I am the Son of God? If I may not believe these names and take them to mean what they assert, how am I to trust and to understand? No hint of another meaning is given. The Father bears witness from heaven, This is My Son; the Son for His part speaks of My Father's house, and My Father. Confessing that name brings salvation, when faith is demanded in the question, Do you believe in the Son of God? The pronoun My shows that the noun that follows belongs to the speaker. What right, I ask, do you heretics have to suppose otherwise? You contradict the Father's word and the Son's assertion; you empty language of its meaning, and twist the words of God into a sense they cannot bear. On you alone rests the guilt of this shameless blasphemy, that God has lied about Himself.

And so, although nothing but a sincere belief that these names truly mean what they say — that when we read This is My Son and My Father, the words really indicate Persons of Whom, and to Whom, they were spoken — can make them intelligible, yet, so that no one supposes that Son and Father are titles, the one merely of adoption, the other merely of dignity, let us see what attributes the Son Himself attaches to His name of Son. He says, All things have been handed over to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to Whom the Son will reveal Him. Are the words we are speaking of, This is My Son and My Father, consistent or not with No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son? For only by the witness each bears to the other can the Son be known through the Father, and the Father through the Son. We hear the voice from heaven; we also hear the words of the Son. We have as little excuse for not knowing the Son as we have for not knowing the Father. All things have been handed over to Him; there is no exception to this All. If They possess equal might; if They share an equal mutual knowledge hidden from us; if these names of Father and Son express the relation between Them, then, I ask, are They not in truth what They are in name, wielders of the same omnipotence, shrouded in the same impenetrable mystery? God does not speak in order to deceive. The Fatherhood of the Father and the Sonship of the Son are literal truths. And now learn how the facts bear out the truths these names reveal.

The Son speaks like this: For the works which the Father has given Me to finish, the very works that I do, bear witness to Me that the Father has sent Me; and the Father Himself who sent Me has borne witness to Me. God the Only-begotten proves His Sonship by appealing not only to the name but to the power; the works He does are evidence that He has been sent by the Father. What fact, I ask, do these works prove? That He was sent. That He was sent is used as proof of His obedience as a Son and of His Father's authority: for the works He does could not possibly be done by anyone other than Him Who is sent by the Father. Yet the evidence of His works fails to convince the unbelieving that the Father sent Him. For He goes on, And the Father Himself who sent Me has borne witness to Me; and you have neither heard His voice nor seen His form. What was this witness of the Father about Him? Turn the pages of the Gospels and review what they contain. Read us other attestations given by the Father besides those we have already heard: This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased, and You are My Son. John, who heard these words, did not need them, for He already knew the truth. It was for our instruction that the Father spoke. But this is not all. John in the wilderness was honored with this revelation; the Apostles were not to be denied the same assurance. It came to them in the very same words, but with an addition which John did not receive. He had been a prophet from the womb, and did not need the commandment, Hear Him. Yes, I will hear Him, and I will hear no one but Him and His Apostle, who heard for my instruction. Even if the books contained no further witness from the Father to the Son than that He is the Son, I still have, to confirm the truth, the evidence of His Father's works, which He does. What is this modern slander, that His name is a gift by adoption, His Godhead a lie, His titles a pretense? We have the Father's witness to His Sonship; by works equal to the Father's, the Son bears witness to His own equality with the Father. Why such blindness to His obvious possession of the true Sonship that He both claims and displays? It is not through condescending kindness on the part of God the Father that Christ bears the name of Son; He did not earn the title by holiness, as many have won it by enduring hardship in confessing the faith. Such sonship is not by right; it is by a favor worthy of Himself that God bestows the title. But what is indicated by This, and My, and Hear Him, is different in kind from that. It is the true and real and genuine Sonship.

And indeed the Son never claims for Himself less than this designation, given Him by His Father, contains. The Father's words, This is My Son, reveal His nature; the words that follow, Hear Him, summon us to listen to the mystery and the faith that He came down from heaven to bring, and to learn that, if we want to be saved, our confession must be a copy of His teaching. And in the same way the Son Himself teaches us, in His own words, that He was truly born and truly came — You neither know Me, nor do you know where I am from, for I have not come of Myself, but He who sent Me is true, Whom you do not know, but I know Him, for I am from Him, and He has sent Me. No one knows the Father; the Son often assures us of this. The reason He says that no one knows Him but Himself is that He is from the Father. Is He from Him, I ask, as the result of an act of creation, or of a genuine birth? If it is an act of creation, then all created things are from God. How is it, then, that none of them knows the Father, when the Son says that the reason He has this knowledge is that He is from Him? If He is created, not born, we will see in Him a resemblance to other beings who are from God. Since on this supposition all are from God, why is He not as ignorant of the Father as the others are? But if this knowledge of the Father is unique to Him Who is from the Father, must it not also be unique to Him that He is from the Father? That is, must He not be the true Son, born from the nature of God? For the reason He alone knows God is that He alone is from God. You see, then, a knowledge unique to Himself, resulting from a birth that is also unique to Himself. You recognize that He is from the Father not by an act of creative power but through a true birth, and that this is why He alone knows the Father, Who is unknown to all the other beings that are from Him.

