Tractates 2.6.1–2.12.2

Divine Scripture, when it speaks of the Son of God, does not contradict itself, but distinguishes with necessary moderation between God and the man he took up. For if it always preached him as pure God, there would be no room for the passion and resurrection, and Christ would have given nothing to the world; if as man alone, as some think, who took his beginning from the virgin's womb, what hope of future blessedness would there be for the believer, since it is written: 'Cursed is the man who has hope in man'? So where it signifies pure God, it says thus in Genesis: 'And God made man in the image and likeness of God'; and in the psalms: 'But God our king before the ages has worked salvation in the midst of the earth'; and in another place: 'Your throne is prepared, O God, from of old, and from the ages you are.' Where it signifies the man joined with God, it continues thus: 'Say to the daughter of Zion: Behold, your king comes to you, just, holy and saving, gentle, sitting on a young ass'; and again: 'Lift up your gates, you princes, and be lifted up, you eternal gates, and the king of glory shall come in'; and again the Magi: 'Where,' they say, 'is he who is born king of the Jews?'

This, brothers, is he who was announced through the prophets as the one to come; who according to the flesh was born in time; who is exalted in the highest, humble on earth; the begetter of the ages, the son of a virgin; immortal for himself, about to die for man; he tastes death to conquer death; he enters the underworld to bring the dead back from there alive. Only-begotten by coming forth from the Father before the origin of things; firstborn from the dead, as the Apostle says, after the deaths of many peoples. This is he to whom has been given power in heaven and on earth, a new thing for his name from his God, as he himself says: 'I have glorified you on earth: I have completed the work which you gave me to do. And now glorify me with yourself with the glory which I had with you before the world was made.' Who, rising, says: 'All things have been handed over to me by my Father.' This is he who came down pure from heaven and ascended into heaven made flesh. This, I say, is he of whom Paul says: 'He who receives the kingdom reigns, and will hand it over to God the Father,' and so on.

Why are you scandalised here, Christian, and suppose the divine mysteries of loving providence from your own nature? If you think less of the Son because the kingdom is handed over to the Father, the injury to the Father is greater if he is ever without the kingdom. Add that we pray daily that the kingdom of the Father may come; we hope for that of the Son too. Then the government of the present time would be vacant, with both ceasing; and it would be all over with the world and the whole substance of the world, if the rule of the divinity ceased even for one moment. But if, as reason itself proclaims, this variation of the kingdom can by no means cease on the part of the founder of the law, it has been assigned to the man assumed by God, and to his just ones, when things have been set in order, not to God, not to the everlasting ruler; especially since it is said thus in the Gospel: 'The Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.' Solomon in Wisdom likewise says, when he speaks of his servants: 'And if before men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality; and having been troubled a little, they will be well rewarded in much; for God tested them and found them worthy of himself. As gold in the furnace he proved them, and as burnt offerings he accepted them, and in time there will be regard for them. They will judge nations and rule over peoples, and their Lord will reign for ever.' What is this? If he reigns for ever, Paul was wrong; if he is going to hand over the kingdom, these are lying. Far from it. There is no error here, no difference. For Paul spoke of the temporal kingdom of the assumed man, in which he will come and judge the living and the dead, as the whole reading testifies, which proclaims that Christ must reign with his saints until, every principality and power and virtue and dominion being made void, all his enemies are put under his feet and the enemy death is destroyed. But those others referred it to the principal power, in whose perpetuity the Son, abiding for ever, neither ever received the kingdom from the Father nor laid it down; for he always reigned with him, according to John, as he himself says: 'My kingdom is not of this world.' Paul expressed this more openly, saying: 'For this you ought to know, that no fornicator, or unchaste person, or defrauder, which is idolatry, has an inheritance in the kingdom of God and of Christ,' showing that the kingdom of the Father and of the Son is one.

