Breath, Radiance, and Mirror

Now let us look at what is meant by the phrase found in the Wisdom of Solomon, where it says of Wisdom that she is “a kind of breath of the power of God, and the purest outflow of the glory of the Almighty, and the radiance of everlasting light, and the spotless mirror of the working or the power of God, and the image of his goodness.” These are the descriptions he gives, and each one of them points out something that belongs to the Wisdom of God: he calls God’s power, and his glory, and his everlasting light, and his working, and his goodness by the name of wisdom. But notice that he does not say wisdom is the breath of the glory of the Almighty, or of the everlasting light, or of the Father’s working, or of his goodness. It would not have been fitting to speak of a breath of any of those. What he says, and rightly, is that wisdom is the breath of the power of God. [a]

By the power of God we are to understand that by which he is strong — by which he appoints, holds in check, and governs everything visible and invisible; which is enough for all the things he rules by his providence; and which is present among them all as though it were one single thing. And although the breath of all this great and measureless power — the vigor itself, so to speak, brought into being with an existence of its own — comes out of the power itself, as the will comes out of the mind, still this will of God is itself made to be the power of God.

So another power comes to be, one that exists with properties of its own: a kind of breath, as Scripture says, of the first and unbegotten power of God, drawing its being from him and never at any time not existing. For suppose someone claims that it did not exist earlier, but came into existence afterward. Let him explain why the Father, who gave it being, did not do so sooner. And if he grants that there was once a beginning, a moment when that breath came out of the power of God, we will ask him again why not before the beginning he has allowed. Going on this way, always demanding an earlier date, working our questions backward, we arrive at this: since God always had power and always had will, there never was any reason — of fitness or of anything else — why he should not always have had the blessing he desired.

This shows that the breath of God’s power always existed, with no beginning except God himself. Nor would it have been fitting for it to have any other beginning than God himself, from whom it takes its birth. And since the apostle says that Christ “is the power of God,” it should be called not only the breath of the power of God, but power out of power.

Now let us examine the phrase “Wisdom is the purest outflow of the glory of the Almighty.” First let us consider what the glory of the almighty God is, and then we will also understand what its outflow is. No one can be a father without having a son, and no one can be a master without owning a servant. In the same way God cannot be called almighty unless there exist those over whom he may exercise his power. So for God to be shown almighty, all things must exist. [g]

Suppose someone wants there to have been ages, or stretches of time, or whatever else he likes to call them, that passed away while the things made later did not yet exist. He would be showing beyond question that during those ages God was not almighty, but became so afterward — from the time he began to have subjects to exercise power over. On that view he would appear to have received a certain increase, and to have risen from a lower condition to a higher one, since there can be no doubt that it is better for him to be almighty than not to be. And how can it seem anything but absurd that God, possessing none of the things it was fitting for him to possess, should afterward come into possession of them by a kind of progress? But if there never was a time when he was not almighty, then of necessity the things that give him that title must also exist, and he must always have had those over whom he exercised power, governed by him either as king or as prince. We will speak of this more fully in its own place, when we come to the subject of created things.

Even now, though, I think a word of warning must be dropped in passing, since the question in front of us is how wisdom is the purest outflow of the glory of the Almighty. No one should think that the title “Almighty” belonged to God before the birth of Wisdom, through whom he is called Father — seeing that Wisdom, who is the Son of God, is the purest outflow of the glory of the Almighty. Let anyone inclined to that suspicion hear what Scripture plainly declares: “In wisdom you have made them all”; and the teaching of the Gospel, that “through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made.” From this let him understand that the title “Almighty” in God cannot be older than the title “Father,” for it is through the Son that the Father is almighty.

But from the phrase “glory of the Almighty,” whose outflow Wisdom is, this is to be understood: that Wisdom, through whom God is called almighty, has a share in the glory of the Almighty. For it is through Wisdom, who is Christ, that God has power over all things — not only by the authority of a ruler, but by the willing obedience of his subjects. And so that you may understand that the Father’s almighty power and the Son’s are one and the same, just as God and the Lord are one and the same with the Father, listen to the way John speaks in the Revelation: “This is what the Lord God says — the one who is, and who was, and who is coming, the Almighty.”

For who else was “the one who is coming” than Christ? And just as no one ought to take offense, since God is the Father, that the Savior is also God, so, since the Father is called almighty, no one ought to take offense that the Son of God is called almighty too. For in this way the saying he speaks to the Father will be true: “All that is mine is yours, and all that is yours is mine, and I am glorified in them.”

