Contra Felicianum Et Arianum De Unitate Trinitatis Optatum Liber

You have wrung from me, most beloved son, that I should write something concerning the unity of the Trinity, which is always perfect and supreme God, not unmindful of my priestly office; and this you have demanded of me in many ways, though I often excused myself as conscious of my own weakness, asserting that the reasoning of the common faith and religious matters ought to be received, and that priests ought not to deny them to the faithful—lest either they, while not receiving them, should begin to be easily deceived by the unbelievers, or lest, when these things are not granted to them as desired, the heavenly treasure of Christ should seem not to be dispensed to the members of Christ, but rather to be hidden in the earth, as it were, by a barren parsimony. Therefore I confess myself overcome by probable reasons, lest I should seem to betray the resisting evils while the faithful are not fortified with the bulwark of truth against the unbelievers. But because in questions of this kind a certain obscurity is frequently encountered in continuous discourse, for this reason it has seemed best to me that, since a conversation was recently held between me and Felicianus, with the principal letters of the names noted beforehand for the sake of distinguishing the persons, I should include it within the brevity of the present little book.

CHAPTER II. For when we were sitting together some days ago, he said: Among other things that frequently offend me in your disputations, I consider nothing worse than that you hand down the precepts of the faith to the unlearned in such a way that you prescribe to those conversing not by reason of the things to be understood, but rather by a certain display of testimonies. That this is, not to say crafty, at least rustic, no one is ignorant. First, because if the one being instructed has already believed the books, he obeys, he does not resist; otherwise, he must contradict not you more than those same testimonies which are brought forward for what is affirmed. And therefore this way seems better to me for teaching, by which the reason of the faith is first given without testimonies: after the one convinced by reason, that path is polished by the responding Scriptures. And not undeservedly. For if these testimonies are proven by the fact that they are not without reason, reason itself can suffice, which seems to establish even these testimonies not except through itself. But if not, who can submit the neck of a reasonable faith to irrational testimonies, even if they are anointed as divine? And that way of disputing, I confess, I would tolerate in others, whom the necessity of inexperience, because they cannot stand by themselves, compels to flee to others: But in you I by no means endure this at all, because I see that eloquence together with knowledge of the faith is not lacking to you.

Then I said: “Do you think me so led by my own praises that I would do injury to the holy fathers who preceded me, or that I would ever presume upon wisdom of word, lest the Cross of Christ be emptied? Rather, content with the authority of the Scriptures, I prefer to obey simplicity than pride. But you say it is better to be taught by reason than by testimonies. What reason, then, can you offer, if you proclaim births from virgins, if you do not deny the restoration of sight to the blind, if you show that the buried have returned from the dead? If, therefore, the reason for these things is incomprehensible and the truth is manifest, in matters of faith it is easier to believe testimonies than to investigate reason. But because you do not too inconsistently distinguish these two, since you do not omit testimonies when reason has been set forth, I confess that in this disputation I will follow what you yourself have approved.” CHAPTER III. Felicianus said: “Therefore,” he said, “since we are at leisure, let us come to the question of your *homoousion*, which has often been discussed not only among us but also among our predecessors. And lest the discourse wander too far, do you yourself, as is your custom, assume the role of the proposer, and from us, who are seeking the reason of our faith, you will in turn inquire, ready to give answer.

Then I said: “Tell me, is it true what I hear you saying, that the Son is in no way homoousion with the Father?” Felicianus said: “It is true, nor can I be persuaded that what is begotten is unbegotten, lest I seem to be proclaiming the same Father as the Son.” Augustine said: “It is not so; for I do not even have it in mind that the same one is unbegotten who is begotten, but rather that what is unbegotten is the same as what is begotten.” Felicianus said: “And how do you not say that the same unbegotten is the same as the begotten, if you think both are one, not the other?” Augustine said: “I perceive that you have not fully grasped the force of the words; for when I say both are one, I do not separate the substance of the true Father and the true Son in any respect. And when I do not proclaim the same Father as the Son, I distinguish the person of each, preserving the property of each one. Thus, if you seek substance, the Trinity itself is one God; if you seek person, the Son is other.

Felicianus said: “And how do you say that He is both the same and the Son is another?” Augustine said: “The same, I say, by communion of substance, the other by property of person.” Felicianus said: “I do not understand how one substance is believed, when one person is not said to be.” Augustine said: “It is not, I say, one person, because one is said to have begotten, and the other is said to have been begotten; and yet the substance of the begotten and of the begetter is not diverse, because the one born is shown to be not dissimilar to the one who generates.” Felicianus said: “I would like, please, for you to clarify what you have said with an easier example for me.” Augustine said: “In things indeed incomprehensible, examples are not at hand for one who is disputing; nevertheless, as far as it can be done, I will not fail even in this part. Behold, then, a human father has a human son. What is common to both is that he is a human; yet for one, that he is a son, for the other, that he is a father, is seen to be proper. For in each, the person is distinguished in such a way that the common humanity is not denied; while one begets, the other is begotten: but equally a human is called both the one who has begotten and the one who is begotten.

CHAPTER IV. Felicianus said: “I would like you to say this, at least: is the begotten separated from the unbegotten by a beginning, or not?” Augustine said: “Not even that is accepted by the truth of spiritual understanding, that the Father is separated from the Son by the intervention, I do not say of time, which consists of days and nights, but of any span of age or eternity.” Felicianus said: “If this is so, you admit two unbegotten beings. And how is one person thought to be the Father’s and another the Son’s, when through the signification of a common unbegotten nature each appears to be confused?” Augustine said: “In this matter, indeed, a sophism of no small calumny is woven by your predecessors; yet, with the help of the Trinity itself, it must be resolved by Catholic simplicity. For I call the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, yet I do not therefore refrain from proclaiming the begotten coeternal with the unbegotten; I teach the Father unbegotten only because He did not proceed from another, and the Son begotten because He did not exist from Himself. For it is not common to both to exist from oneself, it is not common not to be begotten; yet it is common that the one is not separated from the other by the intervention of any intermediate time. Therefore, if we seek what is proper to the Father, it suffices that He alone has no Father; if what is proper to the Son, it suffices that He has no offspring; but we declare the divinity of the Father and the Son to be one and coeternal.

