Catechetical Oration 12–22

Let him who seeks proofs that God has been manifested to us in the flesh look to the activities. For even of God's existence at all one could have no other proof than the testimony of his activities. So just as, looking at the universe, observing the dispositions throughout the world and the benefits worked by God in our life, we apprehend that there is a transcendent power, creative of what comes into being and preserving what exists, so also in the case of God manifested to us through flesh we have taken the miracles in his activities as sufficient proof of the appearing of the Godhead, observing in the recorded works all those things by which the divine nature is characterized. It is God's to give life to human beings; God's to preserve by providence the things that exist; God's to grant food and drink to those who have been allotted life in the flesh; God's to benefit the needy; God's to bring back to itself through health the nature turned aside by sickness; God's to rule alike over the whole creation, earth, sea, air, and the regions above the air; God's to have power sufficient for all things, and above all to be stronger than death and corruption. If, then, the record of him had been lacking in any of these, those outside our faith would reasonably reject our mystery; but if all the things by which God is known are seen in the narratives about him, what hinders faith?

“But,” he says, “birth and death are proper to the fleshly nature.” I say so too. But what preceded the birth and what followed the death escape what is common to our nature. For looking at the two limits of human life, we know both from what we begin and in what we end. Man, beginning to exist from passion, is completed in passion. But there, neither did the birth begin from passion, nor did the death end in passion; for neither did pleasure lead the way to the birth, nor did corruption succeed the death. Do you disbelieve the miracle? I rejoice in your disbelief. For by thinking what is said to be beyond belief, you certainly confess that the miracles are beyond nature. Let this very thing, then, be your proof of the Godhead of him who appeared: that the proclamation does not proceed through what is according to nature. For if the narratives about Christ were within the limits of nature, where is the divine? But if the account surpasses nature, then in the very things you disbelieve lies the proof that the one proclaimed is God. For a man is born from the union of two, and after death comes into corruption. If the proclamation contained these things, you would certainly not have thought him God who was attested by the properties of our nature. But since you hear that he was born, yet went beyond what is common to our nature both in the manner of his birth and in his not admitting alteration into corruption, it would be well, by consequence, to turn your disbelief to the other side, so as not to think him a man like one of those shown in nature. For whoever does not believe that such a one is a man must necessarily be led to the belief that he is God. For he who recorded that he was born also narrated that he was born in this way. If, then, from what was said it is credible that he was born, by these same things it is certainly not incredible that he was born in this way. For he who told of the birth added also “from a virgin”; and he who mentioned the death also bore witness to the resurrection after the death. If, then, from what you hear you grant that he was born and died, from the same you will certainly grant that both his birth and his death were outside passion. But these things are greater than nature; therefore neither is he at all within nature who is shown to have been born in ways beyond nature.

“What, then,” he says, “is the cause of the divine descending to this lowliness, so that faith is in doubt whether God, the uncontainable, incomprehensible, and ineffable reality, which is above all glory and all majesty, is mixed with the cheap covering of human nature, so that even his lofty activities …?”

We are not at a loss for an answer to this befitting God. You ask the cause of God's being born among men? If you take away from life the benefits that have come from God, you could not say from what you would recognize the divine. For from what we experience we recognize the benefactor; looking at what happens, we infer from it the nature of the one at work. If, then, love for humankind is a proper mark of the divine nature, you have the reason you sought, you have the cause of God's presence among men. For our nature, having fallen sick, needed one to heal it; man in his fall needed one to raise him up; he who had lost life needed one to give life; he who had slipped away from participation in the good needed one to lead him back to the good; he who was shut up in darkness needed the presence of light; the captive sought the ransomer, the prisoner the helper, the one held under the yoke of slavery the liberator. Were these things small and unworthy to move God to come down to visit human nature, when humanity was in so pitiable and wretched a state? “But it was possible,” he says, “both for man to be benefited and for God to remain in impassibility. For he who constituted the universe by his will and brought non-being into subsistence by the mere impulse of his will, why does he not, by some sovereign and divine authority, tear man away from the opposing power and bring him to his original state, if this was pleasing to him? Instead, he goes round long circuits, submitting to a bodily nature, entering life through birth, passing through every age in turn, then tasting death, and so accomplishing his aim through the resurrection of his own body, as if he could not, remaining on the height of his glory, save man by a command and dismiss such circuits.” So against such objections too we must set up the truth, so that faith may be hindered in nothing for those who seek the reason of the mystery by examination. First, then, let us consider, as has already been moderately examined earlier, what stands opposed to virtue. As darkness to light and death to life, so plainly vice to virtue, and nothing else besides. For just as, of the many things seen in creation, nothing else is set in opposition to light or life, not stone, not wood, not water, not man, not anything else that exists, except properly the things conceived as their opposites, such as darkness and death, so also in the case of virtue one could not say that any creature is conceived as its opposite, except the notion of vice. If, then, our doctrine proclaimed that the divine had come to be in vice, the objector would have occasion to run down our faith as holding unfitting and incongruous opinions about the divine nature. For it would not be right to say that wisdom itself and goodness and incorruption, and whatever lofty notion and name there is, had fallen into the opposite. If, then, God is true virtue, and no nature is set in opposition to virtue but vice; and God comes to be not in vice but in human nature; and only the passion of vice is unfitting and shameful, in which God neither came to be nor has a nature to come to be: why are they ashamed to confess that God touched human nature, when no opposition to the idea of virtue is seen in the constitution of man? For neither the rational, nor the intellectual, nor the capacity for knowledge, nor anything else of the kind that is proper to human substance, is opposed to the idea of virtue.

