On the Trinity 11.42–12.15

Showing, then, the dispensation of this glory to his apostles with a complete meaning of words, he says: "Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God also has glorified him in himself, and God has glorified him at once." We have first the glory of the Son of Man, then the glory of God in the Son of Man, in the words: "Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him." For this first concerns the glory of the body, which would borrow glory from fellowship with the divine nature. Then follows the advance of a fuller glory, to be taken up from the increase of the glory already granted to the body: "If God is glorified in him, God also has glorified him in himself, and God has glorified him at once." For through this God glorified him in himself, that God was already glorified in him. For that God is glorified in him concerns the glory of the body, through which the glory of God was understood through the body, the glory of God being understood through the glory of the Son of Man. But that, because God was glorified in him, therefore God glorified him in himself: through the increase of God glorified in him, God glorified him in himself, so that, because he already reigns in the glory which is from God's glory, he himself might thereafter pass into the glory of God. For God glorified him in himself, that is, in that nature by which God is what he is; so that God may be all in all, the whole, from the dispensation by which he is man, now to abide in God. Nor did he keep silent about the time, saying: "And God has glorified him in himself, and God has glorified him at once"; so that, since, as Judas went out to the betrayal, he had signified as present the glory which would follow for him after the passion in the resurrection, he reserved for later that glory by which God would glorify him in himself; the glory of God being shown in him through the power of the resurrection, while he himself would abide in the glory of God, that is, in God all in all, by the dispensation of the subjection.

And in this, how great is the folly of heretical madness, to despair of for God what flatters its own human hopes; that God, who is powerful in man, should be weak in accomplishing it in himself? Neither speech nor a sense capable of reason says this: that God, bound by some natural necessity to provide for us, can bring no blessedness to himself; not that one of undisturbed nature and power needs advance, but that, through the dispensation and mystery of great piety, he who is God and is also man would be unable to grant himself to be wholly what God is, when he will without doubt grant us also to be what we are not. For the end of human life and death is resurrection; and the surest pay of our service is incorrupt eternity, not abiding for the continuance of punishment, but unceasing for the fruit and delight of perpetual glory. Since, then, this origin of our earthly bodies passes into the condition of a higher nature and becomes conformed to the glory of the Lord's body, will God, found in the form of a servant, though already glorified in the body according to his being in the form of a servant, not be conformed to God? So that he who will give us the form of his glorified body can give his own body nothing beyond what is common to us and to him? For this saying, "Then he himself will be subjected to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all," many of the heretics take in such a way that the Son is to be subjected to God the Father so that the Father, through the Son's subjection, may be all in all; as though perfection were still lacking to God, which he will gain through the Son's subjection: so that he is to be understood as lacking complete and blessed divinity, if he will attain to being all in all through the advance of times.

To me, indeed, who understand God by veneration alone, it seems no less impious to answer these men than to agree with them: to be confident that one can speak, about a nature which surpasses the conception of human sense, in words whose meaning is still narrower than understanding; and first to doubt whether God lacks anything, or whether he himself is full, or whether it remains for one already full to be fuller. But if God, whose being God always is from nowhere else, has advance, so as to be more at some time, he still cannot reach the point of lacking nothing: because a nature for which advance remains is never understood to have advanced without some remainder of increase, since a nature looking to advance, though always advancing, is always open to advance. But what abides in perfect fullness and always is leaves itself nothing by which to be fuller, because perfect fullness does not admit the addition of a fuller fullness. And this is the form of a pious understanding in thinking thus of God: that God lacks nothing and is full.

But the apostle is not ignorant with what voice of confession one must testify about God, saying: "O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor? Or who has first given to him, and it will be repaid to him? For from him and through him and in him are all things; to him be glory for ever and ever." God is not circumscribed by an earthly mind, nor is this depth of his wisdom reached by the sense of a penetrating understanding, nor are the judgments of his ordinances grasped by the wit of those who search, nor do the ways of his knowledge, past finding out, yield themselves to the efforts of those who pursue them. All things of his are sunk in an incomprehensible depth, and nothing of his matters will be found, nothing tracked down. For no one has known his mind, and he needed no outside counsel. But this whole speech now concerns us, not also him through whom all things are, who is the Angel of great counsel, who also says: "No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son wills to reveal him." But against our feeble minds, plunging themselves into the depth of defining and circumscribing the divine nature, the confession of the apostle's declaration must be used, so that rash opinion may not claim for itself anything about God beyond what is taught.

