An Infant Plunders Damascus

You are led away just as easily by the sound of names when you take the riches of Damascus, and the spoils of Samaria, and the king of Assyria to mean that the Creator’s Christ was to be a warrior. You are not attending to the promise the passage actually contains: “For before the child knows how to cry, My father and my mother, he will take away the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria before the king of Assyria.” Begin with the question of age. Can this be taken to present Christ as so much as a man yet, let alone a soldier? Though of course he might have been about to call men to arms with his crying; might have been about to sound the charge, not on a trumpet, but on a little rattle; might have been about to look for his enemy, not from horseback or a chariot or the ramparts, but from his nurse’s neck or his nursemaid’s back — and so bring Damascus and Samaria under him from his mother’s breast. Things are different, naturally, among the infants of your barbarian Pontus, who leap out to the fight. They are taught the lance, I suppose, before they are taught to gum the nipple; swaddled at first in sunshine and oil, afterwards issued their kit of rags, and put on rations of butter. But since nature nowhere grants a man the chance to learn war before he has learned to live, or to plunder the wealth of a Damascus before he knows what his father and mother are called, it follows that the passage in question has to be taken as a figure. [a]

Well then, comes the answer: “Nature does not allow a virgin to conceive either, and the prophet is believed all the same.” And quite properly he is. He paved the way for an incredible thing to be believed by giving the reason it was to happen: it was to be for a sign. “Therefore,” he says, “the Lord himself will give you a sign: look, a virgin will conceive and bear a son.” Now a sign from God would not have been a sign unless it were something new and out of the ordinary course of things. Then, again, Jewish objectors, to throw us off, boldly maintain that Scripture does not hold that a virgin is to conceive and give birth, but only a young woman. They are answered by this consideration: nothing of the nature of a sign can come out of an everyday occurrence, a young woman getting pregnant and bearing a child. A virgin mother is rightly reckoned to be set out by God as a sign; a warlike infant has no such claim to the distinction, for in that case nothing of the character of a sign occurs at all. But once the sign of the strange and unheard-of birth has been stated, what is announced immediately afterwards as a sign is the child’s later course: he was to eat butter and honey. Not that this is in the nature of a sign either, nor is his “refusing the evil”; that too is only a mark of infancy. But his appointed taking of the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria before the king of Assyria — that is a wonderful sign. Keep to the measure of his age, look for the point of the prophecy, and give back to the truth of the gospel what you have taken from it by the lateness of your heresy, and the prophecy becomes plain at once and declares its own fulfillment. Let those magi from the east wait on the newborn Christ, presenting their gifts of gold and frankincense to him in his infancy — and an infant will certainly have received the riches of Damascus without a battle and without weapons.

For besides the well-known fact that the riches of the East, that is to say its strength and its resources, usually consist of gold and spices, it is certainly true of the Creator that he makes gold the riches of the other nations as well. So he says through Zechariah: “And Judah shall also fight at Jerusalem and shall gather together all the wealth of the nations round about, gold and silver.” And about that gift of gold David also says: “And there shall be given to him of the gold of Arabia”; and again: “The kings of Arabia and Saba shall offer him gifts.” For in the East the magi were generally reckoned kings; and Damascus was anciently counted as belonging to Arabia, before it was transferred to Syrophoenicia when Rome divided the Syrias. Christ received its riches, then, when he received the tokens of them in the gold and the spices; while the spoils of Samaria were the magi themselves. Once they had found him and honored him with their gifts and knelt and worshiped him as their God and King — on the witness of the star that led their way and guided them — they became the spoils of Samaria, that is to say of idolatry, because, as it is easy enough to see, they came to believe in Christ.

He gave idolatry the name of Samaria because that city was notorious for its idolatry, by which it had revolted from God back in the days of king Jeroboam. And this is nothing unusual for the Creator in his Scriptures: to use the names of places figuratively, as a metaphor drawn from the likeness of their sins. So he calls the chief men of the Jews “rulers of Sodom” and the nation itself “people of Gomorrah.” And in another passage he also says: “Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite,” because their wickedness was of a kind with theirs — although he had actually called them his sons: “I have nourished and brought up children.” In the same way Egypt in his usage sometimes stands for the whole world, as a place marked out by superstition and by a curse. By the same practice Babylon in our John is a figure of the city of Rome, being like Babylon great and proud in royal power and making war on God’s holy ones. It was along these lines, then, that he called the magi Samaritans, because, as we have said, they had practiced idolatry as the Samaritans did. And by the phrase “before,” or “against, the king of Assyria,” understand “against Herod” — whom the magi did set themselves against, when they refused to carry word back to him about the Christ he was trying to destroy.

