ON ECCLESIASTICAL THEOLOGY
Modern English version · SermonIndex
Eusebius of Caesarea · c. AD 337–339

A second work by Eusebius of Caesarea against Marcellus of Ancyra, in three books, written after the first and meant to set out ‘the church’s theology’ against what Eusebius took to be Marcellus’s errors about the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Eusebius defends the Son as a distinct, eternal person begotten of the Father, and again quotes Marcellus at length. The sections are those of Klostermann’s edition.

This is a new English translation of On Ecclesiastical Theology from SermonIndex. No older English translation was used: it was prepared with AI directly from the Greek and has not been checked line by line by a person, so please compare it with the Greek where it matters, especially where the Greek text itself is damaged or uncertain. It is released under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read it beside the Greek at https://sermonindex.net/fathers/eusebius-ecclesiastical-theology/


============================================================
BOOK 1
============================================================

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents  The first book contains the following. 1. Marcellus slandered Sabellius for nothing, since he holds the same opinions as Sabellius. 2. The grace of Christ gave to the church of God, as a special gift, the knowledge of the Father and the Son. 3. Those who hold other doctrines have erred in many different ways in their teaching about the Son. 4. Those who do not confess that the Son of God has a real existence call themselves Christians for nothing. 5. How Marcellus denied the Son of God by imitating the heresy of Sabellius. 6. What the church of God believes. 7. How the other teachers have fallen in different ways from the true theology of the Son. 8. A statement of the sound and churchly right belief. 9. The Son was not brought into being in the same way as the many created things. 10. Because he alone was begotten of the Father, he alone is rightly called both God and only-begotten Son. 11. How the church knows one God, though it accepts that the Son is God from God. 12. His begetting from the Father cannot be spoken of. 13. The Son’s oversight is necessary and saving for all. 14. The church was right to reject Marcellus, who thought the same things as Sabellius. 15. With what words Marcellus attacked Sabellius, pretending not to think the same as he did. 16. How he is caught, by his own words, holding the same views as Sabellius. 17. How he denied, with head uncovered, the real existence of the Son. 18. How he said that before the incarnation the Son was nothing other than a word only, like the word in human beings. 19. How the divine Scriptures, even before the incarnation, called the Son of God not only Word but countless other names as well. 20. Quotations and partial explanations of the proofs from divine Scripture, in thirty chapters in all.


PREFACE

Pref.  I thought that the quotations from Marcellus’s own words, which I gathered in the earlier books, were enough to refute him. They contain such a plain and unshakable denial of the Son of God that, even without any reply, those raised in the church of God should avoid what he says in them.

Pref..2  But I considered that some might be swept away from the church’s theology by the great number of quotations he used to support what he thought would help his case. So I decided to bring out the refutation of these too, here and now. Then everyone may learn that not one passage of the God-inspired Scripture gave him testimony in agreement with his denial of the Son of God. All of them speak plainly against him, correcting without distortion his wrong interpretations of the divine Scriptures. Alongside the exposure of these errors I will set out the theology of our Savior. I have nothing newer to say, and no clever discovery of my own. I put forward the uncorrupted teaching of the church of God, which she received from the beginning from those who saw and heard the Word himself, and which she keeps.


CHAPTER 1

1.1  Before examining these matters, I found that in the middle of his work he attacks Sabellius. I was astonished at the man’s foolishness. He did not hold back from speaking evil of the one he ought to have praised above all, since Sabellius shares his opinion and his mind. So I did not think I should pass over this in silence, but should give a refutation of this point also in the present book. To slander God’s servants, even if it brought blame on himself, brought good repute to those freed from fellowship with him,

1.2  and still there was some plausibility in appearing to disparage what he did not hold dear. But to attack himself unawares by speaking ill of one who thinks as he does seems to me to show shamelessness and also dullness. That this is so, he himself provides the proof. He brings in God as “son-father,” as Sabellius did, if not in plain words then in truth, by destroying the real existence of the Son and defining God as one, and by calling this one both his own Father and again his own Son. For he granted that there is a Word in God,

1.3  and he defined this Word as one and the same with God, and said that God is called the Father of this Word. He said that the Word is God’s Son, though not truly a Son with a substantial existence, but properly and truly a Word. At any rate he stresses that it is not Word in a loose sense, but properly and truly Word, and nothing other than Word.

1.4  But if the Word was nothing other than a word, then clearly he was not properly or truly a Son either, and was called so only in sound and in name, by misuse of the term. And by saying that the Word, who became flesh and was born of the virgin, is one and the same as God, he made him out to be God the Father himself. This is exactly what Sabellius declared long ago, and the church of God rejected it and counted him among the godless heretics.


CHAPTER 2

2.1  The confession of one God, set against the polytheistic error of the Greeks, was first handed down by the children of the Jews. But to know this same God also as Father of an only-begotten Son is a special privilege which saving grace has given to the church. The church knows Jesus Christ alone as Son, and no one else. It does not know him as Son by the birth of the flesh which he took up, for it has been taught to call that the form of a servant and the son of man. It knows him as Son by his begetting from God the Father himself before all ages, a begetting unknown to all. By it the fullness of the Father’s divinity established him as Son, himself God. He did not draw in a Godhead that was his own possession and cut off from the Father, nor one that was unoriginate and unbegotten, nor one brought in from somewhere else and foreign to the Father. Rather he is filled from the Father’s own sharing of it, poured out upon him as from a spring. For the great apostle taught that “all the fullness” of the Father’s “divinity” dwells in him alone. This is why one God is proclaimed to the church of God, “and there is no other besides him.” And there is one only-begotten Son of God, the image of the Father’s divinity, and for that reason God.


CHAPTER 3

3.1  Many people could not grasp this teaching about God, and they devised various byways of error. Some granted that the Son is God but denied the man whom he took up. Others supposed him to be a mere man and failed to recognize the God in him. Others, fearing that they would seem to introduce a second God, declared that Father and Son are one and the same. The church of God turned away from these and prides itself on the gospel proclamation of the truth. It boasts of having one God over all. It also acknowledges one only-begotten Son, God from God, Jesus Christ. It confesses that this same Savior became also a son of man. He was the Son of God before he became man, and he became this, what he was not, because of the unspeakable excess of the Father’s love for humanity.


CHAPTER 4

4.1  This is what the word of truth proclaims on behalf of the church. But why do those who deny the Son of God, and say that there is one God and nothing else, trouble the church for nothing, when they ought to be keeping company with the synagogues of the Jews? And why do they run themselves through with blasphemous words, slandering the one God with two titles, if they suppose the Father and the Son to be the same? For whose Father is he, if no Son exists? Whose Son will he be, if the one who begot him does not exist beforehand? And if God is one, then surely this same one will be the one who was made flesh, suffered, and lived out a mortal life among men.


CHAPTER 5

5.1  Sabellius said these things, and the church of God drove him far away, since he dared to say godless and impious things. Marcellus tries to bring them back again, using a cover that is not persuasive. He rightly defines God as one, but then he says that this God has the Word united and joined to himself within him. After that he calls one part of the one God Father and another part Son, as though there were in him some double and composite being.

5.2  And in choosing between evils, how much better than he is the man who does not divide the unoriginate, unbegotten, divine power, but confesses, in plain words, that it is the same! And how much better than both is the Jew. He does not divide the one God into Father and Son, as Marcellus does, nor does he bring in the same person as son-father, as Sabellius does. He worships God, and he knows and expects God’s Christ, who was proclaimed through the prophets as one who would come. Since they did not receive him when he came, they have paid the penalty for their unbelief in him, and they will pay it still.


CHAPTER 6

6.1  Those who are able to pray their way to faith in the One who has come will recognize three things. First, the one “from the seed of David” and of the holy virgin. Second, the Son of God who dwelt in him, who existed beforehand and has a real, substantial existence of his own. Third, the God who is this Son’s Father, by whom the Son himself continually confesses that he was sent. So, as the apostle says, “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” That is the pre-existent only-begotten Son of God. And the third is the son of man according to the flesh, whom the Son of God took up for our sake.

6.2  But the body he took up was not the same as the Son of God who took it up. Nor could the Son of God himself be considered one and the same as the one who begot him. There are three things, then, set before us. Those who grant two of them but remove the third would have to be rejected by the church.


CHAPTER 7

7.1  Some godless people among the heterodox rejected the Saviour’s flesh. They said he was seen on earth only in a seeming appearance, and so they were the first to miss the mark of the truth. Others accepted the economy of the incarnation but denied the pre-existent Son of God, and, as I said, they devised for themselves all sorts of wrong turns. Some said he was a mere man, in no way above the common nature of all, except for a superiority in virtue. Others taught that the God of the universe himself dwelt in the body, and said that he was called his own Son because of the economy he underwent as a man. These people grant two things, God and man, and deprive themselves of the third. They deny the Saviour himself, the only-begotten Son of God.

7.2  Sabellius long ago, and Marcellus now, were carried away by the thinking of these people. Like the unbelieving Jews, they insisted that they knew well enough the God over all, and they also agreed on the second, the flesh from the holy virgin. But the third, the very heart of salvation for all of us, the Son of God, who is light and truth, they pushed aside. In denying the Son, they have at the same time fallen away from the light of truth.

7.3  So you will hear them confessing one God and honouring the Saviour’s flesh. But as for the Son of God who dwelt in the flesh, they accept him with their voice and lips, while in practice they reject him. For we ought to look for a Son of God who truly lives and has his own existence. He is neither the same as the body he took up, nor the same as God the Father. Nobody could call the God beyond the universe a “Son” and still be godly. For whose son would he be, when he is clothed in a deity without beginning and unbegotten? And whoever says that the only-begotten Son of God is himself the Father will not escape the penalty that falls on blasphemers.


CHAPTER 8

8.1  For this reason the church of God lays out the straight, royal road, and has rejected the other detours. To her own nurslings she hands down the knowledge that comes from divine grace. In the very mystery of the new birth she teaches them to confess faith in one God, Father Almighty. She gives them the means to know this theology as complete, exact and whole. It hands down one God, and so marks itself off from the Greek error of many gods. It knows him as Father, and so separates itself from Jewish teaching. It confesses him as Almighty, and so turns away from the impiety of the godless heterodox.

8.2  None of the heterodox, at any rate, would say that the Father of Christ is himself the God Almighty. In the same way, no Jew would confess that God is Father, since he does not know the only-begotten Son. And no Greek would say that he knows only one God. So the church cleanses away the error of all these and proclaims the one God. She teaches that he is both Father and Almighty. He is Father of one alone, Christ, and God, Creator and Lord of all the rest. In the same way she hands down Jesus Christ as the only-begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages. He is not the same as the Father, but exists and lives in himself, and is truly a Son who is with the Father. He is God from God, light from light, life from life. He was begotten from the Father for the salvation of all, in ways that cannot be spoken or told, and are altogether unknown and beyond our grasp. His existence is not like that of other begotten things, and he does not live a life like those who came into being through him. He alone was brought forth from the Father himself, and he is life itself.

8.3  It was fitting for the God over all to bring forth this only-begotten offspring before every created thing and before all ages. He was to be like a foundation and an unbreakable base for everything that would come into being through him. So before everything that was to exist, God begot the Son. He is like a ray of light, a spring of life, and a treasure-house of good things, “in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, hidden,” as the divine apostle says.

8.4  The Father, who alone is good, gave existence to a Son with all these good things. The Son is life itself, who gives life to all things. He is light itself, “the true light,” who enlightens every intelligent and rational being. He is the Word himself and Wisdom itself, who brings all things into being and governs them wisely and rationally. For this reason he alone, and no one else, is called the only-begotten Son of God, and is so.


CHAPTER 9

9.1  So it is reasonable to find fault with those who have dared to call him a creature, one who came into being out of nothing like the other creatures. For how could he still be a son? How could he be the only-begotten of God if he is credited with the same nature as the other creatures? On that view he would be their brother rather than the Son of God. He would be one among the many created things, since he would share with them, just as they do, in a creation out of nothing.

9.2  But the divine oracles do not teach this about him. When Scripture teaches about the existence of created things, it testifies without exception that all things came into being through him. “All things came into being through him, and apart from him not one thing came into being.” And “in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.” And “all things have been created through him and for him; and he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” So the apostolic teachings say.

9.3  But when Scripture brings in the doctrine of his divinity, it sets him apart from all the rest. It knows him as Lord, Master, Maker, God and Savior of all. It declares him alone, and no one else, to be the only-begotten Son of God. It calls him alone Wisdom, Word, Life and Light. It calls him the image “of the invisible God” and “the radiance of eternal light.” And it teaches us to hold countless other things about him of the same kind. All of these point to the special relation of the Father’s divinity to him alone, as to an only-begotten Son.

9.4  That is why the Father’s voice proclaimed him alone as the beloved Son at the streams of the Jordan, testifying with a great cry: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And the Father repeated the testimony at the transfiguration on the mountain, sealing the same word.

9.5  So the God of all himself gave him this testimony. The evangelist plainly teaches that he is the only-begotten Son when he says, “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son (or “only-begotten God”), who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.” And the Savior himself, in his teachings about himself, sealed the same things when he said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

9.6  After these words, whoever defines the Son as something that came into being out of nothing, a creature brought forth from what did not exist, does not notice that he is granting him only the name. He denies that he is truly a Son. For one who has come into being out of nothing could not truly be a son of God, just as no other created thing could.


CHAPTER 10

10.1  But the one who is truly the Son of God has been brought forth from God himself, as from a Father. So it is reasonable that he should be called the Father’s only-begotten and beloved. In this way he would also be God. For what could God’s offspring be other than what is like the one who begot it? A king founds a city but does not beget a city, and he is said to beget a son but not to found one. A craftsman is the maker, but not the father, of what he makes. And he could not be called the maker of a son who was born from him. In the same way the God of all is reasonably called the Father of the Son, and the Creator and Maker of the world.

10.2  If someone finds it said just once somewhere in Scripture, “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works,” he must look at the meaning of the saying, which I will set out a little later. He must not, as Marcellus does, shake the most authoritative doctrine of the Church because of a single expression. For Marcellus too heard it said only once that the Son is “Word,” and so he fell upon the human aspect and rejected the Son’s real existence.

10.3  The Son is attested as Son both by himself and by the Father. How, then, is it holy to compare him with the rest of the things that have come into being? And how will he be “only-begotten” if he is counted together with the multitude of created things? Indeed, the very title “Son” shows his natural relation to the Father. In the same way, the name “only-begotten” touches on his kind, on the begetting itself, and on his being alone, so that nothing else shares in his sonship. But these people seem to have suffered the same thing as Marcellus.

10.4  Marcellus, out of fear of speaking of two Gods, put forward a denial of the Son and rejected his separate existence. These others grant two separate existences, one unbegotten and the other created out of nothing, and yet they claim to hold one God. But for them the Son will no longer be the only-begotten, nor Lord, nor God. He shares nothing in the Father’s deity, and is put on a level with the other created things, in that he came into existence out of nothing. But the Church does not teach this.

10.5  The Church proclaims the Son of God as God and Lord, and teaches that he is truly Son and God. He is not like the many who are called sons and gods by courtesy, of whom it is said, “I said, you are gods, and all of you are sons of the Most High.” Rather, he alone, begotten from the Father himself, “existed in the form of God,” and was “the image of the invisible God and firstborn of all creation.” Therefore the Church has learned to honor, revere and worship him alone, as her Lord, Savior and God.


CHAPTER 11

11.1  But if it frightens them that they might seem to be proclaiming two Gods, let them know this. Even though we confess the Son as God, there is only one God, the one who alone is without beginning and unbegotten, who possesses deity as his own, and who has been the cause to the Son himself of his being and of his being what he is. The Son himself confesses that he lives because of him, saying plainly, “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father,” and, “For just as the Father has life in himself, so he gave the Son also to have life in himself.”

11.2  This is why the Son teaches that the Father is God both of us and of himself, where he says, “I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God.” The great apostle likewise teaches that God is the head of the Son, and the Son the head of the Church. In one place he says, “The head of Christ is God,” and in another he says of the Son, “And he gave him as head over all things to the Church, which is his body.”

11.3  So the Son is the leader and head of the Church, and the Father is his head. Thus there is one God, the Father of the only-begotten Son, and there is one head even of Christ himself. Since there is one source and one head, how could there be two Gods, and not rather that one alone? He ascribes to himself no one higher and no other cause of himself. He possesses deity as his own, without beginning and unbegotten, with the authority of a sole ruler. He has shared his own deity and life with the Son. Through the Son he established all things. He sends him, gives him orders and commands, and teaches him. He hands everything over to him, glorifies him, exalts him highly, and has shown him to be king of all. He hands all judgment over to him. He wishes us also to obey him. He commands him to hold the throne at the right hand of his majesty, speaking to him and saying,

11.4  “Sit at my right hand.” For all these reasons he is God even of the Son himself. In obedience to him, his only-begotten child “emptied himself, humbled himself, took the form of a slave, and became obedient to the point of death.” The Son prays to him, obeys his command, and gives him thanks. He teaches us to regard him as “the only true God,” and confesses that he is greater than himself. And besides all this, he wants all of us to know that he is also his own God.

11.5  The Son honors his own Father in this way, and the Father honors him in return. He has shown him to be Lord, Savior and God over all, and a sharer of his throne in his kingdom. The church of God has been taught these things. She knows him as her own God, Lord and Savior, and as the only-begotten Son of the God who is over all. She does not think it right to proclaim any other created being as God. She knows as God only the one whom the Father alone begot out of himself,

11.6  just as the Son himself declared through Solomon when he said, “Before the mountains were settled, before all the hills, he begets me.” Here, I think, the mountains and hills are a veiled way of speaking about the divine powers that are above the world.


CHAPTER 12

12.1  But suppose someone gets curious and asks how God could beget, or how the one who is beyond all things could be a Father. The one who said, “Do not seek what is deeper than you, and do not investigate what is higher than you. Think about what has been commanded you, for you have no need of hidden things,” will silence the boldness of that question. Paul also said, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how untraceable his ways!” Let that persuade anyone daring to go further not to attempt what cannot be reached. Or let him first tell us, about the things he says came to be out of nothing, how and in what manner they came into existence, when before that they were in no way at all.

12.2  For God did not take material already lying to hand and build the universe with his hands, as the craftsmen among us do. What is by nature impossible, at least for human beings (I mean bringing into being out of what is not something that did not exist at all), was possible for him. He became the Maker of all things, not in a human way, but by words that we cannot speak or describe. In the same way, and much more so, the begetting of his only-begotten Son must be unsearchable and untraceable. It is so not for us alone, as someone might say, but for all the powers that are higher than we are.

12.3  Things far lower in nature, which stand below and very far from the ineffable divine being, how could they reach an understanding that is beyond them and the highest of all? And how could things that once did not exist, and were brought by him out of nothing into being, have knowledge of their first coming to be, when he who brought them forward was the cause of their existence? Are we, who were born only yesterday, clothed in “skin and flesh,” fitted together with “bones and sinews,” and who do not even know our own affairs, to make a harmless inquiry into things that cannot be spoken, meddling in how the Father begot the Son? That countless things right at our feet escape our knowledge will be clear from what follows.

12.4  Who could say how the soul is shut up in the body, how it goes out, how it was admitted in the first place, what its appearance is, what its shape, what its form, what its essence? And I am not yet speaking of prying into the matter of demons, or the essence of angels, or of rulers and thrones and lordships, or of authorities and world-rulers.

12.5  If we are at a loss over all these things, why must we search out knowledge of the divine being who has no beginning and was never begotten? Why ask about what cannot be reached, how God came to be the Father of an only-begotten Son? As if the Father’s own voice were not enough for us as a witness to the beloved Son, whom he proclaimed when he said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”

12.6  If he commands us to listen to him, then let us obey this royal law and listen to the beloved Son. What he wants us to know about himself he will make clear when he says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” We must believe him, then, so that we may obtain eternal life. For he says, “The one who believes in him has eternal life.”

12.7  It is not the one who knows how he was begotten of the Father who has eternal life. No one could have a share in it on that basis, if it has been said that “no one knew the Father except the Son, and no one knew the Son except” the Father alone, who begot him. So the faith is enough for our salvation, the faith that lets us know God as Father almighty, and lets us write down his only-begotten Son as Savior. Among other things, he handed down this teaching: “What has been born of the flesh is flesh, and what has been born of the Spirit is spirit.” And “God is spirit.”

12.8  It follows that we should understand that what has been born of God would be God. And just as the God who is beyond all things is separated and set apart in his nature from earthly flesh, so we must understand that the manner in which the Father begot the Son is just as far removed from the birth of bodies. He did not bring him forth by sending out anything from himself, nor by being changed, nor by being moved by any passion, nor by undergoing anything at all that we know from experience. In none of these ways did he give him existence.

12.9  For God was not a body, so that one could think of an outflow, a diminishing, a stretching out, a change, a turning, a flowing, a part, or a passion in him. Free of all these things, he gave existence to the Son by a begetting that cannot be spoken or reasoned out by us, and is even beyond searching out and tracing by any created nature. The sun also begets its radiance, and the Son too is called “the radiance of eternal light” and “the radiance of the glory.” But this is not to be taken according to the visible picture of light. For beyond every example, the Father gave him existence by inexpressible and incomprehensible means, and gave him as one and only-begotten.

12.10  Let every mouth be shut of those ungodly and godless men who are sick with the error of many gods. They have dragged the special and unique begetting of the only-begotten Son down into a crowd, and have spoken of a father “of men and gods.” They mix men together with gods, and in the same breath bring in one and the same father for them, of the same nature. These men, by the working of demons, uttered this ungodly and godless word. They supposed gods who share the nature and the passions of the mortal, suffering and sinful race of men, and they supposed a common father of them all, surely made like his children. But the herald of the church proclaims to everyone one only-begotten Son of the one God. The Father gave him existence for the salvation and care of all created things.


CHAPTER 13

13.1  The nature of created things has many differences. It includes bodies and bodiless beings, living and lifeless things, rational and irrational, mortal and immortal. It could not come near the God who is over all and above all, or share in the brilliant rays of his divinity, because of the great distance between it and what is greater. In the weakness of its nature it would have slipped far away, even to the farthest distance, if it had not found a helper in a divine Savior. So it was fitting that the Father’s love for mankind set his only-begotten Son over all things. He passes through all things, oversees them all, and waters them with the supplies that come from him.

13.2  The Father who begot him has shown that he alone is shepherd and savior, caretaker and guardian, physician and helmsman of all things together, in heaven and on earth. To him alone the Father handed the tiller for the holding together and governing of the whole. This the Son himself teaches when he says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father,” and again, “For the Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand.”

13.3  Like a wise helmsman, he has received his allotted charge from the Father. He has taken his place over the whole world, and looks up to his Father, and steers the whole, guiding and carrying it. He overlooks not even the smallest thing that needs his provision, and does not look down on the least of them. For this reason he is present to all, giving each what suits it. Like a physician, he supplies for the care of the whole what is fitting for its salvation.

13.4  So it is only natural that he did not look down on life as a human being either. Long before, he gave his help to men who loved God from the beginning of the age. Here he appeared in human form to the forefathers of the Hebrews. There he laid down fitting laws for their descendants. And later he issued oracles through the prophets to all who came after, announcing that his appearing as God would one day shine out on all people.

13.5  As that time went by, he fulfilled in deed the outcomes of the old oracles. Then at last he came and mingled with mortal life, living among men. The only-begotten Son of God was himself present as in a divine image, in the instrument of his body, and he dwelt with the human race through teachings and healings,

13.6  and through the unspeakable instructions of divine wisdom. He even went with them as far as the gates of death, by the surpassing love for mankind of the Father’s will, so that he might count those here below worthy of his grace and draw them up into the life that is with him. So “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” He underwent the economy of the flesh, though he went before it and existed before it, honored with the divinity of the Father’s glory. He did not count “being equal to God” as “something to be seized.” Instead he emptied himself, “took the form of a servant and humbled himself, becoming obedient” to the Father “to the point of death.” The purpose was this: “just as” death, through one man who sinned, gained mastery over the whole human race, so eternal life, through “his grace,” might reign over those who [believe] in him and who through him are made known to God, his Father.


CHAPTER 14

14.1  The church, then, proclaims these things, and so she rightly rejected Sabellius as one who had stamped a counterfeit coin, the denial of the Son of God, even though he, like Marcellus, said he knew one God and that besides him there is none. The first heralds of our Savior himself also gave the name Ebionites to certain people. In the Hebrew tongue it means “poor,” a name for their poverty of mind. They said they knew one God and did not deny the Savior’s body, but they did not know the divinity of the Son.

14.2  The man of Samosata also, although he taught that Jesus Christ belongs to God and, like Marcellus, confessed one God over all, was declared a stranger to the church of God by the fathers of the church. The reason was that he did not confess Christ to be Son of God and God before his birth in the flesh. This man, then, was driven far from Christ’s church as one who was impious toward Christ.

14.3  Sabellius was impious toward the Father himself, whom he dared to call Son, and so he suffered the same penalty as the godless heretics. Marcellus suspected that he would suffer the same, so he devised a newer contrivance for his error. He defined God and the Word within him as one, yet he granted him two titles, Father and Son. But he was not hidden, and he did not escape. Late though it was, he was caught in his own nets.

14.4  Even before he was caught, however, he was struck by his conscience and set out to blaspheme Sabellius, to throw off the suspicion.


CHAPTER 15

15.1  Listen to how he slandered the man, mentioning him by name, as he writes about him in these very words: “Sabellius too slipped from the right faith, and knew neither God accurately nor his holy Word. For whoever has not known the Word has failed to know the Father also. ‘No one knows the Father,’ it says, ‘except the Son,’ that is, the Word, for the Word through himself provides the knowledge of the Father. So too he said to those of the Jews at that time who thought they knew God but rejected his Word, through whom alone God is known: ‘No one knows the Father except the Son and the one to whom the Son reveals him.’ For since it was impossible to know God in any other way, he teaches that people know him through his own Word. So that man also went wrong, because he did not accurately know the Father and his Word.”