But He immediately adds, For I am from Him, and He has sent Me, to bar heresy from violently assuming that His being from God dates from the time of His Advent. The Gospel's revelation of the mystery proceeds in a logical sequence: first He is born, then He is sent. Similarly, in the earlier declaration, we were told of ignorance, first of Who He is, and then of where He is from. For the words, I am from Him, and He has sent Me, contain two separate statements, as do the words, You neither know Me, nor do you know where I am from. Every man is born in the flesh; yet does not the common awareness of all people hold that every man springs from God? How, then, can Christ assert that either He or the source of His being is unknown? He can do so only by tracing His immediate parentage to the ultimate Author of existence; and once He has done this, He can demonstrate their ignorance of God by their ignorance of the fact that He is the Son of God. Let the victims of this wretched delusion reflect on the words, You neither know Me, nor do you know where I am from. All things, they argue, are from nothing; they allow no exception. They even dare to misrepresent God the Only-begotten as having sprung from nothing. How can we explain the blasphemers' ignorance of Christ and of Christ's origin? The very fact that, as the Scripture says, they do not know where He is from points to the unknowable origin from which He springs. If we can say of a thing that it came into existence out of nothing, then we are not ignorant of its origin; we know that it was made out of nothing, and that is definite knowledge. Now He Who came is not the Author of His own being; but He Who sent Him is true, and the blasphemers do not know Him. It was He Who sent Him; and they do not know that He was the Sender. So the Sent is from the Sender, from Him Whom they do not know as His Author. The reason they do not know Who Christ is, is that they do not know from Whom He is. No one who denies that He was born can confess the Son; no one who has formed the opinion that He is from nothing can understand that He was born. And indeed He is so far from being made out of nothing that the heretics cannot tell where He is from.

Those who separate the Divine name from the Divine nature are utterly ignorant; ignorant, and content to be ignorant. But let them listen to the rebuke the Son gives unbelievers for lacking this knowledge, when the Jews said that God was their Father: If God were your Father, you would surely love Me; for I went forth from God, and have come; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. Here the Son of God has no word of blame for the devout confidence of those who join the confession that He is true God, the Son of God, with their own claim to be God's sons. What He blames is the insolence of the Jews in daring to claim God as their Father while they did not love Him, the Son: — If God were your Father, you would surely love Me; for I went forth from God. All who have God as their Father through faith have Him as Father through the same faith by which we confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. But to confess that He is the Son in a sense that covers the whole company of saints, to say in effect that He is one of the sons of God — what faith is there in that? Are not all the others sons in that sense, even though they are feeble created beings? What makes a faith that has confessed Jesus Christ as the Son of God eminent, if He, as one of a multitude of sons, has only the name of the Son and not the nature? This unbelief has no love for Christ; it makes a mockery of the faith for these perverters of the truth to claim God as their Father. If He were their Father, they would love Christ because He had gone forth from God. And now I must inquire into the meaning of this going forth from God. His going forth is obviously different from His coming, for the two are mentioned side by side in this passage, I went forth from God and have come. To clarify the separate meanings of I went forth from God and I have come, He immediately adds, Nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. He tells us that He is not the source of His own existence in the words, Nor have I come of Myself. In them He tells us that He has proceeded forth a second time from God, and has been sent by Him. But when He tells us that those who call God their Father must love Him because He has gone forth from God, He makes His birth the reason for their love. Went forth carries our thoughts back to the incorporeal birth, for it is by loving Christ, Who was born from Him, that we must gain the right to claim God devoutly as our Father. For when the Son says, He who hates Me hates My Father also, this My asserts a relation to the Father that no one else shares. On the other hand, He condemns the man who claims God as his Father and does not love the Son, for taking a wrongful liberty with the Father's name, since whoever hates Him, the Son, must hate the Father also, and no one can be devoted to the Father except those who love the Son. For the one and only reason He gives for loving the Son is His origin from the Father. The Son, therefore, is from the Father, not by His Advent, but by His birth; and only those who believe that the Son is from Him can love the Father.

