Tractates 1 part 8/14

In the beginning, brethren, our Lord unhesitatingly is Christ, whom before all ages the Father—still on both sides God within Himself, in the undivided fullness of the spirit of blessed perpetuity, veiled by I know not what consciousness of His own—embraced as Son, not without affection, but without distinction. But, that He might set in order the things devised, that ineffable power and incomprehensible Wisdom (Ps. 45:1), from the region of the heart belches forth the Word, and by omnipotence propagates itself. From God is born God, having all that is the Father's, detracting nothing from the Father. The one shines back in the other; the glory of either is the common honor: because what is the Son's is the Father's; what is the Father's belongs to both.

The Father rejoices in another self, whom He begot of Himself. But how He was generated who proceeded, it is madness to conjecture; for the Son tempers Himself for the sake of the nature of things, lest the meanness of this world should not be able to bear the Lord of unveiled majesty. When the Father commands the orb to be made, the work is completed by the Son as soon as it is spoken. But how, or how great, or of what kind it ought to be made, no one prescribes, no one asks; for it could not be without injury to the Father, if there were need of this for Him who, abiding in the bosom of the Father, had not learned but possessed the perfection of His will. II. So then, the world being perfected, last of all man is fashioned by the finger and hand of God out of the slime of the earth.

There is constructed a movable image, wholly unaware of itself; and, that it might be the image of God, it is breathed upon by God into a living soul. It conceived a spirit which it equally does not know; it does not see it entering; it cannot prevent it departing. And does anyone reckon that he can know the secret of God, who does not know the hidden thing of his own body? Wherefore, brethren, for the sake of that for which we were made and born, let us fear, love, and honor Him whom we have found, our God. Let those, to be sure, seek Him, who do not have Him with them. THE SIXTH TRACTATE. On that which is written: When He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God and the Father (1 Cor. 15:24). I. The divine Scripture, when it speaks of the Son of God, does not contradict itself;

but between God and the man whom He assumed, it distinguishes with a necessary moderation. For if it always proclaimed Him pure God, there would be no room for passion and resurrection, and Christ would have bestowed nothing on the world; if it proclaimed Him man only, as some suppose, that He took His beginning from the virgin's womb, what hope of future blessedness for the believer, when it is written: Cursed is the man who has his hope in man? (Jer. 17:5). Therefore, where it signifies pure God, it thus says in Genesis: And God made man to the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27); and in the Psalms: But God our King before the ages has wrought salvation in the midst of the earth (Ps. 74:12)! and in another place:

Your throne is prepared, O God, from then, and You are from the ages (Ps. 93:2). Where He signifies the man taken up, He thus continues: Tell the daughter of Sion: Behold your King comes to you, just, holy, and saving, meek, sitting upon a young ass (Zech. 9:9; Isa. 62:11); and again: Lift up your gates, you princes, and be lifted up, you eternal gates, and the King of glory shall enter in (Ps. 24:7); and again the Magi: Where is, they say, He that is born King of the Jews (Matt. 2:2)? II. This is He, brethren, who was announced as to come through the prophets; who according to the flesh was born in time; who is exalted in the heights, humble on earth; the begetter of the ages, son of a virgin, immortal to Himself, to die for man:

He tastes death, that He may utterly conquer death; He penetrates the lower regions, that He may bring the dead thence back alive. The Only-begotten in proceeding from the Father before the origin of things; the firstborn from the dead (Col. 1:18), as the Apostle says, after the deaths of many peoples. This is He to whom power is given in heaven and on earth, His name being new from His God, as He Himself says: I have glorified You on earth; I have finished the work which You gave Me to do. And now You, glorify Me with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was (John 17:4; Matt. 11:27). Who, rising again, says: All things are delivered to Me by My Father (Luke 10:22). This is He who, pure, descended from heaven, and, made flesh, ascended into heaven.

This is He, I say, of whom Paul says: He who receives the kingdom, reigns, and shall deliver it up to God and the Father, etc. (1 Cor. 1:24). III. Why do you here suffer a stumbling-block, O Christian, and from your own nature form opinions about the divine mysteries of the pious provision? If you think too little of the Son, because the kingdom is delivered up to the Father, the injury to the Father is greater, if He is ever without a kingdom. Add to this that we pray daily that the kingdom of the Father may come (Matt. 6:10); and we hope for the Son's also (2 Pet. 1:11). The governance of the present time is therefore void, with both ceasing; and it is all over with the world and the whole substance of the world, if for even one moment the empire of the divinity ceases.

