On the Trinity, Book 10

It is plain that nothing people have ever said is safe from opposition. Where the will disagrees, the mind disagrees too: swayed by an opposing judgment, it goes into battle and denies the claims it objects to. Even if every word we say is beyond dispute when measured by the standard of truth, still, as long as people think or feel differently, the truth is always exposed to the quibbles of opponents, because, deluded by error or prejudice, they attack the truth they misunderstand or dislike. For once decisions are formed, they cling with excessive stubbornness, and the passion of controversy cannot be turned from the course it has taken when the will is not subject to reason. Inquiry into the truth gives way to a search for proofs of what we want to believe; desire overrules truth. Then the theories we invent are built on names rather than things: the logic of truth gives way to the logic of prejudice, a logic that the will adjusts to defend its ideas, not one that moves the will through the reason's understanding of the truth. All controversies between opposing theories arise from these defects of a partisan spirit. Then comes a stubborn battle between truth asserting itself and prejudice defending itself: truth holds its ground and prejudice resists. But if desire had not gotten ahead of reason, if understanding the truth had moved us to desire what was true, then instead of trying to set up our desires as doctrines, we would let our doctrines dictate our desires; there would be no contradiction of the truth, for everyone would begin by desiring what was true, not by defending the truth of what he desired.

Well aware of this sin of willfulness, the Apostle, writing to Timothy, after many instructions to bear witness to the faith and to preach the word, adds, For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but having itching ears they will heap up teachers for themselves to suit their own lusts, and will turn their ears away from the truth, and turn aside to fables. For when their unholy zeal drives them beyond enduring sound doctrine, they will heap up teachers for their lusts, that is, construct systems of doctrine to suit their own desires, not wanting to be taught, but gathering teachers who will tell them what they want to hear, so that the crowd of teachers they have ferreted out and gathered together may satisfy them with the doctrines of their own turbulent desires. And if these madmen in their godless folly do not know in what spirit they reject the sound doctrine and long for the corrupt one, let them hear the words of the same Apostle to the same Timothy: But the Spirit says expressly that in the last days some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils through the hypocrisy of lying talk. What progress in doctrine is there in finding out what one imagines, rather than what one ought to learn? Or what piety in doctrine is there in not desiring what one ought to learn, but heaping up doctrine to suit our desires? But this is what the promptings of seducing spirits provide. They confirm the falsehoods of pretended godliness, for a canting hypocrisy always follows defection from the faith, so that the reverence the conscience has lost is kept, at least in words. Even that pretended piety they make impious with every kind of lie, violating the sacredness of the faith with schemes of false doctrine: for they pile up doctrines to suit their desires, and not according to the faith of the Gospel. They take an uncontrollable delight in having their itching ears tickled by the novelty of their favorite preaching; they cut themselves off completely from hearing the truth and surrender themselves entirely to fables, so that their inability either to speak or to understand the truth gives their talk what seems to them an appearance of truth.

We have clearly fallen on the evil times the Apostle prophesied; for nowadays people seek out teachers who preach not God but a creature. And people are more zealous for what they themselves desire than for what the sound faith teaches. Their itching ears have stirred them so far toward listening to what they desire that, for the moment, the only preaching that rules among their crowd of doctors is the one that estranges the Only-begotten God from the power and nature of God the Father, and makes Him, in our faith, either a God of the second rank or not God at all; either way it is a damning profession of impiety, whether one professes two Gods by making different grades of divinity, or else denies divinity altogether to Him Who drew His nature from God by birth. Such doctrines please those whose ears are estranged from hearing the truth and turned to fables, while the hearing of this sound faith of ours is not endured, and is driven bodily into exile along with its preachers.

But though many may heap up teachers to suit their desires and banish sound doctrine, the preaching of truth can never be exiled from the company of the Saints. From our exile we will speak through these writings of ours, and the Word of God, which cannot be bound, will run unhindered, warning us of this time that the Apostle prophesied. For when people show themselves impatient of the true message, and heap up teachers according to their own human desires, we can no longer have any doubt about the times, but know that when the preachers of sound doctrine are banished, truth is banished too. We do not complain about the times; rather, we rejoice that iniquity has revealed itself in this exile of ours, when, unable to endure the truth, it banishes the preachers of sound doctrine so that it may heap up for itself teachers to suit its own desires. We glory in our exile, and rejoice in the Lord that the Apostle's prophecy is being fulfilled in our person.

