CHAPTER 1
BOOK IV CHAPTER
Of the Mystical Dispensation of Our Lord and SaviourJesus, (144) the Christ of God.
As I have treated at sulticient length the topics connected with the Incarnatif)n of our Saviour in the preceding Book,
(l)) the third Book of the Prooj of the Gospel, it is now the place to approach more recondite doctrine, I mean the more mystical theology of His Person.
Now common to all men is the doctrine of Ciod, the First and the Eternal, Alone, Unbegotten and Supreme Cause of the Universe, Lord of lords, and King of kings.
But the doctrine of Christ is peculiar and common to the Hebrews and ourselves, and, though following their (c) own scriptures, they confess it equally with us, yet they fall far asunder from us, in not recognizing His Divinity, nor knowing the cause of His coming, nor grasping at what period of time it was predicted that He should come.
For while they look forward to His Coming even now, we preach that He has come once already, and believing the predictions and teaching of the inspired prophets, pray that we may behold His second Coming in divine glory.
The account of our Lord is of two kinds : the one may (d) he called the later, brought but recently before mankind, the other is older than all time and all eternity.
For since God, Who is alone good and the Source and Spring of everything good, had willed to make many partakers of His own treasures, He purposed to create the whole reasoning creation, (comprising) unembodied, intelligent and divine powers, angels and archangels, spirits immaterial and in all ways pure, and souls of men as well endued with undetermined liberty of Free-willed Choice 1 6-.
164'
THE PROOF OF THE GOSPEL
Bk. IV. between right and wrong, and to give them whatever bodily (145) organs they were to possess, suitable to the variety of their lives, with countries and places natural to them all.
(For to those who had rema'ned good He gave the best places, and to those who did not He gave fit abodes, places of discipline for their perverse inclinations.)
He, foreseeing the future in His foreknowledge, as God V must, and aware that as in a vast body all these things about to be would need a head, thought that He ought to subordinate them all to one Governor of the Whole Creation, ruler and king of the Universe, as also the holy oracles of the earliest Hebrew theologians and prophets (b) mystically teach.
From which it is to be learned, that there is one principle of the Universe, nay more, one even before the principle, and born before the first, and of earlier being than the Monad,' and greater than every Name, Who cannot be named, nor explained, nor sought out, the good, the cause of all, the Creator, the Beneficent, the Prescient, the Saving, Himself the One and Only God, Rom. xi. from Whom are all things, and for Whom are all things :
; Acts u j/jjj. ji^ i^iji^^j ^^.g jj^.g ^^^^ move, and have our being."
And the fact that He wills it, is the sole cause of all things that exist coming into being and continuing to be.
(c) For it comes of His will, and He wills it, because He happens to be good by nature.
For nothing else is essential by nature to a good person except to will what is good.
And what He wills. He can effect.
Uherefore, having both the will and the power, He has ordained for Himself, without let or hindrance, everything beautiful and useful both in the visible and invisible world, ^ making His own ^Vill and Power as it were a kind of material and substratum of the genesis and constitution of the Univcr.se, llcli. xi. 3. so that it is no longer reasonable to say that anything that exists must have come from the non-existent, for that (<1) which came from the non-existent would not be anything.
For how could that which is non-existent cause something else to exist ?
Everything that has ever existed or now exists derives its being from the One, tlie only existent I'.xod.
Ml. and pre-existent Being, Who also said :
" 1 am the existent,"'
'^" because, you will see, as the Only Being, and the lucrnal '
Sec note, p.
173.
* Gaisfoid notes the echo of Plato, /"m. 29 E., in this passage.
Ch.
THE nfAGE OF THE FATHER
Being, He is Himself the cause of existence to all those to whom He has imparted existence from Himself by His Will and His Power, and gives existence to all things, and their powers and forms, richly and ungrudgingly from Himself. , CHAPTER
That ive hold Ihat the Son of God was before the Whole Creattoil.
And then He makes first of all existences next to Himself (146) His child,^ the first-born Wisdom, altogether formed of Mind and Reason and Wisdom, or rather Mind itself, Reason itself, and Wisdom itself, and if it be right to conceive anything else among things that have come into being (b) that is Beauty itself, and Good itself, taking it from Himself, He lays it Himself as the first foundation of what is to come into being afterwards.
He is the perfect creation of a perfect Oeator, the wise edifice of a wise Builder, the good Child of a good Father, and a.ssuredly to them that afterwards should receive existence through Him, friend and guardian, saviour and physician, and helmsman holding the rudder-lines of the creation of the universe.
In agreement with which the oracles in theological phrase call Him, "God-begotten," - as alone bearing (c) in Himself the image of the Godhead, that cannot be explained in word, or conceived in thought, through which image (they say thai) He is God, and that He is called so, because of this jjrimary likeness, and also for this reason, too, that He was appointed by the Father His good
Minister, in carder that as if by one all-wise and living instrument, and rule of art and kncnvledge, the universe might be guided by Him, bodies and things without body, things living and things lifeless, the reasoning with the irrational, mortal with immortal, and whatever else coexists and is woven in with them, and as if by one force running (d) through the whole, all things might be harmonized together.