Great Catechism 1 part 4/6

but if one should see the flame flowing downward, after the likeness of heavy bodies, he counts such a thing among wonders—how fire both remains being fire and yet in the manner of its motion departs from its nature, being borne downward;

so also the divine and surpassing power is shown not so much by the magnitudes of the heavens and the radiance of the luminaries and the ordering of the universe and the perpetual dispensation of beings, as by the condescension to the weakness of our nature—how the lofty, having come to be in the lowly, is both beheld in the lowly and does not descend from its height; how the Deity, interwoven with human nature, both becomes this and is that.

For since, as was said before, the contrary power had no power to mingle with the pure presence of God and to withstand his bare manifestation, in order that the exchange on our behalf might become easy to grasp for the one who sought it, the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, so that, as in the case of greedy fish, the hook of the Deity might be swallowed down along with the bait of the flesh, and thus, life having been brought to dwell in death and the light having shone in the darkness, that which is conceived as contrary to light and life might be made to vanish;

for it is not the nature of darkness to remain in the presence of light, nor of death to exist while life is active.

Therefore, having taken up the sequence of the mystery in summary, let us make complete our defense against those who accuse the divine dispensation—for what reason the Deity works out human salvation by means of itself.

For the Deity must in all respects be held in fitting conceptions, and it must not be that one thing concerning it is conceived in a lofty manner, while another is cast out from the

worth befitting God;

but every lofty and pious thought must by all means be believed concerning God, and the one must be connected in due sequence with the other.

It has been shown, then, that the good, the wise, the just, the powerful, the unsusceptible to corruption, are all displayed in the account of the dispensation concerning us.

The goodness is apprehended in the choosing to save the one who had perished; the wisdom and the justice were displayed in the manner of our salvation; the power, in his coming to be in the likeness and form of man according to the lowliness of our nature, and in his being able to be hoped, after the likeness of men, to be held fast by death—but, having come to be so, in working out what was proper to himself and according to his nature.

And proper to light is the doing away of darkness, and to life the abolition of death.

Since, then, having been turned aside from the straight way, we at the beginning swerved from life and were borne down into death, what do we learn from the mystery that is outside the likely, if purity touches those defiled by sin, and life touches the dead, and guidance touches those who have gone astray, so that the defilement might be cleansed, the wandering healed, and the dead brought back to life? And that the Deity should come to be in our nature would, to those who consider the things that are not too small-mindedly, bring no strangeness on grounds of reasonableness.

For who is so childish in soul as, looking to the universe, not to believe that the Deity is in everything—both clothing itself in it, and encompassing it, and seated within it? For beings are dependent upon Being, and it is not possible for anything to exist that does not have its being in the One who is.

If, then, all things are in him and he is in all, why are they ashamed at the dispensation of the mystery, which teaches that God came to be in man—he who is believed to be not even now outside of man? For even if the manner of God's presence in us is not this same as that, nevertheless his being in us both now and then is equally confessed.

Now, then, he is commingled with us as sustaining nature in being;

but then he was mingled with our nature, so that our nature, by the commingling with the Deity, might become divine, being rescued from death and coming to be outside the tyranny of the adversary;

for his return from death becomes for the mortal race the beginning of the return into immortal life.

But perhaps someone, in the examination of the justice and wisdom contemplated in this dispensation, is led to suppose that some deceit was devised by God on our behalf in such a method;

for that God should come to be within the one in power, not in bare Deity, but veiled by human nature, and so unrecognized by the enemy, is in a way a kind of deceit and trickery, since indeed it is proper to deceivers to turn the hopes of those they plot against toward something else, and to accomplish something other than what was hoped.

But he who looks to the truth will, more than anyone, agree that this too belongs to justice and wisdom.

For it belongs to the just to render to each according to desert; and to the wise neither to pervert the just, nor to separate the good aim of love for mankind from the judgment according to justice, but to join both to one another in a well-contrived manner—rendering to justice what is according to desert, while not departing from the goodness of the aim of love for mankind.

Let us consider, then, whether these two are not contemplated in what has happened.

For the recompense according to desert, by which the deceiver is in turn deceived, shows the just; while the aim of what came to pass becomes a testimony of the goodness of the one who works it.

