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.
But as flesh, he was not of blood nor of the will of the flesh and of man, because it was of the will of God that the Word was made flesh: for the formal negation of our nativity pertains to the flesh, not to the Word, because the flesh had thus to be born, not the Word. 'But when he denies that he was born of the will of the flesh, why did he not also deny that he was born of the substance of the flesh?' For neither, because he denied that he was of blood, did he refuse the substance of the flesh, but rather the material of the seed, which is agreed to be the heat of the blood, as though changed by a foaming-off into the curdling of the woman's blood: for from the curd there is in the cheese thereof the force of the substance which by a medicinal action thickens it, that is, of the milk.
We understand, therefore, that the Lord's nativity from carnal intercourse was denied--which savours of the will of man and of the flesh--not his participation in the womb. And why indeed did he so emphatically insist that he was born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh or of man, unless because it was that very flesh which no one would doubt to have been born of intercourse? Moreover, in denying that he was of intercourse, he did not deny that he was of flesh; nay, he affirmed that he was of flesh, because he did not deny that he was of flesh in the same way as he denied that he was of intercourse. I beseech you, if the Spirit of God did not come down into the womb in order to participate in the flesh from the womb, why did he come down into the womb? For he could have been made spiritual flesh outside it far more simply than within the womb. Without cause he introduced himself into that from which he brought forth nothing.
But it was not without cause that he came down into the womb. Therefore he received from it; for if he did not receive from it, he came down into it without cause--especially as one about to be flesh of that quality which was not of the womb, that is, spiritual. XX. But what sort of tortuousness is yours, that you seek to remove the very syllable 'ex' (out of) that is assigned the office of a preposition, and to use rather another which in this connection is not found in the holy Scriptures? You say he was born 'through' a virgin, not 'out of' a virgin, and 'in' the womb, not 'out of' the womb--because the angel too, in a dream to Joseph, said, 'For that which is born in her is of the Holy Spirit' (Matt. 1:20)--he did not say 'out of her.' Yet surely, even if he had said 'out of her,' he had said 'in her': for what was 'out of her' was 'in her.'
So then, when he says 'in her,' it agrees just as much with 'out of her,' because what was in her was out of her. But it is well that the same Matthew, running through the origin of the Lord from Abraham down to Mary, says, 'And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, out of whom is born Christ' (Matt. 1:16). But Paul too imposes silence on these grammarians: 'God sent,' he says, 'his Son, made out of a woman' (Gal. 4:4). Was it 'through' a woman or 'in' a woman? This indeed more forcibly, in that he says 'made' rather than 'born.' For he would have expressed it more simply as 'born'; but by saying 'made,' he both confirmed 'the Word was made flesh' and asserted the reality of the flesh made out of the virgin.
For us too, in support of this position, the psalms will plead--not indeed those of the apostate and heretic and Platonist Valentinus, but those of the most holy and most received prophet David: he among us sings of Christ, through whom Christ himself sang of himself. Take the twenty-first psalm and hear the Lord conversing with God the Father: 'For thou art he that plucked me out of my mother's womb' (Ps. 22:10)--behold one point. 'And my hope from my mother's breasts; upon thee was I cast forth out of the womb' (Ps. 22:9-10)--behold another. 'And from my mother's womb thou art my God' (Ps. 22:11)--behold yet another. Now let us contend over the very senses. 'Thou pluckedst me,' he says, 'out of the womb.' What is plucked away, save what cleaves, what is fixed in, what is bound to that from which it is plucked so as to be taken away? If it did not cleave to the womb, how was it plucked away?
If he who was plucked away did cleave, how would he have cleaved unless, while he was out of the womb, he was joined to the origin of the womb through that umbilical cord, as it were the shoot of his own little pouch? Even when something foreign is glued to something foreign, it is so made one flesh and one body with that to which it is glued, that when it is torn away it carries off with it something from the body from which it is torn--as it were a certain train of the broken union and an offshoot of the mutual coupling.
For the rest, since he also names his mother's breasts--which without doubt he sucked--let the midwives and physicians and natural philosophers answer concerning the nature of the breasts, whether they are wont to flow otherwise than by a generative affection of the womb, since from thence the veins suspend that sink of infernal blood into the nipple, and by that very transference decoct it into a more cheerful material of milk: whence indeed it comes about that in the time of the breasts the monthly courses of blood cease. But if the Word made flesh of itself, not by any communication of the womb, the womb doing nothing, performing nothing, suffering nothing, how did it pour over its source into the breasts, which change nothing except by giving birth? And it could not have had blood to supply the milk, if it did not have also the causes of the blood itself, namely the plucking away of its own flesh.
