Collected Works 12

1. Those who strive to disturb the faith of the resurrection — a faith which, before these kinsmen of the Sadducees, had lingered without controversy — so as to deny that this hope pertains also to the flesh, do with good reason also tear apart Christ's flesh with their questions, as though it were either no flesh at all, or in some way another than human — lest, if it be established to have been human, a prejudgment be made against them that it must in every way rise again, that flesh which rose again in Christ. Therefore, from the very point where they demolish the claims of the flesh, from there our foundations must be laid. Let us examine the bodily substance of the Lord: for concerning the spiritual there is no doubt. The flesh is in question: its reality and quality are re-examined — whether it existed, and whence, and of what kind it was. Its account will give the law of our resurrection.

Marcion, in order to deny the flesh of Christ, denied also His nativity; or, in order to deny the nativity, he denied also the flesh — evidently lest nativity and flesh should give mutual testimony to each other, since neither is there nativity without flesh, nor flesh without nativity: as though he could not, with the same heretical licence, either, having admitted the flesh, deny the nativity, like Apelles, his disciple and afterwards his deserter; or, having confessed both flesh and nativity, interpret them otherwise, like Valentinus, his fellow-disciple and fellow-deserter. But he too who introduced a putative flesh of Christ could equally have feigned the nativity also as a phantasm, so that both the conception and the pregnancy and the delivery of the Virgin, and thereafter the whole course of the infant himself, might be held to exist only in appearance;

they would have deceived the same eyes and the same senses which the notion of the flesh deluded. 2. Plainly the nativity is announced by Gabriel. What has he to do with an angel of the Creator? And a conception is introduced in the Virgin's womb. What has he to do with Isaiah, a prophet of the Creator? He hates delays, who was suddenly bringing Christ down from heaven. 'Away with these,' he says, 'the ever-troublesome enrolments of Caesar, and the cramped inns, and the filthy rags, and the hard mangers. Let the angelic multitude see to it, honouring their God by night; let the shepherds rather guard their flocks; and let the magi not be wearied from afar — I make them a present of their gold. Let even Herod be better, lest Jeremiah should glory;

but let not the infant be circumcised, lest He feel pain; nor let Him be carried to the temple, lest He burden His parents with the cost of an offering; nor let Him be delivered into the hands of Simeon, lest He grieve the old man who is thereupon to die; let that aged woman too keep silence, lest she bewitch the boy.' By such counsels, I suppose, you dared, Marcion, to blot out so many original records of Christ, lest His flesh should be proved. On what grounds, I ask you? Show your authority. If you are a prophet, foretell something; if an apostle, preach publicly; if apostolic, hold the same views as the apostles; if you are only a Christian, believe what has been handed down. If you are none of these, then I may rightly say, die. For you are indeed dead, being no Christian, by not believing that which, believed, makes men Christians;

and the more dead are you, the more you are no Christian, seeing that you fell away when once you had been one, by rescinding what you had formerly believed — just as you yourself confess in a certain letter, and your own people do not deny, and ours prove. Therefore, in rescinding what you had believed, you have rescinded it as one no longer believing. Yet it was not because you ceased to believe that you rightly rescinded it; rather, by rescinding what you had believed, you prove that before you rescinded it, things were otherwise: what you believed otherwise, that had been so handed down. Further, what had been handed down was true, as handed down by those to whom it belonged to hand it down. Therefore, in rescinding what had been handed down, you have rescinded what was true. By no right have you acted. But we have already elsewhere, more fully, made use of prescriptions of this kind against all heresies;

after which we now, out of abundance, take up the matter again, desiring the reasoning by which you have supposed that Christ was not born. 3. It is necessary, insofar as you think this was allowable at your own discretion, that you have judged the nativity either impossible or unbecoming to God. But to God nothing is impossible except what He does not will. Let us consider, then, whether He willed to be born — for if He willed, He also was able, and was born. I run to a summary. For if God had not willed to be born, for whatever cause, He would not have offered Himself to be seen as a man; for who, seeing Him as a man, would deny that He was born? Thus, what He had not willed to be, He would not have willed to seem at all. Of everything displeasing, even the notion is rejected, because it makes no difference whether a thing is or is not, if, when it is not, it is presumed to be;

but this indeed matters: that it should not suffer as false what truly is not. 'But,' you say, 'His own consciousness was enough for Him: let men see to it if they thought Him born because they saw a man.' How much more worthily, then, how much more consistently, would He have sustained human estimation as truly born — He who was about to undergo the same estimation even when not born, and that with injury to His own conscience! How, in point of good faith, do you reckon it, that, not being born, He should sustain, against His own conscience, being thought born? What was worth so much — teach me — that Christ, knowing what He was, should present Himself as what He was not? You cannot say, 'Lest, if He had been born and had truly put on man, God should have ceased to be God, losing what He was while becoming what He was not': for there is no peril to His own state for God.

'But for this reason,' you say, 'I deny that God was truly changed into a man, so as both to be born and to be embodied in flesh: because He who is without end must also of necessity be unchangeable; for to be changed into something else is the end of the former state; therefore change does not befit Him to whom no end befits.' Plainly the nature of things changeable is subject to this law: that they do not remain in that into which they are changed, and thus, by not remaining, they perish while they lose by changing what they were. But nothing is equal to God: His nature stands apart from the condition of all things.

If, therefore, those things which stand apart from God — and from which God also stands apart — when they are changed, lose what they were, where will the difference of divinity from other things lie, unless it holds the contrary — that is, that God can both be changed into all things and remain such as He is? Otherwise He will be equal to those things which, when changed, lose what they were, to which God is certainly not equal in all respects: so neither in the outcome of change. You have at some time read and believed that the angels of the Creator were changed into human form, and bore so great a reality of body that Abraham even washed their feet, and Lot was rescued from the Sodomites by their hands, and an angel too, wrestling with a man, desired with the whole weight of his body to be let go — so was he held fast.

