Two Substances, One Person

But why should I go on over things this obvious, when I ought to be going after the places where they try to cloud the plainest proof there is? They have been beaten on every side over the distinction between the Father and the Son — a distinction we hold to without breaking the bond that cannot be broken, as with the sun and its ray, or a spring and the river that runs out of it. So now they fall back on a number they say cannot be divided, though it runs out into two and into three, and they try to read that distinction in a way that will still square with their own opinion. Inside one person, they say, there are two to be told apart, Father and Son: the Son being the flesh, that is, the man, that is, Jesus; the Father being spirit, that is, God, that is, Christ. So while they insist that the Father and the Son are one and the same, what they actually do is begin by dividing them rather than uniting them. For if Jesus is one and Christ is another, then the Son is different from the Father, since the Son is Jesus and the Father is Christ. That is the sort of one-man rule they must have picked up in Valentinus’s school, making two of him — Jesus and Christ. [a]

In any case this notion of theirs has already been answered by what we set out earlier, because the Word of God, or the Spirit of God, is also called the power of the Most High — the one they make out to be the Father. But things spoken of as belonging to someone are not that someone; they come out of him and are his.

Still, on this piece of their heresy another answer is waiting for them. “Look,” they say, “the angel announced it: ‘Therefore the holy thing that will be born of you will be called the Son of God.’ So since it was the flesh that was born, it must be the flesh that is the Son of God.”

No — that is said about the Spirit of God. It was certainly by the Holy Spirit that the virgin conceived, and what she conceived is what she gave birth to. So the thing that had to be born was the thing that was conceived and was going to be delivered: the Spirit, the one whose “name will be called Emmanuel, which means, God with us.” Besides, the flesh is not God, so it could not have been said of the flesh, “the holy thing will be called the Son of God,” but only of the divine being who was born in the flesh — the one the psalm also speaks of: “Since God became man in the midst of her, and established her by the will of the Father.” And which divine being was born there? The Word; and, along with the Word, the Spirit that took flesh, by the will of the Father.

So the Word took flesh. And this is the question we have to settle: how the Word became flesh — whether by being transformed, so to speak, into flesh, or by actually putting flesh on. Actually putting it on, beyond question. For the rest, we are bound to hold that God cannot change and cannot be given some other shape, since he is eternal. Being transformed is the destruction of what was there before, since whatever is transformed into something else stops being what it was and starts being what it was not. But God does not stop being what he was, and he cannot be anything other than what he is. The Word is God, and “the word of the Lord stays forever” — and stays so precisely by holding to his own proper form without change.

Now if he does not admit of being transformed, then “became flesh” has to be understood in this sense: he comes to be in flesh, and is made plain, and is seen, and is handled by means of the flesh. Everything else said about him has to be taken the same way. For if the Word became flesh by being transformed, by a change of substance, then Jesus is at once a substance compounded out of two substances, flesh and spirit — a kind of alloy, like electrum, made of gold and silver. And it begins to be neither gold, that is, spirit, nor silver, that is, flesh: each is altered by the other, and a third substance is the result. At that rate Jesus cannot be God, since he has stopped being the Word, and the Word is what became flesh; and he cannot be man in flesh either, since he is not properly flesh, and flesh is what the Word became. Compounded out of both, he is in fact neither; he is some third substance, quite different from either.

But in fact we find him set out expressly as both God and man. The very psalm we quoted says of the flesh, “God became man in the midst of her; he therefore established her by the will of the Father” — in every respect Son of God and Son of Man, God and man, differing of course according to what belongs to each substance, since the Word is nothing but God and the flesh is nothing but man. The apostle teaches the same thing about his two substances when he says, “who was made of the seed of David” — in those words he is man, and Son of Man; and “who was declared Son of God according to the Spirit” — in those words he is God, and the Word, the Son of God. We see the double condition plainly: not blurred together, but joined in one person — Jesus, God and man.

