On the Trinity 10.32–10.52

Where, I ask, is fear in the passion? Where weakness? Where pain? Where shame? The impious say he feared? But he himself proclaims that he wishes to suffer. It is maintained that he was weak? But he shows himself powerful, when his persecutors, struck with dismay, cannot withstand his meeting them. It is charged that he felt the pain of the wounds of the flesh? But in that he restores the flesh of the ear from a wound, though he himself is flesh, he is found outside the fleshly nature of feeling the pain of a wound: because, when he touches the severed ear with his hand, that hand belongs to the body; and when the hand brings the ear out from the wound, that hand is signified not to be of a weak body.

But the cross is said to be shameful to him. Yet through it the Son of Man is to be seen sitting at the right hand of power, and, born a man from the Virgin's childbearing, he has returned in his majesty with the clouds of heaven. Irreligious man, you do not hold the causes of natural things; and while, full of the spirit of impiety and error, you do not understand the mystery of the faith, you fall back with heretical dullness even from the common sense of the world. For everything that is feared must be avoided while it is feared; what is weak takes terror from its feebleness; whatever feels pain has in itself an unchangeable nature of feeling pain; and whatever is shameful is always without honour. But by what sense of reason do you understand that our Lord Jesus Christ fears that toward which he hastens; that he who strikes the strong with dismay trembles with weakness; that he who does not allow wounds to cause pain feels pain when wounded; and that he is dishonoured by the shame of the cross, for whom the cross is a sitting with God and a return to the kingdom?

But perhaps you think this occasion for impiety is left you, that he feared the descent to the underworld and the very necessity of death, since he seems to testify to this very thing with this saying: "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." Reading this and not understanding it, you should either have kept a pious silence or have prayed religiously for its understanding, rather than wander, incapable of truth, with foolish madness through shameless assertion. Are you to believe that he feared the chaos of the underworld, the scorching flames, and the whole abyss of avenging punishments, when he says to the thief on the cross: "Amen I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise"? The power of this nature you will not shut in, I do not say by fear, but even by the region of the lower world; for, descending to the underworld, it is not absent from paradise (just as the Son of Man, speaking on earth, also remains in heaven), promising paradise to his martyr and pledging the delights of completed blessedness. Bodily fear does not hold him who penetrates the underworld indeed, but is extended everywhere by the power of his nature. And the chaos of Gehenna does not claim for itself, by the terror of death, this nature, mistress of the world and immense in the freedom of spiritual power, which the delights of paradise cannot be without. For the Lord, who is to be in the underworld, is also to be in paradise. Cut off, for fear of punishment, a portion of an indivisible nature: place in the underworld something of Christ that may feel pain, and leave in paradise something that may reign. For the thief asks that he remember him in his kingdom. And, believe it, the groan he heard as the nail passed through the palms kindled him to this faith of a blessed confession, and he learned the kingdom of Christ through the pain of a body weakened in Christ! He asks the favour of being remembered in the kingdom; you count the death of the cross as fear. The Lord at once promises him fellowship in paradise; you shut Christ in the underworld under the terror of punishment. This is a faith of a different hope. The thief under the cross won paradise, having confessed the hanging Christ in his kingdom; but you, reckoning Christ in the pain of punishment and the fear of death, must go without both paradise and the kingdom.

When the powers of the sayings and deeds are compared, then, it is shown without ambiguity that in the nature of his body there was not the weakness of bodily nature, since it lay in the power of his nature to drive away every weakness of bodies; and that the passion, though inflicted on the body, did not bring the nature of pain to the body: because, although the form of our body was in the Lord, yet he was not in the body of our defective weakness, not being in the origin of it, since the Virgin brought him forth from the conception of the Holy Spirit; and though she bore him by the office of her sex, she did not receive him from the elements of an earthly conception. For she bore from herself a body, but one conceived from the Spirit; having indeed in itself the truth of its body, but not having the weakness of its nature: since that body which is begotten from the Virgin is the truth of a body, and what took its beginning from a spiritual conception is outside the weakness of our body.

