On the Christian Faith 5.8–5.12

Hence it is also evident how he calls him Lord whom he knows as Father; for he says: “I confess to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth.” Wisdom first called him its own Father, and afterwards named him Lord of creation. So the Lord himself shows in his Gospel that there is no lordship where there is true offspring, saying: “What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said to him: “David’s.” Jesus said to them: “How, then, does David in the Spirit call him Lord, saying: The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand?” And he added: “If, then, David in the Spirit calls him Lord, how is he his son?” And no one could answer him a word. O how carefully, even in this testimony, the Lord provided for faith against the Arians! For he did not say, “The Spirit calls him Lord,” but that David said it in the Spirit; so that he whose son he is according to the flesh, namely David’s, he might be believed to be also Lord and God according to divinity. You see, then, that the name of fatherly love and the name of lordship are distinct. And the Lord rightly proclaimed his own Father, but Lord of heaven and earth; so that, when you read both “Father” and “Lord,” you may understand Father of the Son and Lord of the creature. In the one is the prerogative of nature, in the other the authority of power; for, taking the form of a servant, he calls him Lord in that respect in which he took on servitude, equal in the form of God, a servant in the form of the body: for servitude belongs to the flesh, lordship to the divinity. Hence the Apostle too says: “The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory”; that is, declaring him God of the human nature assumed, but Father of glory. Did God, then, have two sons, Christ and glory? Not at all. So if Christ is the one Son of God, Christ is certainly glory. And what do you take away from him who is the glory of the Father? If, then, the Son is glory and the Father is glory (for the Father of glory cannot be other than glory), there is not a division of glories but one glory. So glory is referred to the property of nature, but lordship to the servitude of the body he assumed. For if the flesh even of a righteous man is subject to the soul, as it is written, “I chastise my body and bring it into subjection,” how much more is it subject to the divinity, of which it is said, “For all things serve you”? But with one question the Lord shut out the Sabellians and the Photinians and the Arians. For when he says that David called him Lord, Sabellius is shut out, who wants the Father to be the same as the Son. Photinus is shut out, who judges him only according to the flesh; because no one could be lord of King David but one who is God; for it is written: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.” Would the prophet, who reigned under the Law, think against the Law? Arius is shut out, who hears that the Son sits at the right hand of the Father; so that, if he argues from human custom, he destroys himself and pours back on himself the poison of his sacrilegious disputation; so that, while he interprets the inequality of Father and Son from the custom of men, he strays from the truth on both counts and gives preference to the one he disparages, being bound to confess as the superior the one he hears is at the right hand. The Manichaean too is shut out; for he does not deny that Jesus is the son of David according to the flesh, since, when the blind cried out, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on us,” he was pleased with their faith, stood still, and healed them; but he denies that this belongs to his eternity, that the faithless call him the son of David only. For he is Son of God against Ebion, son of David against the Manichaeans; Son of God against Photinus, son of David against Marcion; Son of God against Paul of Samosata, son of David against Valentinus; Son of God against Arius and Sabellius, heirs of pagan error; Lord of David against the Jews, who, seeing the Son of God in the flesh, believed with impious error that he was only a man. But by the faith of the Church the Son of God the Father and of David is one and the same; because the mystery of God’s incarnation is the salvation of the whole creation, according to what is written: “That apart from God he might taste death for all”; that is, that every creature might be redeemed at the price of the Lord’s blood without any suffering of the divinity, as it has it elsewhere: “Every creature will be set free from the slavery of corruption.” It is one thing, then, for the Son to be named according to the divine substance, another according to his taking of flesh; for according to the divine generation the Son is equal to God the Father, and according to his taking