What I have to say about Christ I am holding back for now. But notice this: what belongs to each nature is kept so completely intact that the Spirit did in Jesus everything that suits itself — signs, works of power, wonders — while the flesh went through what belongs to flesh. It was hungry when the devil tested him, thirsty with the Samaritan woman; it wept over Lazarus; it was distressed to the point of death; and in the end it actually died.

If he had been only some third thing, one compound essence made out of the two substances, like the electrum we mentioned, no clear evidence of either nature would show. Instead the functions would trade places: the Spirit would do what the flesh is to do, and the flesh what the Spirit brings about — or else things that suit neither flesh nor spirit, but belong confusedly to some third character. Worse than that: on this account either the Word underwent death or the flesh did not die, if the Word really was converted into flesh, because then either the flesh was immortal or the Word was mortal. But since the two substances acted separately, each in its own character, each necessarily had its own operations and its own outcomes.

Learn, then, along with Nicodemus, that “what is born in the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is Spirit.” Flesh does not become Spirit, and Spirit does not become flesh. In one person they are perfectly able to be together. Jesus consists of both: man, from the flesh; God, from the Spirit. And the angel called him “the Son of God” with respect to the nature in which he was Spirit, keeping the title “Son of Man” for the flesh. In the same way the apostle calls him “the mediator between God and men,” and so states that he has a share in both substances. Now, to finish the matter: you who take the Son of God to be the flesh — be so good as to tell us what the Son of Man is. Will he be the Spirit? But you insist that the Father himself is the Spirit, on the ground that “God is spirit,” as if we did not also read of “the Spirit of God,” exactly as we find that while “the Word was God,” there is also “the Word of God.”

And so, you complete fool of a heretic, you make Christ out to be the Father, without ever once weighing what the name actually carries — if Christ is a name at all, and not rather an added name, a description. It means “Anointed.” And Anointed is no more a proper name than Clothed or Shod; it is only an attachment to a name. Suppose Jesus somehow came to be called Clothed as well, the way he is in fact called Anointed from the sacred act of his anointing. Would you say in the same way that Jesus was the Son of God, and at the same time suppose that Clothed was the Father? Now then, about Christ: if Christ is the Father, then the Father is an anointed one, and of course receives the oil from someone else. And if you say he receives it from himself, you will have to prove that to us. [o]

That is not what we learn from the Acts of the Apostles, in the cry the church made to God: “It is true, Lord — against your holy child Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together.” They testified there both that Jesus was the Son of God and that, being the Son, he was anointed by the Father. So Christ must be the same as Jesus, who was anointed by the Father — and not the Father, who anointed the Son.

Peter says the same: “Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” — that is, Anointed. John, for his part, marks a man out as “a liar” if he “denies that Jesus is the Christ,” and on the other side declares that “everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.” And so he urges us to believe in the name of his — the Father’s — Son Jesus Christ, so that “our fellowship may be with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” Paul in the same way speaks everywhere of “God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.” Writing to the Romans he gives thanks to God through our Lord Jesus Christ. To the Galatians he declares himself “an apostle, not from men, nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father.”

You have all his writings in your hands, and they testify plainly to the same thing and set out two: God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son. They testify too that Jesus is himself the Christ, and that under either title he is the Son of God. For by exactly the same right by which both names belong to the same person — the Son of God — either name by itself, without the other, belongs to that same person. So if the name Jesus stands alone, Christ is understood along with it, because Jesus is the Anointed One; and if the name Christ is the only one given, then Jesus is meant by it, because the Anointed One is Jesus. Of these two names, Jesus Christ, the first is the proper one, the name the angel gave him; the second is only an addition, said of him from his anointing — which lays down the condition that Christ has to be the Son, not the Father.