In the earlier books, then, while holding to the profession of a faith that is, I trust, sincere, and a truth that is uncorrupted, we arranged the method of our answer throughout so that (though our limitations are such that human language can never be safe from objection) no one could contradict us without openly professing godlessness. For we have so completely demonstrated the true meaning of the texts they slyly steal from the Gospels and appropriate for their own teaching that anyone who denies it cannot escape by pleading ignorance, but is condemned of godlessness out of his own mouth. Further, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, we have proceeded so cautiously throughout our proof of the faith that no charge could possibly be trumped up against us. For it is their habit to fill the ears of the unwary with claims that we deny the birth of Christ, when we preach the unity of the Godhead; and they say that by the text, I and the Father are one, we confess that God is solitary. So, according to them, we say that the Unbegotten God descended into the Virgin and was born a man, and that He refers the opening word 'I' to the dispensation of His flesh, but adds to it the proof of His divinity, And the Father, as being the Father of Himself as man; and further, that, consisting of two Persons, human and divine, He said of Himself, We are one.

But we have always maintained the birth that exists outside of time; we have taught that God the Son is God of the same nature as God the Father, not co-equal with the Unbegotten, for He was not Himself Unbegotten, but, as the Only-begotten, not unequal because begotten; that the Two are One, not by giving a double name to one Person, but by a true begetting and being begotten; that our faith holds neither two Gods, different in kind, nor a solitary God because He is one, in the sense in which we confess the mystery of the Only-begotten God; but that the Son is both implied in the Father's name and exists in the Father, Whose name and Whose nature are in Him, while the Father by His name implies the Son and dwells in Him, since a son cannot be spoken of, or exist, except as born of a father. Further, we say that He is the living copy of the living nature, the impression of the divine seal upon the divine nature, so indistinguishable from God in power and kind that neither His works nor His words nor His form are other than the Father's; but that, since the image by nature possesses the nature of its author, the Author too has worked and spoken and appeared through His natural image.

But alongside this timeless and ineffable generation of the Only-begotten, which surpasses the perception of human understanding, we also taught the mystery of God born to be man from the womb of the Virgin, showing how, according to the plan of the Incarnation, when He emptied Himself of the form of God and took the form of a servant, the weakness of the assumed humanity did not weaken the divine nature, but Divine power was imparted to humanity without the might of divinity being lost in the human form. For when God was born to be man, the purpose was not that the Godhead should be lost, but that, with the Godhead remaining, man should be born to be God. So His name is Emmanuel, which is God with us, so that God might not be lowered to the level of man, but man raised to the level of God. Nor, when He asks to be glorified, is it in any way a glorifying of His divine nature, but of the lower nature He assumed: for He asks for the glory He had with God before the world was made.

Since we are answering all their statements, even the most senseless, we come now to the discussion of the unknown hour. Now, even if, as they say, the Son had not known it, this could give no ground for attacking His Godhead as the Only-begotten. It was not in the nature of things that His birth could push His beginning back until it equaled the existence that is unbegotten and had no beginning; and the Father reserves the fixing of this still undetermined day as His prerogative, to demonstrate His authority as the Unbegotten. Nor may we conclude that in His Person there is any defect in the nature that contained, by right of birth, all the fullness of the nature that a perfect birth could impart. Nor, again, could ignorance of the day and hour be attributed in the Only-begotten God to a lower degree of Divinity. It is to show, against the Sabellian heretics, that the Father's authority is without birth or beginning that this prerogative of unbegotten authority is not granted to the Son. But if, as we have maintained, when He said that He did not know the day, He kept silent not out of ignorance but in accordance with the Divine Plan, then every occasion for irreverent claims must be removed and the blasphemous teachings of heresy thwarted, so that the truth of the Gospel may be made clear by the very words that seem to obscure it.

So most of them will not allow Him to have the impassible nature of God, because He feared His Passion and showed Himself weak by submitting to suffering. They claim that He Who feared and felt pain could not enjoy the confidence of power that rises above fear, or the incorruption of spirit that is not conscious of suffering; but that, being of a nature lower than God the Father, He trembled with fear at human suffering and groaned under the violence of bodily pain. These impious claims rest on the words, My soul is sorrowful even to death, and Father if it is possible let this cup pass away from Me, and also, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? And to these they also add, Father into Your hands I commend My Spirit. All these words of our holy faith they appropriate for the use of their unholy blasphemy: that He Who was sorrowful, and even prayed that the cup might be taken away from Him, felt fear; that He felt pain, because He complained that God had deserted Him in His suffering; that He was weak, because He commended His Spirit to the Father. His doubts and anxieties, they say, prevent us from assigning Him the likeness to God that would belong to a nature equal to God as His Only-begotten by birth. He proclaims His own weakness and inferiority by praying for the cup to be removed, by complaining of desertion, and by commending His Spirit.

Now first of all, before we show from these very texts that He was subject to no weakness of fear or sorrow on His own account, let us ask: What can we find for Him to fear, such that the dread of unendurable pain should have seized Him? The objects of His fear that they allege are, I suppose, suffering and death. Now I ask those who hold this opinion: Can we reasonably suppose that He feared death, when He drove away the terrors of death from His Apostles, urging them on to the glory of martyrdom with the words, He who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me; and, He who finds his life shall lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake shall find it? If to die for Him is life, what pain can we think He, Who rewards with life those who die for Him, had to suffer in the mystery of death? Could death make Him fear what could be done to the body, when He urged the disciples, Do not fear those who kill the body?

