Homilies of Maximus of Turin (Bruni's collection) 1.1–7.1

You know well how great the joy is, and how great the throng, when the birthday of the emperor of this world is to be celebrated: how his generals and princes, and all who serve in the army as well, carefully dressed in silk garments and girded with elaborate belts costly with gleaming gold, strive to walk in the king's sight more splendidly than usual. For they believe the emperor's joy is greater if he sees greater adornment in his retinue, and that he will be as glad of them as they have been devoted to him at the festival; so that, since the emperor as a man does not see hearts, he may judge their affection toward him at least by looking at their dress. So it happens that whoever loves the king more faithfully adorns himself more splendidly. Then, because they know that on his birthday he will be generous and will give a great many gifts both to his servants and to those in his household who are thought lowly and of no account, they first hurry to fill his treasuries with a great variety of riches, so that however far his favor wishes to go, a plentiful supply for giving may not be lacking, and the will to give may fail before the means of bestowing. They do this so anxiously because they hope for a greater reward for this care. If, then, brothers, the people of this world, for the glory of present honor, receive the birthday of their earthly king with such a display, with how much care ought we to receive the birthday of our eternal King Jesus Christ, who in return for our devotion will grant us not temporal glory but eternal, and will give not the administration of an earthly office, which ends with a successor, but the dignity of the heavenly kingdom, which has no successor? What our reward will be, the prophet says: “For eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him.” With what garments, then, must we be adorned? When I said “we,” I meant our souls; for Christ our King requires not so much bright clothing as the devotion of souls; he does not look at the ornaments of bodies but considers the hearts of the deserving; he does not admire the elaborate work of a fragile belt girding the loins, but far more the strong belt of chastity binding lust to modesty. Let us strive, then, to be found before him approved in faith, adorned with mercy, careful in conduct; and let whoever loves Christ more faithfully array himself more splendidly by keeping his commandments, so that he may see that we truly believe in him when we shine like this at his feast, and may be the gladder the purer he sees us to be. And so for many days beforehand let us make our hearts chaste, cleanse our conscience, purify our spirit, and receive his coming bright and without stain, unblemished, so that the birthday of him whose birth came about through an unblemished virgin may be kept by unblemished servants. For whoever is filthy and polluted on that day cares nothing for Christ's birthday or for his own vow. Though he be present in body at the Lord's festival, in mind he is separated far from the Saviour. The unclean and the holy, the greedy and the merciful, the corrupt and the virgin cannot have fellowship, except that by thrusting himself in the unworthy man incurs the more offense, since he does not know himself at all. For while he wishes to be dutiful, he becomes insulting, like the man in the Gospel who, invited into the company of the saints, dared to come to the wedding without a wedding garment; and while one shone with righteousness, another gleamed with faith, another was radiant with chastity, he alone, polluted with a foul conscience, was squalid and ugly amid all their splendor; and the more brightly the holiness of the blessed guests reclining together shone, the more plainly the wickedness of his sins appeared. He might perhaps have given less offense if he had not put himself into the company of the righteous. Therefore he was bound hand and foot and cast out into the outer darkness, not only because he was a sinner, but because, though a sinner, he claimed for himself the merit of holiness. Therefore, brothers, as we are about to receive the Lord's birthday, let us cleanse ourselves of all the dregs of sins; let us fill his treasuries with gifts of every kind, so that on the holy day there may be something from which strangers may receive, widows be refreshed, and the poor be clothed. For what will it be like if in one and the same house, among the servants of one master, one exults in pure silk and another wastes away in rags; one is hot with food, another endures hunger and cold; one belches yesterday's surfeit of indigestion, and the other cannot relieve yesterday's hunger from fasting? Or what will be the effect of our prayer? We ask to be freed from the enemy, we who are not free-handed toward our brothers. Let us be imitators of our Lord. For if he willed the poor to be our partners in heavenly grace, why should they not be our partners in earthly goods? Those who are brothers in the sacraments are not strangers in nourishment; rather, we plead our own cause more rightly before God through them when we feed at our own expense those who give him thanks. Whatever blessing the poor man gives the Lord profits the one by whose doing he blesses the Lord. And as it is written of the one, “Woe to that man through whom the name of the Lord is blasphemed,” so it is written of the other: “Peace to this man through whom the name of the Lord the Saviour is blessed.” And how great is the merit of the giver, that one person does the work at home and through many the Lord is entreated in the church; and what he perhaps would not dare to ask of the Godhead, through the prayers of many interceding he receives, even what he did not hope for. Recalling this for our help, the blessed apostle says: “so that thanks may be given by many on our behalf.” And again: “that our offering may be acceptable, sanctified in the Holy Spirit.”

