On the Trinity 7.3–7.19

Nothing is heavier for human nature than awareness of danger (for what is unknown or sudden has indeed a pitiable security, but has no fear of the future); because for one not ignorant of what may happen, anxiety itself is the punishment of suffering. I am not now setting a ship out of harbor ignorant of shipwreck, nor entering a road unaware of forests infested by robbers, nor crossing the sands of Libya uncertain whether scorpions, asps, and basilisks are everywhere: nothing is free of my anxiety, nothing of my awareness. For I speak under the watch of all the heretics, hanging on my mouth for the chance of every single word, and every path of my discourse is either broken by narrow places, cut by pits, or stretched with snares. That it is steep and difficult I complain less: for I climb not by my own steps but by the apostles'. But for me to step aside from the narrow way, or fall into what is dug, or be entangled in nets, is always in danger, always in fear. For as I am about to preach one God according to the Law, the Prophets, and the Apostles, Sabellius is at hand, swallowing me whole with the cruellest bite under the profession of this word, like a longed-for meal. If again I deny one God in Sabellius's sense and confess the Son of God as true God, the new heresy waits to accuse me of preaching two gods. When I am about to say that the Son of God was born of Mary, Ebion, who is Photinus, stands by, ready to take authority for his lie from the truth of my profession. I say nothing of the rest, whom all know to be outside the church. But this evil, though often condemned and cast out, is still an internal one today. Galatia impiously nourished many to profess one God. Alexandria wickedly produced, almost throughout the whole world, those who deny two gods. Pannonia defends, pestilently, that Jesus Christ was born only of Mary. And amid these the church is in danger of not holding the truth through true things, while things are pressed upon her for irreligion by which religion is both confirmed and lost. For we cannot piously preach one God if we preach him as solitary, because the Son will not be God in a faith of a solitary God. But when we preach the Son of God as God, as he is, we are in danger of not holding the faith of one God; and to deny one God is the same danger as to confess a solitary one. And the foolish of the world do not perceive these things, since to them one does not seem to be signified in one not solitary, nor can one be understood without being solitary.

But the church, I hope, will bring the light of her teaching even to the imprudence of the world, so that, though it does not accept the mystery of faith, it may understand that the truth of the mystery is preached by us against the heretics. For great is the power of truth, which, though it can be understood by itself, shines out through the very things that oppose it: so that, remaining unmoved in its nature, it gains the firmness of its nature daily while it is attacked. For it is proper to the church to conquer when she is wounded, to be understood when she is accused, to prevail when she is deserted. She would wish all to remain with her and within her, and would neither cast out nor lose any from her most peaceful bosom, as they become unworthy of the home of so great a mother; but when heretics depart from her or are cast out, as much as she loses the opportunity of granting salvation from herself, so much she gains for faith in the blessedness to be sought from her. This is most readily known from the very zeal of the heretics. For since the church, established by the Lord and confirmed by the apostles, is one for all, from which the raging error of various impieties has cut itself off; and it cannot be denied that disagreement in faith arose from the fault of bad understanding, while what is read is fitted to the opinion rather than the opinion obeying what is read; yet, while the separate parties oppose one another, she is to be understood not only from her own teachings but from those of her opponents: so that, while all are against her alone, she refutes the most impious error of all by the very fact that she alone is one. All heretics, then, come against the church; but while all heretics conquer one another, they win nothing for themselves. For their victory is the church's triumph over all, since one heresy fights against another with what the church's faith condemns in the other heresy (for there is nothing common to the heretics); and meanwhile, as they oppose one another, they confirm our faith.

Sabellius preaches one God, taking away the birth of the Son, while he does not doubt that the power of the nature that worked in the man is God. For, ignorant of the mystery of the Son, he lost faith in a true generation through wonder at the deeds; and when he hears, “He who has seen me has seen the Father also,” he impiously seized on a union of an undistinguished and not unlike nature in Father and Son, not understanding that a natural unity is shown under the signification of birth: since the fact that the Father is seen in the Son is a confirmation of divinity, not an abolition of birth. The knowledge of the one in the other, then, comes because the one does not differ from the other in nature; and in that in which they differ in nothing, there is an undifferentiated beholding of the property of nature. Nor indeed can it be doubted that he who abode in the form of God showed from himself the appearance of the form of God. This saying of the Lord also feeds the foolish fury of this perverse opinion: “I and the Father are one.” For the unity of a nature not unlike led irreligiously to the error of union, and the force alone being understood did not hold the meaning of the saying. For “I and the Father are one” does not signify a solitary one. For the conjunction that signifies “and the Father” does not admit the understanding of one person; and “are” does not allow a singular; but “are one” does not take away the birth, but does not separate the nature in its kind; since “one” is not of difference, nor “are” of a single person.

