Four Discourses Against the Arians

⁶⁷ Therefore call not the Son a work of good pleasure; nor bring in the doctrine of Valentinus into the Church; but be He the Living Counsel, and Offspring in truth and nature, as the Radiance from the Light. For thus has the Father spoken, 'My heart uttered a good Word.' and the Son conformably, 'I in the Father and the Father in Me. ' But if the Word be in the heart, where is will? And if the Son in the Father, where is good pleasure? And if He be Will Himself, how is counsel in Will?

It is unseemly; lest the Word come into being in a word, and the Son in a son, and Wisdom in a wisdom, as has been repeatedly said. For the Son is the Father's All; and nothing was in the Father before the Word; but in the Word is will also, and through Him the objects of will are carried into effect, as holy Scriptures have shown. And I could wish that the irreligious men, having fallen into such want of reason as to be considering about will, would now ask their childbearing women no more, whom they used to ask, 'Had you a son before conceiving him?' but the father, 'Do ye become fathers by counsel, or by the natural law of your will.' or 'Are your children like your nature and essence?' that, even from fathers they may learn shame, from whom they assumed this proposition about birth, and from whom they hoped to gain knowledge in point.

For they will reply to them, 'What we beget, is like, not our good pleasure, but like ourselves; nor become we parents by previous counsel, but to beget is proper to our nature; since we too are images of our fathers.' Either then let them condemn themselves, and cease asking women about the Son of God, or let them learn from them, that the Son is begotten not by will, but in nature and truth. Becoming and suitable to them is a refutation from human instances, since the perverse-minded men dispute in a human way concerning the Godhead.

Why then are Christ's enemies still mad? For this, as well as their other pretences, is shown and proved to be mere fantasy and fable; and on this account, they ought, however late, contemplating the precipice of folly down which they have fallen, to rise again from the depth and to flee the snare of the devil, as we admonish them. For Truth is loving unto men and cries continually, 'If because of My clothing of the body ye believe Me not, yet believe the works, that you may know that “I am in the Father and the Father in Me,” and “I and the Father are one,” and “He that has seen Me has seen the Father.”'

But the Lord according to His wont is loving to man, and would fain 'help them that are fallen,' as the praise of David says; but the irreligious men, not desirous to hear the Lord's voice, nor bearing to see Him acknowledged by all as God and God's Son, go about, miserable men, as beetles, seeking with their father the devil pretexts for irreligion. What pretexts then, and whence will they be able next to find? Unless they borrow blasphemies of Jews and Caiaphas, and take atheism from Gentiles? For the divine Scriptures are closed to them, and from every part of them they are refuted as insensate and Christ's enemies.