The holy bishop Chartenius, returning from the city of Lyons — in which, as we were departing from the council, he had stayed behind to dispatch certain private affairs — has reported that you proposed a question to him, nay rather to all of us. Which, had it been indicated to us while we were present, could easily, with the Holy Spirit supplying, have furnished to your inquiry the things that pertained to the cause. But because we ought to defraud so holy a solicitude by no delay of answer, knowing that — Christ being favorable — my judgment agrees in the faith of my brethren, I presume to answer your consultations by the service of the present page.
You bid me, then, to set forth for you the reasoning, or rather the authority, whereby it may be made plain that God possessed substance in His divinity before He took nature through the incarnation; and that by this that most pernicious heresy may be overcome, which, contending that our Lord took His beginning from Mary, even blasphemes God the Father by cursing the Son. For, so far as those men are concerned, something must needs have been added to the divine imperfection, if, remaining without a Son through so many ages past, now almost at the very end of the world You are slipping away, so that at once with Mary the offspring, and then the Father the fatherhood, should begin to be had: and, bound by the very necessity of their own assertion, whom they name Son they deny to be God.
For they perceive that sound ears cannot bear that God should be believed to have taken His beginning from man but a few years ago. Yet I know not to what effect our redemption arose, if God did not stand forth as the price of His own creature. For neither could man alone redeem man; nor did He who is in the heights and is also God stand in need of redemption. You bid me, then, that what we gather by reason we should also teach by authority. Let a few examples suffice for your keenness, examples which, drawn from many, are abundant for one who desires to know: yet for minds that resist and persist in their own unbelief, if some proofs do not satisfy, all of them together will avail nothing. Isaiah, the most clamorous of the prophets, foreseeing by the Spirit's revealing the nativity of Christ, says:
'For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of peace' (Isa. IX, 6). Consider, I pray, the force of the word. A child is given unto us, a son is given unto us. A child is born, and a son is given: born unto us is the son of man, given is the Son of God; and He shall be called the mighty God. As though he said: God and man, God who had created life, mighty who should conquer death. His divinity the prophet Jeremiah, under the guise of his scribe and disciple, thus sets forth, saying: 'This is our God; no other shall be esteemed beside Him. He found out all the way of knowledge; and gave it unto Jacob His servant, and to Israel His beloved;'
'and afterward He was seen upon earth, and dwelt among men' (Baruch III, 36). But if perchance there be anyone to whom these things which we cite from the ancients seem obscure, let him read the apostle Paul, who, when he made mention of the Lord's bodily forefathers, said: 'Whose are the fathers, and of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever' (Rom. IX, 5). For Thomas the apostle also, when in the body of the risen Mediator he had felt with probing finger the prints of the nails and the gaping mark of the pierced side, gathering the proofs of power amid the tokens of weakness, cried out thus: 'My Lord and my God' (John XX, 28).
Behold by what testimonies, willing or unwilling, the heretics themselves, kinsmen of the Jews in perdition, are overcome concerning the divinity of the Son: on whose word you may believe that the Jews in the Gospel of John disputed with the Lord, saying: 'Thou art not yet forty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?' (John VIII, 57). But He said: 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am' (Ibid., 58). Is there here, I ask, anything that anyone could obscure even if he wished? What now remains, save that He who is known to be older than Abraham should be called younger even than the world? And this, however contentious it be, can be overcome, since the Lord Himself, amid the insults of His passion, proclaims: 'Father, glorify me with that glory which I had with thee before the world was' (John XVII, 4).
But perhaps it is thought that this too must be added, that we should prove Him named 'Son' by the authority of some example. In the Psalm he says: 'The Lord said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee' (Ps. II, 7). Here 'this day' signifies eternity, which is equally without end and without beginning: for which the morrow does not bring forth a thing to come, nor does yesterday carry off a thing past. With us, therefore, through the alternations of darkness these things are changed; but with God, for whom there is no night, it is always 'today.' Yet if the heretics wish to understand this otherwise, it matters not to us. For since we treat only of the name 'Son of God,' let them take 'today' however they will, they will have to grant that the Father begot the Son before the mother brought Him forth.
Certainly Solomon at least, to whom his singular wisdom gives the greatest authority among the ancient Scriptures, most plainly and most clearly names the Son in the Proverbs, saying: 'Who hath bound the waters as in a garment? who hath raised up all the ends of the earth? what is His name, and what is His Son's name, if thou knowest?' (Prov. XXX, 4). Concerning things past, let these suffice. But the Apostle says: 'When the fulness of time was come, God sent forth His Son' (Gal. IV, 4). Indeed, He who is sent existed before He was sent. And if He had not been before Mary, then adoption, not nature, would have made Him, like the rest, a Son of God. Nor would He Himself have said in the Gospels: 'God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son' (John III, 16).
Not chosen, then, but begotten of that same ineffable Fatherhood: to whom, as true God no less than true man, it belongs faithfully in each nature that is properly His own—in His divinity to have remained of the Father, in His body to have begun of the mother. These things, then, since you have bidden it, I have sent as certain little tokens of our reply, and a few seeds of testimony toward the elucidation of the truth: which indeed your keenness or your eloquence may, with Christ's watering, nourish into the fruit of salvation. But if there be any among those against whom we contend, whom in your judgment you believe to have here answered fully to the whole—although there are most vigilant men in the Catholic faith and most faithful expositors—
nevertheless God will grant that I too may be able, at the writing-office to which I have presumed to be called, to suggest to you both a fuller number of examples and reasoning that may satisfy.