What, therefore, was permitted to the angels of the inferior god, when changed into human corporeality — namely, that they should nonetheless remain angels — this you would take away from the more powerful God, as though His Christ, having truly put on man, could not remain God? Or did those angels perhaps appear as a phantasm of flesh? But you will not dare to say this. For if with you the angels of the Creator are as Christ also is, then Christ will belong to that God whose angels are such as Christ also is. If you had not, on purpose, partly rejected and partly corrupted the Scriptures that resist your opinion, John's Gospel would have confounded you in this matter, proclaiming that the Spirit came down in the body of a dove and settled upon the Lord.

And this Spirit, since it was such, was as truly a dove as it was also Spirit, nor did it destroy its own proper substance by the assumption of an extraneous substance. But you ask where the body of the dove is, once the Spirit was taken back into heaven. And equally that of the angels: it was withdrawn by the same reasoning by which it had been brought forth. If you had seen when it was produced out of nothing, you would have known also when it was withdrawn into nothing. If there was no visible beginning, neither was there an end. Yet there was a solidity of body at whatever moment the body was seen: what has been written cannot but have existed. 4. Therefore, if you reject the embodiment neither as impossible nor as perilous to God, it remains that you should reject and accuse it as unworthy.

Beginning indeed with nativity itself as an object of hatred, declaim; go on now to the filth of the generative organs in the womb, the foul clottings of moisture and blood, the flesh to be nourished for nine months from that same mire. Describe the womb growing more distended from day to day, heavy, anxious, not even safe in sleep, uncertain amid the caprices of loathing and of appetite. Inveigh now even against the very modesty of the woman in travail — to be honoured either for its peril or held sacred for its nature. You shudder, no doubt, at the infant too, poured forth with its encumbrances, and duly smeared over. You disdain that it is bound in swaddling-clothes, that it is shaped by anointings, that it is fondled with caresses. This reverence of nature, Marcion, you spit upon — and how were you born?

You have hated man as he is born — and how do you love anyone? You certainly did not love yourself, when you withdrew from the Church and the faith of Christ. But see to it whether you displease yourself, or whether you were born otherwise. Certainly Christ loved that man, clotted amid uncleannesses in the womb, brought forth through the parts of shame, nourished amid trifling caresses. For his sake He came down, for his sake He preached, for his sake He cast Himself down in all humility even unto death, and the death of the cross. He loved, assuredly, the one whom He redeemed at a great price. If Christ belongs to the Creator, He rightly loved His own; if He is of another god, He loved him the more, since He redeemed one that was another's. He loved, therefore, together with man, also his nativity, also his flesh: nothing can be loved apart from that through which it is what it is.

Either take away nativity and show a man, or remove the flesh and present the one whom God redeemed. If these are the man whom God redeemed, do you make these things a cause of shame to Him who redeemed, and unworthy — things which, had He not loved them, He would not have redeemed? He reforms the nativity from death by a heavenly regeneration; He restores the flesh from every affliction: He cleanses the leprous, gives light again to the blind, makes whole the paralytic, cleanses the demoniac, raises the dead — and is He ashamed to be born into that flesh? If in very truth He had wished to come forth from a she-wolf, or a sow, or a cow, and, clothed with the body of a wild beast or of a brute, should have preached the kingdom of heaven, your censure, I suppose, would prescribe to Him that this was base for God and unworthy of the Son of God, and foolish therefore is he who so believes. Let it be plainly foolish;

let us judge God according to our own perception. But look around, Marcion — if indeed you have not deleted it: 'God has chosen the foolish things of the world, that He may confound the wise.' What are these foolish things? The conversion of men to the worship of the true God, the rejection of error, the discipline of righteousness, of chastity, of mercy, of patience, of all innocence? These indeed are not foolish. Ask, therefore, concerning what things He spoke; and if you presume you have found them, will anything be as foolish as to believe in a God born, and that of a virgin, and that in the flesh, who has wallowed through those affronts of nature? Let someone say that these things are not foolish, and that there are others which God chose in rivalry with worldly wisdom;

and yet with that wisdom it is more easily believed that Jupiter was made a bull or a swan, than that Christ was truly a man in Marcion's view. 5. There are plainly other things also just as foolish, which pertain to the affronts and sufferings of God: or let them call a crucified God prudence. Take this too away, Marcion — nay rather, this above all. For what is more unworthy of God, what more to be blushed at — to be born or to die, to bear flesh or to bear the cross, to be circumcised or to be nailed up, to be reared or to be buried, to be laid in a manger or to be shut up in a tomb? You will be wiser if you believe none of these things. But you will not be wise unless you have been foolish in the world, by believing the foolish things of God. Or did you for this reason not cut away the sufferings from Christ — because, as a phantasm, He was free from any sensation of them?

We have said before that He could equally have undergone the empty mockeries of an imaginary nativity and infancy. But now answer here, you slayer of the truth: was not God truly crucified? Was He not truly dead, as truly crucified? Was He not truly raised again, as truly, that is, dead? Did Paul falsely determine to know among us only Jesus crucified? Did he falsely urge upon us that He was buried? Did he falsely inculcate that He was raised again? False, then, is also our faith, and a phantasm will be the whole of what we hope for from Christ, O most wicked of men, who excuse the murderers of God! For Christ suffered nothing from them, if He truly suffered nothing. Spare the one hope of the whole world: why do you destroy the disgrace that is necessary to the faith?

Whatever is unworthy of God is of profit to me: I am saved if I am not ashamed of my Lord. 'Whoever,' He says, 'shall be ashamed of Me, of him will I also be ashamed.' Other grounds of shame I do not find, which through contempt of the blush should prove me well and truly shameless and blessedly foolish. The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed, because it is a thing to be ashamed of. And the Son of God died: it is by all means credible, because it is absurd. And, having been buried, He rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible.

But how will these things be true in Him, if He Himself was not true — if He did not truly have in Himself that which could be nailed, which could die, which could be buried and raised again — namely, this flesh, suffused with blood, framed upon bones, interwoven with sinews, threaded through with veins, which knew how to be born and to die, human without doubt, as born of a human being? And therefore this will be mortal in Christ, because Christ is man and the Son of man. Or why is Christ a man and the son of man, if He has nothing of man and nothing from man — unless either man is something other than flesh, or the flesh of man is from somewhere other than from man, or Mary is something other than a human being, or the god of Marcion is a man?