Perhaps, brothers, you are puzzled why the Lord, announcing his coming, showed that he would come in the night-time, when surely his coming ought to be received by all in the great brightness of day, with great splendor and fear. For we have often heard it proclaimed in the sacred Scriptures that before the Lord Christ comes the Antichrist will reign, who will pour the darkness of his depravity over the human race so that almost no one looks back to the light of truth; and, covering the minds of men with his own gloom, he will bring a kind of blindness on their spiritual eyes. Nor is it surprising if the devil sends forth the darkness of iniquity, since he himself is the night of all sins. To drive away his dismal gloom, then, Christ will come like a flash of lightning. And as night is overthrown when day dawns, so when the Saviour flashes forth the Antichrist is put to flight; and he will no longer be able to spread the darkness of his iniquity when the light of truth has shone out. When he says, “On that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and one will be left,” the merit of the resurrection is already shown here: the grace of rising will accord with the quality of one's life, and so great is the difference of resurrection between individuals that even of two sleeping side by side and resting in one place the taking up cannot be equal. For though they are held in the same shared bed, yet according to their merits one of them will be caught up to heaven, the other left on earth. Our common bed is the vast ground of this earth, in which our bodies, laid down, rest in a most secure place. In this bed he sleeps more softly who has conducted himself more hardly in life. We may also call our very limbs our own beds, in which our souls dwell as on a most pleasant couch; and I think the holy prophet meant this when he says: “You have turned over his whole bed in his sickness.” Blessed is he whose bed the Lord turns over in his very sickness, so that one who a little before was wrathful, an adulterer, wanton, and full of the sicknesses of every crime becomes chaste, humble, and modest, the Lord turning his body from its accustomed evil. Of this bed the Lord spoke spiritually to the paralytic: “Rise, take up your bed, and walk.” For the wonder in him was not so much that the paralytic carried the wooden frame of a broken bed as that he himself carried the limbs of his loosened body, broken by weakness, as the necessary bed of his soul, and in the presence of the Jews went away on his own feet, he who had been brought by the hands of others. In this plainly, as I said, that prophetic saying was fulfilled: “You have turned over his bed in his sickness”; by a reversal he carried the bed in which a little before he had been carried, and his soul, which earlier was borne by the vessel of the body, afterward more usefully carried its body about. The words “There will be two in one bed; one will be taken and one will be left” can also be understood of the Christian people and the people of the Jews, who are held as in one bed, that is, by one set of commandments, and who boast of a like form of resurrection. Then the blessed people of the Christians will be taken up into glory, but the assembly of the Jews will be left on earth.

Last Sunday, discussing a chapter of the Gospel, we touched on part of it; it remains to run through what follows. We explained what the Lord meant when he said, “On that night there will be two in one bed,” and so on. Now let us look at what remains. For the divine sentence says: “There will be two women grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one will be left.” First, then, we must consider what the work of grinding consists of; next, who the two are who are said to grind; third, what the mill is and what the grinding produces. No one doubts that grinding happens only with two stones prepared and fitted to each other, so that the bulk of one is set upon the other. The stone laid down first is sluggish and slow and, so to speak, almost idle, and unless it were furnished with the partnership of the upper stone it would perhaps seem unnecessary; so while the other works, this one too is found useful. The other, the upper stone, is whirled round with all the speed of its work, so that, deceiving the eyes by its very swiftness, it is believed to stand still and is thought motionless while it runs; and the more violently it is driven, the more perfectly the work is finished. So the first stone stands, lies, and does almost nothing; but the other takes in all that is put in and embraces all that comes, and through certain little hollows each obtains what it is to work on. The miller's task seems to be this: with watchful care to break the hardness of the grains and bring out from their inmost, hidden parts the fine flour and the marrow, and, shaking off the light refuse, to bring into the open all that is pure, from which, making the cleanest bread, he may win his master's favor. These two millstones I take to be the two Testaments, that is, the law of Moses and the Gospel of the Lord, which are so arranged and prepared that each Testament fits the other, as the Saviour says: “I did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.” And as with millstones, one was laid first on the ground and the other placed on top: that is, the law was first established for men, then the perfect Gospel. This law, like the stone of the lower millstone, was so slow, sluggish, and wholly idle that whatever it had received for working it lost entirely, as the prophet says of the Jews: “All have turned aside, together they have become useless; there is none who does good, not even one.” So unless the Gospel had been laid on top, the law would still lie, slow and heavy, in the land of Judea, covered within the narrow bounds of one province. Unless the Gospel, I say, had been given, the law would not have been necessary at all. Without the Gospel the law did what one stone can do: it could break, not benefit, as the blessed apostle says, “For the law brings about wrath”; but it does not bestow grace. While the law still stood, the Gospel was given, which, laid upon the Old Testament, adorns both, and with its speed goes round the whole world: it visits the underworld, penetrates the heavens, and lights up the earth. This Gospel, like the upper millstone, takes in all believers, receives all who come, and through the little hollows, as it were, of its commandments passes them to the inner parts, so that there, the roughness