of a body he is servant to God the Father; for, it says, “he took the form of a servant”; yet the Son is one and the same. To the holy patriarch David, on the other hand, he is Lord according to his glory and son according to the line of bodily descent, not falling short of himself, but acquiring for himself the right of our adoption. Nor did he take on servitude in the person of a man only from the race of David, but also from the name, as you have it: “I have found David my servant”; and elsewhere: “Behold, I will send to you my servant; the Dayspring is his name.” And the Son himself says: “Thus says the Lord, who formed me from the womb to be his servant, and said to me: It is a great thing for you to be called my servant. Behold, I have set you for a covenant of my race, for a light of the nations, that you may be for salvation to the end of the earth.” To whom is this said but to Christ, who, though he was in the form of God, emptied himself and took the form of a servant? What is “in the form of God” but in the fullness of divinity? Learn, then, what “he took the form of a servant” means: that is, the fullness of human perfection, the fullness of obedience. And so he says in the thirtieth psalm: “You set my feet in a spacious place. I have become a reproach above all my enemies. Make your face shine on your servant.” Man is called servant, in whom he was sanctified; servant, man, in whom he was anointed; servant, man, in whom he was made under the Law, made from a Virgin; and, to put it briefly, he is called servant in that respect in which he has a mother, as it is written: “O Lord, I am your servant, I am your servant and the son of your handmaid”; and elsewhere: “I am afflicted and humbled exceedingly.” Who was humbled exceedingly but Christ, who came to set all free through obedience? “For as through the disobedience of one man many were made sinners, so through the obedience of one many will be made righteous.” Who received the cup of salvation, Christ the high priest, or David, who neither had the priesthood nor underwent suffering? Who offered the sacrifice of praise? But if this is too little, take another: “Guard my soul, for I am holy.” Would David say this of himself? But it is he who says it who says: “You will not leave my soul in hell, nor give your holy one to see corruption.” The same, then, says both. And he added: “Save your servant”; and further on: “Give power to your servant, and to the son of your handmaid”; and elsewhere, that is, in Ezekiel: “And I will raise up over them one shepherd, and my servant David will rule them; he will feed them and be their shepherd; and I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David a prince in their midst.” Certainly David, the son of Jesse, was already dead. He speaks, then, of Christ, who for our sake was made the son of a handmaid according to the form of man; for according to the divine generation he has not a mother but a Father, nor is he the fruit of a bodily womb, but the everlasting power of God. So when we read too that the Lord said, “My time is not yet fulfilled,” and, “Yet a little while I am with you,” and, “I go to him who sent me,” and, “The Son of Man is glorified,” we ought to refer them to the mystery of the incarnation. But when we read, “And God is glorified in him, and God has glorified him,” what question is there here, where the Son is glorified by the Father and the Father is glorified by the Son? Indeed, to disclose the faith of unity and the bond of the Trinity, he said that he was also to be glorified by the Spirit, as you have it: “He will take of mine and will glorify me.” The Holy Spirit too, then, glorifies the Son of God. How, then, did he himself say, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing”? Is the Son’s glory, then, nothing? It is sacrilege to say so, unless you refer it to the flesh; for the Son was speaking in the person of a man, since in comparison with the divinity the flesh has no glory. Let them stop, then, impiously raising objections that are turned back on their own faithlessness. For they say: “It is written: Now is the Son of Man glorified.” I do not deny that it is written, “The Son of Man is glorified”; but let them see what follows: “And God is glorified in him.” I have an explanation in the case of the Son of Man; he has none in the case of the Father, for the Father did not take flesh. I have an explanation and do not use it; he has none and raises a false charge. Let him allow me either to understand it simply, or to refer to the flesh what belongs to the flesh. A devout mind distinguishes what is read according to the flesh from what is read according to the divinity; a sacrilegious mind confuses them, and twists into an insult to the divinity whatever was said according to the lowliness of the flesh.

