By Water & Blood

Chapter 3: A refutation of his unsound comments on these passages, and a sound interpretation of the same

Now if he did not accept the Scripture of Moses and of the prophets after Moses, his explanation would have had some plausible ground. But since he is not among those who reject the Old Testament, why did he name the apostles and their teachings “ways,” and pay no attention to the prophets of God, who have written countless things about the ways of God? For first Moses, writing thus, said, “Thou shalt go by the king’s highway,” and “Behold, I have set before thy face the way of life and the way of death”;

and David likewise, “The Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish”; and Jeremiah, “Stand ye in the ways, and ask for the everlasting paths of the Lord, and see what is the good way, and walk therein.” And you will find each of the prophets mentioning the ways of God in various manners.

If, then, our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ teaches that he himself is the beginning of the ways of God, saying, “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works” (being, surely, older than Moses and the prophets and those still earlier who lived according to the ways of God), while the flesh which he assumed was not earlier than all of these, then the oracle has not been rightly taken of the flesh.

It was not, therefore, on account of the flesh that the Saviour said these things, but because he pre-exists and leads the way in all the ways of God, along which all the God-beloved men of old have journeyed.

And since the divine apostle, saying, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”, suggests certain other ways—the providential ways over the universe, by which, with secret judgment and incomprehensible principles, he steers all things by divine power—it follows that he who said, “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works,” is to be called the beginning of these ways also. But this man, not understanding the ways of God, declared that the flesh of our Saviour is their beginning.

He also interprets “for his works,” saying (Nr. 13): “‘He created me, then,’ he says, ‘the beginning of his ways for his works.’ And what works does he mean? Those of which the Saviour says, ‘My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,’ and again, ‘I have finished the work which thou gavest me.’” Then, as though clarifying the sense of what had been said, he adds (Nr. 13): “For who, before the facts were demonstrated, would have believed that the Word of God, born through a virgin, would assume our flesh and display in it all the Godhead bodily?” And as though he had rendered the sense complete, he adds (Nr. 113): “This, therefore, is ‘The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works.’” He wrote these things because he was unable to lift the eyes of his understanding “on high” and say, like the prophet, “For I will behold the heavens, the works of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast founded”; nor did he remember the prophetic word in which it is said, “But they regard not the works of the Lord, neither consider the works of his hands.”

For had he attended to these, he would have known that before heaven and earth, and before the whole world—and not only before the visible works of God but also before the intelligible ones, those which exist in hypostasis among the incorporeal and supramundane powers—he who says these things was and pre-existed. But passing on to “Before the age he founded me,” he again brings the flesh into the middle, speaking thus (Nr. 14): “calling this a foundation—the economy according to the flesh that was foreordained for him;

as also the apostle says, ‘For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.’” And he adds (Nr. 14): “Here he mentions one age, from which he said the things concerning Christ were founded, although many ages had passed, as David said: ‘He who exists before the ages.’”

And passing next to “In the beginning, before he made the earth,” he again says that the earth is the flesh, writing thus (Nr. 18): “What earth is this, if not plainly our flesh, which after the disobedience became earth again? For ‘Earth thou art,’ he says, ‘and unto earth shalt thou return.’ For this had to obtain healing.” And this most wise man says these things without remembering that a little above he had said that the flesh was created as the beginning of God’s ways before he made the earth.

But if by “earth” he meant the flesh at all, how is it not necessary to confess that the one who says he was before the earth was made pre-exists the flesh? For “Before the age,” he says, “he founded me, in the beginning, before he made the earth.” Therefore the one saying these things existed before he made the flesh. And even if he mentioned not many ages but one—the one the Saviour also mentioned, saying, “The children of this age marry, and are given in marriage”—even so it was not the flesh which our Saviour assumed that existed before the present age, but he himself who teaches these things through Solomon. You see into what a strait he has fallen who turned aside from the straight and royal road.

And in addition to what has been said, he adds this as well, saying (Nr. 19): “‘Before he made the depths,’ he says. Here the prophet, speaking in a proverb, says that the depths are the hearts of the saints, which hold in their own depth the gift of the Spirit.” And he does not understand that before the incarnate presence of our Saviour the holy prophets of God shared in the same Spirit—Moses, and those still more ancient than Moses. Of necessity, then, the one who says “before he made the depths” is more ancient than all these depths, if indeed these were the hearts of the saints.

