Six Homilies on the Creation

The whole aim of godliness is the correction of our souls. For all the teachings of godliness look to this, the salvation of our souls. This is what the Word of God labors for; this is what the law of Moses lays down; this the rational tongues of the prophets proclaim; for this the apostles cry out with mouths that are never silent. For everything is on our behalf and for our sake, so that our affairs may run toward correction and attain godliness. Every holy book, then, takes our salvation as its starting point, as I said before. But this book of creation is the beginning, source, and power of everything in the law and the prophets. And just as a house cannot stand unless a foundation is laid beneath it, so neither can the beauties of creation shine unless the account of creation has first received its beginning. I know, indeed, that many of the holy Fathers have entered into the account of creation and have said many great and glorious things, as the grace of the Holy Spirit measured out to them. And though many great and wonderful things have been said before, nothing prevents what we have to say from being said as well, as the grace of the Holy Spirit may supply. For just as those before us were not hindered by those before them, so neither are we hindered by those before our generation. For to them, to us, and to those before them there is one grace, supplying the power of the Holy Spirit. For “all these,” he says, “one and the same Spirit works, distributing to each one individually as he wills.” So what comes from the Fathers is not thrown out; rather, what comes from us is set beside it. Even if their contributions are great and ours small, ours are still built up together with theirs. For just as, when a large stone serving as a squared block is set in a building and shakes a little, a small stone slipped beneath it steadies it, so the things said by the Fathers, receiving small additions, make the building of the Church greater. I ask your love to attend to the thoughts in what is said: not whether they are unfamiliar, but whether they are true. For what is customary is not always true, nor is what is unfamiliar false; everywhere one asks whether what is said is truth or falsehood. And I ask you neither to do me a favor like a friend, accepting the words without examination, nor like an enemy to throw out the word because it is strange, but to look everywhere …

“In the beginning,” he says, “God made the heaven and the earth.” This history is a writing of Moses the lawgiver and a revelation of the Holy Spirit. It contains a creation brought about by the power of God and revealed to Moses by prophetic grace. For Moses did not say these things as a historian but as a prophet. He said what he did not see, and narrated things he did not witness. For just as we said long ago that there are three kinds of prophecy (the first kind of prophecy is by speaking, the second by deed, the third by deed and word), so here too there are three parts of prophecy: prophecy about things present, prophecy about things to come, prophecy about things past. For example, a prophet, say Isaiah, was not present at what happened in Moses' time; but since the spirit of Moses was in him, revealing to him what had happened, it was prophecy. Again, there is prophecy about things present: as when someone standing before the prophet wishes to hide something in his mind, and the prophet exposes him, as Elisha did Gehazi, foretelling what is to come and showing what is hidden. Moses told what had happened before; others, what was to come. So we must attend to this history not as a story but as a true prophecy spoken by the Holy Spirit. What is the prophet's aim? Moses set himself two tasks: to set out teaching and to sketch out legislation. For though he was a lawgiver, he did not begin with legislation but with creation. Why did he wish first to show God as maker and Master of the universe? So that God might be shown to legislate not for strangers but for his own. For if he had not first shown him as maker of the world, he would not have been shown a credible lawgiver of the world. To legislate for strangers is a matter of force; to train one's own follows naturally. And in the same way John the evangelist did not set down Christ's legislation first, until he had stated his lordship, saying: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being that has come into being. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.” When he had called him Maker and Creator, then he brings him in as teacher and lawgiver of the universe. Again, another aim of Moses. Why did blessed Moses mention heaven and earth and sea and waters and what comes from them, but not mention angels or archangels or Seraphim or Cherubim? Because he fitted his legislation to the times then. For he knew whom he was addressing: people who had come out of Egypt, who had learned the Egyptian error about sun and moon and stars, rivers and springs and waters. So he left aside the creation of the invisible things and spends his word on the visible ones, to persuade those who worshiped them not to think them gods but works of God. Nor was it necessary then to tell them about angels and archangels, lest he feed their disease again. For if, without seeing angels, they said […], how much more, had they heard of angels or archangels, would they have thought them gods. But he mentions heaven and earth, mountains and waters, and all that comes from them, so as to make known the invisible one from things seen and show the craftsman from his works. The three youths in Babylon did the same. Since they were among that nation that fought against God, where there was no knowledge of God but idols were worshiped, they say in the furnace: “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.” Why did they not stop there, but name angels, heavens, earth, fire, water, cold, heat, and the like, counting creation part by part? So as to wash the whole creation and cleanse all that was made, and leave no spark of impiety. So here too Moses, wishing to drive out the Jews' Egyptian error, mentions heaven and earth as things made, to show the things made and bring to mind the one who made them: “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.”

Give me your mind here. I marvel how John and Moses had the same opening. For this one says, “In the beginning he made,” and that one says, “In the beginning was.” But the one spoke usefully and the other properly. Where there is creation, Moses set down “made”; where there is the Creator, the evangelist set down “was.” Great is the difference between “made” and “was”: the one came into being, not having existed; the other was, always being. “In the beginning he made,” and “In the beginning was.” To be belongs to God, to come into being belongs to creatures, as the evangelist also distinguishes. For of the Savior he says: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” Six times he says “was,” to express being. But of the servant, when he had proclaimed the one who is and came to the slave, John, he says: “There came …” God he was, but man he became. And if they dare to say of the Savior too that the Savior was, having come into being, he differs in nothing from the earth. Attend, I beg you. If the heretic says that Christ was, having come into being, and before coming into being was not, what more has he than the earth? For of the earth too Moses said: “And the earth was.” If, then, they take “In the beginning was” of being made, and not of the eternal nature, he has nothing more than the earth. Both God the Word was, and the earth was; but he was in the beginning without having come into being, always being, while the earth was, having come into being. For the lawgiver did not say first, “And the earth was,” until he had said, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth”: first “made,” and then “was.” We know, brothers, that these subtle questions seem difficult to the minds of most people. But on a fast day we ought to discuss the deeper thoughts, with souls that are more sober. “In the beginning was,” and “In the beginning he made”: they gave the opening in the same words, “In the beginning” and “In the beginning,” to show that there is one root of godliness, which both taught the lawgiver and enlightened the theologian. For the two Testaments are sisters, given by one Father; that is why they also speak in harmony, for they have almost the same image and likeness. And just as sisters born of one father have the marks of likeness, so the two Testaments, begotten of one Father, bear a great resemblance. Indeed, in the Old Testament the law goes first and the prophets follow; and in the new grace the Gospel goes first and the apostles follow. There, the twelve prophets, Hosea and those with him, and four: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel; in the New, twelve apostles and four evangelists. There again God's first calling began with brothers: he took Moses and Aaron as the first heralds; and in the Gospel he makes Peter and Andrew his first calling. There the grace was single, here double: there two brothers were called, Moses and Aaron; here a double pair of brothers, Peter and Andrew, James and John. Since the Savior wished to stamp on us the love that is according to the Holy Spirit and to make us brothers in disposition and in spirit, he took nature as a foundation, fixed onto it the affections of nature, and on it builds the foundation of the Church. The first sign in the Old, the river changed into blood; the first sign in the New, water into wine. But this is not the time to recount the whole likeness in order; let us return to our subject. “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” In six days God made all things. But the first day differs from the days after it. For on the first day God made things out of what did not exist; from the second day on God made nothing out of what did not exist, but changed what he had made on the first day as he willed. And you who have considered and searched: if you find the truth, agree; if you do not find the truth, accuse me, and I accept the accusation, for it gives me a full defense.

On the first day, then, God made the materials of the creatures; on the other days, the shaping and ordering of the creatures. I mean this: he made the heaven when it did not exist, not this one but the one above it; for this one came into being on the second day. God made the upper heaven, of which David also says: “The heaven of heaven is the Lord's.” This is an upper story. And just as in a house, the Lord, having built the world, laid this heaven over it as a middle roof, with the waters above it. That is why David says: “Who roofs his upper rooms with waters.” So he made the heaven when it did not exist, the earth when it did not exist, the abysses when they did not exist, winds, airs, fire, water. He made the matter of all that came into being on the first day. But someone will surely say: “It is written that he made the heaven and the earth, but nothing is written about water and fire and air.” First, brothers, when he said that the heaven and the earth came into being, he expressed the things contained by the things that contain them. For just as, when he said, “God made the man, taking dust from the earth,” he named the creature but did not count its members, nor did he say, “God made eyes and ears and nose,” but by saying “the man” included all the members; so by saying “God made the heaven and the earth,” he included everything, and brought in with them the darkness and the abysses as things made. For “darkness,” he says, “was over the abyss.” The mass of waters is called the abyss. That the abysses too were made, Scripture testifies, saying: “Before he made the abysses, before the earth came to be.” So the abysses too were made. Then hear when the air was made: “And a spirit of God was borne over the waters.” He does not mean the Holy Spirit here, for the uncreated is not counted with creation; he calls the movement of the air “spirit.” And just as it is written in the account of Elijah the prophet, “And the heaven grew dark with cloud and wind,” so here too he calls the nature of the air “spirit.” It remains to show where fire came into being. God said, “Let there be light,” and the nature of fire came into being. For this fire is not the only fire: the powers above are fire too, and the fire above is akin to the fire we have. You ask why the one is quenched and the other is not. Well, God made the angels spirits, and our souls spirits, but our souls in bodies and the angels outside bodies. As it is with souls and angels, so one can see it with fire: the fire above is without matter, the fire below is with matter. For the fire above is akin to this one, just as our soul is akin to the angels, since they are spirits and souls are spirits, as the three youths also say, “Bless, spirits and souls of the righteous,” and again, “Who makes his angels spirits.” So a soul does not appear without a body, nor can fire be seen without tow or brushwood or some other matter. And creation teaches that this fire is not foreign to that one. For many people often borrow fire from the sun and light a flame; if it were foreign, how could what is foreign be taken from it? Again, there is in heaven a great immaterial fire, so that on Mount Sinai fire appeared which God brought into view not with wood beneath it but from that immaterial fire itself; and as one might say that this fire is small beside that great one, so Moses too says: “From heaven the Lord made his voice heard, and God showed his great fire,” to show that this one is small. All of it, then, is fire: lightning, the stars, the sun, the moon; and the fire we have is akin to them. And see how lightning shows its kinship with the stars by its name: astrapē and astra. And the Savior too, to show that fire and lightning are akin, says in the Gospel: “The lamp of the body is the eye. If then your eye is full of light, your whole body will be full of light.” So the Savior. Then he adds: “As when the lamp lights you with its lightning,” calling the lamp's gleam lightning.

So everything came into being: fire came into being, the abysses came into being, winds, the four elements, earth, fire, water, air. For what he passed over, as it were in passing, Moses sums up, saying: “In six days God made the heaven and the earth and all that is in them.” And just as with the body he did not name all the members, so with creation he did not list everything, even though all things were furnished together with the world. If there were no fire in the earth, we would not today strike fire from a stone, or from wood; for wood rubbed together produces fire. Attend carefully, then. “Darkness,” he says, “was over the abyss.” Did God make darkness, then, someone asks? We know that the thought is deep; but since we are often among both those who listen lovingly and those who like to find fault, we must not leave the word unexamined, lest the promise be great and the result small. Where, then, does darkness come from? For God, they say, did not make it; God, they say, is the maker of neither darkness nor gloom. What, then, is darkness? Many have wanted to say that it is a shadow cast by the heaven: when the upper heaven came into being, they say, and the lights stayed above, the earth was left bare and darkness came about. But the upper heaven is full of light, not dark; even if it had no sun or moon or stars, it had its own shining nature. If, then, the heaven lay above and the earth was spread out below, the one shining from above and the other lit from below, where does the darkness come from? It seems to me that since water lay over the surface of the earth, and mist and gloom had gathered about the waters (as happens even now over rivers), the mist, raising gloom, made clouds, and the clouds, overshadowing, made darkness. That a cloud brings darkness, Scripture says: “And the heaven grew dark with clouds.” But we must not be ignorant of the heretics' allegories either. Some heretics have dared to say that the darkness is the devil and the abyss the demons; and when God said, “Let there be light,” that is, the Son, [the devil] is not only equal to him in honor but even older. But this impiety ought not even to be mentioned; we have brought it forward so that you may not be ignorant of what is said. The darkness then, therefore, was the darkness from the clouds. So too there was darkness in Egypt, not because it was night but because a mist had formed. So it was also on Mount Sinai: there was darkness, not because night had come, but because a cloud overshadowed it. So too at the cross of Christ there was darkness, not because night came on, but because a shadow and a screening had come about. So we must not handle the divine oracles carelessly. “And a spirit of God was borne over the water.” He calls the wind “spirit,” as he says elsewhere, “With a violent wind you will shatter the ships of Tarshish,” calling the movement of the air “spirit.” Do not think that air is one thing and wind another: the air itself, when moved, makes wind, as experience testifies. Often with a fan or a linen cloth we stir the still air, and from the movement of the air we make wind. So to show by the word “spirit” that wind is a movement of air, he said “was borne”; for it is the property of wind to be borne over creation. “God said: Let there be light.” Why did Moses not say, “God said: Let there be heaven; let there be sea,” but there “made” and here “said”? Since with us word comes before work (we speak first, then work), he wished to show God working first, to present creation as swifter than any word. When God works the materials by power, he says “made”; but when he was about to set all things in order, and light was the beginning of the world's order, he brings in a fitting word. And again, since God's first work was light and his last work was man, God first works light by word and afterward man by deed, completing the whole from light to light.

And how light and man belong together, hear. Light shows the things that are; man is the light of the world: when he came in, he showed you the light of art, the light of knowledge. Light showed the grain; understanding made bread. Light showed the cluster on the vine; the light of understanding showed the wine in the cluster. Light showed the wool; the light of man showed the garment. Light showed the mountain; the light of understanding showed the quarry. That is why the Savior also calls the apostles light, saying, “You are the light of the world.” Why does he call them light? Not only to honor them, but also to show the hope of the resurrection. For just as light, setting in the evening, is not destroyed but hidden, and after being hidden appears again, so man too, sent to the tomb as to a setting, is kept for the dawn of the resurrection. “Let there be light.” He told what came into being, but did not disclose the manner; nor did he learn it. “That light came into being,” he says, “I know; how it came into being I do not grasp.” That is why the Savior also said to the apostles, “It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father has set by his own authority.” If, then, it is not for us to know times or seasons, can we grasp the Master of times and the maker of the ages by human reasonings? “God said: Let there be light, and there was light.” O that holy and great power! O great wonders! Light came into being, and God calls the light day and the darkness night. Why does he call it “day” (hēmera)? Because everything bright and cheerful is called “gentle” (hēmeron). That is why we call kindness “gentleness” (hēmerotēs), and call tame beasts “gentle.” “And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.” Why “night” (nyx)? Because at night it brings a man, as he sleeps, to remember death, all but saying: “Learn, man, who you are. You are mortal; you are a slave to sleep; why do you imagine things above you?” For night is compunction (katanyxis); whence David too says, “What you say in your hearts, be pierced with compunction on your beds.” Indeed, at night a man lies neither dead nor alive. Ask a heretic: “What is he? Alive or dead?” If he says, “Alive,” say: “Why then does he not perceive those who are talking or walking about?” If he says, “Dead,” say: “How then does he breathe?” For what breathes is not dead, and what does not perceive is not alive. You do not see yourself, yet you imagine things above you. But let this be enough on the first day. For evening has overtaken us, as there it overtook the works of the first day; and we have set these things out as best we could, though the thoughts were deep. It is for the faithful to search what has been said and to inquire …

But we, nurslings of holy fasting, who have feasted on heavenly things while our bodies go without food, let us be eager to keep the fast holy. For “Sanctify a fast,” he says. Do we sanctify it, or are we sanctified by it? The prophet said this in place of “keep it holy.” For just as, when we pray, “Hallowed be your name,” we are not praying on behalf of his name (for his name hallows all things), but since his name has been called upon us (for we are called Christians from Christ), he says, “Let your name be hallowed in us.” For with the Holy One all things are holy; nothing that is not holy draws near to God, for God is holy, resting among the holy. His heaven too is holy: “He will hear him from his holy heaven.” The angels are holy: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory with his holy angels.” The land that holds his worship is holy: “And he will set his will,” it says, “to pervert the covenant against his holy land.” And David: the court is holy: “Worship the Lord in his holy court.” Isaiah: the temple is holy: “For your temple is holy, wonderful in righteousness.” The irrational sheep sacrificed in those days were called holy: “As holy sheep,” it says, “in Jerusalem.” The covenant is holy: “And he will grow strong with many against his holy covenant.” The city itself was called holy: “And upon your holy city, Jerusalem, the city of our fathers.” For nothing that is not holy approaches God. Hence Paul says, “and the holiness without which no one will see God.” We have fasted from bread; let us fast also from injustice. You do not eat bread? Do not eat the flesh of the poor, lest God say of you too, “Those who eat up my people as they eat bread.” You do not drink wine? Do not let anger make you drunk, lest you hear from the lawgiver, “Their anger is like the serpent's,” and again, “Their wine is the rage of dragons.” For when you oppress a poor man and he groans, he is found before God eating the bread of tears. That is why God also says, “My altar was covered with tears.” So God rebukes those weeping at the altar, saying, “Priests, come in, weep.” But he rebukes them not because they themselves wept, but because those who were wronged, orphans and widows, made their pleas there at the altar. And to show that he speaks of them, he added, “with weeping and wailing and toil.” It is worth looking further at our sacrifices. The word of God is set before us as the soul's table. A fasting body is sanctified; a soul that is not fed wastes away. May the body fast from sins and the soul feast on the divine teachings. You cannot eat the bread of Christ and the bread of tears, as Paul says: “You cannot partake of the table of Christ and the table of demons.” The one who fasts must abstain from foods, and first of all from sins. For every day angels note who has resolved to abstain from greed, or sexual immorality, or injustice. These fasts the angels record and God stores up. For just as, brothers, governors report everything to the emperor by their dispatches, so the angels report to God all that happens, not teaching one who does not know, but fulfilling the ministering rank given them in creation. I would call the one who eats ten thousand times more blessed than the one who fasts and does injustice. I say this not to abolish fasting but to proclaim godliness. For eating is not bad; sinning is evil, as God says of a certain righteous man: “Did your father not eat? And he did my will.” So also elsewhere: “The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the tenth shall be for you joy and gladness and good feasts; and love the truth.” But the light our senses perceive has shone out, so that the maker of light may be proclaimed. Evening has overtaken us, sealing the course of the day. The beginning was good; let the end be added. Do not push it away carelessly, but hear David: “For the end; do not destroy.” May the God of this light enlighten you all with word, law, faith, righteousness, and self-control, in Christ Jesus our Lord, through whom and with whom be glory to the Father, together with the Holy Spirit, to the ages of ages. Amen.

