The Sun and Its Ray

Well then, you say: “If the one who spoke was God, and the one who created was also God, then at this rate one God spoke and another created, and two Gods are being announced.” If you are as rash and hard as that, stop and think a while; and so that you may think better and more carefully, listen to the psalm in which two are described as God: “Your throne, God, is forever and ever; the scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of righteousness. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you” — that is, has made you his Christ. Now since the psalm here speaks to God, and states that God is anointed by God, it has stated that two are God, on the strength of the scepter’s royal power. Isaiah too speaks to Christ: “The Sabeans, men of stature, will cross over to you; they will follow after you, bound in chains; and they will worship you, because God is in you; for you are our God, and we did not know it — you are the God of Israel.” Here too, by saying “God is in you” and “You are God,” he sets out two who were God. There is a grander statement still, one you will find said outright in the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” There was one “who was,” and there was another “with whom” he was. But I find the name Lord given in Scripture to both of them as well: “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand.” And Isaiah says this: “Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” He would most certainly have said your arm, if he had not wanted us to understand that the Father is Lord and the Son is Lord too. We have a much older witness than that in Genesis: “Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven.” [a]

Now either deny that this is Scripture, or else — let me ask — what sort of man are you, that you do not think words ought to be taken and understood in the sense in which they are written, especially when they are not put in allegories and parables but in fixed and simple statements? If you really do side with the men who at the time could not bear the Lord when he showed himself to be the Son of God, because they refused to believe he was the Lord, then call to mind along with them the place where it is written, “I have said, You are gods, and you are children of the Most High,” and again, “God stands in the assembly of gods.” If Scripture has not been afraid to call human beings gods — men who became sons of God by faith — then you may be sure that the same Scripture has with better right given the name of Lord to the true and only Son of God.

Very well, you say: “Then from this day forward I will challenge you to preach two Gods and two Lords, and to do it on the authority of these same Scriptures, if you mean to be consistent.” God forbid. We do have, by God’s grace, an insight into both the times and the occasions of the sacred writings — we especially, who follow the Paraclete and not human teachers — and we do lay it down definitely that two are God, the Father and the Son, and, with the Holy Spirit added, even three, according to the arrangement, which brings in number. The point of the arrangement is that the Father should not be believed, as you perversely conclude, to have been born himself and to have suffered himself. We are not allowed to believe that, since it was not handed down that way. But that there are two Gods or two Lords is a statement that never comes out of our mouth — not as though it were untrue that the Father is God and the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, and each of them God, but because in earlier times two were in fact spoken of as God and two as Lord, so that when Christ came he might be both acknowledged as God and named Lord, being the Son of the one who is both God and Lord.

Now if Scripture had shown only one person who is God and Lord, Christ could fairly enough have been refused the title of God and Lord, since there would have been no more than one God and one Lord declared there; and it would have had to follow that the Father himself seemed to have come down to earth, seeing that only one God and one Lord was ever read of. And his whole arrangement would have been left in the dark — the arrangement he planned and ordered with such clear foresight in the way he manages things, as something for us to believe. But as soon as Christ came, and was recognized by us as the very one who had from the beginning brought in the number — being second from the Father, and with the Spirit the third, and himself declaring and showing the Father more fully than the Father had ever been shown before — the title of the one who is God and Lord went straight back to unity. It had to, because the nations would have to pass from their crowd of idols to the one and only God, so that a plain difference could be settled between those who worship one God and those devoted to many. It was only right that Christians should shine in the world as “children of light,” worshipping and calling on the one who is the one God and Lord as “the light of the world.” Besides, if out of that full knowledge which assures us that the title of God and Lord suits the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we were to call on a number of gods and lords, we would be putting out our own lamps; and we would grow less brave about enduring what a martyr endures, since an easy way out would lie open everywhere the moment we swore by a number of gods and lords, as certain heretics do who hold more gods than one.

So I will not speak of gods at all, nor of lords, but I will follow the apostle: if the Father and the Son are alike to be called on, I will call the Father “God” and call on Jesus Christ as “Lord.” But when Christ alone is mentioned, I will be able to call him “God,” as the same apostle says: “Of whom is Christ, who is over all, God blessed forever.” For I would give the name “sun” even to a sunbeam taken by itself; but if I were speaking of the sun the ray comes from, I would certainly take the name sun away from the mere beam at once. Although I make no two suns, still I shall count the sun and its ray as two things and two forms of one undivided substance, just as God and his Word are, just as the Father and the Son are.