How, then, was it possible for these things to be referred to the flesh of the Saviour? And indeed, if he had had any knowledge of the divine Scriptures, he would not so readily have declared that the depths are the hearts of the saints, having noted that, according to the testimony of Moses, “darkness” was “upon the abyss” (ἄβυσσος), and how much is said about the depths in the divine Scripture, and how hard it is to interpret. For the apostle says, “Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven?

(that is, to bring Christ down from above:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead).” In these words, at any rate, he seems to have called the regions of Hades “abyss.” And the Lord himself set this forth more clearly in his oracle to Job, saying, “Hast thou come to the spring of the sea, and hast thou walked in the tracks of the abyss? Do the gates of death open to thee in fear, and did the gatekeepers of Hades cower when they saw thee?”

And the evil powers in the abyss, of which it is said, “Praise him from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps,” and further the darkness upon the abyss, of which Moses said, “And darkness was upon the abyss”—had he learned all these, if indeed he had read the divine Scriptures with labour and not superficially, he would not have dared to say that the depths are the hearts of the saints;

and he would have known how it is said, “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts,” and again, “The depths were troubled; a multitude of the sound of waters,” and again, “The deep as a garment is his covering.”

These things and those akin to them he would have examined precisely, had he any concern to grasp them. But as it is, having declared so offhandedly and loosely that the depths are the hearts of the saints, he did not understand even so that he who said “before he made the depths” taught that he existed before the holy and God-beloved men who have lived from the beginning of the age; so that on every side the words before us cannot be fitted to the flesh of the Saviour.

Then, passing on to another saying of the same Scripture, he interprets this also, saying (Nr. 20): “What, then, is this heading too: ‘Before the springs of the waters came forth’? He says that they are the holy apostles. And this mystery the Scripture of Exodus sets before us, foretelling long ago the types of the apostles; for since the apostles are twelve in number, it mentions twelve springs.” And in saying this he does not understand that Israel too had twelve tribes, and twelve patriarchs of these, and there is one book of the Twelve Prophets—and moreover twelve hours of the day, and twelve months of the whole year.

Why, then, should the number twelve belong to the apostles more than to all of those, if a mere count of quantity gave him the reason for such an interpretation of the passage? He ought to have seen that the prophets of God too, inasmuch as they shared in the same Holy Spirit, were not strangers to the springs. Therefore it is said of them in the Psalms, “Bless ye God in the congregations, even the Lord, from the springs of Israel.”

So one must confess that the Son of God, who says “before the springs of the waters came forth,” was before those springs also. But hear how this man interprets, saying (Nr. 20): “Fittingly, therefore, the Master, speaking through the prophet Solomon concerning the generation according to the flesh, said, ‘Before the springs of the waters came forth.’” And he adds (Nr. 20): “For so the Saviour said to the holy springs, ‘Go ye, and make disciples of all nations.’” Then, as though drawing his argument together, he brings the conclusion to his exposition, saying (Nr. 21): “On every side it is plain that the holy apostles were named ‘springs’ figuratively by the prophet.” So he wants the apostles to be the springs; but the prophets do not please him.

Why, unless because he could not put the flesh of the Saviour before them? And yet the Son of God, who teaches these things about himself in the Proverbs, pre-existed even the natural, perceptible springs which Moses mentioned in the account of the making of the world, saying, “But there went up a spring from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground,” and again, “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden.” And does not he who gave the oracle to Job also mention springs of the sea, saying, “Hast thou come to the spring of the sea, and hast thou walked in the tracks of the abyss?”

And since Scripture teaches that there are also certain waters above the heavens, saying, “Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens,” it follows that we should conceive of certain springs of those waters too (whatever their nature may be), so that he who said that he pre-existed “before the springs of the waters came forth” may be shown to be older than those also. But this man, applying his mind to none of these things and unwilling to take pains, persists in the same notions, since he says this too (Nr. 22): “‘Before the mountains were settled,’ he says, ‘and before all the hills he begets me.’ By mountains and hills he means the apostles and the successors of the apostles, so that he might signify in a proverb their righteous way of life as compared with other men.”

