De Carne Christi

Those who, without controversy, are eager to disturb the faith in the resurrection — a faith already established before these kinsmen of the Sadducees — so as to deny that this hope extends even to the flesh, are rightly distracting Christ's flesh also with their questions, alleging that it was either no flesh at all, or in some way other than human. Their aim is that, if it should be established that his flesh was human, this would prejudge against them the resurrection in every respect of that flesh which has risen in Christ. Therefore, where they pull down the prospects of the flesh, there must we build up our defence. Let us examine the bodily substance of the Lord; about his spiritual substance there is no doubt. It is his flesh that is in question. Its truth and its quality are under review: whether it existed, and from where, and of what sort it was. The verdict upon it will lay down the law for our resurrection. Marcion, in order to deny Christ's flesh, denied his birth as well; or, in order to deny his birth, he denied his flesh as well — clearly so that birth and flesh should not answer to each other as mutual witnesses, since there is neither birth without flesh nor flesh without birth. As if, by that same heretical licence, he could not himself have either admitted the flesh and denied the birth, like Apelles his disciple and afterwards his deserter, or, confessing both flesh and birth, interpreted them otherwise, like Valentinus, his fellow-disciple and fellow-deserter. But even the man who introduced the notion of Christ's flesh as merely apparent could equally have fashioned the birth too into a phantom, so that the conception, the pregnancy, the delivery of the virgin, and the whole subsequent order of the infant himself might be reckoned as mere semblance. They would have deceived the same eyes and the same senses that the supposition of the flesh deceived.

But plainly the birth is announced by Gabriel. What has he to do with an angel of the Creator? And the conception is brought into the virgin's womb. What has he to do with Isaiah, the Creator's prophet? He hates delays, this man who was bringing Christ down suddenly from heaven. "Away with this," he says, "with the troublesome enrolments of Caesar, the cramped lodgings, the squalid swaddling-clothes, the hard mangers. Let the angelic multitude look to honouring their Lord by night. Rather let the shepherds keep their flocks; and let the Magi not weary themselves over a long journey — I make them a present of their gold. Let Herod too be a better man, lest Jeremiah have cause to glory. Nay, let the infant not be circumcised, lest he feel pain, nor be carried to the temple, lest he burden his parents with the cost of an offering, nor be handed into the arms of Simeon, lest the old man, about to die, be made sad thereby. Let that aged woman too keep silence, lest she bewitch the child." By such counsels, I suppose, you dared, Marcion, to blot out so many original records of Christ, that his flesh might not be proved. By what right, I ask you? Produce your warrant. If you are a prophet, foretell something; if an apostle, preach publicly; if a man of apostolic standing, hold the same mind as the apostles; if you are only a Christian, believe what has been handed down; if you are none of these, then with good reason may I say to you: die. For you are indeed dead, since you are not a Christian, in not believing that which, when believed, makes men Christians; and you are the more dead the more you are not a Christian — you who, having once been one, fell away, by tearing up what you formerly believed, as you yourself confess in a certain letter, as your own followers do not deny, and ours can prove. Therefore, in tearing up what you believed, you tore it up as one who already believes no longer; yet it does not follow that you tore it up rightly because you ceased to believe; on the contrary, by tearing up what you believed, you prove that, before you tore it up, things were otherwise. What you believed as otherwise was so handed down. Further, what had been handed down was true, as handed down by those whose office it was to hand it down. Therefore, in tearing up what had been handed down, you tore up what was true. You acted with no right whatever. But we have already used such rules of prescription more fully elsewhere against all heresies. After these, we now take up the matter again over and above, desiring to find the reasoning by which you suppose Christ was not born.

It is necessary, in that you suppose this lay within your own discretion, that you have judged the birth either impossible or unbecoming to God. But to God nothing is impossible except what he does not will. Whether, then, he willed to be born — for if he willed it, he both could and was born — let us consider. I hasten to a short cut. For if God had not willed to be born, on whatever grounds, neither would he have allowed himself to seem a man. For who, seeing him a man, would deny that he was born? Thus what he had not willed to be, he would not at all have willed even to seem. Of any displeasing thing even the appearance is condemned, since it makes no difference whether a thing is or is not, if, when it is not, it is presumed to be. Plainly it does make a difference, that what truly is not should not suffer a falsehood. "But," you say, "his own consciousness was enough for him. Let men look to it, if they thought him born, because they saw him a man." How much more worthily, then, and how much more consistently would he have borne the human estimation of him as one truly born — he who, even though unborn, was going to undergo the same estimation, and that with injury to his own consciousness (which you reckon to his credit) — namely, that, unborn, he should against his own consciousness allow himself to be thought born? What was so great a thing, tell me, that Christ, knowing what he was, should exhibit himself as what he was not? You cannot say: "Lest, had he been born and put on humanity, he should cease to be God, losing what he was while becoming what he was not." For to God there is no peril of his estate. "But for this reason," you say, "I deny that God was truly turned into man, so as both to be born and to be embodied in flesh, because that which is without end must also be unchangeable. For to be changed into something else is the end of the former state. Therefore change does not belong to him to whom no end belongs." Plainly the nature of changeable things is such that they do not remain in that into which they are changed, and so, by not remaining, perish, since by changing they lose what they were. But nothing is on a par with God; his nature is set apart from the condition of all things. If, then, those things which are distant from God, and from which God is distant, when they are changed lose what they were, where will the difference of divinity from other things lie, unless it lie in this — that God obtains the opposite, that is, that he can both be changed into all things and remain such as he is? Otherwise he will be on a par with those things which, when changed, lose what they were; and as he is in all respects not their equal, so neither in the outcome of change. You have read at some time, and believed, that the Creator's angels were changed into human form, and carried so great a reality of body that Abraham even washed their feet, and that Lot was rescued by their hands from the Sodomites, and that an angel even wrestled with a man so bodily, with the whole weight of his frame, that he begged to be let go, so was he held fast. What, then, was permitted to God's lower angels, when changed into human bodily form, so that they nonetheless remained angels — this you would take away from the more powerful God, as though Christ, having truly put on a man, could not have continued to be God? Or were those angels, too, mere phantoms of flesh? But you will not dare to say this. For if with you the Creator's angels are of the same sort as Christ also, then Christ will belong to that God whose angels are such as Christ is. If you had not deliberately rejected some Scriptures opposed to your opinion and corrupted others, the Gospel of John would have confounded you on this very point, when it proclaims that the Spirit in the body of a dove came gliding down and settled upon the Lord. When the Spirit was this, it was as truly a dove as it was Spirit too; nor did it destroy its own proper substance by assuming an alien substance. But you ask where the dove's body may be when the Spirit was taken back into heaven, and likewise the angels' bodies. By the same reckoning it was withdrawn by which it had been produced. If you had seen it when it was brought forth out of nothing, you would have known when too it was taken away into nothing. If its beginning was not visible, neither was its end. Yet there was solidity of body in whatever moment a body was seen. That which is written cannot but have been.