Felicianus said: “As far as I am concerned, I do not see what you are now gathering from this. For although you contend with me with Aristotelian subtlety, it cannot happen that you separate the one who was begotten from the one who begot by any intervening antiquity.” Augustine said: “I know indeed, as he says, in how difficult a place the discourse finds itself; nevertheless, we have nothing to fear, who, by the help of the Holy Spirit, bear witness concerning God. What, then, shall we say? Is there something in the Father that is denied to be unbegotten, or not? If there is, then He is called unbegotten not in whole, but rather in part; otherwise, the Son did not begin to exist in time. For if the Father’s fatherhood did not begin, no beginning can be found for the offspring. If a beginning is given to the offspring, the Father’s eternal fatherhood will not be taught. And how will it stand that you teach everything in the Father as unbegotten, when you claim that the very name of fatherhood has a beginning, since you say that the Son began in time, who cannot be said to have been called into being when the Father did not yet exist?

Felicianus said: “I am not so foolish as to place time before the Son, but it is certain that a beginning is given to the one who was begotten.” Augustine said: “What then? Do you say that there was nothing intermediate between the Father and the Son?” Felicianus said: “Exactly so.” CHAPTER V. Augustine said: “How then do you deny that the Son is coeternal with the Father, when you confess that there is nothing intermediate between the Father and the Son, unless it is that this very ‘nothing intermediate’ is as much a third thing as anything else?” Felicianus said: “Since you are hemming me in by the art of disputation, I will briefly explain what has been said by our forebears. For they say, whenever the beginning of the Son and the eternity of the Father are discussed: ‘There was a time when he was not, and before he was born he was not.’” Augustine said: “As far as I can see, with the error of a bad belief remaining, only the words have been changed. For you said, ‘There was a time when he was not.’ Do you intend that ‘there was’ to pertain to an age, or to the Son? If to an age, that is, as it were to some space of eternity before the Son’s nativity, behold, you necessarily slip back into the earlier blasphemy, since you insert a third thing, time, between the Father and the Son; and you say that before the Son there was God the Father and time. After these two, the Son. After these three, the fourth, the Spirit. If we admit that the Son could not be begotten without time, see how widely these things we are saying extend. For if the Son is not without time, certainly he must also be said to have been begotten only in a place. With this admitted, before the Son and the Spirit, time and place are taught to be in some way coeval with the Father.

If this is so, that the Son could not be born without place and time, in what place, or in what time, do you say that place and time were made? If in none, behold, time and place could be made without time and place. If in some place or time, that very time and place seem themselves to require a place and time in their origin. But if something could be made so entirely without time and place that you cannot show that place was made in a place, nor time in time, then I do not know by what rashness you contend that the Son, who, as far as sound faith is concerned, is taught to have made both place and time, could not be born without these. But enough of this. Now we consider what you proclaim was said by your predecessors: “There was a time when he was not.” If you refer this “was” to time, behold, time existed before the Son; if to the Son, the Son never was not: for the Son already was when time did not yet exist, by whom time is said to have been made. But you say, “Before he was born, he was not.” Who, I ask, was not before he was born? If the Son, behold, by that very understanding, time is said to have existed before the Son. But if before the Son was born time did not exist, it follows that the Son is said to be coeternal with the Father, between whom and the Father no time is said to have existed—especially since, with the evangelists bearing witness among other things, the Son is said to have made time as well. But perhaps someone might think this was said of the Father: “There was a time when the Son was not.” The following words do not agree with this opinion, for it is said: “And before he was born, he was not.

For through you, the Father, who always exists, cannot even by you be said to be born; he who is not taught to have arisen from the beginning cannot fall under the Father: "There was a time when he was not begotten." Chapter VI. Felicianus: Since you weary me not a little with words contending, as I think, with unexpected subtlety, I therefore ask that, if it can be done, you show by the example of any thing that what you are trying to teach can be possible. For I cannot believe otherwise, even if overwhelmed by the force of speech, that the begotten is coeternal with the Father, unless you say that either both are begotten, or both are Father to each other. Augustine: Since you compel me to examples of incomparable things, let us therefore see what the power of fire is, from which there is always brightness, always heat. Both are born from it, yet fire is not found without either of them to any extent. These three do not generate each other mutually, because brightness and heat are not from fire and brightness, or from heat and fire and brightness, but brightness and heat are always born from fire. Since this is so, do you not see that even in creatures something can be born, and yet no time can be shown in which that from which it is born could be found without the begotten? If, therefore, we perceive these things by visible examples, why should we not proclaim similar things concerning the Father and the Son, or the Holy Spirit, at least as regards common and indifferent eternity?

Nor, therefore, must we necessarily say that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are equally unbegotten, because we say that they are not separated by any intervening time: since even in other matters certain things are begotten, yet they are not for that reason taught to be either equally begetting, or to exist without each other. But what good is it to collect many such things, when from the testimonies of a few it is possible to judge the rest as well? Felix: Since you disturb my opinion, founded on the authority of the preceding Fathers, by a new art of disputation, I would like you to tell me what you think about the nature of the Son of God, that is, about his substance itself. For if, as you are accustomed to say, he is *homoousion* with the Father, then in some way he himself is the Father to himself; otherwise he cannot be consubstantial with the begetter. For one of our men used to laugh at the opinion of the *Homoousians* in this way, saying: If the Son was brought forth not from outside, but from the same self, then the one has in some way been divided into two, since the begetter is said to be nothing other than the begotten.

