On the Trinity 5.1–5.21

In answering the impious and mad teachings of the heretics in the earlier books, we were not unaware that we had been led into such a necessity of contradiction that our answer would disturb our hearers with no less danger than our silence. For when unbelieving assertion profanely pressed upon us the one God, and sound faith on the other hand could not religiously deny the one God, it could not be discussed without a sense of danger on both sides, since it would be no less impious to affirm it than to deny it. And by the opinion of human sense this will perhaps be thought foolish and contrary to reason: that what it is irreligious to deny, it should be irreligious to confess; since the piety of confessing condemns the impiety of denying, and it is not reasonable that something should be usefully affirmed which would be usefully destroyed. But human sense, imprudent for understanding divine wisdom and foolish by the measure of heavenly prudence, thinks according to its weaknesses and knows according to the frailty of its nature; it must become foolish to itself in order to be wise toward God: that is, understanding the poverty of its own perception and pursuing the wisdom of God, it must be prudent not according to human wisdom, but wise in what advances it toward God, passing into the wisdom of God from the recognized foolishness of the world. Heretical subtlety, fitting the sense of this foolish wisdom into an occasion for deceit, professed one God, using the authority of the Law and the Gospels, where it is said: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one.” It knew well how great the danger was either in answering or in silence, and expected an opportunity for impiety from either: if the silence of one who connived confirmed the holy saying faithlessly appropriated, then, because God is one, the Son of God would not be God, God alone remaining one, as he is; but if there were contradiction of this impious profession they had put forward, an answer that did not confess one God would not preserve the truth of the gospel faith, since the profession of our faith is according to one God; and a confession that professed the Father and the Son as one God would fall back into the impiety of another heresy. And so the wisdom of the world, which is foolishness with God, would mock us with an appearance of flattering and pestilent simplicity, since it laid down as the starting point of its faith something to which we would impiously either assent or object; and through the danger of either, it would either secure that the Son of God is not God, because God is one; or force us into the necessity of heresy, if, confessing both the Father as God and the Son as God, we were thought to preach one God according to the impious opinion of Sabellius. And so by this way of preaching, the one God would either exclude another, or would not be one because of another, or would be one in names only: because unity would not know another, and another would not allow union, and two could not be one.

But we, following the wisdom of God, which is foolishness to the world, and intending to expose the deceit of a viperous teaching by a saving and sincere confession of the Lord's faith, began our answer in this order, which would gain an entry for showing the truth without entangling itself in the danger of an impious profession; keeping a measured course between the two: not denying one God, but preaching God and God on the authority of the very one through whom one God was preached; teaching one God not by union, nor again cutting him into a number of differences, nor on the other hand confessing him in names only; but showing God and God, while the question of the unity is set aside and deferred for fuller treatment. For the Gospels testify that one God was rightly preached by Moses; and again Moses, preaching one God, is the authority for the faithful teaching of God and God in the Gospels. So the authority was not opposed; rather, the answer was given from the authority, so that it might not be permitted to deny that the Son of God is God because God is one for Israel, since the same author who is the authority for preaching one God is the authority for confessing the Son of God as God.

The order of this connected book, then, follows the order of the question. For since the next statement set down in their impious flattery is this: “We know one true God,” the whole discussion of this second book also turns on whether the Son of God is true God. For without doubt the subtlety of the heretical mind fitted itself to this order, first saying one God, then confessing one true God, so as to turn the Son of God away from the nature and truth of God, since truth abiding in the nature of the one would not exceed the natural truth of the one. Since, then, there is no room for doubt that Moses, preaching one God, is understood to have signified of the Son of God that he is God, let us go back through the very authorities by which he signified it, and ask whether he taught that the one he signified as God is also to be understood as true God. No one doubts that truth comes from nature and power: for example, that is true wheat which, built up in the ear, fenced with beards, threshed from its husks, ground into flour, kneaded into bread, and taken as food, has yielded from itself both the nature and the function of bread. Since, then, the power of the nature provides the truth, let us see whether he whom Moses signifies to be God is true God; we will speak later about the one God who is also the true God; lest, if no pledge were given about confirming the one and true God subsisting in the Father and the Son, a dangerous suspicion should weary the anxiety of those kept waiting.

Since, then, the creation of the world, once accepted as a knowledge of God, signifies that the Son of God is God, I ask in what respect it denies that he is true God. For there is no doubt that all things are through the Son. For all things, according to the Apostle, are through him and in him. If all things are through him, and all things are from nothing, and nothing is not through him, I ask in what the truth of God is lacking to him, to whom neither the nature nor the power of God is lacking. For he used the power of his nature, so that things which were not should be, and things which pleased should be made. For God saw that they were good.

