Catechetical Oration

The discourse of catechesis is necessary for those who have charge of the life of godliness, so that the Church may be multiplied by the addition of those who are being saved, as the faithful word that accords with the teaching is brought to the hearing of unbelievers. Yet the same method of instruction will not suit all who come to the word. Rather, catechesis must be adapted to the differences of religions: aiming at the same goal of the discourse, but not using the same arguments in the same way. For the one who follows Judaism is preoccupied by certain assumptions, and the one who lives in Hellenism by others; and the Anomoean and the Manichaean, and the followers of Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides, and the rest of the catalogue of those who wander astray in the heresies, each preoccupied by his own assumptions, make it necessary to do battle with their particular notions. For the method of treatment must be fitted to the form of the disease. You will not cure the polytheism of the Greek and the unbelief of the Jew concerning the only-begotten God by the same means; nor will you overturn, from the same starting points, the deluded myth-making about the doctrines among those who have wandered astray in the heresies. For the arguments by which one might set Sabellius right will not also help the Anomoean; nor does the battle against the Manichaean benefit the Jew. Rather, as has been said, one must look to the assumptions of the people and frame the discourse according to the error present in each, putting forward in each discussion certain principles and reasonable premises, so that by means of what is agreed on both sides the truth may be uncovered by logical sequence. So when the discussion is with one of those who follow Hellenism, it would be well to make this the beginning of the discourse: does he suppose that the divine exists, or does he agree with the doctrine of the atheists? If he says that it does not exist, he will be led by the things ordered with art and wisdom throughout the world to acknowledge that through them there is shown a certain power, displayed in them, that transcends the universe. But if he does not doubt that it exists, but is carried away in his notions to a plurality of deities, we will use the following line of reasoning with him: does he consider the divine perfect or deficient? And when, as is likely, he bears witness to the perfection of the divine nature, I will require of him perfection in everything that is observed in the Godhead, so that the divine may not be viewed as a mixture of opposites, of deficient and perfect. But whether in power, or in the notion of goodness, or in wisdom, incorruption, and eternity, or in whatever other conception befitting God may belong to our contemplation, he will agree, by the reasonableness of this sequence, that perfection is to be seen in the divine nature in every respect. Once this is granted us, it would no longer be hard to bring the mind that is scattered among a plurality of gods round to the confession of one Godhead. For if he grants that perfection in every respect is to be acknowledged of the subject, but says that there are many perfect beings marked by the same characteristics, then of necessity, in the case of beings distinguished by no variation but observed in the same attributes, he must either show what is peculiar to each, or, if the mind grasps nothing peculiar, not suppose a distinction where there is nothing that distinguishes. For if he can find the difference neither in more and less, since the very definition of perfection does not admit of diminution; nor in worse and more honourable (for one could no longer hold a notion of deity about that from which the name of the worse is not absent); nor in ancient and recent (for what does not always exist lies outside the notion of the divine); but the definition of the Godhead is one and the same, no peculiarity being reasonably found in anything, then of necessity the deluded fancy of a plurality of gods is forced into the confession of one Godhead. For if goodness and justice, wisdom and power are predicated alike, and incorruption and eternity and every pious conception are acknowledged in the same way, then, when every difference in every respect is removed, the plurality of gods is necessarily removed from the doctrine along with it, since identity in all things brings belief round to the one.

But since the doctrine of godliness knows how to see a certain distinction of hypostases in the unity of the nature, so that in our battle with the Greeks our argument may not slide over into Judaism, it is fitting again to correct the error on this point too by a careful distinction. For not even those outside our doctrine suppose the divine to be without reason; and this, being admitted by them, will sufficiently articulate our argument. For whoever admits that God is not without reason will certainly agree that he who is not without reason has reason, that is, a word. But the human word is called by the same name. So if he says that he understands the Word of God, too, on the analogy of ours, he will thus be brought to a higher conception. For it is altogether necessary to believe that the word corresponds to the nature, like everything else. For a certain power and life and wisdom are seen in the human being; yet no one, from the sameness of the names, would suppose such life or power or wisdom in God as well; rather, the connotations of such names are lowered to match the measure of our nature. Because our nature is perishable and weak, our life is short-lived, our power without substance, our word unstable. But in the case of the transcendent nature, everything said about it is elevated along with the greatness of what is contemplated. So even if the Word of God is spoken of, he will not be thought to have his subsistence in the impulse of the speaker, and then to pass away into non-existence like our word. Rather, just as our nature, being perishable, has a perishable word, so the incorruptible and ever-abiding nature has an eternal and subsistent Word. If, then, it is admitted as a consequence that the Word of God subsists eternally, it is altogether necessary to admit that the subsistence of the Word is in life. For it is not reverent to think that the Word subsists lifelessly, like stones. But if he subsists, being something intellectual and incorporeal, he certainly lives; and if he is separated from life, he certainly does not subsist at all. But it has been shown to be impious that the Word of God should be without subsistence. Therefore it has been shown along with this, as a consequence, that this Word is seen in life. And since the nature of the Word is believed to be simple, showing no doubleness or composition in itself, one could no longer see the Word as being in life by participation in life; for such a conception, which says that one thing is in another, would not be free of composition. Rather, since simplicity is admitted, one must necessarily think that the Word is life itself, not a participation in life. If, then, the Word lives, being life, he certainly also has the power of choice; for no living being is without choice. And it is reverent to conclude that this choice is also powerful. For if one does not admit that it is powerful, he will certainly establish that it is powerless. But powerlessness is far from the notion of the divine; for nothing incongruous is seen in the divine nature. It is altogether necessary to admit that the power of the Word is as great as his purpose, so that no mixture and concurrence of opposites may be seen in what is simple, powerlessness and power being seen in the same purpose, as would be the case if he were able to do one thing but unable to do another. And the will of the Word, being able to do all things, has no inclination toward anything evil (for the impulse toward evil is foreign to the divine nature); but whatever is good, this it also wills; and willing, it is certainly also able; and being able, it is not inactive, but brings every choice of the good into act. Now the world is good, and all the things in it are seen to be ordered wisely and skilfully. All things, then, are works of the Word, who lives and subsists, since he is the Word of God; who chooses, since he lives; who is able to do whatever he chooses; and who chooses what is altogether good and wise and whatever is of the better sort. Since, then, the world is admitted to be something good, and it has been shown by what has been said that the world is the work of the Word, who both chooses and is able to do the good, this Word is other than the one whose Word he is. For this too is in a way one of the relative terms, since the Father of the Word must by all means be understood together with the Word; for he would not be a Word if he were not someone's Word. If, then, the mind of the hearers distinguishes, by the relation implied in the term, both the Word himself and the one from whom he is, the mystery will no longer run the risk, in fighting the Greek notions, of coinciding with those who champion the views of the Jews; rather, it will escape the absurdity of both alike, by confessing both that the Word of God is living, active, and creative, which the Jew does not accept, and that the Word himself and the one from whom he is are not divided in nature. For just as with us we say that the word comes from the mind, being neither wholly the same as the mind nor altogether other (for in that it is from it, it is something else and not that; but in that it brings the mind itself to manifestation, it could no longer be supposed other than it, but, being one with it in nature, it is other as a subject), so also the Word of God, by subsisting in himself, is distinguished from him from whom he has his subsistence; but by showing in himself the things that are seen in God, he is the same in nature as the one who is recognized by the same marks. For whether goodness, or power, or wisdom, or eternal existence, or being incapable of evil, death, and corruption, or being perfect in all things, or anything of that kind whatever should serve as a mark by which to apprehend the Father, you will find by the same marks the Word who subsists from him.

And just as we came to know the Word in the transcendent nature by analogy from things in us, in the same way we shall also be led to the notion of the Spirit, contemplating in our own nature certain shadows and imitations of the ineffable power. With us, breath is the drawing in of air, a thing foreign to us, necessarily drawn in and poured out for the maintenance of the body; at the moment of uttering a word it becomes voice, which makes manifest in itself the power of the word. But in the case of the divine nature it has been thought reverent that there is a Spirit of God, just as it was granted that there is a Word of God, because the Word of God must not be more deficient than our word, as it would be if, while ours is observed together with breath, that one were believed to be without spirit. Yet it is not fitting for God to think that, like our breath, something foreign flows into God from outside and becomes the Spirit in him. Rather, just as, hearing of the Word of God, we did not think the Word to be something without subsistence, nor produced by learning, nor uttered by voice, nor dissolved after being uttered, nor suffering anything else of the kind such as the affections observed in our word, but subsisting substantially, endowed with choice, active, and almighty, so too, having learned of the Spirit of God, which accompanies the Word and makes manifest his activity, we do not conceive of it as an exhalation of breath. For the greatness of the divine power would be brought down to lowliness if the Spirit in it were supposed to be like ours. Rather, we conceive it as a substantial power, contemplated by itself in its own peculiar hypostasis, unable either to be separated from God in whom it is, or from the Word of God whom it accompanies, nor dissolving into non-existence, but, like the Word of God, existing as a hypostasis, endowed with choice, self-moving, active, always choosing the good, and having for every purpose a power that runs together with its will.

So the one who examines precisely the depths of the mystery receives in his soul, in an ineffable way, a moderate comprehension of the teaching about the knowledge of God, but cannot explain in words this inexpressible depth of the mystery: how the same thing is both numerable and escapes enumeration, is seen as divided and is apprehended in unity, is distinguished in hypostasis and is not parted in the underlying subject; and again that one is other, whose the Word and the Spirit are. But when you have perceived what is distinct in these, the unity of the nature in turn does not admit division, so that neither is the might of the monarchy split, being cut up into different deities, nor does our account coincide with the Jewish doctrine; but the truth passes between the two conceptions, overthrowing each of the heresies and accepting from each what is useful. For the doctrine of the Jew is overthrown by the acceptance of the Word and by faith in the Spirit; and the polytheistic error of the Hellenizers is abolished, since the unity of nature cancels the fancy of plurality. On the other hand, from the Jewish conception let the unity of the nature remain, and from Hellenism only the distinction according to hypostases, the impious notion being cured on each side in the appropriate way. For the number of the Trinity is, as it were, a cure for those who err concerning the one, and the doctrine of unity for those who are scattered into plurality.