of paganism softened on either side by the saving commandments of the two Testaments, it may bring out all that is pure. I think the prophet Ezekiel touched on this likeness of the Testaments when he says that a wheel was joined in the midst of a wheel. By the working of these millstones, that is, of the New and Old Testaments, holy Church with watchful care does this: shaking off the roughness of sins, she draws out from hidden thoughts the marrow of a clean heart and, cleansed by the heavenly commandments, brings forth spiritual food from within. Of this food the apostle Paul says: “I gave you milk to drink, not solid food.” And again: “But solid food is for the perfect,” who by practice have their senses trained. And, purifying our spirit of all that is merely human, she strives to offer it to God like fine flour, as holy David says: “A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit.” The Gospel is whirled round with such speed that only the wise understand its course; understanding it, blessed Paul says: “That the word of God may run and be glorified among you.” But to the eyes of the foolish the Gospel seems to stand still while they look; they think it stands still, I say, when they neglect its commandments, when they do not believe that what is written will come to pass. The synagogue also grinds, but grinds uselessly, since it tries to work with one stone; and so it does not so much grind as scatter and break. That is why its work displeases, and it is said to the Jews through the prophet: “Even if you bring fine flour, it is an abomination”; and the Lord himself, rejecting its work of grinding, says: “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.” So the synagogue toils at grinding, sustaining error. Because Moses had received two stone tablets of the covenant, it supposes it works with the two necessary instruments, not knowing that the pairing of the tablets prefigured the coming of the two Testaments that cohere with each other. And therefore holy Church, which grinds out for the Lord the food of holiness, will be taken up into eternal glory, but the synagogue will be left at the blood-stained millstones, ever to suffer the round of its own unbelief. [Here it ends.]

Even if I were silent, brothers, the season reminds us that the birthday of the Lord Christ is near. For the very ending of the days anticipates my preaching. By its very narrowness the world says that something is at hand by which it will be renewed for the better, and with eager expectation it longs for the brightness of a more splendid sun to light up its darkness. For while it has had to close its course with the shortness of its hours, it shows by a kind of hope that its year is being reformed. This expectation of creation, then, persuades us too to wait, so that Christ, the new sun, rising may illumine the darkness of our sins, and the sun of righteousness may scatter the long gloom of our offenses in us by the vigor of his birth, and may not allow the course of our life to be shut in by darkness, but widened by the grace of his power. So since we know of the Lord's birthday even from the world's telling, let us also do what the world is accustomed to do: just as on that day the world extends the spaces of its light, so let us extend our righteousness; as the brightness of that day is common to poor and rich, so let our generosity be common to strangers and the needy; as the world then cuts back the gloom of its nights, so let us cut off the darkness of our avarice; and as in winter, when the frost is thawed by the sun's warmth, seeds are nourished in the fields, so in our breasts, their hardness thawed, let the seed of righteousness, warmed by the Saviour's ray, grow. Therefore, brothers, as we are about to receive the Lord's birthday, let us adorn ourselves in pure and shining garments. I speak of the garments of the soul, not of the flesh. The clothing of the flesh is a cheap wrap; the garment of the soul is a precious body. The one is woven by human hands; the other was made by the hands of God; and so it calls for greater care to keep God's work without stain than to keep men's works unsoiled. A worldly garment, if it gets dirty, a fuller can wash for hire; but the garment of the soul, once stained, is hardly washed except by one's own constant works. The craftsman's hand does it no good, nor the fuller's work: water can wash the polluted limbs of the conscience but cannot cleanse them. These are the precious garments of the soul that the evangelist Mark praises in the Saviour, saying: “And his garments became shining, exceedingly white like snow, such as no fuller on earth can make.” Christ's garment is praised, then, because it shone not by its weave but by grace; the clothing is praised, not because it was woven of fine threads, but because it was conceived in bodily integrity; the garment is praised, not because women's hands wove it, but because Mary's virginity brought it forth. And so the grace of its whiteness is extolled in it, because no craftsman's care had made it spotless. “Such as no fuller,” he says, “on earth can make.” Plainly no fuller can make Christ's garment; for a fuller can provide brightness, cleanness, and purity, but cannot provide virginity, righteousness, and goodness. The one belongs to the art of a craft, the other to the nature of virtue. These garments of the virtues the holy evangelist praises in Christ the Lord, and blessed David also proclaimed them with like meaning, saying: “Myrrh and stacte and cassia from your precious garments.” By these fragrant spices are signified the garments of the holy virtues. Therefore, brothers, as we are about to receive the Lord's birthday, let us cleanse our conscience of all dregs. Let us adorn ourselves not with silk clothes but with precious works. Shining clothes can cover the limbs but cannot cleanse the conscience; rather, it is the more shameful to walk with shining limbs and polluted senses. Let us first adorn the disposition of the inner man, so that the clothing of the outer man may also be an adornment. Let us wash away spiritual stains, so that the fleshly garments on us may shine. It profits nothing to shine in clothes and be filthy with crimes. For where the conscience is dark, the whole body is darkened. But we have the means to wash away the stains of conscience, for it is written: “Give alms, and all things will be clean for you.” Good is the commandment of almsgiving, by which we work with our hands so that we may be cleansed in heart. [Here it ends.]