15.2  Marcellus wrote this, clearing himself of the suspicion of Sabellianizing, but only in voice and word. In his thinking, and in his agreement with the man, he is caught pierced by the same arrows as Sabellius. I [wish], and would have prayed, that he had not fallen into the same ones. As it is, he appears to err worse than Sabellius. For Sabellius, when he stumbled, perhaps did so in ignorance. But the man who admits that Sabellius went wrong, and then pushes himself over the plain cliff of the same impiety, could not deserve any pardon. But let us look carefully at what has been said.


CHAPTER 16

16.1  First, Marcellus said that neither Sabellius nor the Jews knew God, because they did not know the Word. We need to look at what kind of “Word” he has in mind. If he means the only-begotten Son of God, who has real existence and is alive, then he himself did not know him either. Our Savior spoke of the Son in various ways. He often called himself the only-begotten Son, and never once called himself “Word.” Throughout all the Gospels he taught that he is the Son of God. For this he even blessed Peter, who said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and he testified that Peter’s knowledge came by the Father’s revelation, saying, “Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal it to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” Yet this remarkable man, as though his ears were stopped up, writes these words exactly: “And for this reason he does not call himself Son of God. Rather he everywhere calls himself Son of man, so that by this confession he might bring it about that man, through fellowship with him, becomes by adoption a son of God.”

16.2  You see how he does not dare to confess him as Son of God, so as not to fall away from the doctrine of Sabellius. He calls him Son of man, because of the flesh he took on. And throughout his whole book he keeps naming him “Word,” stressing continually that he was nothing other than a word.

16.3  Even in the passages where he finds fault with Sabellius, he sets out the Savior’s own words, in which he said, “No one knew the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals him.”

16.4  But, as though correcting those words, he again names “Word” in place of “Son,” saying: “For he says, ‘No one knows the Father except the Son,’ that is, the Word.” And he adds: “For the Word, through himself, provides the knowledge of the Father.” And he adds further: “It was impossible to know God in any other way than through his own Word.” Again he puts “Word” in place of “Son” and calls it God’s “own Word.” In these very few phrases he mentions “Word” many times and “Son” not even once. He even alters the Savior’s own saying.

16.5  In place of “the Son” he inserts: “that is, the Word,” as if the term “Son” did not fit better with the title “Father.” So the Savior naturally and fittingly joined the name of the Son to that of the Father, whereas this man, who refuses to say “Son,” keeps repeating “Word” over and over. He accuses Sabellius of denying the Son, yet does the very same thing himself, imagining that by slandering Sabellius he can turn aside the suspicion of false teaching. Now if he blames Sabellius for denying the Son of God, he ought first to have blamed himself. But if he blames him because Sabellius did not know the “Word” as Marcellus defines it, then he was wrong to make that charge.

16.6  For neither Sabellius nor the Jews themselves, who deny the Christ of God, failed to know what Marcellus says is the Word in God, through whom God spoke to Moses and the prophets. Everyone would say that they know this precisely, not only among the Jews but among the Greeks too. For who would not agree that God is rational, just as he is wise and good and powerful? Sabellius would not deny that he knows this. But he did not confess that there is also a Son of God, living and subsisting, who exists and existed before the flesh. Because of this agreement with Marcellus, he was cast out of the church of God, just as Marcellus was.

16.7  How Marcellus held the same views as Sabellius will be clear from the places where he declared that God and his Word are one and the same. Sometimes he said so in these very words:


CHAPTER 17

17.1  “If the examination were of the Spirit alone, the Word would naturally appear to be one and the same as God.” At other times he compares the Word of God to the human word, adding: “The word in a man is one and the same as the man, set apart from him by nothing else but the activity of action.” For this reason he sometimes declared that before the world was established there was nothing other than God. And again he said in these very words: “When the world had not yet come into being, there was nothing other than God alone.”

17.2  At other times he compared the Word of God to our own spoken word. He wrote this: “Just as everything that has come into being has come into being through the Word by the Father, so also the things spoken by the Father are made known through the Word.” Here he calls him a “spoken word.” Then, going on, he shows that the Word is inseparable from the Father in subsistence, and is one and the same with him, saying something like this: “I think this is easy for people of sound mind to grasp, even from a small and lowly example taken from ourselves.”

17.3  “For no one can separate a person’s word from that person in power and subsistence. The word is one and the same with the man, and it is distinguished from him by nothing else except the activity of the action.” Again he uses the same illustration where he says: “For everything the Father says, he is plainly seen to say everywhere through the Word. This is clear even from ourselves, comparing small things with great and divine ones: we too, as far as we are able, say and do everything we wish by means of our own word.”

17.4  One should think of these words as no more Marcellus’s than Sabellius’s. Unless, perhaps, Marcellus is mocking Sabellius for this: that Sabellius did not shamelessly dare to call the “spoken word” in God (as Marcellus supposes it to be) a Son. For Sabellius was not so devoid of reason as to give God, who is over all, a word just as human beings have one, nor was he so foolish as to call a word that has no real existence the Son of God. So Sabellius spoke of one God and denied the Son,

17.5  and, following the position he had laid down, said that Father and Son are the same. Marcellus likewise grants that God and the Word in him are one and the same. Yet he claims that Sabellius erred in vain, and does not admit that he himself has erred too.

17.6  For either Marcellus ought to have accepted Sabellius, or he ought to blame himself as well and, in blaming Sabellius, turn away from the same bad doctrine he holds. He should not, like a sculptor, suppose that God speaks to his own thought and reasoning and urges himself on, saying, “Come, let us make, come, let us mould a statue.” (For this is how Marcellus said God spoke the words “Let us make man.”)

17.7  Nor should he suppose in God at one time an inward word, as in a man, and at another time a spoken word, like the uttered word in us. It would have been more tolerable to hear this from Sabellius, or from one of the Jews who openly deny the Son of God, than from a Christian.

17.8  But Marcellus, as though priding himself on Jewish teaching, brings into the church of Christ this impious and godless doctrine, that the Son of God does not exist. Throughout the whole of the book he labored over, he argues that before the world came to be there was nothing else but God alone, in order to shut the door against the Son. And he even boasts that he knows one God,

17.9  as if we did not say this too! We have received that the Son of God is truly a Son. We have learned from him to acknowledge one God, who is both God and Father of the only-begotten Son, whose own Son he truly is, begotten from him before all ages. The Son was called not only “Word” before the taking up of flesh, as this noble fellow insists, but also countless other things. In this too Marcellus misrepresents the divine Scripture, when he maintains that before his coming in the flesh the Son was called nothing other than “Word.”


CHAPTER 18

18.1  Listen, then, to how he insists on this, writing in these very words (Nr. 37): “So it is clear from every side that no other name fits the eternity of the Word except the one that John, God’s most holy disciple and apostle, used at the beginning of the Gospel. After the taking up of the flesh he is proclaimed as Christ and Jesus, as life, way, day, resurrection, door, bread, and whatever else the divine Scriptures may call him. But this does not mean we should be ignorant of the first name, that he was Word. For this reason the most holy evangelist and disciple of the Lord, fully alert in the Spirit, recalled the origin from above and nothing more recent. He said, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ in order to show that if any name is new and more recent, it came from the new and recent dispensation in the flesh.”

18.2  And he goes on to add (Nr. 42): “Therefore before he came down and was born through the virgin, he was only Word. For what else was he before taking human flesh, he who came down ‘in the last days,’ as he himself wrote, and who was born of the holy virgin? Nothing other than Word.” And again he adds (Nr. 43 = 81): “For earlier, as I have often said, he was nothing other than Word.”

18.3  And once more he adds, saying (Nr. 36): “For the Word was ‘in the beginning,’ being nothing other than Word. But the man who was united to the Word, not having existed before, became man, as John teaches us: ‘And the Word became flesh.’ For this reason, then, John evidently mentions only the Word.”

18.4  “For whether divine Scripture mentions the name of Jesus or of Christ, it evidently names the Word of God as he is together with human flesh. And if anyone claims he can show the name of Christ or Jesus applied to the Word alone even before the new covenant, he will find it was said prophetically.” And after other remarks he continues (Nr. 44): “So it is reasonable that before the descent he was what we have often said, Word. But after the descent and the taking up of the flesh he received various titles.” These are the passages by which Marcellus is caught denying the Son of God who is, who lives and who is truly Son, and bringing in a bare Word.

18.5  It has also been shown from the words of his quoted earlier what kind of Word he supposed him to be. He used the human word as his example, and said that the Word is one and the same as God. Having laid down this starting point, he went on, consistently with the premise he had given himself, to slander the God-inspired Scripture and to give distorted interpretations of it.


CHAPTER 19

19.1  It seemed good to me to examine a few of these briefly for now. I want to show those who do not know, first, that no Scripture agrees with him in his innovating and turning aside from the sound faith. On the contrary, all of Scripture speaks against him and bears witness against the interpretations he has wrongly adopted. This ought especially to be shown to those who honor the man, lest any of them, through inexperience of the divine readings, suppose that he has hit the mark of the truth.

19.2  This, then, is the first thing to examine, which he was also the first to dare to declare: that before he was born through the virgin, the Son of God was not called by any name other than Word. For he says that before the coming in the flesh he was nothing but Word, and was not named otherwise except prophetically. He says that he was, and was named, Word and nothing else, and that only after the coming in the flesh did he receive various titles.


CHAPTER 20

20.1  So the first thing to show is that he made this statement in ignorance, without knowledge of the divine Scriptures. First (a), the divine evangelist John himself, who called him Word, did not wait long but immediately, right alongside, named him God, saying, “and the Word was God.” He could have said, “and the Word was of God,” but he did not say this, so that no one would say he was like the word among human beings. Instead he calls him God, and so shows the surpassing greatness of the dignity befitting God that belongs to him.

20.2  Second (b), moving on to another thought in praise of him, John named him Light, and by this very name showed that he existed before the taking up of the body,

20.3  In that passage he says about the Baptist: “That man was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light, which enlightens every man coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, and the world did not know him. He came to his own things, and his own people did not receive him.”

20.4  Do you see how in these words he called him not only “Word,” as Marcellus thought, but also God and light? He taught that he existed before, and that the world came to be through him. Just as he had said earlier that all things came to be through God the Word, and that “without him” nothing came to be, so he says the same of the light: “the world,” he says, “came to be through him.”

20.5  So the light and God the Word are one and the same. When he says at one time that the world, and at another that all things, came to be through him, he shows the Son’s role as God’s servant in the work. The evangelist could have said, “All things were made by him,” and again, “the world was made by him.” He did not say “by him” but “through him,” so as to refer us to the Father’s authority as the maker of all things.

20.6  But he also says, “the world did not know him.” Yet all human beings acknowledge the God over all by their natural understanding. The children of the Jews acknowledge him first of all, being led by the hand from the writings of the prophets, as Marcellus himself showed as he went on.

20.7  So the one whom “the world did not know” was someone other than the God over all: God and Word, who both was and was called light. This is not a light perceived by the senses, and does not shine on the eyes of flesh as the sun does. If it did, the nature of irrational animals would share in it too. As it is, he teaches what kind of light it was, saying, “It was the light that enlightens every man coming into the world.” So this rational light belonged to human beings alone.

20.8  For this reason he made the souls that were created “in his image and likeness” intelligent and rational, by a power that is intelligent and rational. Just as this light was not perceived by the senses, so neither was the One who is beyond all things, God himself. For “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” And indeed the Father was light that cannot be approached, as the divine apostle teaches when he says, “dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.”

20.9  But the other “was in the world,” “enlightening every man coming into the world.” The world, he says, came to be through this light, that is, through the Son, while the greater One, the Father, is the one by whom the whole is held together. So these are three fitting and reverent titles of the powers of the Son of God, which the theologian of Scripture took up together at the start: the Word, God, and the light.

20.10  Next, the same writer adds a fourth, calling him “only-begotten,” where he says: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of an only-begotten from a father, full of grace and truth.” So he was already called God’s only-begotten before he took flesh. For even if, as he says, “the Word became flesh” for our sake, still it was to us that he deigned to show his own divinity. We were not looking at the flesh (for that was “the form of a servant”), but at his glory, which is seen with a pure mind apart from the body. “We beheld his glory”: an unspeakable glory, beyond all mortal reckoning, such as one might imagine to be the “glory” of the “only-begotten” Son of God.

20.11  This glory was “from the Father.” Do you see that he did not say, “and we beheld his glory, glory as of a word,” although he had just said, “the Word became flesh”? He said this to teach what kind of Word the Father had caused to exist: not a mere spoken word. (For how could such a thing have become flesh?) So he had to call him “only-begotten.”

20.12  He also teaches that this is his glory, by which he is understood to be God’s only-begotten Son. And he says that the glory belonged to him from no other source than from the Father. For he did not have the glory as something unbegotten, or without beginning, or owned by himself, but as received from the Father. He himself made this clear when he said, “Father, glorify me with the glory which I had with you before the world was.”

20.13  The Father answers him, saying, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The same evangelist establishes the Son’s own distinct existence still more strongly when he adds: “John bears witness about him and has cried out, saying: This was the one who comes after me, who has come to be before me, because he was first, before me. For from his fullness we have all received.”

20.14  But although John cries out that the Savior “was first” before him, the new Sabellius does not hear it. Yet John the Baptist came before the Savior in his birth according to the flesh. How, then, is it testified that the Savior was before him? For in the birth according to the flesh, the Savior was not before John.

20.15  So it was in respect of being the only-begotten of God that he was “first,” before John, and “has come to be before” him. Can these words be applied to the Father and God of the universe? Or to a Word with no being and no substance of its own in God, who is simply the same as God? And how could the words “has come to be before me” be said of a word that has no real existence? Who would be so mad as to suppose that John the Baptist said of the God of the universe, “has come to be before me” and “he was first, before me”?

20.16  So these words show that the one spoken of as God existed before John’s birth and came to be before him. He is established not only as Word, but also as God, light and only-begotten, existing and named as such before his coming in the flesh. 5. Where the evangelist got this knowledge, he himself shows by saying next: “The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained him.” You see from whom he learned his theology: from the Son.

20.17  For he says it was not Moses, nor any of the prophets after Moses, nor any of the angels or higher powers, but “the only-begotten Son himself” who explained this. So the invisible God did not give the explanation; the only-begotten Son, having become visible, gave men the explanation concerning the Father. Clearly, then, he is other than the invisible God. And he also existed beforehand, not in the Father’s mind, as Marcellus supposed, but in his bosom. Just as the Savior has promised that we shall rest in the bosoms of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, so the Son was “in the bosom of the Father.” He was not one and the same with the Father, since neither shall we be the same as the holy fathers.

20.18  But note, besides, that once John has named him Word, called the same one God, named him light, called him only-begotten and confessed him Son of God, he no longer calls him Word. From then on he records the Savior himself as not calling himself Word, but Son, only-begotten, light, life, truth and countless other things. We can hear him teaching somewhere in these terms: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not perish.” And again: “For God did not send the Son into the world

20.19  to judge the world.” And again: “But whoever does not believe has already been judged, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God.” Here again God was the one giving and “sending the Son as savior of the world,” while the Son was the one sent, clearly other than the one who sends. For this reason, it seems to me, our Savior himself said the following words, which were recorded against Marcellus himself and against those who begrudge the Son his nature: “Is it not written in the law that I said, ‘You are gods’?

20.20  If he called those men gods to whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be set aside, do you say of the one whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You blaspheme,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?” You hear how often the Savior himself named himself not Word but Son, and called himself only-begotten.

20.21  You also hear how he taught that he had been sent, and had been sanctified by the Father before he was sent. And he puts to shame those who hesitate to confess him Son of God, by teaching from the divine Scripture that men who were mortal by nature were called not only sons of God but even gods. So it should not be thought blasphemy to confess as both Son of God and God “the one whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world.”

20.22  So what should become of the man who, after so many such sayings, dared to say that he is Word and nothing else? Marcellus has said in so many words (no. 34), “and for this reason he does not call himself Son of God, but everywhere calls himself Son of Man, so that through such a confession he might bring it about that man, by fellowship with him, becomes by adoption a son of God.” After saying this, I do not know with what eyes Marcellus could look these testimonies in the face, or with what lips he could speak against so many of them.

20.23  The Saviour also showed that he is light, in agreement with what has already been set out about light. He says, “I am the light of the world.” And again, “I am the light, and the truth, and the life.” And once more, “The light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness more than the light.”

20.24  And if anyone asks where he has come from, the one who said, “He who comes from above is above all,” and “He who comes from heaven testifies to what he has seen and heard,” will answer. Who was “the one who comes from heaven”? Surely not the flesh which the Saviour took up? Not at all. Plainly it was he himself, the light and the Word and God and the only-begotten and the Son, being all these things himself. So “what he has seen and heard,” it says, “he testifies.” Therefore he both saw and heard before he came to earth.

20.25  Whom did he see, if not the Father? Whom did he hear, if not the Father? And he taught that he is not a mere spoken word that signifies something, but truly a living Son with his own real existence, since he says, “The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.” Let us believe, then, that because he loves “the Son, the Father has given all things into his hand.”

20.26  We must pay careful attention to the word “all.” It takes in the existence of everything that has come into being. Through it one can see the greatness of the power of the Son of God, by considering how great and what kind of hand it was that received from the Father the existence of all things.

20.27  For if the whole heaven and world is great, and the realms beyond what is seen are far better and more excellent, made up of bodiless, incorruptible, rational and divine powers, and everything else that escapes our mind and is unknown to our understanding, then the one hand of the only-begotten Son of God, which grasps all of these together, shows the excellence of his immeasurable power.

20.28  The Son himself shows this again in another saying: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” Then, as if we were at a loss to know who and how great the one is who received so great a trust, he says: do not search, and do not ask. For it is not in the nature of things for him to be known by human beings. Even for higher and more divine powers, an exact grasp of the Son of God is not possible.

20.29  So after saying, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father,” he added, “and no one knows the Son except the Father.” Let every unspeakable account of the Son of God therefore be silent. Let the knowledge of his begetting from the Father be left to the Father alone. Let no one go further in his inquiry into his unspeakable nature and being. Let his own teaching about himself alone be made firm for us by the grace of faith, since it plainly teaches that all things have been handed over to him by the Father.

20.30  So God gave and handed over for the sake of improvement and benefit, making the handover as to a saviour, a physician and a steersman of the whole. The Son received, and like a faithful keeper of a deposit he held what was given. He did this not as a word without being or substance, but as truly the only-begotten Son, beloved of the Father.

20.31  7. Further, he also called himself the bread of life, saying, “I am the bread of life,” and “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” And he made very plain how he was living, setting it out in these words: “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father,

20.32  “…and the one who eats me, he too will live because of me.” He taught the same thing elsewhere when he said, “For just as the Father has life in himself, so he has given the Son also to have life in himself.” So he was the bread of life, and he existed in heaven, watering and feeding the angelic powers by the power of his divinity. He was all this before he came to earth. He was a Son having life “in himself,” just as the Father has life “in himself.”

20.33  For what is special and peculiar to the unbegotten, divine life of the Father is this: because of it, he alone is said to “have immortality,” according to the divine apostle. The Son would also have it alone, as the image of the Father, who is such in this respect too. Yet he has the life described, not as without beginning, not as unbegotten, and not as his own acquisition, as the Father has it, but as one who received it from the Father.

20.34  For he says, “he gave the Son also to have life in himself, just as the Father has life in himself.” So the one gave and the other received. And he alone has received this privilege: he does not have to obtain life from somewhere outside himself, as the other living things do, but has it welling up in himself, in the way the Father has it in himself. Therefore everything that shares in life lives by the supply of the Son. He alone has life welling up in himself, because the Father gave him this gift, so that those who were going to be made alive through him might enjoy it.

20.35  This is what he himself teaches when he says, “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who eats me, he too will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven.” You see how, even while he was in heaven, he was the bread of life. That is why it is said somewhere, “Man ate the bread of angels.” So even before he was sent by the Father, he was in heaven and lived because of the Father.

20.36  He was not a spoken word that merely signifies, nor one and the same thing as God. He was a subsisting being who had a life of his own, which the Father had given him.

20.37  Going on, he set out the superiority of the Father’s glory and said, “As the Father taught me, so I speak these things. And the one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do the things that please him.” Notice carefully that it says “always.”

20.38  For he says: it is not only now, when I am speaking with people on earth through flesh, that I do what pleases the Father, but always. He also testifies that he speaks what he has learned from the Father as from a teacher. So he gives the Father the title of teacher, and he is clearly someone other than the Father, since everyone who is taught by someone is different from the one who teaches.

20.39  But if the Word was in God, and is called rational (“logical”) only because he signifies the thoughts of the Father, how could he be his own teacher? How, if he is inseparable from God, could he say that he had been sent? How, if he is one and the same as God, could he testify that he does what pleases him? And if Marcellus replies to this that the Word spoke these words while in the flesh, what shall we say to that, given that he refuses to confess that he is a Son, and says he is only a Word?

20.40  How was he in the flesh when he said these things? Was he living and subsisting, and existing apart from the Father? Then who was the Father at that time, if he did not have his own Word in himself but subsisted without a Word? Suppose the Word dwelt in the flesh while he spent time on earth. If he was apart from the Father, living and subsisting and moving the flesh as a soul does, then he was clearly different from the Father, and again there were two subsistences, himself and the Father.

20.41  Then all of Marcellus’s labor is shown to be futile, since he defines the Word who became flesh as a living, substantial and subsisting Word. But suppose the Word who dwelt in the body was not apart from God, but was so united and joined to God as to be one and the same with him. Then Marcellus will necessarily have to grant one of these: either that the Father himself was in the flesh, or that the Son was subsisting by himself and working in the body, or that he was the soul of a man, or, if none of these, that the flesh moved by itself, though it was without soul and without reason.

20.42  If Marcellus says it was the Father, then in his view the Father is the one who was born, who suffered, and who endured every work that belongs to human experience. When Sabellius said this, the church of God charged him with impiety. But if it is not permitted to say that the Father became man, then those who are taught by Christ must confess that it was the Son, since he is the one who teaches this.

20.43  But if Marcellus denies that this one has a real existence, it is time for him to suppose that Christ was a mere man, made up of body and soul, differing in nothing from the common nature of human beings. But this doctrine too has been driven out of the church. In former times the Ebionites held it, and more recently the man from Samosata and those called Paulinians after him, and they suffered the penalty of an evil name.

20.44  What then is left after this, except to bring in the flesh alone, with no one dwelling in it, moving like the automata of conjurers? And how could the flesh, the body by itself, without someone working in it, say, “As he taught me, so I speak”? How could the flesh say, “I always do what pleases him”? How could the flesh say that it had been sent by the Father? Is it holy to call God the Father of the flesh, or rather the Father of the one who dwells and works in it? Who then was this? Was it the word in God, who is himself God according to Sabellius? Or was it, as it is holy and true to say, the living and subsisting only-begotten Son of God?

20.45  But if Marcellus says neither of these, he will necessarily be forced to accept a human soul, and for him Christ will be a mere man. Then he is no longer a Sabellian, but our new writer will be a Paulinian. But suppose he says that the word in God, being nothing other than a word, one that signifies or one that acts, dwelt in the flesh.

20.46  How then could this word say that it lives a life of its own, apart from the Father? How could it have been sent, if it was always joined and united to God? How could it say that the Father is its teacher? How could it say of itself, “I always do what pleases the Father”? For these are plainly the voices of a Son who subsists and lives. And all through the Gospel, the one who prays to the Father, who glorifies the Father, who asks to be glorified by the Father, what else does he show except that he himself has real existence? He shows it most of all when he says, “The testimony of two people is true.

20.47  I am the one who testifies about myself, and the Father who sent me testifies about me.” Through all these passages the Savior himself has shown that he lives, and yet he never once called himself “Word.” He called himself Son, light, only-begotten, bread of life, anything rather than Word.

20.48  He teaches that he has a word, saying, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word,” but he does not say that he himself is the Word. How then, after all this, is the man not ashamed who declares that he is only Word and nothing else? Listen to how he wrote: (no. 37) “So it is clear from every side that no other name fits the eternity of the Word except the one the most holy disciple and apostle of God, John, spoke at the beginning of the Gospel.”

20.49  And again (no. 37): “to show that if any name is new and recent, it came to him from the new and recent economy in the flesh.”

20.50  And again (no. 42): “Therefore before he came down and was born through the virgin, he was only Word. For what else was he before taking human flesh, he who came down ‘in the last days,’ as he himself wrote, and was born of the virgin? He was nothing other than Word.”

20.51  This much one can say and declare against Marcellus because he does not confess the Son of God. The evangelist would cry out loudly to him: “What are you saying, man? I did not call him only Word, but also God, and ‘the light that enlightens every person coming into the world,’ and the only-begotten Son, the one ‘in the bosom of the Father.’”

20.52  So let no one slander the theologian. Let him listen carefully to what kind of Word he laid down, since right beside it he joined the words “and the Word was God” and added “all things were made through him.” But the Savior of all himself is not called Word even once. He is called Son of God, only-begotten, light, life, truth, anything rather than Word.

20.53  8. But if Marcellus says that these things were spoken from the New Testament, the answer is that “In the beginning was the Word” also comes from no other place than the New Testament. So the Gospel is one and the same, and the same evangelist who called him “Word” also wrote down everything else about him.

20.54  9. The divine apostle Paul also says, “For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” It is clear that he means the Son of God who existed before his coming in the flesh, the one “through whom all things” came to be. Paul does not call him “Word” but “Lord Jesus” and “Christ.” Yet if, as Marcellus holds, God and the Word within him were one and the same, it would have been enough for the apostle to say, “For us there is one God, the Father,

20.55  from whom are all things.” The thought would have been complete, and the statement sufficient in itself, introducing God as the maker of the universe. But even a Jew could say that. The herald of the church teaches us, in addition to the first point, not to be ignorant of the second as well.

