These are the things one might say to restrain our opponents' readiness to argue, their haste, and the danger that comes from haste in every matter—especially in discussions about God. But rebuking others is not difficult; anyone who wishes can do that. To set one's own understanding in place of theirs belongs to someone devout and sensible.
So, trusting in the Holy Spirit—dishonored by them but worshiped by us—let us bring our own convictions about the Godhead into the light, whatever their worth, like a noble birth brought forth at the proper time. I have not been silent at other times; indeed, on this subject especially I have been vigorous and bold. But now I speak the truth with even greater confidence, so that I may not, as Scripture says, draw back and fall under God's displeasure.
Every discourse has two tasks: to establish one's own position and to overthrow the opposing one. We will therefore state our own teaching first and then try to refute theirs. Both tasks will be carried out as briefly as possible, so that what we say can be grasped at a glance—like the elementary summaries they have devised to deceive simpler or less discerning people—and so that the thought is not dispersed by the length of the discussion, like water that is not confined in a channel but spreads out and disappears over open ground.
The three highest opinions concerning God are anarchy, polyarchy, and monarchy. The first two have been toys for the children of the Greeks, and may they remain so. For what is without rule is without order, and rule by many is full of conflict and therefore tends toward anarchy and disorder. Both lead to the same end: disorder; and disorder tends toward dissolution, for disorder is preparation for dissolution.
What we honor is monarchy. But not a monarchy confined to one person in such a way that unity would be isolated; for even one thing, if divided against itself, can become many. We mean a monarchy constituted by equality of nature, harmony of will, identity of movement, and the convergence toward one of those who are from the One—something impossible in created nature—so that although there is numerical distinction, there is no division of essence.
For this reason the Monad, moving from the beginning toward the Dyad, came to rest in the Trinity. This is what we mean by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The Father is the Begetter and the One from whom the Spirit proceeds—speaking, of course, without passion, without time, and without bodily process. The Son is begotten; the Spirit proceeds. I do not know what terms could express these realities while wholly excluding images drawn from visible things.
We will certainly not dare to speak of an “overflow of goodness,” as one of the Greek philosophers did, as though a bowl had overflowed when he philosophized about first and second causes. We must not introduce an involuntary generation, like some natural excess that cannot be restrained—an image entirely unworthy of the Godhead.
So let us remain within our proper limits and speak of the Unbegotten, the Begotten, and the One who proceeds from the Father, as God the Word Himself says.
When, then, did these things occur? They are beyond every “when.” But if I must speak boldly: when the Father is.
And when is the Father? There was never a time when He was not. The same is true of the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Ask me again and I will answer again. When was the Son begotten? When the Father was unbegotten. When did the Spirit proceed? When the Son did not proceed but was begotten—timelessly and beyond reason.
We cannot describe what is beyond time without using words that normally imply time. “When,” “before,” “after,” and “from the beginning” are not themselves timeless expressions, however much we strain them. Unless perhaps by “age” we mean the interval coextensive with eternal realities, not divided or measured by any movement or by the circuit of the sun, as time is.
How, then, are the Son and Spirit not without beginning if they are coeternal? Because they are from the Father, although not after the Father. What is without beginning is eternal, but what is eternal is not necessarily without origin, so long as it is referred to the Father as its principle.
Therefore, with respect to cause, they are not without origin. Yet the cause is not necessarily earlier than what comes from it: the sun is not earlier than its light. And with respect to time they are in a sense without beginning, however much you may frighten simpler people with verbal tricks. For the sources from which time itself comes are not subject to time.
How, then, is this generation without passion? Because it is incorporeal. If bodily generation involves passion, incorporeal generation does not.
And I will ask you in return: how is the Son God if He is a creature? What is created is not God.
I will not even insist that your own account of creation involves “passion” if understood bodily: time, desire, conception, planning, hope, pain, danger, failure, correction—all these and more belong to created activity as we know it.