For it is proper to justice to render to each those things whose principles and causes he himself had laid down beforehand, just as the earth renders fruits also according to the kinds of seeds sown;

and it is proper to wisdom, in the manner of rendering like for like, not to fall away from the better.

For just as both the one who plots and the one who

likewise mixes the drug into the food—but the one mixes in poison, the other the antidote of the poison—and the manner of the treatment in no way spoiled the aim of the benefit;

for even if from both there comes a mixing of a drug in the food, yet, looking to the aim, we praise the one and are vexed with the other;

so also here, by the principle of justice the deceiver receives in return those things whose seeds he himself had sown through his own free choice;

for he too is deceived by the screen of the man—he who first deceived man by the bait of pleasure;

but the aim of what comes to pass has its change toward the better.

For the one worked the deceit for the corruption of nature, but the one who is at once just and good and wise used the device of the deceit for the salvation of the one who had been corrupted—benefiting through these things not only the one who had perished, but also the very one who had worked the perdition against us.

For from the approach of death to life, of darkness to light, of corruption to incorruption, there comes the doing away of the worse and its passing over into nonbeing, and a benefit to the one who is being cleansed from these things.

For just as, when baser material has been mingled with gold, those who treat gold consume away by the burning of fire what is foreign and to be rejected, and bring back again the more precious material to its natural brilliance;

yet the separation does not come about without pain, the fire by its consuming power in time making the spurious vanish; nevertheless it is a kind of treatment of the gold, that what was lying in it to the marring of its beauty should be melted away;

in the same way, when death and corruption and darkness and whatever offspring of vice had grown about the inventor of evil, the approach of the divine power, like fire, working the doing away of what is contrary to nature, benefits the nature by the cleansing, even if the separation be painful.

Therefore not even by the adversary himself could it be doubted that what came to pass was just and saving, if indeed he should come to a perception of the benefit.

For now, just as those who for the sake of treatment are cut and cauterized are vexed with those who treat them, being stung by the pain of the incision; but if health should come to them through these things, and the pain of the cauterization pass away, they will be grateful to those who wrought the treatment upon them;

in the same way, when by the long circuits the evil has been removed from nature—the evil now mingled and grown together with it—when the restoration to the ancient state of those now lying in vice comes about, there will be a harmonious thanksgiving from all creation, both from those who were chastised in the cleansing and from those who had no need at all of cleansing.

These things and such as these the great mystery of the divine incarnation hands down.

For by those things through which he was commingled with humanity, having come to be through all the properties of nature—birth and rearing and growth, and having gone through even to the experience of death—he wrought all the things aforesaid, both freeing man from vice and healing the very inventor of vice.

For the cleansing of the disease is the healing of the sickness, even if it be painful.

And it is by all means consistent that the one who was being commingled with our nature should receive, through all its properties, the co-mingling with us.

For just as those who wash out the filth of garments do not leave some of the stains and wash away others, but cleanse the whole fabric of its spots from beginning to end, so that the garment may become uniform with itself throughout, equally brightened by the washing;

so, since human life had been defiled by sin at its beginning and its end and in all the things between, it was needful that the cleansing power should come to be through all, and not heal one part by the cleansing while overlooking another part unhealed.

For this reason, our life being bounded on either side by two limits—I mean the beginning and the end—at each limit the power that sets nature right is found, both having touched the beginning and having extended itself even to the end

and having comprehended all the things between these.

But since there is one entrance into life for all men, from where ought the one entering in to us to have been settled into life? "From heaven," perhaps says the one who spurns as shameful and inglorious the manner of human birth.

But the human was not in heaven, nor did any disease of vice dwell in the supramundane life.

And he who was being commingled with man made the co-mingling with the aim of benefit.

Where, then, the evil was not, nor did human life have its conduct, how does anyone seek that man should there be interwoven with God—or rather, not man, but some phantom and likeness of man? And what setting-right of our nature would there have come about, if, when the earthly living being was diseased, some other of the heavenly things had received the divine commingling? For it is not possible for the sick to be healed, unless the suffering part itself in particular receive the cure.