What of the fact that the Arians, false and shameless interpreters of the divine words in the Jewish manner, say that the power of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is different, because it is written, “Go, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and from the order of the words they make a difference of divine power? But although in the earlier books I have claimed this very testimony for the unity of majesty and of name, yet if they raise a question from it, I can show from testimonies of the Scriptures that in very many places the Son is named first and the Father afterwards. Is the Father, then, second to the Son by a prejudice of words, as the Arians would have it, because the mention of the Son was put first? Far be it, I say, far be it. Faith does not know this order; it does not know a separated honor of the Father and the Son. I have not read, I have not heard, nor have I found any rank in God. Nowhere have I read of a second God, nowhere of a third: I have read of the first; I have heard of the first and only. If we demand a superstitious observance of order, the Son ought not to sit at the right hand of the Father, nor should he have called himself the first and the beginning. Then the Evangelist did wrong to begin with the Word rather than with God, saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” For according to human usage he ought to have named the Father first. The Apostle too did not know the order, when he says: “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God”; and elsewhere: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” If we follow the order of words, in the first he put the Son, in the second the Father. But the order of words is often changed; and so you ought not to raise a question about order or rank between God the Father and his Son, since according to divinity there is no division of the unity.

Finally, to show that they are not Christians, they deny that one must believe in Christ, saying that it is written: “He who believes in me does not believe in me, but in him who sent me.” This is the confession I was waiting for; why did you trifle with me by roundabout ways? I knew that my contest was against pagans; but they are converted, you are not. If they believe, the sacrament is safe; you have lost what you received, and perhaps it was not even begun but feigned. “It is written,” they say: “He who believes in me does not believe in me, but in him who sent me.” But see what follows, and see how the Son of God wishes to be seen; for it goes on: “And he who sees me sees him who sent me”; that is, because the Father is seen in the Son. He explained, then, what he had said before: that he believes in the Son who confesses the Father too. For he who does not know the Son does not know the Father either; for everyone who denies the Son does not have the Father; he who confesses the Son has both the Son and the Father. What, then, is “does not believe in me”? Not in what you see bodily, not only in the man whom you see; for he did not declare that one should believe in a man only, but that you should believe that Jesus Christ himself is the Son of God and man. For this reason he says both, “I have not come of myself,” and elsewhere, “I am the beginning, who also speak to you.” As man he did not come of himself; as Son of God he does not have his beginning from man; but “I am,” he says, “the beginning, who also speak to you”; and the things I have spoken are not human but divine. For it is not permitted to believe that he denied that one must believe in him, since he himself said: “That everyone who believes in me may not remain in darkness”; and elsewhere: “For this is the will of my Father who sent me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life”; and elsewhere: “You believe in God; believe also in me.” Let no one, then, take the Son without the Father, because we read “Son.” The Son has a Father, but not a temporal one, not by passion, not by conception, not by grace. I have read of generation; I have not read of conception. And the Father says, “I have begotten,” not, “I have created”; and the Son, according to the eternity of the divine generation, names God not his creator but his Father. He speaks of himself now in the person of man, now in the majesty of God: now claiming for himself the unity of divinity with God the Father, now taking on the frailty of human flesh; now saying that he does not have his own teaching, now that he does not seek his own will; now that his testimony is not true, now that it is true. For he himself said: “If I bear witness of myself, my testimony is not true.” And he himself says later: “Even if I bear witness of myself, my testimony is true.” How, then, Lord Jesus, is your testimony not true, when the man who believed it, though set on a cross and placed among the punishments of a confessed crime, put off the deserts of a robber and won the rewards of an innocent man? Was Paul deceived, then, who received back his eyes because he believed, having lost them before he believed? Did Jesus son of Nave err too, who recognized the commander of the heavenly army? But as soon as he had believed, he conquered, worthy to triumph in the battle of faith. Indeed he did not lead out bronze-clad lines to war, nor bring down the circuit of the enemy walls with the ram and the other siege engines, but by the sound of seven priestly trumpets. So the blast of the trumpet and the priest’s fillet finished a monstrous war. The harlot saw this, and she who in the destruction of the city despaired of any means of safety, because faith had conquered, raised the signs of faith and the standards of the Lord’s passion and tied scarlet in the window, so that the likeness of the mystic blood which was to redeem the world might flourish. So outside, the name of Jesus was there for the combatants unto victory; inside, the likeness of the Lord’s passion for those in danger unto salvation. Hence, because Rahab understood the heavenly mystery, the Lord says in the psalm: “I will be mindful of Rahab and Babylon, who know me.” How, then, is your testimony not true, Lord, except according to the frailty of men? For “every man is a liar.” Indeed, to show that he had spoken as man, he says: “The Father who sent me bears witness to me.” But according to the divinity the testimony is true, as he himself says: “And my testimony is true, because I know whence I came and whither I go; but you do not know whence I come or whither I go. You judge according to the flesh.” Those, then, who think that Christ lacked the knowledge to bear witness judge not according to his divinity but according to the man. So when you hear, “He who believes in me does not believe in me,” and, “The Father who sent me has given me a commandment,” you have learned to what you should think it refers. Indeed he showed what the commandment was, saying: “I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself.” You see that it was said to show that he had free power to lay down his life and take it up again, as he himself said: “I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment I received from my Father.” Whether, then, it is “commandment” or, as some Latin manuscripts have it, “precept,” it is given not according to the divinity but according to the incarnation, for the victory of the passion that he was to undergo.