I am surprised you do not go farther and imagine marriages, periods of pregnancy, and dangers of miscarriage, as though God could not beget unless He begot in the way bodies do. Why not list the forms of generation among birds, land animals, and creatures of the sea, then force the divine and ineffable generation into one of those categories—or eliminate the Son altogether because none fits your new theory?
You fail to see that just as Christ's birth according to the flesh differs from ordinary human birth—for where among your examples do you find a virgin who is Mother of God?—so also His spiritual generation transcends all bodily generation. Or rather, because His mode of being is not the same as ours, neither is His mode of generation.
Who, then, is a Father who never began to be Father? One who never began to exist. Whoever begins to exist also begins to be a father at some point; but the Father's being has no beginning, and therefore neither does His fatherhood.
He is Father in the proper and absolute sense because He is not also Son. Likewise the Son is Son in the proper sense because He is not also Father.
Our own names are not absolute in this way, because the same person may be both father and son. We come from two parents, not from one; we are divided and become human beings gradually, perhaps even failing to become what we ought to be. We depart and are left behind until the relations of father and son remain after the persons who bore them are gone.
“But,” someone says, “the very words ‘He begot’ and ‘He was begotten’ introduce a beginning of generation.”
What if instead we say, “He was begotten from the beginning,” and so escape your curious devotion to temporal objections? Will you accuse us of falsifying Scripture and truth?
Everyone knows that expressions involving time often use tenses interchangeably, especially in Scripture—not only past for present, but even future for past. Thus, “Why did the nations rage?” speaks of what had not yet occurred; and “They will cross the river on foot” is used of what had already happened. It would take too long to list all such expressions noted by careful readers.
So much for that. What is their next objection, so quarrelsome and shameless?
“The Father begot the Son either willingly or unwillingly.”
They imagine they have bound us on both sides, but their cords are very weak. If He begot unwillingly, they say, He was compelled. Then who compelled Him, and how can the One compelled be God? If willingly, then the Son is the son of will. How, then, is He from the Father? They invent “will” as a new mother in place of the Father.
There is at least one improvement in this argument: they have left bodily passion behind and taken refuge in will, since willing is not passion. But let us examine whether the argument itself has any strength.
You who so easily say whatever you wish: did you come from your father willingly or unwillingly? If unwillingly, your father was compelled. By whom? You can hardly answer, “By nature,” since nature also allows chastity. If willingly, then by your own reasoning you have lost your father in a few syllables: you turn out to be a child of his will rather than of him.
Now let us move from human parenthood to God and creation. Did God bring all things into being willingly or by compulsion? If by compulsion, again there is tyranny and a tyrant. If willingly, then by the same logic creation has been separated from its Creator—and you first of all, who invent these arguments—because “will” is inserted as a wall between God and what He makes.
But the one who wills is not the same as the act of willing; the one who begets is not the same as generation; the speaker is not the same as speech—unless we have entirely lost our senses. On one side is the acting subject; on the other, the action, so to speak.
Therefore what is willed is not the child of will, for willing does not always result in the thing willed. What is begotten is not the child of generation, and what is heard is not the child of utterance. Each comes from the person who wills, begets, or speaks.
The things of God transcend even these distinctions. In God perhaps the will to beget and the generation itself are not separated by any intermediate action—if indeed we should accept even this formulation rather than say that generation is beyond our categories of will.
Will you allow me, then, to play a little with the word “Father”? Your own example gives me permission to be bold.
Is the Father God willingly or unwillingly? How will you escape your own cleverness?
If willingly, when did He begin to will to be God? It could not have been before He existed, since nothing existed before Him. Or is one part of Him the willing subject and another the object willed? Then He is divided. And by your reasoning, would He not Himself become an effect produced by will?
If unwillingly, what compelled Him to exist? How is He God if He was forced—and forced to nothing less than being God?
“How, then, was the Son begotten?” my opponent asks.
I answer with another question: how was the Son created, if, as you claim, He is a creature? The same difficulty remains. Perhaps you will say, “By will and word.” But you have not yet explained everything. You still have to show how will and word acquired the power to produce the act. Human beings, at any rate, are not created in this manner merely by someone's willing and speaking.