Rightly, then, will he hand over the kingdom to the Father who said in his admonitions that a divided kingdom does not stand. Hence, brothers, it must not be thought that the Father will receive what he did not have, or that the Son by handing over will lose what he has; since the Father has what he is to receive, and the Son does not lack what he is to give. The Father possesses all, the Son possesses all; what is both's is one's; what one possesses is each one's, as the Lord himself says: 'All that the Father has is mine'; and again: 'Father, all mine are yours, and all yours are mine'; because the Father is in the Son and the Son abides in the Father, to whom he is subject by affection, not condition, by love, not necessity, for beauty's sake; through whom the Father is always honoured. In short, he says: 'I and the Father are one.' Hence the Son is subject to the Father by a subjection not of diminishment but, as I said, of reverence; with whom there is held one possession of the original and perpetual kingdom, one substance of co-eternity and omnipotence, one equality, one power of august majesty, one dignity in a single light; for if you take anything away from the Son, it will touch the injury of the Father, whose all he has; nor is there anything in him that is inferior, because, like the Father, he can have neither more nor less; for each has been poured into the other's fullness, so that God may be all in all, the blessed Father in the Son, the Son in the Father, with the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Although there are many sects that strive to tell tales to Christ's injury, yet there are in a way three chief ones, which pretend to be worshippers of the very one they desire to see perverted. One, then, asserts that Jesus Christ took his beginning from the womb of the Virgin Mary, and was thereafter made God because of his righteousness, not born so. Another, harming more moderately but more bitingly, says indeed that the Son of God is God, but not begotten from the Father in the perpetuity of his nobility; and that there was a time when he was not. The third is the truly blind Jewish one, which, though it reads everywhere in its law (as it is accustomed to say) that two persons, of the Father and the Son, are designated, yet still contends that God has no Son. For all of them the examples or reasoning which we are going to pursue will cut all the sinews of their whole argument at one stroke. Therefore the Christian people must necessarily know that there are two births of our Lord Jesus Christ, lest it suffer any error: one, by which he was born; the other, by which he was born again. But as the first, spiritual, is without a mother, so the second, carnal, is without a father. The latter is wonderful, the former unspeakable, as the prophet says: 'Who will tell his generation?' But why it is unspeakable, let us learn as the Father speaks. The Lord himself teaches us: 'My heart has uttered a good word,' and so on. And in Solomon he says: 'I came forth from the mouth of the Most High before every creature.'

Since this is so, cunning humanity, recognise it even late, and put the reins of silence on your intemperate tongue. It is a kind of madness to want to form opinions about the secret of the invisible and incomprehensible, and to examine the inner things of him whose outward things one cannot even guess: because God is what he is; but what man has thought to define, he is not. For hear, brothers, what the apostle John too preaches in the Gospel: 'In the beginning,' he says, 'was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God: this was in the beginning with God.' Admirable grace, dearest brothers, of the manifest truth, which, while it can be distinguished, yet cannot be external to itself. For if the Word is in God, and the Word is God, and that in which it is is what he is who is in it, there is a twofold person, a twofold name, but one substance of original perpetuity and deity, as the Lord himself says: 'I and the Father are one'; which he surely did not say so as to confound two by reducing them to one, but to teach us that the omnipotence of divinity and power of the two is one. He goes on and says: 'All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made.'

Let us see now, best of Christians, how you insert time between the Father and the Son: for if they owe it to time, not to themselves, that each is bound to the other, beyond doubt, as you wish, nature is greater than God. But since Christ made nature out of nothing, and time comes from nature, it is quite absurd to put a work before its craftsman: and so the only difference is what they alone know of themselves. In short, in Isaiah the Lord God of hosts says thus to the Son: 'Egypt is wearied, and the trade of the Ethiopians: from Saba tall men will pass over to you, and they will be your servants, and will follow you bound in fetters, and will worship you, and will pray in you, because God is in you, and there is no other God besides you.' And Jeremiah too speaks in the same spirit, saying: 'This is our God, and no other will be reckoned besides him: who found the way of prudence and revealed it to Jacob his servant and to Israel his beloved. After this he was seen on earth and lived among men.' In what appearance, let us learn as the Holy Spirit speaks: 'And he is a man,' he says, 'and who knows him?' If so, how then could he be recognised, Isaiah revealed in these words: 'Hear then, house of David: it is not a small contest for you with men, since God provides the struggle. Therefore God will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and his name will be called Emmanuel. Butter and honey he will eat before the child knows good or evil.' This sign he made clear in another place from the designation of his forerunner too, in these words: 'Behold, I send my angel before your face, who will prepare your way.' Who is this angel, brothers, but John the Baptist? To whom belongs the preparation: 'The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God.'