But the heretics seem to strive against the demonstration of the apostolic faith with this saying: "My soul is sorrowful even to death," so that the profession of him who says he is sorrowful testifies to a weakness of nature, through awareness of which he began to be sorrowful. And first I ask the sense of human understanding what it is to be sorrowful even to death. For to be sorrowful because of death and to be sorrowful even to death do not have the same meaning: because where sorrow is because of death, death itself is the cause of the sorrow; but where sorrow is even to death, death is no longer the cause of sorrow but its end. Of him, then, who is sorrowful not because of death but even to death, we must ask why he is sorrowful. And he is sorrowful, not for an uncertain or indefinite time of human ignorance, but even to death. So far was the sorrow not undertaken because of death that it was ended by death.

And so that we may understand the cause of the sorrow, let us see what preceded or follows this profession of sorrow. The Lord had completed the mystery of the whole passion and faith at the paschal supper. After that he teaches that all will be offended in him, but promises that he will go before them into Galilee. Peter pledged with constant faith that, though the rest would be offended, he would not be offended. But the Lord, through the nature of God not ignorant of what would be done, answered that he would deny him three times; so that the offence of the rest might be understood from Peter, since he would fall into so grave a peril of faith by denying him three times. Then, taking Peter, James, and John, two chosen for martyrdom and John to be strengthened for preaching the gospel, he professed himself sorrowful even to death. Then, going forward, he prayed, saying: "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not as I will, but as you will." He asks that the cup pass from him, a cup surely already abiding with him, which was then being completed, to be poured out in the blood of the New Testament for the sins of many. For he does not ask that it not be with him, but that it pass from him. Then he asks that his own will not be done; and what he wills to be brought about, that very thing he does not will to be granted to him. For he says: "Yet not as I will, but as you will"; so that by the will to pray off the cup he signified fellowship with human anxiety in himself, while he did not separate the judgment of the will united to him and common with the Father. And so that he might not be understood to pray for himself, and the reason of the will signified and the petition not to be granted might be complete, he began this whole petition of his with this opening: "My Father, if it is possible." Is something, then, left to the Father of which it is uncertain whether it is possible for him? And if nothing is impossible for the Father, we must understand to whose condition that "if it is possible" was left. For after the request of this prayer there follows: "And he came to his disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter: Could you not watch one hour with me? Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." Is the cause of the sorrow and of the prayer to take away the cup still obscure? For he bids them watch with him and pray for this reason, that they may not enter into temptation, the spirit being willing but the flesh weak. For those who were promising, through the constancy of a faithful conscience, that they would not be offended, were to be in offence through the weakness of the flesh. He is not, then, sorrowful for himself, nor does he pray for himself, but for those whom he urges to pray, watchful, that the cup of the passion may not fall upon them; the cup which he prays may pass from him, namely so that it may not remain on them.

He prayed that it might be taken from him, "if it were possible," for this reason: because, while nothing is impossible for God, as he himself says, "Father, all things are possible to you," yet it is impossible for man not to be overcome by the terror of suffering, and faith cannot be known except through testing. And therefore, both as man for men he wills the cup to pass, and as the will of God from God he is united to the effect of the Father's will. What he said, "if it is possible," he taught plainly in what he said to Peter: "Behold, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail." For through this cup of the Lord's passion all were to be tempted. And the Father is asked for Peter, that his faith may not fail, so that at least the sorrow of repentance might not be absent from the weakness of the one denying; for faith would not fail in him in that he would repent.