“How, then, was He begotten?”
The generation would be no great mystery if you could comprehend it—you who do not even truly understand your own generation, or understand only a little of it, and are ashamed to speak even of that little. Yet you think you can know the whole?
You would have to labor long before you discovered the laws of bodily composition, formation, manifestation, and the bond joining soul to body, mind to soul, and reason to mind; the laws of movement, growth, assimilation of food, sensation, memory, recollection, and everything else from which you are constituted. You would have to determine which belong jointly to soul and body, which belong to one independently of the other, and which each receives through the other. For powers that reach maturity later still received their governing principles at conception.
Explain all this to me. And even after that, do not dare to speculate about God's generation, for that would not be safe. Even if you knew your own generation fully, it would not follow that you knew God's. And if you do not understand your own, how will you understand His? As God is more difficult to trace than a human being, so the heavenly generation is more incomprehensible than your own.
If you argue that because you cannot comprehend the manner of His generation He therefore was not begotten, then you must erase many realities that exist though you do not comprehend them—and first of all God Himself. For you cannot say what God is, however reckless and proud of your intelligence you may be.
Put away, then, your ideas of flowing, dividing, cutting, and imagining an immaterial generation as though it were bodily. Perhaps then you may form some conception worthy of the divine generation.
“How was He begotten?” I repeat the question with indignation. God's generation is to be honored with silence. It is already a great thing for you to learn that He was begotten. As for how, we will not grant that even angels comprehend it, much less you.
Shall I tell you how? In the manner known to the Father who begot and to the Son who was begotten. Whatever lies beyond this is hidden in the cloud and escapes your dim sight.
“But the Father begot a Son who either already existed or did not exist.”
What nonsense. Questions like this apply to you and me. In one sense we existed beforehand—as Levi was in the loins of Abraham—and in another we came into existence. Thus our case can be spoken of in relation both to what existed and to what did not yet exist. The first matter, by contrast, came into being from what did not exist, even if some philosophers imagine matter to be unbegotten.
But with the Son, being begotten from the beginning coincides with being. Where, then, will you place your two-pronged question? What is earlier than “from the beginning,” so that you could locate there a prior existence or nonexistence of the Son? Either alternative destroys the very meaning of “from the beginning.”
If we asked whether the Father came from what existed or what did not exist, perhaps your logic would force you to say that He has a double existence—one prior and one present—or that He too came from nonbeing, like the Son in your theory. Such are the houses of sand built by your childish questions, unable to withstand even the slightest breeze.
I accept neither alternative. I say the absurdity lies in the question, not in the difficulty of the answer.
If, however, your dialectical assumptions require one of two alternatives to be true in every case, answer me one small question: Is time itself in time, or not in time? If it is in time, in what time? What is that other time, and how does it contain the first? If time is not in time, what remarkable wisdom is this that invents a timeless time?
Take also the statement, “I am now lying.” Tell me without qualification whether it is true or false, since you will not allow both. Yet either the speaker lies and therefore speaks truly, or speaks truly and therefore lies. If opposites can be entangled like this in one case, why should it be astonishing if both alternatives in your question about the Son are false, and your clever puzzle turns out to be foolish?
Solve me one more riddle. Were you present at your own generation, and are you now present to yourself? Or neither? If both, who was present to whom, and how did one person become two in this relation? If neither, how were you separated from yourself, and what caused the separation?
You will say it is foolish to ask whether one person is “present to himself,” because such language applies between different persons. Very well. It is still more foolish to ask whether the One begotten from the beginning existed before His generation or did not. Such language applies only to realities divided by time.
They say, “The Unbegotten and the Begotten are not the same. Therefore the Son is not the same as the Father.”
This argument plainly drives either the Son or the Father out of the Godhead. If being unbegotten is the essence of God, then what is begotten cannot have that essence. If being begotten is the essence, then the Unbegotten is excluded. What argument can escape this conclusion?