The Lord's words bear witness to this — I do not say to you that I will ask the Father for you, for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me, and believe that I went forth from God, and have come from the Father into this world. A complete faith concerning the Son, which accepts and loves the truth that He went forth from God, has access to the Father without needing Him to intervene. The confession that the Son was born and sent from God wins it a direct hearing and love from Him. So the account of His birth and coming must be taken in the strictest and most literal sense. I went forth from God, He says, conveying that His nature is exactly the one given Him by His birth; for what being but God could go forth from God, that is, could come into existence by birth from Him? Then He continues, And have come from the Father into this world. To assure us that this going forth from God means birth from the Father, He tells us that He came from the Father into this world. The latter statement refers to His incarnation, the former to His nature. And again, by recording first the fact of His going forth from God, and then His coming from the Father, He forbids us to identify the going with the coming. Coming from the Father and going forth from God are not synonymous; they might be paraphrased as 'Birth' and 'Presence,' and they differ in meaning as much as these do. It is one thing to have gone forth from God and entered by birth into a substantial existence; it is another to have come from the Father into this world to accomplish the mysteries of our salvation.

In the order of our defense, as I have arranged it in my mind, this seems the most convenient place to prove that, thirdly, the Apostles believed our Lord Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, not merely in name but in nature, not by adoption but by birth. It is true that many of the weightiest words of God the Only-begotten about Himself remain unmentioned, words in which the truth of His Divine birth is set out so clearly as to silence any whisper of objection. Yet since it would be unwise to burden the reader's mind with a pile of evidence, and ample proof of the genuineness of His birth has already been given, I will hold back the rest of His sayings until later stages of our inquiry. For we have arranged the course of our argument so that now, after hearing the Father's witness and the Son's self-revelation, we are to be instructed by the Apostles' faith in the true and, as we must confess, the truly born Son of God. We must see whether they could find in the Lord's words, I went forth from God, any meaning other than this: that there was in Him a birth of the Divine nature.

After many dark sayings spoken in parables by Him Whom they already knew as the Christ foretold by Moses and the Prophets, Whom Nathanael had confessed as the Son of God and King of Israel, Who had Himself reproached Philip, when he asked about the Father, for not perceiving from the works He did that the Father was in Him and He in the Father; after He had already often taught them that He was sent from the Father; still, it was not until they had heard Him assert that He had gone forth from God that they confessed, in the words that immediately follow in the Gospel — His disciples said to Him, Now You are speaking plainly, and not in a proverb. Now we are sure that You know all things, and do not need anyone to ask You; by this we believe that You went forth from God. What was so marvelous in this form of words He had used, Went forth from God? Holy and blessed men, who for the reward of your faith have received the keys of the kingdom of heaven and power to bind and to loose in heaven and on earth, had you seen works so great, so truly Divine, performed by our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and do you still profess that you did not attain the knowledge of the truth until He had first told you that He had gone forth from God? And yet you had seen water at the wedding turned into the wedding wine; one nature becoming another nature, whether by change, or by development, or by creation. And your hands had broken the five loaves into a meal for that great multitude, and when all were satisfied you had found that twelve baskets were needed to hold the leftover pieces of the loaves; a small quantity of matter, in the process of relieving hunger, had multiplied into a great quantity of matter of the same nature. And you had seen withered hands regain their suppleness, the tongues of mute men loosened into speech, the feet of the lame made swift to run, the eyes of the blind given sight, and life restored to the dead. Lazarus, who already stank, had risen to his feet at a word. He was summoned from the tomb and came out at once, with no pause between the word and its fulfillment. He was standing before you, a living man, while the air was still carrying the odor of death to your nostrils. I say nothing of other exercises of His mighty, His Divine powers. And is it, despite all this, only after you heard Him say, I went forth from God, that you understood Who it was that had been sent from heaven? Is this the first time the truth has been told to you without a proverb? The first time the powers of His nature made it plain to you that He went forth from God? And this despite His silent scrutiny of your intentions, despite His not needing to ask you about anything as though He were ignorant, despite His universal knowledge? For all these things, done in the power and the nature of God, are evidence that He must have gone forth from God.

The holy Apostles did not take this to mean that He had gone forth from God in the sense of having been sent. For they had often heard Him confess in His earlier discourses that He was sent; but what they hear now is the explicit statement that He had gone forth from God. This opens their eyes to perceive His Divine nature from His works. The fact that He had gone forth from God makes His true Divinity clear to them, and so they say, Now we are sure that You know all things, and do not need anyone to ask You; by this we believe that You went forth from God. The reason they believe that He went forth from God is that He both can and does perform the works of God. Their perfect assurance of His Divine nature comes from knowing, not that He has come from God, but that He did go forth from God. Accordingly, we find that it is this truth, heard now for the first time, that clinches their faith. The Lord had made two statements: I went forth from God, and I have come from the Father into this world. One of these, I have come from the Father into this world, they had often heard, and it causes no surprise. But their reply makes it plain that they now believe and understand the other, that is, I went forth from God. Their answer, By this we believe that You went forth from God, responds to it, and to it alone; they do not add, 'And have come from the Father into this world.' One statement is welcomed with a declaration of faith; the other is passed over in silence. The confession was wrung from them by the sudden presentation of a new truth, which convinced their reason and compelled them to declare their certainty. They already knew that He, like God, could do all things; but His birth, which accounted for that omnipotence, had not been revealed. They knew that He had been sent from God, but they did not know that He had gone forth from God. Now at last, taught by this saying to understand the ineffable and perfect birth of the Son, they confess that He had spoken to them without a proverb.