Further, what terror could the pain of death hold for Him, for Whom death was an act of His own free will? In the human race, death is brought on either by an external enemy attacking the body, such as fever, wound, accident or fall, or else our bodily nature is overcome by age and yields to death. But the Only-begotten God, Who had the power to lay down His life and to take it up again, after the drink of vinegar, having borne witness that His work of human suffering was finished, bowed His head and gave up His Spirit in order to accomplish in Himself the mystery of death. If our mortal nature has been granted the power to breathe its last of its own will and to seek rest in death; if the battered soul may depart without the body being broken up, and the spirit burst out and flee away without being, as it were, violated in its own home by the breaking and piercing and crushing of limbs; then fear of death might seize the Lord of life, that is, if His death, when He gave up His Spirit and died, were not an exercise of His own free will. But if He died of His own will and gave back His Spirit through His own will, death held no terror for Him, because it was in His own power.

But perhaps, with the fearfulness of human ignorance, He feared the very power of death that He possessed; so that, though He died of His own accord, He was afraid because He was going to die. If anyone thinks so, let them ask: To which was death terrible, to His Spirit or to His body? If to His body, do they not know that the Holy One was not to see corruption, and that within three days He was to raise up again the temple of His body? But if death was terrible to His Spirit, would Christ fear the abyss of hell while Lazarus was rejoicing in Abraham's bosom? It is foolish and absurd to think that He should fear death, Who could lay down His soul and take it up again, and Who was about to die of His own free will to fulfill the mystery of human life. He Whose power and purpose in dying is to die only for a moment cannot fear death: fear is incompatible with willingness to die and with the power to live again, for both of these rob death of his terrors.

But was it perhaps the physical pain of hanging on the cross, or the rough cords that bound Him, or the cruel wounds where the nails were driven in, that dismayed Him? Let us see what kind of body the Man Jesus had, such that pain could dwell in His crucified, bound, and pierced body.

Our bodies are by nature such that, when they are endowed with life and feeling by union with a sentient soul, they become something more than inert, insensate matter. They feel when touched, suffer when pricked, shiver with cold, feel pleasure in warmth, waste away with hunger, and grow fat with food. Through a certain infusion of the soul, which supports and penetrates them, they feel pleasure or pain according to the circumstances around them. When the body is pricked or pierced, it is the soul pervading it that is aware and suffers pain. For instance, a flesh wound is felt even to the bone, while the fingers feel nothing when we cut the nails that grow out beyond the flesh. And if a limb withers through some disease, it loses the feeling of living flesh: it can be cut or burned and feel no pain at all, because the soul is no longer mingled with it. Also, when some grave necessity requires part of the body to be cut away, the soul can be lulled to sleep by drugs, which overcome the pain and produce in the mind a deathlike forgetfulness of its power of sensation. Then limbs can be cut off without pain: the flesh is dead to all feeling and does not notice the deep thrust of the knife, because the soul within it is asleep. It is, therefore, because the body lives by being mixed with a weak soul that it is subject to the weakness of pain.

If the Man Jesus Christ began His bodily life with the same beginning as our body and soul, if He was not, as God, the immediate Author of both His own body and His own soul when He was fashioned in the likeness and form of man and born as man, then we may suppose that He felt the pain of our body, since by His beginning, a conception like ours, He had a body animated by a soul like our own. But if by His own act He took flesh to Himself from the Virgin, and likewise by His own act joined a soul to the body so conceived, then the nature of His suffering must have corresponded to the nature of His body and soul. For when He emptied Himself of the form of God and received the form of a servant, when the Son of God was born also Son of Man, without losing His own self and power, God the Word formed the perfect living Man. For how was the Son of God born Son of Man, how did He receive the form of a servant while still remaining in the form of God, unless (God the Word being able of Himself to take flesh from the Virgin and to give that flesh a soul, for the redemption of our soul and body) the Man Christ Jesus was born perfect, and made in the form of a servant by assuming the body that the Virgin conceived? For the Virgin conceived what she conceived from the Holy Spirit alone, and though for His birth in the flesh she supplied from herself the element that women always contribute to the seed planted in them, still Jesus Christ was not formed by an ordinary human conception. In His birth, whose cause was transmitted solely by the Holy Spirit, His mother played the same part as in all human conceptions; but by virtue of His origin He never ceased to be God.