Choose, then, whichever blasphemy you prefer, new theologian, if you are determined to be impious.
But tell me what you mean when you say the Unbegotten and the Begotten are “not the same.”
If you mean that the uncreated and the created are not the same, I agree. What has no created beginning and what is created are not of the same nature.
But if you mean that the One who begets and the One begotten cannot be the same in nature, that is false. The very relation of parent and offspring requires that the offspring share the nature of the parent.
Or put it another way. If by “unbegotten” and “begotten” you mean the properties of unbegottenness and generation themselves, then of course they are not identical. But if you mean the persons to whom these properties belong, why must they therefore differ in essence?
Wisdom and foolishness are not the same qualities, yet both may belong to the same human nature. Their difference does not divide the essence of humanity; it concerns what is predicated of that essence.
Are immortality, freedom from evil, and unchangeableness also God's essence? If so, God has many essences instead of one, or the divine nature is compounded out of them. For if each of these is an essence, God cannot possess them all without composition.
Our opponents do not say that, because some of these qualities may also be shared by other beings. Instead they say that God's essence is whatever belongs to God alone and is proper to Him.
Yet those who introduce matter and form as themselves unbegotten could hardly claim that unbegottenness belongs to God alone. Let us set aside the still darker errors of the Manichaeans.
Suppose, however, that unbegottenness does belong to God alone. What about Adam? Was he not alone directly formed by God? Certainly. Was he therefore the only human being? Of course not. Why? Because humanity does not consist in being directly formed; one who is born is human too.
In the same way, the Unbegotten is not alone God merely because only the Father is unbegotten. Admit also that the Begotten is God, because He is from God, however passionately you cling to the word “unbegotten.”
Besides, how can you make God's essence consist in a negation rather than in an affirmation of what He is? “Unbegotten” tells us that generation does not belong to Him. It does not tell us what the nature of the One without generation actually is.
What, then, is God's essence? Since you are so bold about divine generation, perhaps your presumption will define the essence too. For us it will be a very great thing if we ever learn this in the age to come, when darkness and heaviness have been removed from us, according to the promise of the One who cannot lie. Let those who are purifying themselves for that end think and hope for this.
For now we will dare to say only this: if it is a great glory of the Father that He is from no cause, it is no less glorious for the Son to be begotten from such a Father. He shares the glory of the One without cause because He is from Him, and to this is added the glory of generation itself—a reality so great and venerable to everyone whose mind is not wholly earthbound and material.
They continue: “If the Son is the same as the Father in essence, and the Father is unbegotten, then the Son must also be unbegotten.”
Quite right—if unbegottenness is God's essence. Then we would have the strange absurdity of something “begotten-unbegotten.”
But if the distinction belongs not to essence but to personal property, why speak as though your conclusion were necessary? Are you also your father's father, simply because you share the same human essence with him? Obviously not. Identity of nature does not erase the relations by which one is father and another son.
If we inquire into God's essence at all, the personal properties remain unaffected.
That “unbegotten” is not simply identical with “God” can also be shown another way. If the terms were identical, they would have to be used in the same way. But “God” is a relative term in the expression “God of” something, whereas “unbegotten” is not relative in that way. God is God of all things. The Unbegotten is not “unbegotten of” something in the same sense. Therefore the terms cannot be identical.
Again, begotten and unbegotten are opposed as possession and privation. If each signified an essence, opposed essences would have to coexist within the Godhead, which cannot be admitted.
Or, if possession is prior to privation and privation destroys possession, then by your principles the Son's essence would have to be prior to the Father's and then be destroyed by the Father. Such are the consequences of your theory.
What remains of their supposedly unanswerable arguments? Perhaps they will take refuge in this last one.
“If God has never ceased begetting, then the generation is incomplete and must someday cease. But if He has ceased, then He must once have begun.”
Once again bodily thinkers reason in bodily terms.
