The Divinity of Christ

God is three in the highest, a threefold form, one power; Wisdom was begotten from the Father’s heart: that is the Son; the Holy Spirit subsists from eternity from the mouth [of God]. Neither is the Father older in time, nor greater in light; for God, being wise, always from before brought forth from himself the Word, through whom there always were ages to be begotten. To bring forth the Word is the Father’s; but the rest is the Word’s: to bear the man he assumed, to restore him who had perished, to reconcile him to the Father, to place him on the right-hand seat. The Spirit of God completes these things: God himself, ready to pour out his charisma on faithful peoples, transfers the power of both Father and Christ into bodies. Is our sect true? I consult you, Master. Do we keep the right faith? Or are we not on guard against viperous doctrines, and slip without knowing it? The narrow way of salvation can scarcely be discerned among the winding paths. So many crossroads of the faithless rise up, polished with twisted errors: crooked diversions join one another, with tracks woven on this side and that; if anyone, erring and wandering, follows them, leaving the straight path, he will fall headlong into the pit of a hidden ditch, which the enemy’s hand has dug, the hand of robbers, which besets travelers who follow the out-of-the-way road. What will the lust of the human mind not build? What evils will it not itch for?

They attack the state of the almighty God with slanderous quarrels. They cut the faith to pieces with minute evasions, each according to the wickedness of his tongue; they loose and bind the chains of questions through plaited syllogisms. Woe to the captious tricks of the sycophants! Woe to the turncoat cunning! The straight rule bursts the tenacious knots, hostile to the disputants. That is why God chose the foolish things of the world, so that sophistries might fall, and subdued the strong by the weak, so that believing might be simple. See, a stone is set for us to stumble on, against which vanity may strike, a sign to the wary, to the unwary a stumbling block: this one it lays low, that one it guides. While the blind man tries many ways with uncertain step, he runs into what is in his way. The torch of Faith alone must be carried before our steps, so that our footsteps may be straight. Who is the enemy who in the darkness strikes those who wander, drags them and tramples them? He who savagely devours the grain scattered on the very path of those who go along; he who, a thief, corrupts the glad crops of Christ, adding rival wild oats, which, fertile in grass from the milk of poison, the farmer allows to grow, lest perhaps the empty root, pulled up with them, should destroy the stalk with its ear. So he waits until ripeness, seething, cooks the deceitful and the wheaten, so that the winnowing-fan may give each chosen thing to the barns and burn the refuse in the fires. But it matters to know the very seeds of the darnel, which kill the harvest.

There are very many errors, but I will speak of few, lest dire doctrines, wickedly published, should stain the catholic tongue even by the daring of telling them. One, driving the Father from his throne, thrusts him down into the narrow burden of a human body, and does not fear to expose him to death and fix him to the hard wood. Is God capable of suffering? whose form and image no one has ever seen; for that majesty is not easy to be grasped by sense, or eyes, or hand. [John] has testified that God could never be seen. That Father, whom no keen gaze, looking from afar, has penetrated with the sharpness of burning sight, who did not put on the form of man, and does not limit the immensity of his godhead by an assumed face or measure: either the piety of the Gospel book must be spurned, or the Father’s power is untouched, not to be mixed with perishable things. But yet there is also a form of the Father which it is lawful to see, ready at times to meet human eyes; which, though dull with a gray glass of gazing, the cloudy man with moist sight could approach. Whoever of men is recorded to have seen God saw the Son, poured forth from him: for this is the Son, who, flashing forth from the Father, presented himself to be looked on through forms which man can grasp by sight. For the pure majesty is infinite, nor does it enter the gaze, unless it shapes itself by some measure. This the prince of the noble seed, Abraham, saw, a man who was host to the godhead shining in a threefold figure. This the arms of wrestling Jacob handled. The giver of the divine law himself approached face to face, close at hand, and joined words in sacred speech,

perceived that he saw Christ in the likeness of flesh. But, seeking greater things, he stretched his mind through prayers not granted to man, laboring for more than mortal, to see Christ himself, as great as he was, without a body. At last, after the exchange of much speech, and after the sight of his present Master and long companionship, “I pray,” he says, “that I may now know you, best God.” The Lord answered: “To the righteous I will give to see my back parts, not me.” What could be plainer: that without a borrowed face assumed, the Word cannot be seen? Yet he can, when he wishes, though the Father is never seen by earthly eyes, show himself in our dress; and often, adapted, he takes on angelic or mortal forms, so that he may be seen under an image. This is the Word, which, sent forth from the kindly mouth of the Father, took a fragile form from a virgin’s body. Hence the figure of a man, not yet in flesh, set before Moses, had marked out the likeness of our face: for, as God was one day to take a body, drawn together by the power of the Word, he showed the same face. And yet a fire, roused, was seen to burn the bramble, and the harmless fire drove through the wounding foliage, so that it might be an example that God would come down into thorny limbs, which crimes weave with dense stakes, and sins fill, bristling with evil pains. For the faulty shrub, from an uncultivated stock, had begun to pour out luxury with wicked shoots and shameful sap, and bound knots through frequent points. One could see the barren leaves suddenly shine, God glowing, and not harming the thorny weave, licking the bloody fruits and gory apples,

gathering the life-giving shoots of the death-bearing tree, since sad sins are cleansed by blood. So nothing was seen except what was to be seen under flesh: the Light, the image of God, the Word, God, and God fire, who fills the bramble of our body’s sin. For the begetter of light, the sower of the Word, the author of the fire too is believed to be beyond the eyes, as the Apostle, the authority, teaches, who denies that the fountain of the godhead can be approached by sight: believe, no one has seen God; believe me, no one. God from the fountain is visible; the fountain of God itself is not visible: he who is born can be seen, but the unborn cannot be seen: that mouth of the Father is hidden from which God comes; who once made himself visible, forming in himself something like what followed, the passion, which claims a body for itself; for the lofty power is impassible, since the nature of the heavenly fire knows not how to descend to dreadful punishments, nor can it be tortured by human anguish, pure, serene, flashing, free in clear motion, subject to no one, as mistress of things: which has no beginning from time, but is a majesty above all time, and before the day, with the supreme Father; nay rather, the Father’s mind and reason and the way of his counsels, which, not made by hand nor created by the voice of one commanding, brought forth his command, uttered from the Father’s depth. This, then, no scourges cut, no spittle sprinkles, no palm harasses with dashing slaps, no wounds of nails pierce it on the cross. These things affected the flesh of the man, which a pregnant woman

