What Only God Knows

So then, since we have the truth itself as our rule, and the testimony about God set plainly in front of us, we ought not to throw away the firm and true knowledge of God by running after a crowd of different answers to our questions. It is far better to direct our inquiries this way: to train ourselves in looking into the mystery and the plan of the living God, and to grow in love for the one who has done, and is still doing, such great things for us. What we must never do is fall away from the belief that this being alone is truly God and Father — the one who formed this world, who shaped man, who gave his own creation the power to grow, and who called man upward from lesser things to the greater ones that are in his own presence. He does this the way he brings an infant conceived in the womb out into the light of the sun, and the way he stores wheat in the barn after bringing it to full strength on the stalk. And it is one and the same Creator who both shaped the womb and made the sun; one and the same Lord who raised the stalk of grain, increased and multiplied the wheat, and got the barn ready. [a]

But suppose we cannot find in Scripture an explanation of everything that gets asked about. Even so, we must not go looking for some other God besides the one who really exists. That is the very worst impiety there is. We should leave matters of that kind to the God who made us, thoroughly convinced that the Scriptures are indeed perfect, since they were spoken by the Word of God and by his Spirit — while we, who are lower than the Word of God and his Spirit and came into existence later than they did, are for that very reason short of the knowledge of his mysteries. And there is nothing to wonder at in this, when the subject is spiritual and heavenly things, things that have to be made known to us by revelation. For plenty of things that lie at our very feet — I mean things belonging to this world, which we handle and see and are in constant contact with — are beyond our knowledge, so that even these we have to leave to God. It is only fitting that he should surpass us all. How does it stand, for instance, if we try to explain what makes the Nile rise? We can say a great deal about it, plausible or not; but what is true and certain and beyond dispute belongs to God alone. Or take where the birds live — the ones that come to us in spring and fly away again as autumn comes on. That is a matter belonging to this world, and it escapes our knowledge. What account can we give of the flow and ebb of the ocean, though everyone admits there must be some cause for it? Or of the nature of whatever lies beyond it? What can we say about how rain is formed, or lightning, or thunder, or the gathering of clouds, or vapors, or the bursting out of winds, or anything of that kind — or tell about the storehouses of snow and hail and the rest? What conditions are needed for clouds to be prepared? What is the real nature of the vapors in the sky? Why does the moon wax and wane? What causes the difference in nature between one water and another, one metal and another, one stone and another? On all these points we can indeed say a great deal while we search into their causes, but only God, who made them, can declare the truth about them.

So if there are some things even in creation whose knowledge belongs to God alone, and others that come within the range of our own knowledge, what is there to complain about if the same holds for the things we investigate in the Scriptures, which are spiritual throughout? Some of them we are able to explain by the grace of God; others we must leave in God’s hands — and not only in the present world but in the one to come, so that God should forever teach and man should forever learn the things God teaches him. That is what the apostle said on this point: that when other things have been done away with, these three, faith, hope, and love, will remain. For faith, which has to do with our Master, stands firm and unchanged, assuring us that there is one true God and that we should truly love him forever, since he alone is our Father; while our hope is always to be receiving more and more from God and learning from him, because he is good, and has riches without limit, a kingdom without end, and teaching that can never be used up. So if we follow the rule I have set out and leave some questions in God’s hands, we will keep our faith unharmed and stay out of danger; all of Scripture, which God gave us, will be found by us to be perfectly consistent; the parables will fit the passages that are perfectly plain; the statements whose meaning is clear will serve to explain the parables; and out of the many and varied ways Scripture speaks there will be heard in us one melody in harmony, praising in hymns the God who made all things. If, for instance, anyone asks, “What was God doing before he made the world?” — our reply is that the answer to a question like that lies with God himself. That this world was formed complete by God, and received a beginning in time, is what the Scriptures teach us; but no Scripture reveals to us what God was occupied with before that. So the answer to that question stays with God, and it is not right for us to aim at putting forward foolish, reckless, blasphemous suppositions in reply — so that a man, by imagining he has discovered where matter came from, would in fact be setting aside the God who made all things.