Therefore, if you reject embodiment for God neither as impossible nor as perilous, it remains that you spurn it and accuse it as unworthy. Beginning, indeed, from the birth itself, declaim away, come, against the impurities of the genital elements within the womb, the foul curdlings of fluid and blood, the flesh to be nourished out of that same filth through nine months. Describe the womb, day by day growing more insolent, heavy, anxious, not even safe in sleep, uncertain in its cravings of distaste and of greed. Inveigh now also against the very modesty of the woman in her travail, to be honoured if only for the danger, to be revered if only for nature. You shudder, no doubt, at the infant too, poured forth with its encumbrances; you disdain it surely even when washed, because it is bound up in swaddling-clothes, because it is shaped with anointings, because it is made the sport of caresses. This homage to nature, Marcion, you spit upon — and how were you born? You hate man at his birth — and how do you love anyone? You certainly did not love yourself, when you withdrew from the Church and from the faith of Christ. But see to it, whether you are displeasing to yourself, or whether you were born otherwise. Certainly Christ loved that man curdled amid impurities in the womb, brought forth through the parts of shame, nursed amid mockeries. For his sake he came down, for his sake he preached, for his sake he cast himself down in all humility even unto death, and the death of the cross; he loved, assuredly, the one whom he redeemed at a great price. If Christ belongs to the Creator, he loved his own, with good reason; if he is from another god, he loved the more deeply, since he redeemed a stranger. He loved, then, together with the man, his birth also, and his flesh also. Nothing can be loved without that through which it is what it is. Either take away the birth, and show me the man; or take away the flesh, and present the one whom God redeemed — if these things are the man whom God redeemed. Do you make these things shameful to him whom he redeemed, and unworthy — these things which, had he not loved, he would not have redeemed? The birth he refashions from death by a heavenly regeneration; the flesh he restores from every affliction: the leprous he cleanses, the blind he gives light to again, the paralytic he makes whole, the demoniac he purges, the dead he raises up again — and shall we blush at it? If he had truly willed to come forth from a she-wolf or a sow or a cow, and, clothed in the body of a beast or of cattle, to preach the kingdom of heaven, your censure, I suppose, would have prescribed to him: "This is base for a God, and unworthy of the Son of God, and foolish." So it is — only because one believes it so. It would indeed be plainly foolish, if we were to judge God by our own perception. But look about you, Marcion, if after all you have not blotted it out: "God chose the foolish things of the world, that he might confound the wisdom." What are these foolish things? The conversion of men to the worship of the true God, the rejection of error, the discipline of righteousness, of chastity, of mercy, of patience, of all innocence? These indeed are not foolish things. Inquire, then, of what he spoke; and if you presume to have found it, will it be anything so foolish as to believe in a God born, and that of a virgin, and that in the flesh, who wallowed through those insults of nature? Let someone say that these things are not foolish, and that there are other things which God chose in rivalry of worldly wisdom. And yet with that wisdom it is more easily believed that Jupiter was made a bull or a swan than that Christ was truly a man in Marcion's keeping.

There are plainly other things too, no less foolish, which pertain to the insults and sufferings of God. Or else let them call a crucified God prudence. Take this away too, Marcion — nay, this rather. For what is more unworthy of God, what more to be blushed at: to be born or to die? to bear flesh or to bear a cross? to be circumcised or to be nailed up? to be reared or to be buried? to be laid in a manger or to be hidden away in a tomb? You will be wiser if you do not believe even these things. But you will not be wise, unless you have become a fool in the world, by believing the foolish things of God. Or did you not, for this reason, cut the sufferings away from Christ — that, being a phantom, he was void of any feeling of them? We have said before that he could equally have undergone the empty mockeries of an imaginary birth and infancy. But here now answer me, slayer of the truth: was not God truly crucified? was he not truly dead, as one truly crucified? was he not truly raised again, as, that is, one truly dead? Falsely, then, did Paul determine to know nothing among us but Jesus crucified; falsely did he urge that he was buried; falsely did he insist that he was raised again. False, therefore, is our faith too, and the whole of what we hope from Christ will be a phantom. Most wicked of men, who would excuse God's murderers! For Christ suffered nothing at their hands, if he truly suffered nothing. Spare the one and only hope of the whole world, you who would destroy that disgrace which is necessary to the faith. Whatever is unworthy of God is profitable to me. I am safe, if I am not put to shame concerning my Lord. "Whoever," he says, "shall be ashamed of me, of him will I also be ashamed." Other grounds of shame I do not find which, through my contempt for blushing, may prove me well shameless and happily foolish. The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed, because it is a thing to be ashamed of. And the Son of God died: it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And, buried, he rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible. For how shall these things be true in him, if he himself was not true, if he did not truly have in himself that which could be nailed up, which could die, which could be buried and raised again — namely, this flesh suffused with blood, framed with bones, interwoven with sinews, threaded with veins, this flesh which knew how to be born and to die, human without doubt, as born of a human being? And therefore this flesh will be mortal in Christ, because Christ is man and Son of man. Or why is Christ a man and Son of man, if there is nothing of man in him, and nothing from man? — unless either man is something other than flesh, or the flesh of man is from some source other than man, or Mary is something other than a human being, or Marcion's god is a man. Otherwise Christ would not be called a man without flesh, nor Son of man without some human parent, just as he is not God without the Spirit of God, nor Son of God without God the Father. So the reckoning of both substances set forth him as man and God: on the one side born, on the other unborn; on the one side fleshly, on the other spiritual; on the one side weak, on the other exceedingly strong; on the one side dying, on the other living. This property of the two conditions, the divine and the human, was distinguished with an equal truth of each nature, by the same faith both of the spirit and of the flesh. The powers of the Spirit proved him God; the sufferings the flesh of man. If the powers are not without the Spirit, equally the sufferings are not without the flesh. If the flesh, with its sufferings, was feigned, then the Spirit too, with its powers, was false. Why do you halve Christ with a lie? He was wholly truth. He preferred, believe me, to be born rather than to lie in any part — and that against himself — so as to bear a flesh hard without bones, solid without muscles, bloody without blood, clothed without a tunic, hungry without hunger, eating without teeth, speaking without a tongue, so that his speech might have been a phantom to the ears, by an image of voice. And so he was a phantom even after the resurrection, when he offered his hands and feet for the disciples to examine, saying, "Behold that it is I, for a spirit has not bones, as you see me to have" — hands and feet and bones without doubt, which a spirit has not, but flesh. How do you interpret this saying, Marcion, you who bring Jesus only from the God most good and simple and good? Behold, he deceives and beguiles and circumvents the eyes of all, the senses of all, the approach and touch of all. You ought, then, no longer to have brought your Christ down from heaven, but from some company of mountebanks; nor to have made him a god rather than a man, but a magician for a man; nor a high priest of salvation, but a contriver of a spectacle; nor a raiser of the dead, but a deluder of the living. Except that, even if he were a magician, he was born.