Set against this madness the madness of the present heretics, so that they may stand against Sabellius. They will claim to have read, “The Father is greater than I”; and, understanding nothing either of the mystery of the birth or of the mystery of God's emptying himself and taking flesh, they will make a diminution of nature out of the profession of “greater.” For they will contend against Sabellius that the Son exists, to the extent that he is less than the Father, that he asks back his former honor, that he fears to die, and that he died. But on the other side Sabellius defends the nature of God in the deeds; and while this new heresy will not deny one God, so as not to believe the Son God, Sabellius will keep one God in his profession so that there may be no Son at all. The one will press the Son working; the other will contend that God is in the works. The one will say one; the other will deny one God. Sabellius will defend himself thus: “The works that were done, no nature but God's accomplishes: the forgiveness of sins, the healing of sicknesses, the running of the lame, the sight of the blind, the life of the dead is from God alone. No other nature than one conscious of itself would say, ‘I and the Father are one.’ Why do you drag me into another substance? Why do you urge me toward another God? The deeds that are proper to God, the one God did.” But against this those who preach a Son unlike God the Father will cry out with no less viperous mouth: “You do not know the mystery of salvation; the Son must be believed, through whom the ages were made, through whom man was formed, who gave the Law through angels, who was born of Mary, who was sent by the Father, who was crucified, died, and was buried, who, rising from the dead, is at the right hand of God, who is judge of the living and the dead. In him we must be reborn, him we must confess, his kingdom we must earn.” Each enemy of the church does the church's business: Sabellius preaches God from his nature in the works, and these confess the Son of God from the mystery of faith.

And now, by what victory of our faith Ebion, who is Photinus, either conquers or is conquered: while he refutes Sabellius for denying that the man is the Son of God, and is refuted by the Ario-maniacs for not knowing the Son of God in the man. Against Sabellius he defends the Gospels for himself from the son of Mary; Arius does not leave him the Gospels through the son of Mary alone. Against Sabellius, who denies the Son, the man is claimed by Photinus as the Son; by Arius, against Photinus, who does not know the Son before the ages, it is denied that the Son of God is only from man. Let them conquer as they wish, since by conquering one another they are conquered: while these present ones are refuted about the nature of God, Sabellius is refuted about the mystery of the Son, and Photinus is convicted either of not knowing or of denying the Son of God born before the ages. But meanwhile the faith of the church, founded on the teachings of the Gospels and apostles, holds against Sabellius the profession of the Son, against Arius the nature of God, and against Photinus the creator of the world: and this all the more truly because these things are not denied by them to one another. For Sabellius preaches the nature of God in the works, but does not know the Son working. They name the Son, but do not confess the truth of God's nature in him. Photinus claims the man, but in the man he claims he does not know the birth of God before the ages. So, while each defends or condemns, the very things that each religiously defends or condemns, as they are, show the truth of our faith.

These things, then, I had to show briefly, not from a love of abundance but for caution: first, so that all the heretics' positions might be known to be uncertain and wandering, since they disagree with one another to our advantage; and then so that no one might hold me, as I resist the blasphemous professions of those who are now, and preach God the Father and God the Son of God, and profess that the Father and the Son are of one name and nature, in a not unlike kind of divinity, to be in the error either of two gods or, on the other hand, of a single and solitary God; since neither union would be found in God the Father and God the Son as preached, nor would a diversity of gods fit with the showing of a nature not separated. Now, since in the previous book we answered from the Gospels those who deny that the Son of God subsists from God by the truth of birth, we must show that he who is truly Son of God by nature is truly God by nature as well: yet in such a way that our faith is not lost either to a single God or to another God; since it will neither preach one God as solitary, nor confess him as not one by confessing him not solitary.

We know our Lord Jesus Christ as God, then, in these ways: by name, by birth, by nature, by power, by profession. And about the name I think there is no ambiguity. For we read: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What slander is there, that he should not be what he is called? Or is a name not a signification of nature? And since every contradiction has a cause, I now ask the cause for denying God here. For the naming is simple and free from the stumbling block of an added qualification. For the Word who became flesh is nothing other than God. No suspicion is left here of an attributed or assumed naming, as though what is God should have the name not from nature.