And this is the common understanding of natural causes: that nothing falls into sense except what lies under sense, either a thing set before the eyes or some work later than our sense and mind themselves. Of these, the one, which is touched or seen, yields within the judgment of our opinion, to be measured by the very touch and sight; while the other, which is made in time and is either begotten or established by a beginning more recent than ourselves, because it does not precede the sense of understanding, is also subject to the judgment of the sense that judges it. For neither does our sight judge invisible things, since it discerns only things seen; nor will our mind stretch itself into a time in which it did not exist, and search out things older than its birth, since only the opinion of things than which it is older is left to it; which mind, itself mostly uncertain through the necessity of its natural weakness, does not hold complete knowledge in the understanding of causes; much less would it perceive, by a sense going back beyond its birth, the manner of things which are before it by an eternal reason.

And therefore the apostle, because nothing would ever fall into knowledge except what succeeds later than sense, having mentioned the depth of God's wisdom, the infinity of his unsearchable judgments, the secrecy of his ways past finding out, the unknowing of his unknown mind, and the incomprehensibility of his uncommunicated counsel, added: "For who has first given to him, and it will be repaid to him? For from him and through him and in him are all things; to him be glory for ever and ever." God, who always is, is not subject to measure, nor is he anticipated by any prior movement of mind or understanding. And therefore he himself is wholly an unsearchable and inscrutable depth. And wholly so, not that he is thereby defined in measure, but that he is understood in immensity: because he took what he is from no one, nor has anyone first given to him, so that a return must be made to the giver. For from him and through him and in him are all things. He does not need things abiding from him, through him, and within him; he who is origin, maker, and container, external to things within, founder of things made; and he himself is never in need of what is his. Nothing is before, nothing from elsewhere, nothing outside him. What advance of fullness, then, does he lack, so that through time God is yet to be all in all? Or whence will he take, outside of whom there is nothing? Nothing, I mean, in such a way that he himself always is. And he who himself always is, and outside whom there is nothing, with what increase is he to be filled, or by what growth to be changed, when he says, "I am, and I do not change," since no room is left for change, no cause for advance, nothing earlier for eternity, nothing for God other than what God himself is? God, then, will not be all in all through the Son's subjection; nor will he be completed through a cause, from whom and through whom and within whom every cause consists. God therefore remains as he always is, nor does he need advance, who for what he is always is from himself and for himself.

But not even upon the only-begotten God does a necessity of changing nature fall. For he is God, which is the name of full and perfect divinity. For, as we taught above, both the meaning of the glory sought again and the cause of the subjection is that God may be all in all; and that God is all in all is a mystery, not a necessity. For abiding in the form of God he took the form of a servant, not changed, but emptying himself, hidden within himself, and made empty below his own power: while he tempers himself even to the form of the human condition, so that the weakness of the lowliness taken up might not fail to bear the powerful and immense nature; but the uncircumscribed power would restrain itself as far as was needed for it to obey even to the endurance of the body joined to it. And that he restrained himself, emptying himself within himself, brought no loss to his power, since within this lowliness of self-emptying he still used the power of all the power emptied within himself.

That God will be all in all, then, is the advance of what he took up from us. For he who, being in the form of God, was found in the form of a servant, is again to be confessed in the glory of God the Father; so that he may be understood without ambiguity to abide in the form of him in whose glory he will be confessed. It is, then, only a dispensation, not a change; for he is in that in which he was. But since there is a middle term, what he began to be, that is, a man born, the whole is gained for that nature which before was not God, when after the mystery of the dispensation he is shown to be God all in all. These, then, are our gains and our advances, namely that we are to be made conformed to the glory of the body of God. For the rest, the only-begotten God, though he was also born man, is nothing other than God all in all. For that subjection of the body, through which what is fleshly in him is swallowed up into the nature of spirit, will establish as God all in all him who, besides being God, is also man; and that man of ours advances into this. But we shall advance into a glory conformed to our man, and, renewed into the knowledge of God, we shall be re-formed into the image of the Creator, according to the apostle's saying: "Having put off the old man with his deeds, and having put on the new, who is renewed into the knowledge of God according to the image of him who created him." Man, then, is perfected as the image of God. For, made conformed to the glory of the body of God, he passes into the image of the Creator, according to the appointed fashioning of the first man. And after sin and the old man, made a new man into the knowledge of God, he attains the perfection of his constitution, knowing his God and thereby his image; and advancing through religion to eternity, and through eternity to abide as the image of his Creator.

