Collected Works 7 part 1/4

Chapter 1. The devil has in various ways set himself against the truth. At times he has aspired to shake it under the very pretence of defending it. He claims the one only Lord, the Almighty Maker of the world, that out of this 'one' he may fashion a heresy. He says that the Father Himself came down into the Virgin, that He Himself was born of her, that He Himself suffered, that He Himself, in short, is Jesus Christ. But the serpent forgot himself; for when he tempted Jesus Christ after John's baptism, he approached Him as the Son of God, being certain that God had a Son, even from those very Scriptures out of which he was then framing his temptation: 'If Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread'; and again, 'If Thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down from hence;

for it is written that He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee'—the Father, surely—'that they shall bear Thee up in their hands, lest at any time Thou dash Thy foot against a stone.' Or will he perhaps cast the reproach of falsehood upon the Gospels, saying, 'Let Matthew and Luke see to that; for my part, I approached God Himself, I tempted the Almighty Himself at close quarters—that is the very reason I both approached and tempted Him; but if He had been the Son of God, I should perhaps never have deemed Him worthy of my notice'? Yet it is rather he himself who is a liar from the beginning, even if he has suborned some man of his own kind, such as Praxeas.

For this man was the first to bring this kind of perversity from Asia to Rome—a man in other respects restless, and moreover puffed up with the boast of martyrdom for the sole, simple, and brief inconvenience of imprisonment; whereas even if he had delivered his body to be burned, he would have gained nothing, since he had not the love of God, whose spiritual gifts he also assailed. For this same man, at that time, forced the bishop of Rome—who was already acknowledging the prophecies of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, and out of that acknowledgment was bringing peace to the churches of Asia and Phrygia—by asserting falsehoods about these very prophets and their churches, and by upholding the authority of his predecessors, both to recall the letters of peace already issued and to desist from his purpose of receiving the spiritual gifts.

Thus Praxeas at Rome managed two pieces of the devil's business: he drove out prophecy and brought in heresy, he put the Paraclete to flight and crucified the Father. The tares of Praxeas, sown here also over the good seed, had sprouted while many slept in the simplicity of doctrine; afterward, being exposed through him whom God willed, they even seemed to be uprooted. And indeed the former teacher had given security concerning his own amendment, and the written recantation remains among the psychics, among whom the matter was then transacted. From then on there was silence. And as for us, thereafter the acknowledgment and defence of the Paraclete separated us from the psychics. But those tares had everywhere by then shed their seed: and so for a while it lurked hidden by hypocrisy with a crafty vitality, and now it has burst forth anew.

But it shall be rooted out again, if the Lord will, in this present passage of time; or if not, on its own day all the adulterous crops shall be gathered together and, with the other stumbling-blocks, be burned with unquenchable fire. Chapter 2. And so, after a time, the Father is proclaimed to have been born and the Father to have suffered—God Himself, the Lord Almighty, is preached as Jesus Christ. But we, both always and now the more, being the better instructed through the Paraclete, that Guide, namely, into all truth, believe indeed in one only God, yet under this dispensation, which we call the Economy, that of the one only God there is also a Son, His Word, who proceeded from Himself, by whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made:

that He was sent by the Father into the Virgin and born of her—man and God, Son of Man and Son of God—and was surnamed Jesus Christ; that He suffered, that He died and was buried according to the Scriptures, and was raised again by the Father and taken back into heaven, to sit at the right hand of the Father, and shall come to judge the living and the dead; who thereafter, according to His promise, sent from the Father the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. That this Rule has run down from the beginning of the Gospel, even before any of the earlier heretics, still more before Praxeas of yesterday, will be proved both by the very lateness of all heretics and by the very novelty of Praxeas of yesterday.

Whereby it is likewise, and henceforth, prejudged against all heresies alike, that whatever is first is true, whatever is later is adulterate. Yet, saving this rule of prescription, everywhere nevertheless, for the instruction and safeguarding of certain persons, a place must be given even to fuller discussions—lest any perversity should seem to be condemned unexamined and merely prejudged; and this most of all which supposes itself to possess the pure truth, while it thinks the one only God is not to be believed in otherwise than if it should call one and the same person both Father and Son and Holy Spirit:

as though the One were not in this way also all, seeing that all things are from the One—namely, through unity of substance—while nonetheless the mystery of the Economy is safeguarded, which arranges the Unity into a Trinity, setting in order three: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—three, however, not in state but in degree, not in substance but in form, not in power but in aspect, yet of one substance and one state and one power, because there is one God from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned under the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In what manner they admit of number without division, the discussions that follow will demonstrate. Chapter 3.