Otherwise He would not be called man without flesh, nor son of man without some human parent, just as He is not called God without the Spirit of God, nor Son of God without God the Father. Thus the reckoning of both substances set forth Him as man and God — on the one side born, on the other unborn; on the one side fleshly, on the other spiritual; on the one side weak, on the other exceedingly strong; on the one side dying, on the other living. This property of the two conditions, the divine and the human, was assigned each with the equal truth of either nature, with the same faith both of spirit and of flesh: the powers of the Spirit proved Him God, the sufferings proved the flesh of the man. If the powers were not without the Spirit, likewise also the sufferings were not without the flesh: if the flesh with its sufferings was feigned, then the Spirit too with its powers was false.

Why do you halve Christ with a lie? He was wholly truth. He preferred, I believe, to be born rather than to lie in any part — and that against Himself, so as to bear a flesh hard without bones, solid without muscles, bloody without blood, clothed without garment, hungering without hunger, eating without teeth, speaking without a tongue, so that His speech might be a phantasm to the ears, through a semblance of voice. He was, then, a phantasm even after the resurrection, when He offered His hands and feet for the disciples to inspect, saying, 'Behold, that it is I, for a spirit has not bones as you see Me to have' — without doubt hands and feet and bones which a spirit does not have, but flesh.

How do you interpret this utterance, Marcion — you who bring in Jesus only from the God who is supremely good and simple and kind? Behold, He deceives and beguiles and imposes upon the eyes of all, the senses of all, the approach and touch of all. Therefore you ought no longer to have brought Christ down from heaven, but from some troupe of mountebanks; nor to have made Him a God besides man, but a magician-man; nor a high priest of salvation, but a contriver of a spectacle; nor a raiser of the dead, but a diverter of the living — except that, even if He was a magician, He was born. 6. But certain persons, now disciples of that man of Pontus, driven to be wiser than their master, grant to Christ the reality of flesh, yet without prejudice to their refusal of the nativity:

'He had,' they say, 'flesh, though in no way born.' We have arrived, therefore, from the lime-kiln, as the saying goes, into the charcoal-pit — from Marcion to Apelles, who, after he had lapsed in the flesh with a woman from the discipline of Marcion, and had thereafter been overturned in spirit by the virgin Philumene, undertook to preach, on her authority, a solid body of Christ, but without nativity. And to that angel of Philumene the apostle will indeed reply with the same voice by which he foretold that very one even then, saying, 'Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than that which we have preached, let him be anathema.' But to those things which they further argue, we will offer resistance. They confess that Christ truly had a body. Whence its matter, if not from that quality in which it was seen?

Whence a body, if not flesh a body? Whence flesh, if not born? For since it was to be born, that which is born was to come into being. 'From the stars,' they say, 'and from the substances of the higher world He borrowed His flesh': and indeed they urge that it is no marvel for a body to exist without birth, since among us also it was permitted to angels to appear in flesh without any working of a womb. We acknowledge, to be sure, that it is so reported; but yet what sort of thing is it that the faith of one rule should borrow from that very faith which it assails the instrument of its own argumentation? What has that man to do with Moses, who rejects the God of Moses? If He is another God, let His affairs be otherwise.

But let all heretics use the Scriptures of Him whose world also they use—this too will serve them as a testimony at the judgment, that they build their blasphemies out of His own examples—it is easy for truth to prevail even without laying down any such prescription against them. Therefore let those who propose the flesh of Christ after the example of angels, saying His flesh, though flesh, was not born, compare, I would ask, the causes both of Christ and of the angels for which they came forth in flesh. No angel ever came down for this end, that he might be crucified, that he might taste death, that he might be raised from death. If there was never such a cause for the embodiment of angels, you have the reason why they received flesh without being born: they had not come to die, therefore neither to be born.

But Christ, on the other hand, being sent to die, of necessity had also to be born, that He might be able to die. For nothing is wont to die save what is born: birth owes a mutual debt to mortality; the manner of dying is the cause of being born. If, on account of that which dies, Christ died, and that which dies is also that which is born, it followed—nay, it went before—that He should equally be born on account of that which is born, since on account of that very thing He had to die which, because it is born, dies. It was not fitting that He should not be born, for whom it was fitting to die. And yet then also, among those angels, the Lord Himself appeared to Abraham without birth—with flesh, to be sure—by reason of that same diversity of cause:

but you do not accept this, since you do not accept Him as Christ who even then was learning to address, to deliver, and to judge the human race in the garb of flesh—flesh not yet born, because not yet destined to die, unless first both His birth and His mortality were announced. Therefore let them prove that those angels conceived flesh from the stars: if they do not prove it, since it is not written, then neither will Christ's flesh be from thence, to which they apply the example of angels. It is agreed that the angels did not bear flesh of their own, being by nature of a spiritual substance—even if of some body, yet of its own kind—but that they could for a time appear transfigurable into human flesh and could meet with men.

Therefore, since it is not recorded whence they took their flesh, it is left to our understanding not to doubt that this is proper to angelic power: to take a body for itself out of no matter. 'How much more,' you say, 'out of some matter.' It is certain: but nothing is established about this, since Scripture does not set it forth. Moreover, those who are able to make themselves what by nature they are not, why should they not be able to make it out of no substance? If they become what they are not, why should they not become it out of that which is not? And that which is not, when it comes to be, is out of nothing. For this reason it is neither inquired into nor shown what afterward became of their bodies: that which was out of nothing has become nothing. They can convert nothing itself into flesh, who were able to convert themselves into flesh:

for it is more to transmute a nature than to make matter. But even if it was necessary that the angels took flesh from matter, it is surely more credible that it was from earthly matter than from any kind of heavenly substances, since that flesh was of so earthly a quality that it was fed on earthly food. Grant it: let it now also be that it was of the stars, yet fed on earthly food in the same way, though it was not earthly, just as the earthly was fed on heavenly things though it was not heavenly—for we read that manna was food for the people: 'Man,' it says, 'ate the bread of angels.' Yet the once-distinguished condition of the Lord's flesh is not overthrown by reason of another arrangement. Being one who was truly to be man even unto death, He had to put on that flesh whose death also was involved:

