Anti-Arian Works 6 part 20/24

But she merited both to conceive and to bear that very God made man, not by human merits, but by the condescension of the Most High God, conceived and born of her. For unless God the Word, uniting human nature singularly to Himself, were born of the Virgin true and full man, never would there be conferred upon us, who are born carnally, a spiritual rising from God for our being born; but that a divine nativity might be granted to carnal ones, first the divine majesty of the Only-begotten Son was conceived and born in Him in the truth of flesh. For 'salvation was far from sinners' (Ps. 119:155); and 'our iniquities had separated us from God by a great division' (Isa. 59:2).

And because in the very nativity of our flesh we were held bound by the chain of death, from which we could be released only by the benefit of spiritual nativity, God was born of man, that men might be born of God. For this reason therefore Christ the Son of God, that is, true God and eternal life, was born and died in the truth of flesh, that we might be spiritually reborn in the one name of the Trinity in the sacrament of baptism. This the Apostle teaches, saying: 'Whosoever of us were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into His death' (Rom. 6:3). 15. Therefore the first nativity of Christ the Son of God is from God, the second from man; but our first nativity is from man, the second from God. And because God, being about to be born, received from the womb the truth of flesh,

therefore He granted to us, born again in baptism, the Spirit of adoption. That which He was not by nature from His first nativity, He was made by grace in His second nativity, that we, who by the nature of our first nativity were not, might by the grace of our second nativity be. But God, that He might be born of man, brought us grace; we however receive grace freely, that we might become partakers of the divine nature, by the gift of God being born of the flesh.

Because therefore the Son of God was made the son of man, therefore, 'as many as received Him (as blessed John the evangelist testifies) He gave them power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe in His name, who were born, not of bloods, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God' (John 1:12-13). But if the Only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, after the eternal nativity which the co-eternal Son has from the eternal Father, did not take up a second nativity for the grace of sanctifying man, man conceived in iniquities would not be free from the bonds of his first nativity. But because, according to the words of blessed John, 'for this the Son of God appeared, that He might destroy the works of the devil' (1 John 3:8);

He who in His first nativity, whereby He is from the nature of the Father true God and eternal life, has no beginning of nativity, the same God took from the Virgin temporally the beginning of a second nativity. CHAPTER VIII. The death of Christ according to the flesh destroyed both deaths in us. By the name of flesh the whole man is understood. — 16. That living Word of God, therefore, the state of His life abiding unchangeably, after the first nativity, whereby He is born of the Father with whom He is by nature one Life (because, 'as the Father hath life in Himself, so He hath given to the Son also to have life in Himself' [John 5:26];

the same Son of God in the nature of flesh was born, through grace, for the dead unto death, that we, after the death of the first nativity which we have from the flesh, might be reborn in the grace of the Spirit unto life. But the true and living God, nay God the Truth and eternal Life, unless He became the same true man, could not taste death; and the same man who tasted death, if He were not true God and eternal life, would not be able to conquer death. FOR EXCEPT HIM who is man in such a way that He is also God, 'what man is there who shall by death destroy death, or who shall deliver his soul from the hand of hell' (Ps. 89:48)?

Therefore the Only-begotten God, living and true, according to the flesh which He received from us, as He was conceived and born, so also, having died, rose again: because, 'coming to seek and to save that which was lost' (Luke 19:10), 'He was delivered up for our offences, and rose again for our justification' (Rom. 4:25). But the death of the Son of God, which He took up in the flesh alone, destroyed both deaths in us, namely of soul and of flesh; and the resurrection of His flesh attributed to us the grace both of spiritual and of corporal resurrection; that, being first justified through faith in the death and resurrection of the Son of God, we might be raised from the death of unbelief; whereby, since by nature we were 'children of wrath, even as the rest' (Eph.

2:3), were held bound; and after the first resurrection, namely of souls, which has been conferred upon us in faith, we may also rise in this very flesh in which we now live, never again to die. Nor for any other reason did the true God and eternal Life deign to receive our death to be destroyed, save that He might bestow upon us who believe in His resurrection His own life, to abide without end. The Lord of glory also for this reason endured the ignominy of the cross, that He might bestow His glory upon His faithful ones, as He Himself testified, saying: 'And I have given them the glory which Thou gavest me' (John 17:22). The Word therefore made flesh is one and full Christ.