The word of God stirs up the soul's longing and sets joy about it like a torch, so that its thoughts may be made bright, its mind cheerful, its sins cleansed, and its understanding enlightened. Such is the word of God. What a whetstone is to iron, the word of God is to the soul. The whetstone does not give the iron just one thing; first it makes it spit out its rust; so too the word of God makes the soul spit out the rust of sin, and when it is dull, sharpens and brightens it. The word of God wishes us to be bright, according to the apostle's charge that says: “that you may be as luminaries in the world, holding fast the word of life.” See the brightness. It wishes us not to be dull but sharp: “For the word of God,” he says, “is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword.” It wishes us not to be thick but to refine our mind with thoughts. For thickness is foreign to the word of God, while a finely discerning mind is at home with the law of God. That is why Scripture says of the grosser people: “And he ate and grew broad; he forsook God who made him.” Come, then, let the divine word shine on our minds too, especially with this holy fast before us, which thins bodies and sharpens minds. For fasting is the nurse of all holiness and the mother of a godly mind. What is asked is not how one goes without: many fast even because of public business, but it is not reckoned to them as fasting. For the aim is judged; necessity is not crowned. In this holy condition blessed Moses was taught the law on the mountain and was instructed about creation. We said yesterday that God, when he was about to give the law through Moses, first showed himself Creator and then lawgiver. How could the Jews have believed that God made the heaven and the earth and all that is in them unless he had first worked the wonders in Egypt, which showed him to be the Creator of the world? We teach in order to persuade; God persuades in order to teach. Since Moses was going to set out and say that God made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, if God had not first worked the wonders in Egypt and shown that he is the Creator of all creatures, the people would not have believed that God made the heaven and the earth. Moses first stretched out his hands to heaven and brought down hail and fire, and the peoples learned through the faithful servant that this mortal right hand, moved by the word of God, shook the heaven and stirred up creation; how much more, then, did the right hand of God, at his command, set the heaven firm and found the earth! For no one moves a creation he did not make. So it had to be shown that God made the earth: Moses stretched out his hand over the earth, and gnats came out. Again it had to be shown that God made fire: Moses took soot and sprinkled it, and filled the bodies of the Egyptians with sores boiling like flame. It had to be shown that God made water: the water was changed into blood. It had to be shown that he made the sea: the sea was made firm as rock, and the people passed through. First, then, he showed by works that he is Master, and then explained by words that he is Maker.

So too the Savior in the Gospel did not teach before he had worked wonders. His first sign: he changed the water into wine, and he does not appear to have taught before this sign; for the deed had to come first and the word follow. That is why the writer says: “The first account I composed, O Theophilus, about all that Jesus began both to do and to teach.” How was the Savior to teach that he is the maker of the world? If he had not opened the eyes of the blind man, he would not have been believed when he said, “I am the light of the world.” If he had not raised Lazarus, his hearers would not have believed him when he said, “I am the life and the resurrection.” If he had not spat on the ground and made clay and anointed the blind man, it would not have been believed that he is the one who took dust from the earth and formed Adam. If he had not walked on the sea, he would not have appeared as Master of the sea. If he had not rebuked the wind, he would not have been shown to be Master of the winds. That is why he appeared as a man, but was recognized and glorified as God through the wonders. The Savior, at any rate, astonished the disciples, and they said, “What sort of man is this, that the winds and the sea obey him?” He first showed the elements obeying, and then explained through his works that all things came into being through him. He first showed them obeying. If creation had not first been shown obeying, John the evangelist would not have been believed when he said, “All things came into being through him.” How could the apostles, with their untrained tongue, have been believed when they spoke of God the Word, Creator, Savior, all-wise, teacher? But the tongue of the apostles was the wonders; the mouth of the apostles was a dead man raised, a lame man walking. That faith follows wonders, Scripture testifies, saying: “Through the hands of the apostles many signs and wonders were done among the people.” And all were amazed, and more and more multitudes of men and women were added daily. The wonders shone out first, and the doctrines followed. So too in the law the wonders in Egypt went first, showing God to be Creator. But God, being good, did not wish to exalt himself alone, but shares the glory with Moses. Since God appeared from what he made, Moses too appears from the glory he received. For when he came down holding the law, so that they would not attend to him as a mere man, God filled his face with glory, so that the abundance of grace might fill up what was lacking in the weakness of nature. For they perceived that a glorified face is not foreign to God. So too the Savior made the face of Stephen the first martyr shine. Why did he make Stephen's face shine? Since he was about to be stoned as a blasphemer for saying, “I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God,” God, anticipating this, crowned his face with an angelic form, to persuade the unfeeling: if he is a blasphemer, why is he glorified? Yesterday, then, we said that on the first day God made the things that are out of things that are not. And the wonderful thing is that the works not only show God's craftsmanship but also refute the impiety of the heretics. For I ask: how did the things that were not come into being? For they ask about the one who is, how was he begotten? Let them say how the things that were not came into being, if they were not. By human reasoning, what is not does not come into being; but by divine power it does. Sometimes the heretic says: “God spoke, and it came into being.” But now you have stated the fact, not the manner. “God said: Let there be light”: what was not came into being. If the word was changed into the thing, as though the very voice going out became light, then it is not out of things that are not, but out of one who is. For who dares to say that the Word is not? Then he made nothing out of what is not, but out of himself, and the creatures are found to be of one substance with him; and what they shun in the case of the Son, they apply to the creatures. But again, when hard pressed, they say: “God's will brought about the things that were not.” Then does will make what is not, while nature does not beget what is? And this is a wonder. I speak by way of an image: suppose a spring and a rock. Which is easier, for the spring to bring forth water, or the rock? The spring, if it brings forth, brings out of what it has; the rock, out of what it does not have. Then did the rock bring forth what was not, out of what it did not have, and the spring not bring forth the source that it had in itself? And how did the things that were not come into being? Was it by chance? Is “what is not” a name and not a thing? Do not think, since I say “out of things that are not,” that “what is not” is something. Then, when you cannot say how what is came into being out of what is not, will you dare to pry into how the one who is was begotten of the one who is? All creatures were not from the beginning and came into being; the only-begotten Word and Creator of the world did not come into being from the beginning, but was. These were not, and came into being; he was in the beginning without coming into being, while these came into being in the beginning, not having existed. [3] “And the earth was invisible,” he says. What is “invisible”? I know that many of the holy Fathers have said, “The earth was invisible because it was covered by the water.” Many thoughts are godly but not true. For example, Job's three friends, seeing him in his trial, condemned the saint as suffering justly, and said: “If you had not grieved widows, if you had not defrauded orphans, God would not have brought these things on you.” And yet, since they did not know God's purpose, they chose to condemn him as suffering justly rather than to pass sentence on God as bringing it on him unjustly. They acted on God's behalf, and God rebukes them: “Why did you not speak rightly against my servant?” So a thought may be godly and yet not true. What, then, is “And the earth was invisible and unformed”? The translators have rendered it clearly. For Aquila says, “And the earth was emptiness and nothing.” It is called “invisible” not because it could not be seen, but, as one might say, “unadorned.” It was not yet made bright with plants, not yet crowned with fruits, not yet girded with rivers and springs, not yet arrayed in the rest of its fine order; and it was “invisible,” not yet furnished to be fit for bearing. Scripture says of a brave and handsome man: “Did he not strike down the Egyptian, a man to be seen?” Is there, then, an invisible man? But it means “worthy to be seen.” So just as it called the Egyptian “a man to be seen,” as worthy to be seen, so it called the formless earth “invisible.” On the second day God said: “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the water, and let it divide between water and water.” So he made this heaven, not the one above but the one we see, fixing it out of waters like ice. I want to set the matter before your eyes, for many things are conveyed to us better by sight than by word. This water stood, let us say, thirty cubits above the earth. Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the water,” and then in the midst of the waters […] half of the water above, and left half below, as it is written: “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the water, and it shall divide between water and water.” Why does he call it a firmament (stereōma)? Because he made it firm out of thin and dissolved waters. That is why David too says: “Praise him in the firmament of his power.” And to use another example: just as smoke, when it rises from wood and fire, is thin, and is turned into the thickness of a cloud, so God, raising the nature of the waters, which were so thin, fixed it above. And that the example is true, Isaiah testifies, saying, “The heaven was made firm like smoke.” So the heaven, fixed in the midst of the waters, lifted half of the waters above. Why waters above? For what use? For someone to drink? For someone to sail on? That there are waters above, David testifies, saying, “And the water that is above the heavens.” Attend now to the wisdom of the Creator. The heaven was like ice, fixed out of waters. Since it was going to receive the flame of the sun and moon and countless multitudes of stars, and to be wholly filled with fire, lest it be melted or burned up by the heat, he spread those seas of waters over the back of the heaven, to moisten and anoint its back, so that it might withstand the flame and not be scorched. You have an example of this too: just as a vessel that has water in it withstands the fire, but if it has none falls apart, so God set water against fire as its opponent, so that the heaven might have enough endurance from the waters anointing it from above. And see the wonder: so much moisture abounds in the heavenly body, though warred on by so much fire, that it even lends to the earth. For where does dew come from? There is no cloud anywhere; the air has no water; clearly the heaven drips from its surplus. That is why the patriarch Isaac, blessing Jacob, said: “May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth.”

It is said, brothers, that on the day of judgment the water above withdraws, and the heaven, no longer held together by the waters, is dissolved, and the stars fall, having no path or base. We do not say this lightly; Scripture teaches it: “For the heaven will be rolled up like a scroll” (that is, being scorched, for what is scorched curls up), “and the stars will fall like leaves from a vine.” Attend, I beg you, to another use as well. The waters above the heavens not only preserve the heaven but also send down the flame of the sun and the moon. For if the heaven were transparent, all the radiance would run upward; for fire, which tends upward, would leave the earth deserted. That is why he covered the heaven above with boundless waters, so that the radiance, held in, might be sent downward. See the craftsman's wisdom. You also have in yourself the image of the craftsman's wisdom: God made in you too an image of the four elements. Attend, I beg you. Think of this head as the upper heaven, and of what is above the tongue as the other heaven, that is, the firmament; that is why it is called the palate (ouraniskos, “little heaven”). Above, among the unseen parts, is the brain, which does not appear; in the lower part, the tongue, which appears. Just as the upper heaven is among the invisible things, and the world among the things spoken of; and just as among the elements you find earth heavy, water lighter than earth but heavier than fire, and again air lighter than water but heavier than fire; so too in us the senses, taste, smell, hearing, sight, are not all equal. Take the proof. If you wish to taste something, unless you bring it to the tongue, you get no perception of what is tasted; for taste is coarse and cannot perceive from a distance. Smell perceives from far off: you pass by a house and smell incense that you do not see. Sight again is swifter than smell: from a mountain it sees great expanses. The mind again is sharper than sight: it conceives heaven, earth, sea, and everything at once. That is why the mind is the image of God. The mind conceives, and at once builds marketplaces within itself and paints a crowd, a populace. Let the heretics be ashamed. The mind does such things; and does not the craftsman of the mind, who is sharper than any perception, have a swifter activity, a quick work of creation, an incomprehensible nature? I wish, brothers, to tell you something strange as regards impiety, but akin to the faith as regards examination, so that you may learn how many novelties the devil devises, how many he invents, how many he suggests to the heretics, or rather the heretics to him. Today a heretic came to us in the presence of holy men and Fathers and said (I tell it so that the word, heard otherwise, may not wound otherwise): “Father and Son and Holy Spirit,” he says, “are one godhead, one power, one kingdom. But there must be removed,” he says, “from his soul” (I do not say from the altar) “the saying in the Sanctus […]. If you do not take this away,” he says, “you are not Christians.” Did you see such daring and madness of the devil? Did you see the root of fighting against God? Did you see the excess of blasphemy? [To destroy] the mystery, to make the faith vanish, to uproot what was founded. And see the devil's cunning. He fixed on to it the saying, “Father and Son and Holy Spirit, one faith, one power, one kingdom.” You have mixed the poison with honey. For a lie that wishes to be believed is never believed unless it lays a foundation of seeming truth. And how, hear: not that the case is at all alike, but I will say it. Rahab the prostitute, when she had received the spies, says “Yes”: the first is true. “But they went out,” she says: the second is a lie. If she had said, “They did not go out,” the house would have been searched. She told the truth to put them to shame; she added the lie to deceive. So too this man. When we asked, “Why should we remove the Sanctus?” he said: “‘Lord Sabaoth’ is not a name of God; it belongs neither to Christ nor to the Father.” Did you see the contemptible and foul mouth? Out of ignorance he did not know that Sabaoth is not a name of God but a name of armies, that is, “Lord of the powers.” I will also tell you the reason; but before the end …

Attend, then. Since the subject has come up, we must also give the reason why the blessed prophet heard this Sanctus being sent up to God. Isaiah was a wonderful man, full of zeal, a bold man, bold not from rashness but from zeal. In those times there was a king named Uzziah, who, along with the rest of his royal glory, wished to put on the priesthood as well. The priests knew the proper order, but did not wish to oppose the king at length; they respected his rank. Isaiah too kept silent; he did not withstand the king. When God saw the priests afraid, the prophet slackening, and the king daring, he struck him with leprosy on his face, as one who had dared to touch the holy things; and he was thrown out not only from the priesthood but also from the kingdom, and remained a leper. God did what was his to do, but he was indignant with the priests, and above all with the prophet, because he was present and betrayed godliness. So God kept silence toward the prophet and gave him no words until the transgressor died. When the impious man had died, then God laid aside his indignation and is reconciled to the prophet. So Isaiah says: “And it came to pass in the year in which King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up.” And why did God appear on a throne high and lifted up? Since God is invisible, while the king, who is seen, had made him afraid, he shows the prophet the heavenly glory, to persuade him what kind of throne they despised and what kind of throne they honored; what an escort, heavenly and angelic, they failed to honor or even to consider […]. “And the house,” he says, “was full of his glory, and the Seraphim stood around him.” The Cherubim are a throne, the Seraphim an escort. For “Cherubim” means nothing other than “wisdom filled full.” And just as this throne or any other gives rest to the one seated on it, and is both honor and rest, so God's throne is wisdom, on which God rests. That is why David says, “Who sits upon the Cherubim,” instead of “who rests upon wisdom filled full.” That is why the Cherubim are full of eyes: their backs, their heads, their wings, their feet, their chests, everything was filled with eyes, since wisdom sees on every side and has its eye open on every side. “Six wings,” he says, “to the one, and six wings to the one. And with two they covered the face, and with two the feet, and with two they flew. And they cried one to another: Holy, holy, Lord Sabaoth,” that is, Lord of armies. Six wings to the one, and six wings to the other: eight are still, and four cry out. What, then, does Scripture teach us? Not to set every reasoning in motion about God, but to proclaim some things by silence, and to glorify and speak of God by faith. Why do they cover the feet and the head? Because neither a beginning nor an end is found. With two they cover the head, with two the feet; so clearly they fly with the middle wings, not the upper ones and not the lower. For when we speak about God we must speak the middle things: that he is God, that he is Creator, that he is Master, that he is benefactor. All these are middle things. If you say, “How did he beget?” you have uncovered the head, which the Cherubim cover. If you say, “Where is the end of God?” you uncover the feet, which the Cherubim cover. They cover the head and the feet not to hide them, but to teach that they are unsearchable and incomprehensible. Take the type too. There were six and six, twelve wings; eight are still, and four move. It is a type of the apostles: twelve apostles, but four evangelists cry out. And what do they cry? The very utterance that Satan was eager to overthrow. Attend, I beg you. They did not simply say, as we do, “Holy, holy, holy,” but one answered the other, as it is written: “And they cried one to another.” “Holy,” he says; we must say it once. The other says, “Holy.” Then the first again, adding the third: “Holy.” Since we have counted three, do not think there are three gods. What, then, is “Holy, holy, holy Lord”? “For there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” And just as in the singing of psalms people send the melodies back and forth to one another, so the powers above dance in answer to one another and send up the doxology as in antiphonal song. Then: “The house,” he says, “was full of his glory. And the lintel was lifted up at the cry with which they cried, and the house …”

A strange thing! From the doxology, when glory ought to have been added, even the glory that was there was lost, and smoke came in. Smoke is an image of desolation. What, then, is this? The Holy Spirit foreknew that the “Holy, holy” is fitted to the world, to the preaching of the apostles, and that the temple of the Jews does not receive it. So it says that after the preaching of the Gospel the synagogue is filled with desolation and smoke. And it was not the door that was lifted, but the lintel. Every door has a threshold lying beneath and a lintel lying on the doorposts; doorposts cannot stand without a threshold, nor be held steady unless they receive the lintel. So the upper frame of the synagogue was lifted: not the whole synagogue; it has doors, but it has no lintel. The lintel is the ruling power from above. The lintel was lifted; it was stripped of grace. And once the lintel was lifted, the doorposts were bound to be shaken by any hand at all. That is why every hand shakes the Jewish things. And that is why a prophet said: “And I will make Jerusalem like shaken porches.” “And the house,” he says, “was filled with smoke.” And where did the glory go? Attend, I beg you. Isaiah says, “And his house was full of glory”; then he says, “It was filled with smoke.” When the smoke came in, the glory was necessarily moved. And where was it moved? Not into one house: it filled the churches throughout the whole world. And to show where the glory that was in the temple went, the Cherubim say: “The whole earth is full of his glory.” One nation was stripped bare, and the ends of the earth were enlightened. This holy voice of the Lord, the royal doxology, this God-inspired initiation into the mysteries, a devilish mouth said, “Remove it from the altar.” That the blasphemy is aimed at Christ himself, the testimony makes clear. Whom did Isaiah see on the throne? For he says: “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go to this people?” He had been reconciled to his servant, but still showed a trace of indignation. Just as we, if we are reconciled to a household slave, do not at once show him a kindly face, so God, not wishing to show his whole face while Isaiah stood there, says, “Whom shall I send?” As when slaves stand before their master and he wishes to reproach their laziness, he says, “Whom shall I send? For this task I have no man,” not as though he had none, but as having no diligent one. So God too: “Whom shall I send in place of this man, who kept silent while the priesthood was attacked?” What, then, does Isaiah do? Like a household slave who has given offense and is stung and hastens to make amends for what went before, he says: “Here I am; send me.” From where, then, shall we show that the glory was Christ's? John the evangelist says: “Though Jesus had done such signs, the Jews did not believe in him, so that what was spoken through Isaiah might be fulfilled: You will hear with hearing and will not understand. These things he said when he saw his glory and spoke of him.” Do you see that the Sanctus is the crowning point of our salvation? If the Sanctus is not said, the mystery is not completed either. You have the image. As soon as the Cherubim said, “Holy, holy, holy Lord,” the sacrifice was sanctified. “And one of the Cherubim was sent to me,” he says, “and in his hand he had a coal, which he had taken with tongs from the altar.” He did not take it until it had been sanctified. “He touched,” he says, “my lips.” Why the lips? They are the porch of the mysteries. What do we the faithful say? This mystery forgives sins. And the Cherubim also say: “Behold, I have taken away your sins.” Do you see the type? Do you see the truth shining out? Let us not cease, then, to hallow him who sits on the throne high and lifted up; and let us give thanks also for the soul that was ensnared, which the wolf snatched and the shepherd drew back, which the devil seized and the lover of mankind rescued; so that every heretical mouth and every tongue raving with blasphemy may praise the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit to the ages. Amen.