brought forth under the law of the womb, without the law of a husband. He suffers hunger, drinks gall, and drains vinegar; he fears the face of death, he trembles at pain. Tell me, sacrilegious teachers, who contend that the throne of the supreme Father lay deserted at that time when God came down into fragile limbs: did the Father, then, suffer? What would wicked error not dare! Was he himself conceived in a girl’s blood and did he grow? Did he himself swell the womb of the modest Virgin? And is the page of the divine book now false, which says that the Word flowed into the form of flesh? But he who is Father of the Word is not held to have been made flesh. Fix your step, Scripture: it is not fitting to have affirmed anything shifting and doubtful: the Father is he whom no one is allowed to see: the Father is he who has never been seen in the world, nor shone openly among worldly lights. He sent the Word visible, and received him back when sent, when he willed: by the Word he touched the womb of the pure Virgin, and by the Word built the child’s limbs. He himself, present on earth by power and divinity, is always present in every place: no part is empty of the Father’s majesty; nowhere is God the begetter absent: but he is always present through the Word; and hence to Philip Christ says: “I have been with you so long a time, and do you say you do not know the Father, whom you see in me?” It is the gift of the invisible Father to bring forth a Son visible, through whom the Father himself can be seen; and not only by the eyes of the saints, but by those without sight. I speak of the blindest of the blind, whose black sloth knows not how to weigh the truth with darkened heart.

If you deny that he was visible to mortals, come, tell me, whom did the tyrant see from the citadel of Babylon walking about far off amid harmless flames, treading the rushing fires, his brothers unburned? He says, indeed: “O nobles, the vast fires in the panting furnaces have received three men; see, one added cuts smiling through the steaming fires. That one is the Son of God; I confess it and, conquered, I adore: take away the useless torches, and withdraw the warm pine-brands: the heat of the kindled sulphur is cold. It is the Son (there is no doubt) who does these wonders, whom I see: God himself, the most certain offspring of God. He commands the immense heats and tames their wrath, mocking it, the pyre serving him, and checks the pitchy fury, and forces the rage of the flames to grow cold; the hot air, ordered not to touch the barbarian robes, passes by, and runs hissing through their thin garments. The very heat is afraid to go through the Assyrian tiaras, lest the hair flowing on their shoulders be soiled with bitter smoke.” So he says; and he orders the various songs to fall silent, organs, harps, lutes, reeds and trumpets. The foolish superstition fell silent; the festal voice was still, which wickedly celebrated the gold of the conspicuous image. The songs of the holy men alone now resound, praising in threefold harmony the King of heaven, who made the sea, the lands, the bright stars, and protected his nurslings, safe in the midst of the fires. The Word of the almighty Father always comes down to help man, to save him; he has always taken care, in his own love, to mingle mortal things with himself,

so that flesh, to be joined to him and filled with the eternal Lord, might change the degenerate life it then led as natural man by the example of its Master, and, through limbs like its own, might grow used to seeing a sharer of its earthly face, and to know its partner by sight as by a hostage, and little by little to approach Christ its blood-kin. So man was once natural; now the Spirit has carried him over to the nature of the heavenly seed, pouring God himself into him, giving life to mortal things. Now it is new matter, made solid by a breath under the skin, matter, but ours nevertheless, drawn from the Virgin. It has put off the corrupt beginnings of the old life, taking up immortal good by its own breath. He, the Son of man, but also the Son of the Thunderer, alone now beholds the Father’s face and sees him himself. No one knows the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son shows him, the mediator between us and the Almighty. In short, to conclude briefly the sum of the matter: the Father did not come down into flesh, but the flesh that was taken went up to the Father’s citadel. The Son ran through both. Give way, profaner of Christ, give way now, Sabellius, deposer of the Father and mad denier of the Son. Do you not violate the Father, while you refuse to know the Son? For there is no begetter unless a son exists; nor can you call him Father whom you cheat of offspring. But perhaps you would wish to strip God of the honor of fatherly love, content with the bare name that he is God, and take away the glory of Father and the force of generation. Is there anyone, lying in an idol’s temple among a thousand rites, worshiping ridiculous gods with salt, turf and incense,

who does not think there is a supreme God, alone over all things? Although he consecrates smoking altars to Saturns, Junos and Cythereas and other monsters, yet whenever he has looked up to heaven, he places all authority in one God, whom an immense order of powers serves, equipped with various ministers. What nation is so dull in mind, so barbarous in tongue? Or what superstition so sordid that it would put dog-shaped, barking Anubis before the throne of heaven? No one gives Cloacina or Epona a throne above the stars among goddesses, though he pay a stinking censer and probe the sacrificial meal and entrails with sacrilegious hands. Consult the ravings of bearded Plato; consult those whom the goatish Cynic dreams of, and the sinews which Aristotle wove with twisted giddiness. Though a doubtful labyrinth and winding error drives them all, though they themselves are accustomed to promise a hen or a cock, so that the healing god may deign to show himself favorable to the dying; yet when they come to the rule of reason and art, they conclude their muddled senses and their contentious arguments with clattering modes in one Godhead, at whose will the moving and round sphere turns, and the wandering stars keep their courses. Human nature does not admit it, provided man is not a four-footed beast himself and looks at the heavens with upright face; it does not admit denying that a supreme rule prevails. This even Numa’s soothsayer silently felt within himself, and the half-wild Scot feels it, worse than a dog-soldier. But we, who have now seen the Lord twice, in books and in body,

first by faith, then in flesh and blood face to face, and who, having tested the volumes of the prophets with the cross as witness, plunged our searching fingers into the raw wounds of the side, and, our sight doubting, searched the hollows of the hands, and recognized Jesus as the eternal king, we believe it a sin to strip God of the title and name of Father, who brought forth a king from himself: not a king of the people of the Parthians or of the sons of Romulus, but king of the highest, the middle and the lowest order, and therefore lord of things and king over all. He holds the middle as flesh; the highest as the Father’s; the lowest, of the Styx. He flowed down by these steps, and turns back again into himself: he is God, and he is man: he becomes dead, and the same is God. He ran through all the offices of fallen nature, so that, rolled back up, he might carry back into the Father’s bosom the things that had been dead, and carry up the very limbs as well. Though the instruments of the ancient prophets had sung that these things would be, we, having experienced him with eyes, hands, meeting, voice and speech, have at last understood the words of the ancient heroes, and the oracles laid open when Christ was seen. This is our salvation, by this we live, by this we are animated; this we follow: never, taking away the name of the Son, to call on the Father, and never without the name of the Father to know the Son as God; never to call on the Son and the Father unless the one Holy Spirit is present: yet so that these three stand together, that I do not make three by separate drawing-out, but one God subsists in these three. Yet the Father himself is not the one who is the Son; so that, since we know the Son is from the Unbegotten, he may be truly Father, and the begotten truly offspring: nor is the begetter thus his own Son.

