Six Homilies on the Creation 4.4–4.8

He often says: “Can someone both exist and be begotten?” If, then, I show you that Scripture brings in such a thing not only of God but also of men, what will you do? Scripture says that the children of blessed Abraham were begotten, not as not existing, but as already existing. For Abraham begot Isaac; Isaac begot Jacob; Jacob begot Levi, from whom came the priestly tribe. Since this man, I mean Abraham, met Melchizedek, Paul the apostle, interpreting the ancient history for theology, says: “Melchizedek met Abraham and blessed him.” And he adds at once: “And, so to speak, through Abraham even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes, for he was in the loins of his father Abraham.” Even a mortal existed before he was begotten. Since the root was wholly alive, he included the fruit together with the living root. But here, where there is no passion, no manner of succession, no pregnancy, no sequence of human passions, he will not say that one who exists was begotten of one who exists and remains eternally. “But if he was begotten,” he says, “how did he always exist? For everyone who is begotten receives a beginning.” With us the name of father comes through many stages. For example, suppose a young man who desires marriage. First he becomes a suitor, then a bridegroom, then a husband; and if he begets, then he is called father; but if no child is begotten to grant him the name, even if he lives ten thousand years with his wife, he is not called father. Likewise the mother: first a virgin, then betrothed, then a bride, then a wife; she conceives and carries the fruit; and if it does not come forth, she is not called mother. Even if the root carries the fruit, unless the child comes forth and grants her the title as a reward for her pains, she is not called mother. And God, being wise, arranged this so that fathers might not boast over their children; so that a father might not say to his child, “I gave you life; because of me you were born; through me you were brought into being,” but that if he does say this, he may at once hear: “Because of you I was born, and because of me you too are a father.” Likewise with the mother: “You granted me to be a son; I granted you to be a mother.” With us these things involve a kind of favor and exchange. Likewise the son is not a son at once, but first seed, then embryo, and when he is born, then a son. These things are slaves to the constraints of time; these are subject to passions; these belong to a bodily condition. But where the nature that begets is bodiless, and the fruit begotten is bodiless, what reasoning admits the saying that “there was once when he was not, and he was begotten later”? And so we say this: if God is always as he is, if he never acquires anything, he is always Father as well. And if he is always Father, he always has the Son; so the Son is co-eternal with the Father. We say that the Son was begotten without passion, but we do not know how to explain the manner of the begetting. True knowledge is this: to confess that we do not know the things that surpass our nature. So we worship the offspring, but we do not pry into the nature. If the one who begot were a man, he would have made the begetting human too. If he had a body, he would have begotten as a body. But if he is free of body, do not attach the passions of a body to the bodiless. “But if he begot,” he says, “from his own substance, then he begot by passion, by cutting, by flowing out.” I will persuade you from earthly things. The vine begets, the olive begets, water too begets, not according to our nature but according to its own order. Every woman, when she receives from God the gift of becoming a mother, swells while she carries the child and shrinks when she has put down the fruit. With trees one finds the opposite. Before it bears, the tree does not swell; when it bears, then it thickens; the fruit grows, and the root increases; and there is neither diminishing for the root that begets nor lessening for what is begotten. The vine does not beget as we do; and if you hear that God begot, do you attach human passions to the one who surpasses all human nature?