For the Law brought in no distinction other than of person when it said, “And God said, Let there be a firmament,” and added again, “And God made the firmament.” It neither distinguished power, nor separated nature, nor changed the name, in the passage where it only set forth the understanding of the speaker so as to bring in the signification of the maker. But the signification of the speaker does not take away the truth of nature and power; rather it commends that very truth with great exactness. For to give effect to a word belongs to the nature that, in making, can accomplish what the speaker can say. In what, then, will he who makes not be true, when he who speaks is true, since the truth of the deed follows the truth of the word? God is he who spoke; God is he who made. If truth is in the one who spoke, I ask why it is denied in the one who made; unless perhaps the one is true in speaking and the other not true in making. We have, then, in the Son of God, God, the truth of nature. He is God, he is Creator, he is Son of God, he can do all things. It is little to say that he can do what he wills, for will always goes with power; he can even do what is said to him. For it belongs to perfect power that the nature of the maker can do whatever the speech of the speaker can signify. And so, since whatever can be said can also be done by him, the working that is equal to the words holds the nature of truth. The Son of God, then, is not a false God, nor an adopted God, nor God by sharing a name, but true God. And there is no need to show anything from the opposite side by which he would not be true God; for the name and nature of God in him suffice me. For he is God, through whom all things were made. This is what the creation of the world has told me about him. God is made equal to God in name; truth is made equal to truth in work. As there is the signification of God powerful in the word, so there is the understanding of God powerful in the deed. And after this I ask, in the confession of the Father and the Son, by what authority the truth of the nature is denied, which both the power of the name and the name of the power have fulfilled.

The reader should remember that I am not now silent about the questions usually raised against us out of forgetfulness or lack of confidence. For the saying, “The Father is greater than I,” and others like it, are neither unknown nor not understood, as though the nature of true God in the Son were not taught by these very sayings. But it is fitting that the order of our answer be the order of the opposing proposition, so that the steps of pious preaching, treading on the footprints of impious teaching, may wipe out the very first traces of the deceitful doctrine that strays off onto this profane and irreligious road. With the proclamations of the Gospels and the apostles deferred, then, and kept to the end, our whole fight against the impious will for now be from the Law and the Prophets, their lying and deceitful perversity being refuted meanwhile by the very sayings by which they try to deceive. For truth cannot be understood except by exposing as false what has been set against the truth; and this to the more complete disgrace of the liars, if their lies themselves serve the truth. And indeed it is the common judgment of human opinion that false things are in no way joined to true ones, nor are such kinds of things held together by mutual agreement: for, nature opposing them through difference of kind, things at variance never unite, different things do not agree, and things foreign to each other are not common.

This being so, I ask how this saying is to be understood between a true and a false God: “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” Words express meaning; meaning is a movement of reason; truth sets the movement of reason in motion. Let us follow the meaning from the words, then, understand the reason from the meaning, and grasp the truth from the reason. I ask in what respect he to whom it is said, “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” is not true, according to the one who says it to him; for without doubt this saying comes from the disposition and meaning of the speaker. He, then, who says “Let us make” signifies one with him in the making who does not disagree, is not foreign, is not weak, but is able to do what the words concern. The speaker must therefore without doubt be understood to have meant this, since he said it.

So that the truth of nature and of working might be taught more fully, he who expressed his meaning through words also added the reason for his meaning from nature, with truth, saying: “in our image and likeness.” Where is the false God here, to whom the true God says “in our image and likeness”? There is no union, no diversity, no separation. For man is made, according to the truth of the words, in a common image. But fellowship does not fit the false and the true. God who speaks speaks to God: man is founded in the image of the Father and the Son. The name does not disagree, the nature does not differ. For the form of the image in which man was created is one. And where, among these things, is truth lost, when between the two there remain both fellowship in the deed and the truth of a common image? It is not yet time for me to resolve this question; for later we will show in what image of God the Father and God the Son man was founded. For now we hold to this: whether he is not true God to whom the true God said, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” Distinguish, if you can, the true and the false in this shared image, and with heretical fury cut apart what cannot be cut. For they are one, of whose image and likeness man was made as one copy.