I will not yet settle the question of the expression “Before all the hills He begets Me” until I have examined it more carefully. But I do not see any necessity in their argument. If, according to them, whatever will end must have begun, it does not follow that whatever will not end therefore had no beginning.
What will they say about the soul or the angelic nature? If each had a beginning, must each therefore end? If they will never end, must they never have begun? Yet these beings began and, according to our faith, do not cease to exist. Their rule therefore fails.
Our own teaching is this. Just as there is one definition of a horse, an ox, or a human being that applies to all individuals belonging to the same nature, and whatever shares that nature is properly called by its name, so there is one essence, one nature, and one name of God, even though our thought distinguishes the persons and therefore distinguishes their names.
Whatever is properly called God truly is God; and what something is by nature, that is what it is truly called—if truth belongs to realities and not merely to words.
Our opponents, as though afraid to leave any weapon unused against the truth, are forced by argument and Scripture to confess that the Son is God. But they say He is “God” only equivocally, sharing the name without sharing the same reality.
So we ask them: “Do you mean the Son is not God properly, just as a painted animal is not properly an animal? If He is not properly God, in what sense is He God at all?”
They reply: “Why may not the same name be used properly of different natures?” They point to examples such as a land dog and a dogfish: both are called “dog,” the name is applied properly to each, yet the natures differ.
But notice what your example actually proves. When two different natures share the same name in this way, you do not make one superior and the other inferior in relation to the common name. The dogfish is not “more dog” or “less dog” than the land dog. Their different natures share the name without a scale of greater and lesser.
But in the present case you attach to the name “God” reverence and transcendence above every essence and nature—a dignity that belongs to God alone. Then you give that name to the Father in the full sense while depriving the Son of equal divine dignity, placing Him beneath the Father and assigning Him a second rank of honor and worship.
Even if your words grant the same title, your doctrine cuts away the Son's Godhead. You pass dishonestly from an equivocal name applied to equal things to an equivocal name meant to bind unequal things.
In fact, the relation between a painted human being and a living human being would fit your doctrine better than your two dogs.
Otherwise grant the Son, along with the common divine name, equality of nature and honor. But then you have destroyed the very example you introduced to establish inequality.
What use is ambiguity if those who share the name are equal in dignity? You appealed to equivocation not to establish equality but inequality. Your argument therefore turns against itself as well as against the Godhead.
If, when we say that the Father is greater than the Son with respect to being the cause, they add the premise that He is cause by nature and then infer that He is therefore greater by nature, I do not know whether they deceive themselves more or the people listening to them.
It does not follow that whatever is said of something under one qualification may be transferred without qualification to the thing itself.
Suppose I begin with their own premise, “The Father is greater according to nature,” and then add, “But what is greater according to nature is not in every respect greater, nor is it necessarily Father.” By their method I could conclude, “Therefore the Greater is not always greater, and the Father is not always Father.”
Or take this: “God is an essence; but an essence is not always God.” Follow their logic and conclude, “Therefore God is not always God.”
The mistake is the familiar fallacy of moving from a qualified statement to an unqualified one. We say that “greater” belongs to the Father's nature considered in relation to causality; they transfer it to the divine nature considered in itself.
It is as though we said, “So-and-so is a dead human being,” and they inferred from the word “dead” something about humanity simply as humanity.
How can we pass over another of their arguments, no less remarkable than the rest?
“Father,” they say, “must name either an essence or an action.”
They think they have trapped us whichever answer we choose. If we say it names an essence, they claim we must admit that the Son is of a different essence, since there is one divine essence and, according to them, the Father has already appropriated it. If we say it names an action, they claim we openly confess that the Son is something made rather than begotten, because wherever there is an agent there must be an effect. Then they ask how what is effected could be identical in nature with the One who effects it.
I too might have been frightened by this dilemma if we were forced to accept one of its two alternatives. But we can reject both and give a third, truer answer.
“Father,” most clever gentlemen, names neither essence nor action. It names a relation: the way the Father stands toward the Son and the Son toward the Father. Among us, these names indicate a genuine and intimate relationship. In the divine case they also signify the identity of nature between the One begotten and the One who begets.