But by the name of flesh here the whole man is to be understood, that is, the rational soul and the flesh. For Christ the Son of God, just as He received our flesh true and without sin, so He received His own soul true and without sin. And our flesh indeed He put on with the condition of human mortality, but our soul He received with its infirmities, without the stain of human iniquity, so that the divinity of Christ, by its own power bearing our infirmities in His soul, might without sin keep righteousness, and through it might also take away, by the gift of the resurrection, the penalty of mortality from His own flesh. Therefore 'Christ rising from the dead now dieth no more; death shall no more have dominion over Him' (Rom. 6:9). CHAPTER IX.

According to the custom of Scripture, by the name of flesh or of soul often the whole man is understood. But because it is familiar to the divine words to name, by the word 'flesh,' at once both flesh and soul in man, as it is written: 'I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh' (Joel 2:28); and: 'All flesh shall see the salvation of God' (Luke 3:6); and: 'As Thou hast given Him power over all flesh' (John 17:2); and: 'Unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved' (Matt. 24:22); by this very custom in the holy Scriptures the whole man is called by the appellation of flesh, just as, in the same place again, the whole man is shown by the naming of the soul alone.

For Abraham the patriarch, going out from his land, and from his kindred, and from his father's house, by the command and help of the calling God (Gen. 12:1) (for neither could he in any way fulfill what God commanded, unless He who had commanded helped him); when he led with him the men whom he had, going forth, is related to have taken with him 'the souls which he had acquired in Haran.' Jacob too, going down into Egypt, holy Scripture records that 'seventy-five souls were in his company' (Gen. 46:27). Blessed Peter the apostle also says that 'eight souls were saved through water' in the time of the flood (1 Pet. 3:20).

In the Acts of the Apostles too, when the Jews had been pricked by the sudden and wondrous preaching of the same blessed Peter, and by the change of the right hand of the Most High had been converted from unbelief to faith, it is written: 'that there were added in that day about three thousand souls' (Acts 2:41). By these testimonies, therefore, we recognize that by the name both of flesh alone and of soul the fullness of human nature is often designated. The Word therefore made flesh is one and full Christ;

one out of both and in both, that is, in the human and divine nature, in whom the glorious union of both natures so entirely persists, that whether anyone takes away the humanity from the divinity of Christ, or withdraws the divinity from the humanity, he dissolves Christ by sacrilegious unbelief and blasphemous preaching. But John the apostle, full of truth, testifies that 'every spirit that dissolveth Jesus is not of God, and this is Antichrist' (1 John 4:3). CHAPTER X. The Word, before it was made flesh, was not Christ. — 18. But what Christian would easily either not know or doubt, that the Word, God, before it was made flesh, was not Christ, but only God?

But then the same God the Word, who was ever in the form of God, began to be Christ, when God, emptying Himself, received the form of a servant without any diminution of His natural fullness. God therefore became Christ, that Christ might be perfect God and man: because the Word deigned to be made flesh, that the flesh might be named by the name of the Word, that is, of God. For neither was the flesh of Christ, before that same flesh was assumed by the Word, Christ; nor did the flesh itself, that is, the man himself, receive in itself the form of the living God; but God, who was in the form of God, received the form of a servant, and God, equal to the Father, 'being made in the likeness of men, was found in fashion as a man' (Phil.

(Phil. 2:6-7), and 'He who was rich, for our sakes became poor, that through His poverty we might be made rich' (2 Cor. 8:9). The Word therefore made flesh is one Christ; but that Word without flesh was eternal God, while the flesh of Christ without the Word not only was at some time not Christ, but was not even personally conceived. The Word therefore which was made flesh, before it was made flesh, remained eternal, but the flesh of the Word took its personal beginning in God the Word Himself. But because the Word made flesh is one Christ, the Son of God and of man, and the Word is not one and the flesh another, but the same is one Word-made-flesh;

therefore the same is one, who has no beginning, the eternal God begotten of the Father, and who has a beginning temporally according to the flesh, the same God-man created of the Virgin, one Only-begotten Son of God from the eternity of divinity, and from the beginning of the flesh. From the eternity of divinity, namely, the creator of things visible and invisible; from the beginning of the flesh, however, saving His people from their sins. From the eternity of divinity the same is co-eternal with the Father, of whom He is born ever-living; from the beginning of the flesh, however, the same is later than His mother, of whom He was temporally born, to die in time. For the Apostle testifies: 'That Christ, according to the time, died for the ungodly' (Rom. 5:6). 18 bis.