But certain disciples of that man of Pontus, driven to be wise above their master, grant to Christ the truth of flesh, yet without prejudice to their refusal of the birth. "He had flesh," they say, "but in no way born." We have come, then, as the saying is, "from the lime-kiln into the charcoal-pit," from Marcion to Apelles, who, after he had been brought low in the flesh by a woman, lapsing from Marcion's discipline, and then was overturned in spirit by the virgin Philumene, took up from her the proclamation that Christ's body was solid, but without birth. And to that angel of Philumene's the apostle will reply with the same voice with which he was even then foretelling that very one, saying, "Even though an angel from heaven should preach the gospel to you otherwise than we have preached, let him be accursed." But to those things which they further argue, we shall make answer. They confess that Christ truly had a body. From what matter, if not from that quality in which he was seen? Whence the body, if not flesh the body? Whence the flesh, if not born? Because it would have to be born, being destined to be that which is born. "From the stars," they say, "and from the substances of the upper world, he borrowed his flesh." And indeed they set it down that there is nothing to wonder at in a body without birth, since even among us it was permitted to angels to pass into flesh with no service of a womb. We acknowledge, indeed, that it is so related; but yet how is it that the faith of one rule should borrow from the very faith it assails the instruments of its own arguments? What has he to do with Moses, who has rejected the God of Moses? If there is another god, let his concerns be otherwise. But let all heretics use the Scriptures of him whose world also they use. This too will be for them a testimony of judgment, that they construct their blasphemies out of his own examples. It is easy for the truth, even when laying down no such prescription against them, to prevail. Therefore those who set forth Christ's flesh after the example of angels, calling it unborn though flesh, let them, I pray, compare also the causes both of Christ and of the angels for which they passed into flesh. No angel ever came down for this — to be crucified, to taste death, to be raised again from death. If there was never such a cause for the embodiment of angels, you have the reason why, without being born, they received flesh. They had not come to die, therefore neither to be born. But Christ, sent to die, had also of necessity to be born, that he might be able to die; for nothing is wont to die unless it is born. Birth and mortality are a mutual debt. The mode of dying is the cause of being born. If Christ died for the sake of that which dies, and that which dies is also that which is born, it followed — nay, it went before — that he should likewise be born for the sake of that which is born, since for the sake of that very thing he had to die which, because it is born, dies. It did not befit him not to be born, for whom it befitted to die. And yet even then, among those angels, the Lord himself appeared to Abraham without birth, but with flesh, on account of the same difference of cause. But you do not receive this — not receiving Christ, who even then was learning both to address and to deliver and to judge the human race in the guise of a flesh not yet born, because not yet to die, until first both his birth and his mortality should be announced. Let them prove, then, that those angels conceived flesh from the stars. If they do not prove it — since neither is it written — neither shall Christ's flesh be from thence, to which they apply the example of angels. It is established that the angels did not bear flesh of their own, being of a substance spiritual in nature, even if of some body, yet of their own kind, but that they can be seen, transfigured for a time into human flesh, and consort with men. Therefore, since it is not related whence they took their flesh, it is left for our understanding not to doubt that this is the property of angelic power — to take a body to itself out of no matter. "How much more," you say, "out of some?" That is certain. But of this nothing is established, because Scripture does not present it. Besides, those who are able to make of themselves what by nature they are not, why should they not be able to make a body out of no substance? If they become what they are not, why should they not become so out of that which is not? But that which, when it comes to be, is not, is out of nothing. For this reason it is neither asked nor shown what afterwards became of their bodies. What was out of nothing was made into nothing. Those who were able to turn themselves into flesh can turn that very nothing into flesh. It is more to alter a nature than to make matter. But even if it was necessary that the angels took flesh out of matter, it is surely more credible that it was out of earthly matter than out of any kind of heavenly substances, since it proved to be of so earthly a quality that it was fed with earthly food. Be it so — let it now also be of starry origin, fed in the same way with earthly food when it was not earthly, as the earthly was fed with heavenly food when it was not heavenly (for we read that manna was for food to the people: "Bread," it says, "of angels did man eat") — yet the once-distinct condition of the Lord's flesh is not broken down on the ground of another dispensation. He who was truly to be man even unto death had to put on that flesh of which death is. And that flesh, moreover, of which death is, birth precedes.

But as often as the question is of the birth, all who reject it as prejudging the truth of the flesh in Christ wish to deny that God himself was born, because he said, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" Let Apelles, then, also hear what was already answered by us to Marcion in that little book in which we challenged his gospel — that the substance of this utterance must be considered. First, indeed, no one would ever have announced to him that his mother and brothers were standing outside who was not sure both that he had a mother and brothers, and that they were the very ones whom he was then announcing — whether known of old, or then and there discovered on the spot; even though for this reason the heresies have taken these things out of the gospel, namely that those who marvelled at his teaching said that his father Joseph the carpenter, and his mother Mary, and his brothers and sisters, were exceedingly well known to them. "But for the sake of testing him they announced to him a mother and brothers whom he did not have." This indeed the Scripture does not say, though elsewhere it does not keep silence when anything was done against him for the sake of testing. "Behold," it says, "there rose up a doctor of the law, tempting him." And elsewhere, "And there came to him the Pharisees, tempting him." Where no one forbade it, here too there would be the indication that it was done for the sake of testing. I do not accept what, outside Scripture, you bring in of your own. Next, a ground for the testing must underlie it. What did they suppose they were testing in him? Whether, surely, he was born or not? For if his answer denied this, the announcement of the tempter aimed at this. But no testing, tending toward the recognition of him about whom it tests by doubting, proceeds so suddenly that there does not first go before a question which, by introducing the doubt, forces the testing. Further, if there was never any wrangling about Christ's birth, why do you argue that they wished, by way of testing, to inquire into what they never brought into question? To this we add also: even if he were to be tested about his birth, he would surely not be tested in this way, by the announcement of persons who could, even though Christ were born, not have existed. We are all born, and yet we do not all have either brothers or a mother. A man can even more readily have a father than a mother, and uncles than brothers. So little does a testing of the birth suit the case, which could be established even without naming a mother or naming brothers. It is plainly easier that, being sure he had a mother and brothers, they tested rather his divinity than his birth — whether, busy within, he knew what was outside, being assailed with the falsehood of the announced presence of those who were not present. Otherwise, the device of testing would have been idle in this way. For it could happen that those whom they announced as standing outside, he should know to be absent, by reason of sickness or business or a known journey. No one tests in such a way that he knows he may bring back upon himself the blush of the testing. Since, then, no fitting ground of testing applies, the simplicity of the announcement is set free — namely, that his mother and brothers had truly come up. But let Apelles too learn the reasoning of the answer that denies the mother and brothers for the present moment. The Lord's brothers had not believed in him, as is contained in the gospel published before Marcion. His mother likewise is not shown to have clung to him, while Martha and Mary and other women are frequently in his company. In this place, finally, their unbelief appears: when Jesus was teaching the way of life, when he was preaching the kingdom of God, when he was at work healing sicknesses and infirmities, with strangers fixed upon him, his own kin were so far away. And then they come up and stand outside, and do not come in, plainly not reckoning what was going on within, nor at least waiting, as though they brought something necessary which he was at that very moment doing; but rather they interrupt, and wish him called away from so great a work. I ask you, Apelles, or you, Marcion: if perchance, while playing at dice, or wrangling about actors or charioteers, you were called away by such a message, would you not have said, "Who is my mother, or who my brothers?" Christ, preaching and proving God, fulfilling the law and the prophets, scattering the gloom of so long an age, did he use this saying unworthily, to strike at the unbelief of those standing outside, or to shake off the importunity of those calling him away from his work? For the rest, to deny the birth there would have been for him another place and time and order of speech, not the speech of one who could have uttered it even though he had both a mother and brothers. When indignation denies parents, it does not deny, but rebukes them. In short, he made others preferable, and, showing the merit of the preference — namely, the hearing of the word — he shows on what condition he denied his mother and brothers. For by the same act by which he adopted to himself those who clung to him, he disowned those who stood apart from him. Christ is also wont to fulfil what he teaches others. What sort of thing, then, would it be if, while teaching not to make so much of mother or father or brothers as of the word of God, he himself, the Word of God, should desert that word at the announcement of mother and brotherhood? He denied his parents, then, in the way in which he taught they should be denied for the work of God. But there is also another figure: of the synagogue in the mother set apart, and of the Jews in the unbelieving brothers. Israel was outside in them, while the new disciples, hearing and believing within, clinging to Christ, were marking out the Church, which he named the preferable mother and the worthier brotherhood, the fleshly kindred being refused. In the same sense, finally, he answered also that exclamation, not denying his mother's womb and breasts, but designating as more blessed those who hear the word of God.

