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YOU then make use of the holy Scriptures against God, and try to bring
His own witnesses against Him. But how? Truly so as to become a false
accuser not only of God, but of the evidences themselves. Nor indeed is it
wonderful that, as you cannot do what you want, you only do what you can:
as you can not turn the sacred witnesses against God, you do what you can,
and pervert them. For you say: Then Paul tells a lie, when he says of
Christ: "Without mother, without genealogy." I ask you, of whom do you
think that Paul said this? Of the Son and Word of God, or of the Christ,
whom you separate from the Son of God, and blasphemously assert to be a
mere man? If of the Christ, whom you maintain to be a mere man, how could a
man be born without a mother and without a genealogy on the mother's side?
But if of the Word of God and Son of God--what can we make of it, when the
same Apostle, your own witness, as you impiously imagine, testifies in the
same place and by the same witness, that He whom you assert to be without
mother, was also without father; saying, "Without father, without mother,
without genealogy"? It follows then that if you use the Apostle's witness,
since you assert that the Son of God was "without mother," you must also be
guilty of the blasphemy that He was "without father." You see then in what
a downfall of impiety you have landed yourself, in your eagerness for your
perversity and wickedness, so that, while you say that the Son of God had
not a mother, you must also deny Him a Father--a thing which no one yet
since the world began, except perhaps a madman, ever did. And this, whether
with greater wickedness or folly, I hardly know; for what is more foolish
and silly than to give the name of Son and to try to keep back the name of
Father? But you say I don't keep it back, I don't deny it. And what madness
then drove you to quote that passage, where, while you say that He had no
mother, you must seem also to deny to Him a Father? For as in the same
passage He is said to be without mother and also without father, it follows
that if it can be understood that there He is without mother, in the same
way in which we understand that He is without mother, we must also believe
that He is without father. But that hasty craze for denying God did not see
this; and when it quoted mutilated, what was written entire, it failed to
see that the shameless and palpable lie could be refuted by laying open the
contents of the sacred volume. O foolish blasphemy, and madness! which,
while it failed to see what it ought to follow, had not the wit to see even
what could be read: as if, because it could get rid of its own
intelligence, it could get rid of the power of reading from everybody else,
or as if everybody would lose their eyes in their heads for reading,
because it had lost the eyes of the mind. Hear then, you heretic the
passage you have garbled: hear in full and completely, what you quoted
mutilated and hacked about. The Apostle wants to make clear to every one
the twofold birth of God--and in order to show how the Lord was born in the
Godhead and in flesh, he says, "Without father, without mother:" for the
one belongs to the birth of Divinity, the other to that of the flesh. For
as He was begotten in His Divine nature "without mother," so He is in the
body "without father:" and so though He is neither without father nor
without mother, we must believe in Him "without father and without mother."
For if you regard Him as He is begotten of the Father, He is without
mother: if, as born of His mother, He is without father. And so in each of
these births He has one: in both together He is without each: for the birth
of Divinity had no need of mother, and for the birth of His body, He was
Himself sufficient, without a father. Therefore says the Apostle "Without
mother, without genealogy."
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