Therefore not the Trinity, that is, not the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit together, nor the Father alone, nor the Holy Spirit alone; that is, not He who begot the Son, nor He who proceeds from the Father, but the Son alone, that is, He whom the Father begot in the unity of nature as a Son co-eternal and co-equal to Himself, that is, one person out of the Trinity, Christ the only Son of God, that He might make us saved, was conceived in the flesh and born from the womb of the Virgin-mother, He who is true and supreme God from the womb of God the Father. Not the Trinity, but the Only-begotten Christ, the Son of God from the Father, was in the flesh a little child, and grew in the flesh.

Whom the perfect and immense Father, through the unity of divinity, knows to be equal to His own perfection and immensity. Not the Trinity, but 'the way, the truth, and the life' (John 14:6), Christ the Son of God, through the courses of the ages, from infancy unto perfect youth, mercifully passed through the human ages in the flesh—He who, abiding everlasting in the unity of the paternal nature, wondrously made the ages, and, being unchangeable, established the changes of times. Not the Trinity, but the splendor of the paternal glory, Christ, suffered in the flesh for us—He who, of God the Father alone, was born the impassible God.

That very One indeed—which must not be doubted—namely Christ the Son of God, we truly believe to have tasted death in the flesh for us, the immortality of His divinity being preserved, whom by the truthful preaching of the holy apostle John we hear to be the true Son of God the Father, and true God, and eternal life (1 John 5:20). Not the Trinity, but the Word made flesh, Christ the Son of God, rose again in that same flesh in which He deigned to be crucified and to die—He who, remaining Life, raised up that same flesh of His from the tomb. Not the Trinity, but Christ, who is over all, God, before the eyes of His disciples beholding Him, ascended in the flesh into heaven, to come in the flesh from heaven:

He who neither forsook heaven when He took flesh upon earth, and who, ascending into heaven in the flesh, did not forsake His own upon earth in His divinity. For this He promised, saying: 'Behold, I am with you all days, even unto the consummation of the world' (Matt. 28:20). That God, therefore, who is in the form of God, according to the prophecy of blessed Jeremiah, 'is great, and hath no end, exalted and immense'; of whom also a little later the same prophet says: 'This is our God, and there shall no other be accounted of in comparison of Him. He found out all the way of knowledge, and gave it to Jacob His servant, and to Israel His beloved' (Baruch 3:36-37):

He Himself, according to the form of a servant, in which He was made a little lower than the angels, afterward, as the same prophet says, 'was seen upon earth, and conversed with men' (ibid. 38). This mortal and changeable man the unbelievers beheld, whom those who now truly believe in Him shall behold with a purified heart as the naturally immortal and unchangeable God. For true faith now cleanses the hearts of men, that being made capable, it may present them to the glory of seeing God in the resurrection to come. CHAPTER XI. True faith believes one and the same Christ to be true God and true man. The Roman Church, the summit of the world.

But what is true faith, save without any hesitation to believe one and the same Christ to be true God and true man; and to proclaim one and the same as begotten of God the Father according to divinity, and of the Virgin Mary according to the flesh? For the apostolic authority testifies that one and the same is Christ 'who is over all things, God blessed for ever' (Rom. 9:5), sprung from the fathers according to the flesh; one and the same 'crucified through weakness, yet living by the power of God' (2 Cor. 13:4); one and the same both working mighty deeds in men, and enduring sufferings for men: for while Christ the Son of God wrought miracles according to His divinity, in the same God His humanity was capable of suffering;

and while the same Christ the Son of God suffered according to the flesh, in the same man His divinity remained incapable of suffering. Since, therefore, in Christ the only-begotten Son of God the properties of the natures do not divide the person, nor can the unity of the person confound or take away the properties of either nature; since He who naturally declares Himself to be the Truth preserved both in His one self, the natural truth remaining intact; therefore neither in His sufferings do we separate His impassible divinity from that humanity of Christ, nor do we in His mighty works judge that His humanity is in any way to be sundered from that divinity.