and further, that flesh which death belongs to, birth precedes. VII. But as often as there is contention concerning birth, all who reject it—as prejudging the truth of the flesh in Christ—wish to make the Lord Himself deny that He was born, because He said, 'Who is My mother, and who are My brethren?' Let Apelles therefore hear also what has already been answered by us to Marcion in that little book in which we appealed to his own Gospel, namely, that the occasion of this pronouncement must be considered. First of all, no one would ever have announced to Him His mother and brethren standing outside who was not certain both that He had a mother and brethren and that these were the very persons whom he was then announcing, whether known before or discovered on the spot then and there:

although for this reason the heresies have taken these things away from the Gospel, because those who marveled at His teaching declared that His father Joseph the carpenter and His mother Mary and His brothers and sisters were exceedingly well known to them. 'But for the sake of tempting Him they had announced to Him a mother and brethren whom He did not have.' This, indeed, the Scripture does not say, though elsewhere it is not silent when anything has been done toward Him for the sake of temptation: 'Behold,' it says, 'a doctor of the law rose up, tempting Him'; and elsewhere, 'And the Pharisees came to Him, tempting Him'; so that nothing prevented its being here likewise indicated as done for the sake of temptation. I do not accept what you introduce from your own store, outside the Scripture. Next, there ought to underlie a subject-matter of temptation. What did they think was to be tempted in Him?

'Surely, whether He was born or not: for if His answer denied this, this is what the tempter's announcement aimed at.' But no temptation, tending toward the recognition of that concerning which it tempts by way of doubt, proceeds so suddenly that there does not first precede a question which, introducing the doubt, compels the temptation. Further, if the birth of Christ was nowhere debated, why do you argue that they wished by way of temptation to inquire into what they never brought forward into question? To this we add: even if He were to be tempted concerning His birth, He surely would not have been tempted in this manner, by the announcement of persons who could have existed even if Christ had not been born. We are all born, and yet we do not all have either brothers or a mother:

moreover, one may rather have a father than a mother, and uncles rather than brothers. So little does a temptation about birth fit, which might stand even without the naming of a mother and of brothers. It is plainly easier that, being sure He had both a mother and brethren, they should have tempted rather His divinity than His birth—namely, whether, acting within, He would know what was outside, being challenged by a lie in the announcement of the presence of those who were not in fact present. Except that even so the device of the temptation would have come to nothing: for it could happen that those whom they announced to be standing outside, He should know to be absent by reason of some necessity—of illness, of business, or of a journey known to Him already.

No one tempts in such a way as to know that he can bring back on himself the blush of the temptation. Since, therefore, no subject-matter of temptation is applicable, the guilelessness of the messenger is cleared, in that His mother and brethren had truly come upon the scene. But let Apelles also learn what is the reason of the answer which for the present denies a mother and brethren. The brethren of the Lord had not believed in Him, as is contained also in the Gospel published before Marcion; His mother likewise is not shown to have clung to Him, whereas Martha and the other Marys are frequently found in His company. In this place, finally, their unbelief appears: when Jesus was teaching the way of life, when He was preaching the kingdom of God, when He was at work healing diseases and infirmities, with strangers fixed intently upon Him, those so near to Him were absent:

in short, they come upon the scene and take their stand outside, and do not enter, plainly not considering what was going on within, nor do they even wait, as though they were bringing something needful to that in which He was then most engaged, but they rather interrupt, and wish Him recalled from so great a work. I ask you, Apelles, or you too, Marcion, if perchance, while playing at dice or contending about actors or charioteers, you were called away by such a message, would you not have said, 'Who is my mother or who are my brethren?' Christ, preaching and proving God, fulfilling the Law and the Prophets, dispelling the darkness of so long a bygone age, did He use this saying unworthily, to strike at the unbelief of those standing outside, or to shake off the importunity of those calling Him back from so great a work?

For the rest, for denying His birth there would have been for Him another place, time, and order of discourse—not that of one who could be uttered even by someone who had both a mother and brethren. For when indignation denies parents, it does not deny but rebukes. In short, He made others preferable, and, showing the merit of preference—namely, the hearing of the word—He demonstrates on what condition He denied a mother and brethren: for by the same condition by which He adopted to Himself others who clung to Him, He disowned those who withdrew from Him. Christ is also wont to fulfill what He teaches others. What sort of thing, then, would it have been if, while teaching not to value a mother or father or brothers as highly as the word of God, He Himself, the Word of God, upon the announcement of His mother and brotherhood, should have forsaken them?

He therefore denied His kindred in the very manner in which He taught they were to be denied, for the sake of God's work. But moreover, it is also a figure in another way: of the synagogue in the mother set apart, and of the Jews in the unbelieving brethren. In them Israel was outside; but the new disciples, hearing and believing within, cleaving to Christ, sketched out the Church, whom He named the preferable mother and the worthier brotherhood, the carnal kindred being refused. Finally, in the same sense He answered that other exclamation as well, not denying His mother's womb and breasts, but designating as more blessed those who hear the word of God. VIII.

With these chapters alone, by which Marcion and Apelles think themselves especially furnished, interpreted according to the truth of a whole and uncorrupted Gospel, it ought to have been enough for the proof of human flesh in Christ through the defense of His birth. But since these Apelleians too chiefly put forward the ignominy of the flesh, which they maintain was framed by that fiery ruler of evil out of solicited souls, and therefore was unworthy of Christ, and that therefore a substance from the stars belonged to Him, I must beat them back with their own equipment. They name a certain renowned angel who established this world, and, when it was established, admitted repentance.

And this we have treated in its own place—for we have a little book against them too—whether one who possessed the Spirit and will and power of Christ for such works could have done anything deserving of repentance. That angel they also interpret out of the figure of the wandering sheep. Therefore, by the testimony of its maker's repentance, the world will be a sin, since all repentance is a confession of a fault, because it has no place except in a fault. If the world is a fault, then as its body and members will fault be found in heaven also and the heavenly things along with heaven: if in the heavenly things, then also in whatever has been conceived and brought forth from thence. A bad tree must necessarily bring forth bad fruits.

