By Water & Blood

Chapter 6: How the Church hands down what to think concerning Father and Son and Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit, then, is by nature disposed to dwell gladly in the saints alone, being supplied through the Son to whomever the Father may judge fit. And this would be its work: to sanctify all to whom it imparts one or even several of the gifts within it—so that prophets and apostles and every God-beloved soul, and likely also the higher and divine powers, partake of the holiness that comes from it. But the Son alone, honoured with the Father’s Godhead, would be the Maker and Fashioner of all things that have come into being, visible and invisible, and indeed of the very existence (ὕπαρξις) of the Paraclete Spirit. For “all things were made by him,

and without him was not any thing made,” and “by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible.” But the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is beyond the universe, being a kind of ineffable Good, superior to all reasoning and thought, and to every voice and conception—who at once leads (καθηγούμενος) all things that ever exist, of whatever kind they are, and the Holy Spirit itself, and moreover the only-begotten Son—he alone is fittingly proclaimed as the God who is over all and through all and in all, by the apostle, who says, “One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all.”

And he alone would bear the title “one God and Father” “of our Lord Jesus Christ,” while the Son is “the only-begotten God, which is in the bosom of the Father.” But the Paraclete Spirit is neither God nor Son, since it has not received its origin (γένεσις) from the Father in the same way as the Son, but is one of the things that came into being through the Son, since “all things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made.”

These mysteries, then, are handed down in some such way to the holy and catholic Church through the divine utterances. But Marcellus, mixing everything together, at one time goes down into the very abyss of Sabellius, at another tries to renew the heresy of Paul of Samosata, and at another is plainly convicted of being a Jew. For he introduces one hypostasis with three faces (τριπρόσωπος), as it were with three names, saying that God and the Word in him and the Holy Spirit are the same.

Then, passing from there to the apostolic theologies concerning Christ, he again uses perverse interpretations. For when the divine apostle expressly theologizes the Son of God and says, “Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist,”