Mary Gave Birth to One Who Existed Before Her

You see, then, that when the apostle says that God sent his Son, it was his own Son that God sent, to use the apostle’s actual words, “his own Son.” Since he sent his own Son, it was not someone else’s son that he sent; nor could he have sent him at all if the one who was sent did not exist. He sent, then, he says, “his own Son, made of a woman.” Therefore, because he sent him, he sent one who existed; and because he sent his own, it was certainly not another’s but his own whom he sent. [a]

What, then, becomes of that argument of yours, drawn from the subtleties of this world, that no one ever yet gave birth to one who had existed before? Did the Lord not exist before Mary? Was the Son of God not in existence before the daughter of man? In a word, did God himself not exist before man, since there is certainly no man who is not from God? You see, then, that I do not merely say that Mary gave birth to one who existed before her. Not only, I say, to one who existed before her, but to the one who was the author of her being; and that in giving birth to her Creator she became the mother of him who gave her being. For it was as simple for God to bring about his own birth as to bring about a man’s, and as easy for him to arrange that he himself should be born of humankind as that a man should be born. For the power of God is not limited where his own Person is concerned, as if what was open to him in the case of everyone else were not open to him in his own case; as if he who in his divine nature could do all things as God were unable, in his own Person, to become God in man.

Setting aside and rejecting, then, your foolish, feeble and dull arguments from earthly things, we ought simply to put our trust in plain evidence and the naked truth, and to fit our faith to those witnesses of God alone whom God sent, and in whose person he himself, so to speak, preached. For it is right to believe him in a matter that concerns the knowledge of himself, since everything we know of him comes from him; God could not possibly be known by human beings unless he himself gave us the knowledge of himself. And so it is right that we should believe everything we know of him from the one from whom everything we know comes. For if we do not believe him from whom our knowledge comes, the result will be that we will know nothing at all, since we refuse to believe the one through whom our knowledge comes.