The Divinity of Christ

Contents

Reading pages: 0.1–1.511 · 1.541–1.1051

1. 0.1The opening hymn confesses one God in three, the Son begotten from the Father’s heart as Wisdom and the eternal Spirit, with their distinct works; the preface asks Christ whether the faith held is right, for the narrow way of salvation is beset by the winding paths of heresy.
2. 0.31Heretics tear the faith apart with syllogisms, but God chose the foolish to confound the wise, and Christ is the stone of stumbling; faith alone lights the way; the devil sows tares in Christ’s field, which God lets grow until the harvest, but their seeds must be known.
3. 1.1Against the Patripassians, who make the Father suffer and die: the Father has never been seen; whoever in Scripture saw God (Abraham, Jacob, Moses) saw the Son, who shows the Father in forms men can grasp.
4. 1.31Moses saw Christ in human likeness and was granted only to see God’s back; the Word can be seen only in an assumed form, angelic or human, as in the burning bush, a figure of God entering our thorny, sinful flesh without being harmed.
5. 1.61Only the Son, the image of God, is seen; the Father, the fountain of the godhead, is invisible; the divine nature of the Word is impassible and eternal, and the scourging, spitting and nails fell on the flesh of the man he assumed.
6. 1.91Christ’s flesh, born of the Virgin, hungered, suffered and feared death; the Patripassians wrongly make the Father incarnate; Scripture says the Word, not the Father, became flesh; the Father is present everywhere through the Word and is seen in the Son.
7. 1.121Nebuchadnezzar saw the Son of God walking with the three young men in the furnace and confessed him; the idolatrous music fell silent and the three praised God; the Word has always come down to help and save mankind.
8. 1.151The Word took human flesh so that man might become spiritual and immortal; the Son of man alone sees the Father; the Father did not come down into flesh, but the flesh went up to the Father; Sabellius, who denies the Son, also destroys the Father.
9. 1.181Even pagans, philosophers and barbarians acknowledge one supreme God when they reason, so Christians, who have seen the Lord in Scripture and in the flesh, must all the more confess him.
10. 1.211Christians, who have touched the wounds of the risen Jesus and seen the prophecies fulfilled, confess the Father who begot a king, Christ, God and man, who descended to death and rose to carry humanity to the Father; they confess Father, Son and Spirit, three yet one God, the Father not being the Son.
11. 1.241The Father is not his own Son; the Son is begotten of the Father and equal to him, as shown by their identical works; the manner of the eternal generation is beyond human search, but it is known that the unbegotten Father begot the Son, whole of whole, co-eternal, without division or diminution.
12. 1.271God loses nothing by begetting, but is light from light; the Father was always Father, and Christ is co-eternal with him; whoever doubts this is no catholic; Moses, taught by God himself, shows that the Father created man together with Christ.
13. 1.301In creation God worked with God, for man was made in the image of Christ, the Father’s image; ‘the Lord rained fire from the Lord’ on Sodom shows the Son acting with the Father; Israel, having made the golden calf, could not see Christ veiled in the Law, but Christians see him with unveiled face.
14. 1.331Israel, the olive tree into which the Gentiles have been grafted, is urged not to envy; its Passover lamb and unleavened bread portray the Christian Passover, the true passion of Christ, whose blood marks believers and frees the true children of Abraham.
15. 1.361Abraham saw and believed in Christ, true God, whom the Law, pregnant with Christ, promised; the carnal observance of the Law misses him; every language, as on the title of the Cross, and all music proclaim Christ, whose name is the poet’s delight.
16. 1.391If the Jews will not hear the praise of Christ, let them hear the demons, who in exorcisms confess his name and are driven out, as the legion confessed him in the Gerasene demoniac; Judea heard but did not understand, while the whole world received the gospel.
17. 1.421The gospel has reached and tamed the barbarian peoples to the ends of the earth; since the incarnation the pagan oracles have fallen silent and the emperors adore the Cross; but in the poet’s boyhood one able emperor remained devoted to the gods.
18. 1.451The pagan emperor worships the gods’ images; at a sacrifice to Hecate the presiding priest suddenly cries out that a greater divine power has disrupted the rite, scattering the spirits and quenching the fire, and that a Christian must be present.
19. 1.481A baptized guardsman, signed with the cross, confesses Christ; the emperor flees and his soldiers call on Jesus; Judea is told to see in Christ the God who has conquered Rome, and that the destruction of Solomon’s handmade temple was deserved.