Now let us see what follows. At the same time two kinswomen conceive, one against hope, the other by the word. The one marvels that she has what she does not know; the other rejoices because she learns. Elisabeth's barren womb swells happily with fruitfulness, Mary's with majesty. The one carries the herald, the other the judge. Rejoice, women, and recognise the advancement of your sex. The old guilt blotted out, see, through you we are joined to heaven: for an old woman bore an angel, and a virgin God. This is our God, who, laying aside his dignity for a time, but not his power, out of love for man, whose form and condition as a creature he was to take on, was called angel, man, child, bridegroom, giant, crucified, buried, firstborn from the dead. This, I say, is he who is all in all, since through him and in him are all things. Nor let the worldly and truly childish disputation of thoughtless men move you, brothers, who suffer a just error because they consider that Christ was made man not from God but from man. But if they had spiritual understanding, they would preach this above all in what they think weakest. For God would not truly be perfect if there were anything which, wishing to be, he could not be. In short, do you want to know the truth briefly? He became what he was not, and yet did not cease to be what he had been before.

The true knowledge of the unsuspected secret and the revered majesty is that God is known by none but God; and nothing more is to be sought from it than that one should know his will, without which one can neither serve him lawfully nor please him. But to want to form opinions by vain arguments about the dispensation of the provident God from God is the mark not of a worshipper but of a madman: especially if God, as the contentious think, is subject to dispensation; for remove for a little while the names of Father and Son, and you cannot know which of the two suffers injury; except that both suffer it, because the one name of both is God. So, Christian, ignorant or negligent, learn that there are two births of our Lord Jesus Christ, lest you be deceived by any error: one, which you may not inquire into; the other, which you are allowed to be taught lawfully, if you can. The first birth of our Lord, then, remains in the consciousness of the Father and the Son alone, and has nothing in between, nor any witness, since it proceeded from the affection of the Father's mouth by one consent. But the second, carnal one, as it was foretold by frequent oracles, so we find it fulfilled.

For God the Son of God, at the appointed time, concealing his majesty for a while, set out from his heavenly seat and pitched his camp in the temple of the predestined virgin, in which he is secretly poured into a man, to be born, and there, saving what he was, he plans to be what he was not. So, mixed with human flesh, he forms himself into an infant. Mary's womb shines out proudly, not by a conjugal gift but by faith, by the Word, not by seed. She knows nothing of the ten months' discomforts, since she conceived in herself the creator of the world: she gives birth not in pain but in joy. Wonderful thing: rejoicing, she brings forth an infant greater than all the antiquity of nature. Meanwhile the new mother does not groan. The infant, coming forth into the world, does not, as usually happens, inaugurate of his own accord with preceding tears the life of one who creeps. His mother, exhausted by the weight of so great a birth, did not lie pale with her whole inner parts loosened. The Son was not smeared with any filth of his mother or his own; for in truth he could have nothing unclean about him, who had come to cleanse the sins, filth and stains of the human race. In short, no losses of the mother's inner parts followed the purgations, which are dangerous by their slowness. No warm applications were given to the new mother in the usual way; for, brothers, she could not need these who had deserved to receive into her womb the Son, the saviour of all souls. O great sacrament! Mary, an uncorrupted virgin, conceived; after conception she gave birth as a virgin; after the birth she remained a virgin. The hand of the unbelieving midwife, who tested the woman who had given birth, is set on fire, for a testimony that her virginity was found intact; when the infant was touched, that devouring flame at once died down; and so that doctor, happily curious, then marvelling at the woman as a virgin, marvelling at the infant as God, exulting with great joy, went away healed, she who had come to heal. Thus Christ caused himself to be born into man in a way in which a man cannot be born. In short, he bore a body resplendent wholly with its own light, without shadow: humble in flesh, but exalted in the majesty of omnipotence. He deigned to put on flesh for this reason, that no one should be able to excuse himself through the flesh when the day of judgment has come.

