On Providence (ten orations)

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–1.8 · 2.1–2.6 · 3.1–3.8 · 4.1–4.8 · 5.1–5.8 · 6.1–6.8 · 6.9 · 7.1–7.9 · 8.1–8.8 · 8.9–9.3 · 9.4–10.1 · 10.2–10.10 · 10.11–10.15

1. 1.1Theodoret opens by arguing that, as nature binds children, slaves, and citizens to defend those who have done them good, those made and saved by God must defend him with words against the many kinds of impiety, beginning with poets and philosophers.
2. 1.2Theodoret surveys the errors of philosophers and of heretics who bear the Christian name, sets the others aside, and arms himself to fight those who deny God's providence.
3. 1.3Theodoret challenges the deniers of providence to name anything disordered in creation and points to heaven, unchanged through the ages, as held fast by the Word who made it.
4. 1.4Heaven survives the fire of the sun and stars because its Maker steers creation like a ship; fire, which by nature rises, sends its light downward at his command, and the lights serve humanity by a set distribution of time.
5. 1.5Day and night, like sisters, lend and repay time to each other through the seasons, and the night gives rest to workers, slaves, and armies.
6. 1.6Night lets wild beasts feed while people rest, as Psalm 104 says, and the succession of night and day, with the phases of the moon, gives mortal human beings the measures of time.
7. 1.7The sun's yearly course and the middle seasons of spring and autumn lead human beings gently between the extremes of winter and summer, showing the Maker's care.
8. 1.8Against those who fault the changing seasons, Theodoret shows how each season serves sowing, growth, and harvest, and how the stars guide travellers and sailors, and ends his first discourse in praise.
9. 2.1Opening his second discourse, Theodoret likens the deniers of providence to a passenger who denies the helmsman he sees, and turns from heaven to the air, which God placed between heaven and earth to sustain life and temper the sun.
10. 2.2The same air and sun that sustain life also cause hardship, teaching that no element gives life by itself and that the cause of good things is the Creator, who preserves the air through the ages.
11. 2.3The shape of the earth, its mountains, springs, and hot waters, all serve human beings and show the Maker's power, yet the ungrateful still blaspheme like Mani, who curses those who cut the bread he eats.
12. 2.4Theodoret argues that God both can and wills to care for creation, since he made it out of goodness, and that it is impious to say he envies what he made.
13. 2.5The sea, bounded by God's law, joins the separated lands by trade, so that the deniers of providence, worse than idolatrous Sidon, should be ashamed before the tribute every part of creation pays them.
14. 2.6Frost, birds, and all the fruits of land and water serve human beings, so Theodoret ends his second discourse rebuking those who enjoy God's gifts and rage against the giver, deferring their objections to a later discourse.
15. 3.1Theodoret begins his third discourse by offering a third medicine to those who deny providence, taken from their own bodies, starting with the organs of speech, which work like a pipe organ.
16. 3.2Theodoret describes how tongue, teeth, lips, lungs, and heart work together to produce speech, turning even the heart's waste breath into the vehicle of reason, and shows that musical instruments only imitate this without producing articulate words.
17. 3.3Since human art only imitates God's work as shadows imitate reality, Theodoret turns to the heart and traces how food is digested and purified by belly, liver, and spleen and carried as blood through the veins to the whole body.
18. 3.4Theodoret describes the veins and arteries, built differently for blood and breath and joined so that each sustains the other, and asks what builder or gardener ever provided so well for a house or a garden.
19. 3.5As a tree draws water through its roots, the body receives food through mouth, belly, and liver; man alone is made upright, with jointed legs and a natural cushion for sitting, yet he is less grateful than a dog to its master.
20. 3.6The swift mind, able to reach the heavens, should recognize providence; Theodoret describes the spine, the neck with its passages like a city's water columns, and the head as the citadel guarding the brain.
21. 3.7Theodoret describes the meninges guarding the brain, and the eyes as watchmen protected by eyebrows, eyelids, and eyelashes, as ears of grain are protected by their awns.
22. 3.8Theodoret describes the eye, the changes of the blood, the senses of smell and hearing, and urges his hearers to guard their hearing with reason and the fear of God, ending his third discourse.
23. 4.1Opening his fourth discourse with Psalm 19, Theodoret argues that heaven, day, and night proclaim their Maker without speech, as a well-built house proclaims its builder, and turns with Psalm 139 to the wonder of human nature.
24. 4.2Overwhelmed, with the psalmist, by the soul's powers and the union of mortal and immortal in man, Theodoret shows providence even in the hair of the head, eyebrows, and beard.