At last, with the Holy Spirit now accompanying us, we are heading for the safe and calm harbour of a secure faith. And as very often happens to those tossed by much sea and wind, that, when heavy and difficult waves sometimes delay them about the mouths of harbours, in the end the very surge of the huge and terrible wave drives them into a station known and trusted by them: so, I hope, it will happen to us as we struggle in this twelfth book against the heretical storm, that, as we set our strengthened stern to the wave of the gravest impiety, that very wave may carry us into the bay of the rest we long for. For to all who are carried about by the uncertain wind of doctrine there is fear on one side, danger on another, and often shipwreck too, because the only-begotten God is maintained, on prophetic authority, to be a creature: so that in him there is not birth but creation, because it was said in the person of Wisdom: "The Lord created me the beginning of his ways." This is the greatest wave of their winter, this the heavy billow of their twisting whirlwind: which, met by us and broken by a secure ship, carries us on to the very safest harbour of the shore we long for.

We do not rely on uncertain or idle hopes, as sailors do, whom, sailing sometimes on prayers rather than confidence, wandering and unstable winds either desert or drive off course. But the Spirit of faith is with us, inseparable, abiding by the gift of the only-begotten God, and leading us on an unchanging course to calm waters. For we know the Lord Christ not as a creature, because he is not; nor as a thing made, because he is himself the Lord of all things made; but as God, God the proper offspring of God the Father. We all, indeed, according to the condescension of his goodness, have been called and taken up as sons of God; but he is the one true Son to God the Father, and his is a true and complete birth, abiding only in the knowledge of both. This alone is our religion: to confess the Son not as adopted but as born; not as chosen but as begotten. For we do not preach him as made or as not born, because we neither compare the Creator with creatures nor falsely speak of a birth without generation. He who is through birth is not from himself; nor is he not born who is Son; nor can he who is Son be what a son is otherwise than by being born.

No one doubts that the causes of impiety are always contrary to and striving against the causes of religion, and that what is judged to have been impiously received cannot be piously received: so that either these new correctors of the apostolic faith divide the Spirit of the Gospels and the prophets into quarrels and parcel him out into disputes, or the one prophesied one thing and the other preached another; because Solomon would call us to venerate a creature, while Paul rebukes those who serve the creature. These certainly do not seem, according to the understanding of impiety, to agree, so that the apostle, taught through the law, set apart by predestination, and speaking through Christ speaking in him, should either have been ignorant of the prophecy or, not ignorant of it, have undone it: and should not have known that Christ was a creature, whom he called creator; and should have forbidden the worship of a creature, he who warned that the Creator alone is to be served, saying: "Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and served the creature, passing over the Creator, who is blessed for ever and ever."

Does Christ, God speaking in Paul, too little refute this impiety of lying speech? Too little condemn the lie of changed truth? For all things were created through the Lord Christ; and therefore his proper name is that he is Creator. The nature and name of his own product do not fall upon him. Melchizedek is our witness, proclaiming God the creator of heaven and earth thus: "Blessed be Abraham by God most high, who created heaven and earth." Hosea the prophet is a witness, saying: "Making firm the heaven and creating the earth, I am the Lord your God, whose hands created all the host of heaven." Peter too is a witness, writing thus: "Commending your souls as to a faithful creator." Why do we impose the name of the work on the worker? Why do we name God after our own things? He is our creator, the creator of all the heavenly host.