According to what God had promised his own through the prophets, that he would send his Son as saviour to the human race at a fitting and ripe time, laying aside the dignity of divinity for a while, but not his power, he went out from heaven and, a chaste guest, glides into the sanctuary of the virginal temple foretold as his lodging; and there he arranges what he wills to be. Rather, what he had long arranged to be fulfilled he willingly assumes; for he rests gladly in the most flourishing dwelling of chastity, and in the inner parts of the sacred virgin he prepares for himself a body, to be born by his own judgment. Fitted into man, God is enclosed in the covering of flesh; and he who gives eternity to the times borrows human life from time. Wonderful thing: Mary conceives by him whom she bears; her womb swells with majesty, not seed, and a virgin holds him whom the world and the world's fullness cannot hold. Meanwhile the members advance their maker, and the work clothes its craftsman with its own form. Mary gives birth not in pain but in joy: the Son is born without a father, not wholly his mother's, owing to himself that he was conceived, giving to his mother that he was born; and she is above all amazed that such a Son has come to her, who would not be believed to be born of her, were it not that, as she was an uncorrupted virgin after conception, she remains such after the birth too.

O new reasoning! Constrained by love of his image into an infant, God wails, and allows himself to be bound in swaddling clothes, he who had come to pay the debts of the whole world. He is laid in the manger of a stable, testifying that he is the shepherd and the fodder of the peoples. He subjects himself to the stages of age, whose eternity admits no age in itself. Against his own consciousness he suffers all as a weak man, so that immortality may be given to man consumed by the law of death. For this is the power of God, that saving what he is, he can be what he is not. This is our God, the co-eternal Son of the eternal God. He is both man and God, because he stood as mediator between the Father and men, proving his flesh by weaknesses and his majesty by mighty works. He is our sun, the true sun, who from the fullness of his brightness kindles the brightest fires of the world, the brothers of the stars and the shining poles. He set once and rose again, never to set again. He, I say, is surrounded by a crown of twelve rays, that is, of the twelve apostles; he whom not four dumb animals, but the four Gospels with their saving preaching carry round the circuit of the whole world. What force his garment and chariot have, the prophet testifies in these words: 'God will come like fire, and his chariot like a storm, to repay vengeance in wrath.'

What gift of divine love Abraham received, dearest brothers, the deeds of the old law testify. His wife Sarah, not inferior, after the courses of a long life had passed, perceived in the outpouring of birth what a son she had borne. But because age had taken away from both the hope of offspring, they deserved a substitute pledge. Thus faith earned what time had taken away; belief extorted what nature had denied. Abraham our patriarch, tested by God, received in old age an only son, yet nothing to make the father anxious; though his age was turning in declining years toward the end of its setting, and the time for bringing up was short, and death already near to old age. See the first devotion: to accept gladly what is given late, and in the saddest old age to rejoice in taking up the burden of anxiety; for Sarah too laughed, taking up the gift of youth in old age; from which the infant received his name, who after these things proves Abraham's mind consecrated to God.

That only son of the anxious old man, still a little boy, to whom greater tenderness and pity are owed, is demanded as a victim; if, by human frailty, some weakness had arisen in his body, or a human death had befallen him, the father could hardly have lived through his misfortunes, if he had died in tender years. So this infant, on whose life a father's and a mother's affection hung, is demanded as a victim by the divine voice to test his faith. 'I want,' said God, 'a sacrifice to be made to me, Abraham, by your hands on the mountain from your son: this victim pleases me, with this blood you will appease me, this one is owed to my rites: I now order him to be sacrificed.' The most devoted Abraham does not sadden his brow, nor does grief persuade the father to tears, but he exults and rejoices. Nor did he fear lest murder of his son be imputed to him, but rather he was eager to obey in devotion: he rejoiced that God had commanded this. He prepares a victim from his son; he hastens to complete the sacrifice, lest delay should make it a sin. What is needed for the rites is at once prepared; the mountain is climbed. When the whole mystery and sacrifice had been arranged, the son is led, rejoicing, with his father rejoicing, to be struck by his father's right hand. Before he came to the pile, when he asked his father where the victim was which he was arranging and sacrificing, the father, secure of the faith of his race, disclosed to his son, of whom he had no doubt, that the Lord had demanded him; and he showed what he himself had promised the Lord. The boy rejoiced in his faithful father, himself even more faithful: and he did not refuse the death which God, who had given life, commanded. The father rejoices as his son rejoices too, and with joy binds the hands of his only pledge, which the boy more gladly offers to be bound. He binds his feet too, lest in the departure of death the victim, roused, should kick: for the best father, secure, feared lest pain should be allowed anything against the death.