For God is not born from God by the ordinary process of human childbirth; this is no case of one being issuing from another through the working of natural forces. That birth is pure and perfect and stainless; indeed, we should call it a proceeding forth rather than a birth. For it is One from One: no partition, or withdrawal, or lessening, or outflow, or extension, or undergoing of change, but the birth of living nature from living nature. It is God going forth from God, not a creature picked out to bear the name of God. His existence did not begin out of nothing, but went forth from the Eternal; and this going forth is rightly called a birth, though it would be false to call it a beginning. For the proceeding forth of God from God is something entirely different from the coming into existence of a new substance. And though our grasp of this ineffable truth cannot be defined in words, the teaching of the Son, as He reveals to us that He went forth from God, gives it the certainty of an assured faith.

A belief that the Son of God is Son in name only and not in nature is not the faith of the Gospels and of the Apostles. If this is a mere title, to which adoption is His only claim; if He is not the Son by virtue of having proceeded forth from God, why, I ask, did the blessed Simon Bar-Jona confess to Him, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God? Because He shared with all mankind the power of being born as one of the sons of God through the sacrament of regeneration? If Christ is the Son of God only in this titular way, what was the revelation made to Peter, not by flesh and blood, but by the Father in heaven? What praise could he deserve for making a declaration that applied to everyone? What credit was due to him for stating a fact everyone knew? If He is Son by adoption, what made Peter's confession blessed, when it paid the Son a tribute to which, in that case, He had no more right than any member of the company of saints? The Apostle's faith penetrates a region closed to human reasoning. He had no doubt often heard, He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me. So he knew well that Christ had been sent; he had heard Him, Whom he knew to have been sent, make the declaration, All things have been delivered to Me by the Father, and no one knows the Son but the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son. What then is this truth that the Father now reveals to Peter, which receives the praise due to a blessed confession? It cannot have been that the names 'Father' and 'Son' were new to him; he had heard them often. Yet he speaks words that no human tongue had ever framed before: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. For though Christ, while dwelling in the body, had declared Himself to be the Son of God, now for the first time the Apostle's faith had recognized in Him the presence of the Divine nature. Peter is praised not merely for his tribute of adoration, but for his recognition of the mysterious truth; for confessing not only Christ, but Christ the Son of God. It would clearly have been enough as an act of reverence had he said, You are the Christ, and nothing more. But it would have been a hollow confession had Peter only hailed Him as Christ without confessing Him as the Son of God. And so his words You are declare that what is said of Him is strictly and exactly true to His nature. Next, the Father's utterance, This is My Son, had revealed to Peter that he must confess You are the Son of God, for in the words This is, God the Revealer points Him out, and the response, You are, is the believer's welcome to the truth. And this is the rock of confession on which the Church is built. But the perceptive powers of flesh and blood cannot reach the recognition and confession of this truth. It is a mystery, Divinely revealed, that Christ must be not only named, but believed to be, the Son of God. Was it only the Divine name, or was it not rather the Divine nature, that was revealed to Peter? If it was the name, he had heard it often from the Lord, Who proclaimed Himself the Son of God. What honor, then, did he deserve for announcing the name? No; it was not the name; it was the nature, for the name had been proclaimed again and again.

It is this faith that is the foundation of the Church; through this faith the gates of hell cannot prevail against her. This is the faith that has the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever this faith has loosed or bound on earth will be loosed or bound in heaven. This faith is the Father's gift by revelation: the knowledge that we must not imagine a false Christ, a creature made out of nothing, but must confess Him the Son of God, truly possessing the Divine nature. What blasphemous madness and pitiful folly it is that will not heed the venerable age and faith of that blessed martyr, Peter himself, for whom prayer was made to the Father that his faith might not fail in temptation; who twice repeated the declaration of love for God demanded of him, and was grieved to be tested by a third renewal of the question, as though his were a doubtful and wavering devotion, and then, because this third trial had cleansed him of his weaknesses, was rewarded with hearing the Lord's commission, Feed My sheep, repeated a third time; who, when all the Apostles were silent, alone recognized the Son of God by the Father's revelation, and won the preeminence of a glory beyond the reach of human frailty by confessing his blissful faith! What conclusions does the study of his words force on us? He confessed that Christ is the Son of God; you, lying bishop of the new apostolate, force on us your modern notion that Christ is a creature, made out of nothing. What violence is this, that so distorts the glorious words? The very reason he is blessed is that he confessed the Son of God. This is the Father's revelation, this is the foundation of the Church, this is the assurance of her permanence. This is why she has the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and why she has judgment in heaven and judgment on earth. Through revelation Peter learned the mystery hidden since the beginning of the world, proclaimed the faith, made known the Divine nature, and confessed the Son of God. Whoever would deny all this truth and confess Christ to be a creature must first deny Peter's apostleship, his faith, his blessedness, his episcopate, his martyrdom. And when he has done all this, he must learn that he has cut himself off from Christ; for it was by confessing Him that Peter won these glories.