If, then, the sick part was on earth, but the divine power did not touch the sick part, looking to its own fittingness, the divine power's occupation with things that in no way share with us would have been useless to man.

For what is unfitting is equal in the case of the Deity—if indeed it is at all permissible to conceive anything unfitting besides vice.

But to the one who in this matter judges the divine majesty small-mindedly—in his refusal to accept the fellowship of the properties of our nature—it is no more a comfort to the indignity that the Deity should be fashioned into the likeness of a heavenly body than of an earthly one.

For from the Most High and Inaccessible, according to the height of his nature, all creation stands at an equal distance below, and the whole has been ranked equally beneath him.

For that which is in general inaccessible is not accessible to one and unapproachable to another, but stands above all beings equally.

Neither, then, is the earth further from the divine worth, nor is heaven nearer, nor do the things dwelling in either of the elements differ at all from one another in this respect, so that some should touch the inaccessible nature while others are excluded; or otherwise we should suppose that the power which masters the universe does not pervade all things equally, but abounds in some and is more deficient in others, and the Deity, by the difference of less and more, of greater and lesser, would consequently appear composite, not agreeing with itself, if it were supposed by the principle of nature to be far from us, yet, being neighbor to some other thing, became easy to grasp by reason of nearness.

But the true account concerning the lofty worth looks neither downward by comparison nor upward;

for all things equally stand beneath the power that presides over the universe, so that, if they shall deem the earthly nature unworthy of the interweaving with the Deity, neither would any other be found that has the worthiness.

But if all things equally fall short of the worth, one thing alone is fitting for God: to benefit the one in need.

Where, then, the disease was, there confessing that the healing power came to visit, what have we believed that is outside the conception befitting God? But they make a comedy of our nature, and harp on the manner of birth, and think by these things to make the mystery ridiculous, as though it were unfitting for God to touch the fellowship of human life through such an entrance.

But concerning this it has already been said in the preceding discourses, that only evil is shameful to its own nature, and whatever is akin to vice.

But the sequence of nature, ordered by the divine will and law, is far from the slander on the ground of vice; or otherwise the accusation against nature would go back upon the Creator, if anything pertaining to it should be slandered as shameful and unfitting.

If, then, the Deity is separated from vice alone, and nature is not vice, and the mystery says that God came to be in man, not in vice, and there is one entrance of man into life, through which the one being born is brought into life—what other manner of entrance into life do they prescribe for God, these who judge it reasonable that nature, having fallen sick in vice, should be visited by the divine power, but who are displeased with the manner

of the visitation, not knowing that the whole construction of the body is, in relation to itself, of equal honor, and that in it none of the things contributing to the constitution of life is slandered as dishonorable or base? For the whole arrangement of the organic members is ordered toward one aim.

And the aim is that the human should continue in life.

Now the rest of the organs maintain the present life of men, being apportioned, different ones to different activities, through which the perceptive and active power is administered;

but the generative organs have the forethought of the future, by themselves introducing succession into nature.

If, then, you should look to usefulness, of which of the things deemed honorable would those be second? And of what would they not, in reason, be judged more honorable? For it is not by eye and ear and tongue, or any other of the sense-organs, that our race is carried through to perpetuity;

for these, as has been said, belong to the present enjoyment;

but in those organs immortality is preserved for humanity, so that death, ever active against us, is in a way ineffective and unaccomplishing, nature ever introducing itself in place of what is lost through those who come after.

What, then, that is unfitting does our mystery contain, if through those organs God was commingled with human life, through which nature wars against death? But passing on from this, they attempt again by other means to disparage the doctrine, and they say: if what came to pass was beautiful and fitting to God, why did he defer the benefit? And why, when vice was in its beginnings, did he not cut short its further advance? To this our answer is brief: that it was in wisdom and in providence for what is profitable to nature that the deferral of the benefit to us came about.

For indeed, in the case of bodily diseases too, whenever some corrupt humor creeps beneath the passages, before all the unnatural matter lying within has been brought up to the surface, those who treat afflictions by skillful method do not medicate with the things that close up the body, but they wait for all that lurks within to come outside, and so apply the cure to the malady when it is laid bare.