O, brothers, secure devotion! O father, seizing on the spirit, but despising the body and death! O man who remembered that he was the Lord's servant so as not to know he was a father! What sort of father is this? See, his son lies before his eyes bound with chains. Where are the tears? Where is the grief that usually dwells in human feelings? In such misfortunes of his son he rejoices and is glad, and triumphs that he has earned the Lord's favour. He has already received the rewards he deserves; for the trials of the divine testing are held out: he draws the iron indeed and lifts his armed right hand; but the voice of the one who had demanded the victim forbids it. 'Look behind you,' said God, 'and before you look, spare him.' See, the chief merit has earned the divine indulgence in the midst of danger: for looking behind him Abraham found a victim which he might sacrifice innocently. With the same iron with which he was already preparing to strike his son, he slew the ram. He transferred his right hand from his son to the lamb, always rejoicing and glad. Nor was his face changed when the victim was changed. He offered the ram with as much joy as he had offered his son: for where there was faith there was no grief. In that sacrifice God alone grieved, because he provided another victim: for Abraham with his son was so proved by God that, without asking, he deserved mercy.

Let us look, dearest brothers, at the secrets of the law and bring out the understanding more deeply. Abraham was not under the law, but he alone fulfilled the law; and he who was held by no right of the law kept above all every divine right: in his sacrifice he too would rejoice who was being prepared as the victim. The ram was caught in a thicket, entangled in thorns, bound by the head. This is he who was sacrificed to God in place of Isaac. Him Abraham offered; him he was ordered to sacrifice.

For virginity is not called forth by command, but neither is continence rejected when it is left aside. For faith in this, dearest ones, we have as authority the holy Abraham, who once had a son Isaac. A simple name indeed, but a manifold proclamation. For he, dearest ones, despaired of by his parents but received when God promised, is conceived in the flower of an age that had passed for begetting and generating: he deserved to be procreated not so much from his parents as by divine command, and in the last courses of life the son opened Sarah's womb by his first name, to whom modest old age had already brought the reverence of a grandmother. Begotten, then, dearest ones, under this despair of birth and with wonder, in the first rudiments of infancy he is offered as an innocent martyr to God who commanded and demanded him, a spotless offering, and no unprepared victim: as a witness of divine fear he is demanded for faith by the Lord, brought by his parent; but an offering not of blood but of salvation. To this glory, then, the abundance of a late birth and despaired-of fruitfulness are brought forth.

Abraham's wife, knowing nothing of childbearing, since with her inner parts in chilling old age she could neither hope for offspring nor trust she could carry it, took up the duties of a mother when she no longer knew the functions of a wife. And the birth is brought forth at the time when warmth was already leaving the organs of generation. Wonderful indeed, dearest ones, and not to be hoped for by later ages, is the offspring formed by divine ordinance: an age that had run its course is called back to its beginning; fruitfulness girds itself out of barrenness, so that what was written through the prophet might be fulfilled: 'Rejoice, barren one who did not bear; break forth and cry, you who are not in labour: for many are the children of the desolate.' For see, dearest ones, in Sarah, her sinews drawn by age, the juice of blood failing, her veins drying up, her skin hard on her inner parts, a deformed and lurid pallor already almost loses her human features, nor is there any movement of pleasure in her limbs. Nothing remained in the substance of the body; and yet nothing was denied to the infant in the womb: and she whose age testified she was a grandmother, birth adorned as a mother, when tenderness wavered under an uncertain name of affection, and when the womb brought forth a son, old age wished for a grandson. So at last, against expectation, to the one born through the discord of time and nature, the angel gave the name Isaac, so that joy might confirm what the weakness of age had despaired of. The new parents' affection grows around the son, who was thought more certain from the promise, sweeter from the delay, happier from the despair. One in number, and already first in the solidity of love, he had taken over the whole breast of maternal tenderness: brought up in haste, he was to offer God a victim, and his parents a devout slaying of their son.