The flesh of Christ, therefore, built out of heavenly things, consists of the elements of sin, sinful by a sinner's reckoning, and it will now be a part of that substance—that is, of ours—which they disdain to bring in for Christ as sinful. Thus, if nothing depends upon the matter of ignominy, either let them devise for Christ some material of a purer stamp, to whom ours is displeasing, or let them acknowledge that flesh than which even the heavenly could not be better. We read plainly, 'The first man was of the slime of the earth, the second man from heaven': yet this does not regard a difference of material, but only opposes the heavenly substance of spirit of the second man—that is, Christ—to the earlier earthy substance of the flesh of the first man—that is, Adam.

And He refers the heavenly man so entirely to the spirit, not to the flesh, that those whom He compares to him are agreed to become heavenly in this earthy flesh—namely, by the spirit: whereas if Christ were heavenly according to the flesh too, those who are not heavenly according to the flesh would not be compared to Him. If therefore those who become heavenly, such as Christ also is, bear the earthy substance of flesh, from this too it is confirmed that Christ Himself also was heavenly in earthy flesh, just as those are who are made equal to Him. IX. We have thus far maintained that nothing which has been received from another—so as to be other than that from which it was received—is so other that it does not disclose whence it was received. All matter is not without a testimony of its origin, even though it be transmuted into a new property.

Certainly this very body of ours, which truth—which even the fables of the nations have handed down—declares to have been molded of slime, confesses each element of its origin: earth in flesh, water in blood. For although the species of quality is different, this is what it means for one thing to become another out of another. For the rest, what is blood but a ruddy fluid, what is flesh but earth converted into its own forms? Consider the several qualities: muscles as clods, bones as rocks, and even around the nipples certain little pebbles. Look at the tough connections of the sinews as the layered shoots of roots, and the branching courses of the veins as the windings of streams, and the down as mosses, and the hair as turf, and the very hidden treasures of the marrow as the metals of the flesh.

All these signs of earthly origin were in Christ too, and these are the things that concealed Him as the Son of God, He being reckoned nothing other than a man, existing in the human substance of a body. Otherwise, produce something heavenly in Him, begged from the North stars and the Pleiades and the Hyades: for the things we have enumerated are so much testimonies of earthly flesh that they are also of ours. But I detect nothing new and nothing foreign. In short, they were astonished at Christ as a man only by His words and deeds, by His teaching and power alone: yet the novelty of flesh in Him would have been remarked as held for a miracle. But it was not the condition of the earthly flesh itself that was marvelous, which made His other things marvelous, when they said, 'Whence has this man this teaching and these signs?'

Even of those who despised His form this was the utterance: so far was it not a body of human comeliness, much less of heavenly brightness. While the prophets are silent among you too concerning His ignoble aspect, the very sufferings and the very insults speak: the sufferings proved indeed a human flesh, but the insults proved it a dishonorable one. Or would anyone have dared to graze a new body with the tip of a fingernail, or to defile with spittle a face that did not deserve it? What do you call heavenly a flesh which you have no means of understanding to be heavenly, and why do you deny it earthly which you have the means of recognizing to be earthly? He hungers under the devil, He thirsts under the Samaritan woman, He weeps over Lazarus, He trembles before death—'for the flesh,' He says, 'is weak'—and lastly He sheds blood:

these, I suppose, are the heavenly signs. But how, I say, could He be despised and could He suffer, as He also said, if anything of heavenly nobility had shone forth in that flesh? From this, then, we prove that there was nothing in it from the heavens, precisely in order that He might be able to be despised and to suffer. X. I turn to others, equally wise in their own eyes, who affirm that the flesh of Christ was animal, in that soul became flesh: therefore also flesh a soul, and just as flesh was animal, so too soul was carnal. And here likewise I demand the reasons. If Christ took a soul upon Himself in order to save the soul in Himself, because it would not be saved except through Him while it was in Him, I do not see why He should have made that flesh animal by putting on flesh, as though He could not otherwise save the soul except by its being made flesh.

For since He renders our souls saved—not only not fleshly, but even disjoined from the flesh—how much more could He bring that soul which He Himself took up, even non-fleshly, into salvation. Likewise, since they presume that Christ came forth for the sake of freeing not the flesh but our soul alone, first, how absurd it is that, being about to free the soul alone, He should have made for it that kind of body which He was not going to free. Then, if He had undertaken to free our souls through that soul which He bore, He ought also to have borne, as ours, that soul which He bore—that is, of our form, of whatever form our soul is in the hidden depths, yet not fleshly. For the rest, He did not free our soul if He had a fleshly one: for ours is not fleshly.

Further, if He did not free ours because He freed a fleshly one, it is nothing to us, since He did not free ours. But neither was that to be freed which was not ours—namely, as fleshly: for it was not in peril if it was not ours, that is, not fleshly. But it is agreed that it was freed. Therefore it was not fleshly, and it was ours, if it was that which was to be freed, since it was in peril. Now therefore, if the soul was not carnal in Christ, neither can the flesh have been animal. XI. But we meet another of their arguments, requiring why, by undergoing an animal flesh, Christ should seem to have had a carnal soul.

'For God,' they say, 'longed to exhibit the soul visible to men, by making it a body, the soul which before had existed invisible, by nature seeing nothing, not even itself, on account of the impediment of this flesh, so that it might even be disputed whether the soul was born or not, mortal or not: and so a soul made into a body in Christ, that we might see it being born and dying and, what is more, rising again.' But of what sort will this be, that through flesh the soul should be demonstrated to itself or to us—the soul which through flesh could not be recognized—so as thus to be shown while that comes into being to which it lay hidden, that is, flesh? It received darkness, forsooth, in order to be able to shine.

In short, let us first reconsider this: whether the soul had to be shown in that manner; then, whether they allege it to have been altogether invisible before—whether as incorporeal, or as even having some kind of body of its own. And yet, while they call it invisible, they constitute it corporeal, as having something that is invisible: for how can that be called invisible which has nothing invisible? But it cannot even exist, having nothing through which it may exist: and since it does exist, it must needs have something through which it exists. If it has something through which it exists, this will be its body. Everything that exists is a body of its own kind: nothing is incorporeal except that which does not exist.