20.56  What is this second point? “And one Lord, Jesus Christ.” So he adds the second article in order, saying “for us” (for even if not for all, he means, yet for us) “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” And why this one is also “one Lord for us” after the one God, he shows by adding, “through whom are all things.” For since “all things came to be through him,” it is reasonable that we who know this believe him to be Lord of the universe, after the God who is over all.

20.57  That he was not speaking of the flesh, but of God the Word, is clear from his adding “through whom are all things.” For he says, “For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” The same thing is said of the light and of the Word who existed beforehand. So Jesus Christ himself was the light and the Word, “through whom all things” came to be, and not the flesh. For he would never have said “through whom are all things” of the flesh, in such a disconnected way.

20.58  10. The same Paul also knows how to call the Son of God, who existed before the flesh, “Christ.” In the same way he calls him a rock, in what he writes about those who lived with Moses in the wilderness: “For they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” And he seals the same point after other things, saying, “Let us not put Christ to the test, as some of them tested him and were destroyed by the serpents.”

20.59  He confirms this still further when he says, “By faith Moses, when he had grown great, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, considering the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt.” And he establishes it most clearly of all in the words, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider being equal with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and being found in appearance as a man.”

20.60  You see that before he emptied himself and took the form of a slave, he was, he already existed, and he was “in the form of God.” And who was this? No one other than Jesus Christ. So Jesus Christ was himself God the Word, even before he took flesh.

20.61  For we must listen carefully to the divine apostle when he says, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,” and then makes clear who this Jesus Christ was, by adding, “who, existing in the form of God, did not consider being equal with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.”

20.62  Can the saying here be taken to refer to the flesh? Does it fit to say “who” and “existing” of the flesh? Surely it was not flesh that “emptied itself, taking the form of a slave”? That would be ridiculous. So let us examine how it is said: “who, existing in the form of God, did not consider being equal with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself.” Now if he were a Word with no existence of his own, never standing apart from God but being within him, at one time in rest and silence, at another in activity,

20.63  And how could this “Word” have been “in the form of God,” if he were himself God only in potential? How could he “not consider it robbery to be equal with God,” if he were himself God? And how could he “humble himself, becoming obedient” to the Father? For one to obey another points to two persons.

20.64  Marcellus has used the human word as his illustration, so we should ask whether it makes sense to say this of a human word: “who, being in the form of a man, did not consider it robbery to be equal to a man, but emptied himself by becoming obedient to the man.” How could the word that is naturally part of a man do this, when it is one and the same thing as the man? So he who was “in the form of God” will not be a bare, non-subsisting word. He is truly the only-begotten Son of God, who “did not consider it robbery to be equal to God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” The divine apostle also called him Jesus Christ, knowing exactly that he existed before the flesh.

20.65  11. Besides this, the same apostle called him the mediator of God. He said that the giving of the law through Moses was placed in his hand, in the words: “The law was ordained through angels, in the hand of a mediator. But a mediator is not of one, but God is one.” You hear how he refers to God in his own right and names the angels, and brings in the mediator between them, saying, “A mediator is not of one.” So even before he became man, in the days of Moses, he was acting as mediator in the giving of the law.

20.66  12. The same apostle also calls him high priest, saying: “Having then a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God.”

20.67  13. Moreover, the apostle knows him as the radiance of glory, the exact imprint of God, and as Son and heir, when he says: “At the end of these days he spoke to us in a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also made the ages; who, being the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his substance.” Here too, just as it was said above of the Word, “all things came to be through him,” and of the light, “he was in the world, and the world came to be through him,” and of Jesus Christ, “for us there is one Lord, Jesus Christ,

20.68  through whom are all things,” notice how in the same way it is said of the same one, “through whom he also made the ages.” 14. It is worth paying attention here to how he is named “radiance.” I think the word points to the Son’s begetting from the Father. The Son is often named, and God has been called Father. So that we would not fall into thinking of this in the manner of the begetting of living creatures, the apostle uses an image more fitting for God.

20.69  He says of the Father, “dwelling in unapproachable light,” and he defines the Son as the radiance of the Father’s light. So the radiance is the offspring of the first light, brought into being not in the way mortal creatures are begotten, but according to the example given. It is fitting, then, that he also calls him the image “of the invisible God,” because he is “in the form of God,” and because he is the “radiance” and the “exact imprint of his substance.”

20.70  For this is why, writing about him, he said: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, because in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities. All things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

20.71  These things are said about the divinity of the Son of God, even if Marcellus does not think so. The divine apostle would not have said so much about the flesh. That would be foolish and unthinkable, and the sense of the wording would also be incoherent. For how would it fit to say of the flesh “who is the image,” when, if it were about the flesh, he would have had to say “which is the image”?

20.72  15. In another place the same apostle again called him the image of God, saying: “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled among those who are perishing, among whom the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, so that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not shine in their hearts.”

20.73  Here we should also notice that the divine apostle gave a defining statement about Christ when he called him the image of God. He did this so that no one would suppose there are two Gods, but one God over all. For if “there is one God, and there is no other besides him,” then the one who is made known through the Son, as through an image, must be that same God.

20.74  That is why the Son is also God: the Father’s form is impressed in him, as in an image. The divine apostle shows this when he says at one time, “who, existing in the form of God,” and at another defines him as “the image of God.” So, along with his other titles, the Son was, and was called, “the image of God” before his coming in the flesh. These few texts, out of countless ones, I have gathered from the New Testament, to keep my discourse in proportion.

20.75  16. The prophets of God who lived long ago also honored the same Son with various titles of divinity. One of them called him the Spirit of God. He said, “A rod will come out of the root of Jesse, and a flower will rise from the root, and the Spirit of God will rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding,” and so on. By these words he plainly pointed to the one “of the seed of David according to the flesh” and to God the Word who dwelt in him. So the divine apostle sometimes said, “The Lord is the Spirit,” and sometimes, “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Another prophet likewise calls him Spirit, saying, “The Spirit [before] our face, Christ the Lord.” And in the Gospel it is plainly said of him, “Behold my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased. I have put my Spirit on him; he will bring forth judgment to the nations.”

20.76  17. Another of the prophets called him life and light, when he addressed God and said, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we shall see light.” For who was the fountain of life and the light that is with God, if not the one who says in the Gospels, “I am the light of the world,” and “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”? That is why the prophet again prays to God and says, “Send out your light and your truth; they will lead me.” 18. Zerubbabel also proclaimed him as truth and was thought worthy of the prize of victory. For when he stood before the king of the Persians, it is recorded that he said, “And truth remains and is strong forever,

20.77  and lives and prevails forever and ever. With it there is no respect of persons, but it does what is just and keeps away from all that is unjust and evil.” To this he adds, “And to it belong the strength, the kingdom, the authority and the majesty of all ages.” By saying that truth lives, conquers and prevails, he most forcefully showed that it has a real substance of its own. In keeping with this, the Savior himself, by naming himself the truth, put his seal on Zerubbabel’s testimony.

20.78  19. He also named him a river, the one who said, “The rushing streams of the river make glad the city of God.”

20.79  20. And the one who said, “The mountain which God was pleased to dwell in,” has already called him a mountain. This is why in Daniel a stone was cut “from a mountain” “without hands,” and again the same stone was seen set back on a high mountain. The mountain signifies his preexistent divinity, and the stone his humanity.

20.80  21. They also called him righteousness, as the one who said, “Who has raised up righteousness from the east?” 22. And they called him the sun of righteousness, as the one who said, “For those who fear me the sun of righteousness will rise, and healing is in its wings.” And another says, “The sun will set upon the prophets” “who lead my people astray.” For these words could not apply to the visible sun, nor even to the Word in the flesh.

20.81  23. Solomon also names him wisdom in Proverbs, saying, “Wisdom built herself a house and set up seven pillars,” and so on. And that wisdom existed before the world, living and subsisting, he himself taught, speaking in her person with these words: “I, wisdom, have made counsel my dwelling, and I have called on knowledge and thought.” Then he goes on to say, “Through me [kings] reign, and rulers write righteousness; through me the great are made great, and tyrants hold power through me.”

20.82  24. Solomon also called him the tree of life, and Lord, when he said: “She is a tree of life to all who hold fast to her, and to those who lean on her as on the Lord she is secure.”

20.83  25. David, the father of Solomon, in the Psalms also named him both Lord and priest. At one time he says, “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand.” At another he says, “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: you are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.”

20.84  26. The same David also knew how to confess him as God, saying: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; the scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of uprightness. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.” For who else could this be, a God anointed here by God, but the very one who was proclaimed Christ because of the Father’s anointing?

20.85  27. This same one was also the beloved of God, as the heading of the psalm shows when it says, “A song for the beloved.”

20.86  28. Isaiah called him the arm, saying: “The Lord will uncover his holy arm before all the nations.” 29. David likewise knew him as both righteousness and salvation, and so he said: “The Lord has made known his salvation; before the nations he has uncovered his righteousness.”

20.87  And again: “Proclaim his salvation from day to day.” And again: “Who will give the salvation of Israel out of Zion?” And: “Show us your mercy, Lord, and grant us your salvation.” 30. But why should I go through them one by one, when the lover of learning can gather such things from the whole of God-inspired Scripture? There it is clear that God’s people, enlightened by the divine Spirit, had knowledge of the only-begotten Son of God. That knowledge was then unspoken, and it was hidden from the crowds of the Jewish people. So they spoke of him in various ways, under veiled titles. For the grace of the proclamation of the theology concerning him was being kept for his coming. His church throughout the whole world has received it as a mystery once hidden and passed over in silence, and she is proud of it.

20.88  The divine apostle teaches this as well when he says: “according to the stewardship of God given to me for you, to fulfill the word of God, the mystery hidden from the ages and from the generations — but now revealed to his saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the nations, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” You see how the Son of God was a mystery hidden before, but now revealed.

20.89  For this reason God’s prophets spoke of him as God in a hidden way by the prophetic Spirit, while the multitude of the Jewish nation remained ignorant of the hidden mystery. So they were taught to know one God, because they were constantly being dragged off into the error of many gods. But they did not know that God is the Father of an only-begotten Son. For this mystery was being kept for the church from the nations,

20.90  given to her as a special favor. For in him, as the apostle says, “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” But through all these passages the Word of God, who was “in the beginning with God,” has been shown to be not only called Word, as Marcellus supposes. He is also Son and only-begotten, light and bread, Jesus and Christ and Lord, high priest, radiance, exact imprint, image, firstborn of all creation, fountain of life, truth, river, righteousness, sun of righteousness, wisdom, tree of life, Lord and God, beloved, priest, arm, righteousness and salvation. And he was named all these things while existing before the flesh, as the Scriptures I have set out have shown.

20.91  For what reason, then, does Marcellus pass over all these and stop at “Word” alone? He does not move on to the other titles, but says only that he is God’s Word, a Word that signifies: at one time resting quietly in God, at another speaking or acting by activity alone. Is it because he is plainly a Sabellian, and does not believe in the Son of God, nor recognize the mystery that existed long before but has been revealed only to the church of Christ through his grace?

20.92  But suppose Marcellus says that the hidden mystery was this: that God has a word within himself and uses a word. For that is what he thinks, writing in this way (no. 45): “What else was the hidden mystery but the matter of the Word? This mystery was hidden in God so completely in earlier times that no one of the former people clearly knew what concerned the Word.” If he says this, let him learn that every Jew who has not come to know the Christ of God would also agree that God has a word and is not without reason.

20.93  Sabellius himself would say this too, and so would every Greek and barbarian who holds that God exists, without any dispute. For the moment he says “God,” he also thinks of him as wise, rational, powerful, just and good. What kind of mystery, then, was hidden, if everyone agrees to it? Who would not say that wisdom, power, life, light, truth, righteousness, word, and everything fine and good are in God? Or rather, that he himself is all these things, and anything higher and better than these which we do not know? For self-taught nature forces every human being to confess these things about God. From this we are also taught that the Son is all these things,

20.94  since he is the only-begotten Son and heir of the Father and has everything the Father has. That is why he is said to be in the form of God and the image of God, according to the divine apostle, who says, “who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,” and again, “who is the image of God.”

20.95  So the mystery “hidden from the ages and from the generations” was not this, that God is rational. Nor was this “now revealed,” since all people know it by natural understanding. But if someone asks what it was, the apostle answers. He says, “But now it has been revealed to his saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the wealth of the glory of this mystery among the nations, which is Christ in you.”

20.96  So the mystery was Christ, and clearly the Son of God. For this reason the prophets of God earlier honored him in a hidden way with various titles. They concealed what could not yet be spoken, and kept its disclosure to all in reserve for his grace. So when Marcellus, after so many witnesses from the Scriptures, insists that the Word who was “in the beginning,” before taking flesh, was nothing other than a word and was called by no other name, and that he received various titles only when “the Word became flesh,” being nothing but a word before that, how would he not be exposed as ignorant and without understanding of the divine writings? But now that this point is settled, let us next look at the new Sabellius, as though he had come back to life.


============================================================
BOOK 2
============================================================

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents  The second book of the work on the church’s theology contains the following. 1. How Marcellus revived the teaching of Sabellius. 2. How he is also shown to be judaizing in his teaching. 3. How he defined the Word of God, being in God, as without beginning and unbegotten. 4. How he said that the Word and God are one and the same. 5. That in saying these things he denied the Son. 6. How the church speaks of the Son as God. 7. How the church proclaims the monarchy of the Father. 8. By what words Marcellus denied the Son of God. 9. A refutation of the man’s false teaching. 10. That he did not rightly understand the words “In the beginning was the Word.” 11. That he said at one time that the Word of God is spoken, and at another that he is internal, like the word in human beings. 12. That the evangelist did not set out his theology of the Word in the way Marcellus supposed. 13. In how many ways the meaning of the term “word” is understood. 14. How the gospel’s teaching about the Word ought to be explained. 15. Quotations of Marcellus’s own words, in which he plainly denied the Son of God by saying that he is a spoken word and an internal word. 16. A refutation of the man’s false teaching. 17. An explanation of the true meaning of “the Word.” 18. Why the evangelist called the Son “the Word” at the start of his writing. 19. How Marcellus, appealing to the Old Testament scriptures about one God, denied the Son of God just as the Jews did. 20. Why Moses and the prophets did not hand down to the Jews the theology of the Son in plain terms. 21. That it was the Son of God who spoke to Moses and to Abraham. 22. That in the prophets also the Father was made known as God through the Son. 23. That the church does not proclaim two Gods. 24. How Marcellus likened the only-begotten Word to the words of God that give commands about things to be done. 25. How he contradicted himself in his own writings.


CHAPTER 1

1.1  After the testimonies from the divine Scriptures that I have set out, which show that the Son of God was not named only “Word” before his coming in the flesh (as Marcellus supposed) but had countless other names too, let us now look at the phantom of Sabellius, as if it had popped up out of the earth. For he dared to say that the God over all, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, was born of the holy virgin and himself suffered. He wrote it this way (Fr. 49): “What was it, then, that came down before he became man? Surely it was, he says, the Spirit. For if anyone wished to say something other than this, the angel who said to the virgin, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you,’ will not allow it.” But if he says it was Spirit, let him listen to the Savior saying, “God is Spirit.”

1.2  By these words he said that the God of the universe, of whom our Savior and Lord taught, “God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth,” was the Spirit who came upon the virgin. This is simply Sabellius made new again.

1.3  He goes on. Jeremiah the prophet had spoken plainly about the Savior’s becoming man: “After this he was seen on the earth and lived among human beings.” Marcellus refers that saying to the Father, in these very words (Fr. 50): “But the Father seems to be in the Word, even if Asterius and those who think the same as he does do not think so.”

1.4  He does the same with the Savior’s suffering. He sets down from Jeremiah’s Lamentations, “The breath of our face, the Lord’s anointed [Christ the Lord], was taken in their destructions,” and adds (Fr. 51): “Here too the prophet speaks in the same way about the Word who took our flesh.” And he goes on to say (Fr. 51): “A spirit could never be the maker of a shadow. And that God himself is Spirit, the Savior said: ‘God is Spirit.’ And that God is light, he himself teaches us when he says, ‘I am the light.’” Do you see how he carries over what was said about the Savior to the deity of the Father?

1.5  And again he does away with the real existence of the Son, declaring outright that before the creation of things that have come to be there was nothing else except God alone. He writes this, word for word: “Asterius calls the authority given to him ‘glory,’ and not only glory but ‘glory before the world,’ not realizing that when the world had not yet come to be, there was nothing else except God alone.” And again he confirms the same thing, saying: “Heaven and earth and everything in the heavens and on the earth have been made by God. If, then, he believes this, he must also agree to this, that there was nothing else except God.”


CHAPTER 2

2.1  You see that he is flatly denying, like a Jew, the only-begotten Son of God, “through whom all things” came to be. For if nothing else existed except God before the world came into being, then the Son did not exist. And how then did “all things come to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be”? So the Jew, who denies the Christ of God, knows of nothing before the world came into being except God alone, and Marcellus bears witness with him. But the church of Christ boldly and proudly says: “For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ,

2.2  through whom are all things.” And when it says “through whom are all things,” it knows him to be before all things. So the man who says that before the world came into being there was nothing else except God alone is lying against the truth. For along with the one God, his only-begotten Son also existed before the world was established, and was with the Father. This is what the one who said it also taught the church: “At the end of these days he spoke to us in a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also made the ages.”

2.3  And in Proverbs, through Solomon, the Son himself teaches about himself, saying: “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.” Moreover, he himself “was the light that enlightens every person coming into the world,” since “he was in the world, and the world came to be through him.” But if “the world came to be through him,” it is clear that he existed before the world.

2.4  So God was not alone before the world was established; his only-begotten Son was with him. The Father looked on him and rejoiced, as the Son teaches, being himself the wisdom, when he says in Proverbs: “I was the one in whom he delighted day by day.” And the Son himself, gazing on the Father’s thoughts, was filled with gladness. This is why he says: “And I was glad before him at every time.” These are the devout and divine mysteries which the church of Christ has received and guards. But the man who says that “when the world had not yet come to be, there was nothing else except God alone”

2.5  shows himself to be one of two things: either a Jew or a Sabellian. For if he flatly denies the Son and brings in God alone, he will be a Jew, denying the Christ. Or if he accepts the title “Son” only as a word, while claiming that the one God is himself both Son and Father together, he will be reviving Sabellius. For if nothing else existed before the world except God, then either he himself will be both Father and Son, or he will have no Son at all.


CHAPTER 3

3.1  But Marcellus seems to say that the Son is the Word within God himself, by which he is understood to be rational. The result is that God is his own Father, and in turn his own Son. Listen, then, to his own words, in which he writes in this way: “For before all creation there was a kind of stillness, as one would expect,

3.2  since the Word was in God. For if Asterius believes that God is the maker of all things, it is clear that he too will agree with us that the one always exists, never having received a beginning of being, while the others have been made by him, and made out of things that did not exist.” You see how, having established God as without beginning, he said that the Word, being in him, was in stillness before creation. And going on, he adds next: “If, then, he believes this, he must also agree to this, that there was nothing else except God.” So the Word, being in the Father, had his own glory.

3.3  From this, naturally, Marcellus says that the Word is eternal, that is, unbegotten, writing as follows: “Do you hear, then, the agreement of the Holy Spirit, who through many different persons bears witness to the eternity of the Word?” And again: “And for this reason John begins from the eternity of the Word, saying, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’” By using three testimonies in a row he wants to show the eternity of the Word.

3.4  And how he claimed that the Word is united to God and was begotten together with him, you can hear from his words, which run something like this: “We know that the economy according to the flesh differs by being a matter of the man, but we believe that the eternity according to the Spirit is united to the Father.”


CHAPTER 4

4.1  In this way, then, having granted that the Word is in God, he goes on to declare that the Word is one and the same with him, writing word for word as follows: “For if the examination were of the Spirit alone, the Word would reasonably appear to be one and the same with God. But if the addition according to the flesh in the Savior is examined, the Godhead seems to be expanded only in activity. So reasonably it is truly an undivided monad.”

4.2  And again, going on, he says: “It is not, then, because of an exact agreement in all words and works, as Asterius said, that the Savior says, ‘I and the Father are one,’ but because it is impossible for the Word of God to be separated from God, or God from his own Word.” Now if God and the Word in him were one and the same, as Marcellus thinks, then the one who was born of the holy Virgin, became flesh, became man, suffered the things written, and died for our sins was himself the God over all. This is exactly what Sabellius dared to say, and the church of God counted him among the godless and blasphemers.


CHAPTER 5

5.1  But suppose Marcellus says that the Word of God is the one who became flesh. Yet he defined him as inseparable from God, giving an undivided monad and one hypostasis of God and of the Word in him, so that, according to him, the one who became man is nothing other than the God over all. But if it is an undivided monad, and God and the Word in him are one and the same, whom could one call Father and whom Son, when the underlying subject is one? In this way Marcellus, by bringing in one and the same person as “Son-Father,” was reviving Sabellius.


CHAPTER 6

6.1  The church of God, however, also recognizes the undivided monad, confessing one origin, the one, unbegotten and unoriginate God. And it proclaims as Savior the only-begotten Son begotten from him, truly existing, living and subsisting. He is not without origin and not unbegotten, so that it may not set up two origins and two gods; rather he was begotten from the Father himself and has the one who begat him as his origin.

6.2  For this reason the church has received the teaching to believe in one God, Father Almighty, and in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God. This holy and mystical faith gives the new birth in Christ to those who are enlightened through it. But Marcellus says that the monad is expanded in activity. That has a place with bodies, but not with the incorporeal, unspeakable and inexpressible being.

6.3  For God is not expanded by acting, nor contracted by not acting. He does not act at all as human beings do, nor is he moved as human beings are. Being an undivided monad, God begot his only-begotten Son from himself, without being divided and without undergoing any change, turning, flux or suffering.

6.4  For when he commands, directs or gives law, he does not do these things as human beings do, speaking with tongue and lips. Nor, when he looks upon the ordering of the whole, does he gaze with eyes as we do. For with his unspeakable, divine power he has already anticipated “the things that are not” and sees them as though they already exist and stand firm.

6.5  Nor, when he makes and creates, does God take material that already lies before him and build with hands and fingers, as the craftsmen among us do. Again, by an inexpressible and incomprehensible power he gave existence to the whole substance of all created things, out of things that did not exist. If, then, he made everything by means that we cannot express or reason out, why should we be anxious that we might be saying that some suffering happened to him in the begetting of the Son, as happens with mortal creatures? He brought the Son into being above all things and before all things, not in any way known to mortal nature, but in a manner known to himself alone.


CHAPTER 7

7.1  But you are afraid, man, that by confessing two hypostases you will bring in two first principles and fall away from the divine monarchy? Then learn this. There is one God, without beginning and unbegotten, and the Son has been begotten from him. So there will be one first principle, one monarchy and one kingdom, since the Son himself also ascribes to his Father the place of first principle. For “the head of Christ is God,” according to the apostle.

7.2  But are you anxious that whoever confesses two hypostases, of Father and Son, must accept two Gods? Know this too: the one who grants two hypostases, of Father and Son, is not forced to speak of two fathers or two sons. He will grant that one is the Father and the other the Son. In the same way, then, the one who posits the two hypostases is not forced to grant two Gods.

7.3  For we do not define the two as equal in honor, nor both as without beginning and unbegotten. We say that one is unbegotten and without beginning, and the other is begotten and has the Father as his beginning. For this reason the Son himself also teaches that his Father is his own God, where he says, “I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God.”

7.4  So God, who is Father, is shown to be God even of the Son himself.

7.5  For this reason the church proclaims one God, who is also God of the Son. But the Son, when he is himself compared with the Father, will no longer be God of the Father himself. He is the only-begotten and beloved Son, “the image of the invisible God” and the “radiance” of the Father’s glory. He reveres, worships and glorifies his own Father, claiming him as God, even his own God. It is written that he prays to him, gives thanks to him, and becomes “obedient to the point of death” to him.

7.6  He confesses that he lives “because of the Father,” that he can do nothing without the Father, and that he does not do his own will but the Father’s. He says in these very words: “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.” And again: “I cannot do anything from myself. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of him who sent me.” And that the one who sent him was other than himself, he shows by saying next: “If I bear witness about myself, my witness is not true.

7.7  There is another who bears witness about me.” Then, after mentioning the Baptist, he teaches that the Father is his witness, saying, “And the Father who sent me, he himself has borne witness about me.” And he adds, “If you loved me, you would have rejoiced that I am going to the Father, because my Father is greater than I.”

7.8  By all these words he shows himself to be other than the Father. He also shows the Father’s surpassing glory, by saying that the Father has sent, while he himself has been sent and has come down from heaven “not to do his own will but the will of” the one who sent him. And what could Marcellus say to this, when he hears these things taught by the one who came down from heaven? Surely he will not claim that even now it is the Savior’s flesh that says these things, for the flesh did not come down from heaven.

7.9  Whom, then, will he say it was who came down from heaven and taught these things? God himself, or the Word joined to him? But if he says it was the Father, he exposes himself openly as Sabellius, and the Savior himself will refute him as a liar when he says, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me,”

7.10  and “I can do nothing of myself; as I hear, I judge,” and “I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me,” and “My Father is greater than I.” To think that the Father says these things would be the height of madness.

7.11  But suppose he says that what has been set before us is spoken by the Word that is naturally joined to God, his very thought, by which God reasons and thinks inwardly within himself. Then how could God’s inner reflection, the thought within him, have come down from heaven? How could it, having become in the flesh that it took up, go through these words? And how could the Word within God say that he has come down “not to do his own will, but the will of the one who sent” him?

7.12  In these words the Son of God shows his reverence toward the Father. But when he stands at the head of all created things, which came into being through him, as the Savior, Lord and Creator of them all (“for all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being”), then he may rightly be proclaimed God, Master, Savior and King.