By these chapters alone, on which Marcion and Apelles think themselves chiefly equipped, interpreted according to the truth of the entire and uncorrupted gospel, there should have been enough to prove the human flesh in Christ through the defence of the birth. But since these Apellesians too chiefly put forward the ignominy of the flesh, which they would have to be a thing built up by that fiery prince of evil out of souls he had enticed, and therefore unworthy of Christ, and therefore that a substance from the stars befitted him — I must beat them back from their own equipment. They name a certain renowned angel who set up this world, and, when it was set up, admitted repentance. And this we have treated in its place. For we have a little book against them also, to ask whether one who had the spirit and will and power of Christ for such works could have done anything worthy of repentance, when they even interpret the angel out of the figure of the straying sheep. Therefore, by the witness of its founder's repentance, the world will be a sin, since all repentance is a confession of fault, because it has no place except in fault. If the world is a fault, the body and its members will be a fault, and likewise heaven and the heavenly things, and whatever was conceived and brought forth from thence. And a bad tree must needs yield bad fruits. The flesh of Christ, therefore, if framed of heavenly things, consists of the elements of sin, sinful from a sinful reckoning, and will now be a part of that very substance — that is, of ours — which they disdain to bring upon Christ as sinful. So, if nothing turns on the ignominy, let them either devise for Christ some matter of a purer mark — for those to whom ours is displeasing — or acknowledge that same flesh in which even the heavenly could not be better. We read plainly, "The first man of the slime of the earth, the second man from heaven." Yet this does not look to a difference of matter, but only opposes to the formerly earthly substance of the flesh of the first man — that is, of Adam — the heavenly substance, drawn from the Spirit, of the second man — that is, of Christ. And he so refers the heavenly man to the spirit, not to the flesh, that those whom he compares to him are agreed to become heavenly in this earthly flesh — by the spirit, that is. But if Christ were heavenly according to the flesh too, those would not be compared to him who are not heavenly according to the flesh. If, then, those who become heavenly, such as Christ is, bear an earthly substance of flesh, hence too it is confirmed that Christ himself was heavenly in earthly flesh, just as are those who are made equal to him.

We further maintain that nothing which is received from another, so as to be other than that from which it is received, is so other as not to suggest whence it is received. No matter is without the testimony of its own origin, even if it be changed into a new property. Certainly this body of ours itself, which the truth — through the fables of the nations too — has transmitted as moulded out of clay, confesses the origin of each element, the earth in its flesh, the water in its blood. For although the appearance of the quality is other — this being how one thing comes to be from another — yet what is blood but a reddening fluid? what is flesh but earth in its own shape? Consider the several qualities: the muscles as clods, the bones as stones, even about the nipples certain little pebbles. Look at the tenacious connections of the sinews, like the runners of roots, and the branching courses of the veins, like the windings of streams, and the down like mosses, and the hair like turf, and the very treasures of the marrow hidden away, like the metals of the flesh. All these signs of earthly origin were in Christ too, and these are what concealed him as the Son of God, being otherwise reckoned only a man, as one standing forth in the human substance of a body. Or else produce something heavenly in him, begged and borrowed from the Northern stars and the Pleiades and the Hyades. For the things we have enumerated are so far testimonies of earthly flesh that they are testimonies of ours too. But I find nothing new, nothing foreign. In short, by words and deeds only, by teaching and by power alone, men stood amazed at Christ as a man. But any novelty of the flesh in him would also have been counted a marvel. Yet it was not the condition of the earthly flesh that was itself wondrous which made the rest of him wondrous, when they said, "Whence to this man this teaching and these signs?" Even of those who despised his form this was the cry. So far was his body not even of human comeliness, much less of heavenly splendour. And while the prophets among us too keep silence about his ignoble appearance, the very sufferings and the very insults speak. The sufferings, indeed, proved the flesh human; the insults, that it was without comeliness. Or would anyone have dared to graze that body with the tip of a nail, to defile that face with spittings, had it not deserved it? Why do you speak of heavenly flesh, when you have nothing from which to understand it heavenly? Why do you deny earthly flesh, when you have that from which to recognize it earthly? He hungered under the devil, he thirsted under the Samaritan woman, he wept over Lazarus, he trembled at death ("For the flesh," he says, "is weak"), at last he poured out blood. These, I suppose, are heavenly signs. But how, I say, could he be despised and suffer, as I have also said, if anything in that flesh had shone forth of heavenly nobility? From this, then, we prove that there was nothing in it from heaven, in order that it might be despised and suffer.

I turn to others, equally wise in their own conceit, who affirm that Christ's flesh was of the nature of soul, since soul was made flesh, and so flesh too was soul, and as the flesh was of soul, so the soul too was of flesh. And here likewise I look for the reasons. If, in order to save the soul, Christ took soul upon himself in himself — because it would not be saved except through himself, while in himself — I do not see why he made it flesh by putting on flesh, as though he could not otherwise save the soul unless it were made flesh. For since he renders our souls saved, not only not fleshly, but even separated from the flesh, how much more could he have brought into salvation that soul which he himself took up, even if it were not fleshly? Again, since they presume that Christ came forth for the freeing not of our flesh, but of our soul alone, first, how absurd it is that, being about to free the soul alone, he made it of that kind of body which he was not going to free! Then, if he had undertaken to free our souls through that soul which he bore, he ought also to have borne that one, which he bore, as ours — that is, of our form, of whatever form our soul is in its hidden state, yet not of a fleshly form. For the rest, he did not free our soul, if he had a fleshly one; for ours is not fleshly. Further, if he did not free ours, because he freed a fleshly one, it is nothing to us, because he did not free ours. But neither was that to be freed which was not ours — that is, the fleshly. For it was in no peril, if it was not ours — that is, not fleshly. But it is established that it was freed. Therefore it was not fleshly, and was ours, if it was that which was to be freed, since it was in peril. Now, then, if soul was not fleshly in Christ, neither could the flesh have been of the nature of soul.

But we meet them with another argument of theirs, demanding why, by undergoing flesh of the nature of soul, Christ should be seen to have had a soul of the nature of flesh. "For God," they say, "longed to display the soul, visible to men, by making it a body — the soul which before had stood forth invisible, by nature seeing nothing, not even itself, by reason of the hindrance of this flesh of ours — so that it might even be disputed whether the soul is born or not. And so the soul was made a body in Christ, that we might see it both being born and dying, and, what is more, rising again." But what sort of thing again was this, that the soul should be displayed, to itself or to us, through the flesh — the soul which could not be recognized through the flesh — so as to be shown in this way, while that comes to be in which it lay hid, that is, the flesh? Darkness, forsooth, it received, that it might be able to shine! In short, let us first review this — whether the soul was to be shown in this way; then, whether they allege it was formerly invisible altogether — whether as if incorporeal, or as having also some kind of body of its own. And yet, even when they call it invisible, they constitute it corporeal, as having something that is invisible. For how can a thing having nothing invisible be called invisible? But neither can it even be, unless it has that through which it is. And since it is, it must needs have something through which it is. If it has something through which it is, this will be its body. Everything that is, is a body of its own kind. Nothing is incorporeal except that which is not. The soul, then, having an invisible body, he who had undertaken to make it visible would surely more worthily have made visible that of it which was held to be invisible, since neither here does falsehood nor weakness befit God — falsehood, if he showed the soul to be other than it was; weakness, if he was unable to show that which it was. No one wishing to show a man puts a helmet or a mask on him. But this was done to the soul, if, changed into flesh, it put on an alien surface. But even if the soul be reckoned incorporeal, so that by some hidden force of reasoning the soul is indeed hidden, yet is not a body, whatever soul is — even so, it was not impossible to God, and it was more agreeable to his purpose, to display it by some new kind of body than by that common kind belonging to all, already of another acquaintance — lest without cause he should have longed to make the soul visible out of the invisible, opportune, forsooth, for these very questions, through the defence in it of human flesh. "But Christ could not be seen among men except as a man." Render then to Christ his own faith, that he who willed to walk as a man should also have shown a soul of human condition, not making it fleshly, but clothing it with flesh.

