Distinct, Not Divided

This power, and this ordering of the divine mind, is set out in the Scriptures under another name as well: Sophia, Wisdom. For what has a better claim to the name of Wisdom than the Reason, or the Word, of God? So listen to Wisdom herself, presented as a second person: [a]

“The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways, at the first, with a view to his own works. Before he made the earth, before the mountains were set in place, before all the hills, he begot me.”

That is to say: he created me and brought me forth inside his own mind. And notice, again, the distinction between the two that is implied in Wisdom keeping company with the Lord:

“When he was preparing the heavens, I was there with him; and when he was making his strong places upon the winds — that is, the clouds above — and when he was securing the springs beneath the sky, I was beside him, arranging it all with him. I was beside him, and he delighted in me; and day after day I took my joy in his presence.”

Then, as soon as it pleased God to bring out into their own substances and forms the things he had planned and set in order within himself — together with the Reason and Word of his Wisdom — he first brought forth the Word himself, with his own Reason and Wisdom inseparably inside him. He did it so that all things might be made through the one through whom they had been planned and arranged, and indeed already made, so far as they stood in the mind and thought of God. What they still lacked was this: to be openly known, and to be held permanently in forms and substances of their own.

Then, at that point, the Word takes on his own appearance and adornment as well, his own sound and voice, when God says, “Let there be light.” This is the Word’s full birth: he comes forth from God. He is first formed by him, to devise and think out all things under the name of Wisdom — “The Lord created,” or formed, “me as the beginning of his ways” — and afterward begotten, to carry it all into effect: “When he prepared the heavens, I was there with him.” In this way God makes him his equal. For by coming forth from him he became his firstborn Son, since he was begotten before all things; and his only Son, since he alone was begotten from God, in a way that belongs to him and to no one else, out of the womb of God’s own heart. The Father himself bears witness to it: “My heart,” he says, “has poured out the best Word.” The Father took delight in him always, and the Son rejoiced back with an answering gladness in the Father’s presence: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you” — and, “before the morning star I begot you.” [d]

The Son, for his part, acknowledges the Father, speaking in his own person under the name of Wisdom:

“The Lord formed me as the beginning of his ways, with a view to his own works; before all the hills he begot me.”

Now if Wisdom does seem in that passage to say that she was created by the Lord with a view to his works, and to carry out his ways, another Scripture still gives proof that “all things were made through the Word, and without him nothing was made”; and another again says, “By his Word the heavens were established, and all their powers by his Spirit” — that is, by the Spirit that was in the Word. So it is plain that one and the same power is described in one place under the name of Wisdom and in another under the title of the Word: the power that was set at the beginning for God’s works, that “made the heavens strong,” “through which all things were made,” “and without which nothing was made.” There is no need to labor the point any further, as though it were not the Word himself who is spoken of under the name of Wisdom, and of Reason, and of the whole divine soul and spirit. He became the Son of God as well, and was begotten, when he came forth from him.

And so you ask: “Do you grant, then, that the Word is a substance of some kind, put together by the Spirit and by the imparting of Wisdom?” Certainly I do. But you will not allow him to be a real thing standing on his own, with a substance of his own — in such a way that he can be regarded as an actual object and a person, and so, being placed second to God the Father, can make two: the Father and the Son, God and the Word. For you will say: what is a word but a voice and a sound of the mouth, and (as the schoolmasters teach) air knocked against something — something the ear can make out, but for the rest a sort of void, empty, bodiless thing?

I say, on the contrary, that nothing empty and void could have come out of God, since it is not put forth from what is itself empty and void. Nor could what has proceeded from so great a substance, and has produced substances so mighty, possibly be without substance; for everything that was made through him, he himself made. How can it be that he is nothing, without whom nothing was made? How could one who is empty have made things that are solid, one who is void things that are full, one who is bodiless things that have bodies? A thing may sometimes turn out different from the one who makes it — but nothing at all can be made by what is void and empty.

Is the Word of God, then, a void and empty thing — he who is called the Son, who is himself called God? “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And it is written, “You shall not take God’s name for an empty thing.” This, for certain, is the one “who, being in the form of God, did not count it robbery to be equal with God.” In what form of God? In some form, obviously — not in none. For who will deny that God is a body, even though “God is Spirit”? Spirit has a bodily substance of its own kind, in its own form. And if invisible things, whatever they may be, have both their substance and their form in God, so that God alone can see them, how much more must what has been sent out from his substance not be without substance! Whatever the substance of the Word was, then, I call it a person; I claim the name of Son for it; and while I recognize the Son, I hold that he is second to the Father, and distinct from him.