Now if everything that is the Father’s is Christ’s as well, then certainly the Father’s almighty power is among the things that exist, and beyond doubt the only Son must be almighty, so that the Son may have everything the Father has. “And I am glorified in them,” he says. For “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and every tongue will confess that the Lord Jesus is in the glory of God the Father.” So he is the outflow of the glory of God in this respect, that he is almighty — Wisdom herself, pure and clear — glorified as the outflow of almighty power, or of glory.

And to make it still clearer what the glory of almighty power is, we will add this. God the Father is almighty because he has power over all things: over heaven and earth, sun, moon and stars, and everything in them. And he exercises his power over them by means of his Word, because at the name of Jesus every knee bows, both of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth. And if every knee bends to Jesus, then without doubt it is Jesus to whom all things are subject; it is he who exercises power over all things, and through him all things are subject to the Father. For it is through wisdom — that is, by word and reason, not by force and necessity — that all things are subject. And so his glory consists in exactly this, that he possesses all things; and this is the purest and clearest glory of almighty power, that all things are subject by reason and wisdom, not by force and necessity.

Calling it the purest and clearest glory of wisdom is a useful way of marking it off from a glory that cannot be called pure and unmixed. For any nature that can turn and change, even when it is glorified in works of righteousness or wisdom, cannot have its glory called unmixed and pure, because righteousness and wisdom belong to it only as added qualities, and what has been added can also fall away. But the Wisdom of God, who is his only Son, is in every respect incapable of change or alteration; every good quality in him belongs to what he is, and cannot be changed or turned into something else. That is why his glory is declared to be pure and unmixed.

In the third place, wisdom is called the radiance of everlasting light. We explained the force of this phrase in earlier pages, where we brought in the comparison of the sun and the radiance of its rays and showed, as well as we could, how it should be understood. To what we said there we will add only this. A thing is properly called everlasting, or eternal, when it neither had a beginning of its existence nor can ever stop being what it is. That is the idea John conveys when he says that “God is light.” Now his wisdom is the radiance of that light, not only in respect of its being light, but of its being everlasting light, so that his wisdom is eternal and everlasting radiance. Understand this fully, and it plainly shows that the Son’s existence comes from the Father, but not in time, and not from any other beginning than, as we have said, God himself. [n]

But wisdom is also called the spotless mirror of the energeia, the working, of God. So we must first understand what the working of the power of God is. It is a kind of vigor, so to speak, by which God acts: in creating, or in his providence, or in judgment, or in the disposing and arranging of individual things, each in its season. For just as the image formed in a mirror gives back, without a mistake, every act and movement of the one who gazes into it, so Wisdom would have herself understood when she is called the spotless mirror of the Father’s power and working. [o]

The Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Wisdom of God, declares the same of himself when he says, “Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.” And again he says that the Son can do nothing of himself except what he sees the Father doing. So the Son differs from the Father in no respect in the power of his works, and the work of the Son is not a different thing from the work of the Father; one and the same movement, so to speak, runs through everything. That is why he named him a spotless mirror — so that by such a phrase it might be understood that there is no unlikeness whatever between the Son and the Father.

Some say these things are done the way a student resembles or imitates his teacher; others, that the Son makes in bodily material what the Father first formed in spiritual being. How can either of those agree with what Scripture declares, when in the Gospel the Son is said to do not similar things, but the same things in a similar way?

It remains for us to ask what “the image of his goodness” means; and here, I think, we must understand the same thing we expressed a moment ago, when we spoke of the image formed in a mirror. For the Father is the first goodness, out of which, beyond doubt, the Son is born; and the Son, being in every respect the image of the Father, may certainly be called with equal fitness the image of his goodness. For there is no second goodness existing in the Son besides the one that is in the Father. [q]

And so the Savior himself rightly says in the Gospel, “No one is good except one alone, God the Father,” so that by such a phrase it may be understood that the Son is not of some other goodness, but only of the goodness that is in the Father, whose image he is rightly called, because he comes from no other source than that first goodness — otherwise a different goodness might appear to be in the Son. And there is no unlikeness or difference of goodness in the Son.

So there is no reason to imagine a kind of blasphemy, as it were, in the words “No one is good except one alone, God the Father,” as though they were denying that Christ or the Holy Spirit is good. But, as we have already said, the first goodness is to be understood as residing in God the Father, from whom the Son is born and from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds; and both of them keep within themselves, beyond any doubt, the nature of that goodness which is in the source they come from.

And if there are other things Scripture calls good — an angel, or a man, or a servant, or a treasure, or a good heart, or a good tree — all of them are called so by a stretch of the word, having a goodness that has been added to them and not one that belongs to what they are. But it would take a great deal of time and labor to gather together all the titles of the Son of God — the true light, or the door, or the righteousness, or the holiness, or the redemption, and countless others — and to show the reasons each one is given. Satisfied, then, with what we have already put forward, we go on with our inquiries into the matters that follow.