For the simple folk—not to call them thoughtless and unlearned—who are always the greater part of believers, since the very Rule of Faith transfers them from the many gods of the world to the one and true God, not understanding that He is indeed to be believed as one, yet together with His Economy, take fright at the Economy. They presume that the number and disposition of the Trinity is a division of the Unity, whereas the Unity, deriving the Trinity out of itself, is not destroyed by it but administered. And so they keep bandying it about that two and three gods are preached by us, while they presume that they themselves are worshippers of the one God—as though the Unity too, irrationally collected together, did not make a heresy, and the Trinity, rationally weighed out, did not constitute the truth.

'We hold the Monarchy,' they say; and even the Latins so pronounce the very word aloud, and with such artifice that you would think they understood monarchy as well as they utter it. But while the Latins are eager to sound out 'monarchy,' they—yes, even the Greeks—refuse to understand the Economy. But as for me, if I have gleaned anything of either language, I know that 'monarchy' signifies nothing else than single and sole rule; yet monarchy does not, for the mere reason that it belongs to one, prescribe that He whose it is should either have no Son, or should have made Himself His own Son, or should not administer His own monarchy through whomever He will.

Nay, I say that no dominion is so much one's own, so single, so much a monarchy, that it may not also be administered through other closely related persons whom it has provided as its own officers; but if there be also a Son belonging to Him whose the monarchy is, it is not thereupon at once divided, nor does it cease to be a monarchy, if the Son also is taken up as a partaker of it, but it belongs equally and principally to Him from whom it is communicated to the Son; and while it is His, it is equally a monarchy which is held together by two so united.

Therefore, if even the divine monarchy is administered through so many legions and armies of angels—as it is written, 'Thousands of thousands ministered unto Him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood before Him'—and yet it has not thereby ceased to be one, so as to cease being a monarchy because it is managed through so many thousands of powers: how is it that God should seem to suffer division and dispersion in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, who hold the second and third place, and who are so closely partakers of the Father's substance—which He does not suffer in so great a number of angels, and those too so alien from the Father's substance? Do you reckon the members and the pledges and the instruments, and the very force and whole reserve of the monarchy, to be its overthrow? Not rightly. I would rather have you exercise yourself upon the sense of the matter than upon the sound of the word.

For the overthrow of the monarchy is to be understood by you as taking place when another dominion, of its own condition and its own proper state, and therefore a rival one, is brought in over it—when another god is brought in against the Creator, as with Marcion; when there are several, according to the followers of Valentinus and Prodicus. Then there is an overthrow of the monarchy, when it goes to the destruction of the Creator. Chapter 4. But as for me, who derive the Son from no other source than from the substance of the Father, as doing nothing without the Father's will, as having obtained all power from the Father—how can I be destroying the monarchy from the faith, when I preserve it, handed down by the Father to the Son, in the Son? Let this be said by me also with regard to the third degree, since I hold that the Spirit is from no other source than from the Father through the Son.

See therefore lest it be rather you who destroy the monarchy, who overthrow its disposition and dispensation, established in as many names as God has willed. But so far does it remain in its own state, even though the Trinity be brought in, that it is even to be restored to the Father by the Son; since the Apostle writes concerning the ultimate end, 'When He shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God, even the Father. For He must reign, until God put His enemies under His feet'—namely, according to the Psalm, 'Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool. But when all things shall be subdued unto Him, except Him who did subject all things unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.'

We see, therefore, that the Son is no hindrance to the monarchy, although it is today in the keeping of the Son; because it is in its own state with the Son, and together with its own state shall be restored to the Father by the Son. Thus no one will destroy it on this account, if he admit the Son, to whom both it is agreed that it was handed over by the Father, and by whom it is to be restored at length to the Father. By this one little chapter of the apostolic epistle we have now been able to show that both the Father and the Son are two—apart from the very names of Father and Son—also from this, that He who delivered up the Kingdom and He to whom it was delivered up, likewise He who subjected and He to whom the subjection was made, must of necessity be two. Chapter 5.

But because they will have the two to be one, so that the same be held to be both Father and Son, the whole matter concerning the Son must be examined—whether He exists, and who He is, and in what manner He is; and thus the matter itself will vindicate its own form, the Scriptures and their interpretations acting as its advocates. Some assert that even Genesis, in the Hebrew, begins thus: 'In the beginning God made for Himself a Son.' That this may not stand firm, other arguments lead me on, drawn from the very disposition of God in which He existed before the constitution of the world, right up to the generation of the Son. For before all things God was alone, being Himself to Himself both world and place and all things. But He was alone in that there was nothing else external besides Him. Yet not even then was He alone, for He had with Him that which He had within Himself—His own Reason, namely.

