The Maker of All Things

Novatian’s book on the Trinity runs to thirty-one chapters. In the first eight he takes up the words of the rule of truth — the rule of faith — which tell us to believe in God the Father and Lord Almighty, the perfect Maker of all things. Among God’s other attributes he argues there, partly from reason and partly from the Scriptures, that God is measureless, eternal, one, good, unchanging, deathless, and spirit; and he adds that God has neither passions nor bodily parts, and that where the Scriptures speak as though he had them, they are speaking of God in human terms.

The rule of truth requires that we believe, before anything else, in God the Father and Lord Almighty — that is, the perfect Maker of all things, who has hung the heavens high overhead, settled the earth as the mass beneath, spread out the seas with their flowing water, and furnished every one of them with the equipment that suits it and adorns it. In the solid vault of heaven he woke the light-bringing sunrises. He fills out the white globe of the moon month by month, as a comfort for the night. He kindles the rays of the stars with the changing splendors of their glittering light, and he has willed that all of these should circle the whole compass of the world along their lawful tracks, and so make days, months, years, signs and seasons, and other benefits for the human race. [d]

On the earth he has raised the highest mountains to a peak, thrown the valleys down into the depths, leveled the plains smooth, and appointed the herds of animals for the various services people need. He set the oaks of the woods there for the human use they would one day be put to. He grew the harvests into food. He unlocked the mouths of the springs and poured them into running rivers. And after all this, so as not to leave even the delight of the eyes unprovided for, he clothed everything in the many colors of the flowers, for the pleasure of anyone looking at them. In the sea itself, too — marvelous already for its extent and its usefulness — he made creatures of every kind, some of moderate size, some enormous, so that the variety of what he appointed testifies to the mind of the Craftsman. And, not content with that, in case the roaring and rushing water should seize an element that is not its own at the expense of the man who owns it, he shut the sea’s limits in with shores; so that when the raving breaker and the foaming water come up out of its deep bosom, it turns back into itself again and does not cross its hidden bounds, but keeps the laws laid down for it — so that a man might be all the more careful to keep the laws of God, seeing that the elements themselves keep theirs.

And after these things he set man at the head of the world — man made, moreover, in the image of God, to whom he gave mind and reason and foresight, so that he might imitate God. The first elements of his body were earthly, but the substance was breathed into him from heaven, and was divine. And when he had given him everything for his service, he willed that man alone should be free. And then, in case an unlimited freedom should run into danger, he laid down a command, in which man was taught that there was no evil in the fruit of the tree, but was warned in advance that evil would come about if he used his free will in contempt of the law that had been given him. On the one hand it was fitting for him to be free, so that the image of God should not be held in a bondage that did not suit it; on the other hand the law had to be added, so that an unbridled liberty should not break out even into contempt for the one who gave it. That way he might receive both the rewards he deserved and the punishment he deserved, having in his own power what he chose to do, according to which way his mind leaned.

And so it is by envy that mortality comes back upon him — since he could have escaped it by obeying, and he rushes into it by hurrying to be God on perverse advice. Even so, God tempered his punishment indulgently, cursing not so much the man himself as his labors on the ground. And what is needed does not come without man’s knowing it: God sets out man’s hope of a discovery to come, and of salvation in Christ. And that he is kept from touching the wood of the tree of life is not caused by any spiteful poison of envy, but is so that he should not live forever without Christ’s pardon of his sins going before, and carry about with him always, for his punishment, an immortality of guilt.

There is more, in the higher regions as well — above the firmament itself, regions our eyes cannot make out now. There he appointed angels beforehand, arranged the spiritual powers, set thrones and authorities in command, and founded many other measureless expanses of heavens and unbounded works of his mysteries, so that this world, huge as it is, might look almost more like the last of his bodily works than the only one. And truly, what lies beneath the earth is not itself empty of powers distributed and arranged. For there is a place where the souls of the just and the unjust are taken, aware in advance of the sentences of the judgment to come; so that we might see the overflowing greatness of God’s works in every direction, not shut up inside the fold of this world, however roomy it is, as we have said, but able to be thought of below the abysses and the depths of the world as well. And so, weighing the greatness of the works, we should admire, as he deserves, the Craftsman of such a structure.

And over all these things he himself, who contains all things and has nothing empty outside himself, has left no room for a higher God, such as some people imagine. Since he himself has enclosed all things in the embrace of a perfect greatness and power, he is always intent on his own work: pervading all things, moving all things, giving life to all things, watching all things, and binding materials that disagree into the concord of all the elements, so that out of these unlike first principles one world is so established by a conspiring union that no force can dissolve it — except when he alone who made it commands it to be dissolved, for the purpose of giving us other and greater things. [j]

For we read that he contains all things, and therefore that there could have been nothing outside him. And since he has no beginning, he consequently knows no ending — unless, and far be the thought from us, he began at some time to be, and is not above all things, but, having begun to be after something else, would be beneath what was before him, and so be found to be of less power, in that he is labeled second even in time itself. For this reason, then, he is always unbounded, because nothing is greater than he is; always eternal, because nothing is older than he is. What is without a beginning can be preceded by nothing, since it has no time. He is immortal for this reason, that he does not come to an end by any ending of his own completeness. And since everything that is without a beginning is without law, he shuts out the measure of time by owing nothing to anyone.

