God Made Man Without Change

Against the heretics Beron and Helix. It began with these words: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth — with a voice that is never silent the seraphim cry out and give glory to God.” [a]

Everything that exists is made by the all-powerful will of God, and everything that is made is also kept in being by him. Each thing is held in perfect harmony, according to the principles belonging to it, by the one who is by his own nature the all-powerful God and the maker of all things. His divine will, by which he has made all things and moves them, does not alter, and each thing is carried along by the natural laws that belong to it.

For what is without limit cannot in any way or on any account be moved, since it has nothing toward which and nothing around which it could be moved. In the case of what is by nature without limit, and so cannot be moved, movement would mean change.

So too the Word of God, though he was truly made man in our way and yet without sin, and though he did and endured in a human way the sinless things that belong to our nature, and though for our sake he took on the boundedness of our flesh, underwent no change in that respect in which he is one with the Father: through the emptying he was made in no respect one with the flesh. As he was without flesh, so he remained without any boundary. And through the flesh he did in a divine way the things that belong to divinity, showing that he had both natures, and that he worked in both — the divine and the human, I mean — according to a real and true and natural existence. He showed himself to be, and to be understood to be, at one and the same time God without limit and man within limits, holding the full essence of each, with the activity that goes with each, that is, the natural properties of each. From this we know that the distinction between them always holds, according to the nature of each, and without change.

But the distinction between divinity and humanity is not, as some say, a matter of mere comparison — as if we would otherwise have to speak improperly of a greater and a less in one who is always the same as himself. Comparisons can be made only between things of like nature, never between things of unlike nature. And between God the maker of all things and the thing that is made, between the limitless and the limited, between limitlessness and limitedness, no comparison of any kind is possible; for these differ from each other not by comparison but absolutely, in their essence.

And yet at the same time the two have been brought together into one being, in a union that cannot be put into words and cannot be broken, and that entirely passes the understanding of anything that has been made. For the divine is after the incarnation exactly what it was before the incarnation: in its essence without limit, unbounded, unable to suffer, beyond comparison, unchanging, unalterable, strong of itself, and, in short, being in its essence nothing but the good that is worth beyond all measure.

So the God of all things truly became sinless man, according to the Scriptures, without change, and in a way known to himself alone, since he is by nature the craftsman of things that are beyond our grasp. By that same saving act of taking flesh he brought into the flesh the activity belonging to his own divinity — yet without that activity being bounded by the flesh through the emptying, and without its growing naturally out of the flesh as it grows out of his divinity. It was shown through the flesh in the things he did in a divine way while he was in the flesh.

For the flesh did not become divinity in nature by any exchange of natures, as though it became by essence the flesh of divinity. What it was before, that it also went on being, in nature and in activity, when it was united with divinity — just as the Savior said, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

And by working and enduring in the flesh the things that belong to sinless flesh, he proved that the emptying of divinity was for our sake, confirmed as it was by wonders and by the flesh’s own natural sufferings. For this is why the God of all things became man: so that by suffering in the flesh, which can suffer, he might buy back our whole race, which had been sold to death; and so that by doing wonderful things through his divinity, which cannot suffer, by means of the flesh, he might restore our race to that undying and blessed life it fell away from when it gave in to the devil; and so that by the mystery of his taking of a body he might set the holy ranks of thinking beings in heaven beyond all change — the doing of which is the summing up of all things in himself.

So even after the incarnation he remained, according to nature, God without limit — and more than without limit — having the activity that is his own and fits him: an activity growing out of his divinity by its very essence, and shown through his all-holy flesh by wonderful acts, as the plan required, so that he might be believed in as God while working out of himself, by means of flesh that is weak by nature, the salvation of all things.

Now, to explain by an illustration what has been said about the Savior: the power of thought that I have by nature belongs to me and fits me, since I have a reasoning and thinking soul. To that soul there belongs, according to nature, a self-moved energy and first power, always in motion — the thought, that is, that streams out of it naturally. When there is occasion I put that thought into speech, fitting it to words and setting it out properly in signs, using my tongue as an instrument, or else using written characters. So it is heard, though it comes out into the open by means of things foreign to itself, and yet it is not itself changed by those foreign things.

For my natural thought does not belong to my tongue or to the letters, even though I get it uttered by means of them. It belongs to me, who speak according to my nature and use both of these to express it as my own. It streams always out of my thinking soul, according to that soul’s nature, and is uttered by means of my bodily tongue as an instrument, as I said, when there is occasion.

Now, setting up a comparison with what is utterly beyond comparison: just as in us the power of thought that belongs by nature to the soul is brought out in speech by means of our bodily tongue, without any change in itself, so in God’s wonderful taking of a body the all-powerful and all-creating activity of the whole divinity is shown without alteration in itself, by means of his all-holy flesh and in the works he did in a divine way. That activity of the divinity remains in its essence free of every boundary, even though it shone out through flesh that is by its own essence limited.