7.13  For this reason his church has been taught to revere him, worship him and honor him as God, having learned to do this from him.

7.14  The Savior himself says, “For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father.” He plainly commands that he be honored, not in the way the prophets are, nor angels, nor their various powers, but in a way like the Father himself. For the Father himself willed this: “He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor him just as they honor the Father.”

7.15  Thomas called Didymus knew these things exactly, since he belonged to the company of the twelve disciples. In brilliant words he acknowledged him as both God and Lord, saying, “My Lord and my God.” So it is right that we too worship only the Son, and no one else, with divine honor, just as we honor the Father. And in this the Father is honored through the Son.

7.16  He teaches this very thing when he says, “The one who honors the Son honors the Father who sent him.” When we honor an image of a king that has been sent out, we honor the king himself, who is the original of the image. In the same way the Father is honored through the Son, just as he is also seen through him.

7.17  “For the one who has seen” the Son “has seen the Father.” He sees the unbegotten Godhead, as in an image and a mirror, stamped with its likeness in the Son. “For he is the radiance of eternal light, and a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.” The Son received all these things from the Father, and has his glory from him and from the Godhead, as a true and only-begotten Son. But the Father has received nothing from anyone. He is himself the beginning, the source and the root of all good things, and so he may rightly be proclaimed the one and only God.


CHAPTER 8

8.1  But Marcellus, who knows nothing of this, does not want the Son to have been truly begotten from the Father, as a living Son with his own real existence. Instead he says that he came forth from God as a word, one that signifies or commands something. Hear him say this openly in these words (Nr. 31): “To say that he was begotten before the ages seems to be consistent. For what comes forth from a father who sends it out becomes his offspring. But the other point he has not taken up soundly or reverently. For to say that the one who came forth from him is not a word, and that this is the true manner of begetting, but that he is truly a Son only, tends to give those who hear the impression of a human appearance.”

8.2  Then, to show that the Word was not begotten from the Father either, he says word for word (Nr. 28): “So the holy apostle and disciple of the Lord, John, when he spoke of his eternity, became a true witness to the Word, saying, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ making no mention here of any begetting of the Word.” In this way he denies the Son of God. He used to say that the Word in God is at one time inside God, at another time proceeds from God, and at yet another time will run back up to God and be in him,

8.3  as it was before. Listen to how he says this, in these words (Nr. 108): “But now I believe the divine Scriptures, that God is one. His Word came forth from the Father so that all things might come to be through him. But after the time of judgment, and the setting right of all things, and the destruction of every opposing power, ‘then he himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him,’ ‘to God and Father,’ so that in this way the Word may be in God just as he was before, before the world existed. For when nothing existed before except God alone, and all things were going to come to be through the Word, the Word came forth with active power, being the Word of the Father.”

8.4  And again he sets out the same thought more plainly, writing as follows (Nr. 54): “For before the world existed, the Word was in the Father. But when almighty God purposed to make everything in heaven and on earth, the coming-to-be of the world needed an active power. And for this reason, since nothing else existed except God (for it is agreed that all things were made by him), the Word then came forth and became the maker of the world. He had earlier been preparing it within, in thought.”

8.5  And once more, after all this, he adds (Nr. 34): “And for this reason he does not call himself Son of God, but everywhere calls himself Son of man, so that by this confession he might bring it about that man, through fellowship with him, becomes by adoption a son of God. And after the end of his work he is united again with God, as Word, fulfilling what the apostle said: ‘Then he himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him, so that God may be all in all.’ For at that time he will be what he was before.” After saying all this about the Word who is in God, according to whom we understand him to be rational, Marcellus has fallen into terrible difficulty. He has dared to say that the Word who is in God once came to be outside God, and again, after the time of judgment, will be inside him, so that he is united with him in God as he was before.


CHAPTER 9

9.1  So it is time for us to put our questions to him and have him answer. What, then, are we to think about the time in between, when the Word of God was outside God? How did he come forth? And in what condition was God, if he did not have his own Word in himself? For if the Word will be in God at the consummation of all things, as he was before the time of the consummation, how will he be the Word who came forth from God? If he came to be, subsisting in himself, as one distinct from God, then Marcellus’s labor is in vain. But if, even after coming forth from God, like the spoken word in us he remained inseparable from the Father, then he was always and continually in God, even when he was at work.

9.2  Why, then, does he send it off to the time of judgment, saying that only then will he be united to God and will be as he was before? For if he will then be as he was before, then the Word who came forth from God will not be what he was earlier. God himself will also be unlike himself. Long ago he had the Word in himself, and at the consummation of all things he will take him back and then become as he was before; but in the time between he would have been in an unlike state. And the Word likewise, having come to be outside God, will not be before the consummation of all things what he was before.

9.3  What account could be more impious than this? For the words “was,” “will be,” “came to be at one time,” and “is again going to be” all indicate change in time. They are foreign to an essence that is timeless, without beginning, unbegotten and unchanging. Of that essence it is fitting to think only of being: that it always exists without variation, in the same way and in the same manner. It is not diminished, not contracted, not stretched out, not spread abroad. It has no outside and inside to itself. It does not become one thing at one time and another at another. It is not one thing first and then something else, and then restored again to its former state.

9.4  These are the things Marcellus dared to suppose. He says that God existed long ago, and he pictures a kind of stillness belonging to God alone. In this he follows the founder of those godless heresies, who set out his godless teachings by saying, “There was God, and silence.” After the silence and stillness, he says, the Word of God came forth at the beginning of the making of the world, in effective activity. So the Word was no longer what he had been before, resting quietly in a silent God, but was now active, having come forth from God. And how, then, did he come forth?

9.5  Surely by the uttering of an articulate voice, with God sounding out and speaking just as men do. At any rate, this is what he thought when he wrote as follows (Fr. 55): “For just as all things that have come to be were made by the Father through the Word, so also the things spoken by the Father are made known through the Word.”

9.6  And again (Fr. 56): “For everything the Father says, he is seen to say everywhere through the Word. This is clear from ourselves too, comparing small things with great and divine ones: we also do everything we wish, as far as we are able, to say or to do, by means of our own word.”

9.7  If, then, the Word came forth from the Father in this way, in effective activity, where did Marcellus get the idea of fixing the time of the end as the limit of the Word’s activity? For he says the Word will be in God at that time just as he was before, and before he had him resting quietly in a silent God. So there will be a kind of stillness after the end as well, since the Word will be about to do nothing. But before the creation of created things, he says, nothing existed except God, and since nothing existed, it was natural that he should picture stillness for himself.

9.8  At the time of the end, however, the prophet Daniel foretells that there will be tens of thousands before the throne of God. He says, “A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.”

9.9  All the sons of the age to come will be there then, too: the blessed souls of patriarchs, prophets and apostles, the holy spirits of martyrs, and all the sheep of our Savior, who will be set at his right hand and will hear, “Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

9.10  Since so many will exist then and will live an immortal life after the time of judgment, why will the Word of God not be active then too? Where did Marcellus get the notion to declare that God will no longer speak to the saints at that time, nor make use of his active Word, but will be as he was before, evidently silent and at rest within himself? He often gave this impression by saying that the Word will be then just as he was before; and before, as he himself said, he was in stillness.

9.11  So God will fall silent then. Before that he speaks and uses his Word as active, but then, in the very kingdom of heaven that was promised, he deprives his saints of his own Word and of the wisdom in him. You see over what a cliff he has gone, having taken no one’s hand to guide him, and not the divine Scriptures either. All of this, at any rate, he put together for himself from a single phrase that he had not understood.

9.12  For when he turned to his proofs from the new covenant, he was hard pressed on every side. He found only one expression that fit his bad doctrine, and as if he had come upon a lucky find, he clung to that alone. Even this was not spoken in the person of our Savior but in the person of the evangelist, who gave him that name, saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Starting from there, he took him to be nothing other than a word like the one we know in ourselves, and so he denied the Son.


CHAPTER 10

10.1  Yet the great and divine evangelist did not call him only “Word,” as we have often said, but also God, light, Son and only-begotten. And the evangelist records that the Savior himself never calls himself “Word” anywhere in Scripture. Throughout the whole Gospel he calls himself life, light, only-begotten and Son of God, truth, resurrection, bread of life, vine, shepherd, and countless other things, as has already been shown.

10.2  Why, then, with so many titles before him, does he not stop at the mere word for any of the others, and instead examine the meaning of what is said, yet for “Word” alone insist that the Son is called this in the strict sense, as though he were nothing other than a word? He writes in these very words (Nr. 40): “not called Word by misuse of the term, though the false teachers of other doctrines burst with rage, but being Word properly and truly.”

10.3  And again (Nr. 39): “Let him learn, then, that the Word of God has come, not as one named Word by misuse of the term, as they say, [but] as one who is truly Word.” And once more (Nr. 43 = 81): “Formerly, as I have often said, he was nothing other than Word.” And again (Nr. 42): “Before he came down and was born through the virgin, he was Word only.” For what else was he, before taking on human flesh, the one who came down “in the last days,” as Marcellus himself wrote, and was born of the virgin? He was nothing other than Word. To Marcellus, as he says these things, it would be fair to put this question: And where, my good man, do we get

10.4  “nothing other” and “only,” which you add? We know exactly what is written: “In the beginning was the Word.” And not only that, but also “and the Word was God,” and “it was the light that enlightens every human being,” and “he was the only-begotten Son,” and all the other titles that have been collected. But that he was Word only, and nothing other than Word, no one could show to have been said.

10.5  So where does this bold addition come from? For why should someone not rather say that he is Son only and nothing other than Son? Why not God and nothing other than God? Why not light of the world and nothing other than that? Why not life and nothing else? And the same question could most justly be put about similar titles.

10.6  But just as anyone who said this would be proved wrong (for he is all these things together, being one Son of God, and anything higher than these, counted worthy of each different title according to each conception of the divine powers in him),

10.7  so too in the case of “Word,” whoever says that he is Word only and nothing else could rightly be said to err. Only the evangelist John called him Word, and not that alone but other names too. The Savior himself declared himself light, truth, life, only-begotten Son, and the rest, but never Word. How is it not absurd, then, that for the names he gave himself, Marcellus does not say that he is one of these and nothing else, yet for the evangelist’s word about him, which called him Word, he insists that he was nothing other than Word?

10.8  But, he says (Nr. 40), “properly and truly being Word.” Why not also properly and truly being God? For it was not one man who called him Word and another who called him God. One and the same evangelist taught that he is both God and Word, saying “and the Word was God,” and the same man also named him light. Why then is he not properly and truly only-begotten Son, and all the other things that the Master and Savior himself testified about himself through the evangelist? But Marcellus passes over everything else and says that he is properly and truly Word alone. He adds that he was only Word, and from this he falls into a likeness with the human word.


CHAPTER 11

11.1  When he hears him called light, he does not fall into thinking of bodily light, nor does he say that he is like the sun’s brightness. But when it comes to “Word,” he presents him as a spoken expression, like the human one. So he says that the Word at one time rests quietly in God, and at another time goes forth from God, becoming inside him and outside him, by likeness to the word among us, which is called the inward word and also the word uttered aloud through the voice.

11.2  He says in these very words: “Everything the Father says, he is seen to say everywhere through the Word. This is clear from ourselves too, as far as small things can be compared with great and divine ones: for we also do everything we wish to say and do, as far as we are able, by means of our own word.” And again he says: “Before the whole work of creation there was, as one would expect, a kind of stillness, since the Word was in God.” Then he adds: “For since nothing existed before except God alone, and since all things were going to come into being through the Word, the Word came forth with active power.”

11.3  After saying so much about the Word, listen to how he tries to explain the voice of the Gospel. He writes: “The holy apostle and disciple of the Lord, John, at the beginning of the Gospel teaches clearly and explicitly what had been unknown among men before. Calling him the Word of the Almighty, he said: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’” By using more than one testimony, he shows the eternity of the Word.

11.4  And again he says: “By using three testimonies in succession, he wants to show the eternity of the Word.” And he adds once more: “So that by saying ‘In the beginning was the Word’ he might show that the Word was in the Father in power (for God is the beginning of everything that has come to be, ‘from whom are all things’), and by saying ‘and the Word was with God’

11.5  he might show that the Word was with God in active operation (‘for all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being’), and by saying that the Word was God he might show that he does not divide the Godhead, since the Word is in God and God is in the Word. For he says, ‘The Father is in me, and I in the Father.’” By all this Marcellus does away with the real existence of the only-begotten Son of God, and calls the divine evangelist to witness for his own false teaching, as though the evangelist knew nothing other than a Word, sometimes active and at other times resting in God, and nothing other than God himself.


CHAPTER 12

12.1  Yet the great evangelist, who is also the theologian, mentions the Word three times in the same passage, and not once did he call him “the Word of God.” For he did not say, “In the beginning was the Word of God,” but without qualification, “In the beginning was the Word,” leaving us to ask what kind of Word he was. And again he said, “And the Word was with God,” though he could have said, “And the Word of God was in God.” Nor did he say, “And the Word was of God,” so that we would not suppose him to be some activity of God, one that signifies something or produces something.

12.2  Marcellus, however, supposing that he is the eternal Word of God, that is, unbegotten, has often defined him so. He does not see that if he says the Word is something other than God, there will be two eternal things (the Word and God), and there will no longer be one first principle. But if he says that the eternal is one, defining God and the Word as the same, he will confess Sabellius openly, bringing in, as Sabellius did, the one who is Son-Father.

12.3  So on his view the Father will be the one who was begotten and who suffered. He himself will be the one who prays to himself, and who says he has been sent by himself and calls himself his own Son and only-begotten, not speaking truly but lying in irony. What other account could be more impious than this? But come, let us see what kind of Word the evangelist proclaims to us when he says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”


CHAPTER 13

13.1  Now the word “logos,” when it is spoken in the Greek language, offers many meanings for reflection. First, the logos is what is laid down in the rational soul, by which we are able to reason. Second, besides this, there is another, which signifies something through the tongue and articulate voice. And in a third way, there is the one set down by the writer in writing.

13.2  Fourth, we are also accustomed to call “word” (logos) the seed-like or plant-like principle. By it, things that have not yet come into being lie hidden in the seeds as a potential, and are on the point of coming out into the light in actual fact. Fifth, besides these, people also use “word” in another way for the knowledge of some art or science, the grasp of all such matters of study, as in medicine, architecture or geometry.


CHAPTER 14

14.1  So the word “Word” suggests several different senses. The evangelist said without qualification, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We should therefore pay close attention and learn that here the evangelist hands down a kind of “word” unlike anything we already know. He says “Word” without qualification, but then adds the strangeness and surprising character of its own special power in the words “and the Word was God.”

14.2  It is as if he were saying: do not suppose that this Word is one of those things that exist only in relation to something else, like the word in the soul, or the word heard through the voice, or the word in bodily seeds, or the word that lies in mathematical studies. All of these exist in relation to something else, and are understood to rest in another substance that exists before them. But God the Word does not need some other prior thing in which to come to be and so exist. He is living and subsisting by himself, since he is God. For “the Word was God.”

14.3  And when you hear that he is God, he says, do not suppose that he too is without beginning and unbegotten, as his Father is. Learn instead that “in the beginning was” this God the Word. What kind of beginning he has, the evangelist makes clear next. He does not say “and the Word was the God,” adding the article, so as not to mark him out as the God over all. Nor does he say “in God,” so as not to lower him to a human likeness. He says, “and the Word was with God.”

14.4  For if he had said “and the Word was in God,” he would have been treating the Word as something that happens to belong to a underlying subject, giving one thing in another. He would then be bringing in a God who is composite, supposing a substance without a word, with the word as something added to the substance.

14.5  Marcellus thought this, and so he brings the Father and the Son together into one, calling the substance the Father and the Word in him the Son. He did not reckon that anyone who grants this is supposing God to be without a Word. Such a person would fall into a godless and impious teaching, accepting a God without reason, who has a word as something added in him but is not himself Word.

14.6  What is required is to confess that the One beyond all things is a single divine being: unspeakable, good, simple, uncompounded, of one form. He is himself God, himself mind, himself Word, himself wisdom, himself light, himself life, himself the beautiful, himself the good, and whatever better thing anyone could imagine beyond these. Rather, he is above all mind and beyond all thought and reflection.

14.7  And his only-begotten Son, as the image of the Father sprung from him, is in every way and in all respects most like the one who begot him. He too is God, mind, Word, wisdom, life and light, and the image of the beautiful and good itself. He is not himself the Father but the Father’s only-begotten Son. He is not himself the unbegotten and beginningless one, but the one sprung from him, who names the one who begot him as his beginning.

14.8  But if Marcellus objects to this and says that God and the Word in him are the same, defining God as uncompounded and simple, then it is time for him to confess neither Father nor Son. He would plainly be putting forward the Jew’s position, or bringing in Sabellius, who says that the Father and the Son are the same. So according to him, “In the beginning was the Word” would be equal to “In the beginning was God,” and “the Word was with God” would be equal to “God was with God.”

14.9  The third phrase would likewise be the same as “and the Word was God,” and all this would be not only incoherent but utterly absurd. And how could “all things were made through him” have any place if there is only one underlying subject? For the evangelist does not say that all things came into being by him or out of him, but “through him.” The preposition “through” indicates service, as the same evangelist shows when he goes on to say, “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” The law was not of human origin, and it did not belong to Moses himself; it came from God, and Moses is described as the servant and minister of its being delivered to men. That is why it is said, “The law was given through Moses.” In the same way “grace came through Jesus Christ,” since the Father brought it about through Christ.

14.10  So also “all things were made through him” is said in the same way: one made them, and the other served in the making. The result is that anyone who says this must look for some other maker of the universe, one who brought all things into being through the one called God. And who could that be? He could not say.

14.11  Since this is so, we must acknowledge that the one called God by the evangelist is not the God over all, not the Father himself, but the Father’s only-begotten Son. He is not an attribute of the Father, nor something existing in him as in an underlying subject, nor one and the same thing as God. He is truly a Son, living and with a real existence of his own, who was in the beginning, and was with God, and was God, and through whom he creates all things.

14.12  So anyone who restated the passage more clearly would rightly say, in place of “In the beginning was the Word,” “In the beginning was the Son”; in place of “and the Word was with God,” “and the Son was with the Father”; and in place of “and the Word was God,” “and the Son was God.” In this way the next statement also fits: “All things were made through him, and without him not one thing was made.”

14.13  So it is fitting that the divine evangelist said “in the beginning” of him, giving him a beginning. He plainly means his begetting from the Father, for everything begotten from someone has the one who begot it as its beginning. Yet he did not go on in the same way to say “and the Word was in God,” but “the Word was with God.” He teaches that the one who was begotten, and who has the Father as his beginning, is not somewhere far from the Father, nor cut off and standing at a distance from him, but is present with him and is together with him.

14.14  This is also what he taught in Proverbs. First he said, “Before all the hills he begets me,” and then he added, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.” So the Word, clearly the only-begotten Son, was with his own Father, God, always and at all times, being with him and present beside him.

14.15  This is what the evangelist showed when he said, “And the Word was with God.” But since we also needed to know what dignity he had, he necessarily added, “and the Word was God.” For how could the one begotten from the one and only unbegotten God fail to be God? If, according to the Savior’s teaching, “what is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit,” then it follows that what is born of God must be God. Therefore “the Word was God.”

14.16  He is God, the maker and creator of all things. The evangelist showed this too, when he next added, “All things were made through him.” The law, which was a tutor, delivered through Moses, introduced God as the maker of the universe in the account of creation. It taught the first elements and introductions to reverence for God, saying, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth,” and what follows.

14.17  By these words it urged the people of the Jews, whom it was training like a tutor, to believe that the world was created, so that they would not worship the creation instead of the Creator.

14.18  But Moses did not go on to teach those under him how God made all things, or through whom. That was left to “grace and truth through Jesus Christ.” It announced the mystery that Moses had kept silent about, and it began a newer and more hidden teaching in the church of God. It cried out plainly, for all to hear: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and “All things were made through him,

14.19  and apart from him not one thing was made.” To these it added: “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness,” and what follows. By these words it teaches about the Son of God, the special qualities of the divine light and of the life in him, and how everything Moses spoke of, and everything beyond it, came into being through him. But Marcellus knows none of this. At one time he is caught Judaizing, at another Sabellianizing.

14.20  Like the Jew, he says that before the world was established there was nothing but God alone. Yet the church confesses that before the world was established there were the Father and the Son. Like Sabellius, he declares that Son and Father are one and the same, and at one time he presents him as the word within, at another as the word spoken.

14.21  For even if he pretends not to accept these terms, it is still clear from his saying that at one time the Word is inside God, and at another comes forth from him in effective action, and from the fact that he likens him to the human word. But the divine evangelist did not set forth the Word he speaks of as God in any of these ways. He taught us to think of the only-begotten Son of God as he deserves. He is Word, because by the Word God established all things, and apart from the Word nothing that exists came to be. He is God and only-begotten, because he alone was truly Son of the God over all: a genuine Son in reality and beloved, made like his own Father in every respect.

14.22  So too he was truly light, because he shines the light of mind and reason into souls made in his image. For this reason the evangelist does not say he is the light of all things, but only of men. For he said, “There was the light that enlightens every man coming into the world.” In the same way he was truly life, because he supplies the stream of life that comes from him to all who live. And for each way of thinking about the divine powers in him, you would find titles of his that are true and that express them. For in every respect the Son of God was truth, as he shows himself when he says, “I am the truth.”


CHAPTER 15

15.1  But the new writer neither understands nor knows these things, nor does he know that he is ignorant of them, though he boasts of knowing how they came to be. Come, then, let us take up his words again and hear how he likens him to the human word, both the one in the mind and the one spoken. This is how he writes: “This, I think, is easy for sensible people to grasp even from a small and humble example taken from ourselves. For no one can separate a man’s word from him in power and substance. The word is one and the same with the man, and is separated from him by nothing else but the activity of the action.”

15.2  In these words he has used the spoken word as an image. But he uses the inner word where he says this: “For God needed no other preparation for the construction, such as matter or anything else of human kind, but only this preparation in his own mind. Since it was impossible for God to think out the construction of heaven without the Word and the wisdom that goes with the Word, it was natural for him to say, ‘When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him.’”

15.3  Then, going on, he presents the Word of God as inner at the same time, writing thus: “For who among the holy angels or righteous men was so trustworthy as to release the penalty that had been set on man from the face of God, if not the Word himself, who was present with him and formed with him, to whom the Father said, ‘Let us make man’?”

15.4  Next he makes clear what kind of “word” he has in mind, when he says: “But suppose someone used a small, human example like ourselves and examined the divine action through a kind of picture. Take a skilled sculptor who wants to form a statue. First he studies its outlines and features within himself. Then he considers how wide and how long it should be to look fitting, and he works out the proportion of the whole in each separate part. He prepares the suitable bronze and sketches the coming statue in his own mind, so that he thinks he sees it with the mind. He knows that the word works together with him, the word by which he reasons and by which he is accustomed to do everything (for nothing done without reason is beautiful). Then, as he begins this visible work, he urges himself on as if he were speaking to someone else: ‘Come, let us make, come, let us form a statue.’ In the same way God, the Master of all, when he made the living statue from the earth, urged on no one else but his own Word, saying, ‘Let us make man.’” Through these words he plainly attributes to God both an inward word, by which one reasons things through, and a spoken word, by which one converses. He assumes that the word in God is of the same kind as the word in us.


CHAPTER 16

16.1  All this amounts to a denial of the Son of God, and there is no need to work over it further. But I think it fitting to ask this much. If God were one and nothing else, neither Father nor Son, why did the Scripture falsely use such names? Why does Marcellus himself pretend, calling him not “Son” but “Word,” and then “Son”? And since he has used as his example the word that is in human beings, we must say that not every man has a son, though every man is rational and has within himself the word that is natural to him.

16.2  So a son is something other than the word. If, then, Marcellus says that God has a word within himself and nothing else, the word by which he thought and by which he spoke to himself when he said, “Let us make man,” why does he pointlessly use the name “Son”? Why does he put on a show for the church? Why does he pretend to believe in the Son of God when he does not believe, disguising himself by calling the word in God “Son”? His own example clearly teaches that the word planted in a soul is very far from a son, who is begotten from someone, who has his own existence, and who lives and acts in his own right.

16.3  But he will probably reply: “It was not I but the divine evangelist who called him ‘Word,’ so it follows that you should agree with him.” Yes, I say so too.


CHAPTER 17

17.1  Yet I think we should understand the term in no other way than by learning again from the evangelist himself, who teaches what sort of word he meant. He shows plainly what sort of being this was by adding next: “and the Word was God.” He could have said, “and the Word was the God,” with the article added, if he thought that the Father and the Son were one and the same, and that the Word himself was the God over all. But he did not write the Scripture that way.

17.2  For if he were making the Scripture agree with Marcellus’s thought, he would have had to say either “the Word was God’s” or “the Word was the God,” with the article added. As it stands, he shows that the Word himself is God, just like the God with whom he was. For after first saying, “and the Word was with God,” he adds, “and the Word was God.” He all but teaches us outright, first, to regard as God the one who is beyond all things, the Father of the Word himself, with whom the Word was. Then, after him, we are not to be ignorant that his Word, the only-begotten Son, was not himself the God over all, but that he too was God.

17.3  For the word “and” joins the Son’s deity to the Father. That is why he says, “and the Word was God”: so that we may see the God over all, with whom the Word was. Hear also that the Word himself is God, as the image of God. He is an image not as in lifeless material, but as in a living Son, made exactly like the original deity of the Father.

17.4  Marcellus thought it right to compare God’s Word with the human word. But if he was going to use the human word as an image, he should have used this comparison more fully, and it would have served him far better. He should have said that the father of the word in us is the mind, which is something other than the word. No one among men has ever known what the mind is in its essence, or what kind of thing it is. Like a king seated within his own private chambers, it deliberates in secret about what must be done. But the word that comes from it, born as it were out of the father’s innermost recesses, becomes known to everyone outside.