20. 1.511The Christian temple is the Word made flesh, not built by hands: destroyed in its human nature by the passion, it was raised on the third day and ascended; the Jewish temple was destroyed by Titus, and the Jewish people scattered.
21. 1.541The Jews who denied Christ are now subject to the believing nations; against those who hold that Christ is only a good man and not God, the poet argues from the virgin birth: conceived by the Spirit without man, Christ is to be believed God, and Mary remained a virgin mother.
22. 1.571The unbeliever is urged to believe the angel’s message, as Mary believed and so conceived Christ; Elizabeth and the unborn John bear witness; Isaiah’s prophecy of the virgin and Emmanuel is fulfilled.
23. 1.601The Magi worshiped the child with royal gifts, having seen his star; the constellations of the astrologers gave way before him and the sun foresaw its darkening at his death; the poet too would bring him gifts and worship him as king and God.
24. 1.631The Magi would not have worshiped a mere mortal child; but even setting aside the signs of his birth, Christ’s miracles show him God: he stilled the storm and walked on the sea, commanding the winds as their maker.
25. 1.661Only the creator of the waters, whose Spirit hovered over them at creation, could walk on the sea; Christ healed the blind man with clay and sent him to wash in Siloam, as he had once formed Adam from clay and breathed into him.
26. 1.691The blind man, healed by clay and the washing (a figure of baptism), proclaims Christ, the author of light; Christ fed thousands in the desert with five loaves and two fishes, which only the creator who made the world from nothing could do.
27. 1.721The multiplication of the loaves reflects the creation of the world from nothing; the twelve baskets kept the fragments; then the poet asks Lazarus how he heard Christ’s voice in the depths of death as Christ stood before his tomb and called him.
28. 1.751Lazarus comes out alive, his body restored; only the creator could do this; death is called to confess Jesus as God; Christ, true God, assumed the whole man, body and soul, and redeems the whole; an objector asks whether the God-breathed soul can suffer.
29. 1.781The soul is not God but a creature, the greatest of creatures, made in God’s likeness as a shadow resembles a body; only the Son, begotten not made, is true God co-eternal with the Father; God is boundless, the soul limited.
30. 1.811The created soul, joined to corruptible flesh, shares its sinfulness; it is God’s breath but not a part of God, since it began in time with the first-formed man; man is a mirror of God, and the varied breaths of our mouth illustrate the breath of God.
31. 1.841As man produces many kinds of breath and sound, God could breathe in the soul as he willed; the soul’s limited knowledge shows it is made; God’s ‘hand’ and ‘mouth’ in creation are figures, but body and soul are truly his works.
32. 1.871The soul is limited and located, can fall into sin and be punished, and needs grace and baptism to be justified; therefore it is not God or part of God; even angels, being made and not begotten, can sin; only God, Father and Son, is sinless and impassible.
33. 1.901The soul was created pure but, joined to flesh, fell in Adam, and Adam’s sin stains all his descendants from birth; yet souls are not passed on from parents like blood; each new soul still carries the ancient guilt until baptism washes it and gives new birth; soul and body share guilt and punishment.
34. 1.931Christ, born of an incorrupt mother, took a nature subject to punishment but not to sin, so death had no claim on him and was consumed in his body; only God is blameless, and the soul is not part of him; next the poet turns to the Manichees, who say Christ had only a phantom body.
35. 1.961Christ called himself the Son of man when healing and forgiving and foretelling his passion; if his body were a phantom, he lied, which God cannot do; Matthew’s genealogy of forty-two generations proves his true flesh, Christ completing the seventh week and the year of release.
36. 1.991Christ, the perfect man, brings the sabbath rest to human flesh; Luke’s genealogy traces his descent through seventy-two generations back to Adam, who through Christ becomes son of God; to make Christ’s body airy is to make all his ancestors and humanity itself a fable.
37. 1.1021Christ would not disdain human flesh, having formed Adam from clay with his own hands when all else was made by command; he made the earth his own so that it might become incorruptible; Christ is our flesh: in his death and burial the believer sees himself, and in his resurrection sees God.
38. 1.1051If Christ’s humanity were a phantom, so would be his divinity; his true death and resurrection prove him both man and God; the believer’s body will rise in Christ whole and the same, restored from every loss, so the poet bids his limbs fear nothing and follow the risen Christ.