Let the soul now be shown through the flesh, if it shall have been established that it had to be shown in any way at all — that is, that it was unknown to itself and to us. Although in this there is an empty distinction, as though we were something apart from the soul, when the whole of what we are is soul. In short, without the soul we are nothing, not even the name of a man, but of a corpse. If, then, we are ignorant of the soul, the soul itself is ignorant of itself. So it remains only to look into this — whether the soul was here ignorant of itself, that it might be made known in some way. The nature of the soul, I think, is sensible. So much so, that nothing of the nature of soul is without sense, nothing sensible without soul. And, to put it more pointedly, sense is the soul of the soul. Therefore, since the soul affords sense to all, and itself perceives even the senses, not to say the qualities, of all things, who can think it likely that it alone was not allotted the perception of itself from the beginning? Whence does it know what is at times necessary to it, out of the necessity of its natural needs, if it does not know its own quality, to which something is necessary? This indeed is to be recognized in every soul — I mean the knowledge of itself, without which knowledge of itself no soul could have administered itself. But I think rather that man, the only rational animal, fittingly was allotted to be a soul which makes him a rational animal, itself in the first place being rational. Further, how is that rational which makes man a rational animal, if it does not know its own reason, being ignorant of itself? But it is so far from being ignorant that it knows its author and judge and condition. With no instruction yet about God, it names God. With no admission yet about his judgment, it says it commends itself to God. Hearing nothing more than that there is no hope after death, it invokes blessing or cursing upon each man, well or ill deceased. These things the little book which we wrote, On the Testimony of the Soul, pursues more fully. Otherwise, if the soul had been ignorant of itself from the beginning, it ought to have learned nothing from Christ except what it was. But now it has not learned its own form from Christ, but its salvation. For this reason the Son of God came down and took up soul — not that the soul might recognize itself in Christ, but that it might recognize Christ in itself. For it is not by being ignorant of itself that it is in peril concerning salvation, but by being ignorant of the Word of God. "Life," he says, "was manifested" — not the soul. And, "I came," he says, "to save the soul" — he did not say, "to show it." We were ignorant, no doubt, that the soul, though invisible, is born and dies, unless it were displayed bodily. We were plainly ignorant that it would rise again with the flesh. This will be what Christ manifested. But even this no otherwise in himself than in some Lazarus, whose flesh was not of the nature of soul, nor so his soul of the nature of flesh. What more, then, has become known to us about the formerly unknown disposition of the soul? What was there of it invisible that desired visibility through the flesh?

The soul was made flesh, that the soul might be shown. Was, then, the flesh too made soul, that the flesh might be manifested? If flesh is soul, it is now no longer soul, but flesh. If soul is flesh, it is now no longer flesh, but soul. Where, then, there is flesh and where there is soul, the one has become the other. Nay, if they are neither, while each becomes the other, it would surely be most perverse that, naming flesh, we should understand soul, and that, signifying soul, we should interpret flesh. Everything will run the risk of being taken otherwise than it is, and of losing what it is, while it is taken otherwise, if it is named otherwise than it is. Fidelity of names is the safeguard of properties. Even when qualities are altered, they take possession of their own vocabularies. For instance, baked clay receives the name of "potsherd." Nor does it share the name of its former kind, because it does not share that kind itself. So too the soul of Christ, made flesh, cannot but be that which it was made, and not be that which it had been, having become, that is, something else. And since we have applied a near example, let us use it more fully. For certainly a potsherd, made from clay, is one body and one vocabulary — of one body, that is. Nor can it be called both potsherd and clay; because what it was, is not, and what is not, does not adhere to it. And the soul does not adhere. Therefore the soul too, made flesh, is a uniform solidity and a singularity wholly, and an undivided substance. But in Christ we find the soul and the flesh set forth by simple and bare vocabularies — that is, the soul "soul" and the flesh "flesh," nowhere the soul "flesh" or the flesh "soul" — though they ought to have been so named, if they had been so — but each substance even pronounced by him distinctly, severally, surely on account of the distinction of the two qualities: apart the soul and apart the flesh. "Why is my soul troubled," he says, "even unto death?" And, "The bread which I shall give for the salvation of the world is my flesh." Further, if the soul had been flesh, there would have been one thing in Christ, a fleshly soul or a flesh of the nature of soul. But when he divides the kinds, flesh and soul, he shows two. If two, then no longer one; if not one, then neither a fleshly soul nor a flesh of the nature of soul. For there is one thing where soul is flesh, or flesh soul. Unless he was bearing separately another soul besides that which was flesh, and was carrying about another flesh besides that which was soul. But if there is one flesh and one soul — that one "troubled even unto death" and that other "the bread for the salvation of the world" — the number of two substances, differing in their own kind, is safe, and excludes the single category of a fleshly soul.

"But Christ bore an angel," they say. On what reckoning? On the same as that on which he bore a man. The cause, then, is the same for which Christ bore a man. The salvation of man was the cause — namely, to restore what had perished. Man had perished, man had to be restored. That Christ should bear an angel, there is no such cause. For even if to angels too perdition is reckoned, in the fire prepared for the devil and his angels, yet to them restoration was never promised. Christ received from the Father no charge concerning the salvation of angels. What the Father neither promised nor charged, Christ could not administer. For what purpose, then, did he bear an angel too, unless as a strong attendant, with whom he might work the salvation of man? For the Son of God was not, forsooth, fit to free man by himself, man cast down by a single and solitary serpent! Then there is now no longer one God, nor one saviour, if there are two artificers of salvation, and that the one needing the other. Or was it, indeed, that he might free man through an angel? Why, then, did he come down to that which he was going to accomplish through an angel? If through an angel, why he himself? if through himself, why the angel too? He is called, indeed, "the angel of great counsel" — that is, messenger — by a term of office, not of nature. For he was about to announce to the age the Father's great thought concerning the restoration of man. Yet he is not therefore to be understood as an angel in the sense of a Gabriel or a Michael. For the son too is sent by the lord of the vineyard to the husbandmen, like the servants, to seek of the fruits. But not therefore is the son to be reckoned one of the servants, because he succeeded to the office of the servants. I would more easily say, then, if anything, that the Son himself is an angel — that is, a messenger of the Father — than that an angel is in the Son. But since it has been declared of the Son himself, "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels," how will he be seen to have put on an angel, being thus lessened below the angels in becoming man — in respect of which he is flesh and soul and Son of man? But in respect of which he is the Spirit of God and the power of the Most High, can he be held below the angels — being, that is, God and the Son of God? By how much, then, in bearing man he was made lower than the angels, by so much was he not so in bearing an angel. This opinion may suit Ebion, who makes Jesus a mere man, and only of the seed of David — that is, not also the Son of God — though plainly more glorious than the prophets; so that he should declare an angel to have been in him in the way it was in Zechariah. Except that by Christ it was never said, "And the angel spoke to me, who spoke within me." Nor that daily saying of all the prophets, "Thus saith the Lord." For he himself was the Lord, pronouncing openly out of his own authority, "But I say unto you." What more to all this? Hear Isaiah crying out: "No angel, nor envoy, but the Lord himself saved them."