But let us follow the order of the reading, so that the truth, always consistent with itself, may not be altered by the stumbling block of falsehood. “And God made man; in the image of God he made him.” The image is common: God made man in the image of God. I ask him who denies that the Son of God is true God in the image of which God he understands man to have been made by God. Let him always remember, however, that all things are through the Son, lest heretical understanding claim the work for God the Father. If, then, man is founded in the image of God the Father through God the Son, he is founded also in the image of the Son; for no one denies that “in our image and likeness” was said to the Son. The divine word, then, kept in its sayings the reasoning of truth which the work fulfilled in deeds: that God should form man in the image of God, so as to signify God and not take truth away from God; since he who was understood as God the Son in carrying out the work was also true God in the sharing of the image.

O madness of a desperate and lost mind! O foolish rashness of blind impiety! You hear God and God, you hear “our image”: why do you put in true and not true? Why do you insert natural and false? Why do you overturn religion in the name of religion? Why do you try, by “one God” and “one true God,” to make the true God not one? I am not yet stifling your mad spirits with the sayings of the Gospels and the apostles, in which the Father and the Son are each one true God, not by person but by nature: meanwhile the Law alone is killing you. Does it say true God and not true God? Does it use, in either case, anything but the name of the nature? It said God and God, the very Law that said one God. But why do I say it only said this? It preached true God and true God by the truth of the image. In naming, it first used the name of the nature; then it uses the truth of the nature in their kind. For when he who is made is created according to the image of both, it cannot fail to consist of what is true, since both are true God.

But let us go on even now along the road of our preaching by which the holy Law taught about God. The angel of God speaks to Hagar, and the same angel is God. But perhaps he is not true God because he is the angel of God. For this name seems to belong to a lower nature; and where there is a name of a foreign kind, it is thought that the truth of the same kind is not present. The previous book has already shown the emptiness of this question. For “angel” conveys the understanding of an office rather than of a nature. The prophet is my witness, saying: “Who makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a burning fire.” That burning fire, then, is his ministers, and the spirit that comes is his angels. By these the nature, or the power, of the messengers called angels and of the ministers is shown. This spirit, then, becomes an angel, or this burning fire a minister of God; and this nature of theirs receives the office of messenger and minister. The Law, then, or rather God through the Law, wishing to make known the person of the Father's name, spoke of God the Son as the angel of God, that is, God's messenger. It testifies to the signification of an office in the word “messenger,” but confirmed the truth of the nature in the name when it called him God. Here, however, is an order of dispensation, not of kind. For we preach nothing other than the Father and the Son, and we make the nature of the names equal in such a way that the birth of the only-begotten God from the unbegotten God holds the truth of God. The signification of sent and sender here teaches nothing other than the Father and the Son; it does not take truth from the nature, nor destroy in the Son the property of a divinity received by birth: for let no one doubt that the nature of the author is born together in the birth of the Son, so that what is from one subsists as one, which through one is not separated from one; and so they are one by the fact that one is from one.

O impatient warmth of faith, and silence unable to hold back the speech it longs for! Already in the previous book we went beyond the limit set for our preaching, when, refuting the heretics' impious use of “one God” and teaching that God and God were preached by Moses, we hurried with pious, though rash, haste toward the true and religious confession of one God. And now too, while dwelling on the business of another question, we have not kept the set order; and while speaking of the Son of God as true God, we have burst out, in the ardor of a fervent spirit, as far as confessing true God in the Father and the Son. But let the truth of our faith be reserved for its own treatment: though it has been begun for the reassurance of the reader, it must be treated and completed more fully to bring the gainsayer to despair.

The name of an office, then, brings no change of nature: for he who is the angel of God is God. Let him plainly not be true God, if he has not both spoken and done the things of God. For he increases Ishmael into a great nation and promises multitudes of nations to his name: I ask whether this is the work of an angel. But if it is the power of God, why do you take truth away from the nature when you do not take from it the power of truth? The power of the nature, then, holds the assurance of truth; and he who is true God does not know how ever not to be true God, even amid the mysteries of his dispensation that save the world.

And first I ask, what does “true God” and “not true God” mean? For I do not grasp the sense of the expression if I am told: it is fire, but not true fire; or it is water, but not true water. I ask in what the truth of one kind differs from the truth of the same kind. For what is fire cannot be such that it is not true; nor can a nature, while it remains, lack being true. Destroy in water what makes it water, and by that you will be able to abolish its being true. But if it remains water, it must also persist in being true. A nature can perish only by not existing; but it cannot fail to be true if it remains. Either the Son of God is true God, so that he is God; or, if he is not true God, he cannot even be what God is: because if the nature is not there, the name of the nature does not fit; but if the name of the nature is in him, the truth of the nature cannot be absent from him.