Since these things, to be understood by apostolic and gospel faith, are referred to the Son, through whom all things were made, how will he be made equal to the very things he made, and be under the name of that nature by which all things are? First, the sense of human understanding rejects this, that the creator should be a creature, because creation is through the creator. If he is a creature, he is subject to corruption, liable to expectation, and subjected to servitude. For the same blessed apostle Paul says: "For the long expectation of the creature waits for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creature was subjected to vanity, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope; because the creature itself also will be set free from the servitude of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the sons of God." If, then, Christ is a creature, he must be uncertain under the hope of a long expectation, and his long expectation must wait rather for what is ours, and, waiting, he must be subject to vanity, and through the subjection of necessity subject not willingly. And since he is subject not willingly, he must also be a servant; and since he is a servant, he must also remain in the corruption of nature. For the apostle teaches that all these are proper to the creature, from which, to be set free through long expectation, it will shine according to human glory. And O imprudent and impious profession about God, to assign him these mockeries through the insult of being a creature: that he hopes, that he serves, that he is compelled, that he is known, that he is to be set free into what is ours, not his own, when it is from what is his that we are advanced to anything!

But our impiety proceeds, with a huge increase of unbelief, through this boldness of an unlawful word, so that, because the Son is a creature, the Father too does not differ from a creature. For Christ, abiding in the form of God, took the form of a servant; and if he who is in the form of God is a creature, God will not be removed from a creature, since a creature is in the form of God. And to be in the form of God has no other meaning than to abide in the nature of God: through which God too is a creature, since a creature is in his nature. But he who was in the form of God did not grasp at being equal to God, because he would go down from equality with God, that is, from his form, into the form of a servant. And God could go down from God into man only by emptying himself out of the form of God. But in emptying himself he was not abolished so as not to be, since he was other than he had been. For he who emptied himself into himself did not fail from himself, since the power of might remains even in the power of emptying himself; and to have passed into the form of a servant is not to have lost the nature of God, since to have emptied the form of God is nothing other than the might of divine power.

To be in the form of God is so much nothing other than to be equal to God that equality of honour is due to the Lord Jesus Christ, who is in the form of God, as he himself says: "That all may honour the Son as they honour the Father. He who does not honour the Son does not honour the Father who sent him." A difference of things never exists except in a different honour also. For the same things are of the same veneration; because either the highest honour will be unworthily given to lower things, or lower things will be made equal in honour to higher things to the insult of the higher. But if the Son, as a creation rather than a birth, is made equal to the Father in veneration, we have no reverence of honour toward the Father, since so much veneration of him is laid on us as is of a creature; but because he is equal to God the Father in that he was born God from him, he is also equal in honour. For he is Son, not creature.

And this is the Father's splendid word about him: "From the womb before the morning star I begot you." But, as we have often said, no prejudgment is made of God through the weakness of our understanding, as though, because he said he begot from the womb, he consisted of inner and outer parts coming together through members, like the origins of bodily causes; since, free and absolute outside the cause of natural necessities, remaining Lord of all nature, he signifies the property of the birth of his Only-begotten from the power of his unchangeable nature. For spirit, being born from spirit, though born from the property of spirit by which it is itself spirit, still has no other cause for what is born than that of perfect and unchangeable causes. And, being born from a cause however perfect and unchangeable, it must be born from the cause in the property of the cause itself. Now the property of human necessities is contained within the causes of the womb. But God, not perfect from parts but unchangeable through spirit, because God is spirit, has no natural necessity of inner causes. But because the Spirit was proclaiming to us a birth of spirit from spirit, he trained our sense by the example of our causes; not as a pattern of the birth, but for the understanding of the generation; so that the example might serve not necessity but sense. If, then, the only-begotten God is a creation, what is the meaning of the signification of understanding which, through the custom of human birth, shows the understanding of divine generation?

For very often, signifying to us the moments of his workings through these members of our bodies, God has taught our sense by the use of common understanding, when he says: "Whose hands created all the host of heaven"; or again: "The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous"; or again: "I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after my heart." For since the will through which David pleased by uprightness of conduct is signified by the heart, the knowledge of the universe, so that nothing is outside God's knowledge, is expressed under the word "eyes," and the accomplishing of works, since nothing is not from God, is understood by the name "hands": God, willing, foreseeing, and doing all things, to be understood under the signification of bodily causes without bodily service, how is not the sense of understanding a spiritual birth also brought in by "he begot from the womb," not through the bodily cause of human origin, since through the other significations of members the effect of the other workings in God is shown?

