Eleven Tractates 11.142–11.145

Holy Father, almighty God, who, forming the temple of your manifold grace and the tabernacle of the church arranged in you, stretching out the measures of immeasurable glory, taught, with Christ in you as author, that in you alone both the fullness of invisibility—which the Father owed to the Son—and the visibility of recognition—which the Son owed to the Father—should be wrought in the working of the Holy Spirit; so placing in you the boundary of every defined thing and the receptacle of things infinite, that for us coming from you alone you opened one going forth, and for us returning to you one entrance, into the rising of the Son rising in you; and although they would make for your tabernacle by various roads of calling, all would yet enter to you by the one entrance of Christ at work, so that one to whom he had shut himself would have no access to you, because he had not known the Father of the Son in the Son and the Son of the Father in the Father. For you are God, who, in all the origins of powers, within and without and surpassing,

and inward and poured round and poured into all things, are believed one God, invisible in the Father, visible in the Son, and found the Holy Spirit united in the work of the two; for you are author to yourself of what you are, and you show nothing outside yourself that seems more excellent than you; and although our mind, labouring at the work of an inexplicable understanding, is shut within the error of human weakness, it yet grasps from the prophetic voices the one measure of religious judgment about you: that we know you as one God in all things in such a way that we have no place of the made or of the maker not in you nor any outside you; and so, as you hold and are held, you are found neither outside the whole in anything nor not in all things. For in you and through you is the whole management of all proceedings: you are the father of souls, you the brother to the sons, you the son to the brothers, you the friend to the elect, you the neighbour to those who draw near, you the working of spirits,

you the beginning of the archangels, you the work of the angels, you the whole empowering of the powers; through you the works of all things were arranged; you distinguished the parts of each thing, and, joining the elements together, set the limits of a disciplined work, giving them the spirit of life, so that, though they could do nothing of themselves, yet, animated by the greatness of the worker, they might fulfil the ministry of the service bound to them through you. And after this, looking upon the earth, you brought forth a living soul; and though it was not from itself, yet, lest the word of the command be empty, where your command was the beginning of things that were not, by the animation of the command the earth brought forth what it did not itself have. And your command became the nature of things that could appear, so that, bringing forth the work from nothing, they first appeared unformed and darkened; afterward you distributed feeling to the unfeeling, sight to the dark, smell to the brute, sound to the hard, and hearing to the hardened,

so that, presenting yourself everywhere, the word might arrange for the use of your work the matter of things that the command had brought forth unformed, and, calling each thing by its name—raising the lofty, inclining the sloping, filling the pressed, opening the plains, covering the secrets of the woods—the whole glory of the things made might sing in harmony to you alone, for the knowledge of your knowledge; and though dumb things could not confess you in speech, yet reason, speaking through the arrangements of things, would not deny its testimony to your omnipotence. … What exchange worthy of you shall we give for our souls, holy Father, almighty God? Or what is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you visit him, except that, sent forth into the glory of so great a work, we recognize that we are your workmanship in good works, which you prepared that we should walk in them? And therefore our mind and our speech speak of you, because, made indestructible through you, where …