“And God said: Let the earth bring forth a living soul according to kind: four-footed beasts, creeping things, wild animals.” The four-footed beasts are cattle; the creeping things and wild animals are the snake and the dragon. For not only the wild animals that are made subject are called cattle, but also the beasts of burden. Every grass-eater, whether ox or sheep, is called ktēnos (cattle), from its being man's ktēma (possession). That sheep and oxen are called cattle, Scripture testifies: “And he had possessions of sheep and possessions of oxen.” The earth was filled, adorned with fruits; it brought forth the animals; the master of the house was still lacking. The sea was filled; the air was adorned with a multitude of birds. All was ready, and man was lacking. He is not insulted by coming last, but honored; for the house is prepared, and the master of the house is brought in. For God does nothing out of season or out of measure, but all things for a need. And see the order. God first made plants and grass, and then the animals that feed on them. If there had been nothing to feed them, the creation of the animals would have been untimely, suffering from the lack of fruits. He made what feeds, and then prepares what is fed: first the needs, and then he brings in those who will share in them. He did the same with the Scriptures. The Scriptures went before Christ, proclaiming him first, and then the one to whom they testified came. The testimonies went first, so that the one testified to might be believed. The Law went first, to proclaim the Lawgiver. The prophets went first, so that […]. And see God's wisdom. He did not allow the Scriptures of the prophets to be in the Church only, but also among the Jews; so that they might be refuted, he left them with the Jews too, the unworthy, those who fought against God, the enemies of Christ. Why, then, did he do this, and not take them away from them? The reason is plain and needs no great argument: so that my preaching might be above suspicion. If I alone had the prophets, the unbeliever could have objected. Did I dare to say that Moses said, or Isaiah said, or the rest of the company of prophets said, things about Christ and about what would happen at the time of his coming? Anyone who wished could have objected and said: “How do we know that Moses was a prophet and said or proclaimed these things? You Christians wanted, to support your own doctrines, to fabricate prophets and invent names; must we suffer prejudgment from this?” But now every excuse is taken from the one who wishes to object, since these testimonies, which we bring to support our own doctrines, are found among them. How else could such a fraud not be exposed? So that this might not be said, he allowed the books of the Scriptures to remain with them, so that even if I am disbelieved, as though I fabricated them for my own doctrines because they are mine, they may be believed because they are outsiders. If you ask a Jew (I do not mean the vulgar common crowd, but one versed in reason and law), “Is there a Christ?” he does not say, “There is not,” but, “There is, but not the one you speak of; another.” For the moment he has not overturned the fact; he has only hesitated about the person. It is one thing to deny a fact, another to deny a person. For example, if someone sues me for a debt, it is one thing to say, “I owe nothing,” and another to say, “I do not owe you, but someone else.” For the moment the debt has been acknowledged. So they confess that there is a Christ, but doubt whether he is the one we proclaim, and they await one who does not exist, since they denied the one who does. And attend to the lawgiver Moses himself bringing in the Son and the knowledge of him at the very making of man. He said, “Let there be a firmament”; he said, “Let the earth sprout”; he said, “Let the waters bring forth.” When he came to man, he says: “And God said: Let us make man.” I ask a Jew: if he is alone, and there is with him no Son, whom we proclaim, and no Holy Spirit, whom we worship, to whom did he say, “Let us make man”? He makes the heaven by command alone, likewise the earth and the rest; but when he makes man, wishing now to let the knowledge of the Son's divinity peep out as through windows, he says, “Let us make man,” to show that the Son was his fellow worker in the first works too. So the Jews, hard pressed and unable to change the plain sense of the phrase, say that he spoke to the angels; since they cannot openly deny what the phrase is, they bring in their denial some other way. To whom, then, did he say, “Let us make”? “To the angels,” he says. I ask: who are greater, the angels or men? The angels, surely. For when we reach the full measure of virtue, even then we do not surpass them; we become equal to them. As it is, we fall far below their nature and are lower than the bodiless condition of the angels.

Hear David testifying about this: “What is man, that you remember him, or the son of man, that you visit him? You made him a little lower than the angels.” So for now we are made lower than the angels: we are less, the angels greater. If, in making man, the lesser, he needed the angels as counselors or fellow workers, how is it that when he made the greater (not one angel, but all those countless tens of thousands at once; for just as he made all the luminaries together, so he made angels and archangels together, and they are so many that they surpass the nature of numbers, and Daniel cries, “Ten thousand times ten thousand ministered to him, and thousands of thousands stood before him”), when he made ten thousand times ten thousand angels and thousands of thousands of archangels, he needed no counselor or fellow worker, yet in making one man of clay he uses counsel? […] brings in deliberation, and for one made from earth? Is he not mere dust and ashes? And Abraham cries, proclaiming his own lowliness, “I am earth and ashes.” What are angels? Are they not spirit? Are they not fire? Hear David crying: “Who makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flaming fire.” When he made the nature of fire, the intelligent and bodiless spirits, he had no need of a counselor, a fellow worker, or anyone else to help with what was made; and when he makes the one from earth, the pitiable, the lowly, who a little later will be no more, who is dissolved in the tomb and consumed by time, does he bring in counsel and take thought? “Yes,” he says, “a master, out of great goodness, may well say to the servants standing by: What should be done? What shall we do?” I grant this too, and after so great a contest I concede that “Let us make” was said to angels; but “according to our image and likeness,” did you not see it? By this word I must sew up the mouths of both Jews and heretics. For neither a Jew nor a heretic dares … The heretic is in truth the same as a Jew, or rather worse: the former crucified the visible body, the latter make war on the invisible Godhead, or rather on their own salvation. But the former too were refuted, having attempted impossible things. Therefore they have paid a partial penalty for this daring in the present, seeing their own race scattered over the whole world; later the full penalty will be brought upon them, when the universal court is assembled. And these too will, in due season, be required by the same judge to pay the penalties they deserve. Why, then, did I set all these words before you? I want to return to the sequence. Neither a heretic nor a Jew dares to say that God and the angels have one image and likeness. For were the angels, who came into being, God's fellow workers? They were only ministers, singing hymns, giving thanks, knowing that they had come into being, that before this they did not exist, and that they came into being by the spirit of goodness; and they stood as spectators, watching the things that came into being after them. They saw the heaven coming to be out of nothing, and were astonished; the sea being bounded, and marveled; they beheld the earth being adorned, and trembled. That the angels were not fellow workers but admirers, God says to Job: “When I made the stars, all [my angels] praised me.” “Let us make man.” The word shows the one speaking and the one hearing. See the ray of the orthodox faith always shining; and the sun, appearing, has joined its own ray to it. “Let us make man according to our image and likeness.” He kept both the order of the hypostases and the single form of the substance. “Let us make man according to image”: not “according to images,” for the image of the Father is not one and that of the Son another. “Let us make,” to show the plurality of the hypostases; “according to our image,” to express the consubstantiality. Who is the sharer in this great word and wonderful creation? Jews and heretics rage; the truth is warred against; the word of godliness holds a confession that cannot be defeated.

