By Water & Blood

Chapter 17: How he denied with bare head the hypostasis of the Son

(Nr. 62) “For if the examination of the Spirit alone were undertaken, the Word would reasonably appear to be one and the same with God”; at another time comparing the Word of God with human speech (λόγος) and adding (Nr. 55) that the word in a man is one and the same with the man, separated by nothing other than the activity (ἐνέργεια) of the deed alone. Therefore at one time he declared that before the constitution of the world there was nothing else except God; and again he said in these very words that (Nr. 93) “when the world had not yet come into being, there was nothing else except God alone.”

At another time he compared the Word of God to our significative word (σημαντικὸς λόγος), where he wrote as follows (Nr. 55): “Just as all things that have come into being have come into being by the Father through the Word, so also the things spoken by the Father are signified through the Word.” And having here called him a significative word, proceeding further he represents him as inseparable in hypostasis and one and the same with the Father, saying something like this (Nr. 55): “And this, I think, is easy for those of sound mind to learn even from a small and lowly example drawn from ourselves.

For neither is it possible for anyone to separate the word of a man in power and hypostasis. For the word is one and the same with the man, and is separated by nothing other than the activity of the deed alone.” And again he uses the same image where he says (Nr. 56): “For all things whatsoever the Father says, he plainly says everywhere through the Word. And this is clear even from ourselves—so far as one may liken small things to great and divine ones; for we too do all things whatsoever we wish, so far as possible, to say and to do, by our own word.”

It is fitting to consider that one hears these things said no more by Marcellus than by Sabellius—unless perhaps Marcellus is jeering at Sabellius for this, that he did not shamelessly dare to name the significative word in God, as Marcellus supposes it, “Son.” For Sabellius did not have so great a folly of reasoning as to grant a word to the God who is over all in the same way as to men, nor was he so stupid as to call a non-subsistent word “Son of God.” Therefore Sabellius, saying that God is one and denying the Son,

consistently with the premise he had granted himself, said that the same one is Father and Son. But Marcellus, granting just as he did that God and the Word in him are one and the same, confesses that Sabellius erred in vain, but not that he himself did. For either he ought to have accepted that man also; or else to blame himself too, and, in blaming him, to turn away from the false doctrine like his. He ought not, after the manner of a sculptor, to suppose God conversing with his own thought and his own reasoning and exhorting himself to say, “Come, let us make; come, let us mould a statue” (for so too, he said, God spoke the words, “Let us make man”); nor to suppose in God at one time an internal word (ἐνδιάθετος λόγος), as in a man, and at another a significative one, like the uttered word (προφορικὸς λόγος) in us. For it would be more tolerable to hear these things spoken by Sabellius, or by one of the Jews who deny the Son of God with bare head, than by a Christian. But he, as though priding himself on the Jewish teaching, introduces to the Church of Christ this impious and godless doctrine that the Son of God does not exist, contriving throughout the whole treatise he has laboured over that before the world came into being there was nothing else except God alone, so as to shut off any entrance for the Son. And he even exalts himself, boasting that he knows one God—

as though we too did not say this, we who have received the Son of God as truly Son, and have learned from him to know one God, and that he is at once God and Father of the only-begotten Son—his Son, plainly, being truly Son, begotten from him before all ages, and called not only Word before the assumption of the flesh, as this noble fellow lays down, but also countless other things. But in this too he lies against the divine Scripture, insisting that before the incarnate presence he was called nothing else than Word.