“But the very change of our body,” he says, “is a passion. And he who came to be in this comes to be in passion; but the divine is impassible. So the notion is foreign to God, if they declare that the one impassible by nature came into fellowship with passion.” But to this again let us use the same argument: that “passion” is said partly in the proper sense, partly by extension. What touches the will and turns it from virtue to vice is truly passion; but whatever is seen in nature proceeding step by step in its own sequence would more properly be called a work than a passion: such as birth, growth, the persistence of the subject through the inflow and outflow of nourishment, the concourse of the elements in the body, and again the dissolution of what was compounded and its passing back to its kindred elements. Which, then, does our mystery say the divine touched: the passion properly so called, which is vice, or the movement according to nature? If our account insisted that the divine had come to be in forbidden things, we ought to flee the absurdity of the doctrine, as saying nothing sound about the divine nature. But if it says that he took hold of our nature, whose first origin and subsistence also had their beginning from him, where does the proclamation fall short of the conception fitting to God, since no disposition of passion enters with faith into our notions about God? For we do not say that the physician comes to be in passion when he treats one who is in passion; but even if he touches the sickness, the healer remains outside passion. If birth in itself is not passion, neither would one call life passion. But the passion of pleasure precedes human birth, and the impulse of the living toward vice: this is the sickness of nature. But the mystery says that he was pure of both. If, then, the birth was estranged from pleasure and the life from vice, what passion is left in which the mystery of godliness says God shared? If someone calls the separation of body and soul a passion, it would be much more just first to name the concourse of both so. For if the separation of things joined is a passion, the joining of things apart would also be a passion. For there is a kind of movement, one and the same, both in the combining of things apart and in the separating of things interwoven. So whatever the last movement is named, it is fitting that the one that precedes it be called too. If the first movement, which we call birth, … would by consequence be called a passion, the one by which the concourse of body and soul is separated. But we say that God came to be in each movement of our nature, that by which the soul runs together with the body and that by which the body is separated from the soul. And since he was blended with each of these in the human compound, I mean with the sensible and the intellectual, through that ineffable and inexpressible blending, he arranged this: that the union of the things once united, I mean soul and body, should remain forever. For when our nature, following its own sequence, had been moved in him too to the separation of body and soul, he joined again what had been separated, as with a kind of glue, I mean the divine power, fitting together what had been split into an unbreakable union. And this is the resurrection: the return, after dissolution, of things that had been yoked together into an indissoluble union, growing together with each other, so that the first grace concerning humanity might be recalled, and we might return again to eternal life, the vice mixed into our nature having flowed out through our dissolution, as happens with a liquid when the vessel around it is broken: it is scattered and disappears, there being nothing to hold it. And just as the beginning of death, arising in one, passed through the whole of human nature, in the same way the beginning of the resurrection also extends through one to all humanity. For he who united again to its own body the soul he had assumed, by his power which had been mingled with each of them at their first constitution, in a more general way blended the intellectual substance with the sensible, the beginning proceeding by consequence to the end. For in the human compound he assumed, when the soul returned to the body after the dissolution, the union of what was separated passes, as from a beginning, to the whole of human nature, equally in power. And this is the mystery of God's economy concerning man and of the resurrection from the dead: that he did not prevent the soul from being separated from the body by death, according to the necessary sequence of nature, but brought them back to each other through the resurrection, so that he might become in himself the boundary of both, of death and of life, halting in himself the nature divided by death and himself becoming the beginning of the union of what was divided.