For what is by nature without beginning cannot be bounded by a nature that has a beginning, even though the second has grown into one with the first by a conception that puts a boundary around every mind. Nor can the one ever be brought into the same nature and the same natural activity as the other, so long as each stays inside its own proper nature, which does not change. For it is only in things of the same nature that there is the motion that does the same works — which shows that an essence whose power belongs to it by nature cannot in any way be, or become, the property of an essence of another nature, unless it changes.

For as apostles and prophets and teachers saw it, the mystery of God’s coming in the flesh has been marked out as having two things in it to be looked at, natural to it and distinct in every respect: on the one hand it is the reality of complete divinity, on the other it shows full humanity. So then, as long as the Word is acknowledged to be one in essence and of one activity, no movement will ever in any way be found in the two. For while God, who by his essence always is, became sinless man by his limitless power and according to his will, he is what he was in everything by which God is known; and what he became, he is in everything by which man is known and can be recognized. In both aspects of himself he never falls out of himself, in his divine activities and in his human alike, keeping in both relations his own perfection, which by its very essence cannot change.

Recently a certain Beron, along with some others, left the delusion of Valentinus only to tangle himself in a deeper error. They say that the flesh the Word took to himself became able to do the same works as the divinity, by the fact of being taken; and that the divinity became able to suffer in the same way as the flesh, by the fact of the emptying. So what they assert is that there was at one and the same time a change, a mixing, and a blending of the two sides into each other.

For if the flesh that was taken became able to do the same works as the divinity, then plainly it also became God in essence in everything by which God is known in his essence. And if the divinity, by the emptying, became able to suffer the same sufferings as the flesh, then plainly it also became flesh in essence in everything by which flesh can be known in its essence. Things that act alike, and do the same works, and are altogether of one kind, and can suffer alike with each other, admit no difference of nature.

And if the natures are blended together, Christ will be two; and if the persons are pulled apart, there will be four — and that is a thing to be avoided altogether. How then will they conceive of the one and the same Christ, who is at once God and man by nature? And what manner of existence will he have, on their account, if he became man by a change of the divinity and became God by an alteration of the flesh? The turning of the one into the other is the complete overthrow of both. Let us take up the discussion again, then, from another side.

Among Christians it is settled, as the teaching of true reverence, that in nature itself, and in activity, and in whatever else belongs to these, God is equal to himself and the same as himself, having nothing of his own that is unequal to himself at all, or of a different kind.

If then, as Beron says, the flesh he took to himself came to have the same natural activity as the divinity, plainly it also came to have the same nature as him in everything that nature consists of — having no beginning, not being brought into being, being without limit, being everlasting, being beyond understanding, and whatever else of that transcendent kind a mind reasoning about God discerns in divinity. In that case both of them underwent change, and neither the one nor the other kept any longer the essential ground of its own nature. For anyone who recognizes one and the same working in things of unlike nature brings in at once a blending of natures and a separating of persons, since their existence is made wholly indistinguishable by the transfer of what belongs to each.

But if the flesh did not come to be of like nature with the divinity, then neither will it ever come to be of like natural activity with it. Otherwise he would be shown to have his activity unequal to his nature and of a different kind, and, through everything belonging to himself, to have come to exist outside his own natural equality and sameness — which it is irreverent to suppose.

This, then, is the error they have been carried into. They came, unhappily, to believe that the divine activity was made the property of the flesh, when it was only shown through the flesh in his wonderful acts — the activity by which Christ, so far as he is understood as God, gave the universe its existence and now keeps and governs it. For they did not see that it is impossible for the activity of the divine nature to become the property of an essence of another kind apart from change. Nor did they understand that what is only shown through a thing, and does not spring out of it according to nature, is in no way the property of that thing — and yet the proof of it was clear and obvious to them.

For when I speak with my tongue and write with my hand, I reveal through both of these one and the same thought of my thinking soul, and the activity of that thought is the soul’s own by nature. In no way do I show it as springing naturally out of tongue or hand; nor do I show the spoken thought as coming to belong to them because it was revealed by their means. No one with sense ever took tongue or hand to be capable of thought — just as no one ever took the all-holy flesh of God to have become a maker by nature, on the ground that it was taken to himself and that the divine activity was revealed through it.

But the faithful confession of the believer is this: that with a view to our salvation, and in order to bind the universe to unchangeableness, the Creator of all things took into his own essence a reasoning soul and a body with senses, from the all-holy Mary, ever-virgin, by an undefiled conception, without change, and was made man in nature, but apart from wickedness. The same was perfect God, and the same was perfect man; the same was, in nature, at once perfect God and perfect man. In his divinity he did divine things through his all-holy flesh — such things, that is, as did not belong to the flesh by nature; and in his humanity he suffered human things — such things, that is, as did not belong to divinity by nature — his divinity holding back and bearing with it. He did nothing divine apart from the body—