But let us even grant, for argument's sake, that “Father” names an essence. By the ordinary meaning of the name, it will include the idea of the Son rather than alienate Him from the Father's nature.
Or let it name an action, if you prefer. Even then you have not defeated us. The result of this “action” would be the Son's consubstantiality with the Father; otherwise the very idea of action here is absurd.
You see how we escape your turns even when you insist on fighting badly.
Since we now know how unbeatable you think yourselves in arguments and sophistries, let us examine your strength in the divine Scriptures too, if you are willing to persuade us from them.
We have learned to recognize and proclaim the Son's divinity from the great and lofty names Scripture gives Him.
What are they?
God. Word. The One who was in the beginning, who was with the Beginning, and who is Himself Beginning: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”; “With You is the beginning”; and, “The One who calls her from generations, the Beginning.”
He is Only-begotten: “The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made Him known.”
He is Way, Truth, Life, and Light: “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life”; “I am the Light of the world.”
He is Wisdom and Power: “Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
He is Radiance, Imprint, Image, and Seal: “He is the radiance of His glory and the imprint of His hypostasis”; “the image of His goodness”; and, “God the Father has sealed Him.”
He is Lord, King, the One Who Is, the Almighty: “The Lord rained fire from the Lord”; “The scepter of righteousness is the scepter of your kingdom”; and, “The One who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
These are plainly said of the Son, along with many other expressions of the same force.
None of these titles was acquired later or added afterward to the Son or to the Spirit any more than to the Father. Their perfection does not come from additions. There was never a time when the Father was without the Word, never a time when He was not Father, never a time when He was not true, wise, powerful, living, radiant, or good.
Against these passages you may collect all the expressions that feed your ungrateful argument: “My God and your God”; “greater”; “created”; “made”; “sanctified.” Add, if you wish, “servant,” “obedient,” “gave,” “learned,” “was commanded,” “was sent,” and the statements that He can do nothing of Himself, or say, judge, give, or will anything of Himself.
Add also His ignorance, subjection, prayer, questioning, growth, and being made perfect. Add still humbler things if you wish: that He slept, hungered, grew weary, wept, agonized, and feared. Perhaps you will even reproach Him with the Cross and death. I suppose you will leave resurrection and ascension to us, since they contain something favorable to our side.
You could gather many more such texts if your aim is to construct the equivocal and intrusive “god” of your theory—the One who for us is true God and equal in honor with the Father.
Each of these lower expressions can be explained, one by one, in a reverent sense, and the stumbling block of the bare letter can be removed—provided your stumbling is sincere and not a deliberate act of malice.
Here is the whole explanation in one rule.
Apply the lofty expressions to the Godhead and to the nature in Christ that is above suffering and bodily limitation. Apply the lowly expressions to the composite reality of the One who for your sake emptied Himself and became incarnate—yes, let us say it plainly, became human—and afterward was exalted.
Then you will abandon your fleshly, earthbound doctrines. You will learn to rise higher, to ascend with His divinity, not remaining fixed on what is visible but being lifted with Him toward what is intelligible. You will learn which sayings belong to His divine nature and which to the economy of His assumed humanity.
The One you now despise was once above you. The One who is now human was once uncompounded. What He was, He remained; what He was not, He assumed.
In the beginning He simply was, without a cause—for what can be the cause of God? Later He came to be for a cause, and that cause was your salvation: you who insult Him and despise His divinity precisely because He accepted your coarse condition.
He entered into communion with flesh through a rational soul and became human, the God below. His humanity was united with God and became one, the higher prevailing, so that I might become god to the same extent that He became human.
He was born, but He was also eternally begotten. He was born from a woman, yet she was a virgin. The first belongs to humanity, the second to divinity. Here He is without a human father; there He is without a mother. The whole mystery belongs to the Godhead.
He was carried in the womb, yet while still in the womb He was recognized by the prophet who himself was in the womb and leapt before the Word for whose sake He came into being.
