The Faith of My Baptism

At the very beginning of his work he says, “As if they could not be heretics by themselves, without me.” I must first show that, whether with him or without him, we are no heretics. Then, once our standing is made clear, we will be safe from having that shameful charge hurled at us on the strength of other people’s reports. About thirty years ago, as he and everyone else knows, when I was already living in a monastery, I was reborn in baptism and received the seal of the faith at the hands of those holy men Chromatius, Jovinus and Eusebius. All of them are now bishops, well proven and highly esteemed in the church of God. At that time the first was a presbyter of the church under Valerian of blessed memory, the second was archdeacon, and the third was deacon, and to me a spiritual father, my teacher in the creed and the articles of belief. This is what these men taught me, and this is what I believe: that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one Godhead, of one substance; a Trinity coeternal, inseparable, without body, invisible, beyond comprehension, known in its perfection as it truly is to itself alone. For “No one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father but the Son,” and the Holy Spirit is the one who “searches the deep things of God.” This Trinity, therefore, is beyond all bodily sight; but with the eye of the understanding the Son and the Holy Spirit see the Father, just as the Father sees the Son and the Holy Spirit. And further, in this Trinity there is no difference except that one is Father, another Son, and a third Holy Spirit. There is a Trinity as to the distinction of persons, and a unity in the reality of the substance. We were taught, further, that the only Son of God, through whom in the beginning all things that exist were made, whether visible or invisible, in these last days took on himself a human body and soul, was made man, and suffered for our salvation. On the third day he rose again from the dead in that very flesh which had been laid in the tomb, and in that very same flesh, now glorified, he ascended into the heavens, from where we look for his coming to judge the living and the dead. And further, we confess that he has given us the hope that we too will rise in the same way. So we believe that our resurrection will follow the same manner and process, and take the same form, as the resurrection of our Lord himself from the dead: that the bodies we will receive will not be phantoms or thin vapors, as some slanderously claim that we say, but these very bodies of ours in which we live and in which we die. For how can we truly believe in the resurrection of the flesh unless the very nature of flesh remains in it, truly and in substance? So it is without any double meaning that we confess the resurrection of this real and substantial flesh of ours in which we live. [a]