The craftsman of the world adorned the heaven with sun and moon and stars, crowned the earth with flowers and plants, and embellished the whole creation in varied ways; and we, taking up the account of creation, must marvel at the things made and worship the craftsman. For these things were not written only so that we might learn that they came into being, but also so that we might marvel at the one who made them. It has been said that on the first day he brought forth the materials of the creatures, and on the second how he formed the firmament out of the thinned nature of the waters, which is why it was called a firmament. For this reason too Christ gathered the whole world, which had been thinned out and slackened and scattered among the various materials of the error of many gods, and made it one faith; and the Apostle calls it a firmament, saying, “according to the firmness of your faith in Christ.” So the abyss was divided: the water that stayed below was an abyss, and the water raised above was an abyss. Where is this from? He says: “[Abyss calls to abyss at the voice] of your cataracts.” So the abyss was divided and the firmament came into being; the earth was still covered with water. “And God said: Let the water under the heaven be gathered into one gathering, and let the dry land appear.” Since the wretched children of the heretics want to know everything, and search out the manner of an incomprehensible nature, let them say how the water was gathered, and where it was gathered, or, once gathered, where it went. For by your rule one must not simply follow the words but inquire into the facts. “God said: Let the water be gathered.” Where was it gathered? Into the sea. Was the sea not full then? The earth was full, so surely the sea was too. Where, then, was it gathered? Those who [do not understand] what lies at their feet and in plain sight [pry into] the untraceable and incomprehensible abyss of the Godhead; and the sea, incomprehensible as it is, does not shame them out of searching into the craftsman. That is why the prophet may say to the heretics, “Be ashamed, heretics, says the sea,” just as he said, “Be ashamed, Sidon, says the sea.” Where, then, were the waters gathered? Hear. When God made the earth, there were not yet the hollows between the mountains; but as soon as he said, “Let the water be gathered,” the earth broke open and he made bays. The facts themselves testify that it is earth that was split: the islands, and the mountains in between. That is why God left the islands and the mountains, so that you may learn that from the beginning it was joined together, but the word of God broke it apart. “Let the water be gathered”: the earth was laid bare. We must know that God neither made the earth, as it is now called, as “earth,” nor gave it that name; its name at the making of the world, from the beginning, was “the dry land,” as David says: “For the sea is his, and he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.” Dry land came into being, and was called earth; just as this firmament came into being, and was called heaven. When the waters were separated, the dry land came forth looking like soaked ground, for the waters had just withdrawn. So when the earth was laid bare, the Creator commands: “Let the earth bring forth the herb of grass, sowing seed according to kind and according to likeness, and the fruit tree whose seed is in it according to kind and according to likeness.” Not even this shames the heretics. Plants and trees and grass beget according to likeness, and did God beget what is unlike? And again, when the four-footed beasts and the creeping things and the birds came into being, God says: “Let the waters bring forth creeping things of living souls, and birds flying over the earth according to kind.” Wild beasts, creeping things, birds, swimming creatures, plants, grass, trees beget according to kind and according to likeness; and did God alone beget what is unlike? And when God made us, he said, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness”: the work is according to likeness, and is the craftsman unlike?

But see the wonder; for heretical wickedness often finds itself a lair. “If you say,” he says, “that the Son is according to likeness, as we are, we accept it.” But likeness of nature is one thing, likeness of grace another. We are according to likeness; he is the likeness: “For whoever has seen me has seen the Father”; but we are according to likeness. The servants of God must inquire into the differences between words. God says: “Let the earth sprout the herb of grass, and the fruit tree bearing fruit.” Then he says: “Let the earth bring forth four-footed beasts and wild animals.” Why there “Let it sprout,” and here “Let it bring forth”? Shoots and trees and fruits sprout every year. Since, then, they were going to remain in the earth and always come forth from it, he says, “Let it sprout”; but for the animals he says, “Let it bring forth,” since once they had been born from the earth they are no longer born from the earth again, but from their succession of offspring. “And it was so.” The word ran into deed; the earth was adorned; next the heaven had to be adorned. Why does he make the ordering of the earth come before that of the heaven? Because of the error of many gods that was going to spring up concerning sun, moon, and stars. God said: “Let there be luminaries in the firmament of heaven.” Why did he not make sun and moon on the first day? Because the firmament in which they were to be fixed had not yet been made. And not for this reason only, but because there were not yet any fruits that needed warming; for the fruits sprouted on the third day. And again, so that it might not be thought that they sprouted by the nature of the sun, it was when the work of creation was complete that God at last makes sun, moon, and stars. From what did he make them? It has been said that on the first day he made all things out of what is not, and on the other days out of what is. From what, then, was the sun made? From the light made on the first day, which the craftsman changed as he willed and refashioned into different forms: there the matter of light, here the stars; as if someone were to set out a lump of gold and afterwards, cutting it into coins, so to arrange the ordering of light. For just as he divided the abyss, which was then one water, into seas, rivers, springs, lakes, and wells, so too the craftsman cut up the light, which was one and uniform, and divided it into sun and moon and stars. I want to inquire how God made the luminaries; for he appears to have made them outside the heaven and then to have fixed them above. As a craftsman, when he has finished an image, then fixes it on a wall, so God first made the luminaries outside the heaven and then fixed them above, like a craftsman, as Scripture testifies: “And God made the two luminaries and set them in the heaven.” How, then, did he fix them? Were the two fixed together? That makes no sense. What, then? The fixing followed the very word of God. “God set,” he says, “the luminaries: the great luminary to rule the day, and the lesser luminary to rule the night.” When the sun was fixed in the east, the moon was fixed in the west, since she was commanded to rule the night and he the day. So the moon came into being, and it is born on its first day full. For the work was not to be mutilated at once; the luminary had to be shown as it was made. Afterwards, by its changes, it showed times and seasons and differences of days. So God makes it full, as on its fifteenth day. The sun rose at dawn; for when the moon was fixed at dawn, it appeared in the west. So as the sun ran its own course toward the west, the moon at once began to rise, so that “Let them rule the day and the night” might be fulfilled. Next comes a question: why did God make the moon full? Attend, for the thought is deep. Since it came into being on the fourth day, it ought to have appeared four days old. But again, if it had been four days old, it would not have held out to the far edge of the west. So it was found with an advantage, as fifteen days old: the moon then had an advantage of eleven days over the sun, not in its making but in its shining. That is why the moon pays back to the sun the days by which it then had the advantage. For the number reckoned by the moon, each month of twenty-nine and a half days, makes three hundred fifty-four days in the twelve months of the year. If you reckon the month thus at twenty-nine and a half days, the days of the year come to three hundred fifty-four, so that every year the moon pays back to the sun the days by which it then had the advantage. The one who reckons …

“Let there be luminaries in the firmament of heaven so as to shine on the earth.” Since the nature of fire was to run upward, God put a bridle on its nature, so that it would send its radiance not upward but downward. For fire cannot bear to tend downward, only upward. If you have a torch, turn it downward, and you see that even if you turn the instrument, the fire runs upward. Since its nature had to be such, then, he bound it, so that it shines not according to its nature but according to his command. Let any of you observe the oil in a lamp: how the fire is drawn down along with the oil, and the force of the oil pulls it down while the nature of fire runs upward; and as though forced to run against its course, it gives out a sound as if suffering violence, as if traveling against nature. For whenever something against nature happens in an element, it cries out. Why? When oil is poured on fire, it gives no sound; but if water is poured on, it crackles. Both are liquid. But since oil is food from wood, the olive nourishing it, and fire is always friendly to wood, it gladly receives what comes from its kin. If water is poured on fire, it crackles, for it is fighting its opposite. Fire belongs with air, for they are akin. You blow on a lamp, and the air carries the fire off as smoke, and it is found nowhere; for it ran to its kin. See the craftsman's wisdom; see his power. He placed the luminaries in the heaven so as to shine on the earth. “And let them be,” he says, “for signs and for days and for years.” What is “for signs”? The idle talkers have emptied out their hopes on astrology, noting signs of things that have no substance. That one cannot draw signs about human life from the stars, Isaiah testifies, saying: “Let the astrologers of heaven stand up, and those who look at the signs, and let them tell you what is going to happen.” About human life, then, the heaven gives no sign. Do you want to learn its signs? It signals rains, winds, storm, fair weather. The stars signal these, and this out of God's love for mankind, so that the sailor may see the sign and escape danger, so that the farmer may see […]. There comes also a sign of war and of peace. The Savior confirmed these signs, which are simple and free of superstition. For he says to the Jews: “Hypocrites, if you see […], ‘A storm is coming,’ and so it happens. And if you see the heaven red in the evening, you say, ‘Fair weather,’ and there is fair weather. And if you see the heaven gloomy in the evening, you say, ‘A storm is coming.’” And then he adds: “You know how to judge the face of the heaven and of the earth, but this time you do not know?” These things, storm, rain, fair weather, are not foreign to godliness, and are God's own. One could stretch out a long discourse on astrology, but that needs a strong voice and an instrument that does not flag; for the mind keeps pace with speech, and reasoning grows weak along with the tongue. So let us go on to simpler things. “Let them be for signs and for seasons.” Time is one thing, season another. Time is length; season is the right moment. No one says, “It is time to harvest grapes” in the sense of length; no one says, “It is time to marry the virgin” in that sense; but, “It is the season to marry the virgin, the season of sowing, and the season of harvest.” And Solomon says: “A season to give birth and a season to die; a season to build and a season to tear down.” By “season” he means the right moment. And the stars signal this: for example, the rising of the Pleiades is the beginning of harvest, the setting of the Pleiades the beginning of sowing. These things are foreign to impiety and belong to godliness. The feasts of God are also called seasons. God says: “Three seasons of the year you shall keep feast for me: the feast of Unleavened Bread, the feast of Pentecost, the feast of Tabernacles.” Three seasons. See: signs, and seasons. Again, the moon produces days for the sabbath, and months. The sun keeps the turnings of the years, spring […]: laws unshaken. He spoke, and they were fixed; he commanded, and they were founded. Now give me your mind here. Who is the craftsman of these things? Who made them? The Father? No one disputes it. The Son? The heretics also agree, but not rightly; for they say that the Father made the Son, and the Son made all things. Shall I accept this impiety? Since the truth binds the heretics' reasoning with bonds that cannot be loosed, let us ask the prophets: does the one who made all things have someone greater, or is he above all? For they fall by their own premise.

They say that the Son made all things, and the Father made him. May God be merciful to us for repeating the blasphemy; for in truth it is a dreadful thing to repeat the words of the impious. Yet we imitate physicians, who put their hands into wounds to cleanse the sores. The Apostle too was compelled to mention shameful things, not to defile his tongue but to cleanse sins. They say that the Son made all things, and the Father made him. I will ask the prophets who it is that made the heaven, and what sort of being he is. The prophet Isaiah says: “Thus says the Lord, who made the heaven and fixed it, who made firm the earth and what is in it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who tread it: I am the Lord. Before me there is no God, and after me there is no God. I am, and there is no other.” These are the words of the one who made the heaven and the earth, the Only-begotten, who according to the heretics came into being and then created. But “in the words of his own lips the sinner is caught.” The blessed Jeremiah says: “Thus you shall say.” To whom? To the Greeks: “Gods that did not make the heaven and the earth, let them perish from the earth. The Lord, who made the heaven by understanding, he is the living and true God.” If the God who made the heaven is true, and the heretics too confess that the Son is the one who made the heaven and the earth, what conflict is there when Christ says, “That they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”? When the Savior said these things, whether through the prophets or in his own person, he did not say “that they may know you, the only God” in contrast to himself, but to distinguish God from the falsely named gods. Whence Paul too says: “You turned from idols to serve a living and true God.” He calls him true to refute the falsely named; living, to brand the dead idols. I think, or rather I believe, that the dead are indignant with us when they hear us call idols dead. “You insult our rank,” they say. “We who once lived are called dead; why are those who never lived called dead?” “Gods that did not make the heaven and the earth, let them perish. The Lord, who made the heavens by understanding, he is the living and true God.” Who is the living one? The one who made the heaven. Do the heretics' definitions stand? Does their impiety not fall? Is not true reverence for God vindicated? Is not their perversity dissolved? You cannot grasp the works of the maker, and do you meddle with the craftsman and try to track him down? What does David cry? “How great are your works, O Lord! You have made all things in wisdom.” Prophets magnify the works; heretics belittle the craftsman. He is great in counsel and mighty in works, who fixed the heaven out of waters, for I do not leave the wonder behind. It was fixed out of waters, and carries water; it was set firm from waters, and holds up an abyss. And it has an example altogether, I mean this lowly wonder. Have you seen slabs of ice held up by water and carrying snow on top? Did winter accomplish this, and does God not accomplish it? He made the heaven not like a sphere, as the idle talkers philosophize; for he did not make a rolling sphere, but, as the prophet says, “Who roofed the heaven like a vault, and stretched it out like a tent.” None of us is so impious as to be persuaded by the idle talkers. The prophets say that the heaven has a beginning and an end. That is why the sun does not go up but comes out. Scripture says: “The sun came out upon the earth, and Lot entered Zoar.” So clearly, according to Scripture, the sun came out and did not go up. And again: “From the end of the heaven,” it says, “is his going out,” not his going up. If it is a sphere, it has no end; for where does what is round on every side have an end? Does David alone say this, or the Savior too? Hear him saying: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, he will send his angels with a trumpet and a great voice, and they will gather his elect from one end of heaven to the other end of heaven.”

We ask where the sun sets, and where it runs at night. According to the outsiders, under the earth; but according to us, who say the heaven is a tent, where? Attend, I beg you, and see whether the word is false. If you have a seal attested by the truth, the place too agrees with the phrase. Imagine a vault lying over us. In the figure, the east is there, the north here, the south there, the west there. The sun, rising and then about to set, does not set under the earth; having gone out to the ends of the heaven, it runs to the northern parts, as though hidden behind a wall, since the waters do not allow its course to be seen; and it runs along the northern parts and reaches the east. And how is this clear? Blessed Solomon says in Ecclesiastes […]: “The sun [rises], and the sun sets. Rising, it goes to the west, and circles toward the north; circling, it circles, and rises in its own place.” That it runs along the south and circles the north, learn from the condition of winter. For it does not rise from the middle of the east, but slants toward the region of the south, and, cutting across a short distance, makes a short day; then, having set and again running its circle, it makes a long night. We know, brothers, that the sun does not always come out from the same point. How, then, do the days become short? Its rising draws near the region of the south; then, not coming by the high path but cutting across the slant, it makes the days short. Setting at the far end of the west, it must circle through the night the whole west, the whole north, and the whole east, and arrive at the far point of the south; and so the night must be long. When it is equal in length and keeps an equal step, it makes the equinox. Again, inclining toward the north, as in winter toward the south, and climbing to the far parts of the north, it is raised up and makes the day long; and having only a small circle left, it makes the night short. It was not the children of the Greeks who taught us these things; they do not hold this, but say that the stars and the sun run under the earth. But our Scripture, the divine teacher, Scripture trains and enlightens us. Then he made the sun, an unfailing luminary; and the moon, which puts off its beauty and puts it on again. The work shows the craftsman. The craftsman is unfailing; the work is lasting. For the light of the moon is not used up but hidden. It becomes also an image of us mortal men. Consider for how many ages it has been rising. And when it is new, we say, “Today the moon is born.” Why? Because it is an image of our bodies. It is born, grows, is filled, lessens, wanes, sets; and it is born again, since we too are going to rise, and another birth awaits us. That is why the Savior, wishing to show that as we were born here so we are born again, says: “When the Son of Man comes in the regeneration.” The moon guarantees the resurrection. “You see me,” she says, “hidden and appearing again, and do you give up your hopes?” Was the sun not made for us? The moon not for us? All created things? What is there that does not guarantee our resurrection? Is the night not an image of death? Bodies are cast down in the darkness; can you not make out their forms? Often you feel with your hand the faces of sleepers and do not know which face is this one's and which that one's, but you ask, so that the voice may announce those hidden in the darkness. Just as the night covers our forms, even if we are all in the same place, and no one recognizes another, so death comes and dissolves the forms, so that no one recognizes anyone. You pass by tombs. If you see many skulls in a grave, do you know whose this one is? But the one who fashioned them knows; the one who dissolved them understands where these forms came from. Do you not marvel at God's craftsmanship? Among so many forms in so many tens of thousands there is no exact likeness; even if you run to the ends of the world, you find no one alike; and even if you do find one, there is a difference in the nose or the eye, so that the distinctness may appear. Twins come out of one womb, and the likeness is broken off.