Consider this, all of you who invent such opinions. The Father alone is called God, the one who has a real existence — the one you call the Demiurge. The Scriptures acknowledge him alone as God. The Lord himself acknowledges him alone as his own Father and knows no other, as I will show from his very words. And you call this same being the fruit of a defect and the offspring of ignorance; you describe him as not knowing the things that are above him; and you make all the other allegations about him that you make. Consider, then, the terrible blasphemy against the one who truly is God that you are guilty of. You seem to say, seriously and honestly enough, that you believe in God. But since you are utterly unable to point to any other God, you end by declaring that the very being you profess to believe in is the fruit of a defect and the offspring of ignorance. This blindness and foolish talk comes upon you from this: that you reserve nothing for God, but want to proclaim the birth and production of God himself, and of his Ennoea, his Logos, his Life, and his Christ — and you form your idea of these from nothing but ordinary human experience. As I said before, you fail to understand that in the case of man, who is a compound being, one may speak this way about a man’s mind and a man’s thought: that thought (ennoea) springs from mind (sensus), intention (enthymesis) again from thought, and word (logos) from intention (but which logos? for among the Greeks there is one logos that is the faculty which thinks, and another that is the instrument by which thought is expressed); and one may say that a man is sometimes at rest and silent, while at other times he speaks and is active. But God is all mind, all reason, all active spirit, all light, and always exists one and the same — which is both how it is good for us to think of God and what we learn about him from the Scriptures. Such feelings, and such divisions of activity, cannot fittingly be ascribed to him. For our tongue, being fleshly, is not quick enough to serve the speed of the human mind, since the mind is spiritual in nature; and so our word is held back inside us, and is not uttered at once as the mind conceived it, but comes out by one effort after another, just as fast as the tongue is able to serve it.

But since God is all Mind and all Logos, he speaks exactly what he thinks and thinks exactly what he speaks. For his thought is Logos, and Logos is Mind, and the Mind that takes in all things is the Father himself. So anyone who speaks of the mind of God and assigns it an origin of its own declares God to be a compound being, as if God were one thing and the original Mind another. It is the same with Logos, when someone gives him the third place in the order of production from the Father: on that supposition the man does not know how great the Word is, and Logos has been set far apart from God. As for the prophet, he says of him, “Who will describe his generation?” But you claim to set out his generation from the Father; you transfer the production of a human word, which happens by means of a tongue, to the Word of God — and so you are rightly exposed by your own selves as knowing neither human things nor divine.

But swollen beyond all reason with your own wisdom, you presume to say that you are acquainted with the unspeakable mysteries of God — when even the Lord, the very Son of God, allowed that the Father alone knows the day and hour of judgment, declaring plainly, “But of that day and that hour no one knows, not even the Son, but the Father only.” If, then, the Son was not ashamed to ascribe the knowledge of that day to the Father only, but said what was true about the matter, then let us not be ashamed either to reserve for God the greater questions that come to us. For no one is above his teacher. So if anyone says to us, “Then how was the Son produced by the Father?” we answer him that no one understands that production, or generation, or calling, or revelation, or whatever name one may use for his coming to be, which is in fact altogether beyond describing. Not Valentinus, not Marcion, not Saturninus, not Basilides, not angels or archangels or rulers or powers has that knowledge — only the Father who fathered him and the Son who was born. Since, then, his generation cannot be spoken of, those who strain to set out generations and productions cannot be in their right mind, taking it on themselves to describe things that cannot be described. That a word is uttered at the bidding of thought and mind, all men understand perfectly well. So those who thought up the theory of emissions have not discovered anything great or revealed any hidden mystery; they have simply transferred what everyone understands to the one and only Word of God. And while they call him unspeakable and unnameable, they nevertheless set out the production and formation of his first generation, as if they had been standing by at his birth — making him out to be like a human word formed by emissions.

