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:
mortuumcredunt, etquodestmortuumexincorruptelanatumessecontendunt, quasicorruptelaaliudsitamorte. 'Sedetnostracarostatimresurgeredebebat.' exspecta: nonduminimicossuosChristusoppressit, utcumamicisdeinimicistriumphet. XVI. InsuperargumentandilibidineexformaingeniihaereticilocumsibifecitAlexanderillequasinosaffirmemusidcircoChristumterrenicensusinduissecarnemutevacuaretinsemetipsocarnempeccati.
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.