The Lord, then, has sorrow even to death: because in his death, by the earthquake, the darkness of the day, the tearing of the veil, the opening of the tombs, and the resurrection of the dead, the faith of the apostles was to be confirmed, a faith which the terror of the night watch, and the mockery of the whole passion in scourges, blows, spitting, the crown of thorns, and the burden of the cross, and finally the condemnation of the accursed cross, would shake. The Lord, knowing, then, that all these things would cease after his passion, is therefore sorrowful even to death; and he knows that this cup cannot pass unless he drinks it, saying: "My Father, this cup cannot pass from me unless I drink it; your will be done": that is, that with the passion completed in himself the fear of the cup would pass, which could not pass unless he had drunk it; that the end of their terror would follow only on the terror of the passion completed in him; because after his death, through the glory of mighty works, the offence of the apostles' weakness would be driven away.

And although in saying "Your will be done" he committed the apostles, in the offence of the cup, that is, of his passion, to the decision of the Father's will, he still used the request of prayer repeated a third time, after which he said: "Sleep now, and take your rest." For not without the awareness of some inner reason does he, who before had rebuked them for sleeping, now bid them sleep and rest. But Luke is thought to have given us the understanding of this exhortation: having said that Satan had asked to sift the apostles like wheat, and that the Lord had prayed for Peter's faith, that it might not fail, he added that after the Lord's long prayer an angel stood by strengthening him; and with the angel present he began to pray at greater length, so that the sweat of his body flowed in drops of blood. For when an angel had been sent to guard the apostles, and the Lord had been strengthened by him so as not to be sorrowful for them, he says now without fear of sorrow: "Sleep now, and take your rest." Matthew and Mark said nothing about the angel or about the devil's demand; but after the sorrow of soul, after the rebuke of the sleepers, after the prayer to take away the cup, the exhortation to the sleepers did not follow for no reason, except that, since he was to be absent from them and was strengthened by the help of the angel granted, he let those to be guarded go to sleep in the security of a guard.

Nor must we be unaware that in very many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin, nothing is found written either of the angel coming or of the sweat of blood. To those, then, who are in doubt whether this is lacking or superfluous in the various books (for this is left uncertain to us by the diversity of the books), certainly, if heresy flatters itself from this, so as to affirm him weak who needed the help of a strengthening angel, let it remember that the Creator of angels did not need the protection of his creature; and then that he was necessarily strengthened in the same way as he was sorrowful. For if he is sorrowful for us, that is, because of us, he must have been strengthened because of us and for us; because he who is sorrowful about us and strengthened about us was strengthened on the same terms on which he was sorrowful. And no one will dare to ascribe the sweat to weakness, because it is against nature to sweat blood. Nor is it weakness which power has done not according to the custom of nature; nor can that in any way belong to the heresy of weakness which serves against the heresy that lies about a phantom, by establishing, through the sweat of blood, the truth of the body. Since, then, both the sorrow is about us and the prayer for us, all things cannot but be understood to have been done because of us, since all things were prayed for us, for whom there was fear.

The Gospels supply each other's fullness, since some are understood from others, because all are the preaching of one Spirit. For John, above all the preacher of spiritual causes, shows this prayer of the Lord for the apostles, passed over in silence by all the others, saying that the Lord prayed thus: "Holy Father, keep them in your name. When I was with them, I kept them in your name; those whom you gave me I have also guarded." That prayer, then, was not for himself but for the apostles; nor is he sorrowful for himself who urges them to pray that they may not be tempted; nor is an angel sent for him who, if he wished, could bring down twelve thousand legions from heaven; nor does he fear because of death who is anxious even to death; nor does he ask that the cup pass him by, but asks that the cup pass from him, which yet cannot pass unless he drinks it. To pass is not to leave a place but to cease to exist altogether, as both gospel and apostolic speech signify when it is said: "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away." And the apostle: "Behold, the old things have passed away, and new things have come." And also when he says: "And the form of this world will pass away." The cup, then, of which he prays the Father that it pass, cannot pass unless it is drunk; and what the Lord prays, he surely prays for those whom, abiding with them, he himself saved, and whom he also left to the Father to be saved. Now, about to carry out the mystery of death, he prays the Father to be their guardian; and the angel sent to him, if indeed it is so, is an unambiguous presence; and there is plain security that the prayer was obtained, since, having finished his prayer, he urges them to sleep. The evangelist shows the effect of the prayer obtained, and the security of the sleep urged, in the very work of the passion, when, as all the apostles are about to slip out of the hands of their persecutors, he says: "That the word he had spoken might be fulfilled, Of those whom you gave me I have lost none." For the request of the prayer is fulfilled through itself, and all are safe. But the Father is prayed that those saved through him he himself may now save in his own name. And he saves them so that Peter's faith, though frightened, does not fail, repentance following.