Last Sunday, brothers, we reminded your charity of the coming of this day, on which we said we receive the Lord's birthday today with the world itself as witness. For the world bears witness, since when Christ is born it too is reborn. It is reborn when it is drawn out from the deep darkness of the nights by a kind of birth of light. It is reborn, I say, when its waning ends and its brightness is restored. And so at the rising of Christ we ought rather to speak of the rising of the world. For on this day he rises to save all things. On this day light rises for the world, resurrection for the dead, life for mortals; and therefore today is not so much the birthday of the Saviour as of salvation. So Christ, the salvation of all, is born, whom the prophets testify to be king of the nations; he is born of a virgin, as Isaiah declares, saying: “Behold, a virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and they will call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us.” The manner of his birth, then, proves the Lord's truth. A virgin conceived without knowing union with a man; the womb is filled though touched by no embrace; a chaste womb received the Holy Spirit, whom pure members kept and an innocent body carried. See the miracle of the Lord's mother. She is a virgin when she conceives, a virgin when she gives birth, a virgin after the birth. Glorious virginity and splendid fruitfulness! The Power of the world is born, and there is no groaning of one in labor; the womb is emptied, the infant is received, and virginity is not violated. For it was fitting that when God was born the merit of chastity should increase, and that integrity should not be violated by the coming of him who had come to heal what was corrupt, nor bodily purity injured by him through whom the virginity of baptism is given to the impure. The child, once born, is laid in a manger, and this is God's first cradle; nor does the ruler of heaven disdain these narrow quarters, whose dwelling was a virgin's womb. Mary was plainly a fit dwelling for Christ, not for the condition of her body but for her original grace. So Mary, delivered of her happy burden, knows with joy that she is a mother, though she does not know herself as a wife; she is glorious in her offspring who knows nothing of a husband; she marvels that she has borne an infant, while she testifies that she received the Holy Spirit; nor is she afraid because she gave birth unwed, since she has the testimony of her virginity and her offspring. The offspring points to the Lord as Father; the virginity removes the suspicion of those who are astonished. On the one side the Godhead bears witness to virginity; on the other, the secret of nature. The Godhead, I say, bears witness to the virginal birth. For in order that Christ may be conceived, according to the announcement of the Gospel she is filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit and overshadowed by the power of God the Father, as was said to Mary: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and therefore the holy one who will be born of you will be called the Son of God.” In the Saviour's birth, then, that divine sentence was fulfilled which says: “On the testimony of two or three witnesses every word shall stand.” For behold, the Word of God is born with the testimony of the Trinity. For surely in the womb of holy Mary, when the Holy Spirit comes upon her, when the Most High overshadows her, when Christ is begotten, the confession of faith is contained. It was fitting that the Mother who was to bring forth salvation for the peoples should first confirm in her womb the mystery of the Trinity; and so we would understand that the sacrament of faith was confirmed before the Saviour's birth. For Mary carried the priest with the mystery as in the sanctuary of her womb; for whatever was to profit the world came wholly from her womb: God, priest, and victim; God of the resurrection, priest of the offering. All this we recognize in Christ. He is God, in that he returns to the Father; high priest, in that he offered himself; victim, in that he was slain for us. So I would say that Mary's womb was not a womb but a temple: plainly a temple, in which dwells whatever is holy in heaven; except that it is to be reckoned above the heavens, where, as in a more secret tabernacle, the mystery is arranged by the Godhead of how heaven is to be ascended by many. Mary's womb is plainly to be reckoned above the heavens, because it sent the Son of God back to heaven more glorious than he had come down from heaven. From there he came down to suffer; from here he returned to reign; from there he came down humbled into man; from here he ascends glorified to the Father. The temple of the body is plainly better than that of heaven. For Christ dwells in both: there he is terrible, here approachable; there invisible, here visible and tangible; there he punishes sins, here he forgives them; there he uses a judge's power, here he exhorts his brothers with love. And so it is good for us to worship him when he invites, so that we need not fear him when he judges. [Here it ends.]