25. 4.3Hair as a natural covering appears with the age of moral knowledge, as Adam and Eve covered themselves after the fall; God, who called his work very good, placed even the organs of excretion with care for human modesty.
26. 4.4Theodoret describes the proportions and joints of the arm, hand, and fingers, the protecting nails, and why man, unlike the beasts, was given no natural claws or hooves.
27. 4.5The hands, given to man alone as the instruments of reason, make shoes, farm the land, build and sail ships, and practise all the arts, which depend on one another and which God himself first showed to humankind.
28. 4.6Theodoret marvels at God-given arts of glassmaking, weaving, dyeing, building, and medicine, explaining that even the silkworm's finer thread teaches humility while serving human beings.
29. 4.7Herbs serve for food and medicine; the art of letters, made possible by the hand's opposed thumb, lets the absent converse; so Theodoret calls the denier of providence to submit to God and praise him.
30. 4.8The fourth discourse ends with the psalm verse and a doxology.
31. 5.1Opening his fifth discourse, Theodoret answers the objection that bees, untaught, rival human arts: their labor and honey serve human beings as tribute, and their common life teaches the fruits of harmony.
32. 5.2The bees' common life without lawsuits, their single leader, and their inborn industry teach human beings to shun idleness, seek no rule that is not theirs, and share their goods, as Solomon and Jeremiah say of ant, bee, and birds.
33. 5.3Scripture shames human beings by the knowledge of animals and names good and bad souls after animals; the bees and the spider teach humility, since human arts share or imitate what God gave them by nature.
34. 5.4Human reason, imitating the spider's web, devises snares and nets for birds, beasts, and fish, and by wisdom, not wings or strength, subdues the bull, donkey, mule, and camel.
35. 5.5Those who love God's good yoke learn from the obedient beasts, as the psalmist says, 'I became like a beast before you'; horse and elephant, far stronger than man, obey him.
36. 5.6Man's small body keeps him from arrogance while reason gives him rule over large beasts; dogs, by natural gift, guard flocks and hunt faithfully for their masters.
37. 5.7Unruly animals and wild beasts discipline human beings, driving them to prayer, yet God keeps them far off; their original subjection, lost through sin, appears in Adam, Noah, Daniel, and Paul.
38. 5.8Like a schoolmaster's rod or a physician's knife, the fear of wild beasts disciplines those prone to sin; so Theodoret ends the fifth discourse urging his hearers to stop slandering God and to praise him.
39. 6.1Opening his sixth discourse, Theodoret takes up the objection that the wicked are rich and the virtuous poor, asks what happiness is, and argues that wealth, the helper of injustice, cannot be it, beginning a review of the four virtues with prudence.
40. 6.2Theodoret defines prudence, temperance, courage, and justice as the health and order of the soul's parts, and argues that wealth and luxury destroy them while poverty helps reason rule the passions.
41. 6.3Poverty helps virtue, as even pagan philosophers who renounced wealth show; but wealth, like iron or wine, is a gift that is good or bad according to its use, and only its slaves deserve blame.
42. 6.4As the members of the body have different functions that serve the whole, so God distributed wealth and poverty unequally for the common good; and luxury, which the objector envies, is the enemy of virtue.
43. 6.5If all were equally rich no one would farm, build, or practise any art, and all would perish; God in fact gave rich and poor equally the earth, sky, air, water, body, soul, conception, and birth, the poor often with the advantage.
44. 6.6The Creator balances rich and poor in childbirth, infancy, death, and decay, and makes wealth and poverty depend on each other, since the rich must buy from the poor the products of their arts.
45. 6.7The poor man, whose art cannot be stolen, needs little, while the rich depend on him; poverty even mines and shapes the materials of wealth, so that their mutual need is an equality that binds them in friendship.
46. 6.8If only the righteous were rich, the wicked could plead like Satan against Job; since God sets wealth and poverty before all, neither rich nor poor who live wickedly have an excuse, and God gave health to the poor while the rich suffer amid all their comforts.
47. 6.9God's providence cares for the homeless poor in sickness without physicians; Theodoret ends the sixth discourse urging his hearer, like the three youths in the furnace, to praise the Creator rather than pry into his ways.
48. 7.1As God accepted the poor man's small offering under the law, so he accepts Theodoret's words; opening the seventh discourse, he turns to complaints about slavery and taxes, comparing the complainers to fastidious invalids.
49. 7.2The deniers of providence complain about everything, weather, God's patience, poverty, wealth, life, and death; Theodoret shows that God did not create humanity divided into slaves and masters, for all descend from Adam and Eve, and no slave entered Noah's ark.
50. 7.3Because sin brought disorder, God divided humanity into rulers and ruled and gave laws and magistrates, without which the strong would devour the weak like fish, and through which the wronged find justice in the courts.