It was permitted to Valentinus too, by heretical privilege, to invent for Christ a spiritual flesh. Anything he could feign it, whoever was unwilling to believe it human — since, as has been said to all, if it was not human and from a human being, I do not see from what substance Christ pronounced himself man and Son of man: "But now you seek to kill a man who has spoken the truth to you," and, "The Son of man is lord of the Sabbath." For of him Isaiah says, "A man under stripes, and knowing how to bear weakness." And Jeremiah: "And he is a man, and who has known him?" And Daniel: "And upon the clouds as it were a Son of man." Paul the apostle too: "The mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus." Likewise Peter in the Acts of the Apostles: "Jesus of Nazareth, a man marked out for you by God" — surely a man. These alone ought to have sufficed, in the place of a prescription, for the testimony of human flesh, taken from a human being and not spiritual — as neither of the nature of soul, nor starry, nor imaginary — if the heresies could have existed without zeal and craft of contention. For, as I have read in a certain member of Valentinus's little faction, they first think that an earthly and human substance was not formed for Christ, lest the Lord be found inferior to the angels, who were not of earthly flesh; next, that it would have been necessary that flesh like ours be likewise born — not of spirit, nor of God, but of the will of man. And why not of corruption, but of incorruption? And why is it that, as that flesh of his rose again and was taken up into heaven, so ours, its equal, is not at once assumed? Or why was that, the equal of ours, not equally dissolved into the earth? Such things even the heathen used to debate. "Was the Son of God, then, so far emptied into humility?" And, "If he rose again as a pattern of our hope, why has nothing of the kind been proved concerning us?" With reason do the heathen say such things; but with reason the heretics too. For is there any difference between them, except that the heathen, by not believing, believe, while the heretics, by believing, do not believe? In short, they read, "Thou hast lessened him a little below the angels," and deny the inferior substance of Christ, who pronounces himself not a man, but a worm — who had neither form nor comeliness, but his form was ignoble, despised below all men, "a man under stripes, and knowing how to bear weakness." They acknowledge a man mingled with God, and deny the man. They believe him dead, and yet contend that what is dead was born of incorruption — as though corruption were something other than death. "But our flesh too ought at once to rise again." Wait. Christ has not yet crushed his enemies, that he may triumph over the friends out of the enemies.

Moreover, out of his lust for arguing, after the fashion of the heretical wit, that famous Alexander made himself an opening, as though we affirmed that Christ for this reason put on flesh of an earthly reckoning, that he might void in himself the flesh of sin. Even if we did say so, on whatever reasoning we might fortify our opinion, yet not with such madness as he supposed — as though we suppose Christ's very flesh to be voided in him as sinful — since we both remember that it presides at the right hand of the Father in the heavens, and proclaim that it will come thence from the seat of the Father's glory; so that we cannot call it voided, as neither sinful nor voided in which there was no guile. But what we maintain is that not the flesh of sin was voided in Christ, but the sin of the flesh — not the matter, but the nature; not the substance, but the fault — according to the authority of the apostle, who says, "He voided sin in the flesh." For elsewhere too he says that Christ was "in the likeness of the flesh of sin" — not that he received a likeness of flesh, as an image of a body and not the reality, but a likeness of sinful flesh is to be understood; because the flesh of Christ, itself not sinful, was the counterpart of that whose was the sin — by kind, not by the fault of Adam. From which we also confirm that there was in Christ that flesh whose nature in man is sinful, and that so sin was voided in it, since in Christ that was held without sin which in man was not held without sin. For it would neither serve Christ's purpose, in voiding the sin of the flesh, not to void it in that flesh in which was the nature of sin; nor would it serve his glory. For what great thing, if in a flesh better and of another — that is, of a non-sinful nature — he redeemed the blemish of sin? "Therefore," you say, "if he put on ours, the flesh of Christ was sinful." Do not constrain a sense that can be explained. For, putting on ours, he made it his own; making it his own, he made it non-sinful. For the rest, as for what was said to all who therefore think our flesh was not in Christ because it was not of the seed of man — let them remember that Adam himself was made into this flesh not from the seed of man. As earth was turned into this flesh without the seed of man, so too the Word of God could pass into the matter of that same flesh without curdling.

But Alexander being dismissed, with his syllogisms which he twists in his arguments, and also Valentinus's psalms, which he interposes with great impudence as if of some fitting author — let us direct our contest now to one single line: whether Christ took flesh from a virgin, so that in this way above all it may be established that it was human, if he drew his substance from a human womb. Although it has already become clear, both from the name of "man," and from the state of the quality, and from the meaning of the discussion, and from the issue of the suffering, that it was established as human. But before all, the reasoning must be commended which presided over the Son of God's being born of a virgin. He had to be born in a new way, the dedicator of a new birth, of which the Lord, by Isaiah, was foretold as about to give a sign. What is that sign? "Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bear a son." Therefore a virgin conceived and bore Emmanuel, "God with us." This is the new birth, when man is born in God. In which man God was born, having taken flesh of ancient seed without ancient seed, that he might refashion it with new seed — that is, spiritually — purged with the filth of antiquity cast out. But this whole novelty, as in all things, was prefigured of old, by a reasonable arrangement, man the Lord being born through a virgin. A virgin was "the earth as yet not pressed by labour, not yet subdued by sowing"; out of it we are taught that man was made by God into a living soul. If, then, the first Adam is so handed down, with reason the second, or the last Adam, as the apostle said, was likewise brought forth from the earth — that is, from flesh not yet unsealed for generation — into a quickening spirit by God. And yet let me not let pass the incidental matter of the name of Adam, whence Christ was called Adam by the apostle, if his man was not of an earthly reckoning. But here too reasoning defends it: that God recovered his own image and likeness, captured by the devil, by a rival operation. For into a virgin, while still Eve, had crept the word that builds death. Into a virgin likewise was to be introduced the Word of God that constructs life, that what by such a sex had gone into perdition, by the same sex should be brought back into salvation. Eve had believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel. The fault which the one committed by believing, the other by believing blotted out. "But Eve conceived nothing in the womb from the devil's word." Nay, she did conceive. For thenceforth, that she should bring forth as an outcast, and bring forth in sorrows, the devil's word was seed to her. In short, she brought forth a fratricide of a devil. Mary, on the contrary, brought forth one who would in time render salvation even to Israel, his fleshly brother and slayer. So into the womb God brought down his Word, the good Brother, to erase the memory of the evil brother. Thence Christ had to come forth for the salvation of man, by the way by which man, already condemned, had entered.