Then can the one who brought forth so many forms that did not exist not renew them after dissolving them? Do not, like a wretched man, measure God's power by your own reasonings. Do not think that God can do only as much as you can reason out. If he can do only as much as I conceive, I dare to say that God is very small; for my mind has measured him. But if he surpasses the mind and defeats reasoning, then the maker is untraceable and his works incomprehensible. Let the heretics be questioned from the things that appear, so that they may learn their own perplexity. Since God said, “Let there be a firmament,” and at once the word did the work, he left us this as a pledge that he himself made it. Today we leave the heaven bare in the evening, and on rising suddenly we find another firmament set firm out of the clouds. These are partial pledges of the first works, when you see the heaven darkened and another firmament made of clouds. The one who now quickly makes clouds shows how quickly he then made the heaven. And what does he do? How do the clouds rain? He made the clouds like wineskins, and through them he draws up the waters of the sea, which are salty, and fills the clouds, and changes the water, and waters the earth. Let them say how the weight is carried aloft, how it is drawn up, how the clouds are filled. They do not empty at once, but run a long way, wherever the Master commands; and God's command is like a bond laid on the clouds, not allowing them to rain until he gives the nod. That they are wineskins, David testifies: “Who gathers,” he says, “the waters of the sea as in a wineskin.” And see the wonder. He gathers the waters; the immortal and invisible hand lies upon them, not allowing them to be emptied all at once, but part by part. As a woman, spinning a fine thread, divides the wool into many different strands, so he cuts the boundless depth of the sea into drops as by a pattern and sends it thus to the earth. But here is the wonder: if it is loosed, how is it not emptied at once? If it is bound, why does it flow? You have an example, a weak one, but able to persuade you. Have you seen a water-catcher? Have you seen how it is pierced with holes underneath? A finger laid on top holds back the flow, and it is stopped below by what lies on it above. So the immortal finger of God lies on the clouds and lets go as much as he wills and keeps back as much as he wills, so as to send his gift over all the earth. And he does this especially in the late rains, when he drenches the whole earth, watering now this region, now another. That is why the prophet says: “And he will rain on one city, but on one city he will not rain. One portion will be rained on, and a portion […].” The finger of God […]. I have shaped my word into a figure we know. He commands, and they do not rain. And Scripture says this: “The clouds,” he says, “I will command not to rain rain.” “How great are your works, O Lord! You have made all things in wisdom.” Did you see God's craftsmanship? Did you see how it stops the mouths of the heretics, who do not know creation and meddle with the Creator? All things obey the law of God. The heaven stands, not upheld by its own power but made firm by the divine law. For when I am at a loss how the heaven was set firm out of waters, blessed David resolves my perplexity, saying: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm.” Why were they made firm? Because they were made from waters. For what is already solid is never said to have been made firm; no one can say, “The rock was made firm” […] set firm. That is why Peter, when he raised the paralyzed man, says: “Men of Israel, why do you marvel at this, or why do you stare at us as though by our own power or piety we had made him walk? The God of our fathers, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, glorified his servant Jesus; and by faith in his name, his name has made firm this man whom you see and know,” the paralyzed man. That is why “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm.” Out of thin and dissolved waters, by the word of the Lord, the clouds are lifted on high. See, I beg you: the bitter water is changed. The clouds draw from the sea, and what is drawn bitter from the deep they make sweet and drinkable. Christ raised us from the depths, and our bitterness […]. Who is it that made the heaven and the earth? I say it is Christ. And how do we know? Because if he were not Master of all things, he would not in the Gospel have worked wonders through all the creatures. For he worked through all the elements, through earth, sea, air, and fire, so as to appear Master of all creatures. The light of evening has come in upon the light of day. The sun shines, and a lamp bears its torch: the end of day and the prelude of night. But you, when you see lamp and sun, say: “Yours is the day and yours is the night; you prepared the light and the sun.” But the lighting of lamps does not interrupt the word. For the sun must run at his command (“for the sun knew its setting”), so that it may be shown that Christ is Master of all things made. John proclaims this: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being that has come into being.” But it had to shine not only in word but also in deed. He says to the sea, “Be silent, be muzzled,” and it was muzzled, and the work recognized the craftsman. For he spoke to the sea, and it was silent; he spoke to the wind, and it was muzzled. If he had not made it, it would not have obeyed; if he were not Master of water, he would not have changed the water into wine; if he were not Master of heaven, a star would not have proclaimed him from heaven; if he were not Master of the sun, it would not have put on darkness at the cross. Christ was on the cross, and the sun was darkened. O the wonder! Not even creation could bear the insult to its Master. The sun was darkened, so that you might learn that even on the cross itself he is Master of the sun. The earth was shaken, so that you might learn that David spoke of him: “Who looks on the earth and makes it tremble.” The rocks were split, so that you might learn of whom the prophet said: “His wrath melts rulers, and the rocks were shattered by him.” The tombs were opened, so that the resurrection might appear, and God who raises the dead might shine through all things.

But we must also put forward a moral word. The lamp calls us to say, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my paths.” Evening has overtaken us, so that we may say, “Let my prayer be directed as incense before you, the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.” And why not a morning one? Give me your mind here, for we ought to understand what we sing. David says, “Sing with understanding.” “The lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.” Moses, or rather God, commanded two sacrifices to be offered, one in the morning and one in the evening. The dawn offering was a thanksgiving for the night; for whoever was kept safe through the night gives thanks in the day. The evening sacrifice was a thanksgiving for the day: “Since you kept me,” he says, “during the day, I thank you for the whole day.” The morning sacrifice does not receive one who has sinned in the night. That is why he says, “The lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.” You come in at evening; you spread out your hands. If they have confidence, let them be spread out; if they have not written up injustice, if they have not robbed the poor, if they have not defrauded orphans, let them be lifted up, as having a face to show. “The lifting up of my hands”: that is, “See, Lord, the hands are clean.” For just as one who has sinned cannot lift up his face but is bowed down by his conscience, so a defiled hand does not even dare to face God. See: if the hands are clean of injustice, let them be spread out. That is why the patriarch Abraham refused to take gains from shameful profit, when the king of Sodom said to him, “Take everything; only release the women.” So that he might have confidence, he took nothing; and having clean hands, he said, “I stretch out my hands to God, who made the heaven and the earth.” And he stretched them out, since they were not defiled by unjust gain. “The lifting up of my hands”: Paul interprets “The lifting up of my hands”: “I want the men to pray in every place, lifting up holy hands without anger or disputing.” The evening demands of us the works of the evening. You spread out your hands; the craftsman examines them. The morning time comes, and if you do not have a clean hand or mind, you do not even dare to look at the morning; experience is the teacher. Consider how someone who has remained pure comes in with confidence, as though treading his own courtyard. For self-control in the night gives him confidence in the morning. That is why David says, “If I remembered you on my bed, at dawn I meditated on you.” I thank God; I remember that when our voice was failing, the word of God restored it, looking not to our worth but to your longing. Let us pray, then, in truth of heart, to have peace, to have confidence at dawn, to flee heretical madness, to pursue the orthodox faith, and to send up glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and always and to the ages of ages. Amen.

When our voice was failing the day before, the grace of God made it firm through your prayers and your longing. Using that very experience as a teacher of how much longing and zeal of love for God can do, I come to the same appeal, asking you again to request the same grace on your own behalf. For if Paul, the vessel of election, who had Christ speaking in him, who was steered by the Holy Spirit, took the prayer of his hearers as a pledge, saying, “Brothers, pray for me, that a word may be given me in the opening of my mouth,” how much more do we, who are lowly and, so to speak, nothing, ask for your intercession, so that the bond of the tongue may be loosed and the word of boldness opened; and that divine grace itself may keep the instrument unhindered and grant an abundant supply of thoughts, not so that the one who speaks of divine things may profit alone, but so that he may draw up the heavenly wealth together with you. Come, then, let us take up the sequence. For it is fitting, I think, that just as the lawgiver Moses himself completed the account of creation in sequence and order, so we too, joining the second things to the first and the third to the second, should judge well and hand on to you the course of the word without confusion. […] was adorned with fruits, plants, trees, springs, and in short with everything it needed. For what came up from it was not of one simple kind, but varied and manifold. Some things adorned the earth itself; others became food for men or for the irrational animals; and others provided for the use of the men just mentioned. It is not the time now to go through the various things that came up from the earth, so as not to weary your ears with the length of the discourse. The heaven too had received its own adornment. Next God proceeds to the waters and makes them bring forth a living soul: the great and all-wise Creator, who made all things by an undivided nod and by his holy Word, as you recognized the truth of the facts from the truth of the Word itself when you heard him saying, “Let the waters be gathered,” and at once the work followed the word; and again, “Let the earth bring forth,” and “Let the waters bring forth,” and “Let there be luminaries.” It would take much of the present time to go through all the things made by the Word. Let us leave aside the works of the old creation and come to those done by him in the New Testament by word alone. For he is the one who created the old things and made the new, according to John, who says: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” What word could explain these things exactly? But let us keep to the sequence. This all-wise Creator, as we said before, adorned first what he made first. He gave adornment to the second thing made in the second place, likewise to the third and to the fourth, and to all the rest in turn he provided adornment according to the order of creation. What was he aiming at by this? Perhaps he wished to teach us to honor the boundaries of the elements themselves and to recognize order. First, then, he made the upper heaven; second, the earth; third, the firmament; fourth, he separated the waters. What he made first, he adorned first. “How, then,” some more exacting person will surely say, “did he adorn the earth first, when it came second?” and he will want to seize on my word as contradicting itself. To him we must say that nothing contradictory has been said by us now, but that the word is entirely consistent with itself. For the earth was adorned before this firmament, which came into being after the upper heaven and received its constitution on the second day. For precedence had to be kept in the sequence. When he had adorned the earth with plants and fruits, and beautified the heaven with sun and moon and the rest of the chorus of stars, he came to the waters. And what does the historian say? “And God said: Let the waters bring forth creeping things of living souls, and birds flying over the earth along the firmament of heaven.” See God's word bringing works upon the words, and the words accomplishing things. See God's syllables, small words filled with divine power. “Let the waters bring forth”: the word is God's labor. I think the works ran ahead of the word, for the power was swifter than the utterances. The word had not yet been spoken, and the work was already receiving its own adornment. And the wonder is that God gave each of these elements a double adornment. He gave the firmament luminaries and dew. And again, the use of these luminaries is varied, as is clear from the very words of Scripture; we spoke of them the other day as best we could, if not as they deserve, when we set out our discourse about them, and it is not useful to speak of them again now. To the earth, crops and plants; to the waters, swimming creatures and birds. “Let the waters bring forth creeping things of living souls, and birds flying.” He calls fish creeping things, since they creep rather than walk. Whence blessed David too, following the lawgiver, says: “This is the sea, great and wide; there are creeping things without number.” A strange thing, a strange arrangement, a strange promise in the word! Why? Because he is the maker of all things, he has things past, present, and to come before his eyes more than we have what is before our own eyes. Since he was going to supply life to the world first through waters, he first entrusts the waters with bringing forth a life-producing nature, so that you may learn where the root of life lies. When I see those being enlightened coming out of the holy waters, having gone into baptism with many evils, like creeping things, and coming out with eternal life, I see the lawgiver saying, “Let the waters bring forth” what were once creeping things, now “a living soul.” How does this become clear to us? Because those who come to the bath receive the name of creeping things on account of their former sins. Many came out to the baptism of John; he says to those who came: “Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” When a soul that has lived with wickedness for many years goes into baptism and comes out having put it off, see whether the Master's voice does not shine through the very works, saying, “Let the waters bring forth creeping things of living souls, and birds flying.” For the one being saved receives a double grace: he is made alive in soul, and as a bird he lives as a citizen with the angels and keeps company with the order above. “And birds flying over the earth along the firmament of heaven”: “over the earth” because of the body, “in heaven” because of the citizenship. We say these things not as allegorizers: it is one thing to force the history into allegory, another to keep the history and also to perceive a contemplation in it. And to show that by “creeping things” and “winged birds” he means the creatures in the sea, he added: “And God made the great sea monsters, and every living soul of creeping things, which the waters brought forth, and every winged bird.” For what bird was not winged? What need was there to say “every winged bird”? “To fly” (petasthai) is said from spreading out the hands. Hands too can be spread, as the prophet says: “All day long I spread out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people”; not that hands have wings, but because petasthai means to spread out. So the creeping thing too is a “flyer,” from creeping and spreading itself out; whence David too says, “creeping things and winged birds.” So God made the great sea monsters, that is, the great dragons that are in the sea. For the other translators say: “God made the great dragons.” They did not say “the sea monsters” but “the dragons.” Among the living things in the sea nothing greater came into being than the dragon. That is why David says: “Praise the Lord from the earth, dragons and all abysses”; and elsewhere: “This is the sea, great and wide; there are creeping things without number, living things small with great; there ships pass through; this dragon, which you formed to sport with.” And elsewhere, wishing to show that there is not one dragon but many, he says: “You crushed the heads of the dragons on the water.” So he made the great sea monsters. “And God saw that all things were good.” Why did he say “good” in the plural? Was it not because of their number? But when he made the stars and the sun and the moon, though many things were made, he says, “God saw that it was good.” The stars are many, their tens of thousands are countless, and he did not say, “God saw that they were good,” but “that it was good.” Why? Because though the luminaries are many, they come from one light and all have the same use; they were appointed to give light. But here, since the difference among the creeping things, the birds, and the swimming creatures is great (there is one account of swimmers, another of birds, another of creeping things), and within each kind there are many different ones, he says, “God saw that they were good.” The praise matches the variety of the works. “And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the waters, and let the birds […].” [3] Why, when he made the stars, did he not bless them? Why, having made plants and trees, did he not bless them? Some he blesses, others he does not bless. What is the reason for this? Attend. As many stars as came into being from the beginning, so many remain, and nothing can be added either to their number or to their size. Since they were going to remain in the sameness of their nature, they did not need a blessing to multiply them. But the creatures that are multiplied by succession, and receive increase in no other way, necessarily received the blessing as well. I say it again, so that what has been said may be fixed more firmly in your minds. For a plant that is set simply and carelessly in the folds of the earth, brothers, does not stand firm, but one set deep in it with every care does. The stars did not need a blessing, for it would not have given them increase. But birds and swimming creatures and man sought this blessing because of succession. And where things cannot be multiplied otherwise, there the blessing has its place: where the few are multiplied and the small receive growth. Since, then, we have learned the reason why these were deemed worthy of the blessing, we must next give ourselves to the other words of Scripture. “Increase,” since they are small; “multiply,” since they are few; “fill the waters,” since they occupy only part of them. We must inquire on another occasion why he deemed only the fish, the birds, and man worthy of the blessing and did not share it with the rest. Meanwhile, as we promised, let us keep to the sequence. “And God said: Let the earth bring forth a living soul.” God clothes the earth with a double honor. For first it bears seeds and plants, and after them the animals; not without reason, but since it was going to become man's dwelling. And not only this: since man himself was going to be fed from it, he honors it as the nurse and mother of this great living creature. See here too how he kept to sequence. First he prepares the food, and then brings in those who will enjoy the food, as he also did with man: first he finished the house, and then he brought in the master of the house. “Let the earth bring forth a living soul.” How does soulless earth beget a living soul? Whence came the roaring lion, or the running horse, or the working ox, or the burden-bearing donkey? Whence the differences among the animals? Whence so many souls from what has no soul? And the children of the heretics are not ashamed that the soulless earth brings forth a soul it does not have; but if they hear that God begot from his own substance, at once they stir up tangles of reasonings and bring in: “Then he was cut, then he was divided, then he suffered,” and all such things as they are used to saying. It is not the time now to go through all that they say against the Only-begotten, or rather against their own salvation. For God neither gains by being praised nor is harmed at all by being blasphemed, unless one were to call our salvation God's gain. For he is full of every good and lacks nothing in anything; he enriches all and needs nothing. What indeed could anyone give to him who is the source of all good things, on whose love for mankind alone all things depend? As David says: “All look to you … You open your hand and fill every living thing with good pleasure.” But let us bring the subject in hand to its end; for this is dear to us and fits the order. What the earth does not have, it brings forth in obedience to the command; does the divine and undefiled nature not beget what it has? But again, let no one take “having” in too human a sense and say: “Do you see how the teacher himself has granted that the Father existed before the Son?” Rather let him pardon the word, since we are men with a tongue of clay, speaking to men about a divine nature that surpasses every word. Being men, we were taught to speak as men. For the wretched people do not know that they are discussing God, bringing forward words that are not fit to be said of God. And see their trickery. When they put forward their questions, they speak from human reasonings, for example: “Everything begotten has a beginning of being.” And how so? They at once say: “When you were begotten, did you not have a beginning? Your father, your grandfather?” If you set before him, from these very reasonings, another reasoning able to dissolve his madness, at once he plays the sophist: “The discussion is about God, and you bring human reasonings to me?” They bring forward the root of the evils from common reasonings, but they will not accept the remedy for the evils from the same reasonings.

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.