From where, then, shall we show to whom he said, “Let us make man,” or who his counselor is? For “Let us make” requires a counselor to be present. Blessed Isaiah, then, speaks about the only-begotten Son of God, who for our sake came among us in our form: “A child was born to us, a son and young man was given.” What did not exist, the child, was born; but the one who exists, the Son, was given. “And his name is called Messenger of great counsel”: the name of the child; Son because of the divinity, child because of the humanity. “Messenger of great counsel, wonderful counselor.” But if you call the counselor to whom he said, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness,” the Messenger of great counsel, you have not yet, prophet, disclosed the dignity of the one you proclaim. For Moses too became a counselor; he seemed to give counsel when he said, “Do not kill them, lest the nations say: Because he could not bring them in, he killed them.” But do not stop your wonder at “counselor”; do not make the name a common one. Even if there are many counselors, let the only one not be insulted. “But you have not yet perceived,” he says, “the dignity of the counselor”; for Isaiah explains what follows from what went before: “Wonderful counselor,” he says, “mighty God.” He did well to add “mighty” to “God.” Why? Just as there were many counselors, and the dignity of the one counselor ought not to be wounded on that account, so, since there were many gods (“For I said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High”; and again God said to Moses, “Behold, I have made you a god to Pharaoh”), the one proclaimed ought not to be insulted. And so that you would not think he is a god as Moses was, or as the apostles were, he added, “mighty God.” Moses was a god, not mighty but strengthened; […] mighty. Moses was a god who was strengthened; even if he worked great wonders, he still receives the grace. The apostles are under authority; the Savior holds authority, and gives it. “Mighty God.” And he was not content even with this, but adds, “the one who holds authority,” to teach both us and the heretics not to call the ruler of authority one who is under authority. To be under authority is one thing; to hold authority is another. Do you want to learn the difference between one who has authority of himself and one under authority? The apostles are under authority; the Savior holds authority. Paul saw in Macedonia a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and said in front of everyone, “These men are slaves of the Most High God.” Paul, annoyed, turned and said to the spirit (not to the possessed girl, but to the one possessing her): “I command you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to come out of her.” He calls him Lord to show that he himself is a slave. Since the wonder was beyond man, demons obeying men, so that the sight might not carry off the words and the servants of God be thought gods, “I command you,” he says, “in the name of the Lord.” To give a charge belongs to a slave; to exercise authority belongs to a Master. You have seen the servant giving a charge. […] to the Master a demoniac, deaf and mute. The Master did not say, “I charge you, mute and deaf demon,” but, “I order you.” The charge is Paul's; to order belongs to the one who holds authority. “I order you, come out of him and enter him no more.” The demon obeyed, for it recognized the authority. Let blessed Ezekiel say to the heretical synagogue: “As I live, says the Lord, your sister Sodom has been justified more than you.” And what does he mean? For if you do not learn what he means, you cannot be equipped to grasp the contemplation. The Sodomites were given up, for they lived in lawlessness; that is why they were consumed by fire sent from God. And Jerusalem, many generations after their destruction and the burning of their city, was flourishing to look at, but was doing worse things in wickedness. So when these surpassed the wickedness of Sodom, God swears through Ezekiel, saying: “As I live, says the Lord Adonai, say to the faithless daughter Jerusalem: Your sister Sodom did not sin half your sins, and Sodom was justified by you”; that is, “Compared with you, Sodom is righteous.” It is as if someone said to heretics: “Even Jews are justified by the excess of the heretics' madness; even demons are justified,” since the demons call him Son, while the heretics call him a thing made. “Sodom was justified by you.” I ask in passing the reason why those who did the deeds of the Sodomites did not perish like the Sodomites; or rather, if they doubled the sins, why were they not made desolate …