Now, to answer more simply: it did not befit the Son of God to be born of human seed — lest, if he were wholly the Son of man, he should not also be the Son of God, and should have nothing more than Solomon, and more than Jonah, or be such as Ebion's opinion held. Therefore, being now the Son of God by the seed of God the Father — that is, by the Spirit — that he might be also the Son of that man, flesh alone befitted him, to be taken from the flesh of man without the seed of man. For the seed of man was needless in one who had the seed of God. And so, as while not yet born of the virgin he could have God for father without a man for mother, equally when he was born of the virgin he could have a man for mother without a man for father. Thus, in short, man with God, while the flesh of man is with the Spirit of God: flesh without seed from a human being, Spirit with seed from God. Therefore, if there was a reasoned arrangement that the Son of God should be brought forth from a virgin, why should he not have taken a body from the virgin, which he brought forth from the virgin? "Because," they say, "what he took from God is something other, since the Word was made flesh." This utterance attests what was made flesh, yet it is not in peril, as though something else were straightway made flesh, and not the Word. If the Word was made flesh out of flesh, or if it was made out of the very seed, let Scripture say so. Since Scripture does not say save that it was made, and not also out of what it was made, it suggests, therefore, that it was made out of something else, not out of itself. If not out of itself, but out of something else, draw your conclusion from this — out of what it is more fitting to believe that the Word was made flesh, if not out of flesh, in which it was also made; or because the Lord himself, sententiously and definitively, pronounced, "That which is born in the flesh is flesh, because it is born of flesh." But if he said it only of man, and not also of himself, then plainly deny that Christ is man, and so defend that it did not apply to him too. And yet he adds, "And that which is born of the Spirit is spirit, because God is spirit, and he was born of God." This surely tends all the more toward himself, if it tends also toward those who believe in him. If, then, this too applies to himself, why not that other also above? For you cannot divide it, that this applies to himself, that other above to the rest of men, since you do not deny each substance of Christ, both flesh and spirit. For the rest, if he had flesh as much as spirit, when he pronounces concerning the condition of the two substances which he himself also bears, he cannot be seen to have determined concerning his own spirit, but concerning a flesh not his own. So, since he himself is of the Spirit of God, and the Spirit is God, he was himself born of God; and of the flesh of man, he was born a man in the flesh.

What, then, is the meaning of "Born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God"? This chapter, indeed, I shall rather use, when I have brought forward its adulterators. For thus they contend that it was written: "Who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of man, but of God" — as though designating the aforesaid believers in his name, to show that there is that hidden seed of the elect and the spiritual, which they imbue into themselves. But how can it be so, when all who believe in the name of the Lord are, by the common law of the human race, born of blood and of the will of the flesh and of man — Valentinus himself too? It is written so singularly, as of the Lord: "And he was born of God." With reason, because he is the Word of God, and with the Word of God the Spirit, and in the Spirit of God the power, and whatever is of God is Christ. But as for the flesh — it is "not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh and of man," because by the will of God the Word was made flesh. For to the flesh, not to the Word, belongs the formal denial of our birth, since the flesh, not the Word, had to be born so. But why, denying that he was born also of the will of the flesh, did he not also deny that he was of the substance of the flesh? For neither, because he denied "of blood," did he refuse the substance of the flesh, but the matter of seed, which is agreed to be the heat of the blood, which, changed by a kind of frothing, is curdled into the blood of the woman. For in the curd in cheese there is the force of the substance which, by medicating, constringes it — that is, of the milk. We understand, then, that the Lord's birth from intercourse was denied — which is what the will of man and of the flesh savours of — not from the womb's participation. And why, indeed, did he so emphatically insist that he was born "not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh or of man," unless because such was the flesh that no one would doubt it born of intercourse? But, in denying that he was born of intercourse, he did not deny that he was born of flesh; nay, he confirmed that he was of flesh, since he did not deny "of flesh" in the same way that he denied "of intercourse." I ask you, if the Spirit of God came down into the womb not to take flesh from the womb, why did he come down into the womb? For he could have become spiritual flesh outside it — far more simply outside the womb than within it. Without cause did he bring himself into that whence he carried nothing out. But not without cause did he come down into the womb. Therefore he received from it; because if he did not receive from it, without cause did he come down into it — especially as he was going to be flesh of that quality which was not of the womb, that is, spiritual.

But what manner of tortuousness is yours, that you should seek to take away the very syllable "of," ascribed by the office of a preposition, and to use rather another which, in this case, is not found in the holy Scriptures! You say that he was born "through" a virgin, not "of" a virgin, and "in" the womb, not "of" the womb — because the angel too in a dream said to Joseph, "For that which is born in her is of the Holy Spirit," and did not say "of her." But, of course, even if he had said "of her," he had said "in her"; for that which was of her was in her. So, just as much, when he says "in her" it agrees with "of her," because that which was in her was of her. But well it is that the same Matthew, running the Lord's origin down from Abraham to Mary, says, "Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom is born Christ." But Paul too imposes silence on these grammarians. "God sent," he says, "his Son, made of a woman." Did he say "through a woman," or "in a woman"? This indeed more emphatically, that he says "made" rather than "born"; for he would more simply have stated "born." But by saying "made," he both confirmed "The Word was made flesh," and asserted the truth of the flesh made of the virgin. For us too the psalms shall be patrons to this effect — not, indeed, those of the apostate and heretic and Platonist Valentinus, but of the most holy and most received prophet David. He, among us, sings of Christ, through whom Christ himself sang of himself. Receive Christ, and hear the Lord speaking with God the Father: "For thou art he who didst pluck me from my mother's womb." Behold one. "And my hope from my mother's breasts; upon thee was I cast forth from the womb." Behold another. "And from my mother's womb thou art my God." Behold another. Now let us contend about the very senses. "Thou didst pluck me," he says, "from the womb." What is plucked away, save that which clings, which is fixed and bound to that from which, that it may be taken away, it is plucked? If it did not cling to the womb, how was it plucked away? if it clung, since it was plucked away, how could it have clung, save while, being of the womb, it was bound by that umbilical cord, as it were the runner of its little pouch, to the origin of the womb? Even when something foreign is glued to something foreign, it is so enfleshed and entwined in the flesh with that to which it is glued that, when it is plucked away, it carries off with it something from the body from which it is plucked, as a kind of consequence of the broken union and of the runner of mutual joining. For the rest, whose breasts of his mother does he name? Without doubt those which he drew. Let the midwives, the physicians and the natural philosophers, answer concerning the nature of the breasts, whether they are wont to flow otherwise, without the womb's reproductive working, while the veins, hanging from thence, draw down that sediment of nether blood into the nipple, and by that very transference distil it into the more cheerful matter of milk. Hence indeed it comes about that in the time of suckling the monthly courses of blood are at rest. But if the Word made itself flesh out of itself, not by the womb's communication — the womb working nothing, performing nothing, suffering nothing — how did it pour its own fountain into the breasts, which do not change save by having? And it could not have blood to be furnished to the milk, if it did not have the causes of the blood itself — that is, the plucking-away of its own flesh. What there was of novelty in Christ's being born of a virgin is plain — namely, this only, that he was of a virgin, according to the reasoning we have set forth, in that the virgin was our regeneration, spiritually sanctified from all defilements through Christ, himself a virgin too, even carnally, as being of a virgin's flesh.

