On the Trinity 1.16

On those who say that the Father is incomparable with the Son and greater than he; and that the image is one thing and God another; and that man too is written to be the image and glory of God. And on the testimony that the Father differs from the Son in nothing. They assign incomparability and being greater to the Father because he is unbegotten, and unlikeness to the Son because he has being begotten, dragging down once more what concerns the most ineffable Godhead to the products of our own nature, and thinking that intelligible realities are made like the flux of matter. For the things above the heavens all transcend every mind and every thought … But above all he was born without beginning, existing and working together with his own true Father, as light with the disk of the sun. And he has it, as the Scriptures too bear witness, that he is God, Lord, holy, Creator, incorruptible, life, light, and all that the Father is. And he ought rather to have likeness and equality from the many names than unlikeness from the one. And how did Adam and Eve, who were not begotten and had no father, come to be equal in nature to us who are from them? Or what comparison at all have they made of what they call the unlike? Or by what measuring have they arrived at "stronger" and "greater"? Scripture … does not define the holy and beginningless one by nature … the first and the next? And these two things are clear: that what is greater is not at all necessarily of another substance, and that comparatives in general are said of things of the same substance, not of things of different substances. Nor could they say anything to the point even by guesswork, since not even about the incomparable and the greater … Not in size or any bulk; for God the Word is removed from all magnitude, composition and shape (as are the Father and his Holy Spirit), being himself contained by nothing, but containing all things; for he is also, as their maker, the beginning of all magnitudes. For where is magnitude in the highest, the supremely incorporeal and superior hypostases? Nor with respect to being without beginning … of his glory, and not having God before him. For it says: "In the beginning was the Word." And God is not measured together with time, nor the maker with the thing made; since necessity would require them (which it is dangerous even to think) first to posit a time before the beginningless and incomprehensible God and Father, and so to compare. Men are accustomed to call greater those who have come earlier in birth by time, as Isaac decreed: "The greater shall serve the lesser." Nor as cause; for he is not his cause. For the only-begotten Son too has been shown to be without beginning; otherwise the Father would be greater than he in the same way as he is greater than we, which God forbid that anyone should say or hear. Nor with respect to substance and likeness; for he is from him as "the Only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth", and as "the imprint of his hypostasis", being an imprint in all respects, and as "the image of God", which whoever has seen has seen the Father. For in him dwells "all the fullness of the Godhead"; and the testimony "Let us make man according to our image and likeness" draws this in too. Nor by intensification of a quality; for the divine and ineffable hypostases are not qualities; quality is in bodies, but they are incorporeal and intelligible. But it cannot even be thought of them that there is something finer than the fine and better than the finer, in the way that Paul's words speak about something else: "Now these three remain: faith, hope, love; but the greater of these is love"; for because of its intensity in virtue he assigned the greater to love. "For having loved," he says, "we believe; and having believed, we hope to reign with Christ." For if "One God" is true, and "that you may become partakers of the divine nature", not "natures", then the absolutely good has been shown to be one, I mean the Godhead. Nor with respect to equality; for it is written that God the Son is "great and over all", "making himself equal to the Father", and "swearing by himself", since he has no one greater. Nor with respect to power. For it is written: "Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God"; and "Whatever the Father does, the Son also does likewise." Nor with respect to glory or any dignity. "For if they had known," he says, "they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." And it is the will of the Father, according to John, "that all may honor the Son as they honor the Father." In what respect, then, is the "greater" left? The apostle, checking the impious suppositions of the heretics about the only-begotten Son and God, and proclaiming the identity of his nature with his Father's, and also his being without beginning together with him, wrote, as was said above, "Who, being the radiance of the glory of the Father", and added, "and the imprint of his hypostasis". And again he wrote to the Colossians and to the Hebrews: "Who is the image of the invisible God." And in the Gospel according to John, the Son, presenting his own substance as sealed with the Father's imprint, said: "For on him the Father, God, has set his seal"; and clearly the seal subsists together with the archetype, being of the same form and showing perfectly and truly in itself the archetype's nature. For the seal, like the imprint, signifies likeness and genuineness; otherwise it would be time to say that the Father too is not uncreated and incomparable, if indeed he is imaged and imprinted by what is created and unlike. Not understanding rightly these divine oracles, which need no interpretation, but distorting them, and fighting God's words with human notions, they say: "God is one thing and the image of God another, as a man is one thing and the image of a man another"; and in a way they liken the living and active God the Word