51. 7.4Fear of the law restrains criminals; and Scripture and nature both show that all human beings, of every region and color, share one nature, so that slavery and mastery came later through sin, not from the Creator.
52. 7.5As a ship needs a pilot and an army a general, a household needs a master; slavery came from sin, but order in the household, as in a ship or army, is not to be blamed.
53. 7.6The master is beset by cares for taxes, harvests, and lawsuits, while the slave, free in soul, enjoys health, appetite, and sweet sleep, as Ecclesiastes says; God has balanced the burdens of rule and slavery.
54. 7.7Every human good comes by labor; masters often labor more than slaves, as Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Rebekah, Jacob and his family, and Moses and Zipporah show from Scripture.
55. 7.8Theodoret sums up: God made one free nature; sin made laws and rulers necessary, as in cities, armies, households, angels, and the priesthood; and evil rulers are allowed by God as a consequence of the wickedness of the ruled.
56. 7.9Under wicked rulers and cruel masters, Christians should change their lives and pray, for God hears those who call on him; Theodoret ends the seventh discourse promising to show that slavery cannot harm the pious.
57. 8.1Opening his eighth discourse, Theodoret recalls that wealth, poverty, and slavery serve as remedies for sin and promises to show that slavery does not harm the willing, beginning with Abraham's servant sent to find a wife for Isaac.
58. 8.2Abraham's servant, sent to find a wife for Isaac, prays at the spring for a hospitable woman rather than for beauty or wealth, and Rebekah at once appears and waters his camels.
59. 8.3Abraham's servant tests the signs, praises God before giving the betrothal gifts to Rebekah, and refuses to delay his return to his master, always referring his success to God's providence.
60. 8.4Slavery did no harm to Abraham's servant; virtue and vice are freely chosen, as Joseph shows, whom his envious brothers, after his dreams, nearly killed and then sold to Ishmaelite merchants.
61. 8.5Sold into Egypt, Joseph kept his freedom of soul and was entrusted with Potiphar's house; when his master's wife tried to seduce him, he set his reason against every pressure and became the teacher of chastity.
62. 8.6Joseph refuses Potiphar's wife: God sees everything, marriage is the God-given spring of human life, and he will not betray the master who entrusted him with all but his wife, nor imitate Adam's grasping at the one forbidden thing.
63. 8.7Joseph flees naked from Potiphar's wife, silently accepts imprisonment rather than expose her, and in prison cheerfully consoles the despondent, asking the king's two servants about their dreams without lamenting his own dreams' bitter results.
64. 8.8In prison Joseph credits God with interpreting dreams, does not accuse his brothers or his mistress, and is later raised to rule Egypt without pride, so that the dreams his brothers fought against were fulfilled through their own plot.
65. 8.9Joseph forgives and feeds his brothers, saying God sent him ahead to save life, which proves that vice comes from free choice; so too Obadiah, steward of wicked Ahab and Jezebel, hid and fed a hundred prophets.
66. 8.10Obadiah served wicked masters except where God was opposed; the Ethiopian eunuch Ebed-melech rescued Jeremiah and was saved; and the young captives in Babylon refused the king's food rather than break the law.
67. 8.11The young captives, strengthened by their simple diet, rise to office; when Nebuchadnezzar commands worship of the golden image, Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael refuse, ready to die whether or not God delivers them.
68. 8.12The fire spares the three youths and burns their persecutors, and the king honors their God; Daniel likewise, though a captive, prays openly against the king's law, tames the lions, and teaches the king, showing that slaves of wicked masters can reach the summit of virtue.
69. 8.13God sent the righteous into captivity with the lawless as their teachers and as a light to the nations; so Theodoret ends the eighth discourse urging his hearer, taught that slaves can be virtuous under bad masters, to turn his blasphemy into praise.
70. 9.1Opening his ninth discourse, Theodoret reviews the eight preceding ones and takes up a new objection: that the virtuous, often poor or enslaved, receive no reward for their labors.
71. 9.2True prosperity is not luxury; wealth is given to be shared, and the virtuous seek not human praise but the reward God promises: resurrection, the company of angels, and above all the sight of God himself, as Isaiah, the Psalms, and the Beatitudes teach.
72. 9.3The Gospel parables teach the rewards of virtue, but for unbelievers Theodoret argues from reason: since virtues are goods, their practitioners must receive a reward greater than their labors, as farmers, athletes, and actors do.
73. 9.4Every craftsman labors for a reward, and conscience, which makes wrongdoers hide, shows that virtue is good and deserves recompense; yet in this life many virtuous people go unknown.