CHAPTER VII. Augustine: While you say that we contend with Aristotelian art, you yourself seem to have taken refuge in the snares of the dialecticians. But we, trusting in the truth of the faith, can by no means be terrified by these things. What then do you say? That I believe the Son could not be born from the substance of the Father, lest we seem to divide the unbegotten Father by the generation of the Son. If this is so, then the Son is wrongly believed in, who is proclaimed not as born from the Father, that is, not from the same one himself, but as made from without among other things. To make this easier to understand, I will explain the matter itself as best I can. For of sons, some are adoptive, others natural. Those who are begotten are from the beginning always sons and proper sons; the former are first alien, then sons, when they seem to be adopted into the family. With which of these, then, is the Son of God to be compared? If with adoptive sons, he will be like us in relation to the Father. If with proper sons, he must be said to have subsisted from the substance of the begetter. But, you say, the paternal substance is divided into two, if the Son is substantially generated from the Father alone. How foolish this is, even visible things themselves teach us. For who among even carnal fathers has ever been divided by begetting? But if this division does not occur even in the condition of the body, and no one has begotten a son in such a way as to lose half of himself, you say that the Son could not have been born while the integrity of the Father is preserved. But why say more? To those examining the birth and origin of the Son of God, these possibilities, if I am not mistaken, occur: that is, that he is either from the Father, or from nothing, or from another, or from himself.

Let us, I ask, see the consequence of these. If from Himself, He is not rightly called Son, who is proclaimed not born, but unbegotten. If from nothing, He is shown to be a creature along with the rest, not the author of creatures. If from another, He is proclaimed the son, not of Him in whom we believe, but of some unknown and unrecognized father. But if beyond these four a fifth cannot be found, and of these three cannot be preached at all on account of evident blasphemy, it remains that He is substantially born from the Father, because, as we have said, neither can a fifth be found, nor can any mode besides the first be taught concerning these, so that it is clear that He is neither a creature, nor the son of another father, nor, like the Father, called unbegotten. CHAPTER VIII. Felician: As if I either preached a fifth beyond these, or any of these three; I who say that the Son came forth not from the substance of the Father, yet do not deny that He was begotten from His will. Augustine: You are driven into one of the aforementioned by the consequence itself. For when we inquire about the substance of the Son, whom you do not confess to be substantially born from the Father, you undoubtedly contend that He was made from nothing, since we do not say that even corruptible creatures subsist otherwise, except that we say God both willed them through ineffable dispensation and was able to effect them through singular power, while we know that there was both the will by which it pleased God and the power which is subject to the Lord.

Fel. Therefore, does the Father’s power not suffice for the existence of the Son? Aug. As if I were contending about the Father’s power, and not about the truth of the paternity itself. Or did He prefer to call Himself Father of one whom He wished to be not like Himself, but like creatures? And therefore you must admit that the Son existed from the substance of the Father, if He is both born and God: or else deny that He is both Son and God, if He was created not from the Father’s substance, but from nothing, with only the Father’s will and power operating, as also in other creatures. Fel. Since you compel me by necessity to such a confession, I will not keep silent about what is customarily said by our elders. For they say that the Son is a creature, but a perfect one, and one that can rule over all creatures. Aug. I rejoice indeed that you have revealed the innermost poison of this irreligious preaching by an open confession: yet you offer nothing that seems worthy of belief. For a creature is a substance made by the will of the omnipotent God, from that which either does not yet exist, or at some time did not exist, of any corruptible thing, as far as it is in itself. Let us see whether this definition falls upon the Son of God.

For the Son, in what he is, has been brought forth by the truth of an undifferentiated nature: because he was born from the one who is, that is, from the begetter, not dissimilar; and therefore, unless I am mistaken, this is the distinction between the Son and the first creature: that he is substantially begotten from the Father; the creature is accomplished not from the substance of the maker, but from will and power alone. The latter is corruptible by nature, unless it is preserved by grace. He is incorruptible, who by being born seems to have an incorruptible substance from an incorruptible Father. The Son is in all things like the Father, unlike the creature to its maker. He does not proceed from that which is not into that which is, and therefore never from that which is into that which is not. It proceeds from that which is not into that which is, and therefore, so far as it is concerned, from that which is into that which is not, it returns by the condition of its origin. CHAPTER IX. Fel. I do not see what you have wrapped up in this obscurity of the ark; and therefore you will do well if you explain more intelligibly what has been said by you, in my opinion, incomprehensibly.

Augustine: I said, I declare, concerning the Son, when I distinguished him from the definition of a creature: because he is not from that which is not into that which is; which is as if I were to say, he was not made from nothing. And therefore he is never to be dissolved into that which is not, from that which is; that is, never into nothing from that very thing which he is, by the property of his own nature. But a creature is from that which is not into that which is. By which it is shown that it was brought forth from nothing. And therefore, as far as it concerns itself, from that which is into that which is not, that is, into nothing, unless perpetual grace has done otherwise, it is to be turned by the quality of its own nature. Therefore the Son will never not be, who is taught to be substantially perpetual; and this, as is proper, is known to be separated without injury from the condition of all creatures which were made through him. Felicianus: Although you constrain my understanding with a new subtlety of things, I do not know, nevertheless, in what way you say that the Son is coeternal with the Father: since, according to the common mode of speaking and the law of nature, the begetter seems to be prior to the begotten.

CHAPTER X. Augustine: If we judge the author of nature by the laws of creatures, while we proclaim the Father to be prior to the Son, why do we not, by the same law of nature, say that the Son is stronger than the Father through the passage of time, since the Son does not lack the increments of birth, and old age inflicts the injury of weakness upon the Father? But if reason itself does not admit this, let us set aside in God the law of corporeal understanding, lest we say that the maker is like his works; especially since from that which is evident among us, we can also demonstrate that which is hidden. For just as a mother, without any example, gave birth to her own author, so must the Father be believed to have ineffably begotten a coeternal Son. He was born of a mother who already existed before; he was born of a Father who was never absent. Let faith believe this; let understanding not demand it, lest it either think the undiscovered to be incredible, or, once discovered, not believe it to be true. For behold, Christ was born of a mother, yet the modesty of the mother was not diminished by the contact of a man. A virgin gave birth because a virgin conceived; and, with the order of things not preserved, Christ assumed an intact body from the intact body of his mother. Therefore, if by a new manner, without any example, he is taught to have been born according to the flesh from a body, what wonder is it if he proceeded from the Father not according to the custom of human birth?