It is utterly ridiculous and futile that one should be born from himself, whether the Father was born, or he himself suddenly became new matter for birth, and God of his own accord brought himself forth and made himself his own son. The divine names fashion nothing false or lying. He who is Father is Father by begetting; the Son is Son from this, that he was begotten with the supreme Father as author; yet he himself is supreme; for he is not less, nor unequal to the Father. How could the form of the work be indistinguishable in both, unless the noble Son had all the force of the Father’s majesty, and unless God the begetter were what the Son is? They go on further, searching what this very thing ‘to beget’ is, if it is right to stretch human senses as far as the secret which goes before all times and the ancient days, and stands out above the beginning itself, and passes beyond whatever man can seek. Since it is a difficult way to know the seeds of beginnings, to what mortal will it be given to search out what God did beyond the beginning? or in what manner he brought forth the Word, which lacks all beginning? This alone we know, which is handed down: that he is God, whom the unbegotten begetter begot, one begetting one, whole begetting whole: not begun, but yet arisen, co-eternal with the Father backward, and born of the Father. But neither is the Father cut off, so that the Son should be a part of the Father, nor did the substance, extending itself, draw itself out at length and diminish anything from the full Godhead, while a changed portion forged a new Son. Never convertible, never changeable

is God, nor does he take anything from himself by begetting; but he is whole God, and God from the whole, light from light. But when is light without light? When does shining light lack brightness? When does it happen that fire brought forth diminishes fire? When is the Father, both God and light, not God and Father of light? If he was once not Father, and begot a son late, after times, he becomes new, and advances into a new right. Far be it that ever the Full should advance, who needs no increase. He was always God, and begetter, and light, and glory; nor did he afterwards confer on himself that he should be Father. So it comes about that we believe Christ eternal with the Father, begotten with him as author, whom no author preceded. If you doubt these mysteries of Christ’s birth, lost man, you are not of the catholic people, but one of the incense-bearing herd, a worshiper of Deucalions, devoted to a post, an anointer of a fig-wood stump. Rather search the tokens of God in the very fountain of antiquity; run through the book-cases of the first writer, whom no Sardinian father, nor augur grandfather, nor the tale of ancient rumor, nor a garrulous nurse, nor the shrill crow, talkative with the cry of a witch, taught the matter of God: but God himself, revealed face to face, gently instructed the trembling mortal with friendly address, and unveiled himself and his highest things. Of course that most learned Writer records that at the beginning of the world the Father fashioned the form of his new creation not alone, nor without Christ. “God made man,” he says, “establishing him, and gave him the face of God.” What else is this but to say: he was not

alone? And God stood by God as he worked, when the Lord made a creature in the image of the Lord? Christ is the form of the Father; we, the form and image of Christ, are made in the face of the Lord by fatherly goodness, as Christ was to come into our face after ages. I could pick many examples from the sacred books, if you do not shrink from them, to teach you that the force of majesty is not placed in the Father alone, but that Christ with the Father is God; as that same Genealogist says: “The Lord rained fire from the Lord on the Sodomites.” Which Lord? From which Lord? If the Father alone watches from the starry citadel, or grows hot with anger? The Son, the Lord, was scattering the wrath of the Lord the Father, armed with fires: there is one thunderbolt for both. If these things, so understood, had watered the Jewish ears so as to be able to touch their dull fibres, they would have heard the Lord of powers, who had come to save the perishing sheep: but every ornament had flowed from their ears, and they had already fashioned the molten head of Baal, and stripped their little ears of their honor. The leader of the sinning people comes down from the mountain of flashing light and the speech of God, and brings to the blind tents the tablets cut by the dreadful finger. But the people falls on its face, not to see Christ written in riddles in the likeness of the deep law. Unhappy people, which, its fearful eyes dazzled by the light, covered them, and veiled its face with pressed-down cloth! But we, the veil thrown off, see Christ face to face, and gaze at God with unveiled face; nor, under the heavy law, do we lie with bowed brow,

but we recognize the ray of the law with uplifted face. Alas, tree once leafy with fruitful branches! Alas, olive root once rich in berries! See, now your trunk grows green again with a wild olive grafted in, and is clothed with the bark of foreign rind. Now have pity on yourself. The shoot of the wild olive, exulting on a stock not its own, does not boast, but warns you, mindful of your own race, to give up saddening your foliage with bitter oil, and not from the lowest stock to envy the twigs sent up to the lofty tops. You blaspheme the Lord Christ, most ungrateful nation. Say, say: of whose blood is your Passover a feast so solemn for you? Who in the end is the yearling Lamb that is slain? He is sacred to you as the years return; but sacred in a beast. It is foolish to believe it sacred thus: to touch the tops of the doorposts with the blood of a bleater, to frolic in dances, to eat unleavened bread of fine flour, while your morals swell with the crime of leaven. Do you not understand, foolish one, that you are portraying our Passover, and painting in the furrows drawn beforehand by the ancient law the whole sacrament which the true passion holds: the passion which defends our brow with blood, and smears the bodily house with a signed face? From it the Egyptian plague fled, its scourges shut out; it broke up the deadly kingdom of the king of Pharos; and from the thick hail of worldly power it snatches Abraham with his stock and faithful race. The true race of Abraham is he on whose face the blood is entrusted and glows red-written: by whom he who was seen in the world