Celebrating, brothers, with due honor the most solemn birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, let us exult and rejoice in the Lord that at last there has come from heaven to earth as a man he who is the Son of the eternal God, to redeem us from slavery to the devil; that the dweller in heaven has come down from heaven to lead the inhabitants of earth into heaven. For today from a virgin who knew no dealings with any man there came forth a man who is at once God and man. Today one and the same was born God without carnal conception and made man without any begetter. God begot him from eternity, and in time a chaste virgin received him by the working power of almighty God. He was born from eternity without any beginning of his being; he arose in time from an unblemished virgin. In the first birth he was born God; in the second he was brought forth man. In the first, as God, he made man; in the second he freed man from the chains of sin by which he was held. Exult, then, and rejoice, Sion, since you are freed from all fear of your forefather's ancient transgression. For the Lord has arisen in the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, who mercifully absolved our guilt, the guilt by the devil's frauds of which wretched mortality had so long been ensnared, and in his love shook from our necks the yoke of ancient slavery. God, the Son of God, was born of a woman, wrapped in swaddling cloths, and laid in a manger. [Migne's note: a leaf is missing here; then follows:] To him, then, at once God and man, let us draw near with humble heart, sincere mind, and chaste service. And although we are harried by the clashing arms of foreigners, stirred up by the discord of quarreling kings, we ought not on that account to fail to celebrate the most sacred mysteries of this day with joy; rather, let us honor them with fitting joy, praying God that in his love he may deign to free us from these dangers and guard us. [Migne's note: ten lines are missing here, faded in the manuscript.] Let us, then, offer ourselves to him, so that, freed by his love from the evils that press upon us, etc. [Migne's note: the rest is missing.]

The holy and venerable sacrament of the Lord's birth, which we venerate every year as it returns with ever most devout celebration, excels by such condescension of its mystery that it confounds both the boldness of the pagans and the shamelessness of all heretics. For that God whom we, taught by faith, believe unfailingly with the simplicity of little children could be born of a woman, the pagans on the contrary (to set the heretics aside for now), dulled by carnal arguments, still refuse to believe could be born of a virgin, and they mock the priest of Christ who teaches this. And however much they themselves think and marvel that God does wonders daily in other things and has so often worked them elsewhere, yet in the most holy and wonderful birth of his Son, our Redeemer, alone they contend that he neither could nor should have done so. But what is this foolish doctrine, I would rather say madness, of the wise of this world: to believe that God once did wonders and does them even now, yet that in the most sacred birth of his Son our Lord from a virgin he could in no way accomplish this? For the one and the same God who once by divine art created from nothing heaven and the heavens of heavens and each thing in them; who likewise by the almighty power of his Word formed from nothing the earth, the waters and the seas, and what they contain: he it is who gave a virgin childbirth and offspring. If you believe that God could make heaven, sun, and stars from nothing; if you [admit] that he could make the earth, the seas, the living creatures, and the whole adornment of this visible world, and finally could fashion man from clay, why do you contend that he could not give it to an untouched virgin by the working power of God himself? For which will be the greater power of almighty God: to have created from nothing all that he sees in the heavens and in the world, or to create a man in the womb of an inviolate virgin without any preceding carnal embrace? If you marvel at the Creator's omnipotence in the things that are seen, why will you deny it in the childbirth of an inviolate virgin? What will that foolish madness be [Migne's note: two lines are missing here, wholly faded] … did all things whatsoever he willed in heaven and on earth, since his almighty power willed and was able to do them. But that a virgin could give birth by the working power of God, and truly did give birth … [Migne's note: a leaf is missing here, and only the mutilated conclusion remains.] And so, brothers, celebrating the most holy feast of so great a mystery, let us always worship our God, who did such great things for the unworthy … [Migne's note: ten more lines are missing here, wholly erased.] To him, then, let us hasten with constant prayers, who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen. [Here it ends.]