This reading of ours will be confirmed if, whenever you suppose that Christ is called a warrior somewhere because certain weapons and expressions of that sort are mentioned, you weigh how his other terms answer to one another and draw your conclusions accordingly. “Gird on your sword upon your thigh,” says David. But what do you read about Christ just before it? “You are fairer than the children of men; grace is poured out on your lips.” It entertains me that the charms of a fair face and gracious lips should be ascribed to a man who had to buckle on his sword for war. So too, when it is added, “Go forward, prosper and reign,” the reason follows: “because of truth and gentleness and righteousness.” But who produces results like those with a sword, rather than their opposites — deceit, harshness and injury — which are, it must be admitted, the proper business of battles? [q]

Let us see, then, whether this is not some other sort of sword, since it works so differently. Now the apostle John, in the Revelation, describes a sword that came out of the mouth of God as “doubly sharp, two-edged.” This may be understood as the divine Word, doubly edged with the two testaments, the law and the gospel — sharpened with wisdom, hostile to the devil, arming us against the spiritual enemies of every kind of wickedness and craving, and cutting us away from what we hold dearest for the sake of God’s holy name. If, however, you will not acknowledge John, you have our common master Paul, who “girds our loins about with truth, and puts the breastplate of righteousness on us, and shoes us with the preparation of the gospel of peace” — not of war — “who tells us to take up the shield of faith, with which we may be able to quench all the fiery darts of the devil, and the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which,” he says, “is the word of God.” This is the sword the Lord himself came to send on earth, and not peace.

If that Christ is yours, then even he is a warrior. If he is not a warrior, and the sword he brandishes is an allegorical one, then the Creator’s Christ in the psalm may just as well have been girded with the figurative sword of the Word, and no soldier’s gear about him. The “fairness” of his beauty and the “grace of his lips” would suit a sword like that perfectly — a sword already buckled on his thigh in David’s passage, and one day to be sent by him on earth. For this is what he says: “Go forward, prosper and reign” — advancing his word into every land, so as to call all the nations; destined to prosper in the success of the faith that received him, and to reign from the point at which he conquered death by his resurrection. “Your right hand,” he says, “will lead you out wonderfully” — the might of your spiritual grace, by which the knowledge of Christ is spread abroad. “Your arrows are sharp” — everywhere your commands fly about, and your threats too, and the exposures of the heart that prick and pierce each conscience. “The peoples shall fall under you” — that is, in worship. So the Creator’s Christ is mighty in war and a bearer of arms; and so too he takes the spoils now, not of Samaria alone, but of all the nations. Acknowledge, then, that his spoils are figurative, since you have learned that his weapons are allegorical. And since both the Lord speaks and his apostle writes in a figurative style like this, we are taking no liberty in using their own way of reading, when the precedents for it are ones our opponents themselves admit. And so it will be Isaiah’s Christ who has come, exactly to the degree that he was not a warrior — because that is not the character Isaiah describes him in.

So much, then, for the discussion of his flesh, and through it of his birth, and along the way of his name Immanuel. But about his other names, and above all the name Christ, what has the other side to say in reply? If the name of Christ is as common property with you as the name of God — so that the Son of either God may fitly be called Christ, just as either of the Fathers may be called Lord — then reason will certainly stand against that argument. For the name of God, being the natural word for divinity, may be applied to all those beings for whom a divine nature is claimed, even, for instance, to idols. The apostle says: “For there are those that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth.” The name of Christ, however, does not arise from nature but from an arrangement, and so becomes the proper name of the one to whom it belongs as a result of that arrangement. Nor can it be shared with any other God — least of all a rival, one who has an arrangement of his own, and who for that very reason will need to possess names that are nobody else’s. For how does it happen that, after inventing different arrangements for two Gods, they let a community of names into that diversity of arrangement? No proof of two Gods being rivals could be more serviceable than finding, alongside their differing arrangements, a difference of names as well. A set of differing qualities that is not marked out in the distinctive senses of their titles is not a set of differing qualities at all. Whenever those senses are missing, what occurs is what the Greeks call katachresis, the misapplication of a term to what does not belong to it. In God, however, there ought, I suppose, to be no such defect, no setting up of his arrangements by that katachrestic abuse of words. [x]