Something else comes to our help when we press the point that the Father and the Son are two: the standing rule that has settled God to be invisible. When Moses in Egypt wanted to see the face of the Lord and said, “If, then, I have found favor in your sight, show yourself to me, so that I may see you and know you,” God said: “You cannot see my face; for no man shall see me and live.” In other words: whoever sees me will die. Now we find that God has been seen by many people, and that no one who saw him died of it. The truth is that they saw God as far as a man is able, and not in the full glory of his divinity. The patriarchs are said to have seen God — Abraham and Jacob — and the prophets too, Isaiah, for instance, and Ezekiel; and they did not die. So either they ought to have died, since they had seen him, because the sentence runs, “No man shall see God and live”; or else, if they saw God and did not die, the Scripture is lying when it reports that God said, “If a man sees my face, he shall not live.” Either way the Scripture misleads us — when it makes God invisible, and when it brings him out where we can see him. The one who was seen, then, must be a different one, because of anyone who was seen it could not be said that he is invisible. So it will follow that by the invisible one we are to understand the Father in the fullness of his majesty, while we recognize the Son as visible in the measure that belongs to one derived from another — just as we are not permitted to look at the sun in the whole amount of its substance that is up in the sky, and our eyes can only bear a ray, because of the tempered state of the portion of it that is thrown down to the earth. [o]

Here someone on the other side may want to argue that the Son is invisible too, as being the Word and as being also Spirit; and, while claiming one nature for the Father and the Son, to say instead that the Father is one and the same person as the Son. But Scripture, as we have said, holds their difference by the distinction it draws between the visible and the invisible. They go on to argue like this: if it was the Son who spoke to Moses then, he must have meant it of himself when he said his face was visible to no one, because he was himself the invisible Father under the name of the Son. By this means they will have it that the visible and the invisible are one and the same, just as the Father and the Son are the same. They argue it because in an earlier passage, before he had refused Moses the sight of his face, the Scripture tells us that “the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” — just as Jacob also says, “I have seen God face to face.” Therefore, they say, the visible and the invisible are one and the same; and since both are the same, it follows that he is invisible as the Father and visible as the Son — as if the Scripture, on the reading we have given it, did not apply to the Son once the Father is set apart in his own invisibility.

We declare, however, that the Son too, taken in himself as the Son, is invisible, in that he is God, and the Word and Spirit of God; but that he was visible before the days of his flesh, in the way he says to Aaron and Miriam: “If there is a prophet among you, I will make myself known to him in a vision, and I will speak to him in a dream; not so with Moses — with him I will speak mouth to mouth, and plainly, that is, in truth, and not in riddles, that is, not in an image.” The apostle puts it the same way: “Now we see through a mirror, in a riddle; but then face to face.” Since, then, he keeps his presence and his speech face to face with Moses for some later time — a promise that was kept afterwards in the seclusion of the mountain, where, as we read in the Gospel, “Moses appeared talking with Jesus” — it is plain that in the early days it was always in a mirror and a riddle, in vision and in dream, that God, by which I mean the Son of God, appeared to the prophets and the patriarchs, and to Moses himself as well. And even if the Lord did perhaps speak with him face to face, still it was not as a man that Moses could look at his face, unless it was in a mirror, as it were, and by a riddle.

Besides, if the Lord spoke with Moses in such a way that Moses actually made out his face at close quarters, how does it come about that right afterwards, on the same occasion, he asks to see his face — which he ought not to have wanted, because he had already seen it? And how, in the same way, does the Lord say that his face cannot be seen, if he had shown it, supposing he really had? Or what is that face of God, the sight of which is refused, if there was one that a man could see? Jacob says, “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” There must be some other face, one that kills if it is so much as seen. Was the Son visible, then? Surely not — although he was the face of God — except only in vision and dream, and in a mirror and a riddle, because the Word and Spirit of God cannot be seen except in a form that is only an image.

But, they say, it is the invisible Father that he calls his face. Well, who is the Father? Must he not be the face of the Son, by reason of the authority that comes to him as the one who begot the Son? Is it not a natural way of speaking, about someone greater than yourself, to say: that man is my face; he lends me his countenance? Christ says, “My Father is greater than I.” So the Father must be the face of the Son. For what does the Scripture say? “The Spirit of his person is Christ the Lord.” Since, then, Christ is the Spirit of the Father’s person, there is good reason why, on the strength of that very unity, he — the Spirit belonging to the person of the one he is the Spirit of, that is, of the Father — should have called the Father his own “face.” And this, to be sure, is an astonishing thing: that the Father can be taken to be the face of the Son, when he is the Son’s head; for “the head of Christ is God.”