Since therefore the soul has an invisible body, He who had undertaken to make it visible would surely more worthily have made visible that of it which was held to be invisible, because here too neither falsehood nor weakness befits God: falsehood, if He showed the soul as other than what it was; weakness, if He was unable to show what it was. No one wishing to display a man puts a helmet or a mask upon him: but this is what was done to the soul, if, having been converted into flesh, it put on an alien surface.

But even if the soul be reckoned incorporeal, so that the soul may indeed be hidden by some force of reasoning, yet whatever the soul is may not be a body, then likewise it was not impossible to God, and it more fittingly accorded with His purpose, to demonstrate it by some new species of body rather than by this common one belonging to all—already the property of another's cognizance—lest without cause He should have longed to make the soul visible out of the invisible, opportune, forsooth, for these very questions through the defense of human flesh regarding it. 'But Christ could not be seen among men except as a man.' Restore, then, to Christ His own good faith, so that He who willed to walk as a man should also have shown a soul of human condition, not making it fleshly but clothing it with flesh. XII.

Let the soul now be shown through the flesh, if it be established that it had in some manner to be shown—that is, being unknown to itself and to us: although in this the distinction is empty, as though we were something apart from the soul, when the whole of what we are is soul. In short, without the soul we are nothing, not even called by the name of man but of a corpse. If therefore we are ignorant of the soul, it is itself ignorant of itself. Thus it only remains to consider this: whether the soul was so ignorant of itself that it might in some manner become known. In my opinion the nature of the soul is sensitive: so much so that nothing is animate without sense, nothing sensible without soul, and, to put it more emphatically, sense is the soul of the soul.

Therefore, since the soul furnishes to all the power of perceiving and itself perceives the perceptions of all, not to mention their qualities, for whom is it probable that it did not from the beginning obtain a perception of itself? Whence would it know what is at times necessary to it out of the necessity of natural things, if it does not know its own quality, to which anything is necessary? This indeed is to be recognized in every soul—I mean the knowledge of itself—without which self-knowledge no soul could have administered itself. But I think that man rather, the only rational animal, has been allotted, in full possession, a soul such as makes him a rational animal, itself rational in the first place. Further, how can that be rational which makes man a rational animal, if it does not know its own reason, being ignorant of itself?

But so far is it from being ignorant of itself, that it knows its Author, its Judge, and its own condition. Learning as yet nothing about God, it names God: admitting as yet nothing about His judgment, it says that it commends itself to God: hearing nothing more than that there is no hope after death, it nevertheless invokes upon every departed one, both the good and the evil, their several deserts. These things the little book which we wrote ON THE TESTIMONY OF THE SOUL pursues more fully. Otherwise, if the soul was from the beginning ignorant of itself, it ought to have learned nothing from Christ except of what sort it was. But now it did not learn its own likeness from Christ, but its salvation. For this reason the Son of God descended and took up a soul, not that the soul might know itself in Christ, but Christ in itself: for it was not in peril concerning its salvation by being ignorant of itself, but concerning the Word of God.

'Life,' it says, 'was manifested'—not the soul: and 'I came,' He says, 'to save the soul'—He did not say to show it. Were we, forsooth, ignorant that the soul, though invisible, is born and dies, unless it were exhibited corporeally? We were plainly ignorant that it would rise again with the flesh. This will be what Christ manifested: but this too not otherwise in Himself than in some Lazarus, whose flesh was not animal, so neither was his soul carnal. What more, then, has become known to us about the previously unknown disposition of the soul? What of it was invisible, that longed for visibility through the flesh? XIII. 'Soul became flesh, that the soul might be shown.' Did flesh, then, also become soul, that flesh might be made manifest? If flesh is soul, it is now no longer soul but flesh:

if soul is flesh, it is now no longer flesh but soul. Where, then, is flesh, and where soul, if each has been made the other into the other—nay, if each is neither, while each is being made the other into the other? Certainly it is most perverse that, naming flesh, we should understand soul, and, signifying soul, we should interpret flesh. All things will be in peril of being taken otherwise than they are, and of losing what they are while they are taken otherwise, if they are named otherwise than they are. The faithfulness of names is the safety of properties. Even when qualities are transmuted, they receive the possessions of new appellations. For example, baked clay takes on the name of an earthen vessel, and does not share in the name of its former kind, because neither in the kind itself.

Accordingly, the soul of Christ also, having been made flesh, cannot but be that which it has been made, and not be that which it had been—having, that is, been made something else. And since we have adduced a very apt example, we shall use it more fully. For certainly an earthen vessel out of clay is one body, and one name, namely of one body: nor can it be called both vessel and clay, because what it was, it is not; and to that which is not, the name too does not adhere. Therefore the soul also, made flesh, is a uniform solidity and a total singularity, and an undivided substance.

But in Christ we find soul and flesh set forth in simple and plain terms—that is, soul as soul and flesh as flesh, nowhere soul-flesh or flesh-soul, though they ought to have been so named if they had been so, but rather each substance pronounced separately by Himself, surely on account of the distinction of the two qualities, soul apart and flesh apart. What of it? 'My soul,' He says, 'is sorrowful even unto death': and, 'The bread which I shall give for the salvation of the world is My flesh.' Further, if soul had been flesh, there would be one thing in Christ, either a fleshly soul or an animal flesh: but since He divides the species, flesh and soul, He shows two. If two, now not one: if not one, now neither a carnal soul nor an animal flesh:

for soul-flesh, or flesh-soul, is one thing. Unless indeed He bore separately another soul besides that which was flesh, and carried about another flesh besides that which was soul. But if there was one flesh and one soul—that one sorrowful unto death and that one bread for the salvation of the world—the number of the two substances differing in their own kind is preserved, excluding the unique species of a carnal soul. XIV. 'But Christ also,' they say, 'bore an angel.' On what ground? 'On the same ground as a man.' The cause, then, is the same. That Christ should bear a man, the salvation of man was the cause—namely, for the restoring of what had perished. Man had perished, man had to be restored. That Christ should bear an angel, there is no such cause.