Who is this god who claims names for his son from the Creator? I do not merely say names that do not belong to him: I say ancient and well-known names, which on that account alone would be unsuitable for a new and unknown god. And how is it that he tells us “a piece of new cloth is not sewn onto an old garment,” or that “new wine is not entrusted to old skins,” when he is himself patched and dressed in the worn-out stuff of old names? How is it that he has torn the gospel away from the law, when he is wrapped in the law from head to foot — in the name of Christ, no less? What stopped him from calling himself by some other name? He preached another gospel, he came from another source, and he refused to take on a real body for the very purpose of not being supposed to be the Creator’s Christ. But his unwillingness to seem to be the one whose name he was willing to assume was wasted; even if he had truly been flesh and blood, he would have escaped being taken for the Creator’s Christ far more surely by not taking the Creator’s name. As it is, he rejects the bodily reality of the one whose name he has assumed, though it is by that name that he would have given the proof of that reality. For Christ means anointed, and being anointed is certainly something the body undergoes. A man with no body could not by any possibility have been anointed; a man who could not by any possibility have been anointed could not in any way have been called Christ. It is quite another matter, of course, if he took on the phantom of a name as well. But how, he asks, was he to work his way into being believed by the Jews, except through a name that was in common use among them and familiar to them? Then it is a shifty and tricky God you are describing! Pushing a plan through by deception is what a man resorts to out of mistrust or out of malice. The false prophets went about it far more openly and simply when they set themselves against the Creator: they came in the name of their own god. And I do not find that this proceeding of yours did any good, since the Jews were readier to suppose either that Christ was their own or, more likely, that he was some impostor, than that he was the Christ of the other god; and this the gospel will show.

Now if he snatched at the name Christ the way a pickpocket snatches at the dole-basket, why did he want to be called Jesus as well, by a name the Jews were not so much looking for? For although we, who by God’s grace have reached an understanding of his mysteries, acknowledge that this name too was appointed for Christ, the Jews for all that did not know it; wisdom had been taken away from them. To this day, in short, it is a Christ they are looking for, not a Jesus, and they take Elijah to be the Christ rather than Jesus. So the one who came under a name in which no Christ was expected might as well have come under the one name that was expected for him and nothing else. But since he has mixed the two together, the expected one and the unexpected, his double scheme comes to nothing. For if he is Christ in order to slip in as the Creator’s, then Jesus works against him, because no Jesus was looked for in the Creator’s Christ; and if he is Jesus in order to pass as belonging to the other god, then Christ blocks him, because no Christ was expected to belong to anyone but the Creator. I do not know which of the two names is able to hold its ground. [af]

In the Creator’s Christ, however, both keep their place, for in him a Jesus is found as well. You ask how? Then learn it here, and let the Jews who share your heresy learn it with you. When Hoshea son of Nun was appointed to succeed Moses, was his old name not changed then, so that for the first time he is called Joshua? “It is true.” This, then, is our first observation: it was a figure of the one who was to come. For Jesus Christ was to bring a second people into the promised land that flows with milk and honey — because we are born in the wilderness of this world — that is, into the possession of eternal life, than which nothing can be sweeter; and this was to be brought about not by Moses, that is to say not by the discipline of the law, but by Joshua, by the grace of the gospel, our circumcision being carried out with a knife of stone, that is with the circumcision of Christ, since Christ is a rock. So that man, appointed as a figure of this sacred sign, was actually consecrated with the shape of the Lord’s own name, and called Joshua.

Christ himself bore witness even then that this name was his own, when he talked with Moses. For who was it that talked with him but the Spirit of the Creator, who is Christ? So when he spoke this command to the people — “Look, I am sending my angel before your face, to keep you on the way and to bring you into the land I have prepared for you. Pay attention to him, and obey his voice, and do not provoke him, for he has not hidden himself from you, since my name is upon him,” — he called him an angel because of the greatness of the powers he was to exercise, and because of his work as a prophet while announcing the will of God; but he called him Joshua as well, because that was a sacred sign of his own name to come. Again and again he confirmed that name of his which he had conferred on his servant in this way, since it was not the name of angel, and not Hoshea, but Joshua that he had commanded him to bear as his ordinary name from then on.

Since, then, both these names suit the Creator’s Christ, they are that much more unsuited to the Christ of the non-Creator — and so is all the rest of our Christ’s appointed course. In short, from now on the sure and equitable rule that both sides need must be settled between us: that there ought to be absolutely nothing at all in common between the Christ of the other god and the Creator’s Christ. For you will be under as strong a necessity to maintain that they are different as we are to resist it, since you will be as unable to show that the other god’s Christ has come until you have proved him a far different being from the Creator’s Christ, as we are to claim the one who has come as the Creator’s until we have shown him to be such a one as the Creator appointed. On the subject of their names, then, this is the point we have carried against him. I claim Christ for myself; I keep Jesus for myself.