17.5  Then people receive benefit from the word, but the unseen and invisible mind, the father of the word, no one has ever seen.

17.6  In the same way, or rather beyond every image and example, the perfect Word of God, the King of all, is not made up of syllables, verbs and nouns like the spoken word of men. He is the only-begotten Son of God, living and having real existence. He proceeds from the Father’s deity and kingship, and he waters the whole world with the supplies that come from him. He pours out, as into pools, a share of life, reason, wisdom, light and every good thing to all created beings. But the Father and God of all is beyond everything, beyond the grasp and the reach of all, like the unseen and invisible mind. This is why he is also said to be “dwelling in unapproachable light.”

17.7  So the Father is unapproachable and beyond the reach of all. The Son is nearer to all, since he steers all things by the Father’s nod. This is why the words “he was in the world, and the world came to be through him” are said not of the Father but of the Son. The Father was beyond the universe and above all things, “dwelling in unapproachable light.” The Son extends through all things and in all things with caring providence. So the comparison with the human word holds only in this respect. Now that we have shown this, one of the lovers of learning may well ask:


CHAPTER 18

18.1  Why did the evangelist, at the beginning of his writing, call the only-begotten Son of God “the Word”? To him we will answer: because of the prophecies about him that had long been hidden. For it is said of each prophet, for example, “the word of the Lord which came to Isaiah,” and “the beginning of the word of the Lord in Hosea,” and “the word of the Lord which came to Joel,” and “the word of the Lord came to Jonah,”

18.2  and likewise “to Micah,” and in a similar way for the rest of the prophets the word “came” was attached to each one. The divine Scripture was marking out, precisely and of necessity, that the Word was not in any of the prophets, but came to each one separately. He approached each according to what that person’s capacity could receive, and supplied from himself the Spirit that suited each soul. Now the evangelist was about to announce the good news of the Word’s work in a way the mind can grasp. He teaches that the Word did not come to some other person as he did to the ancients, but that he himself took flesh and became man. Then, since he was going to proclaim the Word’s saving arrival among men for all, he says next, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Of necessity he runs back to the beginning, to show who and what kind of being the Word was, who had become flesh only yesterday and the day before.

18.3  He speaks of him as God, announcing together the knowledge of him and his appearing among men as God. Then, as though the ancients had already learned from the divine readings about the Word who came to each prophet, he himself proclaims the Word’s more divine and distinctive beginning, which no prophet ever showed to men so openly and uncovered.

18.4  So with a loud voice he handed on to all this hidden and secret mystery about the Word, and cried out: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came to be through him, and apart from him not one thing came to be.”

18.5  For he says: If you were trained by the earlier divine Scriptures and learned long ago that the word of the Lord came to this prophet, and likewise came to another, and again to another, yet now it is necessary to announce to all, not how he came, but how he was in the beginning. It is necessary to announce that “he was God,” and that “all things came to be through him,” and that this same God the Word, “through whom are all things,” by the Father’s love for mankind “became flesh and dwelt among us.”

18.6  John, the great disciple and apostle of Christ, proclaimed this good news. He was teaching all people the new and fresh mysteries of the Savior. He did not mean that God was “rational,” or that God reasoned with himself and talked things over with himself when he said, “Let us make man,” or that God made use of words that give orders for things to be done. Anyone who denies the Son of God would say such things.

18.7  Marcellus does just this. As if to a hideout, he runs to the old Scripture and tries to collect the commands given to the Jewish people, who were still like infants, not to worship idols but to know and revere one God only. There his teaching about the one God found its opening. It was handed down usefully and at the right time to Jews who were prone to idolatry. Having fled there, and having fenced himself in, as in a stronghold, with the hardness of heart of the Jews, he put forward a denial of the Son of God.


CHAPTER 19

19.1  Listen, then, to the words he uses. He writes as follows, word for word: “Whom, then, does Asterius suppose is the one who says, ‘I am the one who is’? The Son or the Father? For he said that there are two hypostases, looking to the human flesh which the Word of God took up and imagining things this way because of it, and he said they belong to a Father and a Son. In this way he separates the Son of God from the Father, as someone might separate a son of man from his natural father.”

19.2  He goes on to add: “If, then, he will say that it was the Father, separating himself from the Son, who said these things to Moses, he will be admitting that the Son is not God. For how is it possible for the one who says, ‘I am the one who is,’ not to agree that he says he is ‘the one who is’ in contrast to what is not? But if he claims that it is the Son, a separate hypostasis, who says this, ‘I am the one who is,’ the same thing will in turn be thought to be said about the Father. Each of these is impious.”

19.3  And again, trying to show that the Father and the Son are one, he writes this: “For he himself confesses, saying, ‘The Father is in me and I am in the Father.’ That he did not say this casually or without purpose is clear also from another apostolic saying. For the one who said, ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism,’ also said, ‘one God and Father, who is over all and through all and in all.’ You see that here too he does not depart from agreement, but the same thing holds. For having said ‘one Lord,’ he then said ‘one God,’ so that whenever he mentions the one Lord he includes the Father, and whenever he speaks about the Father he testifies that the Word of God is not outside him.”

19.4  After saying this, Marcellus goes on to collect many more passages from the Old Testament to prove that God has no Son.

19.5  Claiming, then, that God is an undivided monad, he set out that the same one is Father and the same one is Son. He writes in this way: “What then? If we did not pay attention to the Spirit and hold that the monad is undivided in power, would we not be sinning, when the Word clearly teaches us, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and serve him alone’?”

19.6  He proclaims the same thing through the Gospel according to Mark as well. A certain scribe came up to him and asked which was the first of the commandments, and he answered him: “The first of all is: Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your soul and with all your strength. This is the first. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

19.7  There is no other commandment greater than these.” And the scribe said to him, “Well said, Teacher; you have said truly that God is one and there is no other besides him.”

19.8  But the scribe, who seemed to have learned the worship of God through the law, is shown praising the Savior’s saying, “Hear, Israel,” which says “the Lord your God is one,” and confirming as with an oath that it was well said. For he says, “You have said truly that God is one and there is no other besides him.” Yet these men, who boast that they know the mysteries of the New Testament, want to invent a second God, separated from the Father in hypostasis and power.

19.9  To these things he adds, to prove that God is one and that there is no Son (no. 68): “That Scripture knows how to call the unity [monad] Lord and God has already become clear from what was said before, where God said to his servant Moses: ‘And God said again to Moses: Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel: The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ You see how, showing us one person here, he calls the same one Lord and God.”

19.10  Again, in the same way, Scripture says: “And the Lord spoke all these words, saying: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods besides me.” You hear how, by the pronoun, he shows that there is only one God.

19.11  And again a little later he says, “I am the Lord your God,” declaring himself to be Lord and God. And what do we learn from another passage? “And you shall know today,” it says, “and not be turned aside in your mind, that the Lord your God, he is God in heaven [above] and on the earth below, and there is none besides him.” And again in the same Deuteronomy it says: “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind.”

19.12  And again in the same book: “See, see that I am, and there is no God besides me; I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal.” How then did Asterius, who pretends to follow the holy Scriptures simply and with fear, not recognize this passage, which says, “The Lord your God, he is God in heaven [above] and on the earth below, and there is no one else besides him,” and that “he is one,” and that besides him there is no other?

19.13  And after other remarks he adds to these things again, saying (no. 68): “How then will the holy prophet Jeremiah not plainly refute him for teaching something different? For prophesying to us about the Savior he spoke thus: ‘This is our God; no other will be reckoned alongside him. He found out every way of knowledge, and gave it to Jacob his servant and to Israel whom he loved. After this he appeared on the earth and lived among men.’”

19.14  And again he adds, saying (no. 50): “But it appears that the Father is in the Word, even if it does not seem so to Asterius and those who think the same as he does. For this is what seems right to the divinely inspired prophet Isaiah, who says through the Holy Spirit: ‘And they will worship you, and in you they will pray; for in you is God, and there is no other besides you. For you are God.’ Do you see how he overturns by the roots the crafty mischief of those who teach something different?”

19.15  And again he continues (no. 67): “And if you also want to hear another prophecy of the same prophet confirming that God is one for us: ‘I am God,’ he says, ‘the first, and for the things to come I am.’ For the word ‘I’ points to one person. The two expressions signify one person for us. For having said ‘I,’ he adds also ‘am,’ so that through the two parts of speech, pronoun and verb, the unity [monad] of the Godhead is attested.”

19.16  “And if he should need another testimony, I will again offer him the same prophet, saying: ‘I am the first and I am after these things. And besides me there is no God.’ If Asterius supposes that the Son is divided from the Father in substance [hypostasis], like a son of man, he is being offended by the human flesh which he took on for our sake. Let him show us who it is that says these things;”

19.17  “for here too the statement is that of one person. Who then is the one who says, ‘There is no God besides me’? Let him also listen to another prophecy that says, ‘There is no righteous one and savior besides me.’ If he thinks there are two gods, he must confess that the other is not righteous and not a savior. But if he is neither righteous nor a savior, how can he still be God? For the text declares that there is one righteous one and savior. And again it says: ‘Before me there was no other, and after me there will be none; I am God, and there will be no one saving apart from me.’”

19.18  If he also wants to hear another prophetic saying, perhaps one spoken against him and against those who think the same way about the Godhead, let him listen to Isaiah himself, who says: “Repent, you who go astray; turn back in your heart, and remember the former things from of old, for I am God, and there is none besides me.”

19.19  He did not say “I am God” without the article, so that by adding the article (“the God”) he might show plainly that he is the one God. And what of the prophet Hosea? Does he not give the same witness, saying, “I brought you up out of Egypt,” and “You shall know no God besides me, and there is no savior except me”? And again Malachi says, “Has not one God

19.20  created you?” he says. “Do you not all have one Father?” But perhaps Asterius will say that David said nothing about this, even though he is older than the other prophets except Moses, and that therefore he is unsure whether we ought to think there are two gods divided in substance, or not. So that he may not say this, I think it fitting to show him that David too says the same things as the holy men already mentioned: “Hear, my people, and I will speak to you; Israel, and I will testify against you. If you listen to me, there shall be no new god among you, and you shall not worship a foreign god.

19.21  For I am the Lord your God.” The one who points to himself and says “I am” — is it not clear that he is saying there is only one God, that is, himself?


CHAPTER 20

20.1  Marcellus piled up all these texts, and still more than these, to deny the Son of God. In his ignorance he did not consider that this kind of teaching was given to them because of the hardness of heart of the Jewish people. For it was not possible for the Holy Spirit, speaking through God’s prophets, to hand over the full word of true godliness to people whose minds were not yet mature.

20.2  So it was that he gave them laws to perform sacrifices, bodily circumcision, the keeping of the Sabbath, abstinence from certain foods, purifications of the body, and bodily blessings. He also gave them the promise of a land flowing with “milk and honey,” but not the promise of the kingdom of heaven. Our Savior and Lord was asked how it was that, when Moses commanded that anyone who wished should give a certificate of divorce and send his wife away, he himself gave the opposite command. He gave a general principle in reply, saying, “Moses wrote this for your hardness of heart, but from the beginning it was not so.”

20.3  He would therefore have said the same thing if someone had asked why Moses and the prophets after him, while urging the worship of one God, did not teach the people the knowledge of the Son. Those who were constantly being led away by the error of many gods were not able to receive the grace of the gospel. So, because of their hardness of heart, they framed their teaching about the one God. For the time being they were training them like children, turning them away from supposing there were many gods and leading them toward the introduction of the one.

20.4  Moses handed down an incomplete teaching to the people of his day because their understanding was incomplete. So he made no mention at all of the creation of angels in his account of the making of the world. Yet the prophets after him mentioned not only angels but also divine powers, holy spirits, and God’s servants above the heavens. Daniel teaches about them when he says, “A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.”

20.5  But Moses passed over all of these in silence. He was not ignorant of them, since he had already received exact knowledge of everything by the divine Spirit. Still, he made no mention of them in the account of creation as things made by God.

20.6  One could give no other reason for this than the hardness of heart of the people, just as the Savior himself taught. You can also learn from the readings of the New Testament that there are countless other things in the constitution of the universe that are not found at all in the writing of Moses. He did not mention rulers, authorities, world-rulers, or the spiritual forces “of wickedness,” against which the divine apostle says our wrestling is set.

20.7  What then? Since the teaching about these things cannot be clearly found in Moses or in the other prophets, are we to disbelieve the apostle? Or, when the same apostle again mentions the order of the higher beings, saying that Christ sits “at the right hand” of God “far above every rule and authority and power and lordship, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come,”

20.8  And again, when Paul names thrones, lordships, rulers and authorities, saying, “For in him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities,” should we not accept this teaching just because neither Moses nor the other prophets spoke of these things beforehand? Or shall we say the same about these things too: that the “stiff-necked, uncircumcised in heart and ears” were not able to be trusted with teaching about them? The prophets of God did not reveal to such people even the Jerusalem above. Paul made the teaching about it plain to the church of Christ and cried out, “But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother,” and, “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the festal gathering and church of the firstborn, who are enrolled in heaven.”

20.9  Let Marcellus answer this, if he is able to bring forward the teaching on these matters from the ancient writings.

20.10  But if he cannot find it, let him give the reason why the prophets of God kept silent about all these things, and about countless other things like them. The same apostle prayed to God about such things on our behalf, “that we may be strong enough to grasp, together with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of God that surpasses knowledge.”

20.11  Our Saviour himself also revealed a great many mysteries to his disciples about the kingdom of heaven, about the end of all things, and about the promises. Sometimes he did this through parables and sometimes in secret teaching. To them he said, “To you it has been given to know the mysteries of God.” One could not find the like of these things in Moses or in the other prophets.

20.12  What then? Since these things were not handed over to the people of the Jews, but were kept for the church of Christ until the right time, should we on that account reject the grace given to us? Or should we give greater thanks to the one who counted us worthy of such knowledge? In the same way, then, it is right to receive the teachings about the Son from his own new covenant. We should not be at all surprised if the men of God did not uncover the knowledge of him to a hard-hearted people, but kept the teaching about him in store for the fitting time.

20.13  For at that time it did not seem suitable to hand over the mystery of the Father and the Son to men who were being dragged down into the error of many gods. For the same reason the prophets did not uncover the teaching about the lower powers to them, so that they would not fall, on that pretext, into Greek polytheism. The Greeks had invented for themselves a god who was “father of men and gods.”

20.14  So the Word, to hold them back from such error, proclaimed the one God. Yet he did not deny that this same God is Father. He taught them to worship the true God and urged them to know no one besides him, but he did not deny that he is Father. And if he called him Lord and God and righteous and Saviour, he did not thereby rule out thinking of him as Father of his only-begotten and beloved Son. So whether it is the Father or the Son who says “I am the one who is,”

20.15  the word would be true either way. For the Father could be “the one who is,” since he alone is “over all, and through all, and in all, God,” as the divine apostle taught. And the Son also would speak truly in being called “the one who is,” since he is the only Son, the only-begotten, of the One who is. Moreover, being the image of the invisible God, he is his image in this respect: that he alone was himself “the one who is.” For this reason he too may be called “the one who is,” since he, like the Father, is proclaimed both God and Lord throughout all of God-inspired Scripture.


CHAPTER 21

21.1  This can also be learned from the word spoken to Moses. For Scripture says, “God spoke to Moses and said to him: I am the Lord; and I appeared to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob, being their God.” You see how he said that he had appeared to the fathers. And when he appeared, Scripture again bears witness, saying, “The Lord God appeared to Abraham at the oak of Mamre, as he was sitting at the door of his tent.” How did he appear, if not in human form? And whom ought we to believe this was, if not the Son of God? The Son himself made this plain in the Gospels when he said to the Jews, “Abraham your father rejoiced that he might see my day, and he saw it and was glad.”

21.2  When they marveled at the saying, he added, “Before Abraham was, I am,” showing most plainly that he existed before. What, then, does the word establish, if not that it was the Son of God himself who spoke to Moses and said, “I am the one who is”? For he himself taught that he had appeared to Abraham. And how he was himself “the one who is” has already been explained.

21.3  The great apostle Paul also knows that the Son of God became the mediator of the law given through Moses, where he teaches, “The law was ordained through angels, by the hand of a mediator. But a mediator is not of one.” So the one who spoke to Moses was the mediator, acting as mediator for the salvation of human beings from that time on, before he took flesh.

21.4  The same apostle showed that this mediator is Jesus Christ, when he said, “One God, and one mediator between God and human beings, the man Christ Jesus.” So whether the words “I am the one who is” are spoken to Moses in the Son’s own person, or whether it was the Father who uttered this voice through him, the statement is true either way.

21.5  Let Marcellus, then, not be at a loss, as though he were using an inescapable argument, as he thinks, when he says (no. 57): “Whom, then, does Asterius suppose to be the one who says ‘I am the one who is’—the Son or the Father?” Then he goes on to conclude that if the Father is the one who is, the Son will no longer be God. (No. 58) “For the one who is says that he is so in contrast to what is not. But if Asterius should claim that the Son, as a separate subsistence, is the one who says ‘I am the one who is,’ the same thing will in turn be thought to be said of the Father. And either of these is impious.”

21.6  In saying this, Marcellus himself has fallen into both absurdities: he lays down that the one who is, is one, and denies the other. And whom he himself takes this one to be, he could hardly tell. For if he grants it to the Father, he will deny the Son; or if he accepts only the Son, he will reject the Father. More truly, he will be shown to know neither Father nor Son, since he grants only one and removes the other from the scene. And even if he hears God saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

21.7  You shall have no other gods besides me,” here again let him not be troubled in his soul, but let him also hear the words joined to it. For after saying, “You shall have no other gods besides me,” he added, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, nor a likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them; for I am the Lord your God, a jealous Lord.”

21.8  You see how he was warning them not to be swept away into the polytheistic error of the nations, but to know him alone as God and Lord. And who was this? It was the Son, who has the image of the Father in himself, giving these commands by the Father’s authority to people sick with idolatry. For just as “all things came to be through him,” the Father having established through the Savior the substance of everything that has come to be, so it was the Father himself who handed down to human beings the knowledge of himself and reverence for him, through the mediator, the Son.

21.9  The apostle also taught this in these very words when writing to the Galatians, where he said, “The law was ordained through angels, by the hand of a mediator. But a mediator is not of one, but God is one.”

21.10  Even when he says, “See, see that I am he, and there is no God except me,” it was again the Father speaking, as through an image and mediator, that is, through the Son. Consider Isaiah the prophet. He says, “I begot sons and raised them high,” and again, “Israel did not know me, and the people did not understand me,” and again, “I gave orders to all the stars, and with my hand I made the heaven firm,” and much else of this kind. We do not say that Isaiah himself speaks these words. We say that God, who speaks in him, speaks through him. Would it not be just as fitting, then, in the case of the only-begotten Son of God, that the Father should give this testimony through him to people who needed such commands? These people were idolaters, as the same Scripture teaches when it says, “And the Lord said: Where are their gods, in whom they trusted? You ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their drink offerings. Let them rise up and help you, and let them be your shelter.” For it is with these words that the saying is joined: “See, see that I am he, and there is no God except me.”


CHAPTER 22

22.1  GREEK: (translate) Even if he cries out ten thousand times through the prophet, “There is no God except me,” and “There is no righteous one and savior except me,” and “You shall know no God except me, and there is no savior apart from me,” and whatever else of this kind is found in the other prophets, it was still God who, from that very time, was “reconciling the world to himself in Christ.” And it was the Father himself who spoke these things to people through the only-begotten Son, as through an interpreter. The Son himself also handed this on in the Gospels, teaching that we should know only one God, when he said, “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent.”

22.2  So the true God himself is the one and only God, and there is no other besides him. At that time he gave these commands to the idolatrous Jewish nation, not only through the prophets but through his own Son. Take Isaiah (or rather God through him). He said, “There is no God except me. Who is like me?” and then, “You are my witnesses whether there is a God except me.” He went on to add, “And they did not exist then. Those who mold and those who carve are all worthless, doing what pleases themselves.”

22.3  Throughout the whole of his prophecy you would find the lifeless idols being cut down. In each of the prophets likewise you will find the one God proclaimed to turn people away from the error of many gods. This is also our own custom. In our discussions with superstitious pagans, we keep the teaching about Christ for a suitable time. Meanwhile we bring them proofs against the error of idolatry, and we establish by demonstrative arguments that there is one God.

22.4  So let Marcellus learn, if he has grown old in the oversight of Christ’s church and still has not learned it: the knowledge of the hidden mystery concerning the Son of God was in no way suited to the ancient people, who were prone to slip into idolatry. Only for his own church was “the mystery hidden from the ages and from the generations” kept in store through his grace. In that mystery was contained the teaching about the holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

22.5  But Marcellus has gathered together just the sort of arguments that a Jewish teacher might offer when speaking about circumcision in a Jewish synagogue. He sets these before Christ’s disciples and prides himself on it. He does not realize that a Jew according to the flesh could say even more than he does. He boasts of these things, yet he is not ashamed to twist the true teachings about our Savior.


CHAPTER 23

23.1  Right away, then, Marcellus fails to understand the words of the divine apostle, who in the passages I have set out taught in various ways that the Son is the image of God. From them he ought to have understood that the church of God does not proclaim two gods. For, as I have often said, she introduces neither two unbegotten beings nor two without beginning, nor two substances set over against each other on equal footing, and therefore not two gods. She teaches that there is one source and one God, who is himself the Father of the only-begotten and beloved Son. In the same way she teaches one image “of the invisible God,” and that this image is the same as his only-begotten and beloved Son. The apostle, speaking of the Father in theological terms, says, “the blessed and only Sovereign,” and again, “who alone has immortality,

23.2  dwelling in unapproachable light,” and again, “to the King of the ages, the incorruptible, invisible, only God,” and again, “to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be glory for ever. Amen.” Even if still more is said in praise of the one God over all, we must understand that the only-begotten Son of God is the image of all of these things. He is not an image in lifeless matter, but one formed in a living Son. And even if the Savior himself teaches that the Father is the only true God, saying “that they may know you, the only true God,” we must not shrink from confessing that the Son too is true God, since he possesses this as an image does. The word “only” is added for the Father alone, as the archetype of the image, and so it fits him.

23.3  The inspired Paul taught most clearly that the Son is the image and radiance of the Father and “in the form” of God, as has been shown in the earlier passages. Now when there is one Father who exists and one Son born from the Father, no one in his right mind would say that there are two fathers or two sons. In the same way, when one king rules and his image is carried about everywhere on earth, no sensible person would say there are two rulers, but one, who is honored also through the image. In the same way (as I have often said), the church of God, having received the teaching to worship one God, continues to worship that same God also through the Son, as through an image.

23.4  Marcellus did not understand this, and declared that the image “of the invisible God” is the flesh of the Savior, which the apostle called “the form of a servant.” He did not reckon that all human beings also are formed in the likeness of the Savior’s flesh. So he insists that the body the Savior took up is the image of the unbegotten, ineffable, fatherly Godhead, but he denies that the only-begotten Son of God, through whom all things came into being (“for all things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be”), is the image of God. He says in so many words (no. 82): “It is therefore plain that before the taking up of our body the Word, considered in himself, was not the image of the invisible God.” You see how great a distortion he has made of the apostle’s interpretation.

23.5  Yet John the evangelist proclaimed the mystery that had been known in hidden form to Moses and the other prophets, and uncovered it, crying out with a loud voice, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

23.6  All things came to be through him.” He also bore witness that “there was the light that enlightens every person coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, and the world did not know him.” And he set forth the Sonship clearly, in saying of the Father, “No one has ever seen God,” but of the Son, “The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him,”


CHAPTER 24

24.1  This admirable teacher of the words of Christ gathers the commandments of God and the sayings that direct what we are to do from the divine Scripture, and on that basis he defines the Word “in the beginning” as something of that kind. Listen to how he tries to establish this. He writes as follows (no. 41): * * * * * “But those who teach them seem ashamed to mention the Word, whom all the divine Scriptures proclaim in this way. David says of him, ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm,’ and again the same David says, ‘He sent out his word and healed them.’ Solomon says, ‘Evil men will seek me and will not find me, for they hated wisdom and did not choose the word of the Lord.’ Isaiah says, ‘Out of Zion will go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.’ And again Jeremiah says, ‘The wise were put to shame and terrified and were caught, because they rejected the word of the Lord.’”

24.2  The prophet Hosea also said, “They hated the one who reproved in the gates, and they detested a holy word.” Micah likewise, mentioning the word himself, said, “Out of Zion will go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Marcellus gathers these passages and others like them, and thinks that by them he strengthens his own opinion.

24.3  But notice how he has thrown together in a muddle the testimonies from divine Scripture: the word of God that is sent out, the word that saves and heals, and the word that commands what is to be done. For what kind of word does “They hated the one who reproved in the gates, and detested a holy word” suggest, if not a word that commands holy and righteous actions? He is willing to confess anything rather than the Son of God, as though he were ashamed to mention the Son. We know that the Son of God is Son in the truest sense and truly the only-begotten of God. And we know precisely that he is Word, not like the word found in human beings, but as it is fitting to understand a Word of God: living, subsisting, and a Son. But the man who brings in a Word that merely signifies and commands what is to be done was naturally reluctant to confess the Son, whom in fact he was denying by his deed.


CHAPTER 25

25.1  Then he also fails to notice that he is contradicting himself. In other places he insists that none of the earlier people knew anything about the Word, because it was a hidden mystery. He writes in these very words (no. 45): “For what other hidden mystery was there than the one concerning the Word? This mystery was formerly so hidden in God that no one of the earlier people clearly knew the things concerning the Word, but we now enjoy the riches of the glory and of the hidden mystery.” And again he adds (no. 46): “But the holy apostle and disciple of the Lord, John, teaching clearly and explicitly at the beginning of the Gospel, as of something formerly unknown among men, and naming him the Word of the Almighty, spoke in this way: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’” In these passages, then, he determines that the hidden mystery is that God has a Word. But in the prophetic sayings I just quoted, he maintains that all the divine Scriptures proclaim the things concerning him, and he collects a great many testimonies about the Word of God.

