CHAPTER 5 

Psalm xxxii.

How David equally with Us knows the Word of God, Who is of His Essence, to be by the Command of the Father Creator of All Things; and how the Same Prophet witnesses that the Same Word of God was sent by the Father for the Saving of Men, and how He prophesies that in a Short Time the Whole World would be filled by His Teaching.

"By the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm, and all the power of them by the spirit of his mouth." 

And in Ps. cvi. it is said:

"He sent his word and healed them, and saved them from their destruction." 

And again in Ps. cxlvii.:

"He sendeth his oracle upon earth, his word runneth swiftly."

Now it is evident that with the Psalm before us which says, "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm," (229) the holy gospel exactly agrees when it says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made." The Gospel rightly calls Him God: for this same being who is now regarded as God, has been called in our previous quotations, the Word, the Wisdom and the Offspring of God, and the Priest, the Christ, King, Lord, God, and the Image of God. And (b) that He is other than the Father, and His Minister, so that He as the greater can bid Him to create, is added in the Psalm before us:

"8. Let all the earth fear the Lord, | and let all the dwellers on earth be moved by him. | 9. For he spake, and they were created, | he commanded and they were made. | "

For it is plain that a speaker must speak to some one else, and one who issues a command must issue it to another beside himself. And clearly since our Saviour's Incarnation

many multitudes from all the earth, that is to say from all the nations of the earth, have ceased to fear daemons as before, and have feared the Lord Jesus, and all the inhabitants of the world have been moved at the Name of Christ, agreeably to the oracle which here says, "Let the earth fear the Lord: By him shall be moved all the inhabitants of the world." These, then, come from Ps. ii. and xxx. And you would find similar prophecies also in Ps. cxlviii., which teaches that not only things in earth, but also things in heaven, the whole creation in a word, came into being by the command of God. For it says:

"1. Praise the Lord from the heavens, | praise him in the height; | 2. Praise him all ye angels of his, | praise him all his powers, | 3. Praise him sun and moon, | Praise him all ye stars and light, | . . . 5. For he spake, and they were made, | he commanded, and they were created."

For if He commanded, Who was great enough to receive such a command, but the Word of God, who in many ways has been proved to be God in this treatise, and naturally called the Word of God, because the Almighty has set in Him the words that make and create all things, delivering to Him the task of governing all things and steering them by reason and in order?

For of course no one should imagine that the Word of God is like to articulate and spoken speech, which among men consists of syllables, and is compounded of nouns and verbs: for we know that our speech consists essentially of sounds and syllables and their significations, and is produced by the tongue and the organs of the throat and mouth, whereas that of the eternal and unembodied nature, totally divorced from all our conditions, could not possibly involve anything human: It uses the name of speech and nothing more. Since we must not in the case of the God of the Universe postulate a voice that depends on the movements of the air, nor words, nor syllables, nor tongue, nor mouth, nor anything indeed that is human and mortal.

For His must be a Word of the soul, and quite incapable of existence or being apart from the soul. For human speech is in itself without essence and substance, and regarded generally is a self-movement and activity of thought. But the Word of God is other than this: It has its own substance (c) in Itself altogether divine and spiritual, It exists in Itself, It is active also in Itself, and being divorced from matter and body, and made like to the nature of the first Unbegotten and Only God, It carries in Itself the meaning of all begotten things, and the ideas of things visible, being Itself without body and invisible. Wherefore the divine oracles call It Wisdom and the Word of God.