If, then, they contend that this belonged to the novelty — that, as it was not of the seed of man, so neither was the Word of God made flesh of the flesh of the virgin — why should not this be the whole novelty, that flesh not born of seed came forth as flesh? Let me come yet nearer to the close encounter. "Behold," he says, "a virgin shall conceive in the womb." What, pray? Surely the Word of God, not the seed of man — certainly that she might bear a son. For "she shall bear," it says, "a son." Therefore, as it was hers to have conceived, so it is hers what she bore, although it was not hers what she conceived. On the contrary, if the Word was made flesh out of itself, then it both conceived and bore itself, and the prophecy is void. For the virgin neither conceived nor bore, if whatever she bore from the conceived Word is the flesh of the Word itself. But shall this voice of the prophet alone be made void? or also the angel's announcing the virgin's conception and delivery? or also now all Scripture, whatsoever pronounces a mother of Christ? For how a mother, save because she was in her womb? But she received nothing from her womb, which made her a mother in whose womb he was. Such a name flesh that is foreign does not owe. The womb of a mother no flesh names save the daughter of the womb. But the daughter of the womb she is not, if she was born to herself. Elizabeth too, then, will keep silence, bearing the prophet — the infant already conscious of his Lord — and moreover filled with the Holy Spirit. For without cause does she say, "And whence is it to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" If Mary bore in her womb not a son but a guest, Jesus, how does she say, "Blessed is the fruit of thy womb"? What fruit of the womb is this, which did not germinate from the womb, which did not strike root in the womb, which is not of her whose the womb is — and which is surely the fruit of the womb, Christ? Or is it because he himself is the flower sprung from the rod out of the root of Jesse, while the root of Jesse is the race of David, the rod from the root Mary out of David, the flower from the rod the son of Mary, who is called Jesus Christ — that he himself shall be also the fruit? For the flower is the fruit, because through the flower and out of the flower all fruit is led forth into fruit. What then? Do they deny to the fruit its flower, and to the flower its rod, and to the rod its root, so that the root may not claim for itself, through the rod, the property of that which is from the rod — the flower and the fruit? — since every degree of the race is reckoned from the last to the principal, so that now they may know that the flesh of Christ adheres not only to Mary, but also to David through Mary, and to Jesse through David. For this reason God swears to him that this fruit, of David's loins — that is, of the posterity of his flesh — shall sit upon his throne. If of David's loins, how much more of Mary's loins, on whose account he is in David's loins?

Let them, then, blot out also the demons' testimonies that proclaim Jesus the Son of David; but the apostles' testimonies they will not be able to blot out, if the demons' are unworthy. Matthew himself first of all, the most faithful narrator of the gospel, as the Lord's companion, for no other cause than to make us sharers in the knowledge of Christ's fleshly origin, thus began: "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham." From these fountains of origin, the race flowing on while the order is led down step by step to Christ's birth, what else but the very flesh of Abraham and of David, making through each one a runner of itself even into the virgin, is described, bringing in Christ — nay, is Christ himself produced from the virgin? But Paul too, being both disciple and master and witness of the same gospel, in that he is the apostle of that same Christ, confirms that Christ is "of the seed of David according to the flesh" — surely his own flesh. Therefore of the seed of David is the flesh of Christ. If, according to Mary's flesh, it is of the seed of David, then it is of Mary's flesh, while it is of the seed of David. Whithersoever you twist the saying, either it is of Mary's flesh that which is of the seed of David, or it is of David's seed that which is of Mary's flesh. The whole of this controversy the same apostle settles, defining him to be the very seed of Abraham. With Abraham — surely much more with David, as the more recent. For, recounting the promise of the blessing of the nations in Abraham's name — "And in thy seed shall all nations be blessed" — "He said not," says he, "to seeds, as of many, but to seed, of one, which is Christ." We who read and believe these things — what quality of flesh ought we, and are we able, to acknowledge in Christ? Surely none other than Abraham's, since Christ is the seed of Abraham; nor any other than Jesse's, since out of the root of Jesse is the flower Christ; nor any other than David's, since out of the loins of David is the fruit Christ; nor any other than Mary's, since out of Mary's womb is Christ; and, still higher, none other than Adam's, since the second Adam is Christ. It follows, therefore, that either they must contend that those men had spiritual flesh, so that the same condition of substance may be drawn down into Christ; or they must concede that Christ's flesh was not spiritual, since it is not reckoned of a spiritual stock.

But we acknowledge the fulfilment of the prophetic voice of Simeon, pronounced over the Lord while still a recent infant: "Behold, this one is set for the fall and the rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted." For the sign of Christ's birth, according to Isaiah, is: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bear a son." We acknowledge, then, the contradictable sign — the conception and delivery of the virgin Mary, of which those Academics say, "She bore and bore not, a virgin and no virgin" — as though, even if it were to be so said, it would not better befit us to say it. For she bore, in that she bore of her own flesh; and she bore not, in that she bore not of the seed of man; and a virgin, in respect of a man; no virgin, in respect of the bringing forth — yet not so that she therefore bore not, nor therefore is a virgin who is no virgin, because she was not a mother out of her own inward parts. But with us there is nothing doubtful, nothing wrested into a double-sided defence. "Light" is light, and "darkness" darkness, and "Yea" yea, and "Nay" nay; what is more than this is from evil. She bore who bore; and though she conceived a virgin, in her bringing-forth she was wedded. For she was wedded by the very law of the opened body, in which it made no difference whether the force of the male admitted were also emitted: it was the same thing that unsealed the sex. This, finally, is the womb on account of which it is written also of others: "Every male opening the womb shall be called holy to the Lord." Who is truly holy but the Son of God? Who properly opened the womb but he who opened that which was closed? But to all the rest marriage opens it. Therefore hers was the more opened, because it was the more closed. Surely she is to be called no virgin rather than virgin, having become, by a kind of leap, a mother before she was a wife. And what more is to be reviewed of this? When, with this reasoning, the apostle pronounced the Son of God brought forth not of a virgin but of a woman, he acknowledged the nuptial passion of the opened womb. We read indeed in Ezekiel of that cow which bore and bore not. But see whether the Holy Spirit, foreseeing you even then, has not branded with this voice those who would dispute over the womb of Mary. Otherwise he would not, against that simplicity of his, have pronounced it doubtfully, when Isaiah says, "She shall conceive and bear."

For what Isaiah hurls in derision of the very heretics — and first of all, "Woe to those who make sweet bitter, and darkness light" — marks plainly those who do not even keep these vocabularies in the light of their own properties, so that the soul should be none other than what is called soul, and the flesh none other than what is seen, and God none other than who is proclaimed. Therefore too, foreseeing Marcion, he says, "I am God, and there is none other beside me." And when elsewhere he says the same thing in the same way, "Before me there was no god," he strikes at I know not what genealogies of the Valentinian Aeons. And, "Not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh and of man, but of God he was born," he answered Ebion. Likewise, "Even though an angel from heaven should preach the gospel to you otherwise than we, let him be accursed," he directs against the offspring of the Apellesian virgin Philumene's frenzy. Certainly, "Whoever denies that Christ has come in the flesh, this man is antichrist." Pronouncing the flesh bare and absolute, and by the simple name of its own nature, he smites all its disputers. Just as also, defining Christ himself as one, he shakes the arguers of a manifold Christ — those who make one Christ, another Jesus: one who slipped away out of the midst of the crowds, another who was held; one in the recess of the mountain, in the circle of the cloud, glorious before three witnesses, another exposed to suffering with the rest, ignoble; one magnanimous, another truly trembling; lastly, one who suffered, another who was raised again — through which they assert their own resurrection too in another flesh. But well it is that the same shall come from the heavens who suffered, the same shall appear to all who was raised again. And those who pierced him shall both see and acknowledge — surely the very flesh against which they raged, without which neither can he himself be, nor be acknowledged: so that those too may blush who affirm that flesh in the heavens, void of feeling, sits like a sheath, Christ being drawn out of it; or those who hold flesh and soul to be the same; or only soul, and not flesh.

But thus far concerning the present matter. For I think the proof of the flesh in Christ — both born of a virgin and human — is now sufficiently equipped. And the discussion of this alone could have sufficed, apart from the engagement with the several opinions from the opposite side, which, over and above, we have challenged both by their arguments and by the Scriptures which they use; so that, by what we have proved as to what, and whence, Christ's flesh was, and what it was not, we may have prejudged the case against them all. And that the resurrection of our flesh, to be defended in another book, may form the close, in keeping with the common preface, this book will furnish the foundation, now that it is plain of what kind that was which rose again in Christ.