with faith not doubting, is God, true God from the Father. He saw God, and soon believed in the one he saw: but you, posterity of the flesh, seeing all things carnally, carry out under the law the work of the flesh, which an inner spirit fills: for the fleshly law which you keep in the flesh did not flow from heaven: but it was pregnant with Christ, and about to bear my hope from its womb. What hope? none other than the kindly light of the divine power, and the coming of the Lord, whom Abraham’s first faith had seen, and whom the father had once promised to be seen by our eyes, and to be proved by the voice of the law. Nor by the voice of the law alone: for what writing now does not have Christ? or what bookcases of writers, filled with the praise of Christ, do not celebrate his miracles in new books? The Hebrew pen sings of him, Attic abundance sings, and the third eloquence, of the Ausonian tongue, sings too. [Pilate commands:] Set out in verses what power was fixed on the front of the Cross: let the title be in a threefold tongue: let Judea recognize it as she reads, and Greece know it, and golden Rome, worshiping God, survey it. Whatever the curved trumpet bellows, booming in hollow bronze, whatever the huge breath vomits from a hidden draught, whatever the chaste lyre, whatever the tortoise-shell echoes, what the harmonious organs mingle with unequal pipes, what the caves give back in rivalry with the voices of shepherds, celebrates Christ, sounds Christ; all things, even mute, animated by holy strings, speak Christ. O name most sweet to me! light, glory and hope, and my protection! O sure rest from labors! sweet taste in the mouth, fragrant smell, watering fountain,

chaste love, beautiful form, sincere pleasure. If the deaf nation denies that so many proclamations of you, so many voices of things, and elements, messengers of so great a joy, enter through its dull ears, let it hear the mad possession of the raving monster, which the rabid demon shouts within the captured bowels, and let the wretched nation believe its own. Apollo is tortured, struck by the name of Christ, and cannot bear the thunderbolts of the word; as many lashes of the tongue harass the wretch as the praised miracles of Christ God resound. The bishop of the Lord thunders: “Flee, cunning serpent, strip yourself out of the limbs, and loosen your hidden coils. Do you harass a slave of Christ, most corrupt thief? Stop: Christ is here, avenger of the human body: you may not snatch as spoil one to whom Christ has clung. Go, driven out, windy liquid; Christ commands, come out.” Amid these words Cyllenius, burning, wails, and Jupiter sighs at fires he knows. See, the savage legion rushes into the Gerasene pigs, and after many chains under the rock of the tomb, utters groans of punishment with long grunts. It had cried out, but from the mouth of a man: “We know, Jesus, born of God, born of the sceptres and seed of David, who you are, why you come: we know by what power you drive us back, and we lie prostrate in terror of your coming.” Has this voice not reached your ears, Judea? It has reached them: but it has not penetrated a mind lacking light, and, shut out from the first doors, it has fled back. The coming of the Lord has been heard by the land that the evening of the Spanish sun holds, and by the land that first receives the rosy dawn;

the voice of the Gospel loosened the Scythian frosts with its penetrating word, and, fervent, melted the Hyrcanian winters too, so that the Rhodopean Hebrus, now freed of ice, flows a softer river from its Caucasian rock. The Getae have grown gentle, and the bloody savagery of the Gelonian, thirsting for pure milk, mixes bloodless cups, to drink the holy draughts of the blood of Christ. The once faithless land of the Moor of Atlas too has learned to surrender long-haired kings to the altars of Christ. Since the Spirit touched a mortal womb, that Spirit who is God, and God clothed himself with his mother’s body and created man from virginity, the Delphic caves have fallen silent, their oracles condemned; the cauldron no longer covers the tripods, nor does the panting fanatic foam out fates published in Sibylline books. Lying Dodona has lost its mad vapors, Cumae, now mute, mourns its dead oracles, nor does Hammon give back answers in the Libyan Syrtes. The very Capitol of Romulus mourns that Christ shines as God for its princes, and that the temples have fallen, destroyed by the command of the emperors. Now the purple, suppliant, lies prostrate at the halls of Christ, ruler of Aeneas’ people, and the supreme lord adores the standard of the Cross. Yet among all the emperors there was one, when I was a boy, as I remember, a leader very brave in arms, a founder of laws, most famous for speech and hand, a counselor of his country, but no counselor for keeping religion, loving three hundred thousand gods: faithless to God, though not faithless to the world. He did not shrink from bending his august head before the feet of Minerva

of clay, to lick the sandals of Juno, to roll at the feet of Hercules, to smear the knees of Diana with wax; nay, even to bow his brow before the plaster of Apollo, or to fumigate the horse of Pollux with burning entrails. As it happened, sacrificing, he was appeasing Hecate with much blood; herds of cows had stood there, to be struck by the axes at the pontiffs’ feasts, and twisted cypress shaded the heifers crowned on their bound brows. And now the old man, wearing the fillet according to custom, was opening the entrails with the inserted knife, and with bloody hands handling the fibres trembling with the cold of death, and, a crafty interpreter, noting by numbers and limits the last pulses of life in the warm heart; when suddenly in the midst of the rites the priest cries out, pale: “See, what am I doing? Some greater, best king, greater divine power has come upon our altars than the cups foaming with milk can bear, the slain blood of cattle, the sacred boughs, the garlands. I see the summoned shades scattered far; Persephone, terrified, turns back her steps, her torches put out, fleeing with broken scourge. The secret murmur does nothing, Thessalian songs avail nothing, no victim calls back the troubled ghosts. Do you not see how the fire in the cold censers languishes? how the coal grows sluggish under white ashes? See, the Palatine attendant cannot hold the libation dish; the balsam drips from his squeezed right hand; the flamen himself wonders that his laurels fall from his head, and the victim cheats the uncertain iron. Some one, surely, of the worshipers of Christ has crept in

here among the young men. The priestly fillet trembles at this race of men, and every couch of the gods: let the washed and anointed one be far away. Let beautiful Proserpina return, the rites restored.” He spoke, and collapses bloodless; and, as if he saw Christ himself threatening with his thunderbolt drawn, the emperor too, lifeless, his diadem laid aside, turns pale, and looks around at those standing by: which nursling of the chrism had signed his temples with the inscribed wood and troubled the Zoroastrian whispers with his brow? One armor-bearer from the band of fair-haired youths, guard of the purple side, is found out: nor does he deny it, but throws down his spear-shafts, jewelled with double iron, and confesses that he bears the sign of Christ. The emperor leapt forth in fear, the priest thrown down, fleeing the marble shrine with no one accompanying him. Then the terrified cohort, forgetting its master, raises its upturned faces to heaven, and calls on Jesus. Are you now sorry for what you did? Do you now repent? See your Christ, unhappy Judea, God: who, loosing the earthly sabbaths, has taken mortals into eternal sabbaths. He has shone out to the nations, outshone kings, possesses the world, has compelled Rome, mistress of the empire, to yield to him, and subdued the Tarpeian images of the gods. Learn, pitiable one, from your misfortunes, by what avenger at last vain superstition and a law carried out carnally are punished, whose avenging power tramples you. Do the stones of Solomon, built by hand, lie destroyed with their metal? That noble temple lies low. Why does it lie low? Because the soluble right hand of a craftsman built that dissoluble masonry: rightly it was dissolved,