God, then, saw not only the impiety of the Jews at its height, but also the godliness of the faithful afterward. He foresaw that the holy Virgin, the Theotokos, was to come forth from Judea; he foresaw the chorus of the apostles; he foresaw the ranks of the confessors and the tens of thousands of Jews who were going to believe. For did not Paul go up to Jerusalem, and his fellow apostles say to him, “You see, brother Paul, how many tens of thousands there are of Jews who have believed”? So, foreseeing those who would believe, he spared those who did not believe, not for their sake, but for the sake of the fruit that was to be born from them. And Isaiah testifies: “And unless the Lord Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah.” But did we force the word, and was Isaiah speaking about something else? Hear Paul, the brother and interpreter of the prophets, saying: “[Brothers,] now a remnant has come into being according to the election of grace, so that the remnant may be saved. And as Isaiah said: Unless the Lord Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom.” For God foresaw all things; it is not that, as we are taught things by time, God too learns by experience. Again, as I have often said, he saw the ends of the ages. He saw Adam sinning, and foresaw also the righteous who would come from him; he saw him cast out of paradise, but foresaw that a kingdom had been prepared for him. And the wonder is that the kingdom came before paradise. Do you marvel that Adam was cast out of paradise? Marvel that before paradise the kingdom of heaven had been prepared for him. The Savior says: “Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Let the heretics be ashamed. The things prepared for the saints are from before the foundation of the world, and was there a time when the Son was not? In word they confess the Only-begotten, since they cannot erase the letter; they grant the word and steal the thing. If we say “only-begotten Son,” they at once say, “It is also written: Firstborn of all the world.” So according to the heretics the two conflict. For if he is firstborn, he is not only-begotten; for the firstborn is called firstborn when he has brothers, but the only-begotten, if he has brothers, is not called only-begotten. For the only-begotten is the one alone begotten of someone, as Scripture also testifies when it says to Abraham, “Take your son, the only-begotten.” He is called firstborn who has brothers, for he holds first place by being born first; but the only-begotten is called only-begotten because he has no brothers. And again, the only-begotten is the one alone begotten of someone, not the one who alone came into being, as the heretics twist it: “Only-begotten, because he alone came into being as such.” Then the sun too would be only-begotten, since it alone is such, which makes no sense. But it is Scripture's custom to call only-begotten the one alone begotten of someone, according to the proof from the word set out just now. Attend. The firstborn, if he has no brothers, is only-begotten. I find not one, not two, not three, but many firstborn. A strange thing! How can there be many firstborn? There ought to be one. I have extended the discourse because of the firstborn and the only-begotten; let us now solve the difficulty. The one who first believes in his own generation God calls firstborn, not as first among other believers, but as appearing first in his own times. For example, the people was in Egypt, and God says through Moses: “Israel is my firstborn son. I said: Send my people away to me.” See, a firstborn people, since at that time it was the first people to have known God. After this David arose, after the law, after many generations, and God promises to raise up the Christ from his seed, and says: “I found David my servant; with holy oil I anointed him. He will call on me: You are my Father. And I will make him firstborn.” If David is firstborn, the people is firstborn too. Adam is firstborn in his own generation; Noah and Shem are firstborn; Abraham is firstborn in his own generation; Moses, Isaiah, since in their own times they came forward in godliness. From these many firstborn a great Church has been gathered, and it is in heaven. Paul testifies: “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, Jerusalem, and to tens of thousands of angels in festal gathering, and to the church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven.” Of those firstborn Christ is one according to the flesh; according to the divinity he is Only-begotten. For since he takes to himself those who make progress in each generation, he too, with all of them, is called firstborn. That is why Paul says, “Firstborn among many brothers.” But much could be said about man; the account is kept for the next day, the sixth day, on which man was also formed, so that, with the grace of God working with us, the word may be made clearer as far as we are able, not from what we reason but from what we are taught. For the spring is common, and all the gifts set before us are common, if only we are willing to be eager with all zeal. Let us now turn our word to the care of morals.