For although perdition is reckoned to the angels, into the fire prepared for the devil and his angels, yet a restitution was never promised to them: Christ received from the Father no commandment concerning the salvation of angels. What the Father neither promised nor commanded, Christ could not administer. For what purpose, then, did He bear an angel too, unless perhaps as an attendant with whom He might work the salvation of man? For was not the Son of God competent, He alone, to free man, cast down by a single and solitary serpent? Then now there is not one God, nor one Savior, but two makers of salvation, and each certainly in need of the other. Or was it indeed that He might free man through an angel? Why then did He Himself descend, for that which was to be dispatched through an angel?

If through an angel, why He Himself too? If through Himself, why an angel too? He was indeed called the Angel of great counsel—that is, a messenger—by a word of office, not of nature: for He was about to announce to the age the great thought of the Father, namely concerning the restoration of man. Not for that reason, however, is He so to be understood as an angel, as some Gabriel or Michael. For the son too is sent by the lord of the vineyard to the vinedressers, just like the servants, to seek for the fruits: but the son will not on that account be reckoned as one of the servants, because he succeeded to the office of servants. More easily, then, I would say, if you will, that the Son Himself is the angel (that is, the messenger) of the Father, than that there is an angel in the Son.

But since concerning the Son Himself it was pronounced, 'Thou hast made Him a little lower than the angels,' how will He seem to have put on an angel, being thus diminished below the angels while He becomes man, in that He is flesh and soul, and the Son of Man? Whereas in that He is the Spirit of God and the power of the Most High, He cannot be held below the angels, being namely God and the Son of God. By as much, therefore, as He was made lower than the angels while He bears man, by so much He was not, while He bears an angel. This opinion may suit Hebion, who constitutes Jesus a mere man, and only of the seed of David—that is, not also the Son of God—though plainly more glorious than the prophets in some degree—so that in this way an angel may be said to have been in Him, just as in some Zacharias:

except that by Christ it was never said, 'And the angel who spoke in me said to me.' Nor even that daily saying of all the prophets, 'Thus says the Lord': for He Himself was the Lord, pronouncing openly and out of His own authority, 'But I say to you.' What more is there to add to these things? Hear Isaiah crying out, 'Not an angel nor a legate, but the Lord Himself saved them.' XV. It was permitted to Valentinus too, by heretical privilege, to invent a spiritual flesh of Christ. Anyone who was unwilling to believe it human could feign it whatever he pleased, since—which may be said with regard to all of them—if it was not human, nor from man, I do not see out of what substance Christ Himself pronounced Himself both a man and the Son of Man:

But now you wish to slay the man who has spoken the truth to you (John 8:40); and, 'The Son of man is Lord of the sabbath' (Matt. 12:8). For concerning him Isaiah says, 'A man in stripes, and knowing how to bear weakness' (Isa. 53:3); and Jeremiah, 'And he is a man, and who has known him?' (Jer. 17:9 LXX); and Daniel, 'And behold, upon the clouds one like the Son of man' (Dan. 7:13)--yes, a man. Paul the apostle: 'The one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus' (1 Tim. 2:5); likewise Peter in the Acts of the Apostles: 'Jesus of Nazareth, a man designated for you by God' (Acts 2:22)--certainly a man. These testimonies alone ought to have sufficed, in the place of a formal plea, as proof of a human flesh, taken from man and not spiritual (as neither animal nor astral nor imaginary)--if only heresies could have existed without a zeal and artifice for wrangling.

For, as I have read in a certain member of the little faction of Valentinus, they first hold that Christ's substance was not fashioned earthly and human, lest the Lord be found inferior to the angels, who were not of earthly flesh; and next, that it would have been fitting for a flesh like ours to be born in like manner--not of the Spirit nor of God, but from the will of a man. 'And why not of incorruption instead of corruption? and why is not our flesh, just as his rose again and was taken up into heaven, likewise at once assumed together with his? or why was not his likewise dissolved into the earth, on a par with ours?' Such questions the heathen also used to toss about:

'Was the Son of God, then, drained down to so great a depth of lowliness?' and, 'If he rose again as a pattern of our hope, why has nothing of the sort been demonstrated in our case?' The heathen with reason raise such objections; but the heretics with equal reason. For is there any difference between them, except that the heathen by not believing believe, while the heretics by believing do not believe? They read, in short, 'Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels' (Ps. 8:6), and they deny the inferior substance of the Christ who declares himself not a man but a worm, who had neither form nor beauty, but whose form was ignoble, failing beneath all men, 'a man in stripes and knowing how to bear weakness' (Ps. 22:7; Isa. 53:3). They acknowledge man mingled with God, and they deny the man:

they believe him to have died, and yet they contend that what died was born of incorruption--as though corruption were something other than death. 'But our flesh too ought to have risen at once.' Wait: Christ has not yet subdued his enemies, so as to triumph over the enemies together with his friends. XVI. Moreover, out of a lust for arguing according to the cast of his heretic's wit, that Alexander made himself an opening--as though we were affirming that Christ therefore put on flesh of earthly reckoning in order that he might abolish in himself the flesh of sin.

And even if we did say so, by whatever reasoning we would fortify our position, provided only we did not, with the great madness whereby he supposed it, imagine Christ's very flesh to be as it were sinful, abolished in himself--seeing that we remember that flesh both to preside at the Father's right hand in the heavens, and we proclaim that it will come thence in the majesty of the Father's glory. Indeed, just as we cannot call abolished that which is in heaven, so neither sinful that in which was no guile (1 Pet. 2:22). But we maintain that it is not the sinful flesh that has been abolished in Christ, but the sin of the flesh--not the material but the nature, not the substance but the fault--according to the authority of the apostle who says, 'He abolished sin in the flesh' (Rom. 8:3).