But someone will say that the objection raised against us has not yet been resolved, and that what unbelievers bring against us is rather strengthened by what has been said. For if there is in him so great a power as the argument has shown, so that both the destruction of death and the entry of life depend on him, why does he not do what he intends by will alone, instead of working our salvation by a roundabout way, being born and nurtured, and saving man by experiencing death, when it was possible both not to come into this condition and to save us? To such an argument it would be enough, for fair-minded people, to say this much: that the sick do not lay down laws for physicians about the method of care, nor dispute with their benefactors about the form of treatment, asking why the healer touched the painful part and devised this particular remedy for the removal of the evil when another was needed; but, looking to the end of the benefit, they receive the kindness with thanksgiving. But since, as the prophet says, the abundance of God's kindness keeps its benefit hidden, and it is not yet seen plainly through the present life (for every objection of unbelievers would have been removed if what is expected were before our eyes; but now it awaits the coming ages, so that in them what is now seen by faith alone may be revealed), it would be necessary, by such reasonings as are possible, to find a solution to the questions raised that agrees with what has gone before.

And yet it is perhaps superfluous for those who believe that God has sojourned in our life to find fault with his coming as not having taken place with some wisdom and a higher reason. For to those who do not fight too hard against the truth there is no small proof of the divine sojourn, made manifest even before the life to come, in the present life: I mean the testimony of the facts themselves. For who does not know how the deceit of demons had filled every part of the inhabited world, prevailing over human life through the madness for idols? How this was the custom for all the nations in the world, to serve the demons through idols with animal sacrifices and the defilements on the altars? But from the time when, as the Apostle says, “the saving grace of God appeared to all people,” sojourning through human nature, all these things passed like smoke into non-existence, so that the madness of oracles and divinations ceased, the annual processions and the bloody defilements of the hecatombs were abolished, and among many of the nations altars and gateways, precincts and cult images, and all else that the servants of demons had practised to deceive themselves and those who came upon them, disappeared entirely, so that in many places it is not even remembered whether these things ever existed; and in their place, throughout the whole inhabited world, there were raised up in the name of Christ churches and altars, and the holy and bloodless priesthood, and the lofty philosophy practised in deed rather than in word, and the disdain of bodily life and the contempt of death, which those forced by tyrants to depart from the faith plainly showed, counting as nothing the tortures of the body and the sentence of death; they would clearly not have endured these things if they did not have a clear and indisputable proof of the divine sojourn. And this same thing is a sufficient sign to point out to the Jews too, that he whom they disbelieve has come. For until the divine manifestation of Christ, the royal palaces in Jerusalem were splendid among them, that famous temple, the sacrifices customary throughout the year; all that the law had set out in riddles for those able to understand mystically remained unhindered until then, according to the worship of piety established for them from the beginning. But when they saw the one expected, of whom they had been taught beforehand through the prophets and the law, and preferred to faith in him who had appeared that mistaken superstition, which, interpreting wrongly, they kept as the words of the law, serving custom rather than understanding, they did not receive the grace that appeared; and the sacred things of their worship are left only in bare narratives: the temple is not recognized even by traces, that splendid city is left in ruins, nothing of what was customary of old remains to the Jews, and even the place in Jerusalem that they venerated has become forbidden ground by command of those in power.

Nevertheless, since neither those who follow Hellenism nor the leaders of the Jewish doctrines think these things evidence of the divine presence, it would be well to treat separately the objections raised: why the divine nature is intertwined with ours, saving humanity through itself, and not accomplishing its purpose by a command. What, then, would be our starting point, guiding the argument in sequence to the aim set before us? What else than to go through, in summary, the pious conceptions of God?