The substance of the mother is not diminished; we know that a son born from her alone is born without injury to the body of the one giving birth. And is it believed that the incorporeal substance of the Father is diminished, when the Son is said to be brought forth substantially and incorporeally from the same Father? Therefore, if we weigh the nature of things with understanding as our guide, let us grant a beginning if we do not deny an end. Otherwise, let us say that the Son has no beginning, because we confess that he is perpetual not by grace but by nature. In sum, "greater" and "lesser" can be said in three ways: by age, by form, by power. An elder is greater than a boy by age; a taller man is greater than a short one by form; a stronger man is greater than a weak one by power. Let us see whether any of these applies to the Son. For he is not lesser in age, since he is known to have existed as a beginning from the Father, who is a beginning; nor in form, since it is right to proclaim him as nothing other than God; nor in power, since we know that everything is perfected by him.

CHAPTER XI. Felicianus: I desire to understand how the dignity of the Father passes to the Son, and the humility of the offspring does not return to the Father. Augustine: These things are not now said according to nature; daily examples of things teach us. For behold, let us suppose some king and a king's son, having laid aside the insignia of royal majesty, to take up the garments of a subject soldier, and for the sake of a certain dispensation of the father and the safety of his comrades, to endure the insults of rebels. Does it follow that, because it is certain that a share of royal power passes to this one by birth, the injury of the son therefore certainly reaches the one who begot him, not by an affect of compassion, but by the very property of the passion? It is not so, because it is certain that the son was born from the father, not the father from the son. And therefore we say that everything among these is similar which pertains to the communion of nature; that is proper which is known to have happened accidentally to one person. Therefore, the Son, by being born, has everything with the Father that the Father is, but the Father does not have from the Son. Whatever he himself specially suffered is not common to both. That a man was born from a man is a special accident. That which, without prejudice to the common nature, is often taught that neither has in the other. The substance of the Father is one, the person is one. When this begot, it is known without doubt to have existed not diverse, but another; which is taught to be not other than the first, while it is taught both common and proper. Common, I say, by unity of substance, proper by distinction of person.

Since, therefore, that which is born exists in itself, not everything that happens to it necessarily passes to the begetter; just as whatever is proper and substantial to the begetter is known to reach the one being born. For it is not the case that, just as the divinity of the Father was conferred upon the Son by generation itself, so the sickness, poverty, death, and humility of the offspring are referred back to the Father. This does not happen because, although the offspring was born similar from one substance, that is, the Father's substance, nevertheless, since it already exists in itself, whatever is introduced intrinsically into it is said to be not common, but proper. If, therefore, this is the condition of the human race, since sons are never so changed by the begetter into something else that the same substance cannot be, but becomes another—while many accidents happen externally to the son, the common nature nevertheless remains—what is it fitting for us to believe about God and His Son, and what is it proper to proclaim? For although, according to the simple glory of the undivided majesty, their nature is not dissimilar, the Son specially assumed a body so that He who could suffer nothing in the common divinity of substance might be humbled in the infirmity of our flesh. The son of a human man did not assume another nature.

And since it suffers in that same nature which is common with the Father, it nevertheless does not transmit the injury to the Father; nor is God the Father believed to be passible because the Son was humiliated, since it is not in that same nature which is common to both, but rather in our nature, which he alone assumed, that he is believed to have endured the treachery of the Jews. In sum, I ask, what was it that hung on the cross? What was it that the lance is said to have wounded? Was it the passible flesh, or the substance of the divinity? If you, as a preacher of the profane, assume the incorporeal majesty, you will seem to believe in a corruptible God. If you assume the passible flesh, that flesh is not common with the Father, so that the cross could touch him through it. CHAPTER XII. Felix: Since you sweep away everything said by us like a torrent, you preach two Christs, not one. And not without reason; for if the divinity suffered nothing at all in him, then Christ was one thing according to the man, and another; otherwise, through the affection of the common divinity, the passion itself would have reached even the Father.

Augustine: It is not so. For I do not confuse our Saviour, nor do I divide Him. I do not confuse, lest I preach either an incorporeal and imaginary flesh, or a carnal and mortal divinity. I do not separate, lest I seem to introduce one offspring of God the Father according to the flesh, and another according to majesty: because the same Son of God both proceeded from the Father without beginning, and deigned to be born from the Virgin in time. Impassible in His own, He suffered in ours, while He deigned to clothe His incomprehensible majesty with a certain garment of flesh. From both, one person of the Mediator, not one substance. One person, I say, lest Christ be less than one; not one substance, lest the dispensation of the Mediator be removed, and He be called either the Son of God alone, or the Son of man alone. Therefore, I do not extend the assumed flesh in Christ to the perpetuity of divine generation; nor do I confine the immense divinity within the age of corporeal birth: because the same is, in divinity, the author of things, who, in the flesh, is the Redeemer of men; the same is impassible in Himself, who suffered in the body; while thus the Son, born similar to each parent, expressed the property of each nature truly from both, so that it is evident both that He assumed true flesh from His mother, and that He has undifferentiated divinity from His Father. With these joined into one person by the incomprehensible dispensation of the Mediator, He preserved the properties of each, but joined them by a bond proper to each. He preserved the properties, in that He did not lose the immensity of divinity, and did not reject the infirmity of the flesh.

He joined alien things to his own, in that the same and undivided Christ is both slain by his own flesh and not held in the underworld by his own divinity. By his own flesh he tasted death, and by his own divinity he rendered the flesh everlasting. Therefore it is not rightly said that the Father suffered in the Son, since the Son suffered in the flesh, which he does not share with the Father. Thus the flesh was glorified by majesty, while majesty is taught to be humbled in the flesh. But both are not from two Christs, as you think, but from one and the same person, whom after the birth of the Virgin we know as God and man, it is certain that we preach. CHAPTER XIII. Felicianus: If, then, Christ was born from the Virgin, how is he said to be coeternal with God the Father? Augustine: Concerning this, indeed, we also have a different dispute against others; and therefore, lest the explanation of the truth become more difficult, let us first set forth the cause of the error. For, starting from one beginning of false belief, they flow out, in a certain way, into two dissimilar ravings of understanding. For it is common to both to preach one nativity of Christ, not two. But some receive that principal nativity by which God was born from God before all things, others only this one by which this Lord came forth from the Virgin, as the definition of their own doctrine; who, by the consequence of badly cast seed, have fallen into a similar abyss of blasphemy.

