On the Incarnation of the Lord (Against Nestorius)

That before His birth in time Christ was always called God by the prophets.

He it is then of whom the Prophet says: “For in You is God, and there is no God beside You. For You are our God and we knew You not, O God of Israel the Saviour.” Who “afterwards appeared on earth and conversed with men.” Of whom and in whose Person the Prophet David also speaks: “From my mother's womb You are my God:” showing clearly that He who was Lord and man was never separate from God: in whom even in the Virgin's womb the fullness of the Godhead dwelt. As elsewhere the same Prophet says: “Truth has sprung from the earth and righteousness has looked down from heaven,” that we may know that when the Son of God looked down from heaven (i.e., came and descended), righteousness was born of the flesh of the Virgin, no phantasm of a body, but the Truth: for He is the Truth, according to His own witness of Truth: “I am the Truth and the life.” And so as we have proved in the earlier books that this Truth; viz., the Lord Jesus Christ, was God when born of the Virgin, let us now do as we determined to do in the book before this, and show that He who was to be born of the Virgin, was always declared to be God beforehand. And so the prophet Isaiah says, “Cease from the man whose breath is in his nostrils, for it is He in whom he is reputed to be;” or as it is more exactly and clearly in the Hebrew: “for he is reputed high.” But by saying “cease,” a term which deprecates violence, he admirably denotes the disturbance of persecution. “Cease,” he says, “from the man whose breath is in his nostrils, for he is reputed high.” Does he not in one and the same sentence speak of the taking upon Him of the manhood, and the truth of His Godhead? “Cease,” he says, “from the man whose breath is in his nostrils, for he is reputed high.” Does he not, I ask you, seem plainly to address the Lord's persecutors, and to say, “Cease from the man” whom you are persecuting, for this man is God: and though He appears in the lowliness of human flesh, yet He still continues in the high estate of Divine glory? But by saying “Cease from the man whose breath is in his nostrils,” he admirably showed His manhood, by the clearest tokens of a human body, and this fearlessly and confidently, as one who would as urgently assert the truth of His humanity as that of His Godhead, for this is the true and Catholic faith, to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ possessed the substance of a true body just as He possessed a true and perfect Divinity. Unless possibly you think that anything can be made out of the fact that he uses the word “High” instead of “God”; whereas it is the habit of holy Scripture to put “High” for “God,” as where the prophet says: “the Most High uttered His voice and the earth was moved,” and “You alone are Most High over all the earth.” Isaiah too, who says this: “The High and lofty one who inhabites eternity”: where we are clearly to understand that as he there puts Most High without adding the name of God, so here too he speaks of God by the name of Most High. So then, since the Divine word spoken by the prophet clearly announced beforehand that the Lord Jesus Christ would be both God and man, let us now see whether the New Testament corresponds to and harmonizes with the testimony of the Old.