Or shall we bring the Son of God down to such lowliness that he cannot do anything or say anything except what he has heard, and shall we think that a measure of acting and speaking was prescribed for him, because it is written, “I have not spoken of myself,” and further on, “As the Father said to me, so I speak”? But let these be referred either to the obedience of the flesh or to the faith of unity. For many of the more learned understand both the Son’s hearing and the Father’s saying something to the Son as being through unity of nature; for what the Son knows, through unity of will, that the Father wills, he seems to have heard. Hence what is declared is not a bodily function but an indissoluble judgment of cooperation; for he signifies here not any hearing of words but the unity of will and power which is both in the Father and in the Son. He mentioned in another place that this is in the Holy Spirit too, saying: “For he will not speak of himself, but whatever he hears he will speak”; so that we might notice that whatever the Spirit speaks, the Son also speaks, and whatever the Son speaks, the Father also speaks; because the mind and operation of the Trinity is one. For as the Father is seen in the Son, not by bodily appearance but by unity of divinity, so also the Father speaks in the Son, not by a temporal voice nor by a bodily sound, but by unity of work. Indeed, when he had said, “The Father who abides in me, he speaks; and the works that I do, he does,” he added: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; otherwise believe for the sake of the works themselves.” This is our understanding, following the sequence of the divine Scriptures; but the Arians, who will not think of God what is worthy of him, let them be refuted at least by an example fitting their deserts, so that they may not believe everything carnally, since they themselves see the works of their father the devil without any body. As the Lord declared of their associates the Jews, saying: “You do what you have seen your father doing”; though they are certainly accused not because they saw the devil working, but because they did his will, the devil invisibly working sin in them according to his wickedness. This, as the Apostle says, we have put in because of the folly of the faithless. Otherwise, it has been sufficiently proved by examples from the Scriptures that it belongs to the unity of the divine majesty that the Father abides in the Son, and that the things the Son speaks he seems to have heard from the Father. And in what other way can we understand the unity of majesty than in the fact that the same things are ascribed to the Father and the Son? For what more excellent can be said than what the Apostle said, that the Lord of majesty was crucified? The Son, then, is both God of majesty and Lord of majesty; but majesty is not subject to creatures; the Son, then, is not a creature. The Son is the image of the Father’s substance; but every creature is unlike the supreme substance, while the Son is not unlike God the Father; the Son, then, is not a creature. The Son did not think it robbery to be equal with God; but no creature is equal to God, while the Son is equal; the Son, then, is not a creature. Every creature is changeable; but the Son of God is not changeable; the Son of God, then, is not a creature. Every creature, by the capacity of its nature, admits accidents of good and evil and experiences their departure; but nothing can depart from the Son of God, or be added to him, in his divinity; the Son of God, then, is not a creature. God will bring every work of his into judgment; but the Son of God is not brought into judgment, for he himself judges; the Son of God, then, is not a creature. Finally, so that you may understand the unity, the Savior says of the sheep: “No one,” he says, “has snatched them from my hand. What the Father has given me is greater than all, and no one can snatch them from the hand of my Father. I and the Father are one.” The Son gives life as the Father does: “For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will.” The Son raises as the Father does; the Son preserves as the Father does. How is he who is not unequal in grace unequal in power? So too the Son does not let perish, as the Father does not. And so, lest anyone should believe in two gods or bring in a distinction of power, he said that he was one with the Father. How can a creature say that? The Son of God, then, is not a creature. To reign and to serve are not the same; but Christ is both king and the son of a king; the Son of God, then, is not a servant. Every creature serves; but the Son of God, who makes sons of God out of servants, does not serve; the Son of God, then, is not a creature.