25.2  So the Word was not unknown to the earlier people, for they all knew such sayings, carrying the prophetic oracles on their lips and in their memory. Yet this “Christian” holds up to us the scribe of the Jews. He does not listen to the Savior saying, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.” He admires the scribe for confirming with an oath that “God is one, and there is none besides him,” not realizing that “the demons also believe and shudder.”

25.3  Observe how he gathers from the prophetic Scriptures themselves the passages about the word that teaches what is to be done. The children of the Jews would admit that they know such a word, since they received it before us. Not even Sabellius himself was ignorant of such a word.

25.4  How then, in attacking the Jews and Sabellius, did he say that they did not know the Word, in the statements of his that I have quoted? And since he declared in the earlier passages that no one could know God or recognize his Word unless he had received the image of the invisible God, namely the flesh, as he himself said,

25.5  (For he insisted that God and his Word are known only through the image, and he said that the image is the flesh.) We must therefore remind him, from what has been set out above, that all the Jews, even without the coming in the flesh, knew exactly the word of God and the words in the prophetic writings that command holy works. They had studied these from their earliest years, and they confessed God as maker and creator of all things. The scribe is an example: he confirmed this with an oath.

25.6  So much, then, for the proof that the man is a Sabellian. Now it is time to turn to the twisted interpretations he has made of the divine Scriptures. Then everyone who honors the man may learn that he has strayed not only from the right faith but also from a sound reading and understanding of the God-inspired Scriptures.


============================================================
BOOK 3
============================================================

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents.1a  Chapters of Book 3. 1. How Marcellus dared to interpret the divine Scriptures in a twisted way. 2. How the words “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways,” and the verses joined to them, are to be understood, and how Marcellus transferred the same words to the Savior’s flesh. 3. A refutation of what he wrongly said on these passages, and a sound interpretation of them. 4. How Marcellus, not understanding the Scriptures, defined the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as one hypostasis. 5. How the Savior taught about the Holy Spirit. 6. How the church hands down what we are to believe about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 7. How Marcellus insisted that the flesh is the image of the invisible God. 8. How he declared that the flesh of the Savior is of no benefit. 9. How he dared to say that at the end of all things the flesh of the Savior will be left behind, abandoned by the Word. 10. What the divine Scriptures teach about the flesh of the Savior, and how Marcellus thought the opposite. 11. How, failing to understand the Gospel saying, he claimed that the Savior’s flesh causes offense and is of no benefit.

Contents.1b  12. An interpretation of the Gospel wording. 13. How he insisted that Christ’s kingdom received its beginning four hundred years ago and will have its end at the consummation, twisting the interpretations of the divine Scriptures. 14. Explanations of the sound meaning of the readings. 15. How it is said that all things will be subjected to the Son, and he himself to the Father. 16. How the apostle’s words “Then God will be all in all” are to be taken. 17. How the divine Scriptures present the endless kingdom of our Savior, and how Marcellus bluntly declared that his kingdom will come to an end. 18. How in the Son’s kingdom all who are counted worthy of the blessedness of that time will become one. 19. That, just as the Father and the Son are said to be one, so too will all the saints be. 20. That as the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father, so he will be in all the saints. 21. How the words “The one who has seen me has seen the Father” must be understood.


CHAPTER 1

1.1  The great evangelist John, then, proclaimed the theology of our Savior in the way I have described. How Marcellus rejected it and ran aground on Jewish unbelief has been shown by what has been said. But you may learn from many other passages of his accounts, and from this one in particular, how he twisted the agreed and clear teachings about our Savior. In Solomon’s Proverbs, Wisdom is brought in speaking in person about herself, and she says: “I, Wisdom, have made counsel my dwelling,

1.2  and I called on knowledge and understanding. The fear of the Lord hates evil, insolence and arrogance and the ways of the wicked; and I hated the twisted ways of evil men. Counsel and security are mine; I am understanding, and strength is mine.

1.3  Through me kings reign, and rulers write down justice. Through me the great are made great, and tyrants hold power over the earth. I love those who love me, and those who seek me will find me. Wealth and glory belong to me, and the possession of many things, and righteousness.

1.4  It is better to harvest me than gold and precious stone, and my produce is better than choice silver. I walk in the ways of righteousness, and I move about in the midst of the paths of justice, so that I may give a possession to those who love me and fill their treasuries with good things. If I report to you the things that happen day by day, I will remember to number the things from eternity.

1.5  “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways, for his works. Before the age he founded me, in the beginning, before he made the earth, before he made the depths, before the springs of water came forth, before the mountains were set in place, and before all the hills, he begets me. The Lord made lands, uninhabited regions, and the inhabited heights of the world under heaven. When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him. When he marked out his own throne upon the winds, when he made the clouds above strong, when he set the springs under heaven on a firm footing, and when he made the foundations of the earth strong, I was beside him, fitting things together. I was the one in whom he delighted daily, and I rejoiced in his presence at all times. He rejoiced when he had finished the inhabited world, and he rejoiced over the sons of men.”


CHAPTER 2

2.1  This is what Wisdom says about herself in Proverbs. I quoted the passage in full, on purpose and out of necessity, to show that there is one person [whom Marcellus transferred to the flesh of the Savior; the Greek here is corrupt] who says all this, and that there is no change of speaker anywhere in between. So Wisdom is shown teaching these things about herself. And here the first thing to notice is that she is named simply “Wisdom.” For she says, “I, Wisdom, made my dwelling in counsel.” It does not say “the wisdom of God.” It is the same as in the evangelist, where “In the beginning was the Word” is written without qualification, and again “the Word was with God.” It is not said “the Word of God,” so that no one would think he is spoken of as something relative to another, or as a mere attribute in God, but as one who truly exists and lives. That is why John adds, “and the Word was God,” and does not say, “and the Word was God’s.” It is the same with Wisdom.

2.2  For God the Word and Wisdom were one and the same. That is why in Proverbs he is named without qualification, both in the passages quoted above and in others that speak this way: “Blessed is the man who found wisdom”; “God founded the earth by wisdom”; “Say that wisdom is your sister”; “Proclaim wisdom, so that understanding may follow you”; and “For wisdom is better than costly stones.”

2.3  And also: “Wisdom built a house for herself and set up seven pillars,” and everything else of this kind in the same book. In none of these is she called “the wisdom of God.” She is called simply “Wisdom,” so that we would not think of her as some [attribute] belonging to God, as knowledge belongs to a knowledgeable man. She is Wisdom who truly exists and lives, the same as the Son of God.

2.4  Suppose someone takes the wisdom spoken of here to be a wise disposition in God, the way we think of God as wise. Let him listen to what the Scripture says: “Say that wisdom is your sister.” Who would be so mad as to suppose that the God over all, and the wise disposition within him, is called a sister of those among men who do what is right?

2.5  But if you take the saying to refer to the Christ of God, nothing stands in the way of the sense, since “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God,” and since out of his surpassing love for humanity he does not refuse kinship with us. But suppose God and the Wisdom brought in by Proverbs were one and the same, so that she was a wise disposition thought of as in him, in the sense that God is wise. What would have prevented “God” from being written in place of “Wisdom”? Then “Wisdom built a house for herself and set up seven pillars,” and what goes with it, would have been said in the sense of “God built a house for himself,” and so on. And again,

2.6  “Say that wisdom is your sister” would have been said in the sense of “Say that God is your brother.” But you see how such a phrase strikes the ear, because it has no harmony.

2.7  But if you take the words to refer to the Son (for he himself was the [abundance; the Greek is uncertain]), everything will flow smoothly for you, and no impious thought stands in the way. The apostle Paul bears witness with this, for he plainly called our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ “Wisdom” when he said, “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

2.8  GREEK: With all this established, it follows, along with everything set out above, that the words “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works” were spoken in the person of the Son himself. If he says he was created, he does not mean that he came into being out of nothing, nor that he, like the other created things, came to be out of what did not exist, as some have wrongly supposed. He means that he already had real existence and life, and went before the whole world’s formation and existed before it. He was appointed by the Lord, his own Father, to rule over all things, and “created” is used here in place of “appointed” or “established.”

2.9  GREEK: Indeed, the apostle explicitly calls the rulers and governors among men a “creation” when he says, “Submit to every human creation for the Lord’s sake, whether to a king as supreme, or to governors as sent through him.”

2.10  GREEK: The prophet also says, “Prepare to call upon your God, Israel. For behold, he who strengthens the thunder and creates the spirit and announces his Christ to men,” and also, “Let this be written for another generation, and a people being created will praise the Lord.” In these, “creating” is not used of something brought into being out of non-existence. For God did not create the Spirit at the time when he proclaimed his Christ to all men through him, since there is nothing “new under the sun.”

2.11  GREEK: Rather, the Spirit already existed and was there beforehand, but was sent at the time when the apostles were gathered together. Then, like thunder, “there came a sound from heaven, as of a violent rushing wind,” and they were filled with “the Holy Spirit,” and so they proclaimed the Christ of God to all men, in agreement with the prophecy that says, “For behold, he who strengthens the thunder and creates the spirit and announces his Christ to men.” Here “creating” is said in place of “sending down” or “appointing,” while the thunder in another way points to the preaching of the Gospel. And the man who says, “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” did not say this as one who had no heart. He prayed that his mind might be made clean.

2.12  GREEK: In the same way it is said, “that he might create the two into one new man,” meaning “bring together.” Consider whether the same applies to “Put on the new man, created according to God,” and to “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,” and to whatever else of this kind one may find by searching the God-inspired Scripture. So do not be surprised if, in a figurative sense, in “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways,” the word “created” is used in place of “established” or “appointed to rule.” In the Gospels too our Saviour says, “I confess to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you hid these things from the wise and understanding, and revealed them to infants.” We do not say that the Saviour is speaking here of confessing sins (as it is said elsewhere, “Confess your sins to one another”), but of thanksgiving for the infants. “Confess” is used in place of “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth.”

2.13  GREEK: With leisure to search, one could find countless expressions used figuratively throughout the divine Scripture. Others carry several meanings, and others are applied by the same name to different things. To go through these would take long and does not suit the present occasion.

2.14  GREEK: So here too, “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works” is said in place of “appointed me to rule over his works.” This is why it is not simply said, “He created me,” but with the addition, “as the beginning of his ways for his works.”

2.15  GREEK: The Hebrew wording shows this especially. If anyone examines carefully the true sense of the God-inspired Scripture, he will find that the Hebrew reading does not contain “he created me.” For this reason none of the other translators has used this word either. Aquila, for example, says, “The Lord acquired me as the chief of his ways.” Symmachus says, “The Lord acquired me as the beginning of his ways,” and Theodotion, “The Lord acquired me as the beginning of his way.”

2.16  And the translation makes sense. For he himself was the “head” of the existence and the salvation of all created things, visible and invisible. The Father begot him as the only-begotten Son, and having begotten him, appointed him Savior of the whole. In him and through him the Father sums up the ordering of the universe. So the divine apostle taught when he said that all things are “summed up in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things on the earth.” The point is not only that all things came into being through him, passing from non-existence into existence. He also takes on the care of governing the whole, since he is Word and Wisdom and Life, and the fullness of everything fine and good. Through him, then, all things are steered and kept safe.

2.17  He himself shows this through the sayings set out above, where he said: “Through me kings reign, and rulers write righteousness; through me the great are made great, and tyrants hold power over the earth.”

2.18  So the whole universe is governed by the unspeakable reasonings of the universal wisdom and providence of the Son of God. He taught this through the passages quoted above. He urged people to hold fast to him, saying, “I love those who love me, and those who seek me will find me.” He also turned them away from the opposite road by what he added: “But I hated the twisted ways of evil men.”

2.19  Having laid out these things and others like them, the Son of God (for he himself was the Wisdom) next hands over the hidden knowledge of himself to those who have already been helped by these words. He says: “If I declare to you the things that happen day by day, I will remember to number the things from eternity.”

2.20  He means: if I were to teach what I do on each single day, I would have to recall my works from the beginning of the whole age. I would have to show that the Father who begot me set me over the universe for this purpose, to lead his ways and the works he made through me. So he rightly goes on to say, “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works,” or “The Lord acquired me,” according to the rendering given above.

2.21  For the great possession of God was the only-begotten Son. In one respect, he was begotten from God, being his Son. In another respect, he has been established as a common benefit and savior for all. He both is and is named the greatest and most precious possession of the Father. For nothing else could be a more precious possession for a father than a son. So too the first-formed Adam, when he acquired the first son born among men, said of him, “I have acquired a man through God.” The Hebrew word has “kanithi” where the Greek has “I acquired.”

2.22  The word “acquired” is pronounced “kana” among the Hebrews. So it is said of Abraham, “the field which Abraham acquired,” where the Hebrew has “kana.” The same word stands in Hebrew in “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works.” For here too the word “kana” stands, and all the translators agree in rendering it “acquired.”

2.23  But the word “created” is absent in the Hebrew; it does not stand in the passage before us. There is a very great difference between “created” and “acquired.” In the commoner sense, creation means passing from non-existence into existence. But acquisition means the special closeness of something already existing to the one who acquires it.

2.24  So when the Son of God says, “The Lord acquired me as the beginning of his ways for his works,” he shows at once his prior existence and his special closeness to the Father. He also shows the usefulness and necessity of his own providence and management over the Father’s works.

2.25  That is why he goes on: “Before the age he established me; in the beginning, before he made the earth, before the springs of the waters came forth, before the mountains were settled, before all the hills he begets me.” Through all of this he shows how useful and necessary he is for everyone. He teaches, as he had to, that he was and pre-existed, that he existed before the whole world and led the way. Consider Moses. In his account of the making of the world he made no mention of the powers above the world, which are invisible, because those he was training were still immature. He described only the construction of the visible world. At the start he named four elements: heaven, earth, abyss and water. Of two of these he said they were made by God (“In the beginning,” he says, “God made the heaven and the earth”). But he did not say the same of the water and the abyss, that these too were created. He said simply, “And darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of God was moving over the water.” So the Son of God, in the passage before us, teaches about these as well, as he had to: that they were created, that he himself was before all things, and that through him all things were made.

2.26  That is why he says: “Before the age he established me; in the beginning, before he made the earth, and before he made the abysses, before the springs of the waters came forth.” He mentions three of these, earth, abyss and water. The fourth he brings in last, keeping the better one for the end, heaven. So he adds next: “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.”

2.27  The divine Scripture has made these things plain, and we have given a brief, summary account of them. Now let us hear how Marcellus, bringing his mind down to the ground, insists that all of this was said about the flesh which the Saviour took up. He writes, word for word, as follows:

2.28  “This being so, it follows that we should think carefully about this proverbial saying: ‘The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways.’ For our Master and God truly created, having made what did not exist. The flesh which the Word took up was not in existence; it was not in existence when he created it.” And he adds: “So even if this new mystery appeared only in the last times, it was foreordained before this age. The prophet naturally said, ‘Before the age he established me,’ meaning, of course, the flesh.”

2.29  And again he goes on: “Then he says, ‘In the beginning, before he made the earth.’ What earth is this, if not our flesh, which became earth again after the disobedience? For it says, ‘You are earth, and to earth you will return.’” You see how far he has missed the mark. He has turned aside from the straight road and has imagined for himself a rough, hard path, one with no way out.

2.30  See how he was driven to say anything at all, however shameless and brazen, rather than admit that the Son of God is Wisdom.

2.31  He does refer the words “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works” to the person of the Saviour, admitting that he is the one speaking these things in Proverbs. His own words are these: “So it is fitting, now that the old things have passed away and all things are about to become new through the newness of our Saviour, that our Master Christ cried out through the prophet, ‘The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways.’”

2.32  But having said this, he turns his mind to the flesh of our Saviour, and goes on: “For our Master and God truly created, having made what did not exist. The flesh which the Word took up was not in existence; it was not in existence when he ‘created it as the beginning of his ways.’” The noble fellow does not see that it is one single utterance, from one single person, that says “I, Wisdom, dwelt in counsel” and “The Lord created me.” So if one of these is referred to the flesh, the other must be too. And then it will be Wisdom who says both.

2.33  But if, as Marcellus has it, the flesh is the one who says “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways,” then the flesh would be Wisdom. And the flesh would be the one saying “Through me kings reign” and “Through me the great are made great.” How could the flesh say “I will remember to count the things from eternity,” when the author adds to these words “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways”? And Marcellus himself shows what the ways are, when he goes on to say (Nr. 12): “For this one has become for us, who intend to live rightly, the way of godliness, the beginning of all the ways that come after.”

2.34  And he adds (Nr. 12): “He rightly called our Lord and Savior the ‘beginning of ways,’ because after the first way he also became the beginning of the other ways we have received.” By these he means the traditions handed down through the holy apostles, who, as the prophecy says, proclaimed to us this new mystery “with a lofty proclamation.” So says Marcellus.


CHAPTER 3

3.1  If Marcellus did not accept the writings of Moses and the prophets after Moses, his interpretation might have some plausible ground. But since he is not one of those who reject the Old Testament, why in the world did he name the apostles and their teachings as “ways,” and pay no attention to the prophets of God, who wrote countless things about the ways of God? First, Moses wrote and said: “You shall walk by the king’s road,” and “Behold, I have set before your face the way of life and the way of death.”

3.2  David likewise says: “The Lord knows the way of the righteous, and the way of the ungodly will perish.” Jeremiah says: “Stand in the ways and ask for the eternal paths of the Lord, and see what the good way is, and walk in it.” And you will find that each of the prophets mentions the ways of God in one manner or another.

3.3  Now, if our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ [of God] teaches that he himself is the beginning of the ways of God, saying “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works” (and so he is surely older than Moses, the prophets, and those still earlier who lived according to the ways of God), then the flesh which he took up was not earlier than all of those. So the saying has been wrongly understood as referring to the flesh.

3.4  So the Savior did not say this on account of the flesh. He said it because he pre-exists and leads the way for all the ways of God, in which all the God-loving men of old have walked.

3.5  The divine apostle says: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and how untraceable his ways!” By this he points to certain other ways: the ways of God’s providence over all things, by which, through an inexpressible judgment and reasons beyond grasp, he steers the whole universe by divine power. It follows that the one who said “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works” is also the beginning of these ways. But Marcellus, who did not understand the ways of God, declared the flesh of our Savior to be their beginning.

3.6  He also explains the words “for his works,” saying (Nr. 13): “‘He created me,’ it says, ‘as the beginning of his ways for his works.’ And what works does it mean? Those about which the Savior says, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working,’ and again, ‘I have finished the work which you gave me.’”

3.7  Then, as though making clear the sense of what was said, he adds (Nr. 13): “Before the facts were shown, who would have believed that the Word of God, born of a virgin, would take up our flesh and display in it the whole Godhead bodily?” And as though he had given the full sense, he concludes (Nr. 13): “So this is what is meant by ‘The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works.’”

3.8  He wrote these things because he could not lift the eyes of his mind “on high” and say, like the prophet, “For I will look at the heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you established.” Nor did he remember the prophetic saying: “They do not look at the works of the Lord, and they do not consider the works of his hands.”

3.9  If he had paid attention to these things, he would have known that the one who says these words existed, and pre-existed, before heaven and earth and before the whole world. He existed before not only the visible works of God but also the intelligible ones, those that subsist in the bodiless powers above the world. But he moves on to the words “before the age he founded me,” and again he brings the flesh into the middle, saying (Nr. 14) that he names this a “foundation,” meaning the economy in the flesh, which was foreordained.

3.10  So also the apostle says, “For no one can lay any other foundation than the one that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” And Marcellus adds (Nr. 14): “Here he mentions one age, from which he said the things concerning Christ were founded, although many ages had passed, as David said, ‘the one who exists before the ages.’”

3.11  Next he moves on to the words “in the beginning, before he made the earth,” and again says that the earth is the flesh. He writes as follows (Nr. 18): “What earth is this, if not clearly our flesh, which became earth again after the disobedience? For it says, ‘You are earth, and to earth you will return.’ For this needed to receive healing.” He says this, this wisest of men, without remembering that a little earlier he had said that the flesh was created as “the beginning of his ways” before the earth was made.

3.12  But if he really meant the flesh by “earth,” how is he not forced to admit that the one who says he existed before the earth was made existed before the flesh? For he says, “Before the age he founded me, in the beginning, before he made the earth.” Therefore the one who says this existed before the flesh was made.

3.13  And even if the text did not mention many ages but only one, the one the Savior also mentioned when he said, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage,” even so it is not the flesh our Savior took on that existed before the present age. It is the one himself, who teaches these things through Solomon. You see what a rough place he has fallen into, having turned aside from the straight and royal road.

3.14  Besides what has been said, he adds this as well (Nr. 19): “‘Before he made the depths,’ it says. Here the prophet says, in a figurative way, that the depths are the hearts of the saints, which have in their own deep places the gift of the Spirit.” And he does not understand that before our Savior’s coming in the flesh, God’s holy prophets shared in the same Spirit, Moses and those older than Moses. So if these were the depths, that is, the hearts of the saints, then the one who says “before he made the depths” must necessarily be older than all of them.

3.15  How then could these words be referred to the Savior’s flesh? Indeed, if he had had any knowledge of the divine Scriptures, he would not so easily have declared that the depths are the hearts of the saints. He would have noticed that “darkness was over the deep,” according to Moses’ testimony, and that much has been said about the depths in the divine Scripture, and it is hard to interpret. For the apostle says, “Do not say, ‘Who will go up into heaven?’

3.16  that is, to bring Christ down; or ‘Who will go down into the deep?’ that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.” In these words he seems to have called the regions of Hades “the deep.” The Lord himself made this clearer still in his answer to Job, saying, “Have you come to the spring of the sea, and walked in the tracks of the deep? Are the gates of death opened to you in fear, and did the gatekeepers of Hades cower when they saw you?”

3.17  There are also the evil powers in the deep, about whom it is said, “Praise him from the earth, you dragons and all the depths.” And there is the darkness over the deep, about which Moses said, “and darkness was over the deep.” If Marcellus had learned all this, had he read the divine Scriptures with real effort and not carelessly, he would not have dared to call the hearts of the saints “the depths.”

3.18  He would also have understood how it is said, “Deep calls to deep at the sound of your waterfalls,” and again, “The depths were troubled, a multitude of the sound of water,” and again, “The deep is like a garment, his covering.”

3.19  He would have worked out these passages and others like them carefully, if he had cared at all about understanding them. As it is, he casually and carelessly declares that the abysses are the hearts of the saints. Even so, he did not see that the one who said “before he made the abysses” was teaching that he existed before the saints and God-loving men who have lived since the beginning of the age. So on every count these words cannot be fitted to the flesh of the Savior.

3.20  Then he moves on to another saying from the same Scripture, and he explains this one in the same way. He says: (No. 20) “What, then, is this next point: ‘before the springs of the waters came forth’? He says that it means the holy apostles. The Scripture of Exodus sets this mystery before us, announcing the types of the apostles long ago,

3.21  for since the apostles were twelve in number, it mentions twelve springs.” In saying this he does not realize that Israel also had twelve tribes and twelve patriarchs of those tribes, and that there is one book of the twelve prophets. There are also twelve hours of the day and twelve months in the whole year.

3.22  Why then should the number twelve belong to the apostles more than to all those, if it was the number itself that gave him the reason for this interpretation of the saying? He ought to have seen that the prophets of God also, in that they shared the same Holy Spirit, were not strangers to the springs. That is why it is said of them in the Psalms: “In the congregations bless God the Lord, from the springs of Israel.”

3.23  So it is necessary to confess that the Son of God, who says “before the springs of the waters came forth,” existed even before those springs. But listen to how Marcellus explains it. He says (No. 20): “It was fitting, then, that the Master, speaking of his birth according to the flesh through the prophet Solomon, said, ‘before the springs of the waters came forth.’”

3.24  And he adds (No. 20): “For so the Savior said to the holy springs, ‘Go and make disciples of all the nations.’” Then, as though gathering up his argument, he attaches the conclusion to his own account, saying (No. 21): “It is clear from every side that the holy apostles were named springs by the prophet in a figurative sense.” So he wants the apostles to be the springs, but the prophets do not please him.

3.25  Why? Is it not because he could not place the Savior’s flesh before them? Yet the Son of God, who teaches these things about himself in Proverbs, existed even before the natural springs that can be perceived by the senses, which Moses also mentioned in his account of the making of the world when he said, “A spring went up out of the earth and watered the whole face of the earth,” and again, “A river goes out of Eden to water the garden.” And the one who speaks to Job also mentions springs of the sea when he says, “Have you come to the spring of the sea, and walked in the tracks of the abyss?”

3.26  Scripture also teaches that there are some waters above the heavens, when it says, “Praise him, you heavens of the heavens, and you waters above the heavens.” So it follows that we should understand there are springs of those waters too, whatever their nature may be, so that the one who says he existed “before the springs of the waters came forth” may be shown to be older than those as well.

3.27  But Marcellus gives none of this any thought and is unwilling to take any trouble. He stays with the same interpretations, since even when he quotes the words (No. 22), “Before the mountains were settled,” and “before all the hills he begets me,” he says that the mountains and hills are the apostles and the successors of the apostles. By this, in the manner of a proverb, he means to show how righteous their way of life was compared with other people.

3.28  By his account, then, the same people were the springs, the same were the mountains, and the same were the hills. But just as it is not natural to say that springs and mountains are the same thing when we look at them as they are (for springs of water have nothing in common in quality with the height of mountains), so too in things understood allegorically in the mind, one must show a difference between the springs, the mountains and the hills as they are understood in the interpretation. But he knows nothing that has been properly tested. He confuses everything through carelessness, and declares that springs of waters, mountains and hills are the same people. He says that all these are the apostles, and he does not explain how they differ.