and lies low, since everything polished returns to nothing. What admits of being made admits one day of perishing. If, on the other hand, you wish to learn what our temple is: it is that which no workman, fitting it with craft, has put together, which no fir or hewn pine has woven, which never grew from quarried marble, whose lofty weight, supported by no columns, has not hung above on a curved vault by slender art, but was made by the Word of the Lord, not by a sounding voice: by the Word, which always was. The Word made flesh, this is the eternal temple, this has no end; this you, wishing to storm it, attacked with scourges, cross, gall. It lay destroyed by harassing punishments: granted. For from his mother’s womb he had what could be destroyed. But what was dissolved by a brief death on the mother’s side, the third day gives back alive by the majesty of the Father. You saw my temple go on high, accompanied by angelic throngs, by whose protection I am kept safe. The everlasting doors lift up its summits, and its glory is raised through inaccessible towers of stairs, and a white road shines on the highest steps. But your burnt offerings are buried by heaped-up ruins: what you deserve Titus taught; the armies of Pompey taught with their plunder; by whom your limbs, uprooted, are carried through all regions of land and sea. The Jew wanders, a vagrant, here and there in floating exiles, since, torn from his ancestral seat, he pays the penalty for the slaughter, and, sprinkled with the blood of the Christ he denied, atones for the crimes he committed. See, to what has the virtue of the ancient forefathers flowed down?

The nobility that is heir, fallen from the ancient faithful, is a slave, but no longer noble. Captive, it looks up at a recent faith: so great a power is in the new belief. The nation once faithless triumphs, having confessed Christ; but the denier of Christ, conquered, is subjected to its rule, having received faithful masters. There are those who establish a doctrine akin to the Jewish madness, following Christ by a halfway reasoning: only this, that he is a true man; but they affirm that he is not God from heaven; they confess him for his goodness, they deny his majesty: they celebrate him as consecrated for the praise of his conduct; they take away the highest part, the heavenly nature. Every outstanding work by which powerful skill shines out belongs to talent or to strength: the one thrives by a sharp heart; the other excels by hard force. But both are mortal for man: for talents grow old and gray, and the ages consume strong arms. These things we do not follow in the power and everlasting praise of the Lord: we follow what sprouts from no seed of earth, what takes its beginning not from the unclean stain of man; a tender fire sows him: not flesh, nor a father’s blood, nor foul pleasure. The divine power weds the girl untouched by the bridal chamber with a pure breath through her chaste womb: the unheard-of newness of the birth bids that Christ, so formed, be believed to be God. The unwed Virgin is married to the Spirit, and feels no defect of love. Her maidenhood remains sealed, heavy within, and without unharmed, blooming with chaste fruitfulness. Now a mother, yet still a virgin, a mother not knowing a man.

Why do you refuse? Why do you shake your empty head, unbelieving one? The angel announces with holy mouth that this will be: are you willing to believe, and to open your ear to angelic speech? The holy Virgin herself believed the warning of the flashing minister, and therefore, believing, conceived Christ. For Christ comes to those who believe: the doubtful heart under wavering faith he scorns, withdrawing the honor. Virginity and ready faith drank Christ into the womb of the heart, and, about to bear him, hid him in untouched recesses. Believe what the angel, sent from the Father’s throne, says. Or, if your dense hearing does not take in the clear voice from the stars, hear what an old woman, pregnant by her husband, cries out, believing, and at last listen soberly. Wonderful faith! The child, enclosed in an aged womb, is the first to greet the virgin-born Lord from his mother’s mouth, and, an infant not yet born, announces that our infant is already wailing for him: for the little boy did not yet know [how to speak], and yet opened a chattering mouth to Christ God. Bring out the secret records: give, open the book which holy Isaiah poured out as God breathed into him. I would like to review it, and to unroll the furrows of the pen which that golden hand drew with starry marks. Go away, while I bow and adore the glowing letters, while I venerate them in tears, and fix sweet kisses on them. Joys conceive tears, joys give weeping. The promised day has come, which that little verse had said would come, when the Virgin in childbirth, with her betrothed as witness beyond doubt, who cared for the modesty of the pact, brought forth, and made me see my Emmanuel. Is God now our man? He dwells and stands

with us, and proves his name; and with his present face he lights up the verse that was obscure to ancient ages. Is he God, whose cradle the man of the East venerated, and, suppliant, offers royal dishes on gilded plates to the Virgin’s lap and the child’s swaddling clothes? What messenger so winged and so like the swift south wind reached the peoples of the dawn and farthest Bactra, that the day had shone out, in the hours of suckling, on which tender Christ hung on an unwed breast? “We saw this boy,” they say, “carried through the stars, and blazing above the ancient tracts of the constellations.” The astrologer, awake all night on a Chaldean height, stiffened in fear that the serpent had yielded, the lion had fled, the Crab had drawn in his feet in a maimed order of his side, the Bull, tamed, his horns broken, bellowed, and the star of the Goat withered with torn hair. Here the Water-boy slips away, driven out; there the Arrow; flight separates the wandering Twins; the shameless Virgin betrays her silent lovers in the vault of the world. And the other fires that hang in the dreadful clouds feared the new Morning Star: the pale wheel of the sun sticks, and feels destruction about to come at any moment, and that it will be veiled at midday with a gray covering, and the brightness of the sky will perish in a night by day, as sudden darkness clouds its head and orb. Shall I not heap on him gifts of myrrh and incense and gold? I know whom I see, what gifts I should give back. Shall I not venerate him, who, seen in heaven and found on earth as king and God, governs both forms of nature, and, breaking the kingdoms of the underworld from the tomb,

bids the buried rise and go with him? He dwells in heaven, comes among the earth, bursts the hidden underworld. True is the faith: he is God, who is wholly everywhere. Did a vain mind or tongue deceive those men? Did they give gifts frustrated by chance events, or dedicate a vow under a blind honor? What cause then, or reason, was there to bow their necks before the feet of Mary and the rattles of the little boy, if he was only mortal, and the highest power did not fill his tender limbs with divine breaths? But now take away the Magi, the incense, the gold, the gifts of myrrh, which taught that he is true God; the manger, the swaddling clothes, the adored lap of the mother, the burning torch of the star: let his very power and the wonders of his deeds speak God. I see the mad winds suddenly grow gentle when Christ commands; I see seas struggling with great whirlwinds stretched into a tranquil marble surface at Christ’s command; I see the same flood allow itself to be trodden, its liquid making its back solid. He himself walks over the flowing waves with shining feet, and makes his footsteps firm on the pressed wave; he himself rebukes the winds, and orders rest to the blasts. Who would command the savage North Winds, “Go, be silent in your prisons, and withdraw from the wide sea,” unless he be the Lord of heaven, the same who founded the North Winds? Snowy Boreas and rainy Eurus recognize the lord of the storm clouds and the master of tempests, and sweep away the roused winter as the clear sky smiles. Who could tread the waters of the sea? Who, walking about through the gray shallows with pressed steps, could wear the wet