Behold, those who do not believe that he was born from the Virgin overturn the entire faith of the Gospels, the entire utility of baptism, the entire preaching of the apostles, and, in sum, the entire authority of the New Testament, as if by a certain blindness of Jewish unbelief. And therefore they are not even to be thought to have recognized the majesty itself in the Son of God, because they have rejected the sacrament of the mediator, by which the Father wished to make himself known to the nations. But those who contend that he was not born from the Father before every beginning, but from the Virgin’s childbirth in time, have not learned that he is the creator of all, nor that he is Lord, consimilar to the Father in omnipotence and majesty. For how will he be thought to have made all things, before whose birth it is certain that all things existed? Or how is his divinity to be professed, when each thing was made while he was not yet born? Or how is his divinity believed to be perpetual, when it is proclaimed as having been effected not always, as the Father’s, but from a point in time? Therefore these also in a certain way deny the mystery of the mediator by the necessity of consequent things; for they preach Christ not as God and man; not from eternity, but from time; not from power, but from weakness; not as the Son from the Father before all things, similar to the Father, but as from the mother among all things, not a true but an imaginary son of man, born in the open, not through a likeness of truth. Hence it comes about that they are not even to be thought to have known God in the flesh, whom they do not think was born from the Father before the assumption of flesh.

CHAPTER XIV. You see, therefore, in what manner among these, although by differing means, the same beginning and the same outcome of error is nevertheless taught? We, on the contrary, defend both nativities in such a way that we do not abolish either by the affirmation of the other. For we neither condemn the temporal one by the perpetuity of that first, nor do we confine the eternal one by the temporal brevity of this: knowing the inseparable offspring of the true God, and the most true flesh of this true offspring afterward. We do not then confess that the divinity of Christ began when the Virgin conceived; nor did the flesh then begin when that Monad, without any interval of intervening time, in no way differing from the Monad, except that it is taught as a Monad, gave birth by some ineffable birth. The voluntary weakness of Christ did not horrify his omnipotent majesty, nor did bodily weakness extinguish omnipotence. I know that the divinity of the Son of God descended to the lower world by the property of the flesh; I know that the flesh ascended to heaven by the merit of the deity. It is not a property of God that he experienced hunger; but it is a property of God that he satisfied many thousands of men with a few loaves. It is not a property of the flesh that he walked with dry feet upon the roaring waves, but it is a property of the flesh that he endured spitting, slaps, and scourges. Yet one and the same Christ is he, who both so often suffered injuries and did not sink his limbs in the deep. And in this way, in the mediator between God and men, I confess that the deity was affected by the injury of his body, just as we know that the flesh was glorified by the majesty of the deity.

Therefore Christ died, who also rose again: yet not both from one, but each from its own source. In both, however, he himself, perfect and one and inseparable, accomplished such diverse things: with one he tasted death, with the other he raised the dead. And thus he, the true mediator of both, showed himself to be God and man, neither with a doubled person nor with confused substances. The Son of God entered the Virgin’s womb, to be born again, though already born before, and he took up the whole man, while he already possessed from the Father the most full divinity. He was not unlike the Father when he was born, being eternal from eternity; he was not unlike man when, born from a mother, he was to die. Yet he is both eternal in his own and mortal in ours, while he contains each from himself and loses neither from the other. And thus, from God and man, not imperfect, but most full in diverse property, Christ was born; just as each man is taught to be perfect from soul and body. The body is not one man, the soul another, although soul is one thing and body another; yet one and the same man is taught to be both body and soul. Again, body and soul are not one and the same, because from both, one man was made. For these neither confuse substance in the truth of the person, nor double the person by diversity of substance; since one man is known to have existed from these. They do not lose their own, but because they have come together into one and inseparable, from their own they are seen to have become common.

The mind in the body is affected by the body's pains, the body is wearied by the mind's thoughts; and yet one of these is proper to the body, the other to the mind. But when this happens to a single man, it seems common both to the body and to the mind. Thus after the Virgin's birth, there was not one Son of God and another Son of man, but the same Christ was Son of God and Son of man. And just as in one man the soul is one thing, the body another, so in the mediator between God and men, the Son of God was one thing, the Son of man another, yet one Christ the Lord was from both. One thing, I say, for distinction of substance, not another for unity of person. CHAPTER XV. Felix. In the preceding passages you had indeed compelled me to believe in Christ's birth from his mother, with perpetual virginity preserved; but because things that arise against the force of reason cannot be continuous in us, therefore when I look with careful attention to my own proposition, I do not yet seem to myself to have found in what you have said what I seek. For I do not know how you teach that he was born in time, whom you say was already coeternal with the Father. For to be born is like a certain motion of a thing not existing before it is born, which by the benefit of birth brings it about that it exists. From this it is gathered that Christ, who existed, could not have been born; if he could be born, he did not exist.

To the inquiry into incomprehensible things you compel me with a new curiosity for questioning; and therefore it can only be explained by certain outlines of examples, what you seek. Allow me, then, to bring forward for the sake of affirmation a matter from another question: because when I now present it not for its own credibility, but for the demonstration of another, do not force me to explain in it what I intend; but think me to believe at present in such a way that you may more easily understand what I will say. Let us imagine, then, as many wish, that there is in the world a universal soul, which by an ineffable motion quickens all seeds, so that it is not concretely joined with the things born, but itself bestows life on things to be born. Surely when this soul has come into the womb, about to form passible matter for its own uses, it makes the person of that thing be with itself, which same thing is agreed to have the same substance: and by the soul acting and the matter suffering, one man is made from two substances: while the soul is taught one thing, the flesh another: and thus we declare the soul to be born from the womb, which, coming to the womb, we say has conferred life upon the conceived. It is said to be born, I say, from the mother, because from her it has taken a body for itself, in which it could be born: not because before it was born, as far as it concerns itself, it itself had not existed at all. And here if you, a contemplator of everyday speech, attend to the force of words, we propose contraries, we preach opposites; and yet in these it is true what we say.