But if, as reason itself proclaims, this variety of the kingdom can in no way cease on the part of the Founder of the law, it is to the man assumed by God and to his just affairs that the things arranged are allotted—not to God, not to the everlasting Ruler—especially since in the Gospel it is thus said: The Lord God shall give Him the throne of David His father, and He shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there shall be no end (Luke 1:32). Solomon in Wisdom likewise says, when he speaks of His servants: And though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality; and being troubled in few things, they shall be well rewarded in many; for God tried them, and found them worthy of Himself.

As gold in the furnace He proved them, and as whole burnt offerings He accepted them, and in their time there shall be regard for them. They shall judge nations, and have dominion over peoples, and their Lord shall reign forever (Wisd. 3:4 and following). What is this? If He reigns forever, Paul erred; if He is to deliver up the kingdom, these men lie. God forbid. There is here no error, no diversity. For Paul spoke of the temporal kingdom of the assumed manhood, in which He is to come and to judge the living and the dead (2 Tim.

4:1), as the whole reading testifies, which proclaims that Christ must reign with His saints until, all principality and power and might and dominion being emptied out, all His enemies be put under His feet, and the enemy, death, be destroyed (1 Cor. 15:24 and following). But those men referred this to the principal power, abiding in whose perpetuity forever the Son neither at any time received the kingdom from the Father nor laid it down; for He always reigned together with Him, according to John, as He Himself says: My kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). But Paul expressed this more openly, saying: For this you ought to know, that no

fornicator, or unclean person, or covetous person, which is the serving of idols, has no inheritance in the kingdom of God and of Christ (Eph. 5:5), showing that the kingdom of the Father and of the Son is one. IV. Rightly therefore shall He deliver up the kingdom to the Father, who said in His admonitions that a kingdom divided cannot stand (Luke 11:17,18). Hence it is not so to be understood, brethren, that the Father is to receive what He did not have, or that the Son by delivering up what He has is to lose it; since both the Father has what He is to receive, and the Son lacks not what He is to give. The whole the Father possesses, the whole the Son possesses; that which belongs to both is of one, that which one possesses is of each, as the Lord Himself says: All things whatsoever the Father has are Mine (John 16:15);

and again: Father, all My things are Yours, and all Yours are Mine (John 17:10); because the Father is in the Son, and the Son abides in the Father, to whom He is subject by affection, not by condition, by charity, not by necessity, by comeliness—through whom the Father is ever honored. In fine He says: I and the Father are one (John 10:30). Hence by no diminutive but, as I said, by a religious subjection is the Son subject to the Father; with whom there is one possession of the original and perpetual kingdom, one substance of co-eternity and omnipotence, one equality, one power of august majesty, one dignity retained in the single light; for if you take anything away from the Son, it will pertain to the injury of the Father, whose whole the Son has;

nor is there in Him anything that is inferior, because, like the Father, He can neither have more nor less; for the one is poured into the fullness of the other, that God may be all in all—the blessed Father in the Son, the Son in the Father, with the Holy Spirit. Amen. THE SEVENTH TRACTATE. On the Nativity of the Lord. I. 1. Although there are several sects which strive to fabricate an injury against Christ, yet there are in a certain way three principal ones; of which Him, whom they desire to be corrupted, they feign that they are worshippers. One, in fine, asserts that Jesus Christ took His beginning from the womb of the Virgin Mary, and was thereafter made God on account of His justice, not born.

Another, more modestly but more bitingly harmful, says indeed that the Son of God is God, but not begotten from the Father by the perpetuity of His nobility; and that there was a time when He was not. The third is Judea, truly blind, which, though in its law (as it is wont to say) it reads everywhere that two persons of the Father and the Son are designated, yet even now contends that God does not have a Son. Against all of whom the examples, or the reasoning, which we are about to pursue, will sever at one stroke all the sinews of their whole argumentation. Wherefore the Christian people must of necessity know that there are two nativities of our Lord Jesus Christ, lest it suffer any error: one by which He was born, the other by which He was reborn.

But just as the first is spiritual without a mother, so the second is carnal without a father. The latter is to be wondered at, the former is unspeakable, as the prophet says: His generation who shall declare (Isa. 53:8)? But why it is unspeakable, let us learn from the Father speaking. The Lord Himself teaches us: My heart has belched forth a good Word, etc. (Ps. 45:1). And in Solomon, thus saying: I came forth from the mouth of the Most High before every creature (Sir. 24:5). II. Since these things are so, O craftiness of humanity, acknowledge it even though late, and put upon your intemperate tongue the reins of silence.