Yesterday it was shown how the lifting up of hands must be done with confidence in godliness. Let the one who gives to the poor say, “The lifting up of my hands.” Let the one who raises the fallen say, “The lifting up of my hands.” Let us examine the opening of the psalm, since we must surely know what we sing. Why do we say, “Let my prayer be directed as incense before you”? For all incense goes straight up; and God does not take delight in the fragrance of perfumes. What, then, is “Let my prayer be directed”? The article is missing, so that what is said means: “Let my prayer be directed as the incense before you.” What incense? There were two altars in the tabernacle: one in the court outside, in the open air, and the other in the holy place, under a roof. The inner altar was for incense only, not for the pouring of blood; the outer altar was for the sacrificed animals, the offering of loaves, and certain other things. And the outer altar God commands Moses to make of […]; the inner one, in the tabernacle, of turned gold. What the grace of God hints at through these things we must inquire. […] two peoples serving the glory of God, the one uneducated, the other educated. The one who makes solecisms or barbarisms in his speech has his words like unhewn stones; yet they are brought forward to the altar. Again, the precious one is called turned gold; and neither is this one exalted nor is that one cast out. For there is God's altar there, and God's altar here. The incense was made of four […], frankincense. Since, then, perfume is compounded of different ingredients, and virtue too is made of different things, he says, “Let my prayer be directed as the incense before you”: like that incense compounded of many things and brought to one fragrance. Since a person comes in to pray having fasting, almsgiving, and faith, “let the fourfold virtue,” he says, “be likened to that incense that is directed before you.” So too blessed David elsewhere: “Behold, what is so good or so pleasant as brothers dwelling together? Like perfume on the head, running down on the beard, the beard of Aaron.” He likens love to the priestly perfume, prayer to incense. […] Do you have self-control? You are a brother of the priest. I do not have the priesthood, let us say; I have self-control. My self-control is sister to your priesthood. How so? For the one who performs the sacred rites must be pure, and I who worship must be pure. If I have self-control, I receive a priesthood. How so? David, fleeing Saul, came to Abiathar the high priest and says to him: “Give me loaves, since I was sent suddenly by the king and have no provisions.” The high priest, skilled in the laws, says: “They are not for another to eat, but for the priest.” Since he saw the need, but feared to betray the loaves of presentation, he seeks purity from those who were not priests, and says: “If the young men with you are clean from women, take them.” For he considered self-control a sister of the priesthood. And so that no one may take the giving of the loaves to those who were not priests as a reproach against the priest, hear how the Savior mentions it as well done. The Jews once accused the apostles because they were plucking ears of grain, rubbing them in their hands, and eating; the Savior says to them: “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and ate the loaves of presentation, which it was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those with him, but only for the priests?” Do you see self-control as the sister of the priesthood? Do you see how God does not look at persons but tests the truth? Let us prepare ourselves, then, for doing good and for righteousness, so that the fast may take wings. For just as a bird that does not have the help of its wings cannot fly, so fasting too has two wings, prayer and almsgiving, without which it cannot run upward. See Cornelius, who had these wings along with fasting; that is why a voice came to him and he heard from heaven: “Cornelius, your prayers and your alms have gone up to God.” Suppose fasting is a living creature, beloved, and its wings are almsgiving and prayer, without which it cannot run upward. Such a person, even if he does not speak, cries out for justice with a great tongue. For virtue is a great advocate of righteousness. That is why he says: “[Hear,] Lord, [the cause] of my righteousness.” The first and greatest good, then, is prayer and almsgiving and right dealing; but what is secure and unshaken and the root of all is the knowledge of God, the worship of the Only-begotten, the confession of the Holy Spirit: one faith, undivided, secure, unsplit, unparted. What I am about to say has been said before, but I say it again. God, being wise, allowed the heresies to take the names of their doctrines from their own leaders, so that it might be clear that what they hold is not God's doctrine but a human invention: for example, Macedonians from Macedonius, Arians from Arius, Eunomians from Eunomius; and the other heresies likewise. But wishing to keep the faith of the apostles unwounded, he did not allow them to be named after a man. For even if they call us homoousiasts, they do not name a man; they proclaim the faith. That being called after men belongs not to believers but to heretics, Paul says, blaming the Corinthians: “I hear that there are divisions among you; for one says, I am of Paul, another, I of Apollos, another, I of Cephas.” Do you see that being called after men belongs to schisms? Was not Peter more trustworthy than Eunomius? He shuns the names of the apostles, yielding to the glory of Christ; and do you cut up the faith, the undivided kingdom, the unparted glory? But enough of this, for we have the lamp and the light: “For your law is a lamp to my feet and a light to my paths.” Why a lamp […]. I urge your love to keep your fast undefiled, unstained by injustice, clean of greed. See the vanity of those who busy themselves with abstaining from foods and do not care about abstaining from sins. “I do not drink wine,” he says, “I do not eat oil, I do not eat meat.” Good, truly, for God's sake; these things too are good; but let us examine the matter. Bread, water, wine, meat, oil: all these are God's creations; but greed and injustice and impiety are the works of the devil. You withdraw from God's works because of fasting; do you not withdraw from the devil's works because of fasting? Bread and wine and oil and all the rest are God's works, all good, and very good. Paul says: “Every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.” If, then, it is blessed, if it is sanctified, why do we abstain? But injustices and acts of greed and such things are the works of the devil. You withdraw from God's works because of fasting, and from the devil's works are you not separated for the sake of godliness? And indeed, brothers, no judgment has been fixed against the one who does not fast, but against the one who does injustice he has threatened punishment. Do we flee what carries no liability, and not flee what is liable to judgment? Almsgiving is a good thing: in appearance it scatters, but in truth it gathers. For just as a farmer lends to the earth, from which he receives back his seeds, so almsgiving seems to be given to others, but in truth it is stored up for the giver. “He scattered,” says David, “he gave to the poor; his righteousness remains forever.” So let us fast, so let us worship, so let us […], glorifying the Father, hymning the Son, worshiping the Holy Spirit; for to him be glory to the ages. Amen.

Many and great are the gifts given to men by God, who loves mankind; but the first and greatest of all his gifts is the teaching of the Scriptures. For sun and moon and the whole chorus of stars, and rivers and springs and lakes, came into being for the care of our bodies; but the holy Scriptures were given for the correction of our souls. And as far as the soul is above bodies, so far is the gift of the divine Scriptures above the other gifts. That is why the Savior says: “Search the Scriptures, in which you think you have eternal life.” Let us search, then, the treasures of the Scriptures, keep to our promise, and attempt to describe, as best we can, the creation of man. But again, let no one find fault with what is inquired into with exactness; for it is the mark of those who set out to talk nonsense to find fault with God's arrangements and to accuse what is said with exactness. I heard some people complaining: “What need was there to speak about fire and water, and say that fire crackles when water is thrown on it? We,” he says, “do not want to learn natural philosophy, but theology.” We must recognize that these words belong to the idle and the lazy. For after theology, natural philosophy provides a foundation for […]; let them find fault with the prophets, let them find fault with the apostles. The Apostle does natural philosophy: “Not all flesh is the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, another flesh of cattle, another of fish, another of birds; and there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies.” Why does Paul do natural philosophy, and draw an argument from musical instruments, saying, “There are, it may be, so many kinds of sounds in the world, and none is without sound”? “For if the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, who will prepare for battle? Whether pipe or lyre, if it does not give a distinction in the notes, how will it be known […]?” What did Paul's tongue have in common with pipe and lyre? But he does natural philosophy from the things that appear, in order to present the things that are understood. What need was there in the book of Job to say, “The ant-lion perished for lack of food,” and, “The young of vultures fly to the heights”? Why did another prophet say, “As when a lion roars and seizes, and cries out over its prey, and the mountains are filled with its voice”? And the Savior himself does natural philosophy: “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which is smaller than the other seeds, but when it has grown becomes greater than all the herbs”; and again: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who casts his seed, and it sprouts and grows, he does not know how; for the earth bears of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then fills the grain in the ear.” The Savior does natural philosophy about the heaven too: “If the heaven,” he says, “is red in the evening, […]; and in the morning, Today there will be a storm, for the heaven is red and gloomy.” What need, then, was there for these things? I say this because of those who set out to accuse ignorantly. The word concerns God, and do you flee from an exact hearing of the doctrines? Since, then, by God's grace it lies before us to speak about the creation of man, not as the matter deserves but as far as we are able, we must come to the subject …

The heaven had been adorned; the earth had been crowned with fruits; the waters of the sea had been divided off; shoots had sprouted; the irrational animals had come forth; the world had been filled; the house had been adorned; the master of the house of all that had been made was lacking. God said, “Let us make man according to our image and likeness.” It was shown the day before what the force of “Let us make” is, whose word it is and to whom it is spoken, who the counselor is, and whose the common deliberation. But since we presented the Son from the Scriptures as the counselor of the ancient counsel, and kept silent about the glory of the Holy Spirit (so that the sick might not take occasions from us who are healthy), we must know that there is one glory, one mind, one working word of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Here the Son is called counselor; elsewhere it is said that no one knows the knowledge of God except the Holy Spirit. Paul says: “No one among men knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man that is in him; so also no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.” If the spirit in you is foreign to your substance, then the Spirit in God is foreign to God's substance too. Does the Father will something? The same will belongs to the Son and the Holy Spirit. Does the Son will something? The same will belongs to the Father and the Spirit. Does the Spirit will something? The same will belongs to the Father and the Son. Does the Father raise the dead? The Son too raises them. The Savior says: “For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he wills.” See the will joined together. Where, then, is the will of the Spirit? Hear: “All these the one and same Spirit works, distributing to each individually as he wills.” There is one kingdom of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And God finds fault with those who try to do anything without the mind of God. He says through the prophet: “Woe, rebellious children, says the Lord. You made counsel, not through me, and covenants, not through my Spirit.” Zechariah the prophet presents the holy Trinity clearly when he says: “Let the hands of Josedek the priest be strong, and the hands of the people, for I am with you, says the Lord, and my good Word, and my Spirit is in your midst.” Besides, brothers, our regeneration bears witness to the creation. If the Spirit had not shared with the Father and the Son in the creation, it would not have shared in the regeneration. How are we baptized? In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Which birth is greater, that of creation or that of initiation? There, a beginning of life leading to death; here, a beginning of death leading to life. How, then, could the Holy Spirit be a sharer with the Father and the Son in the greater work, but be cut off from their common dignity in the bodily creation? We would not have been created if we had not been formed by the Holy Spirit. And since in the first creation the Spirit is a sharer with the Father and the Son, so likewise in baptism it is sharer and co-worker. Again, in the resurrection we cannot rise otherwise than with the Father willing, the Son working with him, and the Holy Spirit giving power. Hear the Lord saying (I said rightly “the Lord”; for even if the voice is Paul's, it is the Lord's voice, for one can hear him say, “Since you seek proof of the Christ who speaks in me”); the one who speaks in Paul says, then: “But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. If anyone does not have the Spirit of God, he does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Christ dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” Without the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit there is neither the first creation, nor the second birth, nor the final resurrection. “Let us make man.”

Here, now, I have forestalled the fault-finders. The name “man” is interpreted in the Hebrew language as “fire.” Attend, I beg you. The one who listens sincerely, as a friend and companion of the truth, is saved; but the one whose ears are hostile does not seek how he may be helped, but what he may seize on; he does not seek what he may gain, but what he may blame. In the Hebrew language man is called fire. This name was not given to Adam idly. There are four elements in the world (again I am doing natural philosophy, even if they do not like it): earth, water, air, fire. Each of the other elements remains as it is. For example, if you take a clod of earth, you cannot add to it from what you hold; if you take a clod of earth, it remains what it is. Again, if you take water by some measure, the same water remains; it receives no increase. If you fill a wineskin with air, you cannot fill another wineskin from it. But fire does not remain as it is. A small lamp is lit, and from it you kindle ten thousand torches, a whole furnace, a great flame; it does not stay at its own size, but the more material it takes, the more the fire increases. Since, then, God foreknew that the ends of the world would be filled from one human body (one lamp kindles so many torches: west, east, north, and south), he gave a name worthy of the thing. That is why the very name of Adam was a pledge of the world. Since the four regions were to be filled from him, he gives him the name Adam: alpha for east (anatolē), delta for west (dysis), alpha for north (arktos), mu for south (mesēmbria). Both the name and its letters bear witness to man, who was going to fill the world. So in the Hebrew language he is called fire. And since he bears the name fire, Scripture does not hesitate to call the angels men too. For when the women with Mary came to the tomb, it says: “Behold, two men stood by them.” But they were angels. And angels are called fire: “Who makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flaming fire.” It calls them men, since they share the meaning of the word for man. And why are you amazed? God himself is called fire and is called man. The Savior says about his own Father: “There was a man, a householder, who planted a vineyard. And he sent his slaves, and the slaves were killed.” And, to be brief: “And that man said: I still have a son; I will send him; perhaps they will respect him.” What does “man” mean as applied to the divine name? For he did not say it was a parable; he did not say, “It is like,” but, “There was a man.” That is why Moses says, “Our God is a consuming fire”; and the Savior, when he came, says, “I came to cast fire on the earth.” So he receives a name worthy of the thing. Since fire, as I said before, becomes great from small, and man from a few filled the ends of the world, man was called fire. That is why “Let us make man”: for in Hebrew it is “Let us make fire.” “Let us make man according to our image.” Many of the simple, and of those uneducated in soul, have thought that man is according to God's image as though God had a nose, or eyes of such a kind, or such ears, or such a mouth; but this thought is mistaken and absurd. And to this day there is a heresy that says the divine has human shape. For since they heard, “The eyes of the Lord,” and “The ears of the Lord,” and “The Lord smelled,” and “The mouth of the Lord has spoken,” and “The hand of the Lord has made,” and “The feet of God stood,” they drew limbs on the bodiless, not recognizing how absurd the thought is. God speaks so that you may learn that man has no resemblance to God as far as bodily appearance is concerned. For I do not do away with the voice that says, “Let us make man according to image,” but it is shown in what sense God says “according to image.” “I fill the heaven and the earth, says the Lord.” Again the same one says: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth the footstool of my feet.” Shall we follow the letter? Shall we be slaves to the word? But the consequence refutes me. How shall I understand the heaven as a throne? A throne encloses the one seated on it; but God is not circumscribed. There is nothing around God; God encircles and walls in all things. If, then, he has heaven as his throne, how will he measure the heaven with a span? And how does he sit on the heaven? “Heaven is my throne, and the earth the footstool of my feet.” Where does he sit? On the visible heaven? The stars are under the firmament, the water above it. If he sits above, it is not above the heavens but on the higher heaven. And if he sits at all, his feet hang down to the earth. Do you put such a shape on the one who has no shape? Is it not impious to understand it so? Then again, if his feet tread the earth, how […] by his feet? And how did he measure the heaven with a span? How did he have great fingers in proportion to the Godhead? And how with those fingers did he write small tablets, with such fingers, and not many of them? We write with three fingers, the others helping; God wrote the tablets with one finger. Have you seen anyone writing with one finger? These are meanings rather than words.

“Let us make man according to our image.” God wishes us to be his imitators in virtue. What is “according to image”? God is holy; if we become holy, we are according to God's image: “Be holy, for I am holy.” God is righteous; if we pursue righteousness, we are God's image: “For the Lord is righteous and has loved righteousness.” If we are kind and merciful, we are the image of God. For the Savior says: “Be compassionate, as your Father is compassionate.” Do you see where the image is? Paul too shows the image, for he says: “Put off the old man, and put on the new, created according to God, for knowledge of the truth, according to the image of the one who created him.” Do you see that “according to our image” is inscribed on the virtues? In what else is the image? Again, in authority: “Let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of heaven and the wild animals and the creeping things and the cattle and all the earth.” O the sequence of God! O the exactness of the words! Why did he mention first, “Let them rule over the fish of the sea”? The order of mastery follows the order of creation. Since fish and birds came into being first, from the sea, and after them the four-footed beasts and the rest of the cattle from the earth, he names first the things made first. “Let them rule over the fish, and the birds, and the wild animals, and the creeping things, and the cattle.” Whence also the three youths, blessing in the furnace, keep the order: “Bless the Lord, seas and rivers. Bless the Lord, sea monsters and all that move in the waters. Bless the Lord, all birds of heaven. Bless, wild beasts and cattle. Bless, sons of men.” There were other things to consider as well, but let us return to our subject. “And God formed the man.” He did not say simply “made,” but “formed.” “Forming” is used of comeliness, as when someone who sees a handsome face says it is a fine piece of forming. God made nothing in the body unseemly, but everything both for comeliness and for use. For example, the eye has both, use and comeliness: it sees, and it brightens the face and adorns the appearance, and it beholds everything. The ear has its use and has its appearance, for its cymbal-shaped rim adorns the creature. Likewise the nose has the necessary sense of smell; but, unlike the other animals, it has a kind of partition wall, which completes its comeliness; this belongs to man, for the other animals do not have divided nostrils but one opening throughout. God formed this for this reason. That is why David too says: “He who planted the ear, does he not hear? Or he who formed the eye, does he not perceive?” So also he made the earth for comeliness and for use. And not to point out many comely things to you, I will mention one and pass on. God gave man (I mean the male), among other things, the symmetry of breasts. Why breasts for a man? For comeliness. For a woman, granted, because of a necessity of nature, for the supply of milk; but why breasts for a man? For comeliness, for good order. For just as in buildings some things are made for necessity and some for comeliness, so God both adorned man and fitted him for use. “He formed him, taking dust from the earth.” Blessed are the hopes of Christians, if we understand what we hear. Why did he not say, “He took a clod from the earth”? He formed so great a body; did he not need even a clod, but takes dust? God foresaw the future as present. Since he foresaw that this creature would die and be changed into dust, he showed beforehand, at the creation, the hope of the resurrection. He takes dust from the earth, so that when you see dust in a tomb, you may know that the one who formed that dust also raises this. “He formed the man, taking dust from the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life.” See the difference between men and the irrational animals. In making all the others, God brought everything forth together, the soul with the body. Attend, I beg you. He made the swimming creatures, body and soul together. “Let the earth bring forth animals”: the soul came forth together with the bodies. Man he makes first in body, then in soul. For what hope? As the forming is, so is the dissolving. The animals have no resurrection for this reason: as they came into being, so they die; body and soul vanish together. Man's body he took from the earth, but the soul he gives himself, creating it, fashioning it, not casting it out from his own substance, so that when the body dies, or the man, we may not despair of the soul. For what if the body was buried in a tomb? Do not expect the soul to be there. For it was not taken from the earth, nor does it go back to the earth. So he established the hope. That is why in Ezekiel too he prophesies the resurrection, saying: “The dead bones received a body.” Then he says: “Let the spirit come from the four winds, and [breathe into them] …” So too David cries: “You will take away their spirit, and they will fail and return to their dust. You will send forth your Spirit, and they will be created, and you will renew the face of the earth.” Do you see the Spirit as creator? Do you see him as God's co-worker?