Do you think, wretched heretic of today, that Peter would be more blessed now if he had said, 'You are Christ, God's perfect creature, His handiwork, though You excel all His other works. Your beginning was from nothing, and through the goodness of God, Who alone is good, the name of Son has been given You by adoption, although in fact You were not born from God.' What answer, do you think, would such words have received, when this same Peter's reply to the announcement of the Passion, Far be it from You, Lord; this shall not happen, was rebuked with, Get behind Me, Satan, you are an offense to Me? Yet Peter could plead his human ignorance to lessen his guilt, for the Father had not yet revealed the whole mystery of the Passion; even so, a mere lack of faith met with this stern condemnation. Now, why did the Father not reveal to Peter your true confession, this faith in an adopted creature? I suppose God must have begrudged him the knowledge of the truth, and wanted to postpone it to a later age and save it as a novelty for your modern preachers. Yes; you may have a change of faith if the keys of heaven are changed. You may have a change of faith if there is a change in that Church against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. You may have a change of faith if there is a new apostolate, binding and loosing in heaven what it has bound and loosed on earth. You may have a change of faith if another Christ the Son of God, besides the true Christ, is preached. But if that faith which confesses Christ as the Son of God, and that faith alone, received in Peter's person every accumulated blessing, then the faith that proclaims Him a creature, made out of nothing, necessarily does not hold the keys of the Church and is a stranger to the apostolic faith and power. It is neither the Church's faith nor Christ's.

So let us cite every example of an Apostle's statement of the faith. All of them, when they confess the Son of God, confess Him not as a Son in name only and by adoption, but as a Son who possesses the Divine nature. They never lower Him to the level of a creature, but ascribe to Him the splendor of a true birth from God. Let John speak to us, while he waits, just as he is, for the coming of the Lord; John, who was left behind and appointed to a destiny hidden in the counsel of God, for he is not told that he will not die, but only that he will remain. Let him speak to us in his own familiar voice: No one has seen God at any time, except the Only-begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father. He felt that the name of Son did not express His true Divinity distinctly enough unless he gave outward support to Christ's unique majesty by pointing out the difference between Him and all others. So he not only calls Him the Son, but adds the further title of the Only-begotten, and so knocks out the last prop from under this imaginary adoption. For the fact that He is Only-begotten is positive proof of His right to the name of Son.

I put off considering the words, Who is in the bosom of the Father, until a more appropriate place. My present inquiry is into the sense of Only-begotten, and the claim that this sense may make on us. And first let us see whether the word means, as you claim, a perfect creature of God, with Only-begotten equivalent to perfect, and Son a synonym for creature. But John described the Only-begotten Son as God, not as a perfect creature. His words, Who is in the bosom of the Father, show that he foresaw these blasphemous labels; and, indeed, he had heard his Lord say, For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-begotten Son, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. God, Who loved the world, gave His Only-begotten Son as a clear token of His love. If the evidence of His love is this, that He gave a creature to creatures, gave a worldly being for the world's sake, granted one raised up from nothing to redeem things equally raised up from nothing, then this cheap and petty sacrifice is a poor assurance of His favor toward us. Costly gifts are the evidence of affection: the greatness of the surrender shows the greatness of the love. God, Who loved the world, did not give an adopted Son, but His own, His Only-begotten. Here is personal interest, true Sonship, sincerity; not creation, or adoption, or pretense. This is the proof of His love and affection, that He gave His own, His Only-begotten Son.

I am not appealing now to any of the titles given to the Son; delay costs nothing when it comes from an embarrassing abundance of choice. My present argument is that a successful result implies a sufficient cause; some clear and compelling motive must lie beneath every effective action. And so the Evangelist has had to reveal his motive for writing. Let us see what purpose he confesses; But these things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. The one reason he gives for writing his Gospel is that all may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. If believing that He is the Christ is enough for salvation, why does he add The Son of God? But if the true faith is nothing less than the belief that Christ is not merely Christ, but Christ the Son of God, then surely the name of Son is not attached to Christ as a customary add-on due to adoption, since it is essential to salvation. If, then, salvation consists in confessing the name, must the name not express the truth? If the name expresses the truth, by what authority can He be called a creature? It is not confessing a creature, but confessing the Son, that will give us salvation.