For God is rational, and Reason was first in Him, and thus all things are from Him: which Reason is His own consciousness. This the Greeks call Logos, by which term we also designate 'discourse' (sermo); and therefore it is now customary among our people, through simplicity of interpretation, to say that the Discourse was in the beginning with God—whereas it would be more fitting that Reason be held the more ancient, because God was not from the beginning a speaking Being (sermonalis) but a rational one (rationalis), even before the beginning; and because the Discourse itself, subsisting by Reason, shows that Reason was prior as being its own substance. Yet even so it makes no difference.

For even though God had not yet sent forth His Discourse, He nonetheless had it, together with and within His very Reason, within Himself, while silently thinking and disposing with Himself the things which He was presently about to utter through Discourse. For while thinking and disposing with His own Reason, He was making that to be Discourse which He was handling by discourse. And that you may the more easily understand this, first recognize it from your own self, as from the image and likeness of God, in that you too have Reason within yourself, being a rational animal—made not only by a rational Artificer, but also animated out of His very substance. See, when in silence you commune with yourself by reason, this very thing goes on within you, that same reason meeting you with discourse at every movement of your thought, at every impulse of your consciousness.

Whatever you think is discourse, whatever you are conscious of is reason: you must needs speak it in your mind, and while you speak, you suffer discourse to be your fellow-talker, in which there is present this very reason with which you speak while thinking with it—through which, while speaking, you think. Thus in a way there is within you a second thing, discourse, through which you speak by thinking, and through which you think by speaking: the discourse itself is another. How much more fully, then, does this take place in God, whose image and likeness you too are reckoned, in that He has within Himself, even while silent, Reason, and in Reason, Discourse?

I may therefore, not rashly, have already established that God, even before the constitution of the universe, was not alone, since He had within Himself both Reason and, in Reason, Discourse, which He made second to Himself by setting it in motion within Himself. Chapter 6. This power and this disposition of the divine mind is shown in the Scriptures under the name of Wisdom (Sophia) also. For what is wiser than the Reason of God, or than His Discourse? Therefore hear Wisdom too, as a second Person founded: first, 'The Lord created me as the beginning of His ways for His works, before He made the earth, before the mountains were settled; moreover before all the hills He begot me'—establishing and begetting me, namely, in His own thought. Then recognize her as standing beside Him by the very act of separation:

'When He prepared the heavens,' she says, 'I was present with Him; and how He made strong the clouds that are above the winds, and how He set fast the fountains that are under the heaven, I was with Him arranging them, I was that in which He delighted; and daily I took delight in His presence.' For as soon as God willed to bring forth into their own substances and forms those things which He had disposed within Himself together with Wisdom and Reason and Discourse, He first put forth the Discourse itself, having within it His own inseparable Reason and Wisdom, that all things might be made through Him through whom they had been thought out and disposed—nay, already made, as far as concerned God's thought: for this was lacking to them, that they should also be openly known and held in their own forms and substances. Chapter 7.

Then, therefore, does the Discourse itself take on its appearance and adornment, its sound and voice, when God says, 'Let there be light.' This is the perfect nativity of the Discourse, while it proceeds forth from God: founded by Him first for thought under the name of Wisdom—'The Lord founded me as the beginning of His ways'; then begotten for effect—'When He prepared the heavens I was present with Him'; from thence making Him a Father to Himself, from whom, by proceeding, He was made Son, the Firstborn, as begotten before all things, and the Only-begotten, as alone begotten of God, properly from the womb of His own heart, according to what the Father Himself testifies, 'My heart hath poured forth the best Word'; toward whom thereafter, rejoicing, He likewise rejoicing in His Person, 'Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee,' and 'Before the day-star I begat Thee.'

Thus also the Son, out of His own Person, professes the Father under the name of Wisdom: 'The Lord founded me as the beginning of His ways for His works, and before all the hills He begot me.' For if here Wisdom indeed seems to say that she was founded by the Lord for His works and ways, yet elsewhere, through Discourse, it is shown that all things were made and without Him nothing was made—as again likewise, 'By His Word were the heavens established, and by His Spirit all the powers of them' (that Spirit, surely, which was in the Discourse)—it appears that it is one and the same power, now under the name of Wisdom, now under the appellation of Discourse, which received the beginning of the ways for the works of God, and which established the heaven; through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made.