He was wrapped in swaddling clothes, yet rising from the dead He stripped away the wrappings of the grave.
He was laid in a manger, yet angels glorified Him, a star proclaimed Him, and the Magi worshiped Him.
Why do you stumble at what is visible and refuse to look at what is understood?
He fled into Egypt, yet He put Egypt's idols to flight.
He had no form or beauty in the eyes of the Jews, yet to David He was fairer in beauty than the sons of men. On the mountain He flashed with light and became brighter than the sun, initiating us into the mystery of what is to come.
He was baptized as a human being, yet as God He took away sins—not because He needed purification, but so that He might sanctify the waters.
He was tempted as a human being, yet as God He conquered; indeed He tells us to take courage because He has overcome the world.
He hungered, yet He fed thousands; indeed He is the living bread that came from heaven.
He thirsted, yet He cried, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink,” and promised that rivers would flow from those who believe.
He grew weary, yet He is the rest of those who labor and are burdened.
He slept, yet He walked lightly over the sea, rebuked the winds, and raised Peter when he began to sink.
He paid the tax, yet from a fish—and He is King of those who demanded it.
He is called a Samaritan and accused of having a demon, yet He saves the man going down from Jerusalem who fell among thieves. Demons recognize Him; He drives demons out; He sinks a legion of spirits in the sea; He sees the ruler of demons fall like lightning.
He is threatened with stones, yet is not seized.
He prays, yet He hears prayer.
He weeps, yet He brings tears to an end.
He asks where Lazarus has been laid, because He is human; yet He raises Lazarus, because He is God.
He is sold, and for very little—thirty pieces of silver—yet He redeems the world at a great price, His own blood.
Like a sheep He is led to slaughter, yet He shepherds Israel and now the whole inhabited world.
Like a lamb He is silent, yet He is the Word, proclaimed by the voice crying in the wilderness.
He is weakened and wounded, yet He heals every sickness and every weakness.
He is lifted onto the tree and nailed to it, yet through the tree of life He restores us. He saves even the robber crucified beside Him and wraps the visible world in darkness.
He is given vinegar and gall to drink. Who is He? The One who changed water into wine, who abolishes bitterness, who is sweetness itself and wholly desirable.
He gives up His life, yet He has authority to take it again.
The veil is torn, because the things above are revealed. Rocks split. The dead rise beforehand.
He dies, yet gives life; by death He destroys death.
He is buried, yet rises.
He descends into Hades, yet brings souls up.
He ascends into heaven and will come again to judge the living and the dead—and to judge arguments such as yours.
If the lowly sayings give you an occasion for error, let the glorious ones put an end to it.
This is our answer to those who love riddles and objections. We do not give it gladly, for endless talk and verbal opposition are not pleasant to the faithful; one adversary is enough. But necessity compels us because of those who attack, just as medicines exist because diseases do.
We want them to learn that they are not all-wise or invincible in the needless arguments that empty the Gospel of its power.
When we put forward the strength of human reasoning and set faith aside, when questioning dissolves the trustworthiness of the Spirit's witness, and then our argument proves too weak for the greatness of the realities before us—as it inevitably will, since it proceeds from the weak instrument of our mind—what happens? The weakness of our reasoning is mistaken for weakness in the mystery itself. Then clever speech becomes an emptying of the Cross, just as Paul says.
Faith is the completion of our reasoning.
May the One who reveals bonds and looses those who are bound, who has brought it to our mind to undo the strangling knots of violent doctrines, transform even these people if possible. May He make them believers instead of technicians of argument, Christians instead of what they are now called.
This is what we ask and plead for Christ's sake: be reconciled to God, and do not quench the Spirit. Or rather, may Christ be reconciled to you, and may the Spirit, even now at last, shine upon you.
But if you insist on quarrelling, we at least will preserve the Trinity for ourselves, and may we be saved by the Trinity, remaining sincere and without stumbling until the fuller manifestation of what we desire, in Christ our Lord, to whom be glory forever. Amen.