But let us return to our subject. “He breathed into.” By “he breathed into” he showed the simplicity of the soul; therefore it is not composite. Attend now. Since the creation had grown old, Christ renews it in his saving dispensation. Adam was formed from earth; Christ formed the eyes of the blind man from clay, so that you may learn that he is the one who took dust from the earth and formed man. God breathed into the face of Adam the breath of life; Christ breathed into the face of the apostles and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The breath that Adam lost, Christ gave back here, and man became a living soul again. Attend: here is the sequence. For even if the instrument of my voice is weary, still, running ahead with the usual hope and cutting short the entreaties of the brothers, I believe that a word will be given me, not for my worth but for the eagerness of those who listen. Even if we are unworthy of the saints, they too suffered these things and were hindered by the weakness of the body. David testifies, saying, “I grew weary crying out; my throat became hoarse.” It is better to say right things hoarsely than to have a right voice and a twisted soul. “God planted a paradise in Eden toward the east.” What is Eden? Eden is interpreted “delight,” as one might say, “He planted a paradise in delight,” that is, in a delightful place, a fine place. That is why at the end it says: “And he cast out Adam and settled him opposite the paradise of delight.” “God planted a paradise in Eden toward the east.” Why was paradise not in another region, but toward the east? Where the course of the luminaries begins, there too begins the life of men. God foretells the future: he places man in paradise toward the east, to show that just as these luminaries rise and run to the west and set, so man too must run from life to death and set after the pattern of the luminaries, and receive another rising from the resurrection of the dead. Adam ran to the west and set in the tomb; the affairs of the earth followed him and were buried with the one who set. Christ came and made the one who had set rise again. That is why the prophet says about him: “[…] from beneath him he will rise,” that is, from the tombs. In Adam man set; in Christ he rose. Paul testifies: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.” “And God took the man whom he had made and placed him in the paradise.” He brought him into a house made ready. Just as one who invites someone to a feast first prepares the house and then brings in the guest, so here too: he prepared paradise for him as a worthy dwelling, and so brought in the guest. Where was he formed? On the earth, outside paradise. For just as the luminaries came into being elsewhere and were placed in the heaven, so Adam was formed outside, in another land, and then brought into paradise. How do we know this? Scripture says at the end, when Adam was cast out: “And God sent Adam out of the paradise of delight to work the earth from which he was taken.” “He placed him in the paradise of delight, to work and to guard the paradise.” To work: for what was lacking in paradise? And if there was need of a worker, where would a plow come from? Where the other tools of farming? To work and to guard the commandment of God, and to believe the commandment, was the work of God. The Savior says: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Just as believing in Christ is a work, so believing the commandment was a work: that if he touched, he would die, and if he did not touch, he would live. The keeping of the spiritual words was a work. What sort of work did Paul have? Was Paul a farmer? Did he have some other occupation? Was not his whole work the word? Was it not preaching? And he says to the disciples, “You are my work in the Lord.” To work it, he says, and to guard. Against whom? There was no robber, no passer-by, no plotter; against whom was he to guard? To guard it for himself: so that he might not transgress and lose it, but by guarding the commandment keep paradise for himself. My mind grows weary along with my voice; but let us keep to the thoughts. “He placed him in the paradise.” Next, Scripture sketches the future through what came first. “And a river goes out from Eden to water the paradise.” From this learn that paradise was not a little garden of small size. So great a river waters it that from its overflow there are four rivers. “A river goes out from Eden to water the paradise; […] four sources”: into the Tigris, into the Nile, into the Euphrates, into the one called in Scripture the Pishon, which they now call the Danube.

See the size of a river divided into four; and such a river by itself waters paradise. Why so great? Adam was alone; what need was there of so much? But it was not made for one man only, but for the ends of the world. It was being prepared for patriarchs, prophets, apostles, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, saints, the faithful, the orthodox, those who live godly lives, all the righteous. For if the Savior promised paradise to the thief who confessed in a single hour, saying, “Today you will be with me in paradise,” [what of] those who labored from youth, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the patriarchs descended from him …? And before all these the thief inherits paradise. So God makes his works not for what appears but for what is awaited. Why did he make the earth so broad? For Adam, or for those who now inhabit it? “From there it is divided into four sources”: he did not say “four streams,” but “sources” (archai), that is, springs. “The name of the one is Pishon,” which we have just mentioned. Then the Gihon: this is the Nile. Gihon is its ancient name. Jeremiah testifies, saying: “What have you to do with the way of Egypt, to drink the water of Gihon?” Here attend. Imagine this to be paradise; for many things are conveyed better by sight than by word. A great river comes out, with a rich stream, and waters paradise. From there it is carried into some underground chasm and sinks under boundless earth, as the Master who laid its road knows; and the stream is hidden for a long way, and comes up in different places, and is found, one branch in Ethiopia, one in the west, one in the east, God thus drawing the stream through an underground passage and making new springs for the first river. Why this? So that men might not follow the tracks of the rivers and find paradise; so that it might be beyond the reach of men. For if one could travel there, no one would have found paradise before the rich; but God shut it off to poor and rich alike, so that they might find the way by virtue alone. How much did patriarchs, prophets, and saints labor seeking paradise, and did not find it? The thief, not by traveling the road but by believing, truly found the way, the one who says, “I am the way.” He found the paradise that disobedience shut against the first man. I ask the reason why the historian, in mentioning the first river, said: “There the gold is good, and the carbuncle, and the green stone.” If he had been describing the whole world, he ought to have named the good things produced in each country, the emeralds, the jacinths, the topaz, all the different materials; but he picks out gold and two stones, the first-fruits of the priesthood, since the priest wore a golden plate on which the name of God was inscribed. There were twelve stones on the priest's breast: sardius, […], onyx. Of these twelve stones the green stone is set apart for the priestly tribe, the carbuncle for the royal tribe. Why? Because it is the property of fire to burn and to give light, and the property of a king to do good and to punish. He places Reuben, the first tribe, on the sardius; Simeon on the topaz; Levi on the green stone; Judah, from whom Christ came, on the red carbuncle. Indeed, Isaiah, many years later, says to Jerusalem: “On my hands I have painted your walls, and you are before me always. Behold, I am preparing carbuncle as your stone,” meaning the Savior. For “Behold,” he says, “I lay in Zion a cornerstone, chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” So the carbuncle is set apart for the royal tribe, the green stone (prasinos) for the priestly tribe, for doing (prattein) well belongs to the priesthood. From that river four sources of rivers are divided off. Why, then, is their water not alike? For lovers of learning ask: if they come from one river or one spring, why do they not all have one quality? What, then, is the answer? They take on something of the earth and of the quality of the places through which they pass. Just as water itself has one nature and quality, but if it is steeped with wormwood it takes one quality, with dill another, with rue another, and the nature is one but the ingredients change it; so it is with rivers. Since they travel through strange places, one through earth of one quality and another through another, they take their qualities from the places.

Since he gave the rivers their qualities by the situation of the places, next he makes in paradise “every tree beautiful to see and good for food.” He did away beforehand with the transgressor's excuse. For since he said of the woman, “The woman saw that the tree was beautiful to see and good for food,” so that no one might think that among the other trees that one alone was comely, he testified this excellence of all of them, that they were lovely to the eye and very beautiful, so that you may learn that he transgressed not from want, but turned aside while he had abundance. “And the tree of life,” he says, “in the middle of paradise, and the tree of knowing good and evil.” There were three kinds of trees: some were given him so that he might live, others so that he might live well, others so that he might live forever. He had life from those he permitted; he had living well from what he forbade. For living well meant touching what he did not forbid and not touching what he forbade. This was living well: obeying God. The tree of life stood in the middle like a prize; the tree of knowledge like a wrestling bout, like a training ground. Keep the commandment about this tree, and you receive the prize. And see the wonder. All the trees of paradise round about were everywhere leafy, everywhere teeming; only the two in the middle were a training ground and a stadium. Those round about were food. But the occasion of the transgression and of the tree must be kept for another time. Now to the subject: God brings all the animals to Adam. Let the heretics hear; and do not marvel if in every phrase and every word the argument is turned against the heretics; for by every pretext those who fight against the glorified kingdom are accused. “A stone cries out from the wall”: I do not say a word from Scripture; not one iota or one stroke leaves the heretics blameless; through all things those who deny the Master of all are accused. Attend, then. One could see a strange sight: Adam standing, and God, like a servant, bringing things to Adam. For God brought the animals. Here attend not to the word but to the sense. Think of God standing, and Adam judging. God brought them all forward and says to Adam, let us say: “What do you think this one should be called?” “Let it be called lion.” God, it says, stamped it. Then: “This one, what?” “Let it be called bull.” “You have assigned it well.” Likewise God sealed each of the names given. For Scripture says: “He brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called it, that was its name.” See: since he made him according to his image, he wished to bring his honor into view and to show truly that he bears the image of wisdom. And see the wonder. God had already shaped the names for himself; but he wished it to be shown through the image that Adam's decisions agree with God's wishes. Indeed, Scripture, wishing to show that God had predetermined the names Adam gave, says, “And whatever Adam called them, that was its name”; that is, “This had been predetermined; God glorified it.” But let us return to our subject. Adam stands, and God brought the animals to him, and the Master is not insulted by bringing them to the slave. Yet if the heretics hear that Christ brings us to the Father, they at once say, “Do you see that he is a servant?” “He brought them to Adam.” The slave stood judging, and the Master bringing. God, bringing them to Adam, was not insulted; but if they hear that Christ brings us to the Father, they drag him down to the rank of a servant. If the Savior says, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” at once the heretics prick up their ears, or rather twist them. God, bringing the animals to Adam, is not his servant; if God brings man to God, does he hold a servant's rank? So that ignorance of the words may not feed your disease: I know of the Son bringing people to the Father, and of the Father bringing them to the Son. For having said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” the same one says again, “No one comes to me unless my heavenly Father draws him.” But, as I said before, I know I have said this earlier, but the word is akin to the subject; and it happens that some did not hear it then; so I say it now. Consider how many four-footed beasts there are; consider the tame, the wild, those in the mountains, those in the plains, those in Gaul, those in India, those in all the regions of the world; again the creeping things, their kinds and species, all the birds, the swimming creatures, all those in the sea, in lakes, in rivers. All these he brought forward, and Adam set a name for each; and God did not contradict, but abided by it. Tens of thousands of names, and God holds to them. God speaks one name, bearing witness from heaven, “This is my Son,” and the heretics falsify the voice that bears witness with one name: that holy voice that accepted ten thousand names and did not falsify them. The animals were brought and named. Then Adam stood as king.

Just as men who enlist are marked with the royal seal, so, since he was going to hand the mastery over to him, God has him give names as master; for no one gives names but a master and a father. Attend. Of the names, some God gave and some Adam. God named heaven, earth, sea, firmament, day, light, night, fruit, plant, grass, trees; but the cattle and the rest Adam named: peacock, eagle, calf, sheep. Adam named the species, God the kinds, so that the word of the one who said, “Let us make man according to our image,” might not prove false. God gives names to the luminaries: the Bear, Orion, the Pleiades, the Evening Star, the Morning Star. All these God named. David testifies, saying, “Who numbers the stars and calls them all by name.” God names the things above, Adam those on earth. God names heaven, earth, and all the rest; he names Adam “fire” and “man.” What does Adam name? He gives names to the cattle, the birds, the creeping things, the wild animals. Adam gives a strange name, “bone and flesh,” to the woman, saying, “This now is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh.” For God, when he formed him, did not say that he formed him from bones and flesh. Again, God says “male,” and Adam says “husband”; God says “female,” and Adam says “wife.” And the wonder is that, since he was filled with the Holy Spirit, and the wretched man had not yet transgressed but was full of grace, the whole of prophecy, which I divided into its kinds some days ago before your love, was in him. He knew things past, he knew things present, and things to come. How did he know things present? Bone does not appear from outside a body; but since he had the Spirit, he says, “This now is bone from my bones.” How did he know, unless the Holy Spirit revealed it? Why, then, bone first and then flesh? Because it was a rib that God first took from him. “She shall be called woman,” he says, “because she was taken from her husband.” He prophesies things past, he told things present, and he speaks of things to come: “For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother.” There was not yet marriage; where would father and mother come from? Again let the heretics listen. God wished to make the woman for Adam. He cast a trance on Adam, and he slept. Every word of God became an ancient rule of nature. From the first man he taught how the creature is to be divided off from man. God cast sleep on Adam: a wonderful thing. He means the occasion of marriage. Sleep is called “ecstasy” because the man stands, as it were, outside himself. The soul is within, and yet is not within: it does not perceive, it does not think; hearing, it does not hear. Just as today we say, “He was in ecstasy,” meaning he was outside of things, so the soul, when it is outside the senses, is in ecstasy. “And he slept,” it says, “and God took one of his ribs.” Let the heretics be asked this: How did God take it? How did Adam feel no pain? How was he not hurt? One hair is pulled from the body, and we feel pain; even if someone is deeply asleep, the sleeper is woken by the pain; so great a member is removed, so great a rib is disturbed, and the sleeper is not woken? He did not tear it out by force, so that Adam would wake; he did not rend it; but Scripture, wishing to show the swiftness of the craftsman, says:

“He took the rib,” as he took the dust. If one had joined and another had loosed, there would have been a struggle; but since the one who bound also loosed, he loosed it gently. “He took the rib and filled up flesh in its place.” From where did he fill it up? Did he draw it from the rest of the body? But every body that is drawn out becomes thinner. How did he fill it up? We speak about a body and do not understand; we speak about God, and do we pry? “And the Lord built the rib, which he took from Adam, into a woman.” Whence were eyes set in place from a rib? Whence a heart that reasons? Whence a tongue that speaks? How was an intestine stretched out from a rib? How did a liver come from a rib? You cannot grasp how these things came to be, and do you pry into the craftsman? But see the image of Christ everywhere. God did not take the rib from Adam until he had cast sleep upon him. Why? Sin was going to come from a rib, entering through the woman. The Savior came bringing from his side water and blood: water to wash away sins, blood to grant us the mystery. See the type. When Adam slept, a rib was taken; when sleep came upon the body of Christ, his side was opened, so that he might undo the ancient tragedy by a new history; I mean the sleep on the cross. He built the rib into a woman, and brought her to Adam. O the Master's love for mankind! How much he does: he forms, he does good! He brings forward the animals; he leads the bride to her husband. For since Adam was like an orphan, and Eve likewise a virgin without father or mother to fill that role, God fills the role of father and mother. And see the law; for every utterance of God is an ancient rule of nature. God brought the woman to Adam; and this has remained law to this day, that the woman is brought to the man; he does not dress the man as a bridegroom to bring him to the woman. “They were naked, and they were not ashamed.” The rule remains; the law cries out. A man is ashamed before everyone except his own wife; a woman feels shame before everyone except her own husband. This I have said with regard to the law; but the reason they were not ashamed of their nakedness is that they were clothed with immortality and arrayed in glory. The glory did not allow their nakedness to be seen, for it covered it. Where again can you see a man naked and not ashamed? You find him in Christ. Peter and John and James came to the tomb seeking the body, and did not find it; but they found the clothes wrapped up, to show that after the resurrection of Christ the ancient form of Adam is preserved in him: he is without clothes, not naked but clothed. Christ rose and puts off the clothes that Adam had put on, and he was naked, yet was not seen naked. After the resurrection the women see the clothes thrown aside. Martha and Mary see him, recognize him, fall at his feet, and do not see him naked. Where did he get the clothes he wore? For he had thrown his off in the tomb, and his first garments the soldiers had divided. How, then, was he so clothed? How was the naked one not naked? And I ask another thing. Why did they see the clothes and the linen in one place, and in another place the napkin with which the saving head had been bound? To show, by the holy grace, that the resurrection was not accompanied by disturbance. And since the Jews were going to spread the report that he had been stolen by the disciples, he leaves his clothes in the tomb; for whoever steals a corpse steals it with its clothes. One could see the Savior coming out of the tomb as Joseph came out of the house of the Egyptian woman. And see the difference. After the resurrection Christ was seen naked, and Peter was naked; but the one had immortality, the other was still mortal. Jesus stood on the shore, clothed in glory, and said: “Children, have you anything to eat?” “No,” they say, “we have nothing,” for they did not recognize him. Then he says: “Cast on the right side of the boat.” They cast, and caught a great multitude. John recognizes him and says to Peter, “It is the Lord.” O the wonder! They did not recognize him from his voice, but from his works. “And Peter,” it says, “took his outer garment, for he was naked.” The mortal body is ashamed; the immortal body is not ashamed. But let us fall down before the one who clothed us with glory, who clothed the world with immortality; let us entreat him to clothe us with faith, the hope of salvation, and the glory that is in Christ; for to the Father be glory, with the only-begotten Son and the Holy Spirit, now and always and to the ages of ages. Amen.