So, the Lord's prayer having been shown by John, the devil's demand by Luke, and, in Matthew and Mark, the sorrow even to death, the rebuke of sleep, and again the exhortation, nothing ambiguous is left; since by the prayer in John, in which he commends the apostles to the Father, both the cause of the sorrow and the petition for the passing of the cup are resolved: the Lord not praying that the passion be removed from him, but praying the Father to protect the apostles when he was about to suffer; and, the prayer against the devil having been shown through Luke, the permission of the sleep forbidden before is now secure through confidence.

In that nature, then, which is above man, there is no anxiety of human trembling; and a body not begun from earthly elements is outside the evils of an earthly body, since the Holy Spirit brought in the origin of the Son of Man through the mystery of conception. Surely the power of the Most High also mingled its power with the body which the Virgin was bearing from the conception of the Spirit. For since the sense of an animated body lives through fellowship with the soul poured into the body, and the soul mingled with the body quickens the body itself to feel the pain of things inflicted, when that soul, in the blessed warmth of its heavenly hope and faith, has despised the beginning of its earthly origin in its body, the body too, in pain, is made to share its sense and spirit, so that it ceases to feel that it suffers what it suffers: and what more need we say about the nature of the Lord's body and of the Son of Man who came down from heaven? Earthly bodies themselves sometimes do not know how to fear and feel pain at what must necessarily be feared and felt as pain.

For I ask whether the Israelite youths feared the flames of the Babylonian furnace, fed with fuel to blaze, and whether fear of so great a fire came upon that body of our conception. I ask also whether they felt pain at being surrounded by flames. But perhaps they felt no pain because they were not burned; and then it will be thought that the nature of burning was absent from the fire. Certainly the nature of the body was such that it would both fear being burned and could be burned. But if earthly bodies, that is, bodies begun according to the elements of common causes, through the spirit of faith could neither be burned nor fear, then those things which through faith in God are against nature in man are not to be judged by nature in God, when they were begun by the power of the Spirit for the origin of his nature. The youths are bound in the midst of the fire: they do not fear the fire while they climb into it; they do not feel the flames while they pray; they cannot be burned while they are in the fire. In them both the bodies and the fire lose their nature; for neither are the bodies burned nor does the fire burn: and yet in other things both fire and body are in their own nature; for those standing round are burned, and the ministers of punishment are in punishment. You will not have it, impious heretic, that Christ felt no pain when the nail passed through his palms, nor that that wound brought no sharpness of the piercing weapon. I ask why the youths neither feared nor felt pain from the fires, or what nature was in their bodies that surpassed the nature of fire. And if they, by the warmth of faith and the glory of blessed martyrdom, did not know how to fear what is feared, would Christ, even if he had been conceived from the origin of our defects, yet about to remain God through the cross, to judge the world, and to be the king of the eternal ages, be sorrowful with fear of the cross? Unmindful of such great rewards, would he tremble with the anxiety of shameful fear?

