Novatian, On the Trinity 4

The Lord declares Him good, and rightly so; the whole world bears witness to His goodness, for He would not have established it if He were not good. Since all things are very good, it follows necessarily that the things He established are also good, and they prove their Establisher to be good; moreover, nothing that comes from a good Establisher can be anything but good. From this truth all evil is excluded. He cannot be the author or craftsman of any evil work, He who claims the name of the Perfect One, the Father, and the Judge, especially because He is the avenger and judge of every evil deed. Evil comes to humanity from no other source than withdrawal from the good God. This withdrawal is evident in humanity, not because it was necessary, but because man himself so willed it. God appeared, and, lest envy be seen in the God from whom evil originated, He shone forth. Therefore He is always like Himself; He never changes or transforms into any form, lest through change He appear mortal. Change is a portion of conversion, and conversion implies a kind of death. Consequently, no addition of any part or honor ever accrues to Him, lest something seem ever to have been lacking to the Perfect One; nor does any loss occur in Him, lest He seem to have accepted the condition of mortality. Rather, what He is, He always is; who He is, He always is; what kind He is, He always is. Increments reveal an origin, and losses prove death and destruction; therefore He says, 'I am God, and I have not changed' (Exodus 3:14-15), holding His state forever, since what is not born cannot be converted. It is necessary that whatever God is, He always be God, preserving Himself by His own virtues. And therefore He says: 'I AM WHO I AM.' A thing has this name because it always retains the same quality. Change removes the name 'He Who Is,' for whatever undergoes change is shown to be mortal by that very fact: it ceases to be what it was and begins to be what it was not. Rightly, then, God's state remains forever, since without loss through change He is always the same and equal to Himself. What is not born cannot change; only things that are made or generated enter conversion, because what once did not exist learns to exist by being born, and so is changed by being born. But those things that have neither birth nor maker have excluded change from themselves, since they lack the origin in which the cause of conversion lies. Therefore He is also declared to be One, because He has no equal; for God, whatever can be God, must be the Highest. And the Highest must be such that it is the Highest, since it is beyond compare. Therefore He must be alone and One, to whom nothing can be compared, because He has no equal. Two infinites cannot exist, as the nature of reality itself dictates. The infinite is that which has neither origin nor end; whatever occupies the whole excludes the beginning of another. If God did not contain all that exists, He would be found within what contains Him, and the container would be found to be less; thus God would cease to be, reduced to the power of another by whose lesser magnitude He would be enclosed, and the container would rather have begun to be God. It follows that even the proper name of God cannot be spoken, because it cannot be conceived. A name contains whatever is comprehended by the condition of its nature; a name is the signification of a thing that can be grasped by that name. But when the subject is such that it cannot even be grasped by our intellects, how can it be pronounced with a worthy title, since it is beyond intellect and therefore beyond the signification of any title? When God adds and prefers His name for certain reasons and occasions, we must understand that He is not so much revealing a legitimate property of the name as establishing a certain signification, to which men run so that they may seem to obtain God's mercy through it. He is therefore immortal and incorruptible, feeling no loss whatsoever and having no end. Because He is incorruptible, He is also immortal; and because He is immortal, He is certainly incorruptible; each quality is intertwined with the other in a mutual, reciprocal bond, and connected to the state of eternity by a vicarious concatenation, with immortality proceeding from incorruption and incorruption coming from immortality.