It is agreed by all that one must believe the divine to be not only powerful but also just, good, wise, and everything that leads the mind to the better. It follows, then, in the present economy, that it is not the case that one of the things befitting God wills to appear in what has happened while another is absent. For, in general, none of these lofty names, separated by itself from the others, is a virtue alone. Neither is the good truly good unless ranked with the just, the wise, and the powerful; for what is unjust, unwise, or powerless is not good. Nor is power, separated from the just and wise, seen as virtue; for such a form of power is brutish and tyrannical. So too with the rest: if the wise is carried outside the just, or the just is not seen with the powerful and good, one would more properly call such things vice. For how could one count among goods what falls short of the better? And if all must run together in our opinions about God, let us consider whether God's economy as man lacks any of the conceptions befitting God. We certainly seek in God the signs of goodness. And what testimony to goodness could be clearer than that he reclaimed the one who had deserted to the opposite side, and that his nature, firm and unchangeable in the good, was not affected along with the changeableness of the human will? For he would not have come to save us, as David says, if goodness had not produced such a purpose. But the goodness of the purpose would have helped nothing if wisdom had not made the love for humankind effective. For in the case of those who are sick, many perhaps wish the one lying there not to be in evils, but only those bring their good will for the sufferers to completion whom some skilled power assists toward the healing of the sufferer. So wisdom must by all means be joined to goodness. How, then, is the wise seen together with the good in what happened? In that the good of the purpose cannot be seen bare. For how could the purpose appear unless it were made manifest through what happens? And the things done, proceeding in sequence with a certain order and arrangement, display the wisdom and skill of God's economy. And since, as was said earlier, the wise joined with the just becomes virtue, but if separated would not by itself remain good, it would be well, in the account of the economy as man, to consider the two together, I mean the wise and the just.

What, then, is justice? We certainly remember what was said in sequence at the beginning of the discourse: that man was constructed as an imitation of the divine nature, preserving the likeness to the divine both in the other goods and in the self-determination of the will, yet being necessarily of a changeable nature. For it was not possible that one who had the beginning of his existence from alteration should not be altogether changeable. For the passage from non-being into being is a kind of alteration of non-existence, changed by divine power into substance. And in another way, too, change is necessarily seen in man, since man was an imitation of the divine nature. And what imitates, unless it has some otherness, would be altogether the same as that to which it has been likened. The otherness, then, of what came into being according to the image from the archetype lies in this: that the one is unchangeable by nature, while the other is not so, but came into subsistence through alteration, as the account given has said; and, being an imitation, it is in any case subject to alteration in its being. And alteration is a movement ever proceeding from what it is into something else. We speak of two forms of such movement: one always toward the good, in which progress has no halt, because no limit of the course traversed is found; the other toward the opposite, whose subsistence consists in not subsisting. For the opposition to the good, as was said before, has some such meaning in its distinction, as when we say that being is set against non-being, and existence against non-existence. Since, then, by the changeable and alterable impulse and movement, the nature cannot remain unmoved of itself, but the will is always tending toward something, the desire for the beautiful naturally drawing it to movement; and the beautiful is in one case truly so by nature, in another not such but decked with some appearance of beauty; and the judge of these is the mind established within us: in this there is risk, either of attaining the real beauty, or of being turned aside from it through some deception of appearance and drifting away to the opposite; as the pagan fable says happened to the dog, which, looking at the reflection in the water of what it was carrying in its mouth, let go the real food and, gaping at the image of the food, went hungry.

Since, then, the mind, disappointed of its desire for the truly good, was carried off to what is not, through the deceit of the counsellor and inventor of vice, persuaded that the opposite of the beautiful was beautiful (for the deceit would not have worked had not the appearance of the beautiful been moulded around the hook of vice like a bait); now that man had come into this misfortune willingly, having yoked himself through pleasure to the enemy of life, look for me, in the same way, for all the things befitting the conceptions of God: goodness, justice, power, incorruption, and whatever is of the better meaning. As good, then, he takes pity on the one who has fallen; and as wise he is not ignorant of the manner of recall. And the judgment of what is just would also belong to wisdom; for one would not attribute true justice to folly. What, then, is the just thing in these circumstances? Not to use a tyrannical authority against the one who holds us, nor, tearing us from the ruler by superior power, to leave any ground for a plea of justice to the one who enslaved man through pleasure. For just as those who have sold their freedom for money are slaves of those who bought them, having made themselves their own sellers, and neither for themselves nor for anyone else on their behalf is it lawful to cry out for freedom, even if those who deserted to this misfortune are well born; and if someone, caring for the one who was sold, should use force against the buyer, he will seem unjust, tyrannically taking away one acquired by law; but if he wishes to buy him back, no law prevents it.