For elsewhere too he says that Christ was 'in the likeness of sinful flesh' (Rom. 8:3)--not that he received the likeness of flesh, as though a phantom body and not a reality, but he means the likeness of sinful flesh to be understood in this sense: that Christ's own flesh, itself not sinful, was on a par with that flesh whose sin it was, to be equated with Adam in kind though not in fault. Hence too we affirm that there was in Christ that flesh whose nature is sinful in man, and that thus in it sin was abolished, since in Christ that was held without sin which in man was not held without sin. But it would neither have served Christ's purpose, as one abolishing the sin of the flesh, not to abolish it in that very flesh in which was the nature of sin, nor would it have served his glory:

for what would be great, if in a better flesh, of another (that is, of a non-sinful) nature, he wiped out the stain of sin? 'Therefore,' you will say, 'if he put on our flesh, Christ's flesh was sinful.' Do not fetter a meaning that admits of explanation: for by putting on our flesh he made it his own, and by making it his own he made it not sinful. For the rest, as to what has been said against all those who therefore think that our flesh was not in Christ because it was not of a man's seed--let them recall that Adam himself was made into this flesh not from a man's seed: just as the earth was turned into this flesh without a man's seed, so also the Word of God could pass into the material of that same flesh without curd. XVII.

But dismissing Alexander with his syllogisms, which he twists in his argumentations--and also the psalms of Valentinus, which with great impudence he inserts as though they were of some fit author--let us now direct the contest to a single line: whether Christ received flesh from the virgin, so that it may be established as human in this especial way, if he drew his substance from a human womb--although it might already have been established as human both from the name 'man,' and from the condition of his quality, and from the manner of his behaviour, and from the outcome of his passion. But above all we must commend the reason that determined that the Son of God should be born of a virgin: he who was to dedicate a new nativity had to be born in a new way, of which the Lord was announced by Isaiah as about to give a sign. What is that sign?

'Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and shall bring forth a son' (Isa. 7:14). A virgin therefore conceived and bore Emmanuel, 'God with us.' This is the new nativity: while man is born in God, in that God was born in man, having taken up the flesh of the ancient seed without the ancient seed, that he might refashion it with a new seed--that is, spiritual--purged and cleansed of the defilements of antiquity. But all this newness, as in all things, was prefigured from the old, the Lord being born of a man by a rational disposition through a virgin. The earth was still a virgin, not yet compressed by tillage, not yet subdued to sowing: out of it, we are told, man was made by God into a living soul.

Therefore if the first Adam is thus handed down to us, with reason the following, or last, Adam, as the apostle called him (1 Cor. 15:45), was likewise brought forth by God from earth (that is, flesh) not yet unsealed for generation, into a quickening spirit. And yet--that the occurrence of the name of Adam may not be idle for me--whence was Christ called Adam by the apostle, if his 'man' was not of earthly reckoning? But here too reason defends it: because God recovered his image and likeness, which had been captured by the devil, by a rival operation. For into the still-virgin Eve had crept the word that built up death: into a virgin likewise had the Word of God to be introduced that constructs life, so that what through the same sex had gone off into perdition might through the same sex be brought back into salvation.

Eve had believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel: what the one by believing transgressed, the other by believing blotted out. 'But Eve conceived nothing then in her womb from the devil's word.' Nay, she did conceive. For from thenceforth, that she should bring forth as an outcast and bring forth in sorrows, the devil's word was seed to her: at length she brought forth the fratricide devil. Mary, on the contrary, brought forth him who would in time render safe Israel, his brother after the flesh and his own slayer. Into the womb, therefore, God brought down his Word, the good brother, to erase the memory of the evil brother: from thence Christ had to come forth for the salvation of man, whither man, already condemned, had entered. XVIII. Now let us answer also more simply.

It was not fitting that the Son of God should be born of human seed, lest, if he were wholly the Son of man, he should not also be the Son of God and should have nothing more than Solomon or than Jonah (Matt. 12:41-42)--as he would have had to be believed according to the opinion of Ebion. Therefore, being already the Son of God from the seed of God the Father (that is, the Spirit), so that he might be also the Son of man, flesh alone was to be taken by him from the flesh of man without a man's seed: for a man's seed was superfluous in one who possessed the seed of God. And so, just as before being born of the virgin he could have God for a Father without a human mother, equally, when he was born of the virgin, he could have a human being for a mother without a human father: thus at last man with God, while the flesh of man is with the Spirit of God--flesh without seed from man, Spirit with seed from God.

Therefore if there was a disposition of reason for the Son of God to be brought forth from a virgin, why should he not have received from the virgin the body which he brought forth from the virgin, seeing that it is another thing which he took from God? 'Because,' they say, 'the Word was made flesh' (John 1:14). This utterance testifies and declares what the flesh was made from, yet there is no risk that the flesh was straightway made something other than the Word, if the Word was made flesh out of flesh; or, if it was made out of itself, let the Scripture say so. Since the Scripture says only that it was made, and not also whence it was made, it suggests that it was made out of another, not out of itself.

If not out of itself but out of another, from this very point draw the conclusion out of what it is more fitting to believe the Word was made flesh, unless out of the flesh in which it was also made--either that, or because the Lord himself pronounced sententiously and definitively, 'That which is born in the flesh is flesh' (John 3:6), because it is born of flesh. But if he said this only of man, and not also of himself, then plainly deny that Christ was a man, and so maintain that it did not apply to him either. 'But he adds, And that which is born of the Spirit is spirit (John 3:6), because God is Spirit (John 4:24), and He was born of God: this surely, or all the more, tends toward himself, if it does so even toward those who believe in him.' If, then, this too refers to himself, why not also the former statement above?

For you cannot divide it--this to himself, that above to the rest of mankind--you who do not deny either substance of Christ, both of flesh and of spirit. For the rest, if he had flesh as much as spirit, when he pronounces upon the condition of the two substances which he bore in himself, he cannot be thought to have determined concerning his own spirit but concerning a flesh not his own. Thus, since he himself is of the Spirit of God (and the Spirit is God), born of God, he is himself also of the flesh of man and a man generated in the flesh. XIX. 'What then does it mean, He was born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:13)?' This chapter, indeed, I shall rather use myself, when I have exposed its adulterators:

for they contend that it is written thus: 'Who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of man, but of God (John 1:13)'--as though he were designating the aforesaid believers in his name, in order to show that there is that secret seed of the elect and the spiritual which they imbibe for themselves. But how will it be so, when all who believe in the name of the Lord are born, by the common law of the human race, of blood and of the will of the flesh and of man--even Valentinus himself? So that it is written singularly, as concerning the Lord, 'But he was born of God.' With reason, because he is the Word of God, and with the Word of God the Spirit, and in the Spirit of God the power, and whatever is of God is Christ.