So to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is true salvation, the acceptable service of a sincere faith. For we have no love within us toward God the Father except through faith in the Son. Let us hear Him speaking to us in the words of the Epistle; Everyone who loves the Father loves Him who is born from Him. What, I ask, does being born from Him mean? Could it perhaps mean being created by Him? Does the Evangelist lie when he says that He was born from God, while the heretic teaches more correctly that He was created? Let us all hear the true character of this teacher of heresy. It is written, He who denies the Father and the Son is antichrist. What will you do now, champion of the creature, you who conjure up a new Christ out of nothing? Hear the title that awaits you if you persist in your claim. Or do you think that you may still describe the Father and the Son as Creator and Creature, and yet escape being recognized as antichrist through a clever ambiguity of language? If your confession includes a Father in the true sense and a Son in the true sense, then I am a slanderer, attacking you with a shameful title that you have not deserved. But if in your confession all of Christ's attributes are false and in name only, and not His own, then learn from the Apostle the right description of a faith like yours; and hear what the true faith is that believes in the Son. The words that follow are these — He who denies the Son does not have the Father: he who confesses the Son has both the Son and the Father. He who denies the Son is without the Father; he who confesses and has the Son has the Father also. What room is there here for adoptive names? Does every word not speak of the Divine nature? Learn how completely that nature is present.

John speaks like this — For we know that the Son of God has come, and became incarnate for us, and suffered, and rose again from the dead and took us for Himself, and gave us a good understanding so that we may know Him who is true, and may be in His true Son Jesus Christ. He is true and is eternal life and our resurrection. What a wisdom, doomed to an evil end, empty of the Spirit of God, destined to possess the spirit and the name of Antichrist, blind to the truth that the Son of God came to fulfill the mystery of our salvation, and in that blindness unworthy to perceive the light of that supreme knowledge! For this wisdom claims that Jesus Christ is not a true Son of God, but a creature of His, Who bears the Divine name by adoption. In what dark oracle of hidden knowledge was this secret learned? Whose research do we owe this to, the great discovery of the day? Were you the one who lay on the Lord's bosom? Were you the one to whom He revealed the mystery in the close companionship of love? Was it you alone who followed Him to the foot of the Cross? And while He was charging you to take Mary as your Mother, did He teach you this secret as a token of His special love for you? Or did you run to the Sepulchre, and reach it even before Peter, and so gain this knowledge there? Or was it amid the throngs of angels, and the sealed books whose clasps no one can open, and the manifold influences of the signs of heaven, and the unknown songs of the eternal choirs, that the Lamb, your Guide, revealed to you this godly doctrine, that the Father is no Father, the Son no Son, and there is neither nature nor truth? For you turn all these into lies. The Apostle, through the most excellent knowledge granted to him, speaks of the Son of God as true. You assert His creation, proclaim His adoption, deny His birth. While the true Son of God is eternal life and resurrection for us, for the one in whose eyes He is not true there is neither eternal life nor resurrection. And this is the lesson taught by John, the Lord's beloved disciple.

And the persecutor who was converted to become an Apostle and a chosen vessel delivers the very same message. What discourse of his does not presuppose the confession of the Son? What Epistle of his does not begin with a confession of that mysterious truth? When he says, We were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, and, God sent His Son to be the likeness of the flesh of sin, and again, God is faithful, by Whom you were called to the fellowship of His Son, is any loophole left for heretical misrepresentation? His Son, Son of God; that is what we read, but nothing is said of His adoption, or of God's creature. The name expresses the nature; He is God's Son, and so the Sonship is true. The Apostle's confession affirms that the relation is genuine. I do not see how the Divine nature of the Son could have been stated more completely. That Chosen Vessel has proclaimed in no weak or wavering voice that Christ is the Son of Him Who, as we believe, is the Father. The Teacher of the Gentiles, the Apostle of Christ, has left us no uncertainty and no opening for error in presenting the doctrine. He is quite clear on the subject of children by adoption, those who by faith come to be sons and to be called sons. In his own words, For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, Abba, Father. This is the name granted to us who believe, through the sacrament of regeneration; our confession of the faith wins us this adoption. For our work done in obedience to the Spirit of God gives us the title of sons of God. Abba, Father, is the cry we raise, not the expression of our essential nature. For that essential nature of ours remains untouched by that spoken tribute. It is one thing for God to be addressed as Father; it is another for Him to be the Father of His Son.

