By Water & Blood

Book 3, Chapter 21: How one must understand “He who has seen me has seen the Father”

So, then, “he that hath seen” him “hath seen the Father” also, in that he alone and no other is “the image of the invisible God” and “the brightness of his glory, and the express image (χαρακτήρ) of his hypostasis,” and exists “in the form of God,” according to the apostolic teachings. For just as one who has gazed upon the royal image, made exactly like the king, takes the impress of the features of his form through the painting and so forms a picture of the king in his mind, in the same way—or rather, beyond every word and beyond every example—he who, with a clear mind and with the eyes of the soul purified and illumined by the Holy Spirit, has gazed intently upon the greatness of the power of the only-begotten Son and Lord, and has considered how “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Father’s Godhead,” and how “all things were made by him,” and “by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible,” and has reckoned that the Father begot him alone as only-begotten Son, made like him in all things—such a one will see, in power, the Father himself through the Son, as he is beheld by those purified in mind, concerning whom it is said, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”

Let these things, then, be worked through by us as in a summary, since we have set brevity as our aim. But since the matters in this passage require very great elaboration, whoever cares for a precise understanding of them, fixing his mind on the gospel and apostolic readings, will gather the whole sense from them at leisure. And although countless other things have been heaped together incoherently in Marcellus’s treatise—very many said contrary to the intent of Scripture, and others forced and preserving no consistency—I consider that the common refutation has been made manifest to right-thinking people through what we have examined, and I shall be content with these.