It is a kind of madness to wish to form an opinion of the secret of the invisible and incomprehensible One, and to scrutinize the inner things of Him whose outer things one cannot even guess: because God is this, that He is (Exod. 3:14); but what man supposes should be defined, that He is not. For hear also, brethren, what John the Apostle proclaims in the Gospel: In the beginning, he says, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; this was in the beginning with God (John 1:1). Admirable grace, most beloved brethren, of conspicuous truth, which, while it can be distinguished, yet cannot be external to itself. For if the Word is in God, and God is the Word, and this is that in which He is, what He is who is within;

there is a twofold person, a twofold name, but of the original perpetuity and deity there is one substance, the Lord Himself saying: I and the Father are one (John 10:30): which He surely did not say so as to confound the two by reducing them into one, but to teach us that there is one omnipotence of the divinity and power of the two. He continues, and says: All things were made through Him, and without Him was made nothing (John 1:3). III. Let us now see, O best Christian, how you would cram time in between the Father and the Son: for if it is to time, not to each other, that they owe their being one obnoxious to the other, then beyond doubt, as you will have it, nature is greater than God. But since Christ made nature out of nothing;

But if time were derived from nature, it would be foolish enough to set the work before its own craftsman; and by this alone they differ, that they know only themselves. In short, in Isaiah He speaks thus to the Son: 'The Lord God of hosts: Egypt is wearied, and the merchandise of the Ethiopians: from Saba men of stature shall come over to thee, and shall be thine; they shall follow thee bound in fetters, and they shall worship thee, and shall make supplication to thee, because God is in thee, and there is no other God beside thee' (Isaiah 45:14). And Jeremiah likewise speaks in the same Spirit, saying: 'This is our God, and there shall be no other God accounted of beside Him: He found out all the way of knowledge, and revealed it to Jacob His servant, and to Israel His beloved.'

'After this He was seen upon the earth, and conversed with men' (Baruch 3:36-38). In what form, let us learn from the Holy Spirit's word: 'He is also man,' it says, 'and who shall know Him?' (Jeremiah 17:9, after the Septuagint). If this be so, then how He could be recognized, Isaiah disclosed in these words: 'Hear therefore, O house of David: It is no small contest for you with men, since God affords the struggle. Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bear a son, and His name shall be called Emmanuel. Butter and honey shall He eat, before the child knows good or evil.' Which sign, by the designation of His forerunner also, He made clear in another place in these words:

'Behold, I send My Angel before Thy face, who shall prepare Thy way.' Who is this Angel, brethren, but John the Baptist? whose preparation is: 'The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God.' IV. Now let us see what follows. At the same time two kinswomen conceive, the one against hope, the other by a word. The one marvels that she has what she knew not of; the other rejoices, because she has learned. Elizabeth, barren, swells happily with fruitfulness in her womb; Mary, with majesty. The one carries a herald, the other a Judge. Exult, O women, and acknowledge the advancement of your sex. The old guilt being blotted out, behold, through you we are joined to heaven: for an old woman has borne an angel, and a virgin has borne God.

This is our God, who, while His dignity was for a time laid aside, yet not His power, out of love for man whose form He was about to assume, and for the creature, so that He might be called angel, man, child, bridegroom, giant, crucified, buried, the firstborn from the dead. This, I say, is He who is all things in all: for through Him and in Him are all things. Nor let it move you, brethren, the worldly and truly childish disputing of inconsiderate men, who therefore suffer a just error, because they do not consider Christ to have been made man out of God, but out of man. But if they had spiritual understanding, in that very thing which they deem most feeble, this above all would they proclaim.

For truly He would not be perfect God, if there were anything which, willing to be, He could not be. In short, would you know the truth in brief? He became what He was not, yet did not cease to be what He was before. TRACTATE VIII. On the Nativity of the Lord, II. I. The true knowledge of His unsearchable secret and venerable majesty is this: to know God to be nothing but God; and that nothing more is to be required of Him than that one should know His will, without which one can neither lawfully serve Him nor please Him. But to wish to opine by vain arguments concerning the providing God's arrangement is not the mark of a worshipper, but of a madman: especially if God, as the contentious suppose, be subject to disposition;

for if for a little while the names of Father and Son be set aside, you cannot know which of them suffers injury; except that both suffer it, because the one name of both is God. Therefore learn, O Christian, untaught or careless, that there are two nativities of our Lord Jesus Christ, lest you be deceived by any error. The one, which you are not permitted to inquire into; the other, which you are lawfully permitted to be taught, if you can. The first nativity of our Lord therefore remains in the knowledge of the Father and the Son alone, and has nothing interposed, nor any witness, since it proceeded from the affection of the Father's mouth by one consent. But the second, the carnal, even as it was foretold by frequent oracles, so we find it to have been fulfilled. II.

