Against Praxeas 8

Here, if anyone thinks I am introducing some probolē, that is, a putting forth of one thing from another, as Valentinus does, producing Aeon after Aeon from an Aeon, I will first say to you: the truth does not refrain from using this word, and the thing it means, and its sense, because heresy also uses it; rather, heresy took from the truth what it could build into its own falsehood. Was the Word of God put forth, or not? Take your stand here with me. If he was put forth, recognize the probolē of the truth, and let heresy look to it, if it has imitated something of the truth. The question now is who uses a thing and its word, and how. Valentinus distinguishes and separates his probolae from their author, and places them so far from him that the Aeon does not know the Father; in fact it longs to know him and cannot, and is even almost swallowed up and dissolved into the rest of the substance. With us, however, the Son alone knows the Father, and has himself revealed the Father's bosom, and has heard and seen all things with the Father, and speaks what he has been commanded by the Father; and he has accomplished not his own will but the Father's, which he knew from nearby, or rather from within. For “who knows the things that are in God, except the Spirit who is in him?” The Word is built of spirit and, so to speak, the Spirit is the body of the Word. So the Word is both always in the Father, as he says, “I am in the Father,” and always with God, as it is written, “And the Word was with God,” and never separated from the Father or other than the Father, since “I and the Father are one.” This will be the probolē of the truth, the guardian of unity, by which we say that the Son was put forth from the Father, but not separated. For God put forth the Word, as the Paraclete also teaches, as a root puts forth a shoot, a spring a river, the sun a ray. For these forms too are probolae of the substances from which they come. And I would not hesitate to call the shoot the son of the root, the river the son of the spring, the ray the son of the sun; for every origin is a parent, and everything brought forth from an origin is offspring; much more the Word of God, who has also received the name of Son in the proper sense. Yet the shoot is not cut off from the root, nor the river from the spring, nor the ray from the sun, any more than the Word from God. So, according to the pattern of these examples, I confess that I speak of two, God and his Word, the Father and his Son. For the root and the shoot are two things, but joined; the spring and the river are two aspects, but undivided; the sun and the ray are two forms, but cohering. Everything that comes forth from something must be second to that from which it comes forth, yet it is not therefore separated. And where there is a second, there are two; and where there is a third, there are three. For the Spirit is third from God and the Son, as the fruit from the shoot is third from the root, and the channel from the river third from the spring, and the point of light from the ray third from the sun. Yet nothing is estranged from the source from which it draws its own properties. So the Trinity, running down from the Father through degrees that are intertwined and connected, does not stand in the way of the monarchy at all, and protects the condition of the economy.