How blind a man must be not to see that the name Christ implies some other God besides, if he hands this name Christ to the Father. For if Christ is God the Father, then when he says, “I am going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,” he shows plainly enough that there is another Father and another God above himself. If, again, the Father is Christ, then it must be someone else “who strengthens the thunder and creates the wind and announces his Christ to men.” And if “the kings of the earth stood up and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ,” then that Lord must be someone else, against whose Christ the kings and the rulers were gathered. And if, to take another passage, “this is what the Lord says to my Lord, the Anointed,” then the Lord who speaks must be a distinct being from the Lord, the Anointed, whom he addresses. Again, when the apostle prays in his letter “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ may give you the spirit of wisdom and of knowledge,” then the one who is the God of Jesus Christ, and who hands out the gifts of the Spirit, must be someone other than Christ. And, once and for all, so that we do not go wandering through every passage: the one “who raised Christ from the dead and will also raise our mortal bodies” must certainly be, as the one who gives life, other than the dead Father — or other than the Father brought back to life, if the Christ who died is the Father.

Silence. Silence on such blasphemy. Let us be content to say that Christ died — the Son of the Father — and let that be enough, because that is as much as the Scriptures have told us. Even the apostle, when he states that “Christ died” — and he does not state it without feeling the weight of it — immediately adds “according to the Scriptures,” so as to take the harshness off the words with the Scriptures’ authority and spare the reader the offense. Now when two substances are said to be in Christ, the divine and the human, it plainly follows that the divine one is immortal and the human one mortal; and so it is clear in what sense he declares that “Christ died” — in the sense in which he was flesh and man and Son of Man, not as being the Spirit and the Word and the Son of God. In short, since he says it was Christ, that is, the Anointed One, who died, he shows us that what died was the nature that had been anointed: the flesh, in a word. [x]

“Very well,” you say. “We state our own side in exactly the terms you use about the Son, so we are not speaking against the Lord God. We do not maintain that he died in his divine nature, only in his human one.” No — you do blaspheme, because what you allege is not only that the Father died but that he died the death of the cross. For “cursed are those who hang on a tree” — a curse which, by the law, fits the Son, since “Christ was made a curse for us,” but which certainly does not fit the Father. And since you turn Christ into the Father, the blasphemy against the Father is yours. When we say that Christ was crucified we are not abusing him with a curse; we are only repeating the curse the law pronounced. Nor was the apostle blaspheming when he said the same thing we say. Besides, there is no blasphemy in saying of a subject what fairly applies to it; the blasphemy lies in alleging of a subject what does not suit it.

On the same principle, the Father was not a partner in the Son’s suffering. The heretics, afraid of running straight into blasphemy against the Father, hope to cut it down by this device: they grant us so far that the Father and the Son are two, and then add that since it is the Son who suffers, the Father is only his fellow-sufferer. But how absurd they are even in this dodge. What does “suffering along with” mean, except undergoing suffering in company with someone? If the Father cannot suffer, he cannot suffer in company with anyone; and if he can suffer with another, then of course he can suffer. You give him nothing at all by this frightened evasion. You are afraid to call capable of suffering the one you make capable of suffering along with someone. And the Father is as incapable of suffering along with the Son as the Son is of suffering at all, so far as he exists as God.

“Then how could the Son suffer, if the Father did not suffer with him?” My answer is that the Father is separate from the Son, though not separate from him as God. Even when a river is fouled with mire and mud, though it flows out of the spring and is the same in nature with it, and is not cut off from the spring, still the harm done to the stream does not reach the spring. It is the spring’s water that suffers down the stream; but since it is not affected at the spring, only in the river, the spring suffers nothing, and only the river that issues from the spring does.

So too with the Spirit of God. Whatever it was open to it to suffer in the Son, it could not suffer in the Father, the spring the divine being flows from, but only in the Son; and so plainly it did not suffer as the Father. But it is enough for me that the Spirit of God suffered nothing in its own name, since everything it suffered, it suffered in the Son. For the Father to suffer along with the Son in the flesh is quite another matter, and we have dealt with that too. Nor will anyone deny it, since even we cannot suffer for God unless the Spirit of God is in us — the one who also speaks out of us whatever has to do with our own conduct and our own suffering. Not that he himself suffers in our suffering; he grants us the strength and the capacity to suffer.