So the same men were the springs, the same the mountains, the same the hills. But just as it is contrary to nature, in the case of visible springs and mountains, to say that they are the same (for, as regards quality, springs of water have nothing in common with the heights of mountains), in the same way, in the case of things contemplated allegorically according to the sense, one ought to set out a distinction between the springs and mountains and hills understood in contemplation. But he, knowing nothing that has been tested, and mixing up everything through carelessness, has declared that the same men are springs of water and mountains and hills, and says that all these are the apostles, without marking out the manner of the difference.

Why, then, did he not likewise call mountains and hills those who were perfected in righteousness and godliness before the flesh of our Saviour, unless because he could not make the Saviour’s flesh subsist before them? Forced and constrained, therefore, is the referring of the words before us to the flesh of the Saviour. And how would “he begets me” fit the flesh? For he said that he had been begotten before the springs and before the mountains and before the hills, saying, “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works; before the age he founded me.”

If, then, the flesh were saying these things, as Marcellus thinks, how would the flesh say, “And before all the hills he begets me”? Grant that the flesh was before the apostles; but how does it say that it was itself begotten by God? For Marcellus seemed to say that the flesh, not previously existing, was created.

For he said (Nr. 10): “Our Master, God, truly created, having made what was not; for the flesh which the Word assumed was not existing, but he created it when it did not exist.” Its being created, then, we have learned; but how could its being begotten by God be accounted for, when our Saviour says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh,” and the apostle says, “made of a woman, made under the law”?

How, then, would the flesh have said of the God of the universe, “And before all the hills he begets me”? That these things have a forced interpretation is, I think, plain to everyone. But one might say without forcing, and apart from any allegorical manner, that the Son of God makes these words true: for he pre-existed the earth, and was and pre-existed before the bodily springs of the waters came forth, and before the depths so called in the perceptible sense, and before the shape of the earth was constituted in the heights of mountains and hills; for “all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made.”

But if anyone should ask why he did not teach that he was before the heavens, nor before the things in the heavens, nor before the divine and supramundane powers and spirits beyond them, it will be said to him that the Word did not for the present mention these, since through the Proverbs he was handing on a kind of elementary schooling to those who are infants in soul. This is plain from its saying at one time, “My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the laws of thy mother,” and at another, “My son, attend to my laws, and incline thine ear to my words,” and again, “My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord, neither faint when thou art rebuked of him,” and “My son, if thou be good for thyself, thou shalt be good also to thy neighbours; but if thou turn out evil, thou alone shalt draw up the evils.” You might yourself gather from the book of Proverbs countless sayings like these, through which the Word is seen conversing with those who are infants in soul. So too Moses, being a tutor of those immature in understanding, mentioned heaven and earth and the fashioning of the visible things, but not the creation of angels, nor of divine powers, nor of holy spirits, because his disciples could not yet receive the teaching about these. Fittingly, then, the Word in the Proverbs too, speaking to such as these, made his teaching from the mountains and hills and springs about the earth, as from things better known, so that, beginning from a foundation, he might lead those under instruction by the hand toward better things, and prepare them to pass over from lesser things to more divine.

So much, then, if one does not busy himself with anything beyond the letter. But if one wishes to understand these things more deeply too, he will take them of the apostles no more than of all the righteous and God-beloved men who have ever lived; and from there he will pass over also to the divine and angelic powers, saying that the mountains and hills hint at the distinctions of angels and archangels and divine spirits, thrones and dominions and principalities and powers.

For the divine apostle taught that all these too were created “by him and for him,” and that he is “before all things”—starting, as is likely, from this very passage, because in these words it is said in the person of the Son of God, “Before the mountains were settled, and before all the hills he begets me.” The other things, then, he said were settled; but that he alone was begotten before the constitution of the things mentioned.

And the same apostle knows the heavenly Jerusalem, and the heavenly mountain on which he says it stands, saying, “Ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the festal assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven.” Pre-existing all these, therefore, the only-begotten Son of God hinted in a hidden manner, through the Proverbs, at the things of his own ineffable generation. And that he suggested we should understand these things will be plain from what he joins next, saying, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.” Here the noble interpreter of the Scriptures stopped, shut in, and went no further, because he was unable to smooth out the sequence of the hypothesis he had put forward concerning the flesh of the Saviour. For having mentioned the flesh up and down, and declared that everything was said about the flesh, he got as far as the mountains and the hills, saying that these were the apostles; but what follows he willingly consigned to silence, no longer daring to go further into the Scripture.

