On the Trinity 19

What if we read in another place likewise that God is set down as an angel? For when Jacob was complaining to his wives Leah and Rachel of their father's injustice, and telling them that he now wished to go back and return to his own land, he also brought in the authority of his dream, reporting that at that time the Angel of God had said to him in a dream: “Jacob, Jacob.” “And I,” he says, “said, What is it? Look, he said, with your eyes, and see the he-goats and rams mounting the sheep and the she-goats, speckled, white, and spotted, and ash-colored and sprinkled. For I have seen all that Laban has done to you. I am the God who appeared to you in the Place of God, where you anointed for me a standing stone, and vowed a vow to me there. Now therefore rise, and depart from this land, and go into the land of your birth, and I will be with you.” If the Angel of God says these things to Jacob, and the Angel himself goes on to say, “I am the God who appeared to you in the Place of God”, we see without any hesitation that this one is set down not only as an angel but also as God, since he says that the vow was made to himself by Jacob in the Place of God, and he does not say “in my place.” There is, then, a Place of God, and this one too is God. But there it is simply written “in the Place of God”; for it is not said “in the place of the Angel and God,” but only “of God”; whereas he who makes these promises is said to be both God and Angel; so that rightly there is a distinction between him who is called only God and him who is declared not simply God but also Angel. Hence, if such great authority cannot here be taken to belong to any other angel, so that he should confess himself to be God as well and testify that the vow was made to him, but only to Christ, to whom a vow can be vowed, not because he is an angel only, but because he is God: it is plain that he cannot be taken to be the Father, but the Son, God and Angel. And if this is Christ, as it is, he runs a grave danger who calls Christ only a man, or only an angel, taking from him the power of the divine name which he has often received from the faith of the heavenly Scriptures, which often call him both Angel and God.

To all these is added this too: that just as the divine Scripture has often set him down as both Angel and God, so it sets him down as both man and God, the same divine Scripture expressing what he was to be, and already then painting in an image what he was to be in the truth of substance. “For Jacob,” it says, “remained alone, and a man wrestled with him until morning; and he saw that he could not prevail against him, and he touched the breadth of Jacob's thigh, while he wrestled with him and Jacob with him; and he said to him, Let me go, for the morning star has risen. And he said, I will not let you go unless you bless me. And he said, What is your name? And he said, Jacob. And he said to him, Your name will no longer now be called Jacob, but Israel will be your name: for you have prevailed with God, and are mighty with men.” And it adds further: “And Jacob called the name of that place Vision of God: for I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved. And the sun rose upon him; soon he passed the Vision of God; but he limped on his thigh.” A man, it says, wrestled with Jacob. If a solitary man, who is he? Where is he from? Why does he struggle and wrestle with Jacob? What had come between them? What had been done? What was the reason for so great a struggle and so great a contest? Why, besides, is Jacob, who is found strong enough to hold the man with whom he wrestled, found to have asked a blessing from the one he was holding because the morning star was already rising, unless it is that this struggle was prefigured, which was to take place between Christ and the sons of Jacob, and which is said in the Gospel to have been accomplished? For against this man the people of Jacob wrestled, and in that wrestling the people of Jacob were found stronger, since they won the victory of their iniquity against Christ; and at that time, because of the crime they committed, they began, uncertain and slipping, to limp most grievously in the walk of their own faith and salvation: and though they were found superior in condemning Christ, they nonetheless need his mercy, they nonetheless need his blessing.

But this man who wrestled with Jacob says, “Your name will no longer now be called Jacob, but Israel will be your name.” And if Israel is “a man seeing God,” the Lord was elegantly showing that he who was then wrestling with Jacob was not only man but also God. Jacob surely saw God, with whom he wrestled, even though in the wrestling he was holding a man. And so that there might be no further doubt, he himself set down the interpretation, saying, “For you have prevailed with God, and are mighty with men.” For this reason the same Jacob, now understanding the force of the mystery and perceiving the authority of him with whom he had wrestled, called the name of that place where he wrestled Vision of God. He added moreover the reasons to offer an interpretation of “Vision of God”: “For I have seen God,” he says, “face to face, and my soul has been saved.” He saw God, with whom he wrestled as with a man: and he held the man as victor, but asked a blessing as from God, as the lesser. So he wrestled with God and with man; and thus this wrestling was prefigured there, but was accomplished in the Gospel between Christ and the people of Jacob; and in it, though the people were found superior, they were found the lesser, since they were proved guilty. Who will hesitate to acknowledge that Christ, in whom this figure of the wrestling was fulfilled, is not only man but also God, since the very figure of the wrestling seems to have proved him both man and God?

And yet even after this the same divine Scripture does not cease to call the Angel God and to declare God an Angel. For when this same Jacob was about to bless Manasseh and Ephraim, the sons of Joseph, placing his hands crosswise on the boys' heads, he says, “God, who has fed me from my youth to this day, the Angel who delivered me from all evils, bless these boys.” And he so far sets down as the same the Angel whom he had called God, that at the end of his words he put the person of whom he spoke in the singular, saying, “bless these boys.” For if he had wished one to be understood as God and another as the Angel, he would have included two persons in the plural number; as it is, he set down the singular number of one person in the blessing, by which he wished the same one to be understood as God and Angel. But God the Father cannot be understood here; but Christ can be understood as God and Angel. And Jacob signified him as the author of this blessing by placing his hands crosswise over the boys, as though Christ were their father, showing by the way he laid his hands the figure and form of the passion to come. Let no one, then, who does not hesitate to call Christ an Angel, hesitate to declare him God as well, since he understands that this same one was invoked as both God and Angel for the blessing of these boys, a blessing arranged by the mystery of the passion in the figure of the hands.