But now let us learn what faith the Apostle holds concerning the Son of God. For although there is no single discourse, among the many he delivered on the Church's doctrine, in which he mentions the Father without also confessing the Son, yet, to show the truth of the relation that this name conveys with the greatest precision human language allows, he speaks like this: What then? If God is for us, who can be against us? Who did not spare His own Son, but handed Him over for us. Can Son still possibly be a title received through adoption, when He is expressly called God's own Son? For the Apostle, wanting to make God's love for us plain, uses a kind of comparison so that we can estimate how great that love is, when he says that it was His own Son Whom God did not spare. He suggests the thought that this was no sacrifice of an adopted Son for those whom He intended to adopt, of a creature for creatures, but of His Son for strangers, His own Son for those to whom He had willed to give a share in the name of sons. Seek out the full meaning of the term, so that you may understand the extent of the love. Consider the meaning of own; note the genuine Sonship it implies. For the Apostle now describes Him as God's own Son; before this he had often spoken of Him as God's Son, or Son of God. And although many manuscripts, because the translators failed to understand, read His Son in this passage instead of His own Son, the original Greek, the language in which the Apostle wrote, is more exactly rendered by His own than by His. And though the casual reader may see no great difference between His own and His, the Apostle, who in all his other statements had spoken of His Son, which in the Greek is τὸν ἑαυτοῦ υἱ& 231·ν, in this passage uses the words ὅς γε τοῦ ἰδίου υἱοῦ οὐκ ἐφείσατο, that is, Who did not spare His own Son, expressly and emphatically indicating His true Divine nature. Earlier he had declared that through the Spirit of adoption there are many sons; now his aim is to point to God's own Son, God the Only-begotten.

This is no universal and unavoidable error; those who deny the Son cannot blame their ignorance, for they cannot be ignorant of the truth they deny. They describe the Son of God as a creature who came into being out of nothing. If the Father has never said this, nor the Son confirmed it, nor the Apostles proclaimed it, then the daring that prompts their claim comes not from ignorance but from hatred of Christ. When the Father says of His Son, This is, and the Son says of Himself, It is He who talks with You, and when Peter confesses You are, and John assures us, This is the true God, and Paul never tires of proclaiming Him as God's own Son, I can conceive of no other motive for this denial than hatred. They cannot plead unfamiliarity with the subject to lessen their guilt. It is the suggestion of the Evil One, spoken now through these prophets and forerunners of his coming; he will speak it himself later, when he comes as Antichrist. He is using this new engine of assault to shake us in our saving confession of the faith. His first aim is to tear from our hearts the confident assurance of the Son's Divine nature; next, he would fill our minds with the notion of Christ's adoption, and leave no room for the memory of His other claims. For those who hold that Christ is only a creature must regard Christ as Antichrist, since a creature cannot be God's own Son, and so He must be lying when He calls Himself the Son of God. So those who deny that Christ is the Son of God must also have Antichrist for their Christ.

What hope is this futile passion of yours pursuing? What assurance of your salvation emboldens you, with blasphemous license of tongue, to maintain that Christ is a creature and not a Son? It was your duty to know this mystery from the Gospels, and to hold on to that knowledge. For although the Lord can do all things, He resolved that everyone who prays for His effective help must earn it by a true confession of Him. Not that the confession of the one praying could increase the power of Him Who is the Power of God; but the earning was to be the reward of faith. So when He asked Martha, who was pleading with Him for Lazarus, whether she believed that those who had believed in Him would not die eternally, her answer expressed the trust of her soul — Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, Who has come into this world. This confession is eternal life; this faith has immortality. Martha, praying for her brother's life, was asked whether she believed this. She did believe it. What life does the one who denies expect, and from whom does he hope to receive it, when this belief, and this alone, is eternal life? For the mystery of this faith is great, and the blessedness that is the fruit of this confession is perfect.

The Lord had given sight to a man blind from birth; the Lord of nature had removed a defect of nature. Because this blind man had been born for the glory of God, so that God's work might be made manifest in the work of Christ, the Lord did not wait until the man had shown his faith by confessing it. But although he did not know at the time Who had given him the great gift of sight, he later earned a knowledge of the faith. For it was not the removal of his blindness that won him eternal life. And so, when the man had already been healed and had been thrown out of the synagogue, the Lord asked him the question, Do you believe in the Son of God? This was to keep him from thinking of his exclusion from the synagogue as a loss, by the certainty that confessing the true faith had restored him to immortality. When the man, his soul still unenlightened, answered, Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him? The Lord replied, You have both seen Him, and it is He who talks with you. For He intended to remove the ignorance of the man whose sight He had restored, and whom He was now enriching with the knowledge of so glorious a faith. Does the Lord demand from this man, as from others who begged Him to heal them, a confession of faith as the price of recovery? Certainly not. For the blind man could already see when He spoke to him like this. The Lord asked the question in order to receive the answer, Lord, I believe. The faith that spoke in that answer was to receive not sight, but life. And now let us examine carefully the force of the words. The Lord asks the man, Do you believe in the Son of God? Surely, if a simple confession of Christ that left His nature obscure were a complete expression of the faith, the question would have been worded, 'Do you believe in Christ.' But in days to come almost every heretic would make a show of that name, confessing Christ and yet denying that He is the Son; and so He demands, as the condition of faith, that we believe in what is unique to Him, that is, in His Divine Sonship. What good is faith in the Son of God if it is faith in a creature, when He requires of us faith in Christ, not as the creature of God, but as the Son of God.