road without sinking, hanging on his soles, and dry of foot, unless the maker of the sea’s water? he who once, as Spirit, poured forth from the Father’s mouth, hovered over the waters not yet separated, nor enclosed by a fixed shore. The liquid, as a servant, bore its master’s step, and, lacking motion, bound itself for solid use. Why should I recall the various famous deeds of God the Christ, whom you, denier, though you do not doubt he is man, will yourself confess to be divine when his majesty is examined more deeply? He smeared blind eyes, and gave back sight by clay, handling with his fingers earth moistened with holy spittle. The covered night held the clay remedy; the moisture spread over it removed the darkness. Moreover he showed in what washing the darkness was to be cleansed: Siloam pours back its waters at various moments, nor does it always pant with a flow, but by distinct turns its pool receives abundant draughts. The crowds of the sick thirst for the hope of the greedy fountain, to wash away the blemishes of their limbs by a pure swim. Meanwhile, vying with one another, they await the hoarse springs from the dripping pumice, and hang on the dry edge. Christ bids this clay, put on, to be washed in the fountain, and the face to shine with light poured in. For he knew that he had formed the figure from clay before, in darkness, and had added the remedy of his own mouth to the new Adam whom he had first fashioned. For without the divine breath of the supreme Lord the earth was dry, fit before for no healing: but after the clear Spirit from the heavenly mouth

sprinkled the virgin ground, it became able to heal. From there it draws sap, and steeps health with sticky moisture, and, washed in baptism, pours in daylight. The blind man is here, his eyes now uncovered by Christ’s mouth, and he cries that he has taken light from clay and shining streams, and shows the author through the astonished towns: the author of light and the giver of days, who did not disdain to show the cleansing of healing water in his own body to the sick who wander. Of the many thousands I shall recount a very few, going over little by little the things the whole world cannot hold. In the desert he bids five loaves and two fishes be set out as food for the peoples who, as it happened, with hunger not calling them back, were crowding round their master on every side, and, forgetful of food, had spurned villages, forts, market, towns, fairs, gatherings and cities, content to feed on abundant teaching. Many banquets of men seethe on the strewn hay; companions lay down in hundreds at a time; and the crowds pour themselves through countless tables, to be filled (now believe him God) by two little fishes and a few loaves, the food growing through the fragments. When the feast is eaten, the dishes overflow heaped up; after supper they fill twelve baskets with masses of crumbs: the guest, overfed, sweats out the heap in his belly, and the servant groans under the load. Who can heap small food into great? Who, but he who, founding from nothing the body and all the body’s food, created the world with no matter existing? Not as a sculptor from the rubble of bronze

is accustomed to make a mass, smelted down, come alive. But almighty God fashioned the world without seed. All that is was nothing: that nothing was ordered to come forth and to be, and to be made new, and soon to grow great. At first there was a little from nothing: increases added to the little enlarged all things to full measure. So when I see small food for men thus growing in the hands of Christ, can I doubt that through him the tiny forms of things and the elements of the world, at first small from nothing, and soon little by little great, grew, which we see completed from small beginnings? And lest, after men’s meal, the remains should perish trampled, or lie as prey, left with no guard, to wolves or foxes or little mice, twelve were appointed to keep in heaped-up abundance the goods of Christ, displayed far off in laden baskets. But why do I recount these things with stammering voice, unworthy to sing holy things? Come forth from the tomb, Lazarus, tell whose voice you heard beneath the lowest earth; what power penetrated the hidden places of death, that, when Christ calls you to return, though you were deeply sunk in the darkening abyss, you hear as if he were close by, and are present without delay? What so near Charybdis joins to the world above the kingdoms of darkness, separated by a thin boundary? where grim Taenarus is cast headlong into the vast chaos, and that hidden river rolling fires with insatiable banks? Before the doors of the tomb, which huge rocks had condemned with a hard bar, built up of hollowed stones, stands the Lord, and calls the name of his cold friend.

Without delay the funereal horror, its rocks rolled back, vomits out a living funeral, the corpse walking. Loosen now, glad sisters, the fragrant bonds; only the smell of the sprinkled spice breathes out its breath, nor does the filthy air bring back a reek from bodily corruption; the former beauty rouses the eyes, loosened with dripping gore, into seeing again, and purple little by little clothes the rotted cheeks, tinged with red. Who could pour back the soul into the flowing limbs? Surely he who gave the limbs; who breathed through the moist vein of the clay sedge; for whom the wasting clod drew blood-red colors with infused moisture. O death, now gentle with laws that listen? O death, deaf before, now taught to follow wherever you are commanded, who had such power over you? Conquered, confess that Jesus is God, who alone snatches me from you. Hide away the deniers of Christ: no one grudges it, hide them: use your lot. Keep the blasphemers in perpetual night, but release the captured people of the righteous, who know how to call Christ man and God in such a way that the true and supreme God bears mortal things. He himself bears the work he built, nor is the maker ashamed to bear what he brought forth: I mean the body, and the force of the soul. He had fashioned the one with his fingers, breathed the soul with his mouth. God assumes the whole man, because the whole man is from him, and redeems the whole whom he had assumed, bringing back all that man is: the one from the tombs, the other from the abyss. Here a doubting disputant meets me and objects this: does faith admit that a substance inspired by God’s breath should feel torture, and that