If the Jew objects to this, our argument with him will no longer be difficult, since it starts from his own ground; for the truth will be made manifest from the teachings he was brought up on. That the Word of God and the Spirit of God are powers subsisting substantially, creative of what has come into being and embracing all that exists, is shown quite plainly from the divinely inspired Scriptures. It is enough to mention one testimony and leave the discovery of more to the more diligent. “By the Word of the Lord,” it says, “the heavens were made firm, and all their power by the Spirit of his mouth.” By what Word and what Spirit? For the Word is not a spoken utterance, nor the Spirit a breath. Otherwise the divine would be made human on the analogy of our nature, and they would be teaching that the maker of the universe used such a word and such a breath. And what power could come from utterances and breath great enough to suffice for the construction of heaven and the powers in it? For if the Word of God is like our utterance, and the Spirit like our breath, then from like things the power is certainly like; and as much strength as our word has, so much has the Word of God. But the breaths that pass out along with utterances are inactive and without subsistence. Those who bring the divine down to the likeness of the word with us make those too altogether ineffective and without subsistence. But if, as David says, the heavens were made firm by the Word of the Lord, and their powers had their constitution in the Spirit of God, then the mystery of the truth stands established, which instructs us to speak of a Word in substance and a Spirit in hypostasis.

That there is a Word of God and a Spirit, the Greek from common notions and the Jew from the Scriptures will perhaps not dispute; but the economy of the Word of God in becoming man both of them will equally reject, as unconvincing and unfitting to be said of God. So we shall bring the objectors to faith on this point from another starting point. They believe that all things came into being by reason and wisdom from him who constituted the universe; or are they reluctant to accept even this belief? But if they do not grant that reason and wisdom preside over the constitution of things, they will set unreason and lack of skill at the origin of the universe. And if this is absurd and impious, it is fully agreed that they will admit that reason and wisdom govern the things that exist. Now it has been shown earlier that the Word of God is not this very utterance, nor the possession of some knowledge or wisdom, but a power subsisting according to substance, choosing every good and having the strength to do all that it chooses. And since the world is good, the power that desires and makes good things is its cause. If the subsistence of the whole world depends on the power of the Word, as the sequence of reasoning has shown, it is altogether necessary also not to conceive of any other cause of the constitution of the parts of the world than the Word himself, through whom all things had their passage into being. Whether one wishes to call this Word, or Wisdom, or Power, or God, or anything else lofty and honourable, we shall not quarrel. For whatever word or name is found to indicate the subject, what is signified by the terms is one: the eternal power of God, creative of the things that exist, inventive of things that do not exist, sustaining what has come into being, foreseeing what is to come. This God, then, the Word, the Wisdom, the Power, has been shown by logical sequence to be the maker of human nature, not driven by any necessity to the construction of man, but creating the existence of such a living being out of the abundance of his love. For his light was not to be unseen, nor his glory unwitnessed, nor his goodness unenjoyed, nor all the other things observed in the divine nature to lie idle, with no one to share and enjoy them. If, then, man comes into being for these purposes, to become a sharer in the divine goods, he is necessarily so constructed as to be suited to the participation of those goods. For just as the eye comes into communion with the light through the radiance naturally lodged in it, drawing to itself by its innate power what is akin to it, so it was necessary that something akin to the divine be blended into human nature, so that through this correspondence it might have a longing for what is its own. For even in the nature of irrational creatures, those that have been allotted life in the water or in the air are each constructed to correspond to their form of life, so that, through the particular fashioning of the body, the air is proper and congenial to the one and the water to the other. So too man, who came into being for the enjoyment of the divine goods, had to have something in his nature akin to what he participates in. For this reason he was adorned with life and reason and wisdom and all the goods that befit God, so that through each of these he might have a desire for what is his own. Since, then, eternity too is one of the goods belonging to the divine nature, it was altogether necessary that the construction of our nature should not be without a share in this either, but should have immortality in itself, so that through the power lodged in it it might recognize what transcends it and be in desire of the divine eternity. The account of the creation of the world indicated this by a comprehensive term in a single phrase, saying that man came into being according to the image of God. For in the likeness according to the image is the enumeration of all that characterizes the divine; and all that Moses relates about these things more in the manner of history, setting doctrines before us in the form of narrative, holds to the same teaching. For that paradise, and the peculiar character of the fruits, whose eating gives those who taste them not fullness of stomach but knowledge and eternity of life: all this agrees with what we have already considered about man, that our nature was in the beginning good and set among good things. But perhaps one who looks at present conditions will object to what has been said and think that he refutes our account as untrue, because man is now seen not in those conditions but in almost all their opposites. “For where is the godlike quality of the soul? Where is the body's freedom from suffering? Where is the eternity of life? Man is short-lived, subject to passion, perishable, liable in soul and body to every form of suffering.” Saying these and similar things and running down nature, he will think he overturns the account given of man. But so that our argument may nowhere be diverted from its sequence, we will treat these matters too in a few words. That human life is now in a sorry condition is not a sufficient proof that man never came into being among good things. For since man is the work of God, who brought this living being into existence through goodness, no one could reasonably suspect him whose constitution has goodness as its cause … Rather, there is another cause of our being in this condition now and of being stripped of better things. And again, the starting point for this argument too is not outside what our opponents agree to. For he who made man for the participation of his own goods, and built into his nature the beginnings of all things fair, so that by each of them desire might be carried toward its like, would not have deprived him of the fairest and most precious of goods: I mean the gift of being without a master and self-determining. For if some necessity presided over human life, the image would have been falsified in that respect, being estranged from the archetype by unlikeness. For how could a nature yoked and enslaved to certain necessities be called the image of the sovereign nature? So what has been made like the divine in every respect had by all means to have in its nature self-rule and freedom from a master, so that the participation of the goods might be the prize of virtue. Whence then, you will say, did he who was honoured in every respect with the fairest things take the worse in exchange for the good? The account of this too is clear. No origin of evil had its beginning from the divine will; for then evil would be beyond blame, inscribing God as its maker and father. Rather, evil somehow grows from within, coming into existence in the will at the moment when the soul withdraws from the good. For as sight is an activity of nature and blindness is the privation of the natural activity, so virtue stands opposed to vice. For one cannot conceive any other origin of vice than the absence of virtue. For as darkness follows when light is removed but does not exist while it is present, so while the good is in the nature, vice has no existence by itself; but the withdrawal of the better becomes the origin of the opposite. Since, then, this is the property of self-determination, to choose freely what one pleases, it is not God who is the cause of your present evils, since he made your nature masterless and free, but thoughtlessness, which chose the worse instead of the better.

Perhaps you ask also for the cause of the failure of the will; for the sequence of the argument leads to this. So again a reasonable starting point will be found for us, which will also clarify this question. We have received from the Fathers an account of this kind; and the account is not a mythical tale but draws its credibility from our very nature. There is a twofold apprehension of the things that exist, contemplation being divided into the intelligible and the sensible; and nothing can be found in the nature of things apart from these that falls outside this division. These are separated from each other by a wide interval, so that the sensible is not among the marks of the intelligible, nor that among the marks of the sensible, but each is characterized by opposite marks. For the intelligible nature is something incorporeal, intangible, and without form; the sensible, as its very name says, falls within perception through the senses. But just as in the sensible world itself, though the elements are greatly opposed to one another, a certain harmony has been devised, fitted together out of opposites by the wisdom that presides over the universe, and so the whole creation comes into concord with itself, the natural opposition nowhere dissolving the chain of agreement, in the same way there comes about, by divine wisdom, a mixing and blending of the sensible with the intelligible, so that all things may share equally in the good and nothing that exists be without a portion of the better nature. For this reason the region corresponding to the intelligible nature is the fine, rational, and mobile substance, which, in the supramundane region, has by the peculiarity of its nature great kinship with the intelligible. But by a higher providence a certain blending of the intelligible with the sensible nature takes place, so that nothing in creation may be rejected, as the Apostle says, nor be without a share in the divine fellowship. For this reason the mixture that is man, composed of intelligible and sensible, is brought forth by the divine nature, as the account of the creation of the world teaches. For God, it says, taking dust from the earth, formed man, and by his own inbreathing breathed life into what he had formed, so that the earthly might be raised up together with the divine, and one grace, equal in honour, might pervade the whole creation, the lower nature being blended with the supramundane. Now the intelligible creation had come into existence first, and to each of the angelic powers a certain activity for the maintenance of the universe had been assigned by the authority that presides over all things; and there was a certain power appointed to hold together and govern the region around the earth, empowered for this very purpose by the power that orders the universe. Then the earthly formation was constructed, an image of the power above; and this living being is man. And in him was the godlike beauty of the intelligible nature, blended with a certain ineffable power. The one who had been allotted the government of the earthly region thinks it terrible and intolerable that from the nature subject to him there should be brought forth a substance made like the transcendent dignity. How he who had been created for no evil by him who constituted the universe in goodness slid down into the passion of envy, it is not the task of the present treatise to relate in detail; but it would be possible to set out the account briefly for those who are harder to persuade. The contrast of virtue and vice is not seen as between two things appearing in hypostasis; but just as non-being is contrasted with being, and one cannot say that non-being is contrasted with being as a hypostasis, but we say that non-existence is contrasted with existence, in the same way vice is set against the idea of virtue, not being something in itself, but conceived by the absence of the better. And just as we say that blindness is contrasted with sight, not that blindness exists in nature by itself, but as the privation of a prior condition, so we say that vice is seen in the privation of the good, like a shadow that follows upon the withdrawal of the ray. Since, then, the uncreated nature does not admit movement by way of turning, change, and alteration, while everything that subsists through creation has a kinship with alteration, because the very subsistence of creation began from alteration, non-being being transferred into being by divine power; and since the power mentioned above was also created, choosing what seemed good to it by a self-determining movement: when it shut its eyes to the good and ungrudging thought, just as one who lowers his eyelids in sunlight sees darkness, so he too, by the very fact of not willing to perceive the good, perceived the opposite of the good; and this is envy. Now it is agreed that the beginning of any matter is the cause of what follows upon it in sequence: for instance, health brings well-being, activity, a pleasant life; sickness brings weakness, inactivity, a life of discomfort; and so everything else follows in sequence from its own beginnings. Just as, then, freedom from passion becomes the beginning and foundation of the life of virtue, so the inclination toward vice that came about through envy became the road for all the evils that appeared after it. For once he who had begotten envy in himself by turning away from goodness had taken the inclination toward evil, just as a stone broken off from a ridge is driven downhill by its own weight, so he too, torn from his natural union with the good and weighed down and sinking toward vice, was carried away of himself, as by a weight, pushed to the uttermost limit of wickedness; and making the power of thought, which he had received from the Creator to cooperate in the participation of the better, his accomplice in devising the schemes of vice, he cunningly circumvents man by deceit, persuading him to become his own murderer and slayer. For man, empowered by the divine blessing, was lofty in dignity (for he was appointed to rule over the earth and all that is on it), beautiful in form (for he had come into being as an image of the archetypal beauty), free from passion in nature (for he was an imitation of the passionless), and full of freedom of speech, delighting in the divine manifestation itself face to face. These things were fuel for the Adversary's passion of envy. But he could not accomplish his purpose by strength and force of power, for the power of God's blessing prevailed over his force. Therefore he contrives to separate man from the power that strengthened him, so that he might become easy to capture for his plot. And just as, when the fire of a lamp has taken hold of the wick, someone who cannot put out the flame by blowing mixes water into the oil and by this device dims the flame, so the Adversary, by deceit mixing vice into man's will, brought about a certain quenching and dimming of the blessing. When that failed, its opposite necessarily entered in its place. Death is opposed to life, weakness to power, curse to blessing, shame to freedom of speech, and to all the goods the things conceived as their opposites. For this reason the human race is now in its present evils, since that beginning provided the starting points for such an end.