In a divine way, then, he brought in that parable of the rich man who went into a far country to receive a kingdom and to return, describing himself according to the substance both of his divinity and of his incarnation. For he is rich according to the fullness of divinity, he who for us became poor though he was rich, an eternal king and born of an eternal king; he went abroad according to his taking of a body, because, entering on the ways of man as on a foreign journey, he came into this world to prepare a kingdom for himself from among us. Jesus came, then, into this earth to receive a kingdom from us, to whom he says: “The kingdom of God is within you.” This is the kingdom that Christ received; this is what he handed over to the Father. For how did he receive a kingdom, who was an eternal king? The Son of Man came, then, to receive a kingdom and to return. The Jews would not receive him, of whom he says: “Those who would not have me reign over them, bring them here and slay them.” Let us follow the order of the Scriptures. He who came will hand over the kingdom to God the Father; and when he has handed over the kingdom, then he himself will also be subject to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all. If the Son of God received the kingdom as Son of Man, then as Son of Man he will certainly also hand over what he received; if he hands it over as Son of Man, then as Son of Man he acknowledges subjection, through the condition of the flesh, not through the majesty of the divinity. And do you raise it as an insult that God subjected all things to him, when you hear that the Son of Man hands over the kingdom to God, and have read, as we said in the earlier books: “No one comes to me unless the Father draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day”? If we follow the letter, see rather and notice the unity of honor: the Father subjected all things to the Son, and the Son hands over to the Father. Tell me which is greater, to draw or to raise? By human custom, is not drawing a service and raising an act of power? But the Son draws to the Father and the Father draws to the Son; the Son raises and the Father raises. Away with the sacrilegious inventions of division, where there is unity of power. Let the Son, then, hand over his kingdom to the Father. The kingdom he hands over is not lost to Christ but advances. We are the kingdom, for it was said to us: “The kingdom of God is within you.” And we are the kingdom of Christ first, afterwards of the Father; for it is written: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” When I am on the way, I am Christ’s; when I have arrived, I am the Father’s; but everywhere through Christ and everywhere under Christ. It is good to be in the kingdom of Christ, so that Christ may be with us, as he himself says: “Behold, I am with you until the end of the world.” But it is better to be with Christ: “For to depart and be with Christ is far better.” While we are in this world under sin, Christ is with us, so that through the obedience of one many may be made righteous. And if I escape the sin of this world, I shall begin to be with Christ. Indeed he says, “I will come again and take you to myself,” and further on, “I will that where I am, these also may be with me.” Now, then, we are under the kingdom of Christ, while we live in the body and are not yet stripped of the form of the servant, which he took when he emptied himself; but when we see his glory, which he had before the world was, we shall be in the kingdom of God, in which are the patriarchs and prophets, of whom it is written: “When you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God”; so that we may then enjoy a fuller knowledge of God. But in the kingdom of the Son the Father also reigns, and in the kingdom of the Father the Son reigns, because the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father; and in whom the Son dwells, the Father also dwells; and in whom the Father dwells, the Son also dwells, as he himself says: “I and the Father will come to him and make our dwelling with him.” As the house is one, then, so the kingdom is one. And the kingdom of the Father and the Son is one to such a degree that what the Son hands over the Father receives, and what the Father receives the Son does not lose. In one kingdom, then, there is unity of power. Let no one, then, divide the divinity between the Father and the Son.