Look at other names, either attributed or assumed. It was said to Moses: “I have made you a god to Pharaoh.” But is not the reason for the name added, when it says “to Pharaoh”? Or did he bring the nature of God to him, and not rather terror upon one who would fear, when Moses' serpent, soon to be a rod again, swallows the magicians' serpents; when he drives away the swarm of flies he had sent; when he turns away the hail by the power by which he had called it; when he drove back the locusts by the power by which he had brought them; when the magicians confess at his works that it is the finger of God? So Moses was given as a god to Pharaoh, while he is feared, while he is entreated, while he punishes, while he heals. And it is one thing to be given as a god, another to be God. For he was given as a god to Pharaoh; but he does not have both the nature and the name of God. I remember also another naming, where it is said, “I said, You are gods”; but in it there is the signification of a name granted. And where “I said” is added, it is the speech of the speaker rather than the name of the thing; for the name of a thing brings the understanding of the thing, but the will to name comes from another. And where the author of the naming shows himself, there the naming is by the word of the author, not a natural name in kind.

But here the Word is God: the reality exists in the Word, and the reality of the Word is declared in the name. For the name “Word” in the Son of God comes from the mystery of his birth, as do the names Wisdom and Power: which, though they came into existence as God the Son with the substance of a true birth, are yet not lacking to God, as his own, though born from him as God. For, as we have often said, we preach not a mystery of division in the Son, but of birth. Nor was there an imperfect separation, but a perfect offspring: because birth does not have a loss in begetting, since it holds the gain of being born. And therefore the only-begotten God has been given the names of those things which, while they complete him as subsisting from birth, yet are in the Father by the power of an unchangeable nature. For the only-begotten God is the Word, but the unbegotten Father is never at all without the Word: not that the Son's nature is the utterance of a voice; but God, subsisting from God with the truth of birth, was signified in “Word” so that he might be taught to be the Father's own and inseparable from him through no difference of nature. Just as Christ is the wisdom and power of God, not, as is usually understood, an effective movement of an inner power or mind, but a nature possessing through birth the truth of substance, signified by the names of these inner things. For what subsists by being born cannot be seen to be the very thing which is always within each person. But the only-begotten Son, born from the eternal God the Father as subsisting God, was shown as subsisting by these names of properties, which he did not lack from whom he subsisted, so that he could be understood not to be foreign to the nature of the Father's divinity. God, then, who is, is nothing other than God. For when I hear, “And the Word was God,” I do not hear only that the Word is said to be God, but I understand it shown that he is what God is: for as above, in Moses as god and in those named gods, a name was added by way of address; here, however, the reality of substance is signified when it is said, “He was God.” For “to be” is not an accidental name, but subsisting truth, abiding cause, and the natural property of a kind.

And let us see whether the confession of the apostle Thomas follows this preaching of the evangelist, when he says, “My Lord and my God.” He whom he confesses as God is his God. And certainly he was not ignorant of the Lord's saying, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one”: and how did apostolic faith become forgetful of the chief commandment, so as to confess Christ as God, when life was to be lived in the confession of one God? But the Apostle, understanding the faith of the whole mystery through the power of the resurrection, having often heard, “I and the Father are one,” and, “All that the Father has is mine,” and, “I am in the Father, and the Father in me,” now confessed the name of the nature without danger to faith: because religion, confessing the Son of God as God, would not fall away from the profession of one God the Father, since nothing but the truth of the Father's nature was believed to be in the Son of God; nor would faith in one nature be endangered under an impious confession of another God, since the perfect birth of God had not brought the nature of another God. Understanding the truth of the gospel mystery, then, Thomas confessed his Lord and his God. This is not a name of honor, but a confession of nature: for he believed in God by the very realities and powers. And the Lord taught that the devotion of this profession was one not of honor but of faith, saying: “Because you have seen, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” For Thomas believed by seeing. But you ask what he believed. What else did he believe than what he professed: “My Lord and my God”? For only the nature of God could have risen from the dead to life by itself; and the faith of the religion believed professed this, that he is God. Will the name of God, then, be thought not a reality of nature, when the profession of the name followed faith in the nature believed? For surely a devoted Son, who did not his own will but the will of him who sent him, and who sought not his own honor but the honor of him from whom he had come, would have refused the honor of this name in himself, lest what he himself had preached, one God, should be undone. But truly confirming the mystery of apostolic faith, and acknowledging in himself the name of the Father's nature, he taught that those are blessed who, though they had not seen him rising from the dead, have yet believed him to be God through understanding the resurrection.