3.29  Then why did he not likewise call the people who were made perfect in righteousness and godliness before the Savior’s flesh “mountains and hills”? The only reason would be that he could not have the Savior’s flesh come into being before them. So applying these words to the Savior’s flesh is forced and strained. And how could “he begets me” fit the flesh? For he said that he was begotten before the springs, before the mountains and before the hills, when he said: “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works; before the age he established me.”

3.30  If, then, the flesh were saying these things, as Marcellus thinks, how could the flesh say, “Before all the hills he begets me”? Suppose the flesh did exist before the apostles. But how does the flesh claim to have been begotten by God? Marcellus evidently thought that the flesh was created, having not existed before.

3.31  For he said (Nr. 10): “Our Master, God, truly created, making what did not exist. For the flesh which the Word took up was not already existing; he created it when it did not exist.” So we understand that it was created. But how could it be said that it was also begotten by God? Our Savior says, “What is born of the flesh is flesh,” and the apostle says, “born of a woman, born under the law.”

3.32  How, then, could the flesh say of the God of all, “Before all the hills he begets me”? I think it is plain to everyone that this interpretation is forced. But one could say without any strain, and without any allegorical method at all, that these words are true of the Son of God. He existed before the earth, and was there before the physical springs of water came forth, before the deeps, as they are literally called, and before the shape of the earth was set in the heights of the mountains and hills. For “all things came into being through him, and apart from him not one thing came into being.”

3.33  Suppose someone asks why he did not teach that he existed before the heavens, or before the divine powers and spirits above the world, in the heavens or beyond them. The answer is that the Word did not mention these for the time being, because through Proverbs he was giving a kind of elementary training to those who were still infants in their souls.

3.34  This is clear from the way it says at one time, “Listen, son, to your father’s instruction, and do not reject your mother’s rules,” and at another, “Son, pay attention to my laws, and bend your ear to my words,” and again, “Son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when you are rebuked by him,” and, “Son,

3.35  if you are good to yourself, you will be good to your neighbors; but if you turn out bad, you alone will draw up the evils.” You could gather countless similar sayings of your own from the book of Proverbs. In them the Word clearly speaks to people who are infants in their souls.

3.36  In the same way Moses, as a teacher of those whose minds were immature, spoke of heaven and earth and the making of visible things. But he did not mention the creation of angels, or of divine powers, or of holy spirits, because his pupils could not yet take in teaching about them.

3.37  So it is reasonable that the Word in Proverbs also taught such people by starting from the mountains, hills and springs on the earth, as things better known to them. He began, as it were, from a lower step, so that he could lead his pupils by the hand to higher things, and prepare them to move on from the smaller things to the more divine.

3.38  That is so if one looks no further than the wording. But if someone wants to understand these things at a deeper level, he will not apply them to the apostles any more than to all the righteous and God-loving men who have ever lived. He will go on from there to the divine and angelic powers, saying that by “mountains” and “hills” the text hints at the different ranks of angels, archangels and divine spirits, thrones, lordships, rulers and authorities.

3.39  For the divine apostle taught that all these things too were created “through him and for him,” and that he is “before all” of them. He was probably starting from this passage, because in it the Son of God is the speaker of the words, “Before the mountains were settled, before all the hills he begets me.” The other things, then, he said were settled, but he said that he alone was begotten before the establishing of the things mentioned.

3.40  The same apostle also knows the heavenly Jerusalem, and the heavenly mountain on which he says it stands. He says: “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the festal gathering and assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven.” The only-begotten Son of God existed before all these things. So in the Proverbs he was hinting, in a hidden way, at the account of his own ineffable begetting.

3.41  That he meant us to understand these things becomes clear from what he joins on next: “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.” Here the noble interpreter of the Scriptures was shut out and stopped. He went no further, because he could not make the sequence agree with the explanation he had given about the Savior’s flesh.

3.42  For he had spoken of the flesh again and again, and declared that everything was said about the flesh. He got as far as the mountains and hills, saying these were the apostles. But what follows these words he deliberately passed over in silence, no longer daring to go further in the text.

3.43  So here he halts his argument. But after saying a great deal in between, he abandons the interpretation about the flesh and acknowledges that it is the Word of God who speaks these words. He says in these very words (Nr. 54): “For before the world existed, the Word was in the Father. But when God the Almighty purposed to make everything in heaven and on earth, the coming-to-be of the world needed an active, working power. And so, since nothing else existed except God (for it is agreed that all things were made by him), then the Word came forth and became the maker of the world. Even before this he had been preparing it inwardly, in thought, as the prophet Solomon teaches us when he says, ‘When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him,’ and ‘as he set the springs under heaven on a sure footing, when he made the foundations of the earth strong, I was beside him, fitting things together;

3.44  I was the one in whom he delighted.’” For the Father naturally delighted as he made all things with wisdom and power through the Word. That is Marcellus. If he has at last, and barely, admitted that these words are spoken in the person of the Word, he must accept that the whole connected sense of the passages before us refers to that same Word of God.

3.45  For the one who said, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him,” is the very one who said, “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works.” We were shown at the outset that it is one and the same person who runs through all the passages before us. So the very one who said, “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works,” went on to say, “Before the age he established me,” and “In the beginning, before he made the earth,” and “Before the mountains were settled, and before all the hills, he begets me.”

3.46  And the same speaker also joined on, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him,” and what follows it. Now if it was the Word who said these things, how could he be inside God, coeternal with God and one and the same with him, and yet say that he had been created and begotten? For, as I said, it was shown that the person who runs through all the passages before us is one and the same.

3.47  But if he did at last admit, though late, that these words were spoken in the person of the Word who is in God, then his explanation about the Savior’s flesh has been forced aside. All of that is shown to be stale, empty and pointless. But suppose it was the Savior’s flesh that said, “The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works,” according to the interpretation he gave. Suppose the flesh “was established before the age and in the beginning, before he made the earth” (the earth meaning the flesh, as he thought, because it was said, “You are earth, and to earth you will return”). And suppose it was the flesh that said, “Before he made the depths, before the springs of water came forth, before the mountains were settled, and before all the hills, he begets me” (because, as the wisest of men supposed, the flesh was begotten before the choosing of the apostles). Then it follows that “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him” is also spoken in the person of the flesh.

3.48  But no one in his right mind could ever agree with that interpretation. The word of truth will cry out loudly against him and show who it really was that spoke all this.

3.49  That the only-begotten Son, begotten from God, was a distinct one, living and subsisting, and existing even before the formation of all created things, the text itself shows by what it adds next: “When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him.” For he was with him and present with him before the heaven came into being, and before the things beyond heaven and everything in heaven. This is what the text hinted at when it said, “When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him.”

3.50  How did God “prepare” it, if not by laying down the law and the pattern, before it came into being, for how it must be formed? The Father laid out the pattern and made the preparation. He was considering how so great a heaven should be formed: how large it needed to be, what shape, and how many measures and parts. He was thinking of the things that were to be contained inside it, the things that would be outside it, and the things that would run their course within it. The Son, for his part, fixed his gaze on the Father’s thoughts and alone looked closely into the depths within him. He then went forward into the works, serving the Father’s wishes.

3.51  So it is said somewhere: “Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the highest places.

3.52  Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his powers. Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all the stars and the light. Praise him, heaven of heavens, and the waters above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he spoke and they came to be; he commanded and they were created.”

3.53  But even before heaven came into being, and the things beyond heaven and all that is in heaven (for by naming one thing the text includes everything), the Son of God existed. He was present with the Father and with him while the Father was still planning the formation of all these things. That is why he says, “When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him.” Then, like a good painter, he took the original patterns from the Father’s thoughts and carried them over into the substance of the works. He shaped them and gave them being, just as he saw them already existing in the Father’s mind.

3.54  He himself would be a trustworthy witness of this, teaching in the Gospels as follows: “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of himself unless he sees the Father doing it; for whatever that one does, the Son likewise does these things.

3.55  For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he himself does.” Here someone might reasonably ask how the Son does again what the Father has already done. But he himself resolved the question by saying, “For whatever the Father does, the Son likewise does these things.”

3.56  So the things done by the Son are likenesses of original works that existed beforehand in the Father’s hidden thoughts. The Son, looking intently at these in the Father’s mind, made copies of what he saw. That he looked into the Father’s depths was an act of the Father’s love, as he makes clear when he goes on to say, “For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he himself does.” So the Father showed his own hidden things, and the Son, contemplating them, gave real existence through his works to the works of the Father’s will. In this way, being with the Father and present with him as he prepared the heaven and what is in it, he taught this when he said, “When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him.”

3.57  The Father rejoiced even before the world came into being, looking at his own only-begotten Son and seeing himself in him as in an image in a mirror. That is why Wisdom says, “I was the one in whom he rejoiced every day.” The Son too was filled with gladness, delighting in the sight of the Father. He teaches this himself when he says, “I was glad before him at every time, when he was glad, having completed the inhabited world,”

3.58  where “the inhabited world” is understood as the full completion of all created things. As they were brought from non-being into being through the Son, the God of all rejoiced. This, then, is the true account, set out briefly and in summary from the divine Scripture. But the one who drives the passage from above down to the flesh of our Savior has run his understanding aground, twisting and misinterpreting the true meaning of the God-inspired Scripture.

3.59  Moreover, when he turns to the Word, he says that it is the Word within the Father, as in his reasoning and thought, who prepared the heaven.

3.60  At any rate, he said in these very words: “Before the making of the world, the Word was in the Father. But when the almighty God set out to make everything in heaven and on earth, the creation of the world needed an active power at work. For this reason, since nothing else existed except God (for all things are agreed to have been made by him), the Word then came forth and became the maker of the world. Even before this he had been preparing it inwardly, in thought, as the prophet Solomon teaches us when he says, ‘When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.’”

3.61  In these words it is right to look at how he deliberately turns a deaf ear. He does not listen to “I was present with him,” which plainly means the presence of the Son together with the Father. Instead he declares, against the Scripture, that nothing else existed except God before created things came to be. He did not shudder to utter this saying, which denies the Son. Nor was he put to shame before the divine Scripture, which testifies that before the creation of heaven the Son alone was present together with the Father. For it says, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.”

3.62  The word “with,” added to “be present,” shows presence in the same place along with another. So the Son teaches that he was not simply present, but was present together with the Father. And the Father did not simply rejoice; he rejoiced in addition at the presence of the Son. That is why the Son says, “I was the one in whom he rejoiced day by day.”

3.63  And how could it fit a Word with no real existence of his own, but who is only in God himself and active only by way of signifying, that this Word should also be “glad before the Father”? Being glad, and “before him,” plainly set forth his distinct existence. But Marcellus takes no account of any of this. He sets aside the Son, and says that the Word, being inside God, sometimes goes forth in active power and sometimes is inside him and not active. He does not see that to say something is inside and outside God supposes something composite and a bodily condition. It is not right to admit that of the unbegotten and bodiless nature.

3.64  And how, when the Word came forth, did he become the maker of the world? Was it by tongue and voice, with God surely using speech as well? And to whom would he have spoken, if no one else was with him? To whom would he have talked, if no one was present? Or did he talk to himself, using voice and speech, so that the Word came forth from him in that way?

3.65  And why could he not have established, by active power, what he wished while the Word was inside him? Among men, most craftsmen finish their works even in silence, and above all when no one is with them while they work. So what stopped God from establishing all things in some such way, having the Word in himself? But Marcellus even supposes the picture of a sculptor talking to himself and saying to himself: “Come, let us make, let us shape a statue.” In the same way, he says, the Master of all, God, said to himself, “Let us make man.” As has already been shown many times in the earlier sections, I think his denial of the Son of God has been laid bare by them.

3.66  For to say that God talks to himself, having his own Word inside him, would belong to some Jewish way of thinking. But to say that he is himself the Father of the Word within him, and that the Word within him is his Son, was the mark of Sabellius’s false teaching.


CHAPTER 4

4.1  So again, to say that the three are one, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, is also Sabellius’s teaching. Marcellus himself declared this too, writing somewhere as follows: “For it is impossible for three hypostases to be united in a monad, unless the triad first has its beginning from a monad. For the holy Paul said that those things are summed up in a monad. They differ in nothing from God in unity, for the Word and the Spirit differ from God in unity alone.”

4.2  Next he tries to establish this point, going on to say (Nr. 60): “If then the Word is shown to have come out from the Father himself and to have come to us, and the Holy Spirit, as Asterius also admitted, proceeds from the Father, and again the Savior says about the Spirit, ‘He will not speak from himself, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will announce to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and announce it to you,’ is not the monad shown here, not plainly and openly but in an unspeakable way, expanding into a triad and yet in no way willing to be divided?”

4.3  “For if the Word proceeds from the Father, and the Spirit too is acknowledged to proceed from the Father, and again the Savior says of the Spirit, ‘He will take from what is mine and announce it to you,’ is it not perfectly clear that some hidden mystery is being uncovered? For how could he say about the Spirit at one time that he proceeds from the Father, and at another time, ‘He will take from what is mine and announce it to you,’ and again, after breathing on the disciples, say, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ unless the monad, being undivided, expands into a triad?”

4.4  “For how, if the Spirit proceeds from the Father, does he promise that the Spirit will receive this service from the Son? If they were two persons divided from each other, as Asterius said, then one of two things is necessary. Either the Spirit, proceeding from the Father, does not need service from the Son (for everything that proceeds from the Father must be perfect, in no way needing help from another), or, if he receives from the Son and administers grace out of the Son’s power, he no longer proceeds from the Father.”

4.5  And after other remarks he adds (Nr. 60): “But if the Gospel says that he breathed on the disciples and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ it is clear that the Spirit came out from the Word. How then, if the Spirit came forth from the Word, does the same Spirit again proceed from the Father?” And after other remarks he adds (Nr. 60): “So he did not speak rightly or fittingly when he said there are three hypostases, and he said it not once but twice.” By these arguments and others like them, this very wise man tries to establish that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one and the same, with three names laid down for a single hypostasis.

4.6  For he did not grasp, in these passages, how the Son is said to proceed from the Father and the Holy Spirit likewise. Nor has he been able to understand how the Savior said of the Holy Spirit, “He will take from what is mine and announce it to you,” or how he breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This will be easy to resolve for those who look at it reverently, if one reasons as follows. The Son was always with the Father and present with him, somewhere within the inner sanctuary, so to speak, the untrodden places of the Father’s kingdom. Then, when he was sent out by the Father for the salvation of the human race, he said that he had come out from the Father. He made this clear elsewhere too, through a parable, speaking about himself: “The sower went out to sow.”

4.7  For where did he go out from, if not from the innermost palace of the Father’s divinity? By the same reasoning the Holy Spirit, who always stands beside the throne of God (for “ten thousand times ten thousand” stand beside him, according to Daniel), was also sent out. Sometimes he was sent in the form of a dove upon the Son of Man, and sometimes upon each of the prophets and apostles.

4.8  This is why it is said that he too proceeds from the Father. And why are you surprised? Even of the devil it is said, “And the devil went out from the Lord,” and a second time it is said, “But the devil went out from the Lord.” You could find the same in the case of Ahab, where Scripture goes on: “And an evil spirit came out and stood before the Lord and said, ‘I will deceive him.’”

4.9  But those are opposing spirits, and this is not the time to inquire into how or in what sense that was said of them. The only-begotten Son of God teaches that he himself has come out from the Father because he is always with him. The same is true of the Holy Spirit, who likewise is other than the Son. The Savior himself shows this plainly when he says, “He will receive from what is mine and will announce it to you.” This is a direct proof that the Son and the Holy Spirit are not one and the same. For what receives something from another is understood to be different from the one who gives.


CHAPTER 5

5.1  That the Holy Spirit is other than the Son, our Savior and Lord himself [taught] explicitly, in several ways, and in the plainest words. He said to his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Paraclete, to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive.” You see how he says that the Paraclete Spirit is other, and different from himself. And if he breathed on the disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” we must not overlook that the breathing was in some way a cleansing of the apostles’ souls, making them fit to receive the Holy Spirit.

5.2  For it does not say that he breathed into their face, nor that he breathed the breath of life, nor the Holy Spirit, as it is written of Adam that “God breathed into his face the breath of life.” Rather, it says first that he breathed, and then that he said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And the fact that he gives the Spirit again shows that he is other than what is given.

5.3  For the giver and the gift would not be the same. The one who supplied it was the Savior, what was given was the Holy Spirit, and the recipients were the apostles. The breathing, as I said, was either a cleansing of the apostles or a means of bringing about the imparting of the Holy Spirit, since it can be understood either way.

5.4  In any case, these words show that the Holy Spirit is other than himself. The same is shown by what follows, where it is again recorded that he said, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.”

5.5  He goes on: “I have spoken these things to you while staying with you. But the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom my Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and remind you of everything I said to you.” You hear how he uses the plural in “we will come and make our dwelling with him,” speaking of himself and the Father. And when he speaks about the Holy Spirit, he speaks as of another: “he will teach you all things.”

5.6  The words “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Paraclete to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth” are of the same kind. So the Paraclete, about whom he was teaching so much, was other than himself. It was fitting, then, that he added again: “I have spoken these things to you while staying with you. But the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom my Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and remind you of everything I said.”

5.7  For he says, in effect: “For the present I have spoken these things to you, but the Spirit of truth, whom my Father will also send, will teach you everything that you have not yet learned because you cannot yet bear it.”

5.8  “But when he comes” (I mean the Paraclete), he will complete the teaching, and also bring back to your memory what I am now saying. And again he adds: “When the Paraclete comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.” By all these words he clearly shows that the one sent by him, who is to bear witness about him, is other than himself.

5.9  He develops the point still further by adding: “But I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” In speaking of his going away, he was indicating his passion and his ascent to the Father after it.

5.10  Who, then, is so foolish that after so many statements he would say that the one speaking these words and the one he was speaking about are one and the same? For he hears him clearly distinguishing, saying that he is telling them the truth, and showing what that truth is: that if he himself does not go away, the Holy Spirit will never come.

5.11  Sometimes he says that the Father will send the Holy Spirit, and sometimes that he himself will. But he is not teaching contradictory things. For everything that the Son “sees the Father doing,” “the Son does likewise,” and “as he hears, he judges.” So by the Father’s judgment, when the Father also wishes it, then the Son, and [text uncertain: through him] the Savior, sends to his disciples the Spirit of truth, the Comforter. He sends him to encourage them and console them in what they suffered from those who drove them out as they preached the gospel.

5.12  He sends him not only to encourage them but also to teach them the whole truth of the new covenant. They could not bear to be taught it by the Savior when he spoke with them, because they were still held in bondage to the Jewish way of life.

5.13  He fulfilled these things in deeds after his resurrection from the dead. After it he said to Mary, “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father.” After this, having now gone up to the Father, he appeared to the disciples. The Holy Spirit had been sent, was with him, and stood ready for the service to which he was appointed. That is why he now allowed himself to be touched.

5.14  For then “he breathed on them,” and then he gave them a part of the gift of the Holy Spirit, the part that brings about the forgiveness of sins. For “there are distributions of gifts.” He gave them a portion of these at that time, while he was with them and present among them. Afterward he filled them with a greater and more perfect power. Concerning this he said to them in the Acts of the Apostles, “You will receive power from on high when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.” At that time he also promised that they would be baptized in the Holy Spirit. This too was fulfilled after his ascension, on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was sent to them in accordance with his words.

5.15  The matters at this passage need more thorough work and clarification, but now is not the time to go through them with exact examination, since that is not our present aim. What we had to show is that the Comforter Spirit is other than the Son. This has been demonstrated in various ways through what the Savior himself taught, and among other places in these words: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will tell you the whole truth.

5.16  For he will not speak from himself, but whatever he hears, and he will announce to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and announce it to you.” In these words he again promises that his disciples will learn from the Holy Spirit what he himself has not taught. He speaks as of another when he says “when he comes,” and “he will not speak from himself,” and “he will glorify me,” and “he will take from what is mine.” To suppose that the Savior is saying all this about himself is a terrible and hard-to-cure silliness.

5.17  No, through these words the Savior himself clearly taught that the Holy Spirit is other than himself. The Spirit surpasses all in honor, glory and precedence, and is greater and higher than every intellectual and rational being. This is why he is included with the holy and thrice-blessed Trinity.

5.18  Yet he is [text uncertain: subordinate] to the Son. The Savior shows this by saying, “For he will not speak from himself, but whatever he hears he will speak.” From whom he will hear, he makes plain by saying, “He will take from what is mine and announce it to you.” By “what is mine” he clearly means his treasury, for in him “are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, hidden.”

5.19  The Son, as the only-begotten Son, receives from the Father and hears from the Father. The Holy Spirit, however, is supplied through him. That is why he says, “He will take from what is mine and declare it to you.” Now the God who is over all is also called Spirit, as the Savior himself taught when he said, “God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.” He will truly be holy of holies himself, and “resting among the holy ones.” But the Son of God is also Spirit, and he himself is likewise a Spirit, holy of holies, if indeed he is the image of the invisible God.

5.20  That is why it is said of him, “The Lord is the Spirit,” and “The Spirit before our face is Christ the Lord.”

5.21  But the Holy Spirit is other than the Father and the Son. To show what is distinctive about him, the Savior called him the Paraclete. By the title “Paraclete” he marks off the Spirit from what is merely a shared name, since the angelic powers might also be called spirits: it is said of God, “who makes his angels spirits.” But none of these can be put on the same level as the Spirit the Paraclete. For this reason he alone is included with the holy and thrice-blessed Trinity.

5.22  The Savior commanded his apostles to hand on the mystery of his new birth to all who believe in him from the nations in no other way than by baptizing “them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The Father is the one who has authority and bestows the grace. The Son serves in this grace, for “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” The Holy Spirit, that is, the Paraclete, is himself the one who is supplied, according to the distributions of gifts in him: “To one is given through the Spirit a word of wisdom, to another a word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith in the same Spirit,” and the other gifts listed alongside these in the same way.


CHAPTER 6

6.1  The Holy Spirit by nature dwells only among the holy. He is supplied through the Son to those whom the Father judges fit. It is his work to make holy all those to whom he gives a share of one or more of the gifts that are in him. So it is with the prophets, the apostles and every soul that loves God, and probably also the higher, divine powers, who share in the holiness that comes from him. But the Son alone is honored with the Father’s divinity. He is the maker and creator of all created things, visible and invisible, and indeed of the very existence of the Spirit the Paraclete. For all things “came into being through him,

6.2  and apart from him not one thing came into being,” and “in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.” But the God beyond all things, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is an unspeakable good, greater than every reckoning, thought, word and imagining. He is the leader and ruler together of all things, whatever they are and of whatever kind, and also of the Holy Spirit himself and of the only-begotten Son. It is fitting, then, that he alone is called by the apostle the God “over all and through all and in all,” where he says, “One Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

6.3  He alone may be called “the one God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” while the Son is “the only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father.” The Spirit the Paraclete is neither God nor Son, since he did not receive his origin from the Father in the same way as the Son. He is one of the things that came into being through the Son, because “all things came into being through him, and apart from him not one thing came into being.”

6.4  This, then, is roughly how the mysteries are handed down to the holy and catholic church through the divine words. But Marcellus confuses everything. At one time he plunges into the whole depth of Sabellius. At another he tries to revive the heresy of Paul of Samosata. At another he is plainly shown to be a Jew. For he introduces one hypostasis with three persons, just as it has three names, saying that God, the Word within him, and the Holy Spirit are the same.

6.5  Then Marcellus moves on from there to the apostolic teaching about Christ, and again he uses twisted interpretations. The divine apostle speaks plainly of the Son of God as God, and says: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, because in him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”


CHAPTER 7

7.1  This remarkable man then throws himself down upon the flesh and declares that the flesh itself is the image of the invisible God. He does not hear that the words “who is the image” are expressed in a masculine form. For he somehow fits the word “who” to the flesh, and says that the flesh is what is meant, as though it were “the image of the invisible God.” And again he says that “he is before all things” was spoken about the flesh, and he is not ashamed to take the word “he” as referring to the flesh.

7.2  He also says that the one called “firstborn of all creation” is so called because of the flesh. He persists without hesitation in speaking of the flesh when he says that “the things in the heavens and on the earth” were created, “both the visible and the invisible.” He does not shrink from saying that thrones and lordships and rulers and authorities were counted worthy of the creation in Christ through the savior’s flesh. I have already set out Marcellus’s words on these matters in the preceding writing. To spare the proportions of my argument, I will be content with the testimony of those very words. I do not think I need a longer demonstration that this explanation of the apostle’s wording is twisted and forced, since the shamelessness of the interpretation is plain to everyone.


CHAPTER 8

8.1  Yet after saying so much about the savior’s flesh, he does not even keep it safe for us. I wish he had at least kept a godly way of thinking about it! As it is, after everything he has said about it, he declares that at the completion of the ages the flesh is left behind, abandoned by the Word. He writes this: “If, then, he confesses that the flesh is of no benefit to him, how is it possible that what is from the earth and is of no benefit should also be with the Word in the ages to come, as though it were useful to him?”


CHAPTER 9

9.1  And he says the same thing a second time in another place: “If, then, Paul said that at the time of the restoration of all things the creation itself will be changed from slavery into freedom (for he says, ‘that the creation itself will be set free from the slavery of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God’), how could it still be possible for the form of a slave, which the Word took up, being the form of a slave, to be with the Word [because of itself]?”


CHAPTER 10

10.1  You see what words he has dared to utter against the flesh of our savior. He has not considered that, even before the ascension into heaven, while the flesh was still on earth before the passion, it was glorified in this way on the mountain. He showed to only three of his chosen disciples an image of his kingdom, so that his face shone like lightning and flashes of light blazed out.

