The Spirit Descending at His Baptism

Next in your blasphemy comes the claim that his flesh was made a temple of the Holy Spirit, on the ground that John said, “For I saw the Spirit coming down from heaven and remaining on him.” You try to support even this wild statement of yours by the authority of Scripture. So let us see whether that sacred authority says what you say. “For I saw,” it says, “the Spirit coming down like a dove and remaining on him.” Make out here, if you can, which is more powerful, which is greater, which is more to be honored: the one who came down, or the one on whom he came down? The one who brought the honor, or the one to whom the honor was brought? Where do you find in this passage that the Spirit made his flesh a temple? Or how does it lessen the honor of God if God himself came down to show God to mankind? We certainly ought not to think that the one whose high rank was pointed out is less than the one who pointed it out. [a]

But away with the thought of believing in any separation within the Godhead, or making one. One and the same Godhead and equal power shut out altogether the wicked idea of inequality. So in this event, where the Persons of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are present, where it is the Son of God on whom the Spirit comes down, the Spirit who comes down, and the Father who gives his witness, no one received more honor and no one was slighted. It all comes back equally to the fullness of the Godhead, for each Person of the Trinity contains within himself the glory of the whole Trinity.

And so nothing more needs to be said, except to show the rise and origin of your blasphemy. Thorns and thistles springing from their roots put out shoots of their own kind, and their character shows where they came from. In the same way you, a thorny offshoot of the Pelagian heresy, show in the bud exactly what your father is said to have had in the root. For he, as his follower Leporius said, declared that our Lord was made the Christ by his baptism. You say that at his baptism he was made the temple of God by the Spirit. The words are not quite the same, but the wrongheadedness is exactly the same.