The name of the nature, then, does not abandon the profession of our faith. For the name that signifies each thing also shows a thing of the same kind; and there are not now two things, but a thing of the same kind. For the Son of God is God; this is what is signified by the name. One name does not count up two gods, because God is the one name of one undivided nature. For since the Father is God and the Son is God, and the proper name of the divine nature is in both, both are one: because, while the Son subsists from the birth of the nature, he yet keeps the unity in the name; and the Son's birth does not force the faith of believers to profess two gods, since it professes the Father and the Son to be of one name as of one nature. The Son of God, then, has the name from his birth. For this is our second step in the demonstration: that he is God by birth. Though there still remains for me the apostolic authority concerning the proper use of the name, meanwhile I wish to treat the words of the Gospel.

And first I ask what newness the birth of the Son could bring into the nature so that he would not be God. The understanding of human sense excludes that anything should become, by being born, different from the nature of its origin; unless perhaps something conceived from a difference of natures comes into life as something new in itself (and so of both kinds, so as to be neither), as is common among cattle and beasts. But even this newness is present only from inborn properties under a difference of nature; and birth did not bring in their difference, but received it, holding what is one for it from both. And since these things are so in bodily causes and passions, what madness is it, I ask, to refer the birth of the only-begotten God to a nature degenerate from God, when birth is only from the property of the nature, and it will no longer be birth if the property of the nature has not been in the birth? From this comes all that heat and fury, that in the Son of God there should be not birth but creation; that, subsisting, he should not hold the origin of his own nature, but take one foreign to God from things that did not exist: because, according to his saying, “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit,” since God is spirit, there can be no doubt that nothing different and foreign from the one from whom he was born is in the one born. The birth of God, then, makes God perfect, so that God is understood not to have begun but to have been born: because to have begun can be different from being born, since everything that begins either comes into existence from nothing into something, or advances from one thing into another and ceases; as gold from earth, liquids from solids, hot things from cold, red from white, living creatures from waters, the living from the lifeless. But the Son of God did not begin to be God from nothing, but was born; nor was he anything else before he was God. And so he who was born God neither began nor advanced to what God is. The birth, then, holds the nature from which he subsisted, and the Son of God subsists as nothing other than what God is.

Or if anyone doubts on this point, let him learn an understanding of the nature from the Jews, or rather let him learn the truth of the birth from the Gospel, in which it is written: “For this reason the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal to God.” Here it is not, as is usual elsewhere, the speech of the Jews reported as said by them; rather this is the evangelist's explanation, showing the reason why the Jews wished to kill the Lord. The excuse of a faulty understanding, then, ceases for the impiety of the blasphemers, since by the Apostle's authority the natural property has been shown under the signification of birth: he called God his own Father, making himself equal to God. Is it not a natural birth, where through the name of his own Father the equality of nature is shown? For there is no doubt that equality has no difference. Who, moreover, will doubt that an undiffering nature follows from birth? For from this alone comes the only equality that can truly exist: because birth alone can provide equality of nature. But equality will never be believed to exist where there is union; nor will it be found where there is difference. So the equality of likeness has neither solitude nor diversity: because all equality is neither diverse nor solitary.

Although, then, the judgments of our understanding here are shared with the opinion of human sense, that birth has equality of nature, and that where there is equality there can be nothing foreign to itself nor solitary, yet the faith of this discussion of ours must also be confirmed from the Lord's own words, so that the rashness of contradiction may not, under the freedom of a different understanding of names, dare to oppose the declarations of God's testimony about himself. For the Lord answered: “The Son can do nothing of himself, except what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, the Son also does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself does; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you may marvel. For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom he will. For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.” The order of our proposition indeed required that each kind of each cause be treated separately; so that, since we had learned that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God by name, birth, nature, power, and profession, our demonstration might run through each step of the arrangement proposed. But the nature of the birth does not allow this, since it alone embraces in itself name, nature, power, and profession. For without these there will be no birth, since by being born it contains all these in itself. In treating it, then, we have fallen into the necessity of not being able to postpone the matters mentioned above to the order of their own treatment.