But perhaps, when the angel of God is called God, the name is granted by adoption, and there is in him the naming of God rather than the truth. If he did not sufficiently show the nature of God in himself when he was called the angel of God, consider, under the name of a nature lower still than an angel's, whether he displayed the truth of God from himself. For a man spoke to Abraham; but Abraham worshipped God. But, O pestilent heretic, Abraham confessed as God the one whom you deny to be God. What blessings promised to Abraham do you impiously expect? He is not to you, as he truly is, the father of nations; nor are you reborn into the family of his seed through the blessings of his faith. You are not raised up from stones as a son of Abraham; but, a brood of vipers, you stand as an enemy of his confession. You are not the Israel of God, not Abraham's posterity, not justified by faith; for you have not believed God. For Abraham was justified, and made father of nations, through that faith by which he worshipped the God in whom he had believed. For that blessed and faithful patriarch worshipped God; and hear how true a God, to whom, as he says of himself, no word is impossible. Or is not every word possible to God alone? Or I ask what is lacking of true God to him to whom every word is possible.

And I ask, who is this God, the destroyer of Sodom and Gomorrah? For the Lord rained from the Lord: was it not true Lord from true Lord? Or what else than Lord from Lord? Or what will you fit to Lord and Lord besides the signification of person? And remember that the one you know as the only true God you have professed as the only just judge. And understand that the Lord who rained from the Lord, who does not kill the righteous with the wicked and judges all the earth, is both Lord and just judge, and rained from the Lord. And among these, I ask whom you have called the only just judge. For the Lord rained from the Lord; and you will not deny that he is a just judge who rained from the Lord. For Abraham, the father of nations, but certainly not of unbelievers, said: “By no means will you do this thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous will be as the wicked. By no means will you who judge the earth do this judgment.” This God, then, the just judge, must also be true God. I hold you, impious one, by your own lie. I do not yet bring forward God as judge from the Gospels: the Law has told me of God as judge. Take from the Son that he is judge, in order to take away that he is true God. For you professed the same one as only true God whom you professed as only just judge; and the one you teach to be just judge you cannot, by your own reckoning, deny to be true God. He who is judge is Lord, is able to do every word, is the guarantor of eternal blessings, is judge of the pious and the impious, is the God of Abraham, was worshipped by him: invent, at least, by this impious and foolish impudence of your words, some reason why he is not true.

The mysteries of heavenly mercy do not destroy the truth of the nature; nor do the appearances adapted to the vision of faith deceive the faith of the saints. For the mysteries of the Law prefigure the mystery of the gospel dispensation, so that the patriarch sees and believes what the Apostle contemplates and preaches. For since the Law is a shadow of things to come, the appearance of the shadow expressed the truth of the body. And God, who in the fullness of time was to be begotten in man, is seen and believed and adored in man. For the appearance of a prefigured truth is taken up to be seen. At that time God was only seen in man, not born; afterward he who had been seen was also born. The familiarity of the form taken up to be beheld prepares for the truth of being born. There, man is taken up by God to be seen according to the weakness of our nature; here, what had been seen is born for the sake of the weakness of our nature. The shadow receives a body, the appearance truth, the vision nature. Yet God is not changed from himself when he is either seen or born for us in man, birth and vision having a close kinship of property with each other: so that what was born had been seen, and what was seen was to be born. And since this is not yet the place for comparing the Gospels with the Prophets, let us meanwhile pursue the order we set from the Law. For we will afterward prove from the Gospels that the true Son of God was born in man; for now we teach from the Law that the Son of God, seen by the patriarchs in the form of a man, is true God. For when a man was seen by Abraham, God was both worshipped and proclaimed judge; and when the Lord rained from the Lord, there is no doubt that the Law, in saying that the Lord rained from the Lord, speaks to signify the Father and the Son. Nor again must we think that the patriarch did not know that he was worshipping true God, whom he worshipped understanding him to be God.