And let no one ask why God, foreseeing the misfortune that would befall man from his thoughtlessness, came to create man, for whom not to have come into being would perhaps have been more profitable than to be in evils. For those who have been swept away by deceit into the Manichaean doctrines put this forward to establish their error, as proving on this ground that the creator of human nature is evil. For if God is ignorant of nothing that exists, and man is in evils, the account of God's goodness could no longer be maintained, if he brought man into life knowing that he would live in evils. “For if activity in accordance with the good belongs altogether to a good nature,” he says, “this painful and perishable life could no longer be referred to the workmanship of the good; one must think that there is another cause of such a life, owing to which our nature is inclined toward wickedness.” All these and similar arguments seem to have some strength, through their superficial plausibility, to those who have absorbed the heretical deceit deeply, like a falsifying dye; but to those who see more keenly into the truth they are clearly seen to be unsound and to offer ready proof of their deceit. And I think it well to set up the Apostle in this matter as advocate of the plea that accords with him. For in his discourse to the Corinthians he distinguishes the fleshly and the spiritual states of souls, showing, I think, by what he says, that one should not judge good or evil by sense perception, but, withdrawing the mind from bodily appearances, discern the nature of good and its opposite by itself. For “the spiritual person,” he says, “judges all things.” This, I think, was the cause of the myth-making of these doctrines for those who put such things forward: they define the good by the pleasure of bodily enjoyment; and since the nature of the body, being composite and flowing toward dissolution, is necessarily subject to sufferings and sicknesses, and some painful sensation somehow follows upon such sufferings, they suppose the making of man to be the work of an evil being. Whereas if their mind looked to what is higher, and, removing their thought from its attachment to pleasures, they examined the nature of things dispassionately, they would not have thought anything evil except wickedness. And all wickedness is characterized by the privation of the good, not existing by itself nor seen as a hypostasis. For nothing evil lies by itself outside the will; but it is so named from the absence of the good. And what does not exist does not subsist; and the maker of what subsists is not the maker of what does not subsist. So God is outside the cause of evils, being the maker of the things that exist, not of those that do not; he created sight, not blindness; he manifested virtue, not its privation, as the prize of the will, setting before those who live according to virtue the goal of the goods, not yoking human nature by any violent necessity to what seemed good to himself, drawing it unwillingly to the good like some animate tool. But if, when the light shines clear from a cloudless sky, someone of his own will closes his eyelids over his sight, the sun is outside the cause of his not seeing.

[Heading: On those who are indignant, asking why man dies, when this is rather for man's benefit, and that this is why there is death.] But one who looks at the dissolution of the body is certainly indignant, and considers it hard that our life is dissolved by death. Let him, then, consider through this gloomy thing the surpassing greatness of the divine beneficence. For perhaps by this he may rather be led to wonder at the grace of God's care for man. To live is desirable to those who share in life because of the enjoyment of things to their liking; so that if someone should live in pains, for such a person not to exist is judged far preferable to existing in pain. Let us examine, then, whether the giver of life looks to anything else than how we may live among the fairest things. Since by the self-determining movement we drew fellowship with evil to ourselves, mixing evil into our nature through some pleasure, like a poison seasoned with honey, and thereby falling from the blessedness conceived as freedom from passion, we were transformed toward vice; for this reason man, like an earthen vessel, is dissolved again into earth, so that, the filth now caught in him being separated off, he may be refashioned through the resurrection into his original form. Moses sets out such a doctrine for you more in the manner of history and through riddles; yet the riddles too contain plain teaching. For when, he says, the first human beings came to be among forbidden things and were stripped of that blessedness, the Lord put garments of skin on the first-formed. I do not think the account carries its meaning to such skins; for from what animals slaughtered and flayed is the covering devised for them? But since every skin separated from the animal is dead, I certainly think that the power of mortality, which had been reserved by providence for the irrational nature, was afterwards put upon human beings by him who heals our vice, not so as to remain forever. For a garment is one of the things put on us from outside, giving its use to the body for a time, not grown together with its nature. So mortality, taken from the nature of irrational creatures, was by dispensation wrapped around the nature created for immortality, covering its outside, not its inside, and taking hold of the sensible part of man, but not touching the divine image itself. And the sensible part is dissolved, not annihilated. For annihilation is passing into non-existence; dissolution is the scattering back into the elements of the world from which it had its composition. And what has come to be in these has not perished, even though it escapes the grasp of our perception. The cause of the dissolution is clear from the illustration we mentioned. For since perception is akin to what is gross and earthy, and the better and higher judgment about the good went astray in the testing done by the senses, and the failure to attain the good produced the existence of the opposite condition, the part of us that was made useless is dissolved by its reception of the opposite. The point of the illustration is this. Suppose a vessel made of clay, and that through some malice it has been filled with molten lead; the lead, poured in, has hardened and remains unpourable; the owner claims the vessel, and, having the potter's skill, breaks the earthenware off around the lead, and then remoulds the vessel again in its former shape for his own use, emptied of the material mixed into it. So too the fashioner of our vessel, since vice has been mixed into the sensible part (I mean the bodily), will dissolve the matter that received the evil, and, refashioning it through the resurrection unmixed with the opposite, will recompose the vessel into its original beauty. And there is a certain bond and fellowship between soul and body in the passions that belong to sin, and a certain analogy of bodily death to the death of the soul: for as in the flesh we call separation from sensible life death, so in the soul we name separation from true life death. Since, then, there is one fellowship in evil, as has been said, seen in soul and body (for wickedness proceeds into act through both), for this reason the death of dissolution, which comes from the putting on of the dead skins, does not touch the soul. For how could what is not composite be dissolved? But since there is need that the stains grown into it from sins should also be removed by some treatment, for this reason in the present life the medicine of virtue has been applied for the healing of such wounds. But if it remains unhealed, the healing is reserved in the life after this. And just as there are differences among bodily sufferings, some admitting treatment more easily, others with more difficulty, for which incisions, cauteries, and bitter medicines are employed to remove the disease that has struck the body, so the judgment to come also announces something of this kind for the healing of the sicknesses of the soul. To the more careless this is a threat and a stirring of gloomy things, so that by fear of a painful requital we may be brought to our senses to flee vice; but by the more intelligent it is believed to be a treatment and healing from God, bringing his own creature back to its original grace. For just as those who remove by cutting or burning the calluses and warts that have grown unnaturally on the body do not bring the cure without pain to the one they benefit, yet do not apply the cutting to harm the one who undergoes it, so too whatever material excrescences harden on our souls, made fleshly by fellowship with the passions, are cut and scraped away at the time of the judgment by that ineffable wisdom and power of him who, as the Gospel says, heals those who are ill. “For those who are strong,” he says, “have no need of a physician, but those who are ill.” And because the soul has grown into great natural union with evil, just as the cutting of a wart stings the surface (for what has grown into the nature against nature clings to the subject through a certain sympathy, and there comes about an unnatural blending of the foreign with what is ours, so that the sensation is pained and stung when separated from what is against nature), so too, when the soul is wasted and melted away in the reproofs for sin, as the prophecy says somewhere, there necessarily follow, because of its deep-rooted familiarity with evil, certain unspeakable and inexpressible pains, the description of which is as ineffable as the nature of the goods hoped for. For neither these nor those fall under the power of words or the conjecture of thought. So whoever looks to the end of the wisdom of him who orders the universe would no longer reasonably, from pettiness of mind, call the creator of human beings the cause of evils, saying either that he did not know what would be, or that, knowing and having made him, he is not free from the impulse toward wickedness. For he knew what would be, and did not prevent the impulse toward what happened. For he who comprehends all things by his power of foresight, and sees what follows equally with what is past, was not ignorant that humanity would turn aside from the good. But just as he beheld the deviation, so he also planned its recall back to the good. Which, then, was better: not to bring our nature into existence at all, since he foresaw that what would come to be would fail of the good; or, having brought it into being, when it had fallen sick, to recall it to its original grace? But to call God the maker of evils because of the bodily pains that necessarily befall our fluid nature, or to think him not the creator of man at all, so that he may not be suspected of being the cause of what pains us, belongs to the extreme pettiness of those who judge good and evil by sense perception, who do not know that that alone is good by nature which perception does not touch, and that alone evil which is estrangement from the good. To judge good and evil by pains and pleasures is proper to the irrational nature, in whose case the apprehension of what is truly good has no place, because they have no share in mind and understanding. … naming him the maker of man, we have not forgotten what we established in the introduction against the Greeks, where it was shown that the Word of God, being substantial and subsisting as a hypostasis, is himself both God and Word, embracing all creative power, or rather being power itself, having an impulse toward every good work and accomplishing whatever he wills, because his power runs together with his will; whose will and work is the life of the things that exist; by whom man too was brought into life, adorned in godlike fashion with all the fairest things. But only that which does not have its origin through creation is unchangeable by nature, while all the things that came into subsistence from non-being by the uncreated nature, having begun to exist straight away from a change, always proceed through alteration: if they act according to nature, the alteration is always toward the better for them; but if they are turned aside from the straight path, movement toward the opposite takes them over. Since, then, man too was among these, and the changeableness of his nature slipped toward the opposite; and since, once the withdrawal from the goods had brought in in sequence every form of evil, so that death was brought in by turning from life, darkness came upon the privation of light, vice was brought in by the absence of virtue, and the list of opposites was counted against every good: through whom was he who had fallen by thoughtlessness into these and similar things (for it was not possible for one who had turned away from prudence to be prudent, or for one who had withdrawn from wisdom to plan something wise) to be recalled again to his original grace? To whom did the raising up of the fallen belong, the recall of the lost, the guiding of the wanderer by the hand? To whom else, surely, than to the Lord of the nature? For only to him who had given life in the beginning was it possible, and fitting as well, to recall it when it was perishing. This is what we hear from the mystery of the truth, learning that God made man in the beginning and saved him when he had fallen.

