The Difference Between Seeing and Knowing

This is the chief passage that those who were sent from the East to lay snares for me tried to brand as heretical, not only by perversely misunderstanding it, but by falsifying its words. Yet I could see nothing suspicious in it, any more than in several similar passages of the writer I was translating. Nor did I think there was any reason to leave it out, since it said nothing comparing the Son with the Father. The question concerned the nature of the Godhead itself, whether the word visibility could in any sense be applied to it. Origen was answering, as I said before, the heretics who claim that God is visible because they say he is bodily, since the power of sight is a property of the body. For this reason the Valentinian heretics, whom I mentioned above, declare that the Father begot and the Son was begotten in a bodily and visible sense. So Origen shrank, I suppose, from the word ‘seeing’ as a suspect term. He says that when the question turns on the nature of the Godhead, that is, on the relation of the Father and the Son, it is better to use the word the Lord himself deliberately chose when he said, “No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son.” He thought that any opening that might be given to these heresies would be shut off if, in speaking of the nature of the Godhead, he used the word ‘knowledge’ rather than ‘vision.’ ‘Vision’ might seem to give the heretics some support. The word ‘knowledge,’ on the other hand, preserves the true relation of Father and Son in one nature that can never be divided, and this is especially confirmed by the authoritative language of the Gospel. Origen also thought that this way of speaking would make sure that the Anthropomorphites never heard God spoken of as visible in any way. [a]

It did not seem right to me to throw this reasoning out entirely, since it made no difference between the persons of the Trinity, though there were indeed some words in the Greek, perhaps used somewhat incautiously, which I thought it best to avoid. I will suppose that readers may hesitate in judging whether, even so, it is an argument that can be used effectively against these heresies. I will even grant that people practiced in judging words and their sense in matters like this may say that the point is of little value either for edification or for fighting heresy, people who besides being experts are God-fearing men, who do nothing out of strife or empty glory, and whose minds are free alike from envy, favoritism and prejudice. Even so, are they not free to pass it over and set it aside as of no use for driving back our opponents? Suppose it is superfluous: does that make it criminal? How can we count as criminal a passage that asserts the equality of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in this matter of invisibility? I do not think that anyone can really think so. I say anyone, for there is no evidence that anything in my writings gives offense in the eyes of my accusers. If they had thought so, they would have set down my words as they stood in my translation.