If anyone concludes from this that I am introducing some probolē — that is, some putting-forth of one thing out of another, the way Valentinus does when he brings out Aeon from Aeon, one after another — then here is my first answer to you. The truth must not give up using such a term, and the reality and meaning behind it, just because heresy uses it too. The fact is that heresy took it from the truth, in order to mold it into a counterfeit of its own. Was the Word of God put forth, or was he not? Take your stand with me here, and do not flinch. If he was put forth, then admit that the true teaching has a putting-forth of its own — and never mind heresy, when at some point it apes the truth. The question now is in what sense each side uses a given thing, and the word for it. [n]

Valentinus divides his prolations off from their author and sets them at such a distance from him that his Aeon does not know the Father. He longs to know him and cannot; in the end he is all but swallowed up and dissolved back into the rest of matter. With us it is otherwise. The Son alone knows the Father, and has himself unfolded “the Father’s bosom.” He has heard and seen everything with the Father, and what the Father has commanded him, that is what he says. It is not his own will he has carried out but the Father’s, which he had known most intimately from the very beginning. “For what man knows the things that are in God, except the Spirit who is in him?” But the Word was formed by the Spirit; and, if I may put it this way, the Spirit is the body of the Word. So the Word is always in the Father — “I am in the Father,” he says — and always with God, as it is written, “And the Word was with God” — and never separate from the Father, or other than the Father, since “I and the Father are one.”

This, then, will be the putting-forth that the truth teaches: the guardian of the Unity, in which we say that the Son is put forth from the Father without being separated from him. For God sent the Word out, as the Paraclete also declares, the way a root puts out a tree, and a spring a river, and the sun a ray. These are probolai, things put forth out of the substances they proceed from. I would not hesitate to call the tree the son or offspring of the root, and the river of the spring, and the ray of the sun — because every original source is a parent, and everything that issues from a source is an offspring. How much more the Word of God, who has actually been given “Son” as his own proper name. But the tree is still not severed from the root, nor the river from the spring, nor the ray from the sun; and no more is the Word separated from God.

Following the pattern of these comparisons, then, I admit that I call God and his Word — the Father and his Son — two. For the root and the tree are two distinct things, but joined to each other; the spring and the river are two forms, but not divisible; the sun and the ray are two forms, but they hold together. Everything that proceeds from something else must be second to what it proceeds from — without being separated from it on that account. And where there is a second, there must be two; and where there is a third, there must be three. Now the Spirit is third, from God and the Son, just as the fruit of the tree is third from the root, or the stream drawn off the river is third from the spring, or the tip of the ray is third from the sun. But nothing is a stranger to the original source it takes its own properties from. In the same way the Trinity, running down from the Father through steps that are linked and joined together, does not disturb the Monarchy at all, and at the same time it keeps the state of the Economy safe.

Bear in mind always that this is the rule of faith I profess; by it I testify that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are inseparable from one another — and then you will understand in what sense I say it. Now notice: my assertion is that the Father is one, and the Son is one, and the Spirit is one, and that they are distinct from each other. Every uneducated person, and every person with a twist in him, takes that statement the wrong way, as if it asserted a difference of a kind that would mean a separation between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. [t]

I am obliged to say it all the same, when they exalt the Monarchy at the Economy’s expense and insist that Father and Son and Spirit are one and the same: it is not by difference of kind that the Son differs from the Father, but by distribution; not by division that he is other, but by distinction. For the Father is not the same as the Son, since they differ from each other in their manner of being. The Father is the whole substance, while the Son is a derivation from the whole and a portion of it, as he acknowledges himself: “My Father is greater than I.” In the Psalm his lower place is described as being made “a little lower than the angels.” So the Father is distinct from the Son, and greater than the Son, in that the one who begets is one and the one begotten is another; the one who sends is one and the one sent is another; the one who makes is one and the one through whom the thing is made is another.

It is a good thing that the Lord himself uses this way of speaking about the person of the Paraclete, so as to signify not a division or a severance but an arrangement. For he says, “I will ask the Father, and he will send you another Paraclete… the Spirit of truth” — making the Paraclete distinct from himself, just as we say the Son is also distinct from the Father. In that way he showed a third degree in the Paraclete, as we hold the second degree to be in the Son, because of the order kept in the Economy.

Besides, does not the very fact that they have the distinct names of Father and Son amount to a declaration that the one is other than the other? For of course everything will be what its name says it is; and what a thing is, and always will be, is what it will be called. The distinction the names mark leaves no room at all for blurring the two, because there is no blurring in the things the names stand for. “Yes is yes, and no is no; anything more than that comes from evil.”