Come, let us take up our promise again and bring the subject of paradise to its end. For if it was an unbearable evil that Adam was cast out of paradise, it will be a much greater evil if we too are cast out of the memory of paradise. Let us take up the subject, not entrusting the inquiry to ordinary words, but taking the solution of the difficulties from holy Scripture itself. For whoever thinks and judges as he pleases deceives himself; but whoever learns the solution of the difficulties from Scripture has truth itself as his teacher. Since, then, many of the faithful are perplexed when they read, and many unbelievers blaspheme out of ignorance, let us take up the subject as far as we are able, so as to give full assurance to the saints and refutation to the unbelievers, and let us entreat God together with you to supply the truth in abundance. How man was constructed, how he was shaped in body, how a soul created by God was put into his body, how he had paradise as his dwelling, has been said sufficiently before, if not as the subject deserves, at least as far as we were able. Now let us turn the discourse to our subject. The whole earth was given to Adam, but his special dwelling was paradise. He was allowed to walk outside paradise too; but what lay outside paradise was not set apart for man's dwelling, but for the irrational animals: cattle, four-footed beasts, wild animals, creeping things. Paradise was his royal and lordly residence. That is why God brought the animals to Adam, as creatures that lived apart from him. For slaves do not always stand by their master, but only when they are needed. The animals were named and at once sent out; but Adam remained in paradise. Now let us learn the exact understanding of this. The irrational animals were allowed to approach Adam, to bow before him, and to fawn on him. I mean this: just as there were three kinds of trees (trees that fed him so that he might live, trees that tested him so that he might live well, and a tree that kept him so that he might live forever), so too three kinds of irrational animals were given to him: one kind for food (set apart not for him alone but for the whole race), another for service, another for delight. For example, for food, those that are now slaughtered; for service, horses, camels, donkeys, oxen, and the other working animals; for delight, the animals that mimic, and the bright voices of the birds of the air, which charm the ears. For just as a body after toil, if it does not shake off its labors, cannot hold out for further labors, so a soul that endures the labors of virtue, unless it is refreshed by pleasant sights, is not equal to the strain of virtue. When God sees a soul weary, he refreshes it through pleasant things, as happens with us too. For often a man comes back from the marketplace with his mind flooded by ten thousand griefs, having met with many heavy sights and fallen into unbearable misfortunes and losses; coming into the house he finds the delight of a little child, and the softness of his mind soothes the hardness of his labors. For when he is despondent, his wife does not come to console him, since her consolation would be untimely, nor does a slave dare to console him; so God brings in the artless nature, which is pardoned because it does not understand, and through it soothes the soul worn out by its labors. If a slave smiles at him, he is thought to be laughing at his master's misfortune; if his wife laughs, she is thought to be insensible to the calamity; but a child's coaxing is above suspicion, because of the innocence of its nature. And often what friends could not do by counsel, nor wise men by admonition, a child could do merely by laughing, dissolving the whole misfortune. Then the soul, at the very height of its grief, sees the child, and at first turns away and rejects the untimely comfort; but it is drawn by the child's persistence, and when the man has often turned his eye toward it, his mind is captured; then he takes up the child, puts off his grief, and says: “Let God grant me this one alone, and I care nothing for the rest.” Do you see how God raises up consolation for the soul even from ordinary things? Since, then, Adam was alone in paradise, with no friend, no neighbor, no kinsman, God brought the animals to him for his delight; for example, as there are today animals that mimic, some imitating gestures and others voices: the ape and such animals imitate human gestures, the parrot and other birds the voice. So he had delight from the irrational animals, some twittering, others fawning. Since, then, there were many that supplied his consolation, the serpent was the most prudent of all the wild animals of the earth, as Scripture said: “The serpent was the most prudent of all the wild animals that the Lord God made.”

So it was more imitative than the imitative animals, and more […] than the […]. [The serpent, which now we] both flee and loathe, was not so from the beginning. The serpent was a friend, and nearer to man than the other animals that fawned on him. Who, then, made it an enemy? God's sentence: “Cursed are you above all the wild animals. I will put enmity between you and the woman.” That enmity dissolved the friendship. I mean a friendship not of reason but an irrational familiarity; just as today a dog shows a kind of friendship, not by reason but by natural impulse, so the serpent fawned on man. Since, then, it was very familiar, it appeared to the devil to be a suitable instrument. Seeing Adam delighting in the serpent, and the serpent fawning on him and imitating many human ways, the craftsman of wickedness devised what those who weave plots do when they corrupt a man through his own people; for no one prevails through strangers, but only through one's own household, as the Savior said: “A man's enemies are those of his own household.” He speaks, then, through the serpent, giving Adam an impression […]. I urge your love not to attend carelessly to what is said. It is no ordinary question; for many ask how the serpent spoke: with a human voice, or with a serpent's hiss, and Eve understood it? Before the transgression Adam was filled with wisdom and understanding and prophecy. Consider how much wisdom he had, that one man was enough, without a teacher, taught by no human being, to give names to all the birds and animals and creeping things and wild beasts, and simply to everything. Picture in your mind the species and the kinds; to put it briefly, he gave so many names that we today, even with experience, cannot repeat them. When, then, God brought the animals to the man, Adam, being wise and having God's Spirit, saw the particular nature of each. He paid attention to the serpent as more prudent, as having perception, as understanding movements from a nod. While Adam was so disposed, the devil perceived both the serpent's prudence and Adam's opinion of it, for he regarded the serpent as intelligent. So he speaks through it, so that Adam might suppose that the serpent, being prudent, had even managed to imitate the human voice. The serpent comes, then. Nowhere did Scripture say that the devil spoke in the serpent; Moses simply passed over the history. Attend, I beg you, with exactness. Paul, the second man to have been in paradise, did not himself undo the wording either, but says: “I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I fear lest, as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning …”; and he did not say, “the devil.” He was a faithful guardian of the Scriptures, a servant of the Scriptures, a teacher of the Scriptures, an interpreter of the Scriptures. He did not wish to undo the wording, so as not to undo the order of the Scriptures; but he resolved the difficulty by the sense. “I fear,” he says, “lest, as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, so your thoughts be corrupted.” How so? Was Paul afraid that the serpent would come again and deceive some? But, he says, “I know that that serpent does not appear, but the one who worked in it does.” But Paul, as a faithful servant and guardian of the holy Scriptures, did not alter the wording, but revealed the sense; and the Master himself of things ancient, new, and to come made the difficulty clear, so that no one might lay the sin on the serpent, but on the one who worked through it. Christ says to the Jews, when they said to him, “We are from God”: “If you were from God, you would do the works and the will of God; but now you are from your father the devil.” He named the devil, and at once brings in the history: “He,” he says, “was a man-slayer from the beginning.” The servant interpreted as a servant; the Master taught as Master: he showed the one who murdered Adam. He did not say simply, “He was a murderer,” but “a man-slayer”; for he killed not one man, but through that one every man. “And he does not stand in the truth,” he says, “because he is a liar.” [3] See how he explained both that he is the devil and that he is a liar. And how did he lie? The serpent said to the woman: “Why is it that God said to you not to eat from every tree?” Do you see the liar? God said: “From every tree you shall eat, but from one do not eat.” The liar says: “Why did God say that you are not to eat from every tree?” Is this not a terrible lie? For when someone wishes to misrepresent a matter maliciously, he feigns ignorance, so as to bring in his villainy unsuspected, as if to say, “I do not know; there is no scheme; I came in simplicity; I know nothing.” Have you not met many such people? Do we not know the deeds of the deceitful? Do they not stitch such things together and feign ignorance? So too the devil: “Why is it,” he says, “that God said to you” (that is, “I misheard, I did not hear well”) “that you are not to eat from every tree?” The woman, thinking it was ignorance, corrects the wording. “He did not say so,” she says; “God did not say not to eat from every tree, but he permitted every tree and forbade one; for he said to us: Do not eat, lest you die.” He seemed to be learning what he did not know; then, no longer suspected as a schemer, he says to her: “You will not die by death.” See another lie. For God had said, “In the day you eat [of it, you shall surely] die”; this was his second lie. “For God knew,” he says, “that in the day you eat you will be like gods.” See a third lie. See the error contrived for the world. And since, as I said before, he planned to raise up the worship of many gods in the world, he anticipated it as in a story and sowed in the woman's ears the notion that there are many gods. But while the craftsman of wickedness thus sowed beforehand the notion of gods, God, foreseeing it, so arranged that the coming error should not be spoken by a human mouth, so that the first rational voice should not utter anything about gods; rather, the first mouth to do so was a serpent's, so that every mouth speaking about idols might be likened to that mouth. I know that you pardon my voice and seize the holy meanings of the Scriptures. Let no one, then, be occupied with elegance of voice, but with the force of the thoughts. “For God knew,” he says, “that in the day you eat you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” Many say, especially those who have followed Porphyry, hateful to God, who wrote against the Christians and drew many away from the divine doctrine; they say, then: “Why did God forbid the knowledge of good and evil? Granted that he forbade evil; why good as well? For when he says, Do not eat from the tree of knowing good and evil, he prevents him from knowing evil; why also good?” Wickedness always schemes against itself and gives handles against itself. God did not forbid the knowledge of good; for Adam had it even before he ate. For if he had no knowledge, how does he recognize the woman? How does he speak about nature: “Bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh”? And how does he prophesy the future: “She shall be called woman, because she was taken [from her husband. For this reason a man will leave his fa]ther and mother,” and the rest? He knew so much, and did he not know the good? He knew God, he kept God's ordinances, he had knowledge, he gave so many names; how did he not have knowledge of the good? What, then, is it? God does not forbid the knowledge of the good; he wishes that the knowledge of evil not be joined to the good. I resolve the sophism of impiety from the Scriptures. Paul says: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.” He did not forbid both, but hallowed the holy and threw away the accursed and profane. So too the Savior: “You cannot serve God and mammon”; in the same way it is impossible to serve both God and a demon. So God prevented him from taking knowledge of evil, so that the knowledge of evil might not be mixed with the good.

Now let us attend here. Why was it called the tree of knowing good and evil at all? It did not have such a nature, but it brought about such an occasion; I mean the idiom of the Scriptures. For example: a spring of water in the desert was called the water of contradiction: “I tested you at the water of contradiction.” Did the water have such a nature as to bring the people to contradiction? Why, then, did Moses, who drank of it, not contradict God? So the water was called the water of contradiction, not because it had such a nature, but because of the occasion that took place at it. Since the people contradicted there, it was called the water of contradiction. Again, Jacob saw God, as far as a man can see him, and calls the name of the place “Form of God.” The place did not have the form of God or the shape of God; but since the vision came to him there, he named the place from the event. Another place was called “Peace of God.” When an angel appeared to Gideon, he was afraid and says, “Alas, alas, I shall die, for I have seen an angel of God.” The angel says to him, “Peace to you; do not fear.” “And Gideon built an altar,” it says, “and called it Peace of God.” Just as the altar did not itself have peace, but was a symbol of the peace that came and was given; and just as the water did not have contradiction, but was so called because of the occasion at it; so too the tree did not have knowledge, but was so called because everyone who sins comes to the knowledge of what he sins. Let me put it again by an example. Sometimes, traveling, we pass through places infested by robbers, and people are accustomed to say, “These places are fearful.” Does the place have fear? Or do they say it because of the robbers who lurk in that place? So too that tree did not have a nature that worked deadly knowledge, but received its name from the tragedy that befell Adam around it. I resolve the matter briefly, for divine Scripture is never at a loss. Today we have an altar, of which the faithful partake. Does the gift itself have salvation by nature, or does it have it through the glory that is invoked upon it? Take a pledge from things present; do not doubt about the past. If this food saves by nature and not by grace, then that food kills by nature and not by transgression. I will show you another deadly food outside paradise; I mean idolatry. Why did the martyrs refuse to eat meat? Why were they afraid to eat? If they had eaten, would they have died? Not at all; but since the memory of the idols had been named over it, they fled not the eating but the invocation of the defiled. So the tree was the tree of knowing evil and good, not because it gave knowledge, but because it taught him through the transgression. For experience always teaches the foolish that transgressing is evil. Again, the question will be resolved by another way, not as though the first were weak, but because the grace of God is rich. Let no one think that bringing in many thoughts is a sign of the weakness of the earlier ones; for the grace of God, being rich, supplies us from its own treasures, if we are worthy. Attend, then. The martyrs refused to eat what was sacrificed to idols, truly fleeing the eating; just as, if Adam had fled the tree, he would have been saved. That knowing good and evil is not what is hateful, the truth shines out. For does God, who inquires into evil and does not do it, know it or not? Who dares to say that he does not know it? Knowledge is not action. Did Paul, who says, “Flee sexual immorality,” not know what sexual immorality was? Did the one who flees adultery not know what adultery was? But the knowledge did not condemn him. And God himself knows all our deeds, counting them and saying: “From the heart come evil thoughts, acts of greed. These are what defile a man.” Do God and the Apostle say these things without knowing them, or knowing them? So knowledge does not disgrace Adam. It was not knowledge that harmed him, but transgression. I want to ask him: what good or evil did he learn from the tree? After eating, did he know what murder is? There was not yet anyone to punish. Adultery was not known, for there were not yet marriages; there was no sexual immorality, no robbery, for there was not yet rich and poor; no slanders and false witness. What evil, then, did he come to know, except only this: that it was good to obey God and evil to disobey God? I will use a common, everyday expression, and let no one condemn it as bold. We are accustomed to say to those who sin, threatening them with correction: “I will make you learn correction.” Does he not mean learning by “knowledge”? So the “knowing” comes from the experience of misfortunes. He taught him to know how many evils he had been yoked to …

Attend, then, with exactness. For even if this was said the other day, the subject draws the discourse. God, who gave all things, was invisible; the one who received all things from God was visible. The receiver appeared; the giver did not appear. Man was alone, with the irrational animals around him. He had no one over his head. God set a law for him, the tree in the middle as a reminder, so that, having received the mastery, he might not forget. For example, he went about gathering the fruits with his wife; he came near the tree; he said, “Let us not touch this tree, for God gave a command about it.” And the visible thing was a reminder of the invisible one, as happens even now. Consider how many governors there are throughout the whole earth. And since the emperor is not present to all, the emperor's image must stand in law courts, in marketplaces, in assemblies, in theaters. In every place where a governor acts, it must be present, so that what is done may be ratified. The emperor, being a man, cannot be present everywhere; and God, again, cannot appear to men as God. So he gave the tree as an image of his kingship, bringing to Adam's mind that he had received mastery over all things: “Know the one who gave you the authority.” And that you may learn how the tree reminded them: when the serpent wished to deceive the woman, he said to her, “Why did God say that you are not to eat from every tree?” The woman did not forget the law, but even corrects his ignorance and says: “God did not say so; but we may eat from every tree; but from this tree, God said, do not eat from it, nor touch it.” See the exactness. God did not say, “Do not touch.” For touching brought no danger; but they, having a divine understanding and enjoying the rest, determined among themselves: “God said, Do not taste the tree; but we will not even touch it.” So much did the woman care to keep God's commandment. So the tree stood in the middle, and by it he deceived them. Hear a strange thing. He used as his instrument for the deception something implanted in man. For when God formed man, he put in him, along with the rest of his knowledge, a longing for God. So when the devil saw in them the torch of that longing, he says: “You will be like gods. Now, as men, you cannot always be with God; if you become like gods, you will always be with him.” For he did not say to them, “If you eat, you will become enemies of God.” Desire for equality with God, then, deceives the woman; and she does not deceive her husband, but persuades him. And Paul testifies, saying, “Adam was not deceived.” Then why was he condemned? See the terrible thing. The woman, deceived, ate; after eating, she persuades her husband too, so that she might not be ruined alone; and she persuaded, she did not deceive, as often happens even now. A man knows the faith, loves the law, is zealous for orthodoxy, and is persuaded by his wife not to show his zeal, not because he is ignorant of the truth, but because he obeys his companion. Many have thought that Adam took the fruit from the woman in ignorance, not knowing where she had brought it from. But he has no defense; for God convicts him, saying to him, “Because you listened to the voice of your wife.” He did not say, “Because you took from your wife”; and indeed Adam could have said, “I did not know; I did not know where she brought the fruit from.” The husband's charge is not that he was deceived, but that he was enticed. Let us come next to the court; let us look at the first records of that holy, impartial, and kindly trial, written in immortal letters, whose memory, aspect, and brightness not even the whole of time can dissolve. Attend now. “Adam heard,” it says, “the voice of the Lord walking in paradise in the afternoon.” He knew it from the sound and from habit. Could God appear through a noise? He appeared not as he was, but as he wished. Blessed be the God of the saints, who visited Adam then in the afternoon, and now on the cross in the afternoon. For the Savior endured the passion during the same hours that Adam spent from his eating to the transgression and the judgment, from the sixth hour to the ninth. At the sixth hour he ate; for by the rule of nature the meal comes after the sixth hour. In the afternoon God came to him. Adam desired to become a god; he desired impossible things; Christ answered his desire. “You desired to become what you could not; I desire to become man, which I can.” For God set his own act against Adam's deception as a counterweight. “You desired the things above you; I take the things beneath me.” This is what Paul too says: “And being found in form as a man.” “You desired to become a god, and I was not angry on that account, for I want you to long for equality with God; but my anger is that you wished to seize the dignity against your Master's will. You desired to become a god, and could not; I become man, and make the impossible possible.” That he came to this out of desire, he himself testifies when the one who feeds all was eating the Passover with those he feeds, and a table was set for the one who feeds the whole world under heaven; he says to the apostles: “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you.” “Did I begrudge you equality with God? You wished to seize what was mine, and could not; I take what is yours, and can.” Attend. He came down in the afternoon and says: “Adam, where are you?”

Those events and these are sisters, for both belong to one God. Did any other come to the passion than the one who came down in paradise? Adam hid; he became aware after eating. “For their eyes were opened, [and they knew that they were naked].” Since the devil said, “In the day you eat, your eyes will be opened,” someone says, “See, Satan told the truth.” It befits Paul to say: “For we are not ignorant of his designs.” The saints know the devil's devices. See his wickedness. How did the devil know that after eating their eyes would be opened? Were they blind? Scripture says, before they ate from the tree, “The woman saw the tree.” So she was not blind. “The woman saw,” it says, “that the tree was lovely to see.” First she saw, and then she ate. How, then, were their eyes opened? Attend, I beg you; here is the question. The devil came from a fall, that is, from a transgression; and he knew what the transgressor had suffered and what transgressors suffer. The experience is common to all. For today too, when we sin, we sin as if blind; and when we have sinned, then we see what we have done. For example, if someone is accused, “Why did you do this?”, he pleads compulsion: “Truly, I did not see what I was doing”; not that he is blind, but in sin the reasoning is maimed, wholly given over to the deed, and it is blinded in the act. Afterward, by his conscience, he sees what he has done. Let me put a case. Someone goes in to rob a house, and he goes in as if blind; he does not reckon with the one who will meet him, the one who will seize him, the fear of the judges, the danger hanging over him; for he has been blinded by the disease. When he has gone in, taken what he wants, and gone out having stolen, with no one there, he is filled with fear, he perceives what he has done, and he reckons that if there is a search, they will know whose work it is. And what he did not reckon while acting, he reckons after acting. So too the adulterer, throwing himself into another man's fire, goes in and does not reckon that there are laws, courts, accusations, sharpened swords; but when he has done it, he is afraid, he suspects the slave boy, the slave girl, the neighbor, the kinsman; and what he did not see in the act, he sees after the act. Again, someone urges another to keep away from evils; and if he is disobedient, common speech says, “I told him often, and he did not hear,” not that he did not hear with his ears. Then, giving him blows, he says, “I am teaching you to hear,” not that he gives him hearing, but because the blow corrects his prejudice and brings him to understanding. So too the prophet: “The discipline of the Lord opens my ears.” Since, then, the devil had fallen (for I have not forgotten our subject), he knew where he was after falling, and then he came to perceive what he had done. So he learned from what he suffered, and says: “If you eat, your eyes will be opened,” that is, as mine were: “I know, since I transgressed, what I suffered; I know what I suffered, I know what I lost.” Then they ate, and their eyes were opened, and they saw that they were naked. For before this they were naked and were not ashamed. They put off immortality; the robe of glory was taken from them; the body was stripped bare, and from then on it was clay. At once the invention of the arts springs up. Adam's first art was sewing. Before any other art he took fig leaves and sewed them. Who taught him? Who trained him? He had once received understanding from God; he was God's image; and do you doubt about his knowledge? When you consider by yourself how man first made a plow, who showed him how to shape wood and set iron in the middle and bind it fast and put a yoke on the oxen; how woman discovered the art of weaving, to take a fleece, wash it, card it, spin it, thin what is joined and join again what is split, where did this come from? Who taught the embroiderers embroidery? The loom stands; one thread is passed through; it is not the hand that works, but the design that works; the design produces the figures. The craftsman does not lay hands on it, and the design of the art shapes the garment, and the craftsman's intention rises in visible figures. Then the embroiderer does not move a hand, and raises figures; and if you hear that God works, do you think he works by moving a hand? And if you inquire into every art and every invention and say, “How did they think of this or that?”, remember the first voice, which says, “Let us make man according to our image,” and you have the solution of the difficulty. God's image, and it does not think? God's image, and it does not imitate its Master? “He sewed fig leaves.”

