Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Then, therefore, the Word himself too takes on his own shape and adornment, sound and voice, when God speaks the command, "Let light come to be." This marks the Word's full and proper birth, when he proceeds forth from God — first laid down by him as a thought, under the title of Wisdom ("The Lord established me at the start of his paths"), then brought forth into genuine effect ("As he set the sky in order, I stood there beside him") — from which point God makes himself a father, and by proceeding from him the Word becomes a Son, firstborn as begotten before all things, and only-begotten as alone begotten of God, properly from the womb of his own heart, as the Father himself testifies: "My heart has belched forth a good word." Then, rejoicing over him and he rejoicing correspondingly in the Father's presence: "You are my Son, today I have begotten you," and, "Before the morning star I begot you." So too the Son, in his own person, acknowledges the Father under the name of Wisdom: "The Lord established me at the start of his paths, the first of his deeds; and before any hill he brought me into being." For if in this passage Wisdom seems to say she was founded by the Lord for his works and his ways, while elsewhere it is shown through the Word that everything came to be through him, and apart from him not one thing came to be — as again, "By his Word the heavens were made firm, and by his spirit all their power" (that spirit, of course, which was inherent in the Word) — it is plain that one and the same power is meant, now under the title of Wisdom, now under the label of Word: the power that had the start of its paths in God's deeds, and that made the heavens firm, the one through whom everything came into existence and apart from whom nothing came into existence. No need to dwell longer on this, as though this were not the very same Word who carries the title of Wisdom, of Reason, and of the entire divine mind and spirit, who was made the Son of God, and who by proceeding from him was begotten. "So, then," you say, "you grant that the Word is some sort of substance, built up out of spirit and wisdom and reason?" Plainly I do. For you refuse to let him have a real, substantive existence by way of a proper substance, so that he might appear as a distinct thing and person, and so that this second one, set up by God, might make two — Father and Son, God and Word. "But," you object, "what is speech except a sound and utterance from the mouth, or, as the grammarians teach, air struck so as to be intelligible to the ear — and for the rest, some empty, vacant, incorporeal thing?" But I say that nothing empty and vacant could have come forth from God, so that what was uttered was not uttered from emptiness and vacancy; nor does that lack substance which proceeded from so great a substance and made such great substances of its own — for the Word himself made the things that were made through him. How could he who is the one without whom nothing was made himself be nothing — an empty thing working solid things, a vacant thing working full things, an incorporeal thing operating on bodies? For although something can, at times, come to be different from that through which it comes to be, still nothing whatever can come to be through that which is empty and vacant. Is the Word of God, who is termed Son and who is himself named God, an empty and vacant thing — "the Word was present alongside God, and the Word was himself God"? It is written, "You shall not take the name of God in vain." This is surely he who, though existing in the shape of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be seized. In what shape of God? In some definite shape, certainly — not in no shape at all. For who will deny that God is a body, even though God is spirit? For spirit possesses a body proper to its own kind, cast in its own shape. But if even those invisible things, whatever they are, have with God both their own body and their own form, through which they can be seen by God alone — how much the more, then, must what was sent forth from his own substance possess substance too. Whatever, then, the substance of the Word was, that I call a Person, and to it I claim the name of Son, and while granting the Son I maintain him as a second, distinct from the Father.