Up to this point perhaps one who looks to the sequence will agree with the argument, since nothing said seems to be outside the conception fitting for God; but toward what follows he will not be similarly disposed, the things by which above all the mystery of the truth is established: human birth, and growth from infancy to maturity; eating and drinking, weariness and sleep, grief and tears, false accusation and court, cross and death, and the laying in the tomb. For these, being included in the mystery, somewhat blunt the faith of the more small-minded, so that because of what was said before they do not accept what follows either. For they do not admit what is fitting to God in the resurrection from the dead because of what is unfitting in the death. But I think one must first withdraw reasoning a little from the grossness of the flesh and consider the good itself by itself and what is not such, and by what marks each of these is apprehended. For I think no one who has reasoned will dispute that in the nature of things one thing only is shameful: the passion of vice; and what is outside vice is foreign to all shame. And that in which nothing of the opposite is mixed is certainly apprehended in the portion of the good; and what is truly good is unmixed with its opposite. And everything seen in the domain of the good befits God. So either let them show that birth, upbringing, growth, progress to the maturity of nature, the experience of death, the return from death are vice; or, if they agree that the things mentioned are outside vice, they will necessarily admit that what is foreign to vice is nothing shameful. And since it is shown to be altogether good, how are those not pitiable in their unreason who teach that the good is not fitting in the case of God?

“But human nature,” he says, “is small and circumscribed, while the Godhead is infinite; how could the infinite be contained by the atom?” And who says that the infinity of the Godhead was contained by the circumscription of the flesh as in a vessel? Not even in our own life is the intellectual nature shut up within the boundaries of the flesh. The bulk of the body is circumscribed by its own parts, but the soul by the movements of thought spreads freely over the whole creation: it ascends to the heavens, treads the depths, traverses the breadth of the inhabited world, and penetrates by its curiosity to the regions below the earth; and often it is in contemplation of the heavenly wonders, not weighed down at all by the burden of the body. If the soul of a man, blended with the body by the necessity of nature, is present everywhere at will, what necessity is there to say that the Godhead is enclosed by the nature of the flesh, and not rather to form, through examples we can grasp, some fitting conjecture about the divine economy? For fire is seen on a torch taking hold of the underlying material; reason distinguishes the fire on the material from the material that kindles the fire, but in fact it is not possible to cut these apart and show the flame by itself, disjoined from the material, but the two together become one (and let no one take along with the illustration the destructiveness of fire, but, accepting only what is fitting in the image, let him reject what is inappropriate and incongruous). In the same way, then, as we see the flame both attached to its subject and not shut up in the material, what prevents us, perceiving a certain union and drawing near of the divine nature to the human, from preserving even in this drawing near the conception fitting to God … even though he was in man?

If you ask how the Godhead is blended with the human, it is time for you to ask first what the coalescence of the soul with the flesh is. And if the manner in which your own soul is united to the body is unknown, do not think that that other matter must by all means come within your comprehension. But just as here we believe that the soul is something other than the body, because the flesh, left alone without the soul, becomes dead and inactive, and yet we do not know the manner of the union, so there too we confess that the divine nature differs from the mortal and perishable in being more majestic, but we are not able to perceive the manner of the blending of the divine with the human. That God came to be in human nature we do not doubt, because of the miracles recorded; but how, we decline to investigate, as being beyond the approach of reasoning. For although we believe that all corporeal and intelligible creation came into subsistence from the incorporeal and uncreated nature, we do not examine the whence or the how along with our faith about these things; but, accepting that it came into being, we leave the manner of the constitution of the universe uninvestigated, as being altogether ineffable and inexplicable.

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.

In the same way, since we had willingly sold ourselves, it was necessary that he who through goodness was taking us back into freedom should devise not the tyrannical but the just manner of recall. And this is, in a way, to give the one in power whatever he might wish to take as ransom for the one held. What, then, was it likely that the ruler would choose to take? It is possible by inference to form some conjecture of his desire, if the evidence of what we are seeking becomes plain to us. He, then, who, as the account given at the beginning of this treatise said, shut his eyes to the good through envy of the one who prospered, and begot in himself the darkness of vice, and fell sick with the love of rule, the beginning and foundation of the inclination to the worse and, as it were, the mother of the rest of vice: for what would he exchange the one he held, if not clearly for something higher and greater in exchange, so that by trading lesser things for greater he might feed the more his passion of pride? Now in all that had been recorded from the beginning of the ages he had known nothing such as he beheld in the one who then appeared: a conception without union, a birth without corruption, nursing from virginity, and voices from the invisible world bearing witness from above to his surpassing worth; the correction of the sicknesses of nature …, accomplished by him simply by a word alone and the impulse of his will; the return of the dead to life; the fear of the demons; authority over the disturbances of the air; the journey through the sea, not with the sea parting on either side and baring its bottom for those passing through, as in the miracle of Moses, but with the surface of the water becoming like dry land under his feet and supporting his step with firm resistance; the disregard of food for as long as he wished; and the abundant feasts in the wilderness of those who were feasted by many thousands, for whom neither did heaven rain down manna, nor did the earth, making grain by its own nature, supply the need, but the munificence came from the ineffable storehouses of the divine power: bread ready, springing up in the hands of those serving as though harvested, and increasing through the fullness of those eating; and the meal of fish, not with the sea contributing to their need, but he who had also sown the race of fishes in the sea. And how could one go through each of the Gospel miracles one by one? Seeing, then, this power in him, the enemy saw in the exchange that what was offered was more than what he held; for this reason he chooses him to be the ransom for those shut up in the prison of death. But it was impossible for him to look at the bare appearance of God without seeing in him some portion of the flesh which he had already subdued through sin. For this reason the Godhead was veiled in the flesh, so that, looking at what was familiar and akin to him, he might not be terrified by the approach of the transcendent power, and, perceiving the power gradually shining out more and more through the miracles, he might think what appeared to be desirable rather than fearful. You see how the good has been joined to the just, and the wise has not been separated from them. For to devise that the divine power should become containable through the covering of the body, so that the economy on our behalf might not be hindered by fear of the lofty manifestation, gives proof at once of the good, the wise, and the just. For to will to save is testimony of goodness; to make the redemption of the one held a matter of exchange shows justice; and by a device to make the uncontainable containable for the enemy gives proof of the highest wisdom.

But it is likely that one who attends to the sequence of what has been said will ask where the power of the Godhead, where the incorruption of the divine power, is seen in what has been said. So that these too may become clear, let us examine what follows in the mystery, in which power is shown above all blended with love for humankind. First, then, that the almighty nature was able to descend to the lowliness of humanity gives greater proof of power than the great and supernatural miracles. For that something great and lofty should be accomplished by the divine power is somehow natural and consistent; and it would bring no strangeness to the ear to say that all creation in the world, and whatever is apprehended beyond things visible, was constituted by the power of God, his will itself giving substance to what he pleased. But the descent to lowliness is a kind of superabundance of power, hindered in nothing even in what is against nature. For upward motion is proper to the substance of fire, and no one would think what is naturally done by the flame worth wondering at; but if one should see the flame flowing downward like heavy bodies, one would count it a wonder how the fire remains fire and yet in the manner of its motion goes beyond its nature, being carried downward. So too the divine and transcendent power is shown not so much by the greatness of the heavens, the radiance of the luminaries, the ordering of the universe, and the continual governance of things that exist, as by the condescension to the weakness of our nature: how the lofty is seen in the lowly, and the height does not come down; how the Godhead, intertwined with human nature, both becomes this and is that. For since, as was said before, it was not in the nature of the opposing power to come into contact with the undiluted presence of God and to endure his unveiled manifestation, so that what is given in exchange for us might be easily taken by the one seeking it, the divine …, so that, as with greedy fish, the hook of the Godhead might be swallowed together with the bait of the flesh; and so, life taking up dwelling in death and light appearing in darkness, what is conceived as their opposite might vanish before the light and the life. For it is not in the nature of darkness to remain in the presence of light, nor of death to exist when life is at work. So, taking up the sequence of the mystery in summary, we shall make our defence complete against those who accuse the divine economy, asking why the Godhead works human salvation through itself. For the divine must in all things be held in fitting conceptions: one thing must not be thought loftily of him while another is cast out of the dignity befitting God; rather, every lofty and pious thought must by all means be believed of God, and each must be bound to the other in sequence. It has been shown, then, that the good, the wise, the just, the powerful, and the incapable of corruption are all displayed in the account of the economy concerning us. Goodness is apprehended in his choosing to save the lost; wisdom and justice were shown in the manner of our salvation; power in his coming to be in the likeness and form of man, according to the lowliness of our nature, and in his being able to be expected, like human beings, to be overcome by death, and yet, having come to be so, doing what was proper to him by nature. And it is proper to light to make darkness vanish, and to life to destroy death. Since, then, having been carried away from the straight road, we turned aside from the life that was ours at the beginning and were brought down into death, what do we learn from the mystery that is beyond reason, if purity touches those defiled by sin, and life the dead, and guidance the wanderers, so that the defilement may be cleansed, the error healed, and what was dead return to life?