10.2  (For the divine Scripture says, “His face became like the sun, and his garments white as light.”) But Marcellus also did not understand what kind of body of glory the divine apostle was speaking of, or that he was teaching that our bodies too will be conformed to that body, when he said, “who will transform the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory.” Nor did he understand how the mortal is to be swallowed up by life, as the apostle wrote when he said, “in which we do not wish to be unclothed, [but to be clothed over], so that the mortal may be swallowed up by life.” In his ignorance of these things, he insists that the Word will become one and the same with God as he was before, but what will ever become of the flesh left behind by the Word, I do not know.

10.3  Listen then to how he says this: “And if someone should ask about this flesh which has become immortal in the Word, what do we say to him? That we do not think it safe to lay down doctrine about matters we have not learned precisely from the divine Scriptures. For how is it possible to do this for those who also overturn the doctrines of others?”

10.4  But we will say to those who want to learn from us the exact account of this matter: we obey the holy apostle, and we know that we should look at hidden mysteries as he himself said. “For now we see,” he says, “through a mirror, [in] a riddle, but then face to face,” and so on. So do not ask me about things I have not clearly learned from the divine Scripture. For that reason I will not be able to speak clearly about that divine flesh which shared in the Word. Then he who confesses that he can say nothing admits also that he has learned nothing from Scripture.

10.5  Such are the statements he made about the flesh. He did not take them from Scripture, he did not receive them from others, and he did not learn them from the church. He fashioned them for himself and devised, out of his own reasoning, a strange offspring foreign to the truth. He did not even bear in mind the Scripture that says, “Do not add to his words, lest he reprove you and you be found a liar,” and “Woe to those who prophesy from their own heart.”

10.6  See, then, what great impiety he has fallen into. He threw the whole theology of the pre-existent only-begotten Son onto the flesh, and in so many words proclaimed it a crown of victory. For he said (no. 114) that the Word of God prepared human flesh to become immortal through the resurrection, and, as though he had put on a crown of victory, sits at the right hand of the Father. Yet this same man says that the flesh will be left desolate and orphaned at the end of all things. He unites the Word with God, but separates the flesh from the activity of the Word, and leaves it, I do not know how, immortal and incorruptible, yet lifeless and without any activity from the Word.

10.7  And again he tries to support this from the divine readings, which he has not understood. For our Savior spoke to those who did not understand his teachings about his flesh and blood: “Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man going up where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is of no use at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”


CHAPTER 11

11.1  Without giving thought to the meaning of the saying, he supposed that the Savior was rejecting the flesh he had taken from the holy virgin. Then from this he tries to establish that after the consummation of all things the Word who is in God will leave the flesh desolate, without his own activity. At any rate he says in these very words (no. 104): “For concerning the flesh with which he lived among the disciples, he speaks like this: ‘Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man going away where he was before? The Spirit gives life; the flesh is of no use at all.’” If, then, he admits that the flesh is of no use to him, how is it possible that flesh which is from the earth and of no use should also, in the ages to come, be with the Word as though it were profitable to him? You see how great a distortion of the gospel saying he has used, because he did not understand the saving word of the Word: how it was said, and for what reason.


CHAPTER 12

12.1  But you, take up the Gospel writing and see how the whole teaching of our Savior was not about the flesh he had taken, but about the mystical body and blood. For he had fed the crowds with the five loaves, and this gave those who saw it a great wonder. But most of the Jews made light of what had happened and said to him, “What sign then do you do, so that we may see and believe?” Then they brought up the manna in the wilderness, saying, “Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

12.2  To this the Savior answered, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.” Then he adds, “I am the bread of life,” and again, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and once more, “The bread that I will give is my body.” And again he adds, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves.”

12.3  “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.

12.4  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.” While he was going through these and similar things in a more mystical way, some of his disciples said, “This is a hard saying. Who can listen to it?” The Savior answered them: “Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man going up to where he was before?

12.5  It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is of no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.” By these words he was teaching them to hear in a spiritual way what had been said about his flesh and blood. “Do not suppose,” he says, “that I mean the flesh I wear, as though it had to be eaten. Do not imagine that I am commanding you to drink physical blood perceived by the senses. Know well that ‘the words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.’ So the words and sayings themselves are the flesh and the blood. Whoever shares in them continually, nourished as it were by heavenly bread, will share in heavenly life.”

12.6  “So do not let this offend you,” he says, “what I have said about eating my flesh and drinking my blood. Do not let the surface hearing of what I said about flesh and blood trouble you. For when these things are heard in a physical way, they ‘are of no help at all.’ But it is the Spirit who gives life to those who are able to hear spiritually.”

12.7  But the new interpreter of the Gospel teachings understood none of this. Listen to how he writes, in these very words (Fr. 105): “After he touched the human body and showed it to those who saw it, he said, ‘Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man going up to where he was before? The Spirit gives life; the flesh is of no help at all.’”

12.8  One could say to him: “And where, my good man, did you get this addition, which is not found in the Gospel text? You invent on your own that the Savior touched the human body and showed it to those who saw it before saying, ‘Does this offend you?’ You make it up yourself and dare to add it from yourself.” Having taken this bold step on his own, he thinks he can establish from it that the Savior’s flesh will be left without any share in the Word’s activity. He says (Fr. 104): “If, then, he confesses that the flesh is of no help to him, how can it be that the flesh, which is from the earth and is of no help, should also in the ages to come be with the Word as though it were beneficial to him?” In this ignorant and unlearned way, then, he set out to misinterpret the Gospel’s statement. And he likewise gave twisted interpretations of the apostles’ words.


CHAPTER 13

13.1  For example, in the Acts of the Apostles Peter said of our Savior, “whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration.” Marcellus did not grasp the meaning of this saying. From it he tries to put a limit on the kingdom of Christ, claiming that a boundary and a fixed deadline for his kingdom is indicated by the words “until the times of restoration.”

13.2  He says the same thing is confirmed by the Psalm that says, “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet,” and that Paul the apostle said this too: “For he must reign until he puts his enemies under his feet.” For he assumed that “until” and “up to” indicate a limited period of time. Listen, then, to how he writes, word for word (Fr. 104): “For this reason, it seems to me, God the Almighty, the Master, says to him, ‘Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet.’ Because of the human flesh, he seems to separate him only in activity, and as though setting a fixed time for his sitting at the right hand, he says to him, ‘until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet.’”

13.3  The sacred apostle explained this prophetic saying of David more plainly for us, saying something like this: “For he must reign until he puts his enemies as a footstool under his feet.” So, Marcellus thinks, his dispensation as man, and his kingdom, has some limit. And after other remarks he adds (no. 104): “And for this reason the Acts of the Apostles teach about this man, whom the Word of God took up and, having taken him up, sits at the right hand of the Father. They say: ‘whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration.’ These words too set a kind of limit and fixed term.”

13.4  After other remarks he adds to these words (no. 104): “How, then, could the form of a servant, which the Word took up, being the form of a servant, still be with the Word [through him]? Clearly and explicitly, the divine Paul has said that the dispensation of the Word in the flesh, which took place for our sake, happened within a short time between the ages past and the ages to come, and that it has an end just as it has a beginning. He said it in this way: ‘Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God, even the Father.’”


CHAPTER 14

14.1  Through all this Marcellus has failed to understand the “body of the glory” of the Son, and he denies that the Son’s kingdom has no end. He has not noticed that Scripture has a peculiar habit of its own in how it uses the word “until.” So, for example, the Savior said to his disciples, “Look, I am with you all the days until the end of the age.” He is not denying that he will be with them after the end as well. He is teaching that now, until the end, he will be with them, watching over and guarding all who are his disciples, and that after the end he will be with them in a better way, making them sharers in his kingdom.

14.2  So in the same way, “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies as a footstool under your feet,” and “whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration,” are not said as though he will no longer be there afterward. They are said because at the time of the end he is going to rise from the Father’s throne and make a second descent from heaven. The apostle teaches about this when he says: “The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord.” The Savior, then, must remain in heaven and sit at the Father’s right hand “until the end.” But at the very end of the whole order of things he will make his glorious second appearing and take his holy ones to himself, to be with him always. This is not for a limited time but for endless ages, for Paul says, “so we will always be with the Lord.”

14.3  So the saints, who will be with him always, will enjoy his kingdom in the kingdom of the heavens that has been proclaimed. But our fine fellow does not understand this. The divine apostle said of our Savior, “For he must reign until he puts his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” and again, “But when all things are subjected to him,

14.4  then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him, so that God may be all in all.” Marcellus follows his usual approach here and misinterprets these words as well. I do not know how he takes the Son’s being subjected to the Father to mean the Word’s being united with God. But when was the Word ever not united with him, if he was indeed the Word, existing eternally in God? How then can he say that “then” he will be subjected “to God and the Father”?


CHAPTER 15

15.1  We must also notice that the apostle said all things will be subjected to the Son himself, and he teaches that by the same subjection the Son will also be subjected to the Father. He says, “But when all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him,

15.2  GREEK: He does not hear “so that God may be all in all” in this way. For the apostle does not say that God will be “all” in the Son, but “in all.” That phrase would more likely suggest a kind of joining and union of all things, if God is going to be all in all. Yet Marcellus explains the Son’s subjection as a union of the Word, who will become one and the same with the Father, as he was before, according to what he himself said.

15.3  If, then, he defines subjection to the Father as union, it would follow that the subjection of all things to the Son also means the same union with him. The Son would then no longer exist by himself, nor would the multitudes of the saved who are to be subjected to him live a life of their own. Instead there would be a kind of smearing together and confusion of the whole, with the Son and all the rest becoming one and the same, and not only that, but with God himself as well.

15.4  For if all things are united to the Son by being subjected, and the Son is united to the Father by being subjected, see what follows from his argument.

15.5  But just as the apostle did not mean union when he said that “all things” will be subjected to the Son, but rather obedience from freely chosen purpose, and the glory and honor that all things will give him as Savior and King of the universe, so also the Son’s being subjected to the Father would signify nothing other than glory, honor, reverence, majesty and freely given obedience. He too will render these to God and Father, once he has made all people worthy of the Father’s divinity.

15.6  For in the meantime, since they are not yet worthy of it, he has gone ahead as a common Savior of all. He reigns with a kingdom that corrects the imperfect and heals those who need healing, bringing the enemies of the kingdom under his feet. The Psalm declares this when it says, “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”

15.7  But when he puts his enemies under his feet, and establishes those worthy of his kingdom in unending life, then death, the enemy of all, will be destroyed last. For no one will be dying any longer, since those worthy of the kingdom will then be living in eternal life. It is reasonable that death will be idle, having no one left to put to death.

15.8  When these things have been so prepared, all the saints will be subjected to the Son of God in a subjection that brings salvation. They will live eternally, since he is life; they will become wise, since he is wisdom; and they will be made rational, since he is Word. In the same way they will also become anointed ones, anointed with the Spirit of his fragrance. They will be shown to be lights of the new age, supplied with their lights from him. They will be sons of God, adorned with the Spirit of adoption. Those who are subjected to him will share in his other powers too, so that they become righteous from his righteousness and holy from his holiness. And since “the Word was God,” he will not begrudge them even divinity.

15.9  So the apostle will be proved right, who foretold that the saints would be “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” Indeed they will also have heavenly bodies, like the sun, the moon and the stars, and in this too they will share in his glory.

15.10  The same apostle showed this when he said, “from whom we also await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform the body of our humiliation to be like the body of his glory, according to the working of his power to subject all things to himself.” You see how by his power to subject all things to himself he will also transform our body to be like the body of his glory, and so bring our own to that state.

15.11  But if our body will be shaped like the body of his glory, how much more will the body of his glory share in his kingdom! And if our body will be swallowed up by life, as the apostle testified when he said, “in which we do not wish to be unclothed but clothed over, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life,” how much more will his own body, since it served his divinity, be swallowed up, not by life alone as ours is, but also by his divinity! So let no one ask, or be perplexed within himself, about what we ought to think concerning the Savior’s body. He hears Paul say plainly that “what is mortal” must be “swallowed up by life,” and that our body will be shaped like “the body of the glory of Christ, according to the working of his power to subject all things to himself.”

15.12  So then, he will subject all things to himself. And we must understand the subjection that brings salvation to be of this kind, in which “the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him.” He will make a subjection that cannot be spoken or described, one that suits him alone. At that time he will gather all who are under him around himself like a chorus, and “he will bring to God and Father the glory, the honor, the reverence and the majesty,” offering them to him as the cause of all good things.


CHAPTER 16

16.1  Then the apostolic teaching will also reach its conclusion, when it says, “so that God may be all in all.” We will understand this from another promise, in which God himself says, “I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.” But now, in the present age, the promise goes forward only partially and only to a few who are worthy, as in “we know in part, and we prophesy in part.” After the consummation of all things, when the new age has come, he will no longer dwell in a few, but in all who are then worthy of the kingdom of the heavens.

16.2  So it will be “all in all” in this way: he will be “dwelling in them and walking among them,” and will be “their God.” He will not think it beneath him that they be his people, and he will make them all his own. He will be in them in the same way that he is said to be in the Son himself, as the Son teaches when he says, “The Father is in me and I in the Father.” And he will be “all” in them by giving himself to all, to the degree that each one’s capacity can share in his divinity. The thrice-blessed hope and the endless, imperishable life will be established in this end. In it God will be “all in all,” filling everyone with the radiance of his divinity, a light beyond words. The Son will rejoice and exult in his accomplishment. He will set around himself, like a crown, those whom he has made worthy of blessedness, and under the Father’s oversight he will carry out a kingdom that never grows old and never ends. Then the sayings about him will be fulfilled, among them what the angel Gabriel said to the all-holy virgin about the one who would be born of her: that “he will reign for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

16.3  So the Son of God, reigning then, will hand over to his Father all those who are ruled by him. He will not cease from his kingdom or withdraw from it. For the divine apostle did not say that he will cease from the kingdom. Otherwise he would have written the opposite of what Gabriel declared to the virgin, that he will reign for ever and that there will be “no end” of his kingdom. Rather, the apostle said that he will hand over “the kingdom,” that is, those who are ruled by him, “to God and Father.”

16.4  For when all have been brought to perfection under him, he will hand them over to the Father, glad, as it were, at his accomplishment, as one who has received a deposit entrusted to him. This is what he teaches when he says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” So, as a good guardian, he will bring the deposit safe and strong in every way and hand it over to God. Like a high priest, he will present to him all who are consecrated under him, clothed in white and shining like lightning, as it were in the most brilliant robes, with the imperishable bodies of the resurrection. In this way they will not only enjoy the kingdom under him, but will also be filled with the unspeakable good things of the Father.

16.5  For in this way, according to the apostle, “God will be all in all,” when the Son brings those he has ruled to him, so that this whole result comes about, I mean that the Father is “all in all.” As the Father was before in the Son, according to the words “the Father is in me and I am in the Father,” so then he will also be in all who have been brought to perfection under the Son.

16.6  For the apostle did not say that the Son would cease from his kingdom and God would reign instead. He said that the Son would hand over “the kingdom to God and the Father,” showing that the trust committed to him is kept safe and is sufficient for the worship and priestly service of the Father. And God will be “all in all,” dwelling and walking “in them” as God and becoming everything to them. To some he will be master, to others king, to others something else. But to all together he will be God, becoming everything to them by the divine excellences and powers that are in him.

16.7  This is the end of the thrice-blessed hope that the great apostle described when he said, “that God may be all in all.” He will be all things in all, in proportion to the capacity of each, supplying to all the different aspects of his Godhead. But for his only-begotten Son alone he will keep the choice and fatherly glory, honor and kingdom, which is shared with none of the rest.


CHAPTER 17

17.1  17. If these things need to be sealed with a prophetic seal, then to confirm what has been said I will use the prophetic Spirit as witness, speaking these very things through the prophet Ezekiel in words like these: “Thus says the Lord, the Lord: Behold, I will seek out my sheep and visit them. As a shepherd seeks his flock on a day when there is darkness and cloud among sheep that have been scattered, so I will seek out my sheep.” And after other things: “And I will save my sheep, and they shall no more be plunder. And I will judge between ram and ram.

17.2  And I will raise up over them a shepherd, and he will shepherd them: my servant David. And he will be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be God to them, and David will be a ruler in their midst. I the Lord have spoken, and I will make a covenant with David.” And after other things he repeats the same prophecy, saying: “And I will rescue them from all their lawless deeds in which they sinned, and I will cleanse them, and they will be my people, and I will be God to them. And my servant David will be ruler in their midst, and he will be shepherd of them all.”

17.3  And again he adds: “And David my servant will be their ruler forever.” Notice in all this that God is said to be not shepherd or ruler but God to those who are counted worthy of the blessed end. But David is prophesied to become ruler and shepherd of these same people. Here “David” is a veiled way of speaking of Christ, because Christ came “from his seed.”

17.4  This is clear from the fact that David had died long before the time when these words were spoken. The prophet Daniel prophesies the same things more plainly, naming Christ the Son of God “son of man” in plain terms, just as the writing of the holy Gospels is accustomed to call him. He speaks in this way: “I was watching in a vision of the night, and behold, with the clouds of heaven one like a son of man was coming, and he reached the Ancient of Days, and was brought before him. And to him were given rule and honor and kingdom, and all peoples, tribes and tongues will serve him.

17.5  His authority is an everlasting authority which will not pass away, and his kingdom will not be destroyed.” You see that here too the prophet shows that the imperishable, ageless and endless kingdom belongs not to the Word who is in God but to the Son of man. And he teaches clearly that the one who receives the imperishable kingdom from the Ancient of Days, that is, from the Father himself, is someone other than the Ancient of Days, namely the Son of man.

17.6  But Marcellus lays it down that the Father and the Son are one and the same, a single hypostasis lying beneath two names. He even dares to put a limit on Christ’s kingdom. He shamelessly declares that Christ’s kingdom will come to an end after the time of judgment, and he writes as follows (no. 101): “Here the apostle uncovers a very great mystery for us, when he says that there will be an end of Christ’s kingdom;

17.7  and the end will be then, when everything has been put in subjection under his feet.” He then develops the argument somewhat like this (no. 102): “In the sayings we gave earlier we said that our Lord Christ had a beginning of his kingdom, using proofs from the divine Scriptures.” And he adds (no. 102): “In fact, anyone well supplied could show, from countless sayings as testimony, that the man received the beginning of a kingdom through the Word.

17.8  If, then, he received the beginning of a kingdom not more than four hundred years ago in all, it is nothing strange that the apostle says that the one who obtained this kingdom such a short time before will hand the kingdom over to God.”

17.9  And after other remarks he adds (no. 103): “What, then, are we to learn about the human flesh which the Word took up for our sake less than four hundred years ago? Will the Word have it in the ages to come as well, or only until the time of judgment?” Such were the things Marcellus dared to say. But the prophets of God, who define Christ’s kingdom as without end, say that after the time of judgment he will take hold of the beginning of the new age. Look how the prophet Ezekiel sets up a judgment of God’s sheep, and after their judgment places David over them as shepherd, and foretells that the same man will be their ruler.

17.10  And Daniel, having said beforehand, “I kept watching until thrones were set, and the Ancient of Days sat down; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was a flame of fire, its wheels burning fire. A river of fire was flowing before him; thousands upon thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the court sat, and books were opened” — after seeing these things first, he next sees the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven coming to the Ancient of Days and receiving the imperishable kingdom. So then, at that time too he will have a beginning of reigning over those worthy of blessedness, in a way surpassing and better than now.

17.11  The Gospel bears witness to this, where the Savior himself puts his seal on the prophetic words, handing on to his disciples the teaching about the end of the age, saying: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory; and all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will set the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right: Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Observe how these words agree with what was said in the prophecy about the judgment of sheep and rams, and how the Son of Man is introduced as king after the judgment of the sheep, while his Father is God.

17.12  For he himself taught this when he said, “Then the king will say to those on his right, Come, you blessed of my Father,” in keeping with the David named in the prophecy. The prophecy teaches that he will be shepherd and ruler of the sheep, intending to shepherd and rule God’s flock under God’s oversight.

17.13  We must also give attention to this: what the apostle said in the words “when he abolishes all rule and all authority and power” the prophecy hinted at when it said, “And I will destroy the evil beasts from the earth.”

17.14  For what could the beasts be, which in earlier times troubled the sheep, other than the opposing powers? When these have been removed and the new age, made fresh and cleansed of all evil, comes, it will have the Son of Man as king. Or, according to the prophecy, which speaks in a hidden way, it will have David as shepherd and ruler, because the Son of Man came “from the seed” of David. But God is not said to be acquired as its shepherd or ruler. It will have God himself as God, in a way higher than the thought of a shepherd, ruler and king. In the splendor of his divine power he will lead not only the sheep but the shepherd himself. For he says, “My servant David will be a shepherd to them, and I the Lord will be God to them.” He calls David a servant because of the fact that our Savior and Lord, “from the seed of David,” took “the form of a servant.”


CHAPTER 18

18.1  And this was the thrice-blessed end. Our Savior guarantees the promised kingdom of the heavens to those worthy of it. Then the God over all and his Father, the highest good of all, will give himself to those who are ruled by the Son, becoming “all in all.” Our Savior and Lord himself set this forth again when he sent up his great prayer on behalf of his disciples “to God and Father.” In it he asks, “That they all may be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me.

18.2  And I have given them the glory which you gave me, that they may be one just as we are one: I in them and you in me, that they may be made perfect into one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them just as you loved me.

18.3  Father, I want those whom you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they may see my glory which you have given me.” This is the great intercession of our Savior for us: that we may be with him wherever he is, and see his glory, and that we may be loved as his Father loved him. Whatever the Father gave him, may he give the same to us, and the glory he gave him, may he give the same to us. So he makes us all one, so that we are no longer many but all of us one, united with his divinity and the glory of his kingdom. This is not by the blending together of one substance, but by the perfecting of virtue to its highest point.

18.4  For this is what he taught when he said, “that they may be made perfect.” In this way, made perfect by him in wisdom, understanding, righteousness, godliness and every virtue, we shall be joined to the unspeakable light of the Father’s divinity. We too shall become lights through our union with him. We shall be made sons of God by sharing in fellowship with his only-begotten, through participation in the radiant flashes of his divinity.


CHAPTER 19

19.1  And in this way indeed we shall all become one with the Father and the Son. For just as he said that he and the Father are one, saying, “I and the Father are one,” so he prays that all of us, by imitating him, may share in that same unity. It is not as Marcellus says, that the Word is united to God and joined to him in substance. It is as the truth itself testified, the Savior saying, “The glory which you gave me I have given them, that they may be one just as we are one: I in them and you in me, that they may be made perfect into one.” For in this way the apostolic saying will then reach its goal, which said, “that God may be all in all.”

19.2  Marcellus, and those who are Sabellians in the same way as he, are accustomed to use three sayings when they try to show that the Father and the Son are one. Sometimes they keep repeating “I and the Father are one,” sometimes “The Father is in me and I in the Father,” and “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.” In answer to “I and the Father are one,” we must bring in the passages set out above, in which he prays further for his disciples, that they too may all obtain the same union. For he says, “that they may be one just as we are one.”

19.3  “I in them and you in me, so that they may be made perfect into one.” As for the words “The Father is in me and I in the Father,” we will set beside them his own saying, where he prays on their behalf: “As you, Father, are in me and I in you, so that they also may be in us, and I have given them the glory that you gave me.” By these words he plainly shows that the Father is in him in just the way he wants the Father to be in us. This does not mean that he and the Father are one in a single subsistence. It means that the Father shared his own glory with him, and that he in turn, imitating the Father, shares what is his with his own.

19.4  That is why he says, “And I have given them the glory that you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.” “As you, Father, are in me and I in you, so that they also may be in us.” So the Father and the Son are one in this way: they share a common glory. The Son shares that glory with his disciples, and he asked that they too be granted the same unity.


CHAPTER 20

20.1  And again, in the same way the Father was in him and he was in the Father. The divine apostle teaches the same about all who are worthy of the heavenly kingdom when he says, “Then God will be all in all.” So too it is said, “I will dwell in them and walk among them.” And we too “live and move and exist in him.” All of this is said about us, who each exist and live in our own subsistence and have nothing in common with the Father’s divinity.

20.2  Why, then, should anyone be surprised if similar words are used of the Son? They do not abolish his own subsistence, nor teach that he is himself both Father and Son. They show the special and distinguished honor the Father gives him, and the glory of the sharing that belongs to the only-begotten and divine Son.


CHAPTER 21

21.1  In the same way, then, “the one who has seen” him “has seen the Father.” This is because he alone, and no one else, is “the image of the invisible God,” “the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his subsistence,” and exists “in the form of God,” according to the apostolic teachings. Consider someone who looks at a royal portrait made as an exact likeness. By tracing the outlines of the features in the painting, he forms a picture of the king in his mind. In the same way, but far beyond any description and beyond every comparison, there is the person whose mind is clear, whose soul is cleansed, and whose eyes are enlightened by the Holy Spirit. He fixes his gaze on the greatness of the power of the only-begotten Son and Lord. He understands how “in him dwells all the fullness of the Father’s divinity,” and how “all things came to be through him” and “in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.” He reasons that the Father begat only him as the only-begotten Son, made like him in every respect. That person will in power see the Father himself through the Son, as the Father is contemplated by those whose minds have been purified. Of them it is said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

21.2  Since my aim is brevity, let this much be worked out here in summary. The matters in this passage need a very full treatment. Anyone who cares to grasp them accurately should give his mind to the readings from the Gospels and the apostles and, at leisure, gather the whole sense from them. As for the countless other things heaped together without order in Marcellus’s treatise, many of them said against the intention of Scripture, others forced and keeping no consistency, I consider that his refutation has already been made plain to sensible people by what we have examined. I will therefore be content with these points.

------------------------------------------------------------
Greek text: Erich Klostermann’s edition (Eusebius Werke, Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1906), digitised by Open Greek and Latin and the First Thousand Years of Greek project (CC BY-SA 4.0). Modern English © SermonIndex, CC BY-SA 4.0. https://sermonindex.net/fathers/eusebius-ecclesiastical-theology/