But we shall not be wrong if we say the same thing about the substance of matter: that God produced it. For we have learned from the Scriptures that God holds supremacy over all things. But where he produced it from, or in what way, no Scripture has anywhere declared, and it is not for us to guess, forming endless conjectures about God to match our own opinions. We should leave that knowledge in God’s own hands. In the same way we must leave to God and to his Word this question: why, when all things were made by God, certain of his creatures sinned and revolted from a state of submission to God, while others — indeed the great majority — went on, and still go on, willingly subject to the one who formed them; and what sort of beings those are who sinned, and what sort those are who kept on. It was to his Word alone that he said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” But as for us, we still live on the earth and have not yet sat down on his throne. For although the Spirit of the Savior that is in him “searches all things, even the deep things of God,” with us it is that “there are varieties of gifts, differences of service, and varieties of working”; and while we are on the earth we, as Paul also declares, “know in part and prophesy in part.” So since we know only in part, we ought to leave every sort of hard question in the hands of the one who gives us grace in some measure — and only in some measure. That eternal fire is prepared for sinners, the Lord has plainly declared, and the rest of the Scriptures show it. And that God foreknew this would happen, the Scriptures likewise show, since he prepared eternal fire from the beginning for those who were going to break his commands. But the cause itself of what such transgressors are by nature — no Scripture has told us, no apostle has told us, and the Lord has not taught us. So it is fitting for us to leave the knowledge of this matter to God, just as the Lord does with the day and hour of judgment, and not to rush into such an extreme of danger that we leave nothing in God’s hands, when we have received only a measure of grace here. But when we look into matters that are above us and cannot reach any satisfaction about them, it is absurd that we should display such an extreme of presumption as to lay God open, and things not yet discovered, as if we had already found out — by empty talk about emissions — God himself, the Creator of all things, and to assert that he got his substance out of apostasy and ignorance, so framing an impious theory against God.

What is more, they have no proof of their system, which they invented only recently. Sometimes it rests on certain numbers, sometimes on syllables, sometimes again on names; and there are times, too, when by means of the letters contained inside letters, or by parables not properly interpreted, or by certain groundless guesses, they strive to establish the fable they have devised. For if anyone should inquire why it is that the Father, who shares everything with the Son, has been declared by the Lord alone to know the hour and the day of judgment, he will find at present no more suitable or fitting or safe reason than this — since indeed the Lord is the only true teacher — that through him we might learn that the Father is above all things. “The Father,” he says, “is greater than I.” The Father, then, has been declared by our Lord to excel in knowledge; and the reason is this: that we, too, as long as we belong to the scheme of things in this world, should leave perfect knowledge, and questions of the kind mentioned, to God, and should not by any chance, while we try to investigate the height of the Father’s nature, fall into the danger of raising the question whether there is another God above God.

But suppose some lover of strife contradicts what I have said, and also what the apostle affirms, that “we know in part and prophesy in part,” and imagines he has acquired not a partial but a universal knowledge of everything that exists — a man such as Valentinus, or Ptolemy, or Basilides, or any other of those who maintain that they have searched out the deep things of God. Then let him not array himself in empty pride and boast that he has acquired greater knowledge than the rest of us about things that are invisible or cannot be put where we can observe them. Let him instead make diligent inquiry, get his information from the Father, and tell us the reasons we do not know for the things that are in this world — for instance, the number of hairs on his own head, and the sparrows that are captured day by day, and other such points we do not already know — so that we may credit him about weightier matters too. But if these perfect ones do not yet understand the very things in their hands, and at their feet, and before their eyes, and on the earth, and above all the rule followed with the hairs of their own head, how can we believe them about things spiritual and above the heavens, and about the things they so confidently assert are above God? So much, then, I have said about numbers, and names, and syllables, and about questions concerning things that are beyond our comprehension, and about their improper expositions of the parables. I add no more on these points, since you can enlarge on them yourself.