That the Godhead came to be in our nature would reasonably bring no strangeness to those who consider things without too much pettiness of mind. For who is so childish in soul as, looking at the universe, not to believe that the divine is in everything, clothing itself in it, embracing it, and dwelling in it? For all things depend on him who is, and it is not possible for anything to exist that does not have its being in him who is. If, then, all things are in him and he in all things, why are they ashamed of the economy of the mystery, which teaches that God came to be among men, when he is believed not to be outside human beings even now? For even if the manner of God's presence in us is not the same as that one, still his being in us is equally acknowledged both now and then. Now he who holds nature together in being is blended with us; but then he was mingled with what is ours, so that by the mingling with the divine it might become divine, rescued from death and set outside the tyranny of the adversary; … becomes for the mortal race the beginning of the return to immortal life.

But perhaps someone, examining the justice and wisdom seen in this economy, is led to think that God devised some deceit of this kind on our behalf. For that God, unrecognized by the enemy, came within the grasp of the one who held power, not in bare Godhead but veiled by human nature, is in a way a deceit and a trick, since it is the mark of deceivers to turn the hopes of those they plot against in another direction and to accomplish something other than what was expected. But one who looks to the truth will agree that this above all belongs to justice and wisdom. For it belongs to the just to assign to each according to desert, and to the wise neither to pervert the just nor to separate the good aim of love for humankind from the judgment of justice, but skilfully to join both together, rendering to justice what is deserved, and, for goodness, not departing from the aim of love for humankind. Let us consider, then, whether these two are not seen in what took place. The repayment according to desert, by which the deceiver is deceived in turn, shows the just; the aim of what was done becomes testimony to the goodness of the one at work. For it is proper to justice to assign to each those things whose beginnings and causes he has laid down, as the earth too yields fruits according to the kinds of seeds sown. It belongs to wisdom, in the manner of repaying like with like, not to fall away from the better. For both the one who plots and the one who heals the victim mix a drug into the food alike, but the one the poison, the other the antidote to the poison, and the manner of treatment in no way spoils the aim of the benefit (for even if a drug is mixed into food by both, yet looking to the aim we praise the one and are angry with the other); so here too, by the principle of justice, the deceiver receives in return those things whose seeds he sowed by his own will. For he who first deceived man by the bait of pleasure is himself deceived by the screen of the man. But the aim of what took place changes things for the better. For he worked the deceit for the corruption of the nature; but he who is at once just, good, and wise used the device of the deceit for the salvation of the one who had been corrupted, benefiting by these means not only the one who had perished but also the very one who had worked destruction against us. For from the approach of death to life, of darkness to light, of corruption to incorruption, there comes the annihilation of the worse and its passing into non-existence, and benefit to the one cleansed from these. … the refiners of gold, consuming by the expenditure of fire what is foreign and to be rejected, bring the more precious material back to its natural lustre; the separation is not without pain, since in time the fire by its consuming power makes the base matter vanish; but still, the melting out of what lay in it to the ruin of its beauty is a kind of healing of the gold. In the same way, since death, corruption, darkness, and whatever is the offspring of vice had grown upon the inventor of evil, the approach of the divine power, working like fire the annihilation of what is against nature, benefits the nature with incorruption, even if the separation is painful. So not even the adversary himself could doubt that what was done was just and saving, if he should come to perceive the benefit. For now, just as those who are cut and burned for treatment are angry with those treating them, stung by the pain of the incision, but if health comes through this and the pain of the burning passes, they will be grateful to those who worked the treatment on them, in the same way, when over long periods evil has been removed from the nature, which is now mixed and grown together with them, when the restoration to their ancient state of those now lying in vice takes place, there will be a thanksgiving with one voice from all creation, both from those who have been punished in the purification and from those who had no need of purification at all. These and such things the great mystery of the divine becoming human hands down. For through the ways by which he was mingled with humanity, passing through all the properties of nature, birth, upbringing, and growth, and going as far as the experience of death, he accomplished all that has been said, freeing man from vice and healing the very inventor of vice. For the cleansing of the disease is the healing of sickness, even if painful …

It follows altogether that he who blended himself with our nature should receive the blending with us through all its properties. For just as those who wash the dirt out of garments do not leave some of the stains and remove others, but cleanse the whole fabric of its spots from beginning to end, so that the garment may be of equal worth throughout, brightened equally by the washing, so, since human life had been defiled by sin in its beginning and end and in everything between, the cleansing power had to pass through all of it, and not to treat one part with the purgative while overlooking another as untreated. For this reason, since our life is bounded on either side by two limits, I mean that of the beginning and that of the end, the power that corrects our nature is found at each limit, taking hold of the beginning, extending itself to the end, and taking in everything between. And since there is one entry into life for all human beings, from where was he who was entering among us to be settled into life? “From heaven,” perhaps says one who spurns the form of human birth as shameful and inglorious. But there was nothing human in heaven, nor had any disease of vice become native in the supramundane life. And he who mingled himself with man made the blending with a view to benefit. Where, then, there was no evil and no human life was lived, how does anyone seek that man should be intertwined with God there, or rather not man, but some phantom and likeness of man? And what correction of our nature would there have been if, while the earthly creature was sick, some other of the heavenly beings had received the divine sojourn? For the sick person cannot be healed unless the suffering part receives the cure itself. If, then, the sick part was on earth, and the divine power, looking to what befitted itself, did not touch the sick part, the occupation of the divine power with things that have nothing in common with us would have been useless to man. For in the case of the Godhead the unfitting is equal everywhere (if indeed it is right to conceive anything unfitting at all besides vice); but for one who pettily judges the divine majesty to consist in not accepting fellowship with the properties of our nature, the indignity is in no way relieved by the divine being conformed to a heavenly rather than an earthly body. For from the one who is lofty and unapproachable in the height of his nature the whole creation stands equally distant below, and the universe is equally beneath him. For what is altogether unapproachable is not approachable to one thing and inaccessible to another, but rises equally above all things that exist. So neither is the earth further from his dignity nor heaven nearer, nor do the creatures living in each of the elements differ from one another in this respect, so that some touch the unapproachable nature and others are separated from it. Otherwise we would suppose that the power that governs the universe does not pass equally through all things, but abounds in some and is more deficient in others; and by the difference of less and more the divine will appear, by consequence, composite and inconsistent with itself, if it were supposed to be far from us in the principle of its nature, but neighbour to some other creature and easily grasped from close by. But the true account of the lofty dignity looks neither downward nor upward by comparison; for all things lie equally beneath the power that presides over the universe. So if they think the earthly nature unworthy of union with the divine, no other would be found to have any worthiness. But if all things equally fall short of the dignity, it befits God to benefit the one in need. When, then, we confess that the healing power went where the disease was, what have we believed that is outside the conception fitting to God?

But they mock our nature and harp on the manner of our birth, and think by this to make the mystery ridiculous, as if it were unfitting for God to take hold of fellowship with human life through such an entrance. But this was already spoken of in the earlier discussions: that only evil is shameful by its own nature, or whatever is akin to vice; but the sequence of nature, arranged by divine will and law, is far from the reproach of vice. Otherwise the accusation against nature would rise up to the Creator, if anything about it were reproached as shameful and unfitting. If, then, the divine is separated from vice alone, and nature is not vice, and the mystery says that God came to be in man, not in vice; and if the entry of man into life is one, through which what is begotten comes into life: what other manner of entry into life do they lay down as law for God, those who judge it reasonable that the nature weakened in vice should be visited by the divine power, but are displeased with the manner of the visitation, not knowing that the whole construction of the body is of equal honour throughout, and that nothing among the things in it that contribute to the maintenance of life is reproached as dishonourable or wicked? For the whole arrangement of the organic members has been ordered toward one aim; and the aim is that man should remain in life. The other organs maintain man's present life, divided among various activities, by which the powers of sense and action are managed; but the generative organs have forethought for the future, bringing in succession by themselves through nature. If, then, you look to usefulness, to which of the things thought honourable would these be second? And than which would they not reasonably be judged more honourable? For not by eye and ear and tongue or any other of the senses is our race carried on continuously; these, as has been said, belong to present enjoyment; but by those, immortality is preserved for humanity, so that death, always at work against us, is in a way ineffective and unaccomplished, since nature always brings itself in again through those who are born to fill what is lacking. What unfitting thing, then, does our mystery contain, if God was mingled with human life through those means by which nature fights against death?

