By Water & Blood

Book 2, Chapter 14: How one must interpret the evangelical teaching about the Word

Since, then, various senses are presented by the term “word” (λόγος), and since the evangelist has said absolutely, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” it is fitting to apply the mind and learn that the evangelist here hands down a strange kind of Word, beyond those known to us: he said “Word” absolutely, but added the strange and paradoxical character of the power peculiar to him in the words “and the Word was God.”

For, he says in effect, do not suppose that this Word too belongs to the class of relatives (τὰ πρός τι), like the word in the soul, or the word heard through the voice, or the word present in bodily seeds, or the word that subsists in mathematical theorems. For all these, being relatives, are conceived as existing in some other, pre-existing essence. But God the Word does not need some other pre-existing subject in which to come to be and so subsist; rather, he is living and subsisting by himself, inasmuch as he is God. For “the Word was God.”

But when you hear him called God, he says, do not suppose that he too is without beginning and unbegotten like his Father; rather, learn that this God the Word “was in the beginning.” And whom he posits as his beginning, he makes clear next: not saying, “and the Word was the God,” with the addition of the article, lest he should define him to be the God over all; nor yet “in God,” lest he should cast him down to the human likeness; but he said, “and the Word was with God.”

For if he had said, “and the Word was in God,” granting it as an accident in a subject, and as one thing in another, he would have brought in God as though composite, positing him as an essence without a word and the Word as an accident of the essence. Marcellus, supposing exactly this, brings the Father and the Son together into the same, calling the essence the Father and the Word in him the Son. He did not reckon that whoever grants this, positing God without a Word, would fall into a godless and impious doctrine, accepting a God without reason (ἄλογος), who has a word as an accident in him but is not himself Word. Whereas one ought to confess that what is beyond the universe is one divine, ineffable, good, simple, uncompounded, uniform being: very God, very Mind, very Word, very Wisdom, very Light, very Life, very Beauty, very Good, and whatever one might conceive better than these—or rather, beyond all mind and beyond all thought and reflection;

and that his only-begotten Son, as an image of the Father sprung from him and in every way and in all respects most like the one who begot him, is himself also God and Mind and Word and Wisdom and Life and Light, and the image of the Beautiful and Good itself—not being the Father himself, but the only-begotten Son of the Father; nor being himself the unbegotten and unoriginate, but the one sprung from him and inscribing the one who begot him as his beginning.

But if Marcellus, contradicting these things, should say that God and the Word in him are the same, defining God as uncompounded and simple, it is time for him to confess neither Father nor Son, but plainly to put forward the Jew, or to bring in Sabellius, who says that Father and Son are the same; so that, according to him, “In the beginning was the Word” is equivalent to “In the beginning was God,” and “and the Word was with God” is equivalent to “and God was with God,”

and likewise the third phrase is the same as “and God was God”—statements which, besides being incoherent, would be utterly irrational. And how will “all things were made by him” have any place, if the subject is one? For he does not say that all things came into being by him (ὑπό) or from him, but “through him” (διά). And the preposition “through” signifies ministry, as the same evangelist shows as he proceeds, saying, “The law was given by (διά) Moses, but grace and truth came by (διά) Jesus Christ.” For just as the law, not being human nor belonging to Moses himself but being from God, inscribed Moses as deacon and minister of its delivery to men—and for this reason it is said, “The law was given through Moses”—so too “grace came through Jesus Christ,” the Father having wrought it through Christ.

In the same way, then, it is also said, “All things were made through him,” another having made them, while he ministered; so that one must seek another, the Maker of the universe, who brought all things into subsistence through the one who is theologized. And who could that be? He would have nothing to say.

These things being so, it is necessary to confess that the one theologized by the evangelist is not the God over all, nor the Father himself, but his only-begotten Son: not an accident of the Father, nor in him as in a subject, nor one and the same with God, but truly a Son, living and subsisting, being in the beginning, and being with God, and being God, through whom the Father fashions all things;

so that one might rightly, paraphrasing more clearly, say instead of “In the beginning was the Word,” “In the beginning was the Son”; and instead of “and the Word was with God,” “and the Son was with the Father”; and instead of “and the Word was God,” “and the Son was God.” In this way what is added next would also fit: for “all things were made through him; and without him was not any thing made.”

Fittingly, therefore, the divine evangelist said that he was “in the beginning,” granting him a beginning—namely, plainly, his generation from the Father; for everything that is begotten from something has the one who begot it as its beginning. Yet he did not go on in like manner, “and the Word was in God,” but “the Word was with God,” teaching that the one who was begotten and possesses the Father as his beginning is not somewhere far from the Father, nor cut off and standing away at a distance from him, but is present with him and is together with him.

This he taught also in Proverbs, first saying, “Before all the hills he begetteth me,” and then adding, “When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him.” Thus, then, the Word—that is, plainly, the only-begotten Son—was with his own Father, God, being together with him and present alongside him always and at all times.

This the evangelist showed in saying, “and the Word was with God.” And since we needed to know also of what dignity he was, he necessarily joined to it, “and the Word was God.” For how could the one begotten from the one and only unbegotten God fail to be God? For if “that which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit,” according to the saving teaching, it follows that that which is begotten of God would be God. Wherefore also “the Word was God”—

and God productive and creative of all things. This too the evangelist set forth, joining on next, “All things were made through him.” Now the law, the tutor, through Moses, introducing God as Maker of the universe in the account of the world’s making, and handing down the elements and introductions of piety, taught, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” and what follows, by which, as tutor of the Jewish people, it exhorted them to regard the world as having come into being, so that they might not worship “the creature more than the Creator.”

But how God fashioned all things, and through whom, Moses did not yet hand down to those under him. Rather, “grace and truth, which came through Jesus Christ,” proclaiming as good news the mystery kept in silence by Moses, began a newer and mystical teaching for the Church of God, crying aloud openly to all for everyone to hear, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and, “All things were made through him,

and without him was not any thing made”; and adding further to these, “That which was made in him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness,” and what follows—by which it instructs us concerning the Son of God, and the singular prerogatives of the divine light and of the life in him, and how through him all the things spoken by Moses, and still more beyond these, were constituted. But Marcellus, knowing none of these things, is caught at one time Judaizing and at another Sabellianizing:

after the manner of the Jew, saying that before the constitution of the world there was nothing except God alone—whereas the Church confesses that before the constitution of the world there were the Father and the Son; and after the manner of Sabellius, declaring that Son and Father are one and the same, and bringing him in at one time as the internal Word and at another as the uttered Word.

For even if he pretends not to accept these terms, he is nevertheless made plain by his saying that at one time the Word is within, in God, and at another comes forth from him through an effective activity, and by the fact that he likens him to the human word. The divine evangelist, however, did not posit the Word theologized by him according to any of the senses that have been given, but as it was fitting to conceive the only-begotten Son of God: being Word, inasmuch as he constituted all things by reason (λόγος), and without reason none of the things that exist came into being; and God and Only-begotten, inasmuch as he alone was truly Son of the God over all, a Son genuine in very truth and beloved, made like to his own Father in all things.

Wherefore he was also truly Light, inasmuch as he shines the intellectual and rational radiance into souls made according to his image. Wherefore the evangelist does not say that he is the light of all things, but of men only; for he said, “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” So too he was truly Life, inasmuch as he furnishes to all living things the stream of the supply that comes from him. And according to each conception of the divine powers in him you would find titles of his that are both expressive of him and true. For in all things the Son of God was Truth, as he himself shows, saying, “I am the truth.”