Did the devils fail to understand the full meaning of this name of Son? For we value the heretics at their true worth if we refute them no longer by the teaching of Apostles, but out of the mouths of devils. They cry out, and cry often, What do I have to do with You, Jesus, You Son of God most High? Truth forced this confession from them against their will; their reluctant obedience bears witness to the force of the Divine nature within Him. When they flee from the bodies they have long possessed, it is His might that conquers them; their confession of His nature is an act of reverence. These events show Christ as the Son of God both in power and in name. Amid all these cries of devils confessing Him, can you hear Christ called a creature even once, or hear any mention of God's condescension in adopting Him?

If you will not learn Who Christ is from those who know Him, learn it at least from those who do not know Him. So the confession that their ignorance is forced to make will rebuke your blasphemy. The Jews did not recognize Christ when He came in the body, though they knew that the true Christ must be the Son of God. And so, when they were bringing false witnesses against Him, without one word of truth in their testimony, their priest asked Him, Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? They did not know that the mystery was fulfilled in Him; they knew that the Divine nature was the condition of its fulfillment. They did not ask whether Christ is the Son of God; they asked whether He was the Christ, the Son of God. They were wrong about the Person of Christ, not about His Sonship. They did not doubt that Christ is the Son of God; and so, while they asked whether He was the Christ, they asked without denying that the Christ is the Son of God. What, then, of your faith, which leads you to deny what even they, in their blindness, confessed? Perfect knowledge is this: to be assured that Christ, the Son of God, Who existed before the worlds, was also born of the Virgin. Even those who know nothing of His birth from Mary know that He is the Son of God. Note the fellowship with Jewish wickedness in which your denial of the Divine Sonship has entangled you! For they have put on record the reason for their condemnation: And by our Law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God. Is this not the same charge you are blasphemously bringing against Him, that, while you declare Him a creature, He calls Himself the Son? He confesses Himself the Son, and they declare Him deserving of death: you too deny that He is the Son of God. What sentence do you pass on Him? You object to His claim just as the Jews did. You agree with their verdict; I want to know whether you will dispute the sentence. Your offense in denying that He is the Son of God is exactly the same as theirs, though their guilt is less, for they sinned in ignorance. They did not know that Christ was born of Mary, yet they never doubted that Christ must be the Son of God. You know perfectly well that Christ was born of Mary, yet you refuse Him the name of Son of God. If they come to the faith, a salvation free of danger awaits them, because of their past ignorance. Every gate of safety is shut to you, because you persist in denying a truth that is obvious to you. For you are not ignorant that He is the Son of God; you know it so well that you grant Him the name as a title of adoption, and pretend that He is a creature adorned, like others, with the right to call Himself a Son. You rob Him, as far as you can, of the Divine nature; if you could, you would rob Him of the Divine name as well. But because you cannot, you divorce the name from the nature; He is called a Son, but you will not let Him be the true Son of God.

The confession of the Apostles, for whom the raging wind and troubled sea were calmed by a word of command, was an opportunity for you. You might have confessed, as they did, that He is God's true Son; you might have borrowed their very words, Truly, this is the Son of God. But an evil spirit of madness is driving you to the shipwreck of your life; your reason is distracted and overwhelmed, like the ocean tormented by the fury of the storm.

If this testimony of the voyagers seems inconclusive to you because they were Apostles, — though for that same reason it carries greater weight for me, even if it surprises me less — at least accept a confirmation given by the Gentiles. Hear how the soldier of the Roman cohort, one of the stern guard around the Cross, was humbled into faith. The centurion sees the mighty workings of Christ's power; and this is the testimony he gives: Truly this was the Son of God. The truth was forced on him, after Christ had given up His Spirit, by the torn veil of the Temple, and the earth that shook, and the rocks that split, and the sepulchres that were opened, and the dead who rose. And it was the confession of an unbeliever. The deeds that were done convinced him that Christ's nature was omnipotent; he names Him the Son of God, being assured of His true Divinity. The proof was so compelling and the man's conviction so strong that the force of truth conquered his will, and even the man who had nailed Christ to the Cross was driven to confess that He is the Lord of eternal glory, truly the Son of God.