But passing from this, they try again to disparage the doctrine by other means. And they say: “If what took place was good and fitting for God, why did he postpone the benefit? Why, when vice was in its beginnings, did he not cut off its advance to greater extent?” To this our answer is brief: that the delay came about by wisdom and by forethought for what is profitable to our nature, for our benefit. For in bodily diseases too, when some corrupt humour creeps under the pores, before all of what lies there against nature has been uncovered to the surface, those who treat diseases by art do not medicate with things that make the body dense, but wait for all that lurks within to come out, and so apply the treatment to the disease laid bare. Since, then, the disease of vice had lodged in the nature of humanity, the healer of the universe waited until no form of wickedness was left hidden in the nature. For this reason he did not bring the treatment to man immediately after the envy and fratricide of Cain; for the vice of those destroyed in Noah's time had not yet blazed out, nor had the grievous disease of Sodomite lawlessness been uncovered, nor the Egyptians' fighting against God, nor the pride of the Assyrians, nor Herod's lawless murder of children, nor all the other things that are recorded, and those outside history, that were done in the following generations, the root of evil sprouting in many ways in the choices of human beings. When, then, vice had reached its utmost measure, and no wickedness was left undared among men, so that the treatment might proceed through the whole of the sickness, for this reason he treats the disease not when it is beginning, but when it has been completed.

If someone thinks he refutes our account because, even after the treatment was applied, human life still goes wrong through sins, let him be led to the truth by a familiar example. For as with a snake, if it receives the fatal blow on the head, the coil behind does not die at once along with the head, but while the head is dead the tail is still animated by its own spirit and is not deprived of its vital power, so one can see vice, struck by the fatal blow, still troubling life with its remnants. But giving up finding fault with the doctrine of the mystery on these points, they make it a charge that faith does not reach all people. “And why,” they say, “did the grace not come to all, but, while some have joined themselves to the word, the part left over is not small? Either God did not wish the benefit to be granted to all ungrudgingly, or he was not able at all. Neither of these is free of blame; for it befits God neither to be unwilling nor unable to do good. If, then, faith is something good, why,” they say, “is the grace not upon all?” If, then, we too had maintained in our account that faith is allotted to human beings by the divine will, some being called while the rest had no share in the calling, there would be occasion to bring such a charge against the mystery. But if the call is of equal honour for all, making no distinction of worth, or age, or … at the first beginning of the proclamation those who served the word were suddenly, by divine inspiration, made to speak the language of all the nations, so that no one might be without a share in the goods, how could they still reasonably blame God that the Word did not prevail over all? For he who has authority over the universe, through the excess of his honour toward man, left something to be under our authority too, of which each alone is master. And this is the will, a thing unenslaved and self-determining, lying in the freedom of the mind. So such a charge would more justly be transferred to those who were not brought to faith, not to him who called them to assent. For not even when Peter at the beginning preached the word in a crowded assembly of the Jews, and three thousand received the faith at once, did those who disobeyed, though more numerous than those who believed, blame the Apostle for what they were persuaded of. For it was not reasonable, when the grace had been set before all in common, for one who had willingly gone away to blame not himself but another for his ill fortune.

But they are not at a loss for a contentious rejoinder even to this. For they say that God could, if he wished, draw even those who resist by force to the acceptance of the proclamation. Where, then, in this is self-determination? Where is the praise of those who do right? For it belongs only to inanimate or irrational things to be led about by another's will to what seems good to him. But the rational and intellectual nature, if it lays aside what is in its power, loses along with it the gift of intellect. For to what will it use its thought, if the power of choosing anything according to its inclination lies in another? And if the will remains inactive, virtue necessarily vanishes, fettered by the immobility of the will; and if there is no virtue, life is dishonoured, reason goes the way of fate, the praise of those who do right is taken away, sin is unconquerable, and the difference between lives cannot be judged. For who could still reasonably either reproach the licentious or praise the self-controlled, when everyone has this answer ready: that none of our inclinations is in our power, but human wills are led about by a stronger dominion to what seems good to the one who rules? So the charge that faith has not come to be in all does not fall on the goodness of God, but on the disposition of those who receive the proclamation.

What further do the objectors bring forward besides these things? That, above all, the transcendent nature ought not to have come to the experience of death at all, but even without this could have accomplished what it wished with ease by the superabundance of its power; and if it had to …, it ought not to have been outraged by the dishonourable manner of death. “For what death,” he says, “could be more dishonourable than death by the cross?” What, then, do we say to this too? That birth makes death necessary. For he who had once decided to share in humanity had to pass through all the properties of the nature. If, then, human life being bounded by two limits, he had come to be in the one and not touched the next, the purpose would have remained half-accomplished, the other property of our nature not having been touched. But perhaps one who has learned the mystery precisely would say more reasonably that death did not follow because of birth, but, on the contrary, birth was taken on for the sake of death. For he who lives forever does not enter bodily birth because he needs to live, but to call us back from death to life. Since, then, there had to be a return of our whole nature from death, stretching out a hand, as it were, to the one lying down, and for this reason bending down to our fallen corpse, he came so near to death as to touch deadness, and to give our nature the beginning of the resurrection by his own body, raising up the whole man together with himself by his power. For since the flesh that received God, which was raised up together with the Godhead through the resurrection, came from nowhere else but from our lump, just as in our body the activity of one of the senses brings the whole that is united with the part into shared perception, so, as if the whole nature were one living being, the resurrection of the part passes through to the whole, communicated from the part to the whole according to the continuity and unity of the nature. What, then, do we learn in the mystery that is beyond reason, if he who stands bends down to the one who has fallen, so as to raise up the one lying down? As for the cross, whether it contains some other, deeper meaning, those who have knowledge of hidden things would know; but what has come down to us by tradition is this. Since everything in the Gospel was said and done according to the loftier and more divine life, and there is nothing in it in which a certain mingling of the divine with the human does not appear, the voice or the act being carried out in human fashion while what is understood in secret shows the divine, it would follow in this matter too not to see the one and overlook the other, but in the deathless one to observe the human, and in the man to search out the more divine. For it is proper to the Godhead to pass through all things and to extend along with the nature of existing things in every part (for nothing would remain in being unless it remained in him who is; and what is properly and primarily is the divine nature, which the persistence of existing things compels us to believe is in all that exists): this we are taught through the cross, whose shape is divided four ways, so that from the middle, where it joins with itself, four projections are counted; because he who was stretched on it at the time of his economy in death is the one who binds and fits together the universe to himself, bringing the different natures of existing things together through himself into one agreement and harmony. For among existing things something is thought of either above or below, or the thought passes to the lateral limits. If, then, you consider the constitution of things in heaven or things under the earth, or of the limits of the universe on either side, everywhere the Godhead meets your reasoning first, alone seen in every part of existing things and holding all things together in being. Whether this nature should be named Godhead, or Word, or Power, or Wisdom, or anything else of the lofty terms that can better indicate the one who transcends all, our account has no quarrel about a sound or name or form of words. Since, then, all creation looks to him and is around him, and through him becomes coherent with itself, things above growing together with things below and the lateral with each other through him, it was necessary that we be led by the hand to the understanding of the Godhead not only through hearing, but that sight too should become a teacher of the loftier thoughts. Starting from this, the great Paul initiates the people in Ephesus, instilling in them through his teaching the power to know what is the depth and height, the breadth and length. For he names each projection of the cross by its own word: calling the height what is above, the depth what lies below, and breadth and length the lateral extensions. And elsewhere, I think, he makes such a thought clearer to the Philippians, to whom he says that “in the name of Jesus Christ every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.” Here he takes the middle and the arms together in one term, naming “earthly” all that is between things in heaven and things under the earth. This is what we have learned about the mystery of the cross. And what follows from this the account contains in sequence, such that even unbelievers admit that it is nothing foreign to the conception fitting to God: that he did not remain in death; that the wounds made in his body by the iron made no hindrance to his rising; that after the resurrection he appeared to the disciples at will whenever he wished, and was present with them unseen, and came to be in their midst, not needing entry through …; that he strengthened the disciples by breathing the Spirit on them; that he promised to be with them and to be walled off from them by nothing in between; that in what is seen he ascended to heaven, but in what is understood he is everywhere; and whatever else of the kind the history contains: none of these needs the support of reasonings to show that they are divine and belong to the lofty and transcendent power. I think there is no need to go through them one by one, since the account itself shows what is beyond nature. But since the economy concerning the washing is also a part of the mystical teachings (whether one wishes to call it baptism, or illumination, or regeneration, we have no quarrel about the name), it would be well about this too …

For when they hear such a thing from us (that, since the mortal passes over to life, it followed, the first birth leading to mortal life, that another birth should be found, neither beginning from corruption nor ending in corruption, but leading the one born into immortal life; for just as from a mortal birth what is born necessarily came into existence mortal, so from a birth that does not admit corruption the one born may become stronger than the corruption that comes from death); when they hear these and such things, and are taught beforehand the manner, that it is prayer to God and the invocation of heavenly grace, and water, and faith, through which the mystery of regeneration is fulfilled, they are hard to persuade, looking at what appears, as if what is done bodily did not agree with the promise. “For how,” he says, “does prayer and the invocation of divine power over the water become the source of life for those who are initiated?” To them, unless they are very obstinate, a simple argument suffices to bring them to assent to the doctrine. For I will ask in return, since the manner of fleshly birth is plain to all, how that which is laid down for the constitution of the living being becomes a man. There is no account in that case that finds the probable by any reasoning. For what has a man's seed in common with the quality seen in man? Man, when constituted, is a rational and intelligent thing, capable of mind and knowledge; but that is seen in a moist quality, and the mind grasps nothing more in it than what is seen by the senses. The answer, then, that we can expect from those asked how it is credible that a man is constituted from that, we shall give when asked about the regeneration that comes about through water. For there, each one asked has the answer ready, that that becomes a man by divine power, without whose presence it is motionless and inactive. If, then, there the subject does not make the man, but the divine power changes what appears into the nature of man, it would be the height of unfairness, while bearing witness to such power in God there, to think that the divine is weak in this matter for the fulfilment of his will. “What has water in common with life?” they say. “And what,” we shall say to him, “has moisture in common with the image of God?” But there is nothing strange there, if, God willing, the moist passes into the most honourable living being. We say the same in this case too: there is nothing wonderful if the presence of divine power transforms what is born in the corruptible nature into incorruption.