Since, then, once the disease of vice had broken out upon the nature of humanity, the Healer of the universe waited until no form of wickedness should be left hidden in nature.

For this reason he does not bring the cure to man straightway after the envy and the fratricide of Cain;

for not yet had the vice of those destroyed in Noah's time flashed forth, nor had the grievous disease of the Sodomite lawlessness been revealed, nor the Egyptians' fighting against God, nor the Assyrians' arrogance, nor the Jews' bloody murder against the saints of God, nor the lawless slaughter of children by Herod, nor all the other things that are recorded and that, outside of history, were perpetrated in the generations following, the root of evil sprouting in manifold ways in the free choices of men.

Since, then, vice had reached its uttermost measure, and no form of wickedness was any longer left undared among men, so that the cure might proceed through the whole of the sickness, for this reason he heals the disease not when it was beginning, but when it had been brought to completion.

But if anyone thinks to refute our argument, on the ground that even after the cure was applied, human life is still in error through sins, let him be guided to the truth by some familiar example.

For just as in the case of the serpent, if it receive the mortal blow upon the head, the coil behind does not at once die together with the head, but the head has died, while the tail part is still animated by its own vital force and is not deprived of vital motion; so it is possible also to see vice struck in its vital part, yet still in its remnants troubling life.

But, leaving aside even the charge against the doctrine of the mystery on these grounds, they make it a matter of accusation that the faith does not pervade all men.

And why ever, they say, did the grace not come upon

all, but, some having joined themselves to the word, no small is the part that is left behind—either God not willing to apportion the benefit ungrudgingly to all, or not being at all able? Of which neither is free from blame.

For neither is it fitting that the good should be unwilled by God, nor that it should be impossible.

If, then, faith is something good, why, they say, is the grace not upon all? If, then, these things had been maintained in our discourse too—that the faith is allotted to men by the divine will, some being called, while the rest are without share in the calling—such an accusation would have occasion to be brought against the mystery;

but if the calling is of equal honor upon all, distinguishing neither worth, nor age, nor the differences according to nations;

for this very reason, at the first beginning of the proclamation, those who ministered the word suddenly became, by divine inspiration, speakers of the same tongue with all the nations, so that no one might be without share in the teaching of the good things;

how, then, could anyone with reason still blame God for the word's not prevailing over all? For he who holds the authority over the universe, through the exceeding measure of the honor paid to man, left also something to be under our own authority, of which each alone is master.

And this is free choice—an unenslaved thing and self-determining, lying in the freedom of the understanding.

Therefore such an accusation would more justly be transferred to those who have not been brought to the faith, not to the one who called them to assent.

For neither, when Peter at the beginning preached the word in the populous assembly of the Jews, and three thousand at once received the faith, did those who disobeyed—being more in number than those who believed—blame the apostle for the things in which they were not persuaded.

For it was not likely, the grace having been set forth in common, that the one who voluntarily departed should blame, not himself, but another for the ill lot.

But they are not at a loss even for contentious counter-argument against such things.

For they say that God, if indeed he willed, would be able even to draw those who are resistant compulsorily to the acceptance of the proclamation.

Where, then, in these things is free will? Where is virtue? Where the praise of those who do right? For it belongs only to lifeless or irrational things to be led about at another's will toward what seems good to him.

But the rational and intellectual nature, if it should lay aside its self-determination, has destroyed along with it also the grace of the intellectual.

For to what end will it use the understanding, if the authority of choosing something according to its judgment lies with another? But if free choice should remain inactive, virtue is by necessity done away, hindered by the immobility of the choice;

and virtue not existing, life is dishonored, the praise of those who do right is taken away, sin is without peril, and the distinction in life is without judgment.

For who would still with reason either blame the licentious or praise the temperate? This answer being ready to hand for everyone—that nothing of what is according to our judgment is in our power, but that human choices are led about by a superior dominion toward what seems good to the one in power.

Therefore the accusation is not against the goodness of God—that the faith did not come to be in all—but against the disposition of those who receive the proclamation.