Let those who allegorize be ashamed, who say that paradise is in heaven and is spiritual. What is a fig tree doing in heaven? But suppose paradise is in heaven: where do the rivers come from? Not from the earth? If paradise is above, clearly the rivers too flow from above. Did Scripture say, “A river comes down from Eden”? But see the sophism. The allegorists laugh at us. “For God clothed them,” it says, “with tunics of skin.” Did he sacrifice oxen or sheep, then, and open a tannery, and carry out the tanner's craft? We say: he brought forth whole animals without coupling, without mating. He made what did not exist; could he not make part of what exists? Then they press their point: “But God never makes part of an animal; God makes nothing incomplete.” He hears “skin” and asks where it came from. Then I too hear of blood in Egypt and ask where it came from; but when, because Pharaoh did not obey, God changed the Nile into blood, what animals did he sacrifice? The river became blood, and no animal was slaughtered; two skins came into being, and he asks what animals they came from. But there too there was skin without an animal. Attend to the sequence, even if my voice is weary, and we are too. But so that the discourse may not be cut off, I will say a few things quietly and then end the discourse. “He sewed fig leaves.” Would that the heretics had learned this art! Adam, having transgressed, learned to sew; the heretics, having turned aside, learned to tear, so as to strip the holy things bare. We often hear the things done at the cross and marvel that soldiers took Christ's garments and divided them, and at once our mind says: “Great is God's patience, that no thunderbolt came down, that no sword came down. The Holy One was insulted, and were the profane hands not cut off?” Do you marvel that those soldiers dared to divide his garments? Marvel that these men have torn the garment of the Church. The soldiers saw Christ's tunic, seamless, woven from the top throughout, and spared the garment; but the heretics […] the clothing of Christ, the robe of […]. Let us return to our subject. “He sewed fig leaves.” They heard God walking, as far as one can hear; they heard and hid. Nature is fair-minded; even if we are ten thousand times sinners, our conscience is free. Sometimes the face is shameless, and the conscience convicts. Sometimes the tongue says, “What have I done wrong?”, and the conscience convicts from within. Adam and Eve were most simple and guileless; they confessed freely. God says, “Where are you?” Many have contemplated this with piety; but we must attend to exactness. For I accept their interpretations too, since they are pious; and I say these things, since they are true. “Adam, where are you?” From where? To where have you come down? From what glory have you fallen? Truly I accept this sense as pious, for it has both dignity and compassion. But I seek the sequence. “Adam, where are you?” God asks. As maker, he knew the nature of his creature: that everyone who has sinned is without confidence, and that the mouths of sinners are sewn shut. He perceived that Adam had fled for lack of confidence. A slave is most anxious when he perceives that his master has learned what has happened; but as long as the master does not know, he consoles himself that he may escape notice. Adam fled as one found out; God feigned ignorance to dissolve his fear; as we say about a friend, “I pretended not to know, so as not to grieve him.” Such things often happen among us. And if such things happen among us, much more with God, who loves mankind. “Adam, where are you?” That is, “I do not know.” Then, since God feigned ignorance, the fair-minded and free soul did not hide: “I heard your voice, and I was afraid, because I am naked, and I hid.” Why were you afraid? Why did you hide? “I was afraid because of the transgression; I hid because of the nakedness.” Truly one may weep at the transgressor's words. “I heard your voice,” that longed-for voice, that voice that gave me everything, that voice […]; “I perceived […] that I am naked.” Then God persists in encouraging him: “Who told you that you are naked, unless you ate from the tree of which I commanded you that from this one alone you should not eat?” That is, “unless you have surely done what I forbade.” See how he asks as one who does not know: “Unless you ate from that tree of which I commanded you not to eat.” And see God's love for mankind: “Who told you?” That is why he lengthens the conversation, to dissolve his fear and raise his confidence. For Adam perceived that there was nothing harsh, nothing severe, no insult, no blows. You have common experience as your teacher. A slave who has sinned, when he comes to his master, takes either courage or fear from the first word. If the master begins to be angry and to call him thief and deceiver and worthy of ten thousand deaths, he collapses; if he hears him reproaching him, “What happened to you? Why did you sin?”, at once he is equipped and takes courage for the moment, for the master is not punishing as a master but admonishing as a teacher. So too God: “Who told you that you are naked, unless you ate from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Did I forbid many things? I forbade only one, and that not out of hatred, but out of providence. “Who told you that you are naked?” He said nothing shameless, like “I did not know”; but what? “The woman whom you gave me, she gave to me, and I ate”; that is, “the one given me as a help.” For I heard, when I had been formed and she not yet, God saying, “Let us make him a helper fit for him.” “Whom you gave me, she gave to me.” He did not say, “She deceived me,” nor, “She lied”: “She gave to me, and I ate.” [8] Then God says: “And should you have believed a woman and not me? Is the woman more trustworthy than I? I gave you the good things and honored you with deeds; she enticed you with words.” And see: just as when a judge accepts the defense of the accused and examines him no further, but passes on to another, the man at once takes courage and says, “For now my examination is over,” so too God passes on from Adam to dissolve his fear, and says to the woman, “What is this you have done?” She says, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Since she spoke the whole truth, he does not insult the defense of truth, but leaves it unexamined. He did not say, “And was he, the serpent, believed above me? He promised equality with God and procured death.” He does not pass judgment at once, but rather spared her as the weaker vessel, and goes on to the serpent, to persuade both him and her, since he now goes to the cause; and he says, “Because you have done this.” Do you see a wonderful judge? He questions the deceived; he does not question the deceiver. He does not say to it, “What have you done?” but, “Because you have done this.” In keeping with this image David says, “The ungodly will not rise up in judgment”; not that they are not raised, but that they are not examined. “Because you have done this.” The threat against the serpent lightened the blows on those who were deceived. If, he says, God had not laid everything to its account, he would not have judged it without examination. “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the wild animals of the earth. On your breast and belly you shall go.” “Because you have done this; since you deceived the heart and persuaded the belly to touch food, on your breast and belly you shall go.” God now pronounces this walking on the belly not because the serpent had used feet before, but because it had stood upright to converse with the woman. For otherwise it could not have conversed with Eve. The very posture of the conversation by which it deceived Eve he punishes by going on the breast; and […] had been formed from the beginning, but it rode on its breast in fierce coils. That is why even now the serpent, when it is angry, often raises itself and runs in coils; but having risen just enough to show the memory of its old gait, it is cast down again by the law of the sentence. “And you shall eat earth all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman.” What is “You shall eat earth”? What you made Adam become, eat that. For he is going to hear, “You are earth, and to earth you will depart.” “I will put enmity between you and the woman.” Since you deceived as a friend, you are cast out as an enemy. That word became law. Attend, then: “You shall eat earth all the days of your life.” See: he does not say this of the serpent, “Earth will be your food”; for serpents do not always eat earth, but they also feed on meat, feast on fruits, touch seeds, and hunt plants. But by saying, “You shall eat earth,” he means this: “You will wear away the earth,” he says, “rubbing yourself along it.” But some say: “If the devil deceived, why did the serpent receive the curse?” The invisible demon he scourges with an invisible blow; the visible instrument he subjects to a visible punishment. Why? Just as God, being invisible, gave the tree as a visible reminder, so the devil, being invisible, speaks to men through the serpent. So God subjects the serpent to a curse, so that whoever has suffered something from the devil, always seeing the serpent dragging itself along that once stood upright, may take it as a reminder: if the servant of wickedness is so punished, how much more its author? Attend, then. You find things akin to this in the Gospel. For just as in the visible serpent he condemned the speaker along with the visible creature, so too in the Gospel, when the demons asked Christ not to be sent into the abyss, they said, “Permit us to go into the swine”; he permitted them to go in, so that he might drown the invisible ones together with the visible bodies. […] “I will put enmity between you and the woman.” He changed the friendship into enmity, and the word became law. Men are eager to tame other wild animals; but if anyone sees a serpent, he shudders. For the boundary remains: “I will put enmity between you.” If he sees one in a house, he wants to kill it; if he sees one on the road, he is wild to kill it. For the ancient word pricks him. Even if he gives the serpent ten thousand blows, if he sees that the head is not wounded, he at once urges the one standing by, “You have not struck the serpent's head; strike at the head”; since God said, “He will watch your head, and you will watch his heel.” What does this mean? He does not say, “I will make man use no blows against the other members of your body, and punish only the head.” For man strikes the serpent on all its members, punishing the whole wherever he hits it. And what the Master said to the serpent, “You will watch his heel,” does not proclaim that serpents are allowed to attack only the heel; for sometimes they attack even sleepers, often seize the belly, inject venom, and bite hands and other members; and in general no human member that falls in their way remains unharmed. But the meaning of the sentence is this: “No longer,” he says, “will the serpent be bold to plot against man; but staying inside, you will have this much from men: to peep out from holes barely and with fear, watching only for men's passing so as to come out safely.” “But man,” he says, “will walk in security, while your head is kept in holes, as of an enemy in hiding, not speaking to him as to a friend.”

But since time presses, let us too complete our discourse. He questioned the woman who was deceived; he passes on to the deceiver. The sentence then began from the root, the deceiver. Then he came to the woman who was deceived, and threatens. The first word to the serpent was “Cursed.” “And God said to the woman: [I will greatly multiply your griefs and] your groanings.” He does not curse her, lest […], since he had blessed them, saying, “And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth.” And Paul says, “The gifts of God are irrevocable.” So he does not curse those he had blessed; but what? He applies a strange remedy to the wound, griefs and groaning. It has the form of a sentence that strikes, but it promises release from the fault. “I will greatly multiply,” he says, “your griefs and your groaning.” These are remedies of repentance. Attend: just as physicians with the same remedy both sting and heal, and the same cutting, the same iron, and the same pain that comes with the cutting bring forth health, so God gives the woman who sinned two provisions for repentance, grief and groaning. What does grief profit? Hear Paul saying, “For grief according to God produces repentance.” And what does groaning work? Hear Isaiah: “When you turn and groan, then you will be saved.” “I will greatly multiply your griefs and your groaning.” Grief disfigures the outward face and makes it gloomy; [groaning] saddens the heart. Since the eye saw the tree and the mind reckoned on equality with God, God gives groaning to the heart and grief to the face, so that she might be punished in the things by which she sinned, and so that this punishment, or rather salvation, might persuade the woman that he had not gone back on the ancient blessing. For having said to them, “[Increase and multiply and fill] the earth,” he says, “In griefs you shall bear children.” “I do not take away childbearing, for I blessed it once; but you will be in pain, in labors, in troubles.” That grief is the heaviest. And the Savior testifies: “[A woman, when she is in labor, has grief].” [Even afterward the] woman worries while she is nursing; if the child is grown, she worries lest he be foolish; if he goes abroad, lest he die, lest he fall sick, lest he suffer. The man does not have this; for even if the father worries, it is not as the mother does, but he consoles himself, saying, “He is a man; he knows how to look after himself,” and he does not worry. Why? Because he himself did not hear, “In griefs you shall bear children.” It is a strange kind of judgment; experience is witness. When labor pains take hold of a woman, not even in the pains themselves does she renounce her husband. She does not say, “Would that there were no marriage, would that there were no childbearing!” God does not allow her to hate her husband even after the experience; but she knows what she has suffered and what she has undergone, and she loves her husband. That is why: “In griefs you shall bear children, and your turning will be toward your husband, and he will rule over you.” “Since you have just now ruled badly, and he became the slave of your choice, I reverse the order: let him who was deceived be master.” That is why Paul says, “I do not permit a woman to teach, nor to have authority over a man.” For she taught badly the first time, in paradise. “Nor to have authority over a man”: for she exercised authority badly. So it is in this sense that Paul directs that a woman not teach, because of what happened in paradise. Lest we seem to be inventing, hear him: “I do not permit a woman to teach, nor to have authority over a man.” And to show that it is because of the first events, he adds, “For Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and came into transgression.” What then? Has the race of women been subjected to condemnation, and does it remain in griefs, and is the bond not loosed? Christ came, who looses the bond; the Mother of the Lord came forward, making defense for her race, the holy Virgin in place of the virgin (for Eve too was a virgin when she sinned); she loosed the grief and groaning of the condemned woman. For just as someone called to the palace is eager to honor his own people, and to release them if they are in distress, so the holy Virgin, called to the palace to minister to the divine birth, coming to a strange childbirth, asks, or rather receives, this as her first grace. Since it was not fitting for a condemned woman to bear the guiltless one, the one comes who first looses Eve's grief through joy. The angel comes, saying to the Virgin, “Rejoice, favored one.” Then by “Rejoice” he looses the bond of grief. “Rejoice”: the one who looses grief has come. “Rejoice, favored one,” since until now womankind was under a curse. Here attend to the grace of God. “Rejoice, favored one; the Lord is with you.” Since with that woman was the serpent, in grief; “rejoice,” since with you is God. And see the angel's words, how they set out the whole dispensation of Christ. “Rejoice, favored one.” Since that woman received a double curse, grief and groaning in childbirth, he brings in the birth that undoes that bearing: “Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will call his name Jesus; for he will save his people from their sins.” The fruit that springs from you looses the sins of your forefathers. From then on the matter was reversed. To this day those who hear of Eve call her wretched: “Woe to the wretched woman, from what glory she fell! Woe to the wretched woman, what she suffered!” Mary hears every day from everyone, “Blessed,” since indeed she was filled with the Holy Spirit. And this Virgin, prophesying, what does she say? “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked upon the lowliness of his handmaid; for from now on all generations will call me blessed.” To show that she bears the person of Eve, she says, as it were, “Insulted until now; from now on all generations will call me blessed.” “And what does it profit her,” someone says, “if she does not hear it?” Indeed she does hear it, from being in a place of light, in the land of the living, the mother of salvation, the source of the light that is perceived: perceived through the flesh, understood through the Godhead. So she is called blessed throughout. But even while she still lived in the flesh she was called blessed, for she heard the blessing while she was still in the flesh. Eve first saw, and then tasted the tree; Mary first spoke, and then heard the blessing. For when the Savior was teaching, “a woman raised her voice from the crowd and said to him,” with everyone listening, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that you sucked.” But God completed the sentence against Adam, or rather the healing of repentance, and says: “Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat, cursed is the earth in your works.” Again, the one who had been blessed does not receive the curse, but the earth does: one sinned, and another is beaten. Just as Eve's curse, or rather rebuke (for it was not a curse but correction), just as Eve's rebuke, “In griefs you shall bear” (for every woman bears in griefs), has remained until now, so also Adam's: “Cursed is the earth in your works.” Our works are lawless, and the earth is scourged; we sin, and the earth receives the curse. God spares his creature as a well-born child and beats the earth as its tutor. “Cursed is the earth in your works.” Do not look at nature, but at the grace of God. He did not say, “Cursed is the earth,” for then it would have remained cursed and borne no fruit, just as he said to the fig tree, “May no fruit come from you any more,” and it withered; so the earth would have become. But he says, “in your works.” When I sin, the earth is beaten; when I do well, he blesses it. And see the wonder. When God created the earth, the sea, the birds, the creeping things, the wild animals, and man, he blessed them all; the fruits he did not bless, since he knew that this punishment was reserved for the earth: that when men sin it should receive barrenness, and when they do right, fruitfulness. He did not bless the fruits, for the gift was irrevocable. “Thorns and thistles it will bring forth for you.” “You despised the great things,” he says; “be beaten by the small.” See how the chastisements too are measured: a thorn cannot kill; it can draw blood. “And you shall eat of the earth in griefs.” She bears in griefs; you eat in griefs. For the ancient sentence remains until now. And show me a rich man, a poor man, a ruler, a subject, and see whether it is possible to find one whose life is free from grief or care. Why? Because of this: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread.” You did not want to eat at ease; eat in sweat. He does not punish him with famine, but subjects him to punishment and toil. Now you, the faithful, consider this: if Adam […], who does not eat bread without sweat, how shall we receive the kingdom of heaven without labors and sweat? “Until,” he says, “you return to the earth from which you were taken.” O sentence! O fear full of love for mankind! O sentence full of recall! He has not yet banished him, and he says, “Until you return to the earth from which you were taken.” He did not say, “Until you are destroyed, until you are dissolved,” but, “Until you return to the earth from which you were taken,” so that you may set before yourself the hope of the resurrection. “I send you back to where I took you from; as I took you then, I can take you again.” “For you are earth, and to earth you will depart.” You will not be destroyed, but […]. As far, then, as lay within our power, by the supply of the Holy Spirit, we have gone through paradise with you, we have read the royal records, we have seen the freedom of the accused and the love for mankind of the judge; through it may we also receive the salvation that comes from Christ, so that we may enjoy those heavenly and eternal goods, in Christ Jesus our Lord; for to him be glory and power, now and always and to the ages of ages. Amen.