But they seek proof that the divine, being called upon, is present at the sanctifications that take place. Let one who seeks this read again what was examined earlier. For the demonstration that the power manifested to us through flesh is truly divine becomes the defence of the present argument. For once it has been shown that he who was manifested in the flesh is God, having shown his nature by the miracles that took place, it has been shown along with it that he is present in what is done at every time of invocation. For just as each existing thing has some peculiarity that makes its nature known, so truth is proper to the divine nature. And he has promised always to be present with those who call on him, to be in the midst of those who believe, to remain in all and to be with each; and we should need no other proof of the divine being present in what is done, since we have believed him to be God through the miracles themselves, and do not doubt that what was promised is present by the truthfulness of the promise. And that the calling by prayer precedes the divine economy is a superabundance of proof that what is worked is accomplished by God. For if in the other form of the making of man the impulses of those who beget, even if the divine is not invoked by them in prayer, form what is begotten by the power of God, as was said earlier, and when this is withdrawn their effort is ineffective and useless, how much more, in the spiritual manner of birth, when God has promised to be present at what is done and has put his own power into the work, as we have believed, and our will has its impulse toward what is sought, will what is sought be accomplished all the more, if the help that comes through prayer is duly taken along with it? And just as those who pray God that the sun may shine on them in no way blunt what will happen in any case, nor will anyone say that the zeal of those who pray is useless if they entreat God about what will certainly be, so those who have believed, according to the truthful promise of the one who promised, that grace is certainly present to those regenerated through this mystical economy, either make some addition to the grace or at least do not turn away what is present. For that he is certainly present is believed because the one who promised is God; and the testimony to the Godhead is through the miracles. So that the divine is present through all this admits no doubt.

The descent into the water, and the person's being in it three times, contains another mystery. For since the manner of our salvation became effective not so much from instruction handed down as through the very things done by him who entered into fellowship with man, working life in deed, so that through the flesh assumed by him and deified along with him all that is akin and of the same race might be saved together with it, it was necessary to devise some manner in which there would be a kinship and likeness, in what is done, between the follower and the leader. We must see, then, in what things the leader of our life was seen, so that, as the Apostle says, the imitation may be accomplished by those who follow according to the pioneer of our salvation. For just as drill is brought by trained men to skill in arms through what is seen by those who are learning rhythmic armed movement, while he who does not do what is shown remains without share in such skill, in the same way all who have equal zeal for the good must necessarily follow by imitation the one who leads the way to our salvation, bringing into act what he has shown beforehand. For it is not possible to arrive at the same end without travelling by the same ways. For as those who cannot find their way through the wanderings of labyrinths, if they come upon someone experienced, pass through the various and bewildering turnings of the chambers by following behind, which they could not have passed through unless they followed step by step the one who leads, so, I pray you, consider the labyrinth of this life to be impassable to human nature, unless one takes the same road by which he, having been in it, came to be outside what enclosed him. By labyrinth I mean figuratively the inescapable prison of death, in which the wretched race of man was enclosed. What, then, did we behold in the pioneer of salvation? A three-day deadness, and life again. So some such likeness must be devised in us too. What, then, is the device by which the imitation of what happened in him is fulfilled in us too? Everything that has died has a proper and natural place, the earth, in which it is laid and hidden. And earth and water have great kinship with one another, being the only elements that are heavy and tend downward, remaining in one another and held by one another. Since, then, the death of the leader of our life was beneath the earth and according to our common nature, the imitation of death made by us is expressed in the neighbouring element. And as that man from above, having taken on deadness, after being placed beneath the earth, ran back to life on the third day, so everyone joined with him by the nature of the body, looking to the same success (I mean the goal of life), having water poured on him instead of earth and going down into the element, imitates in three rounds the three-day grace of the resurrection. Something of this kind was also said earlier: that death was brought upon human nature by divine providence as a dispensation, so that, vice having flowed out at the dissolution of body and soul, man might be recomposed again through the resurrection sound, impassible, pure, and foreign to any admixture of vice. In the case of the leader of our salvation, the economy of death had its completion, fulfilled perfectly according to its own aim. For through death what was united was separated, and what was separated was brought together again, so that, the nature having been purified in the dissolution of the things grown together, I mean soul and body, the return of what was separated might be pure of foreign admixture. But in the case of those who follow the leader, nature does not admit exact imitation in everything; receiving now as much as it is able, it reserves what is lacking for the time after. What, then, does it imitate? It brings about the annihilation of the mixed-in vice in the image of deadness made through the water; not indeed a complete annihilation, but a certain interruption of the continuity of evil, two things running together for the removal of vice: the repentance of the one who has done wrong and the imitation of death. Through these man is somehow released from his natural union with evil, advancing by repentance to hatred of vice and estrangement from it, and by death working the annihilation of evil. But if it were possible for the imitator to come to be in complete death, what happened would not be imitation but identity, and evil would be annihilated from our nature entirely, so that, as the Apostle says, he “died to sin once for all.” But since, as has been said, we imitate the transcendent power as far as the poverty of our nature admits, by having water poured on us three times and coming up again from the water we represent the saving burial and resurrection that took place in the space of three days, keeping this in mind: that as water is in our power, both to be in it and to come up from it again, in the same way it was in the power of him who holds dominion over the universe, having plunged into death as we into the water, to return again to his own blessedness. If, then, one looks to what is reasonable and judges what happens by the power of each, he will find no discord in what happens, each accomplishing what is within his power according to the measure of his nature. For as water is available to man to touch without danger if he wishes, infinitely more easily is death available to the divine power, both to be in it and not to be changed by suffering. For this reason, then, it is necessary for us to rehearse beforehand in the water the grace of the resurrection, so that we may know that it is equally easy for us to be baptized in water and to rise again from death. But just as among the things that happen in life some are more fundamental than others, without which what happens could not be achieved (although, if the beginning were judged against the end, the beginning of the matter would seem to be nothing compared with the end; for what equality is there between a man and what is laid down for the constitution of the living being? Yet if that were not, neither would this come to be), so too what belongs to the great resurrection, though greater in nature, has its beginnings and causes here. For that cannot happen unless this goes before. I say that man cannot come to be in the resurrection without the regeneration of the washing, not looking to the refashioning and recomposition of our compound. For to this nature must by all means proceed, compelled by its own necessities according to the economy of the one who ordered it, whether it receives the grace of the washing or remains without share in such initiation; but I mean the restoration to what is blessed and divine and separated from all dejection. For not all that receives the return to being through resurrection returns to the same life; great is the interval between those who have been purified and those who still need purification. For those in whom the purification through the washing has gone before in this life, the departure will be to what is akin to them. And impassibility is akin to the pure; and that blessedness lies in impassibility is not doubted. But those in whom the passions have hardened, and to whom no purification of the stain has been applied, no mystical water, no invocation of divine power, no correction from repentance, must necessarily also come to be in what is fitting for them. And the fitting thing for adulterated gold is the smelting furnace, so that, the vice mixed into them having been melted out, after long ages their nature may be restored pure to God. Since, then, there is a cleansing power in fire and in water, those who have washed away the filth of vice through the mystical water do not need the other form of purification; but those uninitiated in this purification are necessarily purified by fire.

For both common reason and the teaching of the Scriptures show that it is not possible for one who has not purely washed away all the stains of vice to come within the divine choir. This is what, though small in itself, becomes the beginning and foundation of great goods. I call it small by the ease of the achievement. For what labour is there in the matter, to believe that God is everywhere, and, being in all, is present also to those who call upon his life-giving power, and, being present, does what is proper to him? And the salvation of those in need is proper to the divine activity; and this becomes effective through the purification in water. And he who is purified will be in participation of purity; and what is truly pure is the Godhead. You see how small and easily accomplished the beginning is: faith and water, the one lying within our will, the other the familiar companion of human life. But the good that springs from these, how great and of what kind, so as to have kinship with the divine itself!