From the mother's womb we know that the soul is born with the body, but we also see the soul proclaimed as prior to the mother. In the child, the mother gives birth to the soul, yet even in the mother herself, only the soul lives, without which she herself cannot even be what gave birth. Therefore, if we seek the origin of the living being's power, the soul is prior to the mother, and from this it again seems to be born with the offspring. The soul, I say, is prior, through which the mother is ensouled: the mother is prior, through which the soul seems to be born in the child. But the mother does not turn flesh into soul, nor does she change soul into flesh, but the creator of flesh and soul and of the whole human being presented ensouled flesh from the mother's womb, who, through the economy of analogy joining different things, in one and the same human being both joined each in an indissoluble unity and confused neither by the participation of the other. CHAPTER XVI. Thus, then, but much more incomprehensibly and sublimely, the Son of God was born by the reception of a perfect human being from a mother, who is not only the capacity but also the cause of birth for all born things by singular omnipotence. According to the human being, I say, God was born from the Virgin, in the same way that the soul is taught to be born with the body: not because the substance of both is one, but because from both one person is made. The body is not one human being and the soul another, but one human being is body and soul. Thus, after the birth from the Virgin, the Son of God is not one and the son of a human being another, but the same Christ is the Son of God and of a human being.

And just as in one human being the body is one thing and the soul another, so in the one mediator the Son of God is one thing and the Son of man another: yet he is the same and not a different Son of God than Son of man, although he is Son of God on account of one thing and Son of man on account of another. We do not say that the Son of God began from the beginning of the flesh, lest anyone believe the divinity to be temporal. We do not know the flesh of the Son of God as from eternity, lest we think that he assumed not the truth of a human body but some image. For neither does the truth of the flesh consume the majesty of the Son of God, nor does the immensity of the divinity consume the truth of the flesh; while one shines with its own powers, the other is taught by our infirmities. But Christ, one and inseparable, is both humbled in what he assumed and glorified in what is his own, since he does not disdain to be affected by injuries and yet preserves the equality of the begetter. Therefore Mary both gave birth and did not give birth to the Son of God. She gave birth when Christ was given according to the flesh from her; she did not give birth when the Son existed from the Father without beginning. She gave birth when the Word became flesh from her so that it might dwell in us; she did not give birth when in the beginning was God the Word, which provided origin to all things. Do not, therefore, determine the origin of the Word of God by the Virgin's childbirth. Do not say that the body born from the Virgin is coeternal with the divinity; because the mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus the man (1 Tim. 2:5), is coeternal with the Father in his first nativity, and a partaker of our time in the second: in the former he is the author of time, in the latter he is a partaker of age.

CHAPTER 17. Felicianus: Since you have treated the mystery of the mediator with clear reasoning and sufficiently for anyone to believe, I therefore ask that you also deign to explain what is to be thought concerning the soul of Christ. For it has always been handed down by our forebears that Christ's body was animated by the presence of the Son of God himself in place of a common soul, and that he who was the dwelling place of the fountain of life had no need of the addition of a vital spirit, since that fountain could confer upon him what enabled him to live. Augustine: We could indeed teach what is prescribed in this question by the definition of Catholic authority, using the testimonies of the divine volumes; but since it has pleased us to discuss everything now not by the evidence of books but by reason alone, therefore, reserving the monuments of Scripture for another time, we shall treat the inquiry concerning the soul just as was done above. So that this may be done more easily, let us briefly inquire, with only one passage from the Apostle set before us, what was the cause for our Savior's taking on a human being; once that is found, we shall pass on without any difficulty also to those things that have followed from this preceding one. From the beginning, therefore, God made man from body and soul; this man, having transgressed the precepts of the law, after the usurpation of the forbidden tree, received in a certain way the sentence of capital punishment.

CHAPTER 18. Therefore, the venerable Paul says that Christ was born according to the flesh for this reason: that just as through one man sin entered this world, and through sin death, and so it passed into all men, in whom all have sinned (Rom. 5:12). And a little later: "But not as the transgression, so also the grace. For if by the transgression of one many have died, much more the grace of God and the gift, in the grace of one man Jesus Christ, has abounded to many. And not as through one sin, so also the gift: for judgment from one leads to condemnation, but grace from many transgressions leads to justification. For if by the transgression of one death reigned through one, much more, receiving the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness, we shall reign in life through one Jesus Christ." Therefore, just as through the transgression of one, into all men for condemnation, so also through the righteousness of one, into all men for the justification of life.

Just as through the disobedience of one man many were constituted sinners, so also through the obedience of one many are constituted righteous. Therefore Christ came to save what had perished (Luke 19:10). Let us first see, then, what that thing is which perished through the transgression of the first-formed man, and we will be able to know easily what the Lord, by coming, was able to save. We must therefore inquire who it was that received the law of the Creator. For without doubt he sinned who despised the commandments; he despised the commandments who admitted what was forbidden. But Scripture says: The Lord commanded Adam, saying: "You shall eat from every tree which is in paradise, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat from it. But on the day you eat, you shall die the death" (Gen. 2:16). Let us now inquire whether the whole man received this law. For if, as is contained in the book of Genesis, he received it already perfect in body and soul, then the whole man sinned by transgressing; and if the whole man sinned by transgressing, then the whole man perished at that time by the fault of his sin. But if the whole man perished, the whole man stood in need of the benefit of the Savior. And if the whole man stood in need of the benefit of the Savior, then Christ, by coming, saved the whole; and if by coming he saved the whole, then he assumed not a body without a soul, but the body and the soul of which the whole man consists, and which previously appears to have sinned.