We therefore neither divide nor confound in His mighty works and sufferings that Christ, whom blessed Peter, by the Father's revelation, confessed to be the Son of the living God, though Christ Himself had first truly called Himself the Son of man (Matt. 16:16). Therefore true faith neither confounds nor divides the true Christ in His sufferings and mighty works, because the personal unity in Him admits no division, and the truth of either nature persists unconfused. For Christ God 'was delivered up for our offences' (Rom. 4:25), because He is true man; and the same man Christ 'rose again for our justification,' because He is true God. For unless the same were both true God and true man, He could not have been delivered up and put to death;

and the same true man, if He were not true God, could not have raised Himself up, the pains of hell being loosed. But because there is not one God and another man, but one and the same is Christ God and man, assuredly the same God Christ it is who received death in His flesh, and the same man Christ it is who destroyed death by His divinity. For the same Christ the Son of God, who could not die in His divinity, died in the flesh which the immortal God took as mortal. And the same Christ the Son of God, dead in the flesh, rose again, because dead in the flesh He did not lose the immortality of His divinity.

Hence it is that even after His resurrection, just as in the true scars, and in the true eating of the fish and honeycomb, He taught the solidity of true flesh in Himself, so entering through closed doors, He showed the true power of His eternal divinity in Himself: that it might be recognized both that the weakness of the dying Christ had been natural, and that natural majesty resided in the same one risen again. Whence Thomas, when, having put forth his hand, he is bidden to prove the truth of the wound in the side of the dead and risen Christ, recognizing in those scars the true power of the divinity that suffered and rose again—where he is bidden to touch with his fingers the place of the nails—proclaims with a faithful confession his very Lord and God, saying: 'My Lord, and my God!'

For he acknowledged that no other had risen again in his flesh by the natural power of his divinity than He who is of the nature of God the Father, true God and eternal life (John 20:28). Making known to us the truth of this faith, the very Creator and Redeemer of the human race, the maker and partaker of our nature, after He had shown true flesh in Himself by true scars, and true divinity by the power of resurrection—that He might show Himself to be believed and proclaimed as one and the same God and man—at once named in Himself the divine and human nature under the one name of the Son, saying to the apostles: 'Go, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit' (Matt. 28:19).

The teacher, therefore, and bestower of eternal salvation gave this form of holy baptism for this reason: lest anyone, dividing the natures in the same Son of God, should be ensnared in deadly error—if he should believe either that the human nature of the Son of God was foreign to the work of human redemption in the sacrament of baptism, or, confessing two persons in Christ, should be no longer a truthful worshipper of the Trinity, but a wicked assertor of a quaternity, and thereby worship together with the Father and the Holy Spirit not the Son but sons, whoever should judge that the faith of one person in Christ ought in any way to be rejected: since the same Christ Jesus is one Son in the Trinity with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, who created the world and shed His blood for us.

Therefore everyone who is washed in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of holy regeneration, is baptized in nothing else than the death and name of Christ, so that it may evidently appear that we are 'buried together with Him by baptism into death' (Rom. 6:4), in whose one name, together with that of the Father and of the Holy Spirit, it stands that we are baptized. This the Roman Church, WHICH IS THE SUMMIT OF THE WORLD, illumined by the words of the two great luminaries, namely Peter and Paul, as by shining rays, and adorned by their bodies, holds and teaches, and with her the whole Christian world; and unto justice she believes without any hesitation, and unto salvation she does not doubt to confess. For these are the words of blessed Peter, preaching the Son of God to the Jews:

'Do penance, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins' (Acts 2:38). Blessed Paul also, that we might most firmly believe ourselves baptized into the death of Christ, in the epistle which he writes to the Romans, set forth this mystery of our salvation as though on a most eminent watchtower for all to behold, saying: 'Whosoever of us are baptized in Christ, are baptized in His death; for we are buried together with Him by baptism into death' (Rom. 6:3-4). 22. Whoever, therefore, strives to assert two persons in Christ, and yet, according to the rule established by the mouth and command of the Lord, confesses himself baptized in the one name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit;

either by most manifest blasphemy let him deny that he was baptized into the death of Christ, so that he may appear an enemy of the apostolic preaching; or let him acknowledge himself a worshipper not of a Trinity, but of a quaternity. But if he fears the precipice of either impiety, let him hold with his whole heart the right sentence of the catholic faith, and let him not doubt that he was baptized into the death of Christ, in whose name also he was baptized.