Nor need we linger longer on this—as though He were not Himself the Discourse under the name both of Wisdom and of Reason and of every divine mind and spirit—He who was made the Son of God, of whom, by coming forth, He was begotten. 'Therefore,' you say, 'you grant that the Discourse is a certain substance, constructed of Spirit and Wisdom and Reason?' Plainly. For you are unwilling that He should have substantive being in reality through a property of substance, so that He may be seen as a thing and a certain Person, and thus, being constituted second from God, may bring it about that there are two—Father and Son, God and Discourse. For what, you will say, is Discourse but voice and sound of the mouth, and, as the grammarians teach, air struck so as to be intelligible to the hearing—but otherwise something I know not what, empty and void and incorporeal?

But I say that nothing empty and void could have come forth from God, as not being 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 too made the things that were made through Him. How is it that He should Himself be nothing, without whom nothing was made—that the empty should have wrought solid things, the void full things, the incorporeal corporeal things? For although something may sometimes be made different from that through which it is made, yet nothing can be made through that which is empty and void. Is the Discourse of God an empty and void thing—He who was called the Son, who Himself was surnamed God, 'And the Word was with God, and the Word was God'? It is written, 'Thou shalt not take the name of God in vain.'

This is surely He who, being constituted in the form of God, thought it not 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 a body, even though God is a spirit? For a spirit is a body of its own kind, in its own form. But even if those invisible things, whatever they are, have with God both their own body and their own form, through which they are visible to God alone—how much more will that which was sent forth from His very substance not be without substance? Whatever, therefore, was the substance of the Discourse, that I call a Person, and to it I claim the name of Son; and while I acknowledge the Son, I maintain Him to be second from the Father. Chapter 8.

If any one should think, on this account, that I am introducing some 'projection' (probolē)—that is, the bringing forth of one thing out of another, as Valentinus does when he produces one aeon after another out of an aeon—I will first say to you: it is not for that reason that the truth does not use this term and this thing and its reckoning, merely because heresy also uses it; nay rather, heresy has borrowed from the truth what it might build up unto its own lie. Was the Discourse of God projected forth, or not? Here fix your step with me. If it was projected, acknowledge the projection of the truth, and let heresy look to it, whether it has imitated anything of the truth. It is now asked who uses any given thing and its term, and in what manner. Valentinus severs and separates his projections from their author, and so places them far from him that the aeon does not know the Father;

in short, it longs to know Him and cannot; nay, it is almost swallowed up and dissolved into the remaining substance. But with us the Son alone knows the Father, and Himself has declared the bosom of the Father, and has heard and seen all things with the Father, and what He was commanded by the Father, that He also speaks; and He has accomplished not His own but the Father's will, which He knew from close at hand, nay, from the beginning. For who knoweth the things that are in God, save the Spirit which is in Him? But the Discourse is built up of Spirit, and, so to speak, the Spirit is the body of the Discourse. The Discourse, therefore, is 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 otherwise than from the Father, because 'I and the Father are one.'

This will be the projection of the truth, the guardian of unity, whereby we say that the Son was projected forth from the Father, but not separated. For God projected forth the Discourse, even as the Paraclete also teaches, as the root the shrub, and the fountain the river, and the sun the ray: for these species too are projections of those substances from which they proceed. Nor should I hesitate to call the Son both the shrub of the root and the river of the fountain and the ray of the sun, because every origin is a parent, and everything which is brought forth from an origin is offspring—much more the Discourse of God, who has also properly received the name of Son: yet neither is the shrub severed from the root, nor the river from the fountain, nor the ray from the sun, even as neither is the Discourse from God.

Therefore, according to the form of these examples, I profess that I hold there to be two—God and His Discourse, the Father and His Son; for the root and the shrub too are two things, but conjoined; and the fountain and the river are two species, but undivided; and the sun and the ray are two forms, but cohering. Everything that proceeds from something must of necessity be second to that from which it proceeds, yet it is not therefore separated. But 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, just as the fruit from the shrub is third from the root, and the stream from the river is third from the fountain, and the point of light from the ray is third from the sun: yet nothing is estranged from that matrix from which it derives its own properties.

Thus the Trinity, running down by joined and connected degrees from the Father, in no way clashes with the monarchy, and safeguards the state of the Economy. Chapter 9. Hold everywhere fast to this rule, which I have professed, whereby I testify that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are inseparable from one another; and so you will recognize how each thing is said and in what sense. For lo, I say that the Father is one, and the Son another, and the Spirit another (every uninstructed or perverse person has taken this saying amiss, as though it sounded of diversity and, out of diversity, stretched forth a separation of the Father and the Son and the Spirit:

but I say this of necessity, when they contend that the same is Father and Son and Spirit, flattering the monarchy against the Economy)—yet the Son is other than the Father not by diversity but by distribution, and another not by division but by distinction, because the Father and the Son are not the same, being also in a measure other, the one than the other. For the Father is the whole substance, but the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole, as He Himself professes, 'Because the Father is greater than I'; by whom also He is sung as made less, 'A little lower than the angels.' So too the Father is other than the Son, in that He is greater than the Son, in that one is He who begets, another He who is begotten, in that one is He who sends, another He who is sent, in that one is He who makes, another He through whom it is made.