For the Lord, answering the Jews, who wished to kill him all the more because, calling God his Father, he had made himself equal to God, set out the whole mystery of our faith while contradicting their impious motives. For he had said earlier, when, after the paralytic was healed, he was judged guilty of breaking the Sabbath and even deserving death: “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” And from this all their envy was kindled, because he had made himself equal to God by claiming the name of Father. Wishing, then, both to confirm his birth and to profess the power of his nature, he says: “The Son can do nothing of himself, except what he sees the Father doing.” The beginning of his answer was fitted against the impious motive of the Jews, by which they were driven even to the will to kill him. For to the charge of breaking the Sabbath brought against him he had said, “My Father is working until now, and I am working,” so that he might be understood to have claimed this by the authority of an example; yet signifying that what he himself did must be understood as the Father's work, since the Father was working in him as he worked. And again, against the envy by which he had made himself equal to God through the name of Father, he added: “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of himself, except what he sees the Father doing.” So that this equality through the name and nature of son might not take away faith in the birth, he says that the Son can do nothing of himself except what he has seen the Father doing. And so that the saving order of our confession in the Father and the Son might remain, he showed the nature of the birth, which took the power of acting not by increments of strength granted for each work, but drew it beforehand from knowledge; and drew it not from some example of a bodily work, as though the Father first did something toward what the Son would do afterward; but since the nature of God had come to subsist into the nature of God, that is, the Son had been born from the Father, he testified that, through consciousness of the Father's power and nature in himself, the Son can do nothing of himself except what he has seen the Father doing; and since the only-begotten God worked by the workings of the Father's power, he claimed for himself as much to do as he was conscious that the nature of God the Father, inseparable from him, which he possessed through a lawful birth, could do. For God does not see in bodily ways, but all his seeing is in the power of his nature.

Then he added: “For whatever the Father does, the Son also does likewise.” He added “likewise” to signify the birth; he spoke of “all” and “the same” to show the truth of the nature. For in what are “all,” “whatever,” and “the same,” there can be neither difference nor remainder. And so he is in the same nature whose nature can do all the same things. But where all the same things are done likewise through the Son, the likeness of the works excluded the solitude of the worker: so that all that the Father does, the Son also does all the same things likewise. This is the understanding of a true birth, and the most complete mystery of our faith, which, from the unity of the divine nature, confesses the truth of one undifferentiated divinity in the Father and the Son: that the Son, doing the same things, does them likewise, and, doing them likewise, the things he does are the same; because under one signification these testify both to the birth, by “done likewise,” and to the nature, by “the same done.”

The order of the Lord's answer, then, keeps the whole order of the church's faith, neither separating the nature nor failing to signify the birth. For this follows: “For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself does; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you may marvel. For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom he will.” Does the showing of the works press on us here anything else than faith in the birth, so that we believe in a Son subsisting from God the Father who subsists? Unless perhaps the only-begotten God is to be believed to have needed the teaching of a showing through ignorance; but the rashness of this impious opinion is not admitted. For one who knows whatever he is to be taught does not need to be taught. For after he said, “The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself does,” to show that all this showing by the Father is teaching for our faith, so that both the Father and the Son might be in our confession, and so that no ignorance might be understood in the Son, to whom the Father showed all the works he did, he at once said: “And he will show him greater works than these, so that you may marvel. For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom he will.” The showing of the future work, then, is not unknown to the Son, to whom it is to be shown that, after the example of the Father's nature, he gives life to the dead. For he says the Father will show the Son things at which they will marvel; and what those same things were he soon taught: “For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom he will.” The power is made equal by the unity of a nature not unlike. And the showing of the works is not instruction for ignorance, but for our faith: it brought not knowledge of unknown things to the Son, but confession of the birth to us, confirming it through the fact that all that he could do had been shown to him. Nor did the heavenly word act without circumspection, lest perhaps the signification of a different nature should creep in under the occasion of an ambiguous saying. For he says that the Father's works were shown to him, rather than that a nature of power was added to him for working them: so that the showing itself might be taught to belong to the substance of the birth, to which, through the Father's love, knowledge of the Father's works, which he willed to be done through him, was inborn. Moreover, lest, through the profession of being shown, a difference of nature, as of one ignorant, be believed in him, he is not ignorant of the very things he professes are to be shown. So far is he from acting on the authority of an example, that he gives life to whom he will. For to will is the freedom of a nature which subsists with the will of choice in the blessedness of perfect power.