What was the newness in Christ's being born of a virgin is plain: this alone, namely, that he was born of a virgin according to the reason which we have set forth, and in order that our regeneration might be virginal in a spiritual sense, sanctified from all defilements through Christ, himself too a virgin, even carnally, in that he was of a virgin's flesh. XXI. If, then, they contend that this belonged to the newness--that just as the Word of God did not become flesh from a man's seed, so neither should it become flesh from the virgin's flesh--why is not this the whole newness: that a flesh not born of seed should proceed from a flesh born of seed? Let them come closer yet to the encounter hand to hand. 'Behold,' he says, 'a virgin shall conceive in the womb' (Isa. 7:14). Conceive what? The Word of God, of course, not a man's seed. Certainly that she might bring forth a son: for 'she shall bring forth,' he says, 'a son.'
Therefore, as it was hers to bring forth, because it was hers to conceive, so what she brought forth is hers, although what she conceived was not hers. On the contrary, if the Word made flesh of itself, then it conceived and brought forth itself, and the prophecy is void: for the virgin neither conceived nor brought forth, if what she brought forth is not, from the conceiving of the Word, his own flesh. But shall this word of the prophet alone be made void? Or that of the angel too, announcing the virgin's conceiving and childbearing? Or every Scripture whatsoever that pronounces a mother of Christ? For how a mother, save because he was in her womb? To what end in the womb, if he received nothing out of her womb which would make her a mother in whose womb he was? A flesh alien to her ought not to have this name:
the womb does not call it 'mother's,' unless it is the flesh that is daughter of that womb; and it is not daughter of the womb, if it was born to itself. Elizabeth too, then, will be silent--she who bore a prophet, an infant already conscious of his Lord, and who was moreover filled with the Holy Spirit: for she says without cause, 'And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?' (Luke 1:43). If Mary carried in her womb Jesus not as a son but as a guest, how does she say, 'Blessed is the fruit of thy womb' (Luke 1:42)? What fruit of the womb is this, which did not sprout out of the womb, which did not take root in the womb, which is not of her whose womb it is? And who indeed is the fruit of the womb but Christ?
Is it because he himself is the flower that came forth from the rod out of the root of Jesse (Isa. 11:1)--and the root of Jesse is the family of David, the rod out of the root is Mary out of David, the flower out of the rod is the son of Mary, who is called Jesus Christ--will he then be also the fruit? For the flower is the fruit, because through the flower and out of the flower every fruit is trained forward into fruit. What then? Do they deny to the fruit its flower, and to the flower its rod, and to the rod its root, so that the root may not claim for itself, through the rod, the property of that which is of the rod--that is, of the flower and the fruit? Since every degree of the lineage is reckoned from the last to the principal, so that even now they may know that the flesh of Christ cleaves not only to Mary but also to David through Mary, and to Jesse through David.
So truly that God swears to David that this fruit, of the loins of David (that is, of the posterity of his flesh), shall sit upon his throne (Ps. 132:11). If of the loins of David, how much more of the loins of Mary, on whose account he is in the loins of David. XXII. Let them, then, blot out also the testimonies of the demons, proclaiming to Jesus that he is the Son of David (Matt. 15:22; Mark 10:47); but the testimonies of the apostles they will not be able to blot out, if the demons' testimonies are unworthy. First of all Matthew himself, the most faithful commentator of the Gospel, as the companion of the Lord, for no other reason than to make us partakers of Christ's carnal origin, thus began: 'The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham' (Matt. 1:1).
With the lineage flowing by descent from these fountains of origin, when the order is brought down step by step to the nativity of Christ, what else is described than the very flesh of Abraham and of David, making through each a transmission of itself right into the virgin, bringing in Christ--nay, Christ himself coming forth--from the virgin? But Paul too, being both disciple and master and witness of the same Gospel, because he is an apostle of the same Christ, confirms that Christ is 'of the seed of David according to the flesh' (Rom. 1:3)--his own flesh, of course. Therefore of the seed of David is Christ's flesh. But according to Mary's flesh is it of the seed of David: therefore it is of Mary's flesh, in that it is of the seed of David. Whithersoever you twist the saying, either it is of Mary's flesh what is of the seed of David, or it is of David's seed what is of Mary's flesh.
The same apostle settles this whole controversy by defining that Christ himself is the seed of Abraham: and if of Abraham, then surely much more of David, as the more recent. For, in reweaving the promise of the blessing of the nations in the seed of Abraham--'And in thy seed shall all nations be blessed'--'He said not,' he says, 'to seeds, as of many, but to seed, of one, which is Christ' (Gal. 3:16). We who nonetheless read and believe these things, what quality of flesh ought we and are we able to acknowledge in Christ? Surely no other than Abraham's, since Christ is the seed of Abraham; nor other than Jesse's, since out of the root of Jesse Christ is the flower; nor other than David's, since the fruit of the loins of David is Christ:
nor other than Mary's, since Christ is out of Mary's womb; and yet higher up, no other than Adam's, since Christ is the second Adam. It follows, therefore, that they must either contend that those men had spiritual flesh, so that the same condition of substance may be brought down into Christ, or else concede that Christ's flesh was not spiritual, seeing that it is not reckoned of a spiritual stock. XXIII. But we acknowledge the fulfilment of the prophetic word of Simeon, pronounced over the Lord while yet a recent infant: 'Behold, this one is set for the ruin and the raising up of many in Israel, and for a sign that shall be spoken against' (Luke 2:34). For the sign of Christ's nativity is according to Isaiah: 'Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and shall bring forth a son' (Isa. 7:14).