See, dearest ones, as the Apostle says, Abraham leads to the altar, at the Lord's command, the son born against hope, to sacrifice him to the Lord: nor is a sword lacking for the service, so that he might be father and priest alike. The son's security too is like his, coming from the divine will: since he did not see the victim in whose place he had been chosen, he asked for it. But his still tender hands are handed over to chains; and so that nothing less might be seen than in a victim, binding constrains his foot, lest the victim, roused, should displease. So let the abominable suspicion of impiety cease here, dearest ones. Abraham put the Lord before his son, the priest before the father; nor did he believe himself devout unless he had proved himself faithful. In short, dearest ones, he arms himself fearlessly for the service of sacrifice; his secure mind searches out the blow of the wound, but his hand is more secure; the sword raised for the sacrifice is poised; nor does approaching death sadden the boy, lest trembling betray a weak faith. Under this constancy, then, of the one sacrificing and the one to be sacrificed, he deserved to be released, while he lays aside human fear from himself; and as far as faith is concerned, the father fulfilled what he promised, and the Lord, his will proved, forbade the slaying of the son.

To the person of Christ, then, this modest birth is referred, but the hall of the virgin womb is more secret: the womb of a body not wasting away bore within itself one formed by the art of the divine Word. But the impious counsels of the Jews blazed against the most certain Lord, begotten as heavenly offspring, not of seed: and the wicked led him, silent as if guilty, and grieving only for their blindness, to the cross to be lifted up, as Isaac was led to the altar not to perish. But because eternity does not know how to die, the Lord came to life again after the tomb, and with the Jews remained only the odium of a condemned will, because they would not recognise the Lord, and believed that he was punished by thought alone, whom it had been wicked even to worship too late. At the savagery of their monstrous daring the form of the elements is changed in fear, and nature betrays the injury to God before the Jewish people understands it. So the horror of the fury began from its author. The deadly crowd girds itself, and the point of swords is turned against the invisible one hanging there. Nor, as I said, did the cruelty of their crime gain any fruit from it: because as in Isaac one thing is offered and another sacrificed, so too in the passion of Christ, what had sinned through Adam is set free through Christ.

Abraham, to be the father of many nations, did not learn justice but begot it. The approach of cities had not infected him. He did not have a law, he whose way of life was law. He hears exile commanded him by God, that he should leave both his kindred and his land. And then Abraham, looking up with his eyes, saw three; he ran, worships prostrate on his face, offers a sacrifice. 'Refresh yourselves,' he says, 'under this great tree.' He sprinkles fine flour, butchers a calf. After this a son is promised him from his lawful marriage, by faith, not by age. Sarah conceives; she who could not walk carries the burden of the womb without labour; she learns to be a mother when she ceases to be one. Withered breasts show an abundance of milk, and from a fasting age a sturdier boy is fattened. Nothing is difficult for faith, which has as much as it believes.

So Isaac, the only son, the hope of peoples and nations, the origin of so many kings, clung to the embraces of his dear father. He had bound his father's tenderness to himself because he was the only one, because he came late, because he was promised, because he alone, the only hope, made up for the losses of all the past barrenness. A cause was found in which Abraham's faith might fight more strongly in temptation. Armed with a sword, he is commanded to kill the dearest limbs which his mouth used to press on the skin. What was tenderness to do? The command cannot be postponed. You had been granted, mother, when you were barren; the boy is born for the sword. No one grieved over such a misfortune except the mother who had borne him. No one laments the living funeral, and no one waters beforehand with tears the obedience of the innocent man, lest the father should seem to have doubted, if he had wept. Devoted, with set face he leads the boy to the altar; he draws the sword halfway, his breast fought for faith; his face does not grow pale, his hand did not tremble. The boy asks where the victim is; which soon, lest his tender age be struck, he comes upon, so that the father could not strike, because the Lord did not demand human blood. The religious executioner draws the sword. It was the father's that he raised it; it was God's that he spared. Neither did the one being struck fear, nor did the one striking take fright. The Lord's sacrifice is not given up but changed. He kept his son better by not sparing him: for faith alone walks safe among swords, a friend among hungry beasts, cold in the fire; faith alone is to be preferred. By it let us, who through faith have become sons of Abraham, believe that we come into his bosom.