About him, then, and about the things that are of him and are in him, the mind of a man cannot conceive worthily what they are, how great they are, or what they are like; nor does the eloquence of human speech reach a power that comes anywhere near his majesty. To conceive his majesty, and to speak of it, all eloquence is rightly mute and every mind is poor. He is greater than mind itself, and it cannot be conceived how great he is; for if he could be conceived, he would be smaller than the human mind in which he was conceived. He is greater than all speech, and cannot be uttered; for if he could be uttered, he would be less than human speech, which, in uttering him, could both surround him and hold him. Whatever could be thought about him must be less than he is, and whatever could be uttered must be less than he is, when it is compared with him.

We can be aware of him to some degree in silence, but we cannot unfold him in speech as he is. Call him Light, and you are speaking of his creature rather than of him — you have not declared him. Call him Strength, and you are speaking of his power and bringing that out rather than speaking of him. Call him Majesty, and you are describing his honor rather than himself. And why should I make a long business of going through his attributes one at a time? I will unfold the whole thing at once. Whatever you might declare of him in any respect, you would be unfolding some condition and power of his rather than him. For what can you fittingly say or think about the one who is greater than all speech and all thought?

Except in this one way — and how are we to do it? how can we possibly conceive how we may grasp these very things? — we will grasp with the mind what God is if we consider that he is what cannot be understood in quality or in quantity, and cannot so much as come into thought at all. For if the sharpness of our eyes grows dull when we look at the sun, so that the gaze, beaten by the brightness of the rays that meet it, cannot look at the disc itself, the sharpness of our mental sight suffers the same thing in all our thinking about God; and the more directly we bend our efforts to consider God, the more the mind is blinded by the light of its own thought.

For — to say it once more — what can you say worthily of him who is loftier than all loftiness, higher than all height, deeper than all depth, clearer than all light, brighter than all brightness, more brilliant than all splendor, stronger than all strength, more powerful than all power, mightier than all might, greater than all majesty, more potent than all potency, richer than all riches, wiser than all wisdom, kinder than all kindness, better than all goodness, more just than all justice, more merciful than all mercy? Every kind of virtue must be less than he is, since he is both God and the Parent of all the virtues, so that it may truly be said that God is what nothing can be compared to. For he is above everything that can be said. He is a certain Mind that generates and fills all things, and that, without any beginning or end of time, governs by the highest and most perfect reason the causes of things that are linked together by nature, so that the outcome is a benefit to all.

This, then, is the one we acknowledge and know to be God, the Maker of all things — Lord because of his power, Parent because of the training he gives. He it is who “spoke, and all things were made”; he commanded, and all things came forth. Of him it is written, “You have made all things in wisdom.” Of him Moses said, “God in heaven above, and on the earth beneath.” According to Isaiah, it is he who “has measured out the heaven with a span, and the earth with the hollow of his hand”; “who looks on the earth and makes it tremble; who sets the bound of the circle of the earth, and those who live in it are like locusts; who has weighed the mountains in a balance, and the woodlands in scales” — that is, by the sure test of the divine arrangement. In case the earth’s great bulk, lying unevenly, should easily fall into ruin if it were not balanced with equal weights, he has poised this load of earthy mass evenly. [k]

It is he who says through the prophet, “I am God, and there is no one besides me.” And he who says through the same prophet, “Because I will not give my majesty to another” — so as to shut out every pagan and every heretic, with the things they invent; proving that what the hand of a workman makes is not God, and neither is what a heretic thinks up. For something whose existence you have to ask a workman for is not God.

And he has added to this through the prophet, “The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What house will you build me, and where is the place of my rest?” — to show that the one the world does not contain is much less contained in a temple. And he says these things not out of boastfulness about himself, but for our knowledge. He does not want the glory of his greatness from us; he wants to give us, as a father does, a religious wisdom.

And wanting, moreover, to draw our minds toward gentleness — brutish minds, swollen and stubborn with a clodlike wildness — he says, “And on whom shall my Spirit rest, except on the one who is lowly and quiet and trembles at my words?” — so that a person might recognize in some measure how great God is, by learning through the Spirit given to him to fear God. And wanting still more to come into our knowledge, and to stir our minds up to worship him, he said, “I am the Lord, who made the light and created the darkness” — so that we should not suppose that some Nature or other, I do not know what, was the craftsman of the changes by which nights and days are governed, but should rather recognize, as is truer, that God created them.

And since we cannot see him with the gaze of our eyes, we rightly learn about him from the greatness and the power and the majesty of his works. As the apostle Paul says: “For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made — his eternal power and divinity as well.” So the human mind, learning what is hidden from what is plain, may from the greatness of the works it looks at consider with the mind’s eyes the greatness of the Architect. The same apostle says of him: “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory.” For the one who has gone beyond the greatness of thought has gone beyond what the eyes can take in. And it is said: “Of him, and through him, and in him are all things.” For all things are by his command, because they are of him; and they are ordered by his word, as being through him; and all things return to his judgment, since, as they wait in him for freedom when decay is done away with, they appear to be called back to him.