For God the Son of God, at the appointed time, His majesty being for a while dissembled, setting out from His ethereal seat, pitches His camp for Himself in the temple of the predestined virgin, into whom He is secretly infused, about to be born into man; and there, while that which He was remained safe, He purposes to be what He was not. Mingled thus with human flesh, He fashions Himself an infant. Mary's womb swells proudly, not by a conjugal gift, but by faith; by the Word, not by seed. She knows none of the discomforts of the ten months, inasmuch as she conceived within herself the Creator of the world: she gives birth not with pain, but with joy. A wondrous thing: rejoicing, she brings forth an infant older than the whole antiquity of nature. Meanwhile the inexperienced mother groans not in her childbearing.

The infant, coming forth, did not enter the world poured out as is customary, of its own accord opening the way of the crawling life with the foretokens of tears. His mother did not lie pale, exhausted by the weight of so great a birth, dissolved in all her inward parts. The Son was not smeared with any defilement of His mother or of His own; for indeed He could have nothing unclean about Himself, who had come to cleanse the sins, defilements and stains of the human race. Finally, the purgings which are perilous by their slowness, no harms of the maternal parts attended the child. No fomentations were applied to the inexperienced mother after the wonted manner; nor indeed, brethren, could she have need of these, who had merited to receive into her womb the Son, the Saviour of all souls. O great Mystery!

Mary, an inviolate virgin, conceived; after conceiving, a virgin she gave birth; after the birth, a virgin she remained. The hand of the unbelieving midwife, who put to the test her that had given birth, was found, as a testimony to that virginity, to be burned; and when with that hand she touched the infant, at once that devouring flame was quenched; and thus that physician, happily inquisitive, then marvelling at the virgin woman, marvelling at the infant God, exulting with immense joy, she who had come to be cured departed cured. Thus Christ caused Himself to be born into man, in a manner in which a man cannot be born. In short, His whole body, resplendent with its own light, He bore without a shadow: lowly in flesh, but exalted in the majesty of His omnipotence.

He indeed for this reason deigned to put on flesh, that no one might be able, through the flesh, to excuse himself when the day of judgment shall come. TRACTATE IX. On the Nativity of the Lord, and His Majesty. I. According as God had promised through the prophets that He would send His Son the Saviour to the human race at an opportune and ripe time, His divinity's dignity being for a while laid down, yet not His power, having come forth from heaven into the foretold sanctuary of the virginal temple, the chaste Guest glides in; and there He disposes of what manner He wills to be. Nay rather, what He had long since arranged to be fulfilled, He secretly assumes;

for He rests willingly in the most flourishing dwelling of chastity, and within the inward parts of the sacred virgin He prepares for Himself a body, about to be born by His own decision. Fitted into man, God is enclosed in the covering of flesh; and He borrows human life from time, who bestows eternity upon the ages. A wondrous thing: Mary conceives of Him whom she bears; the womb swells by majesty, not by seed, and the virgin contains Him whom the world and the fulness of the world cannot contain. Meanwhile the members advance their own Maker, and the work clothes with its own figure the Craftsman. Mary gives birth not with pain, but with joy:

the Son is born without a father, not wholly His mother's, owing to Himself that He was conceived, granting to His mother that He was born; she who is above all amazed that such a Son had come to her, who would not be believed born of her, were it not that, just as she was an inviolate virgin after the conceiving, she remains such also after the birth. II. O new manner of being! Constrained by love of His own image into an infant, God wails; and He suffers Himself to be bound in swaddling-clothes, who had come to loose the debts of the whole world. He is laid in the manger of a stable, attesting that He is Himself the shepherd and the pasture of the peoples. He submits Himself to the degrees of age, whose eternity admits no age in itself.

All this, contrary to His own consciousness, He suffers as a weak man, that to man, consumed by the law of death, immortality might be granted. For this is the power of God, that, while remaining what He is, He can be what He is not. This is our God, the co-eternal Son of the eternal God. This One is both man and God, since He stood as mediator between the Father and men, proving by His infirmities His flesh, and by His powers His majesty. This is our Sun, the true Sun, who from the fulness of His brightness kindled the brightest fires of the world, the kindred of the stars and of the gleaming poles. This is He who once set, and rose again, never to repeat His setting.