Here, then, he halts his argument. But after a great many things said by him in between, he departs from the interpretation referring to the flesh and confesses that it is the Word of God who spoke these words. He says, then, in these very words (Nr. 54):

“For before the world existed, the Word was in the Father. But when God Almighty purposed to make all things in the heavens and on the earth, the coming-into-being of the world required an effective activity (ἐνέργεια δραστική); and for this reason, since there was nothing else except God (for all things are confessed to have come into being by him), then the Word, having come forth, became the Maker of the world—he who even before was preparing it inwardly, in thought, as the prophet Solomon teaches us, saying, ‘When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him,’ and ‘When he was setting fast the springs beneath the heaven, when he was making strong the foundations of the earth, I was beside him, setting all in order; I was the one in whom he delighted.’ For the Father fittingly rejoiced, making all things with wisdom and power through the Word.”

So much for Marcellus. If, then, he confessed at last, and barely, that these words were spoken in the person of the Word, he must accept that the whole connected passage before us refers to the same Word of God.

For he who said, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him,” was the same who said, “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works”; for one and the same person, going through everything set before us, was shown to us at the outset. He, therefore, who said, “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works,” added, “Before the age he founded me,” and “In the beginning, before he made the earth,” and “Before the mountains were settled, and before all the hills he begets me”;

and the same one joined on also, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him,” and what follows. If, then, the Word was the one who said these things, how was he within God—and how, being co-unbegotten (συναγένητος) with God and one and the same with him, did he say that he had been created and begotten? For one and the same person, as I said, was shown to go through all that is set before us.

And if, late in the day, he confessed that these things were said in the person of the Word in God, then his assignment of them to the Saviour’s flesh has been forced, and all those comments together have been exposed as stale, vain, and superfluous. But if it was the flesh of the Saviour that said “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works,” according to the interpretation he gave; and if the flesh “was founded before the age, and in the beginning, before he made the earth” (the earth being, as he thought, the flesh, because it is said, “Earth thou art, and unto earth shalt thou return”); and if it was the flesh that said, “Before he made the depths, before the springs of the waters came forth, before the mountains were settled, and before all the hills he begets me” (because it had been begotten before the choosing of the apostles, as the most wise man thought)—then it follows that “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him” is also said in the person of the flesh.

But no one who had not taken leave of his senses would ever agree to this interpretation; for the word of truth will answer him with a great shout, showing who it was that went through these things.

That the only-begotten Son, begotten from God, was another, living and subsisting, existing even before the constitution of all things that have come into being, he himself establishes by what he adds next, saying, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.” For he was with him and present to him before the heaven came into being, and the things beyond the heaven, and all things in the heaven. This, at any rate, he hinted at by saying, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.”

And how was God preparing it, if not by legislating and designing, before it came into being, the manner in which it had to be constituted? The Father, then, was designing and preparing, considering how so great a heaven ought to be constituted—of what size it needed to be, and of what shape, and of how many measures and parts—for the sake of the things that were to be contained within it, and of those that would be outside it, and of those that would run their course in it; while he, gazing intently upon the Father’s reasonings and alone beholding the depths within him, went forth into works, serving the Father’s nods.

Therefore it is said somewhere: “Praise ye the Lord from the heavens: praise him in the heights. Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts. Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars and light. Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord: for he spake, and they were made; he commanded, and they were created.”

But even before the heaven itself came into being, and the things beyond the heaven, and all things in the heaven (for by naming one, all things have been indicated comprehensively), the Son of God was, and was present to and with the Father while he was still deliberating about the constitution of all these. Therefore he says, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.” Then, like a good painter, receiving the archetypal ideas from the Father’s reasonings, he transferred them onto the substances of the works, forming and giving subsistence to such things as he saw lying beforehand in the Father’s mind.

Of these things he himself would be a worthy witness, teaching thus in the Gospels: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth.” Here one might fittingly ask how the Son does again the things that have once been done by the Father. He himself resolved the question, saying, “For what things soever the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.”