Since, then, the heart is put for will, the eyes for sight, the hand for effect, though God, beyond any incomplete comparison of parts, wills, foresees, and accomplishes, and these same things are expressed by heart, eyes, and hand: is not the signification "he begot from the womb" the showing of a true birth? Not that he begot from a womb, just as he neither acts by a hand, nor sees by eyes, nor wills by a heart; but because through the signification of these he truly acts, sees, and wills all things, so through the signification of the womb he truly begot from himself him whom he begot, not by the cause of a womb but for the profession of truth; just as he neither wills, nor sees, nor acts by the causes of bodies, but uses these names of parts so that through the service of bodily things the power of incorporeal workings may be perceived.

The nature of human custom, then, does not allow, nor does the judgment of the Lord's teaching permit, that the disciple be above the master or the servant command the lord: because the one is subject to the other both through ignorance, as the ignorant to the knowing, and is weak through condition, as servitude to lordship. Since common judgment holds that this is so, by the example of what rashness shall we now both say and think that God is a creature and the Son a thing made, when nowhere has our Master and Lord spoken this of himself to his servants and disciples, nor taught that his birth was a creation or a making? But both the Father has never testified anything other than that he is Son, and the Son has never professed anything other than that God is his own Father; asserting, surely, that he was born, not made or created, as he says: "Everyone who loves the Father loves also the Son who was born of him."

Things made are works of creatures, not the birth of generation. For heaven is not a son, nor the earth a son, nor the world a birth, of which it was said, "All things were made through him," and through the prophet, "The heavens are the works of your hands," and through the same, "Do not forsake the works of your hands." Is a painting the painter's son, or a sword the smith's son, or a house the builder's son? These are works of their makers; but to a father only he who is born from him is son.

We too are sons to God, but sons by making. For we were once sons of wrath; but, made sons to God through the Spirit of adoption, we rather earn to be called so than are born so. And because everything that is made did not exist before it was made, we, not having been sons, are made into what we are. For before, we were not sons; but after we earned it, we are this. And we are not born but made; not begotten but acquired. For God acquired a people for himself, and through this he begot. But we never know that God begot sons with the signification of what is proper. For he does not say, "I have begotten and raised up my sons," but only this: "I have begotten and raised up sons."

Unless perhaps, in his saying "Israel is my firstborn son," someone will understand his saying "my firstborn" so as to take from the Son the property of generation; so that, because he also said "my" of Israel, the adoption of sons made would be usurped for the property of birth; and therefore what was said of him, "This is my beloved Son," would not be proper to God's birth, since "my" is said to be proper also to those who manifestly were not born. And that they were not born, though they are said to be born, is taught by this, when it is said: "To a people that will be born, whom the Lord has made."

The people of Israel, then, is born so as to be made; and through its being said to be born, it is understood also to be made. For it is son by adoption, not by generation; and it has not the property but the name. For though "my firstborn" is written of it, "my beloved Son" and "my firstborn son" differ long and much. For where there is birth, there is "my beloved Son"; but where there is choice from the nations and adoption by will, there is "my firstborn son." Here his being his own goes with "firstborn"; there his being his own goes with "son." And in birth the son is first his own and so beloved; in election the son is first firstborn and so afterwards his own: so that for Israel, a son adopted out of all peoples, being firstborn is what is proper; but for the one born to the one God it is manifest that being son is proper. There is, then, no true and perfect birth where one is reckoned rather than begotten: because there is no doubt that the people which is born into a son is also made. But what is made when it had not been, and is said to be born through being made, has no true birth in it, because before it was something other than what was born. And therefore it was not before it was born, that is, before it was made: because one who is a son from the nations is a nation before he is a son, and through this not truly son, because not always son. But the only-begotten God was never not a son, nor was he anything before he was son, nor is he himself anything except son. And so he who is always son left no room for the understanding that he once was not.