This One, I say, whom a crown of twelve rays, that is, of the twelve Apostles, encircles; whom, throughout the compass of the whole world, not the dumb four living creatures, but the four Gospels carry round with their salvation-bringing proclamations. What might His mantle and chariot possess, the prophet attests in these words: 'God shall come as fire, and as a tempest His chariot, to render vengeance in wrath.' TRACTATE X. On Abraham, I. I. Abraham, dearly beloved brethren, what a gift of divine goodness he received, the deeds of the old Law attest. Sara his wife, in no way inferior, when the courses of her long life had been passed through, perceived by the outpouring of birth what manner of son she should bring forth.

But because age had taken away from both of them the hope of offspring, they merited a substitute pledge. Thus faith merited what time had taken away: belief wrested forth what nature had denied. Abraham our Patriarch, tested by God, in his old age received an only son, yet one that caused the father no anxiety; whose age, with the years inclining toward the term of their setting, and the time for rearing being short, and the end of old age now near. Behold the first devotion: gladly to receive what is given late, and in the most sorrowful old age to rejoice in the burden of solicitude undertaken; for Sara too laughed, undergoing the gift of youth in old age; whence the infant received his name, who thereafter approves Abraham's mind as consecrated to God. II.

That only son of the anxious old man, still a little child, to whom greater tenderness and pity is owed, is demanded for a victim; for whom, if through human frailty some infirmity were to arise in his body, or a human death befell, the father could scarcely have gone on living amid his calamities, were he to die in his tender years. This infant therefore, on whose life the father's affection and the mother's hung, is demanded for a victim by a divine voice for the proving of his faith. 'I wish,' said God, 'a sacrifice to be made to Me, Abraham, by your hands upon the mountain, of your son: this victim pleases Me, with this blood you shall appease Me, this one is owed to My sacred rites: this one I now bid to be immolated.'

The most devout Abraham does not sadden his brow, nor does grief persuade tears from the father, but he exults and rejoices. Nor did he fear lest the murder of his child be imputed to him, but rather that he might obey his devotion: he was glad that God had commanded this. From his son he prepares a victim: in short, he hastens to fulfil the sacrifice, lest delay should commit a sin. The things necessary for the sacred rites are prepared forthwith; he ascends the mountain. Every mystery and sacrifice being arranged, the son is led up rejoicing, while the father rejoices, to be smitten by the father's right hand. He, before he came to the heap of wood, when he asked of his father where was the victim that he should arrange and immolate; the father, secure as to the faith of his own line, made plain to his son, of whom he did not doubt, that the Lord had asked

and what he himself had promised to the Lord, he showed. The boy was glad of his faithful father, himself yet more faithful; nor did he refuse the death which God, who had given life, commanded. The father rejoices, the son too rejoicing, and with joy he binds the hands of his only pledge, which the boy more gladly offers to be bound. He binds his feet also, lest in the going-out of death the agitated victim should kick: for the best father, secure, feared lest aught be permitted to grief in that death. III. O brethren, secure devotion! O father, grasping at the spirit, but despising the body and death! O he who so remembered himself to be the Lord's servant, that he forgot he was a father! What is this, father? Behold, beneath your eyes lies your son, fast bound with fetters.

Where are the tears? where is the grief that is wont to dwell in human feelings? Amid such calamities of his son he is glad and rejoices; and he triumphs that he has deserved the Lord. He has already received the rewards which he merits; for the trials of the divine testing are extended to him. He draws indeed the steel, and with armed right hand raises his hand: but the voice of Him who had demanded the victim forbids it. 'Look back,' said God, 'and before you look, spare.' Behold, his chief merit also was to have deserved divine indulgence amid calamities: for Abraham, looking back, found the victim which the innocent man should immolate. With that steel he slew the ram, with which he was now preparing to strike his son. From his son to the lamb he transferred his right hand, ever glad and rejoicing.

Nor was his countenance changed, when the victim was changed. With as great gladness he offered the ram, as that with which he had offered his son also: for where faith was, there was no grief. In that sacrifice God alone grieved, because He provided another victim: for Abraham with his son was so proved by God, that, not making request, he might obtain mercy. IV. Let us see, dearly beloved brethren, the secrets of the Law; and let us bring forth its meaning more deeply. Abraham was not under the Law, but he alone fulfilled the Law; and he who was held by no enactment of the Law, observed all divine right above all: in whose immolation that one too might rejoice, who was being prepared for the victim. The ram clung in a thornbush, entangled in thorns, bound by the head.