The things done by the Son, therefore, are likenesses of archetypal works pre-subsisting in the ineffable reasonings of the Father; beholding these intently in the Father’s mind, the Son made imitations of what he saw. And that his beholding the depths of the Father is a work of the Father’s love, he established by clarifying next and saying, “For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth.” As the Father, then, showed his own hidden things, the Son, beholding them, made the works of the Father’s counsel subsist through deeds. Being with the Father in this way, then, and present with him as he prepared the heaven and what is in it, he taught this, saying, “When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.”

And the Father rejoiced, even before the world came into being, looking upon his own only-begotten Son and, as it were, beholding himself in him as in a mirror, as in an image; therefore Wisdom says, “I was the one in whom he delighted day by day.” But the Son too was filled with gladness, exulting at the sight of the Father; this, at any rate, he himself teaches, saying, “And I rejoiced before him at every season, when he rejoiced at having completed the inhabited world”—

the “inhabited world” being understood here as the full completion of all things that have come into being, at which, as it was being brought forth from non-being into being through the Son, the God of all rejoiced. The true account, then, as set forth briefly, in a concise narrative drawn from the divine Scripture, would be something like this. But he, carried downward from above, ran his understanding aground upon the flesh of our Saviour, perverting and misinterpreting the true sense of the divinely inspired Scripture.

Yet, passing on to the Word also, he says that it is he who was within, in the Father, and who had prepared the heaven as in reflection and thought.

He said, at any rate, in these very words (Nr. 54):

“For before he made the world, the Word was in the Father. But when God Almighty purposed to make all things in the heavens and on the earth, the coming-into-being of the world required an effective activity; and for this reason, since there was nothing else except God (for all things are confessed to have come into being by him), then the Word, having come forth, became the Maker of the world—he who even before was preparing it inwardly, in thought, as the prophet Solomon teaches us, saying, ‘When he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him.’”

Here it is fitting to consider in what way, wilfully deaf, he does not hear the “I was present with him” (συμπαρήμην), which expressly signifies the presence of the Son with the Father, but declares, contrary to Scripture, that there was no one else except God before the things that have come into being came into being. He did not shudder at uttering this expression, which is a denial of the Son, nor was he put to shame by the divine Scripture, which bears witness that he alone was present with the Father before the creation of the heaven. For “When he was preparing the heaven,” it says, “I was present with him.”

For the preposition “with” (σύν), attached to “be present,” indicates presence together with another at the same time. He teaches, then, not that he was simply present, but that he was present together with the Father. And the Father did not simply rejoice, but rejoiced in (προσέχαιρεν) the presence of the Son; therefore he says, “I was the one in whom he delighted day by day.”

And how would rejoicing before the Father fit a Word that does not subsist, but is in God himself and is active only as a sign (σημαντικῶς)—when “rejoicing” and “before him” directly establish his hypostasis? But Marcellus, taking no account of these things, sets aside the Son, and says that the Word, being within God, at one time comes forth by effective activity, and at another is within him, inactive. And he does not see that to say that something is inside and outside God supposes something composite and a bodily affection, which it is not lawful to admit in the case of the unbegotten and incorporeal nature.

And how did the Word, having come forth, become the Maker of the world? Was it with tongue and voice—God, surely, making use of speech as well? And to whom would he have spoken, when no one else was with him? With whom would he have conversed, when no one was present? Or was he conversing with himself, using voice and speech, so that the Word came forth from him?

And why could he not, with the Word still within him, have constituted by effective power the things he wished, since even among men most craftsmen accomplish their own works in silence, especially when no one is present with them as they work? What, then, prevented God too from constituting all things in some such way, having the Word in himself? But he even proposes the image of a sculptor conversing with himself and saying to himself (Nr. 52), “Come, let us make; come, let us mould a statue”; for so, he says, the God and Master of the universe said to himself, “Let us make man”—as has often been shown already in what came before, through which, I think, his denial of the Son of God has been laid bare.

For to say that God converses with himself, having his own Word within, would belong to a Jewish way of thinking; while to say that he is himself the father of the Word in him, and that the Word in him is his son, was the mark of Sabellius’s false doctrine;