Against Praxeas 7

Then, therefore, the Word himself also takes his own form and adornment, sound and voice, when God says, “Let there be light.” This is the perfect birth of the Word, when he proceeds from God: first established by him for thought, under the name of Wisdom, “The Lord established me as the beginning of his ways”; then begotten for effect, “When he prepared the heavens, I was present with him”; thereafter, making him his Father, from whom by proceeding … he became the Son, the firstborn, as begotten before all things, and only-begotten, as alone begotten from God, properly from the womb of his own heart, as the Father himself also testifies: “My heart has poured forth an excellent Word.” To him, rejoicing in his turn, the Father, likewise rejoicing in his presence, says, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you,” and, “Before the morning star I begot you.” So also the Son, in his own person, confesses the Father under the name of Wisdom: “The Lord established me as the beginning of his ways for his works; and before all the hills he begot me.” For if here Wisdom seems to say that she was established by the Lord for his works and ways, while elsewhere it is shown that all things were made through the Word and without him nothing was made, as again, “By his Word the heavens were made firm, and all their powers by his Spirit” (that is, by the Spirit who was in the Word), it is clear that it is one and the same power, now under the name of Wisdom, now under the title of Word, which received the beginning of the ways for God's works and which made the heavens firm, through which all things were made and without which nothing was made. No more on this, as though it were not the Word himself, under the name of Wisdom and of Reason and of the whole divine mind and spirit, who became the Son of God, from whom he was begotten by going forth. “So,” you say, “you grant that the Word is some substance, built up of spirit and the imparting of Wisdom?” Certainly. For you will not have him be substantive in reality through a property of substance, lest he should be seen to be a thing and a kind of person, and so, being constituted as second to God, be able to make two, Father and Son, God and the Word. “For what is a word,” you say, “but voice and sound of the mouth, and, as the grammarians teach, air struck, intelligible to the hearing, but otherwise something empty and void and incorporeal?” But I say that nothing empty and void could have come forth from God, since it was not put forth from what is empty and void; nor could that lack substance which proceeded from so great a substance and made such great substances; for he himself made the things that were made through him. How could it be that he is nothing, without whom nothing was made; that, being empty, he made solid things, being void, full things, being incorporeal, corporeal things? For although something can sometimes be made different from that through which it is made, nothing can be made through that which is void and empty. Is the Word of God, then, a void and empty thing, he who is called the Son? He who is himself named God? “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is written, “You shall not take the name of God in vain.” This is certainly he who, “being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God.” In what form of God? Surely in some form, not in none. For who will deny that God is body, although “God is spirit”? For spirit is body of its own kind, in its own form. And if even those invisible things, whatever they are, have with God their own body and their own form, by which they are visible to God alone, how much more will that which was sent forth from his own substance not be without substance! Whatever, then, the substance of the Word was, that I call a person, and for it I claim the name of Son; and while I acknowledge the Son, I maintain that he is second to the Father.