it should seek the depths of the infernal pole, and be cooked in the abyss? Believe that the soul is not God, but believe that it is greater than all created things: believe that it too was created. For it was formed by the mouth of God, and did not exist before; but it was formed most beautiful in its condition, and painted with divine things, and full of God, and like its creator: yet not itself God, since it is not a begetting, but it is the making of God: from the heart of the Parent the Son alone flashed forth: he is true, true God. It was conferred on the soul that it should suddenly be, which was not; he is co-eternal with the Father, and always in him, not made, but born, he has whatever is the Father’s; the soul is like God as a shadow is. So the Maker himself spoke, planning to build man from both materials joined in his own likeness; but a shadow does not have what the solid body has, whose imitation is in the shadow: and the true is one thing, the imitation of the true another. It is like him in that it is not consumed by any ages; in that it is wise and capable of justice, and as queen of things commands; it foresees, weighs, takes precautions, speaks, taught to run through heaven with its sense and arts: in these the Founder fashioned the soul like himself, unlike in the rest: for it is easy to grasp it, since measure and form bound it: but God, immense and poured out beyond all things, has nothing in himself that is a limit, so that he could be enclosed or held by sense; his power remains ungrasped, for which the last line is lacking, which a space not measurable stretches. So the soul, made, and less than its great maker,

and greater than the others, and ruling over all, the turbid corruption of rotting flesh conceives as it is born, and, poured into wasting limbs, gives it a share of its own dregs: then the nature of sinning is mixed with clay, together with the simple breath. But perhaps, because the soul flowed from the mouth of the Lord, you would deny that it was put together and made, as though it were a part of God that (it is a crime to say it) drags foul sins, forgetful of itself, and, condemned, rushes to ruin and enters the hidden chaos. Let it be a thing of God; I do not deny it: yet it is by no means to be called a part of God, since it began in time. Nor is it to be thought earlier or older than the first-formed creature. For I see it made at the time when, as a sister, it entered the house of its friendly heart, and, guest of the fresh clay, itself fresh, sat in the brotherly hall. It is indeed the breath of the Lord: but it is not the full spirit and power of God, sent with only so much measure as the breather wished to keep in the tenor of his breathing. It is impossible to look on the depths of Sabaoth: but man is the mirror of the deity. In the body you may learn, if you are skilful, a thing not bodily, with Christ as interpreter, who shows his own Father in a mortal body. Look how varied are the vapors we pour from our mouth, as often as we breathe the breezes of the breathable soul: now exhaled heat pants a warm breath, blowing out dewy mists from moist throats; when it pleases, into a cold wind with a breezy chill

a thin breath comes forth, and the air hisses. Add too the distinct breath which the musical pipe takes in: either it is sparing with pressed melody, or it raises a swelling boom with abundant blast, or, hoarse, it breaks the measures, or whispers gently, or, drawing thin, it produces sharp sounds, or it lowers a tender murmur with a tiny voice. Since you see that you can do these things in a mortal body, why should you not believe that the Eternal could pour in such a soul as he willed? Since, founding it, he breathed it out and poured it in prescribed measures, it must be made. In short, the force of our soul knows many things, but not all, bidden to know and foreknow a fixed amount. Now that which has a fixed measure, and which is denied knowledge of all things, is a thing made: for it is shown to be founded and increased. Gather from a like case whether this is a thing made. The Lord’s hand created, indeed, the mortal body, and put together the clay with his fingers: is God’s hand divided into joints? has it a palm? has it nails, able to bend and close, or to stretch out an open palm? That is the figure of our hand, which the uncircumscribed Lord does not have in himself: but a form has been handed down which, known to human minds, might give understanding, so that he is said to have formed the likeness of a body through a bodily appearance: so in turn a breathable thing was formed by an incorporeal breath, and is said to be the work of his mouth, through which the slender form of the soul, built, shone out and felt itself made by an unwrought gift. If our flesh is not the work of his hand, neither is the soul the work of his mouth, begun by breath and breathing,

and brought down into some place: for everything which the hour of birth brings forth, a place receives; and what any place can contain is limited, not poured out into all things. And what is so limited that it is set in a fixed seat can now totter, and what has tottered is within the nature of fault; and, faulty, it at last falls into sad punishment: this, believe me, is not God. Or, if the soul has majesty, show me what it means that new grace floods it when fallen and without Christ, and the Holy Spirit ennobles it, justified by baptism, and adds to the handmaid the glory she lacked. Since this is granted to merits, and denied to merits, it is absurd to call God, or part of God, that which now drinks the divine and highest good from the everlasting fountain by obedience, now loses it by fault or crime, and now receives punishment, now treads it underfoot, free. Do you wonder that the soul sins, which has been allotted to dwell in a house compacted of flesh, when even an angel sins, who knows not how to enter the perishable lodging of a wasting frame? He sins because he too was made, not begotten: in whatever way he was made, the one Maker, the Lord, knows; let it be enough for me to believe he was made. Only the Founder of the world is without the stain of sin, God unbegotten and begotten, Father, and born of the Father; and he alone, exempt from admitting sad torment, lives inviolate, and feels nothing bitter. Call the soul exempt from torture and pain, if you know it to be immune from fault and free of crime: what can sin can also succumb to punishment. It was indeed pure, when it was once founded,

which, when bestowed, made the rough clay come alive, as it received its first condition from the clear seed of nature, and was formed from the serene heaven above. But soon, when it was bidden to be bound to the heavy field, too much flattered by sweet enticements, it grew cold, and defiled the precious fire with wallowing, while, transgressing, it wickedly trampled on God’s established law. This is the first nature of the soul: so founded simple, it fell into vice through the filthy covenant of the flesh. Then, stained by the evil sin of the first man Adam, it infected the whole race of men that sprouts from there; and the infancy of souls holds at birth the inborn stains of the first man, nor is anyone born innocent. Yet the error must be avoided of believing that by a shoot of the flesh the fountain of souls is poured into the offspring, after the pattern of blood, whose vein is woven by propagation. Souls do not beget souls, but by a hidden law nature pours out its work, so that the little vessels breathe, and a living spark is present in what has been compacted; which, though, poured in, it is always new as it enters a new creature, is yet drawn old from the crime of the forefathers, since it is bound up with unwashed old decay. From there the second generation returns, and from there the filth of nature is washed, and we are reborn within, bathed, so that the soul, shining, puts off the old Adam. And since, joined to the flesh, the soul draws the matter of sin from its tinder, and is itself at the same time an incentive to sin for its companion, the avenging punishment entangles both as guilty, sinning under one mind, and burns the partners in sin with equal tortures.