For if, with the whole man sinning, Christ assumed only his flesh, the soul of that first transgression’s penalty has remained even now without any hope, according to what has been said. But if this is so, I do not know what the person of the mediator has conferred upon us, who, not redeeming our better part in its entirety, took up brute flesh by itself, and flesh which, being without a soul, could not even perceive his benefit. CHAPTER XIX. I would nevertheless ask such preachers why, having accepted the flesh, the mediator’s dispensation omitted the soul. Unless perhaps, knowing it to be innocent, he did not believe it to be in need of healing; or, thinking it alien to himself, he did not bestow upon it the benefit of redemption; or, judging it wholly incurable, he was unable to cure it; or, deeming it base and fit for no use, he cast it aside. Two of these notions blaspheme against the creator of the whole man with the unbelief of a profane spirit. For they believed him first to be incapable, and second not to be God of all. For how is he taught to be omnipotent, if he could not cure the hopeless? Or how is he God of all, if he did not himself make our soul? As for the other two, in one the cause of the soul is unknown, in the other its merit is not seen. Is he to be thought to understand the cause of the soul, who, when it is equipped by the habit of innate reason to receive the law, strives to separate it from the sin of voluntary transgression?

Or how does he know its nobility, who says it is despised by the vice of ignobility, preferring the flesh, which is known to have been formed not by the breath of God like the soul, but from the mud of the earth? But if none of these things is rightly understood about the soul, let us believe that our Redeemer assumed the whole man, lest we seem somehow to cut off the eternal benefit of our soul. Alas! “Flesh alone,” he says, “Christ assumed; the soul he did not seek.” Here, if you, as a contemplator knowledgeable of things, consider the origin of each, the substance of the soul is more precious; if you consider the fault of transgression, because of understanding, the cause is worse. But I know that Christ is both perfect in wisdom and do not doubt that he is most merciful: of these, first, he did not despise the one more capable of wisdom and prudence; second, he assumed the one that had been more wounded. For it is fitting neither for wisdom to love more the most foolish of two equally his own, nor for perfect mercy not to have helped the one more in need.

CHAPTER 20 Felicianus: Indeed, I confess that I have understood in the preceding matters, and I do not deny that I have approved, everything that you have said not only reasonably but also truly. However, I do not know in what way the divinity of Christ is said to have experienced death. Concerning this, whether you have said something obscurely, or I, due to the slowness of my intellect, have been unable to grasp what was sufficiently said, I do not know. For I do not dare to believe that that fountain of life, from which all things have their living, would have fallen so far from the property of its nature during the three days that the body lay in the tomb that, if it is permissible to say so, with its senses buried, it would lose all motion of vital substance; and for the sake of the redemption of the human race, it would abandon not only the Father but also all the ornaments of spiritual glory. Augustine: Far be it, far be it from the faithful that suspicion, that Christ experienced our death in such a way that, as far as in him lies, life would lose life. For if this were so, how could we say that anything lived during those three days, if we believe that the fountain of life had dried up? Therefore, the divinity of Christ experienced death by participation in the human affection which he had voluntarily undertaken, not by losing the power of his nature through which he gives life to all things. Thus, in the tomb, he did not abandon his flesh by dying with it, just as in the womb of the Virgin he formed it by being born with it.

And so in both [natures], to be born and to die, the Lord willed it not compelled by another, but of His own accord, so that it is established that He underwent what He Himself did: and therefore He is not not a sufferer because He Himself was the agent, nor is He not the agent because no other was enduring it. For if you consider the mystery of the Lord's incarnation with the cooperation of the undivided Trinity preserved, in this humility the same one is both the author and the work: the same one is the author, because He is born of His own accord, He suffers of His own accord: the same one is the work, because both [actions], although not compelled by another, are nevertheless undergone by Him alone. He made the flesh in the womb of His mother—you have the author of the work: He Himself deigned to be born in it—you have the work of the author: yet it is one person, with the proper nature of each substance, both of the author and of the work, preserved. Thus He died not with life departing, just as He suffered not with power perishing. No one takes His soul from Him, because He has the power to lay it down and the power to take it up again (John 10:18). Here you have the author of the work. He lays down His soul for His friends: you have the work of the author. To conclude with a general definition: whenever in the flesh Christ suffers something, it is the work of the author. But because He undergoes the same thing by His own power, not compelled by another, He Himself is the author of the work.

CHAPTER XXI. Therefore the divinity did not come to Mary by local motion, but by the manifestation of its ineffable power, and it filled the womb with the one to be born, and did not deprive the whole of its substance of its simple fullness. It did not leave the Father when it came to the Virgin. Everywhere whole, everywhere perfect; because incorporeal simplicity admits no division, and fullness knows no parts. Therefore at one and the same time it was wholly even in hell, wholly in heaven. There suffering the injury of the flesh, here not abandoning the glory of the divinity. It was among the dead the resurrection of the dead, it was above the heavens the life of the living. Truly dead, truly alive; in which both the assumption of mortality received death, and the divinity preserved did not lose life. Therefore, whenever you consider these things which were humbly endured by Christ, acknowledge the author himself of the voluntary passion. Thus it will happen that, while humility is ascribed to the sufferer, virtue to the doer, the same Christ is taught to be, at one and the same time, weak when he suffers, omnipotent when he acts. But lest you think that we still accept some insensibility in the death of the Son of God, it is not untimely to investigate what was perceived concerning death: in which, without doubt, our life abandons the body, it does not perish; for the departing soul does not lose its own power, but it leaves behind what it had animated: and as far as it is concerned, it itself causes the death of another, it does not receive it. It causes it, I say, not by giving life to what it abandons: not by losing what lives.

Therefore the death of a man is nothing other than the setting of the flesh: from which, when the power of the life-giving force has departed, it returns to the earth from which it was taken, having lost the senses which it did not possess through itself. CHAPTER XXII. But, you say, death is the opposite of life. I admit it; but not from that class of opposites which destroy each other by the opposition of existing substance, but rather from that class which, while they cannot exist together when they befall something, are generated only by the habit and privation of a single substance. As, for example, we teach night and day. For these too are taught to be opposites of the same kind, since they seem to be the substance not of both, but of only one. For we say that it is day when the sun is above the earth; but the sun is known to be a substance. When this, after completing the course of the daytime period, has withdrawn from the contemplation of human sight, it soon makes night by withdrawing. It makes it, I say, by subtracting the abundance of light, not by receiving the substance of night into itself. Hence one substance of light seems to make both day and night, but not in the same way. For it makes day when it comes, and makes night when it departs.