Daniel, about to be fed by the prophet's meal, does not fear the lions' den. The apostles rejoice to be beaten and to suffer for the name of Christ. For Paul his being poured out is a crown of righteousness. Martyrs stretch out their necks with hymns to be cut by the executioners, and climb with songs the fires built for them from heaps of wood. So far does the sense of faith, having destroyed in bodies the fear of natural weakness, change the bodies themselves to a sense of not feeling pain, that firmness of body is brought in by the purpose of the soul, and the animated body feels itself only toward that to which it is moved by the zeal of the soul; so that what the mind, from desire of glory, despises to suffer, the body, the soul quickening it, does not feel itself suffer. If these things are natural in men, through the warmth of a soul burning for glory, so that they do not know their sufferings, are unaware of wounds, and do not perceive deaths: will the Lord of glory, Jesus Christ, whose very fringe is power, whose spittle and word are the nature of a body, when the maimed man, no longer maimed, is bidden to stretch out his hand, the man born blind does not feel the defects of his birth, and the one cut off at the ear is not cut off, be reckoned in that weakness of a pierced and suffering body in which the spirit of their faith did not leave glorious and blessed men?

The only-begotten God, then, suffered all the weaknesses of our sufferings that fell upon him; but he suffered by the power of his own nature, as he was also born by the power of his own nature; for, though he was born, he did not fail in his birth to hold the nature of his omnipotence. For though he was born by the law of men, he was not conceived by the law of men: having in himself both the constitution of the human condition in his birth, and being himself outside the constitution of the human condition in his origin. Accordingly he suffered in the body from the weakness of our body in such a way that he took up the sufferings of our body by the power of his own body. And the prophetic word is also a witness to this faith of ours, when it says: "He bears our sins and grieves for us; and we thought him to be in pains, and in stroke, and in affliction. But he was wounded for our iniquities, and was weakened for our sins." The opinion of human judgment is deceived, then, thinking that he feels the pain of what he suffers. For bearing our sins, that is, taking up the body of our sin, he himself does not sin. For he was sent in the likeness of the flesh of sin; bearing sins indeed in the flesh, but ours. And he grieves for us, but does not grieve with the sense of our grief; because, found in condition as a man, he had in himself a body capable of grief, but not the nature of grieving, since his condition is as of a man, and his origin is not of man, being born from the conception of the Holy Spirit. Hence, then, he was thought to be in pains, in stroke, and in affliction. For he took the form of a servant; and, born a man from the Virgin, he brought upon us the opinion of a pain natural to him in his suffering. But he was wounded; but for our iniquities. For although he was wounded, the wound was not of his own iniquity; and whatever he suffers, he does not suffer for himself. For he was not born man for himself, nor is he unjust of himself. The apostle testifies to the cause of this dispensation, saying: "Praying through Christ that you be reconciled to God: him who knew no sin he made sin for us." For, about to condemn sin in the flesh through sin, though without part in sin, he himself was made sin; that is, condemning sin in the flesh through the flesh, not knowing the flesh himself, he was nevertheless made flesh for us; and therefore he was wounded for our iniquities.

For the rest, the apostle knows no trembling at pain in Christ. For, about to speak of the dispensation of the passion, he preached it in the mystery of divinity, saying: "Forgiving you all sins, blotting out the handwriting that was against us in decrees, which was contrary to us, taking it out of the way and nailing it to the cross; stripping himself of the flesh, he led away principalities and powers with confidence, triumphing over them in himself." Does it seem to you that this Power yields to the nail of a wound, and, terrified at the blow of the piercer, changed itself into the nature of feeling pain? Yet the apostle, speaking with Christ speaking in him, and recalling the work of our salvation through the Lord, signifies the death of Christ in such a way that he strips himself of the flesh, puts the powers to shame with confidence, and triumphs over them in himself. If there is necessity in his passion, and not the gift of your salvation; if in the cross there is the pain of piercing, and not the nailing up of the decree by which death was written against you; if in death there is the force of death, and not the putting off of the flesh by the power of God; if, finally, death itself is anything other than the shaming of the powerful, than confidence, than triumph: ascribe weakness, if there is necessity and nature there, if there is force, distrust, and disgrace there. But if, on the contrary, these things are proclaimed in the mystery of the passion, what madness is it, I ask, to reject the faith of the apostolic teaching, to change the sense of religion, and to snatch all this, which is will and mystery, power and confidence and triumph, to the insult of a feeble nature? It is plainly a triumph to be sought for the cross, and, offering oneself, not to be withstood; to stand to the sentence of death, but thence to sit at the right hand of power; to be pierced with nails, but to pray for the persecutors; to drink vinegar, but to complete the mystery; to be reckoned among the wicked, but to give paradise; to be lifted up on the tree, but to make the earth tremble; to hang on the cross, but to put the sun and the day to flight; to go out of the body, but to call souls back into bodies; to be buried dead, but to rise God; according to man to suffer all weak things for us, but according to God to triumph in them all.