The impiety of faithlessness has no small difficulty in understanding the true faith. For the teaching of religious doctrine does not enter a mind narrowed by irreligion. Hence the irreligious mind does not grasp what God did, by being born in man, for the mystery of human salvation, since it does not understand that the work of its salvation is the power of God. Beholding the childbirth, the weakness of infancy, the growth of childhood, the years of youth, the sufferings of the body, the cross of the sufferings, and the death of the cross, they do not perceive true God through these things; though he brought forth in himself, as his own nature, things which he did not have before in the truth of his nature, in such a way that he did not lose the truth of his nature, nor did God, made man, cease to be God, when he who is God began to be man. They do not understand that it is only by the power of true God that what was not should be, and yet what was should not cease to be; since the taking up of weak things of nature could only come from the power of a mighty nature, which, while remaining in what it was, could yet be what it was not. O heretical imprudence, and foolish wisdom of the world, not understanding that the reproach of Christ is the power of God, and not perceiving that the foolishness of faith is the wisdom of God! So for you Christ is not God because he who was is born, because he who is unchangeable grows in age, because the impassible suffers, because the living dies, because the dead lives, because everything in him is against nature? I ask, what else is this than to be almighty, which is what God is? I do not yet touch the sacred and venerable Gospels, to show from them that Christ Jesus is God in these sufferings. For you take your stand on the Law; and it must teach that he who is God does not lose being God through the weakness he assumed. For it has testified to the mystery of your faith by the power of its own mysteries.

Stand by me now, stand by me with the spirit of your faith against the poisonous hissing of unbelief, holy and blessed patriarch Jacob: prevailing in the wrestling with a man, being the stronger, you beg to be blessed by him. What is this, that you pray to the weak one, that you look for something from the feeble one? The one whose blessings you ask, you, the stronger, crush in your embrace. The work of your mind differs from the deeds of your body, for you perceive something other than what you do. In the act of wrestling you hold a weak man; but this man is to you true God, not by naming but by nature. For you ask, patriarch, to be blessed not with adoptive blessings but with true ones. You wrestle with a man, but you see God face to face. You do not discern with the eyes of your body what you perceive with the sight of your faith. The man is weak in relation to you; but your soul has been saved by seeing God. In the wrestling you are Jacob; after the faith of the blessing you asked for, you are Israel. A man is subject to you according to the flesh, foreshadowing the mystery of the passion in the flesh; you are not ignorant of God in the weakness of the flesh, foreshadowing the mystery of the blessing in the Spirit. Neither does what you see prevent faith from remaining, nor does weakness draw you away from asking the blessing. Nor does being man prevent him who is man from being God; nor is he who is God not true God: for he who is God cannot fail to be true God, in blessing, in changing your name, and in naming you.

The shadow of the Law still keeps the order of the gospel mystery, and, a rival of the truth, prefigures in its mysteries the truth of apostolic teaching. In the vision of a dream blessed Jacob had seen God: in a dream there is the revelation of a mystery, not a bodily seeing. For by the ladder the descent and ascent of the angels to heaven is shown, and God is shown leaning on the ladder, and the interpretation of the vision foretold the revelation of the dream. For by the patriarch's words this place of the vision is shown to be both the house of God and the gate of heaven. And after a long account of his deeds there follows: “And God said to Jacob, Arise and go up to the place Bethel and dwell there, and make there a sacrifice to God, who appeared to you when you went away from the face of Esau.” If the gospel faith has access to God the Father through God the Son, and God cannot be understood except through God, now teach how the God who asks honor for the God leaning on the ladder of heaven is not true. Or what difference of nature is there in the two, where there is one and the same name of the same nature? God was seen; God speaks of the God who was seen. God cannot be understood except through God, just as God receives honor from us only through God. For the one will not be understood to be honored unless this one has taught that he is to be honored; nor will God be known unless this God has been known. The dispensation of mysteries has its order: we are taught to honor God through God. The nature keeps its name: neither is anything other than God. And when there is one name of the one nature for the Father and the Son, I ask how God the Son could degenerate from himself so as not to be true.

We must not think about God with human judgments. For our nature is not such as to raise itself by its own strength to heavenly knowledge. What is to be understood about God must be learned from God, because he is known only on his own authority. Let there be the elaborate training of secular learning, let there be innocence of life: these will further the satisfaction of conscience, but will not attain the knowledge of God. Moses, adopted as the queen's son and instructed in all the learning of the Egyptians, though he had, out of natural affection, avenged a Hebrew's wrong by the death of an Egyptian, still did not know the God of his fathers' blessings. For when, leaving Egypt out of fear because the killing had become known, he was a shepherd of sheep in the land of Midian, he saw fire in a bush without the bush being burned, heard God, asked his name, and learned his nature. For these things about God could not have been known except through God. We must speak about God, then, in no other way than he himself has spoken about himself for our understanding.