What besides these is still brought forward by the gainsayers? That, above all, the surpassing nature ought not to have come at all into the experience of death, but, even apart from this, by the superabundance of its power it could with ease have accomplished what seemed good.

But if indeed it had altogether to come about, according to some ineffable principle, yet at least it should not have been insulted by the dishonorable manner of death.

"For what," he says, "could be more dishonorable than the death by cross?" What, then, do we say also to these things? That death the birth makes necessary.

For the one who had once resolved to partake of humanity had to come to be through all the properties of nature.

If, then, human life being bounded by two limits, he, having come to be in the one, had not touched the next, the purpose would have remained half-finished, the other of the things of our nature being left untouched.

And perhaps someone, having accurately understood the mystery, would more reasonably say that it was not on account of the birth that the death came about, but on the contrary that the birth was taken on for the sake of the death;

for he who is ever existent does not undergo bodily birth because he needed to live, but recalling us from death to life.

Since, then, the return again from death of the whole of our nature had to come about, stretching out, as it were, a hand to the one lying prostrate, and for this reason stooping down to our fallen state, he drew so near to death as to touch the deadness and to give to nature, by his own body, the beginning of the resurrection, having by his power raised up the whole man together with himself.

For since the God-receiving man was from nowhere else but from our own lump—he who through the resurrection was raised up together with the Deity—just as in the case of our body the activity of one of the sense-organs brings the common perception to the whole that is united with the part, so, as though the whole of nature were one living being, the resurrection of the part passes through to the whole, distributed from the part to the whole according to the continuity and unity of nature.

What, then, do we learn in the mystery that is outside the likely, if the one standing stoops down to the one fallen, in order to set upright the one lying prostrate? But the cross, if indeed it contains also some other deeper meaning, those who are versed in hidden things would know.

But what, then, has come to us by tradition is such as this.

Since all things in the gospel, according to the more lofty and more divine principle, have both been spoken and done, and there is nothing that is not such—nothing in which there is not by all means displayed some mixture of the divine with the human, the utterance or the action being conducted in a human manner, while what is conceived in the hidden sense displays the divine—it would be consistent also in this matter not to look at the one and overlook the other, but in the death to behold the human, and in the manner to inquire closely into the more divine.

For since it is proper to the Deity to pervade all things and to extend itself together with the nature of beings throughout every part;

for nothing could remain in being unless it remained in Being;

and that which is properly and primarily Being is the divine nature, which the permanence of beings compels us by necessity to believe to be in all the things that exist;

this we are taught through the cross, the shape of which is divided into four, so that from the center, at which it is joined to itself, the projections are counted as four—because he who at the time of the dispensation according to death was stretched out upon it is the one who binds together and fits the universe to himself, drawing the diverse natures of beings into one concord and harmony through himself; for in beings either something is conceived as above, or below, or the thought passes over to the lateral limits.

If, then, you reckon the constitution of the heavenly things, or of the things beneath the earth, or of the limits at either side of the universe, everywhere the Deity meets your reasoning beforehand, alone being contemplated in every part of beings and holding all things together in being.

Whether, then, this nature ought to be named Deity or Word or Power or Wisdom or any other of the lofty things more able to indicate the Supreme, our discourse disputes nothing concerning utterance or name or the form of words.

Since, then, all creation looks to him, and is about him, and through him becomes joined together with itself, the upper things being grown together with the lower and the lateral things with one another through him, it was needful that we should be guided to the understanding of the Deity not by hearing alone, but that sight too should become a teacher of the loftier conceptions; whence also the great Paul, having set out, initiates the people in Ephesus, implanting in them through his teaching a power to know what is the depth and the height, and the breadth and the length.

For he names each projection of the cross by its proper word, calling the height the part that surpasses, the depth the part that lies beneath, and breadth and length the lateral extensions.

And more clearly elsewhere, to the Philippians, I think, he makes such a meaning, where he says that "In the name of Jesus Christ

every knee shall bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth."

Here he comprehends the middle beam under one designation, naming as "earthly" all that is between the things in heaven and the things beneath the earth.

This we have learned concerning the mystery of the cross.

And the things after this the discourse contains in due sequence, such that it is confessed even by the unbelievers that nothing is alien to the conception befitting God.