We acknowledge, then, that the sign to be contradicted is the conceiving and childbearing of the virgin Mary, concerning which those Academics say, 'A virgin brought forth and did not bring forth, a virgin and not a virgin.' As though, even if it had to be so put, it would not rather beseem us to say it: for she brought forth in that it was of her own flesh, and did not bring forth in that it was not of a man's seed; and a virgin as regards a man, no virgin as regards childbearing--yet not so that she did not bring forth what she brought forth because it was not of her own flesh, nor a virgin who was no virgin because she was not a mother from her own inward parts. But with us there is nothing doubtful, nothing twisted into an ambiguous defence: light is light and darkness is darkness, and yea is yea and nay is nay; what is more than this is of the evil one (Matt. 5:37). She brought forth who brought forth; and if as a virgin she conceived, in her childbearing she was wedded:
for she was wedded by that very law of the opened body, in which it made no difference whether the force of the male was admitted or emitted: it was the same sex that unsealed it. This, in short, is the womb on account of which it is written also concerning others: 'Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord' (Exod. 13:2; Luke 2:23). Who is truly holy, save that holy Son of God? Who properly opened the womb, save he who opened one that was shut? For in all others it is marriage that opens the womb. Thus it was the more opened because it was the more shut. Surely she is to be called rather no-virgin than virgin, having by a certain leap become a mother before being a bride. And what further need be discussed on this point? Since it was on this principle that the apostle pronounced the Son of God to have been brought forth not of a virgin but of a woman (Gal. 4:4), he recognized the nuptial affection of the opened womb.
We read indeed in Ezekiel concerning that cow which brought forth and did not bring forth: but see whether the Holy Spirit, even then foreseeing you, did not by this utterance mark you out as about to dispute over the womb of Mary. But for the rest, he would not have pronounced against that simplicity of his own in a doubtful manner, since Isaiah says, 'She shall conceive and shall bring forth' (Isa. 7:14). XXIV. For what Isaiah also hurls elsewhere in derision of those very heretics, and above all, 'Woe to them that make sweet bitter and darkness light' (Isa. 5:20)--he brands, namely, those who do not preserve even the very words in the light of their proper meanings, so that the soul is not other than what is called soul, and the flesh not other than what is seen, and God not other than who is proclaimed.
Therefore, foreseeing Marcion too, he says, 'I am God, and there is none other beside me' (Isa. 45:5). And when in another way he says the same thing, 'Before me there was no God' (Isa. 43:10), he strikes at those I-know-not-what genealogies of the aeons of the Valentinians. And 'He was born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh or of man, but of God' (John 1:13), was his answer to Ebion. Equally, 'Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel otherwise than we have, let him be anathema' (Gal. 1:8), he directs against the possessing-spirit of Apelles' virgin Philumene.
Certainly, 'He who denies that Christ has come in the flesh, this one is antichrist' (1 John 4:2-3; 2 John 7)--pronouncing the flesh bare and absolute and by the simple name of its own nature, he smites all its disputers, just as, in also defining Christ himself to be one, he shakes the arguers for a multiform Christ, who make one Christ and another Jesus--one who slipped away from the midst of the crowds and another who was held fast, one glorious in the retirement of the mountain in a circuit of cloud under three witnesses and another passive to the rest, one noble and another ignoble, one magnanimous and another indeed trembling, and lastly one who suffered and another who was raised again--whereby they assert their own resurrection also into another flesh.
But it is well that the same one who suffered will come from heaven, the same who was raised again will appear to all, and those who pierced him shall see and recognize him (Zech. 12:10; Rev. 1:7)--surely that very flesh against which they raged, without which he can neither himself exist nor be recognized: so that those too may blush who affirm that the flesh sits in the heavens void of sense, like a sheath from which Christ has been drawn out; or those who say that the flesh and the soul are just the same, or that there is only the soul and no longer the flesh. XXV. But thus far concerning the present matter. For I now think that the proof of the flesh in Christ--both born of a virgin and human--has been sufficiently furnished.
And this discussion alone might have sufficed--apart from the encounter with the several opinions on the opposite side, which out of abundance we have challenged both by their argumentations and by the Scriptures which they use--so that, together with our having proved what and whence Christ's flesh was, we may also have prejudged, against them all, what it was not. But that the conclusion may recall the preface, the resurrection of our flesh, to be defended in another treatise, will here have its foundation laid, since it is now manifest from all this of what sort was that which rose again in Christ. Text edited by Ernest Evans (1956). Transcribed by Roger Pearse (2002).