Without Father, Without Mother

So you use the Holy Scriptures against God, and try to bring his own witnesses against him. But how? In such a way that you become a false accuser not only of God but of the evidence itself. And it is no wonder that, since you cannot do what you want, you do only what you can: as you cannot turn the sacred witnesses against God, you do what you can, and twist them. For you say, “Then Paul is lying when he says of Christ, ‘Without mother, without genealogy.’” I ask you, of whom do you think Paul said this? Of the Son and Word of God, or of the Christ whom you separate from the Son of God and blasphemously claim to be a mere man? If of the Christ you maintain is a mere man, how could a man be born without a mother, and without a genealogy on his mother’s side? But if it was said of the Word of God and Son of God, what are we to make of it? For the same apostle, your own witness as you wickedly imagine, testifies in the same place and with the same words that the one you claim was without mother was also without father. He says, “Without father, without mother, without genealogy.” It follows, then, that if you use the apostle’s witness to claim that the Son of God was “without mother,” you must also be guilty of the blasphemy that he was “without father.” [a]

You see, then, what a pit of ungodliness you have fallen into in your eagerness for your perversity and wickedness. While you say that the Son of God had no mother, you must also deny him a Father, a thing that no one since the world began has ever done, except perhaps a madman. Whether there is more wickedness or more folly in it, I hardly know. For what is more foolish and silly than to give someone the name of Son and try to hold back the name of Father? But you say, “I do not hold it back. I do not deny it.” Then what madness drove you to quote a passage in which, while you say he had no mother, you must seem to deny him a Father as well? For since in the same passage he is said to be without mother and also without father, it follows that, if he can be understood there to be without mother, then in the same way in which we understand him to be without mother, we must also believe him to be without father. But that hasty frenzy for denying God did not see this. When it quoted in mutilated form what was written whole, it failed to see that its shameless and obvious lie could be refuted by opening the sacred book and laying out what it says. What foolish blasphemy and madness! It failed to see what it ought to follow, and did not even have the wit to see what anyone could read. It was as if, because it could throw away its own understanding, it could take away everyone else’s power to read, or as if everyone would lose the eyes in their heads for reading because it had lost the eyes of the mind.

Hear, then, you heretic, the passage you have garbled. Hear in full and complete what you quoted cut short and hacked about. The apostle wants to make the twofold birth of God clear to everyone. To show how the Lord was born both in his Godhead and in the flesh, he says, “Without father, without mother,” for the one belongs to the birth of his divinity, and the other to the birth of his flesh. For as he was begotten in his divine nature “without mother,” so in the body he is “without father.” And so, although he is neither without father nor without mother, we must believe in him as “without father and without mother.” For if you look at him as begotten of the Father, he is without mother; if as born of his mother, he is without father. So in each of these births he has one parent, and in the two together he is without each. The birth of his divinity had no need of a mother, and for the birth of his body he was himself enough, without a father. That is why the apostle says, “Without mother, without genealogy.”