Acknowledging also the one natural name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and considering himself baptized into His death and name—from whose side, as He hung upon the cross, flowed the sacrament of the font and the chalice (John 19:34)—let him acknowledge Him crucified for us, whom Paul both believes and preaches to be the power of God and the wisdom of God, saying: 'But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumbling-block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness, but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God' (1 Cor. 1:23-24).

This is the great sacrament of piety, namely that the Only-begotten, true God, deigned to become true man, and, being eternal, to be born in time; being impassible, to suffer; being incomprehensible, to be crucified; being immortal, to die; and being immense, to be confined within the smallness not only of a manger when He was born, but even of a tomb when He died. All these things, according to the truth of the flesh, are true in the Son of God, because, the human and divine nature remaining in Him unconfusedly and inseparably, there is one person of the Son of God Jesus Christ in the truth of both natures. CHAPTER XII. Through Christ not only is iniquity blotted out, but also the faculty of holy thought is recovered, which God had bestowed upon the first man in his creation. 23.

Thus divine goodness bestowed upon the human race a freely given grace, through which in men not only might all the iniquity contracted by the bond of generation and added by the vice of one's own will be blotted out, but also the faculty of holy thought, long since lost in the first man, might be recovered through the second man; and thus, God having died and risen in the flesh for men, that captivity might be led captive which, sin reigning in our body, had been wont to rule; and 'where the sin of the transgressing man abounded, the grace of the Redeemer might more abound' (Rom.

5:20-21), and so man's free choice, which under the dominion of sin had been evilly free, might again receive the state of true and salutary liberty, being set free by the gift of prevenient grace. Concerning this grace of God—not that by which we are born men, but that by whose working, through faith in the Mediator, we are loosed from the bonds of original and actual sin—we will discourse, as far as we can within the brevity of a letter, supported by the aid of that same grace, so that even in this question our response may not be lacking to your inquiry, or rather to your profession. 24.

Whoever, therefore, does not wish to bear the name of the Christian religion vainly, nay damnably, let him most firmly believe that our God, that is, the holy Trinity, which is the one supreme and true God, created the first man—whom in freely given goodness He made good after His own image, into whom He also implanted the faculty of knowing and loving Him—not only with the gift of good will, but also with an entire and sound free choice for holding and guarding justice: so that, if the faculty and movement of the implanted liberty should not forsake the grace of God helping it, the goodness of God might grant to man the reward of eternal life; but if, despising divine justice, it should fall away from grace, His justice might repay punishment to the sinner.

Accordingly, by the good and just Creator, for that man whom, created in an animal body, He enriched with the gift of understanding and justice, a just condition was appointed on both sides: namely, that if he should guard obedience, which is the first virtue, he should pass from the animal quality of body in which he was created into a spiritual and immortal state without the death of the body (because without the iniquity of the soul); and that he should receive by divine gift, if he had kept the precepts, not only perfect and inamissible immortality of the body, but also such grace of living holily and justly in the soul, that he could thereafter not sin at all, if he did not sin so long as he was able to sin. 25. The first man, therefore, 'created from the earth, earthly' (1 Cor.

15:47), received indeed the grace by which he could avoid sinning, if he willed; yet he had not yet received such great grace by which he would not will to sin at all, nor be able to: namely, so that afterward it should be bestowed as a gift by the good and just Lord, if this had first been guarded in deed by the servant voluntarily. But if he neglected to obey the good and just commandment, then, after the death of the soul which he himself, guilty, had inflicted upon himself by sinning, he should also be punished by the death of the body with the affliction of the present life; nor should he who had refused to keep justice in his heart be allowed to hold perpetually a damnable life in the flesh of sin;

and he should henceforth be penally bound by the necessity even of bodily death, who, contumaciously transgressing the salutary commands, had of his own accord made himself liable to spiritual death. For unless the death of the soul had gone before in sin, never would the death of the body follow as punishment. This the apostolic authority teaches, which says: 'The body indeed is dead because of sin' (Rom. 8:10). Therefore, after the sin committed by voluntary transgression, the sinner deserved to hear this word of God's punishing sentence: 'Earth thou art, and into earth shalt thou go' (Gen. 3:19). Man, therefore, would not go into the earth in the flesh, if he had not by sinning become earth. CHAPTER XIII. Man through sin lost the faculty of good thought and good will.