There remains for us still, as it seems to the heretics, a great and grave profession of confessed weakness, uttered above all in the Lord's own words, when he says: "God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" What greater complaint can this protest be understood to be, than to complain that he has been forsaken and given over to weakness? But this is the violent presumption of an impious understanding, which it sets against itself in every kind of the Lord's sayings: that he who hastens to death, who is to be glorified through it, who after it is to sit at the right hand of power, amid so many causes of blessedness feared to die, and for that reason complained that he was forsaken by his God to the necessity of dying, when by undergoing death he was to abide in those blessed things!

Indeed, heretical minds strive toward this irreligion as toward a road prepared for them, through the fact that they hold either that God the Word wholly failed into the soul of the body, so that Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, was not the same as the Son of God, and God the Word failed from himself while he quickens the body in the office of a soul; or that Christ was not born man at all, because the Word of God dwelt in him in the manner of the prophetic spirit. But the error of this ridiculous perversity extends itself to a greater boldness of impiety: that Jesus Christ was not Christ before he was born of Mary, since he who was was not born, but only then first began to be what he was born. To this is added the fault that God the Word, as some part of the powers of God, extending itself by a kind of drawing out in continuity, dwelt in that man who began to be from Mary and equipped him with the powers of divine working, while he lived by the movement and nature of his own soul.

Through this subtle and pestilent teaching, then, they are led into error, so that either God the Word became the soul of the body through a change of a nature weakening itself, and the Word ceased to be God; or, again, that man, of an external and bare nature, was animated only by the life of a soul moving him, and in him the Word of God, that is, a kind of power of an extended voice, dwelt. And so the way is opened in every manner for a most impious understanding: either that God the Word failed into a soul and did not remain God the Word; or that Christ did not exist at all before Mary's childbearing; because Jesus Christ, a man only of common soul and body, would have of himself only the beginning by which he began to be man, whom the power of a word extended from outside strengthened for powerful works; who now, deserted by the Word of God when the extension was drawn back again, cries: "God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Or certainly, at the time when he was changed from the nature of God the Word into the soul of the body, having used the Father's help in everything, now, destitute of it and given over to death, he complains of his loneliness and accuses him who leaves him. And in every way a deadly peril of deceived faith is prepared, if either a weakness of nature is thought to be signified in God the Word by the complaint, or God the Word did not exist at all, since for Christ Jesus the beginning is only Mary's childbearing.

But amid these impious and weak opinions, the faith of the church, steeped in apostolic teachings, knows a birth in Christ but does not know a beginning. It knows a dispensation, but does not know a division. It does not allow Christ Jesus to be such that Jesus is not himself Christ; nor does it distinguish the Son of Man from the Son of God, lest the Son of God perhaps not be understood also to be the Son of Man. It does not absorb the Son of God into the Son of Man. Nor does it cut Christ, whose garment woven from the top was not torn, by a threefold faith, so as to cut Jesus Christ into Word and soul and body; nor again does it absorb God the Word into soul and body. For it, God the Word is whole, and the man Christ is whole; holding this one thing in the mystery of its confession, to believe Christ nothing other than Jesus, and to preach Jesus nothing other than Christ.