74. 9.5Because not all the virtuous are honored nor all the wicked punished in this life, a just God must have prepared another life; even pagan poets and philosophers taught judgment after death, and justice requires that the body share the soul's reward or punishment.
75. 9.6Theodoret imagines the soul pleading that the body shared its sins, and the virtuous body pleading that it shared all the soul's good works, from prayer and fasting to building churches and washing the saints' feet; the just judge will therefore restore bodies to souls and reward both together.
76. 9.7As victors are portrayed with the equipment they used, the soul should be honored with the body with which it fought; God, unlike the potter's clay or the doubter's weakness, has power to do what human beings cannot.
77. 9.8God, who created heaven, earth, light, and all living things by a word, can easily gather and restore scattered bodies; as Paul says, and as seeds and cuttings show, what dies and decays is raised to new life.
78. 9.9The forming of a human being from tiny seed into all the body's parts, which even pagan physicians ended up praising, shows that God, who sees every particle of dust, can raise the dead from the earth as from a womb.
79. 9.10As one easily sorts mixed grains, God, holding the earth in his hand, will raise the dead at the archangel's trumpet for judgment before Christ; Theodoret ends the ninth discourse urging his hearers to make peace with Providence.
80. 10.1Opening his tenth discourse, Theodoret acknowledges with the psalmist and Paul that God's judgments are an unfathomable abyss; present knowledge is partial, and perfect knowledge is the prize of virtue in the life to come.
81. 10.2The saints praised God in their trials: David, Daniel and the three youths, Abraham in famine, Peter and John rejoicing under the scourge, and Paul content in persecution; why then do those who suffer nothing blaspheme?
82. 10.3The saints counted suffering for the gospel a benefit; Theodoret turns to the incarnation, the greatest proof of God's care: the only-begotten, consubstantial Son took the form of a servant, and by uniting defeated human nature to himself, justly freed it from the tyrant.
83. 10.4Christ is born of a virgin; the Word made flesh is not defiled by the incarnation, as the omnipresent God is not defiled by creation nor a physician by the wounds he treats; laid in a manger, he becomes food for irrational humanity, now received at the mystical table.
84. 10.5Christ took on human healing himself; he was circumcised, fled to Egypt, was baptized to fulfil all righteousness and revealed by the Father and the Spirit, then fasted forty days and was tempted by the devil, who thought he faced Adam but met Adam's Maker in Adam's nature.
85. 10.6Christ answered the tempter with Scripture as a man, won the victory for humanity, worked many miracles, and, envied by his enemies, willingly went to the cross, sinless, to pay the debt owed by human nature.
86. 10.7Isaiah and Paul testify that Christ, sinless, bore our sins: the sheep led to slaughter and the shorn lamb show that he died as man while remaining impassible as God, and he redeemed us from the curse by his blood.
87. 10.8Christ bought us with his blood and took the curse of the law on himself; sinless, he arraigns the devil, who killed him unjustly, and so loses his hold on all whom death held.
88. 10.9Christ continues his case against the devil: as Adam lost paradise by greed, the devil loses his tyranny for seizing the sinless; by just mercy Christ pays the debt of nature with his body, rises, and frees humanity, as his words on the ruler of this world show.
89. 10.10Christ, sinless, condemned the devil and by his cross and resurrection made all humanity alive with him, as John and Colossians teach; then he ascended, leaving the hope of the same ascent, the supreme act of the Maker's care for his image.
90. 10.11God restored his image, corrupted by sin, in Christ; to those who ask why so late, Theodoret answers that God planned salvation before the world and teaches each age what it can bear: Adam one law, Noah the food law, Abraham circumcision, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as heralds of piety to the nations.
91. 10.12God made Joseph a teacher of the one God in Egypt and chose Israel to teach all nations: Rahab believed at the report of the exodus, and the Philistines learned the difference between God and Dagon when the ark was among them; so too with Belshazzar.
92. 10.13Daniel explains Belshazzar's doom for profaning the temple vessels; through Israel, even in captivity, God taught Nebuchadnezzar, Sennacherib, and Nineveh, and he scattered the Jews through the world to prepare the nations for the apostles' preaching of one God.
93. 10.14The Jews' opposition helped the nations' faith, since the dispute brought forward the law and the prophets, which the Jews themselves acknowledged as divine; God planned salvation from the beginning, as Galatians 4 and 1 Corinthians 2 show.
94. 10.15Had the rulers of this age known God's hidden plan they would not have crucified the Lord of glory; Theodoret ends the tenth discourse urging his hearers to stop raging, worship God's manifest dispensations without prying into hidden ones, and praise Christ, our true God.