I have ventured to say that the view of our Lord as not only God, but definitely and directly as in the Divine Unity the Son of God, is a point of theology of great moment in the doctrine of His incarnation. I will now give distinctly my reasons for saying so, and will begin with a reference to Thomassin’s treatment of the subject in his de Incarnatione Verbi, 1. ii. c. 1, pp. 89, &c. I have done my best to abridge and reduce it without injury to the sense, but, long as it is, still the importance of the subject and the depth and force of his remarks would, I think, be my justification for the following extracts, even had I made them longer.
1. “This,” he says, “first of all must be laid down, that it belongs to the Father to be without birth, but to the Son to be born. Now innascibility is a principle of concealment, but birth of exhibition. The former withdraws from sight, the latter comes forth into open day; the one retires into itself, lives to itself, and has no outward start; the other flows forth and extends itself, and is diffused far and wide. It corresponds then to the idea of the Father, as being ingenerate, to be self-collected, remote, unapproachable, invisible, and in consequence to be utterly alien to an incarnation. But to the Son, considered as once for all born, and ever coming to the birth, and starting into view, it especially belongs to display Himself, to be prodigal of Himself, to bestow Himself as an object for sight and enjoyment, because in the fact of being born He has burst forth into this corresponding act of self-diffusion.
“Next, however, whereas the nature of Father and Son is one, therefore equally inaccessible and incomprehensible and invisible is in His nature the Son as the Father. Accordingly, we are here considering a personal property, not a natural. For it is especially congenial to the Divine Nature to be good, beneficent, and indulgent; and for these qualities there is no opening at all without a certain manifestation of their hiding-place, and outpouring of His condescending Majesty. Wherefore, since the Majesty and Goodness of God, in the very bosom of His Nature, look different ways, and by the one He retires into Himself, and by the other He pours Himself out, it is by the different properties of the Divine Persons that this contrariety is solved, and the ingenerate Father secures the majesty and invisibility of the Godhead in its secret place; while the Son, who issues thence, manifests Its goodness and sheds abroad Its beneficence. And hence, further, as might be proved from Irenæus and other Fathers, not to speak of the Platonists, the Father is the Son’s incomprehensibility and invisibility, and the Son is the Father’s comprehensibility and visibility; the Son’s Nature is perceived to be invisible and incomprehensible in the Father, and the Father’s Nature to be most bountiful and self-communicating in the Son, who, as possessor of a generate and communicated divinity (Deitate genita et donata), rejoices to give what He has received.
“Moreover, since the Incarnation involves some sort injury (injuriam) to the Godhead, nay even a self-emptying, there is a propriety in the Son’s sustaining this rather than the Father, for the Father is the invisible safeguard of Divinity, in that He is its Origin and Fount; and the Son is the principle of Its effusion, nay, the expenditure and emptying out of Itself, saving always that the Father’s inviolability is the Son’s, and the Son’s munificence is the Father’s too.
“Again, as the Incarnation, so previous to it the divine adumbrations made to prophets or to patriarchs, would have been strange in the Father, while they were glorious in the Son; for the Godhead in its own Fount is most pure from all humiliation, all the dust of creation, all contagion of foreign natures any whatever; on the other hand, in its Stream, though it is entire, and all and everything that it is in the Fount, it is less strange that it should extravagate and intermingle with the creatures, and (as it were) be, so to say, soiled by its own beneficence.
“And hence again it is that the Scripture speaks of the Father as invisible, and of the Son as the Image of the Invisible God; and says both that God can be seen, and that He cannot. The teaching of the Fathers reconciles the contrariety at once. Invisibility is reserved to the Father, visibility (whether by angelic adumbrations or by an incarnation) is undertaken by the Son.
“Once more. Why was it that the early heretics invented their Eons, and, beyond them all, their First and Inaccessible God, and made the God of Moses, or the Creator, an inferior being? Because they preferred shattering the Divine Nature to viewing it in a plurality of Persons. For the prerogatives which they assigned to their supreme invisible God, these belong to the Father; those which they withheld from Him as unsuitable, are opportune in the Son, viewed as wounding Himself for our needs and our infirmities. Thus Irenæus, Clement, Tertullian, and others, by discriminating the Divine Persons, made provision for the Divine Unity.