Hence we often refute the not merely irreligious but also foolish division of the Manichaeans, by which they strive to separate good from evil as if from equally existing substances: showing them the greater luminary by which we know day is made; and compelling them likewise to teach us what, if it is permissible to say, would be the greater darkness, by which we would substantially believe night is made. But of these matters elsewhere, who through the folly of a blasphemous dogma either affirm non-existent things as existent, or consequences as principles, or common things as contraries. If anyone not deprived of the eyes of faith examines these, he confutes all their contrivances with easy reasoning. Therefore, as we had begun to say, the soul no otherwise than the sun gives life to the flesh when it comes, and causes death when it departs. Lest anyone think it is consumed by the death of the body, let him hear what the Lord in the Gospels defines with general authority: "Do not," he says, "fear those who kill the body, for they cannot kill the soul; but rather fear him who can kill both soul and body in the fire of Gehenna" (Matthew 10:28). Therefore the body is understood to be killed while the soul survives; and consequently it is not necessary that souls be consumed by the destruction of bodies. If this is so, even after the death of the body we nonetheless live in our minds. But if this is rightly understood concerning each one of us, how is it claimed that the source of life, through participation in the human mind, has lost its power to give life?

But, you say, the soul and the body can be killed in the fire of Gehenna. This does not work against us, first, because that death seems to be not of condition, but of crime. For when guilt is removed, we are commanded that men should not fear, who, although they can kill the body, are nevertheless denied the ability to kill the soul. Next, because this is said to be possible only for God, concerning whom we do not believe that His only-begotten Son, by communion of nature and equality of power, merited this. Therefore, the Savior took upon Himself the condition of our death, but not in such a way as to make it worse, since contrary to custom He permitted it to dominate the soul, but rather so that He might prove that this harms the soul of all the righteous equally, and life. CHAPTER XXIII. But let us suppose, although the Gospels cry out against it, that souls perish. Is there not in our Savior, although He does not repel death in these matters, a third and special majesty, which human death could not touch? In sum, let us see what He promised while placed on the cross. "Today," He says, "you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). "Today," He says, not after three days, when I will have raised my flesh from the rest of the tomb, not when I will have shown in myself the firstfruits of the future resurrection. Whose voice do we think this is? Of majesty, of mind, or of body? But no one is ignorant that the body was in the tomb. It remains that this voice belongs to the divinity, or to the mind. But someone says: We believe this is the voice of the divinity, not of the soul of Christ. And what do we receive in that to whom the promise was made?

Today," he says to the thief, "you will be with me in paradise," whose body common death confined until the future resurrection. It is the soul, therefore, to which the Lord promised and granted this. If, then, when the body is dead, the soul is soon called to paradise, do we still believe anyone so impious as to dare to say that the soul of our Savior, during that three-day period of bodily death, was consigned to the custody of the underworld? And who, you ask, is the other who, at the onset of Christ's passion, groaned, saying: "My soul is sorrowful unto death" (Matt. 26:38)? Sorrowful unto death, on account of the affection of the assumed flesh, not after death, when the fellowship of the divinity promises blessedness. That death is not the beginning of grief, but its end. Nor do the scourges of the just begin after this, but cease, when they both cast off the impediments of fluctuating matter and already grasp their author through the contemplation of fuller understanding.

CHAPTER XXIV. Therefore, you say, did the Son of God not suffer death in his soul, and not feel it in his majesty? What then do you claim he suffered? He certainly felt and suffered, but by participation in another's affliction, not by the property of his own wound. He felt as all feel who, with their flesh dying, live in their minds: not as the impious, who, as the same author says, are destroyed in both parts by the fires of Gehenna. Some indeed define common death even on this basis, saying that it is nothing other than when, by a kind of discord, the things that by their agreement produce life are separated from each other. If this is the death of a man, which does not consume what is joined but divides it, restoring each to its own origin, what shall we now say about the soul of the Savior, which—not to mention the divinity dwelling within it, nor its singular righteousness, but certainly because of the common lot of dying—could so desert that body for three days that it itself could not utterly perish?

Therefore, you ask, was Christ's soul at the underworld, and not his divinity? It was, I say. For I do not see how he could otherwise have revived his own flesh, if the power of God, as of an absent God, had not been at the underworld. Yet let no one therefore believe that we proclaim a local presence of God; concerning whom we say these things for the sake of manifesting a certain work, because he was somewhere, just as he who was not absent anywhere. He lay, as far as the flesh was concerned, dead in the tomb, raising the dead in the underworld, bestowing life upon all in heaven: he did not leave the world when he ascended to heaven, nor did he descend from heaven when he came to earth; but at one and the same time he filled the whole entirely, who, by the manifestation of his works appearing more in one place, denied the recognition of his presence to the unworthy, but did not procure the absence of his immense divinity. CHAPTER XXV. Do you wish to know what I think concerning this death of the mediator? This is entirely the opinion which, by the necessity of all the questions that have arisen incidentally in the preceding chapters, has been scattered throughout: that I believe the Son of God died, not according to the penalty of injustice which he did not have at all, but according to the law of nature which he undertook for the redemption of the human race: that death of which it is said: "Who is the man who lives and will not see death?" (Psalm 88:49), not that of which Isaiah says: "But the dead will not see life" (Isaiah 26:14). That death which is general to all according to nature, not that which is special to the wicked.

Let us suppose, then, that this is in some way the force and power of the seed, by which the soul restores souls, and by which the flesh of each of us is to be revived at the impending judgment, while through the operation of his own divinity he gives life to all things, and from the one grain of the man he assumed, he is about to render an innumerable harvest to the Father. Then he will separate the crop from the tares (Matt. 13:30), when he begins to bestow reward upon the just.