to a motionless image. But he is, in substance and in all respects, the most unerring and beginningless image of the Father, and not in form and shape, as the statue molded or carved, without breath and not self-moving; nor in appearance and color, like the artificial, imitative, voiceless image. For these do not show the prototype by nature, nor indeed in all other respects. A son of man is indeed an image of the substance of his own father; but he happens to differ from him in age, or appearance, or mind, or power, or rank, or in several of these, or in something else. But God the Word images the simple, uncompounded and unvaried Godhead of the Father without variation and exactly, in all respects, by nature and without beginning. For one may not think that he is the image of God in one respect and not in another; nor indeed can there be an image of what is incomparable, nor can the true, the archetypal, the greater, the self-determining and the incomparable appear through what is unlike, or smaller, or under authority. Nor again can the natural form of the creator be perceived through the creature. For no nature shows another nature in itself; and the Father is even found to have been without hypostasis, when the heretics do not grant that he has the imprint of his hypostasis. Nor does the invisible, uncompounded and shapeless God have an imitative image such as they suggest. And the words that follow plainly undo their views: "He did not count being equal to God a thing to be grasped." Moses too gives an account of a natural image thus: "Adam begot Seth according to his form." Seth was of necessity not of a different substance from Adam; and yet he called the form and likeness of substance an image. "But of man too," he says, "it is written that he is the image and glory of God." But nowhere, my friends, is man or any other thing made written to be the radiance of God's glory and the imprint of his hypostasis; and it is one thing for man to be the image of God, that is, as the thing crafted is of the craftsman, as a stool of the carpenter (for Solomon says, "From the creatures, by analogy, their Maker is seen"); and another thing … to be the radiance of glory, and the imprint of the hypostasis, subsisting and most truthful. For he says: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father"; but whoever has seen a man has not seen God, as one who has looked at the stool has not seen the carpenter. Moreover, the image of the only invisible God must of necessity be that invisible image alone, and not man, who is visible and made "according to the image". So the Son is neither like any other (for it is written, "Who shall be likened to the Lord among the sons of God?"), nor unlike his own Father: "For I and the Father," he says, "are one." But those who apply to him the notion of a created image … to the one who fashioned a lifeless image to be worshiped. And God justly cast Adam out of paradise for his disobedience; but the Son brought in the thief, and with him Adam and the whole of our common race, being altogether equal in Godhead, goodness and lordship to the one who had cast him out. Where is it written that the Father is incomparable with his own Only-begotten? Or that his Son, the Creator and judge of all, is a creature with respect to his divine nature, which is infinite and exalted above all? Or at all that there was a time when he was not? Or where did the Father specifically say, "I created a Son for myself", or the Son, "I was created by the Father", which is dreadful and to be shunned even to hear, let alone to say? These things are found nowhere at all in the divine and spiritual Scripture. On the contrary, all the words of the Only-begotten about his Godhead are those of one comparing himself with the Father, and uniting himself … has ever been called "child" or "offspring" with respect to the infinite birth above, which nothing at all can describe; lest anyone imagine something small, or something that gives grounds for suspicion; but "Son", because he is perfect, and was begotten without beginning, and is of a nature unvarying from the Father's. And all the sayings that some think small with respect to the Godhead, including "The Father who sent me is greater than I", have been uttered in the sacred books because of his loving and ineffable becoming man, which took place for us and on our behalf; because of which it is also written that he was made lower than the angels, according to the apostle's letter: "But we see Jesus, made for a little while lower than the angels because of the suffering of death." I think, then, and I am not altogether mistaken, that he spoke of the Father and of himself, showing the goodness and the consubstantiality of both, when he said: "Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree rotten and its fruit rotten; for by the fruit," he says, "the tree is known." … dare to say that … the Holy Spirit is the first creature; and Macedonius says this of the Spirit only. May the holy and consubstantial Trinity turn upon them the weight of recalling such desperate and condemned words; but we, setting out the divine Scriptures, will show how the first creature of God came to be. The first creature, lifted up, was cast from the heavens like lightning, as the very one who created it well, and afterwards justly cast it down, beheld it, as he says in the Gospel; and he speaks thus in Job: "But behold, the beast beside you eats grass like oxen; behold, its strength is in its loins, and its power on the navel of its belly. It set up its tail like a cypress, and its sinews are … of cast iron. This is the beginning of the Lord's formation, made to be mocked by the angels." So it says that the devil is the first creature, who made himself to be mocked by the holy angels because of the unholiness and malice of his choice. And the Son, who also created him, would not be after him; nor indeed was the Spirit of God created.