From these tortures Christ frees us, he who bore an incorrupt mother and an innocent body. Jesus alone put on a nature exposed to punishment, but not a nature exposed to the contacts of vices. And so he owed nothing to punishment: undefiled, free of deceit, free of every sprinkling of faults. (What had the line of sins to do with that body?) What could punishment, the savage attendant of sin, do in the limbs of Christ? What could death do to a man without crime? Surely, with vain efforts and without sinews, it would fall barren, with no tinder of sin. Death is fed by guilt: he who has no guilt consumes death, empty, starved by the very lack of food. So death was consumed in the body of Christ the Lord; so it perished, while, dried up, it lacked its usual food. Look up, then, to the only blameless Godhead, the power of the Father and of Christ; and now stop stirring up envy against our soul, as though it were God or a small portion of God, since it is not lawful to cut anything from Christ, and to cut off a part from God, or to pluck so great a Godhead, always full in itself and to itself. It is worth while to expose the shadow of a cloudy doctrine, which slender atoms build with a tiny structure; but it falls empty and melts like the wind, and does not hold itself up in its vain flowing. The Manichee says that God flew about as an airy thing, without a true body, a lying phantom, the hollow likeness of a body, having nothing that can be touched. And first look whether it is fitting to attribute anything feigned to God, whose pure glory admits nothing

false. Would this one, fitting himself to deceptive limbs, craftily pretend to be a man by windy art? He would have lied so many times when he said: “To long-standing diseases I grant pardon, and at the same time I forgive sins. It is the Son of man who can drive out the plague of the flesh, and loosen and dissolve the knots of crimes. Rise strong, rise innocent, now take up your bed: I, the Son of man, command this.” Does he not seem worthy to be a witness to himself, and to know himself and his fleshly nature? What of when, foreknowing, he warned his disciples with faithful mouth that the Son of man would suffer? Did he not confess that with the Father’s power he was a true man? If I do not believe this, he deceived. If you ask, Manichee, what the nature of God is: all that it is, is true. For if it does anything deceitful, it is not God: divine practice admits no falsehood. You object to the eternal Lord that he came to us slippery, pretending to be other than he truly was. Be silent, madness: bite your own tongue, wicked dog, consuming your words with a torn palate. Matthew opposes the barker and refutes his rage: he records the whole line of the fleshly stock, down to the bodily Christ, descending through six times seven names of men, and weaving the vein of high blood from the forefathers in a long thread through the pedigrees. Christ came as the seventh to add to the sixth week this number, he who completes the peaceful year that releases all things entangled in manifold contracts, and raises man from the death of man. For the mortal clay was then imperfect:

the only perfect and whole man present is Jesus, who lacked nothing of the seven sevens, by which he might perfect the mortal race with everlasting power. This is he who completes for us the seventh sabbath, so that our flesh, at last joined to God, may rest, which twice three sabbaths vexed with evil harms. Let us run through the known steps, and follow the offspring of kings: you will find that Christ flowed from the flesh of human ancestors, being of the seed of David, to be counted as heir of his blood when the stock is reviewed. What of when holy-tongued Luke, rolling back the lineage, drives the series upward, as the descendant’s body climbs, and runs back the course through the ancient forefathers? Christ climbs through seventy and two births: for he sent as many teachers into the world: the steps he came down by being born, he retraced by returning, carried right up to the summit of the earthly body, Adam. From there the parent Deity receives his own, and ours mixed with it, and through Christ Adam becomes son of the supreme God. [Make, then,] the patriarchs airy, Levi, Judah, Simeon; make David airy, the bodies of the great kings airy, and the very womb of the fruitful Virgin swelling with deceptive air and mists and cloud. Let the blood vanish, blown through; let the soft bones melt; let the texture of the flying sinews perish. Let the useless South Wind carry away all that was done, let thin breezes scatter it: let what we all are be a fable. And what does Christ do, if he does not take me up? Or whom, weak, does he free, if he disdains to take on

the burden of the flesh, and shudders at the memorials of his own hands? Does he think it unworthy to take on a body of clay, he who once thought it not unworthy of himself to handle clay, when he put together a vessel from the field, not yet of flesh, but drew out its crumbling limbs from the glue of inert mud under his pressing thumb? So great is his love of the earth, so great his affection for us! He deigns to grasp the soft clod of rich ground with divine fingers, nor does he think the clinging mass a filthy contagion. He had commanded that light be made: it was made as he had commanded. All things, brought forth by a commanding order, took new forms. Man alone deserved to receive a face formed by the Lord’s right hand, and to be born by the craftsman’s fashioning of the deity. Why, then, did such indulgence fall to our clay, that, handled by the Lord’s hands, it became sacred by honoring art, already noble by that very touch? Because God had decreed to mingle Christ with the incorrupt ground: what he wished to fashion he thought worthy of his holy fingers, and to establish as a dear pledge. Nature, indeed, destroyed, abandoned the form of the compacted earth, and, liable to death, gave way; but the nature of God, never to be dissolved, willed that the perishable earth, corrupted from the first by our use, should be his own, so that it would no longer be corruptible. Christ is our flesh: for me he is dissolved, and for me he rises; I am dissolved by my death, I rise again by the power of Christ. When Christ dies, when he is mournfully buried, I see myself; when, now returning, he stands out of the tomb,

I see God. If it is a phantom of my limbs, it is also a phantom of God: Christ must be a liar in both appearances, if Christ knew how to deceive: if he is not true man, whom death itself proves man, neither is he true God, whom the glory of his work reveals to be God; either believe that he died, or refute that he is present, and deny the true Christ by a twofold reasoning. For what is magnificent if Jesus did not die and return? That is the memorable power of God, that, slain, he returns to the world above, and, buried, rises. Whoever wishes to call Christ God, let him say that the same is man, lest his majesty lose its mighty deeds. I know that my body rises in Christ. Why do you bid me despair? I shall come by the ways by which he came back, death trampled down: what we believe, this is it: and I shall come whole. For I shall not be restored less, or other than I now am. The face, the vigor, the color that now lives will be the same: nor will the pit of the opened tomb vomit me back cheated of a tooth or a nail. He who bids me return will give back nothing weak; for if weakness returns, it is not restoration. What accident snatched away, what disease, what pain drained, what devouring old age cut off as decay plundered, will all return to the restored limbs of the one who returns. For death, conquered, owes good faith, lest by the fraud of the tomb it give back anything maimed; although it has devoured bodies already maimed, yet the weakness and violence of disease were the strength of death. It will give back what it had swallowed bit by bit, in whatever way, lest the whole dead man should not return, if anything is lacking from the full body. Drive fear from your heart, my limbs, and believe that you will return with Christ God. For he carries you, and calls you back with him. Laugh at threatening diseases; despise inflicted mishaps, and spit on the black tombs: go where Christ, rising, summons you.