Thesaurus de sancta et consubstantiali trinitate

Chapter 27. On the phrase: "That they may know you as the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent." Another. If the Father has made all things through his own Word, and the blessed evangelist speaks truly saying: "All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be," and again if all things spoken through the prophets are uttered through the Word and through no other, how is it not absurd to conceive that the Word of God himself uttered such words against himself? Therefore, does God and Father say such things through the Son for the refutation of falsely named gods? Another for the refutation of the doctrine of the Arians, overturning the power of the creature. When the Father says that he himself is one and only true God, he does not overturn the fact that the Son has been begotten from him and is true God, just as he himself is, but rather he casts out from divinity that one whom you might conceive for yourselves as God or son outside his essence; for this one is truly not true, but a product of the ignorance present in you. Another. If the Father is called true and only God, the Son will not reasonably be banished from likeness to him, nor will he be cast out from being true God. For if he does not lie when he says: "I am the truth," and is intelligibly that which he says himself to be, how will he not necessarily be ranked together with the true Father? He himself being truth, therefore, is it said for the refutation of those gods that are not by nature nor in truth existing or called: "That they may know you as the only true God"?

Another. If the Father alone is the true God, and the Word from him does not have the same nature as the one who begot him, but is of a created substance, even if he is considered by us to surpass all other creations, how, being of a different substance and not true, as you say, does he join himself to the God who truly is, and wish to be known together with him, saying: "That they may know you as the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent"? For what reason does the creature, which according to you is to be known together with the uncreated, and the made thing to be numbered with the not-made and not-begotten? For if you were to allow this to hold, and that it can be so, what will prevent some other rational creature from using such a saying? But if no such thing is borne by any other, and the saying belongs only to the Son, it is clear that he does not know himself as one of all, but has ranked the very property of the Father's substance with the begetter, and being conceived together with him, he has given us to know that he is a true offspring of a true Father. For that the Son is true, hear John saying: "And we are in his true Son Jesus Christ." Chapter 32. Selections of sayings with syllogisms from the New Testament, that the Son is God by nature, and if this is so, he is not a product nor a creation. Another. That we all have received from his fullness, and that the perfect fullness is preserved for the divine nature alone, since it needs nothing from another, but rather has and is able to fill whatever might be receptive of it.

This is in Christ: how could he be alien from the divine substance, who performs its works, and is that which we would define that substance to be, at least in respect of the perfection? How then could one admit that the nature of the Son, which is so constituted, is created? For he will hear with us: "What have you that you did not receive?" which is most impious. 41 The great Cyril said well that what is owed to God should be rendered to God; for it is clear that ruling and reigning and governing one's own mind, as the great Athanasius said. And indeed also leading through himself the flesh and the fleshly movements both divinely and without sin, according to the wonder-worker Gregory, but also, he says, to the flesh what befits it. And what befits the flesh of the Word, as the great Eustathius, who became bishop of Cyricus, interpreted, is to be led in all things in which it is naturally moved by the spirit and will and power and authority of its own hypostasis—that is, of the Word—and to do nothing from its own impulse and by itself, because it does not subsist at all by itself in any way.