It is well that the Lord too, using this word in the person of the Paraclete, signified not division but disposition: 'For I will ask,' He says, 'the Father, and He shall send you another Advocate, the Spirit of truth.' Thus He showed the Paraclete to be another from Himself, just as we show the Son to be another from the Father, so that He might display a third degree in the Paraclete, as we display a second in the Son, for the sake of observing the Economy. The very fact that they are called Father and Son—is it not one thing other than another? Surely all things will be what they are called, and what they are they shall be called; and the diversity of the names cannot mingle itself together at all, because neither can the diversity of the things whose names they will be. 'Let your yea be yea, and your nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than this is of evil.' Chapter 10.

Thus it is either Father or Son; and neither is the day the same as the night, nor the Father the same as the Son, so that both should be one and each be the other—which these most empty-headed Monarchians wish. 'He made Himself a Son to Himself,' they say. But the Father makes the Son, and the Son the Father; and those who come into being from one another can in no way come into being from themselves for themselves, so that the Father should make Himself a Son to Himself, and the Son should furnish Himself a Father to Himself. The relations which God has instituted, He Himself also keeps. The Father must needs have a Son, in order to be a Father, and the Son a Father, in order to be a Son. But it is one thing to have, another to be: for example, that I may be a husband, I must have a wife; I shall not be a wife to myself. So likewise, that I may be a father, I have a son; I shall not be a son to myself:

and that I may be a son, I have a father; I shall not be a father to myself. For these relations make me what I am: if I shall have had one, then I shall be—a father, if I have a son; I shall be a son, if I have a father. Moreover, if I myself shall be either of these, then I no longer have that which I myself shall be—neither a father, because I myself shall be the father; nor a son, because I myself shall be the son. But inasmuch as it behooves me to have the one of these and to be the other, in so far, if I shall have been both, I shall not be the one while I do not have the other. For if I myself shall be the son who am also the father, then I no longer have a son, but am myself the son. But having no son, while I myself am the son, how shall I be a father? For I must have a son in order to be a father: I am not, therefore, a son, because I have no father who makes a son.

Likewise, if I myself am the father who am also the son, then I no longer have a father, but am myself the father. But having no father, while I myself am the father, how shall I be a son? For I must have a father in order to be a son: I shall not, therefore, be a father, because I have no son who makes a father. This will be the whole cunning of the devil, to exclude the one by means of the other, while, by shutting up both into one under favour of the monarchy, he causes neither to be held—so that neither should He be Father who has no Son, nor should He be Son who likewise has no Father: for while He is Father, He will not be Son. Thus do they hold the monarchy who hold together neither Father nor Son. But nothing is difficult to God. Who does not know this? And who is ignorant that things impossible with the world are possible with God?

And, 'God hath chosen the foolish things of the world, that He may confound the wise'—we have read all these things. 'Therefore,' they say, 'it was not difficult for God to make Himself both Father and Son, contrary to the form handed down to human affairs: for even to make the barren bear, contrary to nature, was not difficult for God, as neither the virgin.' Plainly nothing is difficult to God: but if we should use this maxim so abruptly in our presumptions, we shall be able to fabricate whatever we please concerning God, as though He had done it, because He could have done it. But not, because He can do all things, is it therefore to be believed that He has done even what He has not done; rather, whether He has done it, must be inquired into. God could, had He willed, have furnished man with wings for flying, which He has bestowed even on kites: yet not, because He could, has He straightway also done it.

He could also have straightway extinguished both Praxeas and all heretics alike: yet not, because He could, has He extinguished them. For it was needful that there should be both kites and heretics; it was needful too that the Father should be crucified. On this principle, then, there will be something even difficult to God—namely, whatever He has not done, not because He could not, but because He would not. For with God, to be able is to will, and to be unable is to be unwilling: but what He willed, that He both was able to do and has shown. Therefore, since, if He willed, He could make Himself a Son to Himself, and since, if He could, He did it—you will then prove that He both could and would, if you shall have proved that He did it. Chapter 11. But you will have to prove it as plainly from the Scriptures as we prove that He made His own Discourse a Son to Himself.