Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But since they want the two to be one, so that the Father and the Son should be taken to be the very same person, the whole question of the Son must be examined — whether he exists, who he is, and how he exists — and so the matter itself will vindicate its own shape, with the support of the scriptures and their interpretations. Some say that Genesis, in the Hebrew, actually opens: "At the outset God fashioned a Son for himself." That this may not stand as certain, I am led to think by other arguments, drawn from God's own arrangement of things, from before the founding of the world right up to the generation of the Son. [2] For before all things, God was alone — he was, to himself, both world and place and everything. Alone, however, only in the sense that nothing else existed outside him. Yet even then he was not, strictly speaking, solitary: he had at his side that which he possessed within — namely his own Reason. For God is a rational being, and Reason resided in him from the very start, and so all things spring from him; and this Reason is nothing other than his own awareness. [3] The Greeks call this logos, a word by which we also mean "word" or "speech." That is why it has already become the practice among our people, out of a naive way of translating, to say that "the Word" was with God in the beginning, when it would be more fitting to hold that "Reason" is the more ancient, because God was not from the beginning a speaker but was rational even before the beginning, and because the Word itself, consisting in reason, thereby shows that reason is prior to it, as its own substance. [4] Even so, though, it makes no real difference. For even though God had not yet sent forth his Word, he nevertheless had that Word with him, in that very Reason, within himself — silently thinking and arranging within himself what he was shortly to say through the Word; for by thinking and arranging things with his own Reason, he was making that Reason into the very Word which he was handling in speaking. [5] And so that you may grasp this more easily, look first to yourself, seeing that you were fashioned after God's own image and likeness — for you too, a rational creature, possess reason within yourself, since you were made by a rational Maker not merely as his creature but even animated out of his own substance. Notice, when you silently confer with yourself in your own reason, that this very thing is happening within you: reason meets you together with a word, at every movement of your thought, at every impulse of your perception. [6] Whatever you have thought is a word, whatever you have perceived is reason; you cannot help but utter it within your mind, and even as you speak it, you find the word acting as a kind of conversational partner, in which this very reason is present, by which you converse with it in thinking, through which, while speaking, you think. In this way there is, in a certain sense, a second within you — a word through which you speak while thinking and through which you think while speaking; the word itself is something distinct. [7] How much more fully, then, does this take place in God, whose image and likeness you yourself are counted, that he should have within himself, even while silent, both reason and, within that reason, a word? So I may, without rashness, lay down in advance that even then, before the founding of the universe, God was not alone, having within himself, thus, Reason, and within Reason, a Word, which he would make into a second alongside himself by setting it in motion within himself.