But since the human being is twofold, compounded of soul and body, those who are saved must follow the leader to life through both. The soul, then, blended with him through faith, has from this the beginnings of salvation; for union with the life has fellowship with the life. But the body comes into participation and blending with the Saviour in another way. For just as those who have taken poison through treachery quench its destructive power with another drug (and the antidote, like the deadly thing, must enter the human vitals, so that through them the power of the remedy may be distributed through the whole body), so, having tasted what dissolves our nature, we necessarily needed in turn what brings together what was dissolved, so that such an antidote, coming to be in us, might drive out by its own counteracting power the harm of the poison previously put into the body. What, then, is this? Nothing else than that body which was shown to be stronger than death and became the beginning of our life. For just as a little leaven, as the Apostle says, makes the whole lump like itself, so the body made immortal by God, coming to be in ours, changes and transposes the whole to itself. For as, when something destructive is mixed with what is healthy, the whole mixture is made useless, so too the immortal body, coming to be in the one who received it, changed the whole also to its own nature. But nothing can come to be inside the body except by being mixed with the vitals through eating and drinking. So the body must receive the life-giving power of the Spirit in the manner possible to its nature. And since only that body which received God received this grace, and it has been shown that our body cannot come to be in immortality otherwise than by coming into participation of incorruption through fellowship with the immortal, we must consider how it was possible that that one body, being distributed forever to so many myriads of believers throughout the whole world, comes to be whole in each through the portion, and itself remains whole in itself. So that our faith, looking to the sequence, may have no doubt about the thought before us, it is fitting to turn the discussion aside a little to the physiology of the body. For who does not know that the nature of our body has no life by itself in its own subsistence, but holds itself together and remains in being through the power that flows into it, drawing to itself by unceasing movement what is lacking and pushing away what is superfluous? And just as a skin full of some liquid, if what is in it escapes at the bottom, would not keep the shape of its bulk unless something else came in from above to replace what is emptied, so that one who sees the bulky outline of this vessel knows that it does not belong to what he sees, but that what flows in, coming to be in it, shapes what contains the bulk, so too the construction of our body has nothing of its own known to us for its maintenance, but remains in being through the power brought into it. And this power both is and is called nourishment. And it is not the same for all bodies that are nourished, but a suitable one has been allotted to each by the one who orders nature. Some animals are nourished by digging up roots; for others grass is food; for some the food is flesh. For man, principally, bread; and for the persistence and preservation of the moist element there is drink, not water alone, but often sweetened with wine to support the heat within us. So he who looks at these potentially looks at the bulk of our body. For those things, coming to be in me, become blood and body correspondingly, the nourishment being changed into the form of the body by the power of alteration. These things having been distinguished in this way, we must bring the mind back to the matter before us. For the question was how that body of Christ gives life to the whole nature of human beings, in as many as have faith, being distributed to all and not itself diminished. Perhaps, then, we are coming near a probable account. If the subsistence of every body comes from nourishment, and this is eating and drinking; and in eating there is bread, and in drinking water sweetened with wine; and the Word of God, as was distinguished at the beginning, being both God and Word, was blended with human nature, and, coming to be in our body, did not innovate another constitution for human nature, but gave his own body persistence through customary and suitable means, maintaining its subsistence by eating and drinking, and the food was bread: then, just as with us, as has already been said many times, one who sees bread in a way sees a human body, because that, coming to be in this, becomes this, so there too the body that received God, taking the nourishment of bread, was in a sense the same as it, the nourishment, as has been said, being changed into the nature of the body. For what is proper to all was acknowledged of that flesh too: that that body too was sustained by bread. And the body, by the indwelling of God the Word, was changed to divine dignity. Rightly, then, do I believe that now too the bread sanctified by the Word of God is changed into the body of God the Word. For that body too was potentially bread; and it was sanctified by the tabernacling of the Word who tabernacled in the flesh. So from the same cause from which the bread changed in that body into divine power … made a holy body, whose constitution was from bread, and which was in a way itself bread; and here likewise the bread, as the Apostle says, is sanctified through the Word of God and prayer, not passing into the body of the Word by eating and drinking, but changed immediately into the body of the Word, as was said by the Word: “This is my body.” And all flesh is nourished also by the moist (for without being joined to this nothing earthy in us would remain alive); just as we support the solid part of the body through solid and firm food, in the same way we make the addition to the moist from the kindred nature; and this, coming to be in us, is turned into blood by the power of alteration, especially if it receives through the wine the power to be changed into heat. Since, then, the flesh that received God also received this part for its constitution, and the Word who was manifested mingled himself with the perishable nature of human beings for this reason, that by fellowship with the Godhead humanity might be deified together with him, for this reason he sows himself, by the economy of grace, in all who have believed, through the flesh whose constitution is from wine and bread, blending himself with the bodies of those who have believed, so that by union with the immortal man too may become a sharer in incorruption. And he gives these things by the power of the blessing, transelementing the nature of the things that appear into that.

I think nothing of what is sought concerning the mystery is lacking in what has been said, except the account of faith, which we shall set out briefly in the present treatise too. For those who seek the fuller account, we have already set it out in other works, unfolding the account with precision with all the diligence possible to us; in them we both grappled combatively with our opponents and examined by ourselves the questions brought against us. In the present discourse we thought it well to say only as much about faith as the words of the Gospel contain: that the one born by the spiritual regeneration should know from whom he is born and what kind of living being he becomes. For only this form of birth has it in its power to become whatever it chooses.

For the other things that are born come into existence by the impulse of those who beget them; but the spiritual birth depends on the power of the one who is born. Since, then, the danger lies in this, in not missing what is profitable, the choice being freely open to everyone, I say it is well for one who is moving toward his own birth to discern beforehand by reasoning what father will profit him, and from whom it is better for his nature to be constituted. For it has been said that by free power … Existing things being divided into the created and the uncreated, and the uncreated nature possessing in itself unchangeableness and immutability, while creation is altered toward change, which will one who chooses the profitable by reasoning prefer to become the child of: of the nature seen in change, or of that which possesses a nature unchanging, firm, and ever the same in the good? Now in the Gospel the three persons and names have been handed down through which birth comes to believers, and the one born in the Trinity is born equally from the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (for thus the Gospel says about the Spirit, that “what is born of the Spirit is spirit”; and Paul begets in Christ; and the Father is the father of all): here, I pray, let the mind of the hearer be sober, lest it make itself the offspring of the unstable nature, when it may make the unchangeable and unalterable nature the founder of its own. For according to the disposition of the heart of the one who comes to the economy, what happens also has its power: so that one who confesses the Holy Trinity to be uncreated enters the unchangeable and unalterable life, but one who, through a deceived conception, sees the created nature in the Trinity and then is baptized in it, is born again into the changeable and altering life. For what is born is necessarily of the same kind as the nature of those who beget it. What, then, would be more profitable: to enter the unchangeable life, or again to be tossed in the waves of the unstable and altering life? Since, then, it is clear to everyone who has any share of understanding that what stands is far more honourable than what does not stand, the perfect than the deficient, what does not need than what needs, and what has nowhere to advance but always remains in the perfection of the good than what climbs up by progress, it would be necessary for one who has sense to choose one of the two: either to believe that the Holy Trinity is of the uncreated nature, and so to make it the founder of his own life through the spiritual birth; or, if he thinks the Son or the Holy Spirit to be outside the nature of the first, true, and good God, I mean of the Father, not to take belief in them along with him at the time of the birth, lest he unwittingly adopt himself into the deficient nature that needs one to make it good, and in a way bring himself back into what is of the same kind as himself, having removed his faith from the transcendent nature. For whoever has yoked himself to one of the creatures has unwittingly not placed his hope of salvation in the divine. For all creation, by coming equally from non-being into being, is akin to itself; and just as in the construction of bodies all the members have a natural union with one another, even if some happen to be placed below and others above, so the created nature is united with itself by the principle of creation, and no difference in us of superiority or inferiority separates it from its natural union with itself. For in things of which non-existence is equally conceived beforehand, even if there is difference in other respects, we find no variation of nature in this respect. If, then, man, being created, thinks the Spirit, and the only-begotten God too, to be created, he would be foolish, returning to himself with no hope of change to the better. For what happens is like the notions of Nicodemus, who, learning from the Lord that one must be born from above, because he did not yet grasp the meaning of the mystery, was dragged in his reasonings to his mother's womb. So if he brings himself not to the uncreated nature but to the kindred creation, his fellow slave, he is of the birth from below, not from above. And the Gospel says that the birth of those who are saved is from above.

But it seems to me that the catechesis does not yet have sufficient teaching with what has been said. For I think we must also consider what follows, which many of those who come to the grace of baptism overlook, leading themselves astray by deceit and being born only in appearance, not in reality. For the change of our life that comes about through regeneration would not be a change if we remained in what we are. For I do not know how one who is in the same state can be thought to have become someone else, when none of his distinguishing marks has been changed. For it is clear to all that the saving birth is received for the renewal and change of our nature. Yet humanity in itself does not admit change from baptism: neither the rational, nor the intellectual, nor the capacity for knowledge, nor anything else that properly characterizes human nature undergoes change. For the change would be for the worse if any of these properties of the nature were exchanged. If, then, the birth from above becomes a recomposition of the man, and these things do not admit change, we must consider by the change of what the grace of regeneration is complete. Clearly, when the evil marks of our nature have been wiped out, the change to the better takes place. So if, as the prophet says, having washed in this mystical washing, we become clean in our wills, having washed away the wickedness of our souls, we have become better and have been changed for the better. But if the washing is applied to the body, but the soul does not cast off the stains of passion, and the life after initiation matches the uninitiated life, then, even if it is bold to say, I will say it and not turn back: in their case the water is water, the gift of the Holy Spirit nowhere appearing in what is done, when not only the shame of anger outrages the divine … and the indecent mind, and conceit, and envy, and pride, but also the gains from injustice remain with him, and the woman acquired by him through adultery serves his pleasures even after this. If these and such things surround the life of the baptized alike before and after, it is not possible to see what has been changed, since one sees the same man as before. The one who was wronged, the one who was falsely accused, the one who was driven from his property see no change of what is spoken of in their own case. They have not heard from this man too the voice of Zacchaeus: “If I have falsely accused anyone of anything, I give it back fourfold.” What they said before the baptism, the same they now relate about him, calling him by the same names: greedy, coveter of others' goods, living in luxury on human misfortunes. Let, then, the one who is in the same state, and then prates to himself of the change to the better through baptism, hear the voice of Paul: “If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.” For what you have not become, you are not. “As many as received him,” the Gospel says of those who were born again, “he gave them power to become children of God.” And the child of someone is altogether of the same kind as the one who begot him. If, then, you have received God and become a child of God, show also by your will the God who is in you; show in yourself the one who begot you. By the things by which we know God, the kinship with God of one who has become a son of God must be shown. “He opens his hand and fills every living thing with good pleasure”; “he passes over iniquities”; “he relents over evils”; “the Lord is kind to all,” “not bringing on wrath every day”; “the Lord God is upright, and there is no injustice in him”; and whatever such things we are taught here and there by the Scripture. If you are in these, you have truly become a child of God. But if you remain in the marks of vice, in vain do you prate to yourself of the birth from above. The prophecy will say to you: “You are a son of man, not a son of the Most High. You love vanity, you seek falsehood.” Do you not know that man becomes a son of God in no other way than by becoming holy? It would be necessary to add to this what remains: that the goods set forth in the promises for those who have lived well are not such as to come under description in words. For how could the things “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered the heart of man”? Nor is the painful life of those who have sinned equal to any of the things that pain the senses here. But even if one of the punishments there is named with names known here, the difference is not small. For hearing “fire,” you have been taught to think of something other than this fire, from something being attached to that fire that is not in this one: for that is not quenched, while for this experience has found many means of quenching; and great is the difference between what is quenched and what does not admit quenching. So it is something else, and not this. Again, one who hears “worm,” let him not be carried in thought by the sameness of name to this earthly creature. For the addition of its being endless suggests thinking of another nature besides the known one. Since, then, these things are set before the hope of the life to come, growing up in life correspondingly from each one's will according to the just judgment of God, it would belong to the prudent to look not to the present but to what comes after, and in this short and temporary life to lay down the beginnings of the ineffable blessedness, and by a good will to estrange themselves from the experience of evils, now in life, and afterwards in the eternal recompense … Christ wills …