The Lord Himself reveals this deep and beautiful mystery of His taking on manhood in the words, No one has ascended into heaven except He who descended from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven. 'Descended from heaven' refers to His origin from the Spirit: for though Mary contributed to His growth in the womb and to His birth all that is natural to her sex, His body did not owe its origin to her. The 'Son of Man' refers to the birth of the flesh conceived in the Virgin; 'Who is in heaven' implies the power of His eternal nature, an infinite nature that could not confine itself to the limits of the body of which it was itself the source and foundation. By the might of the Spirit and the power of God the Word, though He remained in the form of a servant, He was always present as Lord of all, within and beyond the circle of heaven and earth. So He descended from heaven and is the Son of Man, yet He is in heaven: for the Word made flesh did not cease to be the Word. As the Word, He is in heaven; as flesh, He is the Son of Man. As the Word made flesh, He is at once from heaven, and Son of Man, and in heaven, for the power of the Word, remaining eternally without a body, was still present in the heaven He had left: the flesh owed its origin to Him and to no one else. So the Word made flesh, though He was flesh, never ceased to be the Word.

The blessed Apostle also perfectly describes this mystery of the ineffable birth of Christ's body in the words, The first man was from the soil of the ground, the second man from heaven. By calling Him 'Man' he expresses His birth from the Virgin, who, in carrying out her role as mother, performed the duties of her sex in the conception and birth of a man. And when he says, The second man from heaven, he testifies to His origin from the Holy Spirit, Who came upon the Virgin. Since He is, then, man and from heaven, this Man was born of the Virgin and conceived of the Holy Spirit. That is what the Apostle says.

Again, the Lord Himself, revealing this mystery of His birth, speaks this way: I am the living bread Who descended from Heaven: if anyone eats of My bread he shall live forever: calling Himself the Bread because He is the origin of His own body. Further, so that no one may think the Word left His own power and nature for the flesh, He says again that it is His bread; since He is the bread that descends from heaven, His body cannot be regarded as sprung from human conception, because it is shown to be from heaven. And what He says about His bread asserts that the Word took a body, for He adds, Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. So, since the Being Who is Son of Man also descended as bread from heaven, the 'Bread descending from heaven' and the 'Flesh and Blood of the Son of Man' must be understood as His assumption of the flesh, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin.

Being Man, then, with this body, Jesus Christ is both the Son of God and Son of Man, Who emptied Himself of the form of God and received the form of a servant. There is not one Son of Man and another Son of God, nor one in the form of God and another born perfect man in the form of a servant; so that, just as man is born with body and soul by the nature that God, the Author of our being, determined for us, so Jesus Christ, by His own power, is God and Man with flesh and soul, possessing in Himself whole and perfect manhood and whole and perfect Godhead.

Yet many, with the craft they use to try to prove their heresy, habitually deceive the ears of the unlearned with the error that, since both the body and the soul of Adam sinned, the Lord must have taken the soul and body of Adam from the Virgin, and that it was not the whole Man that she conceived from the Holy Spirit. If they had understood the mystery of the Incarnation, these men would at the same time have understood the mystery that the Son of Man is also Son of God. As if, in receiving so much from the Virgin, He received His soul from her too; whereas, though flesh is always born of flesh, every soul is the direct work of God.

In order to deprive the Only-begotten God, Who was God the Word with God in the beginning, of substantive divinity, they make Him merely the utterance of God's voice. The Son, they say, is related to God His Father as words are to the speaker. They are trying to slip into the position that it was not God the eternal Word, remaining in the form of God, Who was born as Christ the Man, Whose life therefore springs from a human origin and not from the mystery of a spiritual conception; that He was not God the Word making Himself man by birth from the Virgin, but the Word of God dwelling in Jesus as the spirit of prophecy dwelt in the prophets. They accuse us of saying that Christ was born a man with a body and soul different from ours. But we preach the Word made flesh, Christ emptying Himself of the form of God and taking the form of a servant, perfect according to the pattern of human form, born a man in our likeness: that, being true Son of God, He is indeed true Son of Man, no less Man because born of God, and no less God because Man born of God.

But just as He assumed a body from the Virgin by His own act, so He assumed a soul from Himself; though even in ordinary human birth the soul is never derived from the parents. If, then, the Virgin received from God alone the flesh she conceived, it is far more certain that the soul of that body can have come from God alone. If, too, the Son of Man is the same Christ Who is also the Son of God (for the whole Son of Man is the whole Son of God), how ridiculous it is to preach, besides the Son of God, the Word made flesh, some other I do not know who, inspired like a prophet by God the Word; whereas our Lord Jesus Christ is both Son of Man and Son of God. Yet because His soul was sorrowful to death, and because He had the power to lay down His soul and the power to take it up again, they want to derive it from some alien source, and not from the Holy Spirit, the Author of His body's conception: for God the Word became man without departing from the mystery of His own nature. He was born, too, not so as to be two separate beings at once, but so that it might be made plain that He Who was God before He was Man, now that He has taken humanity, is God and Man. How could Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have been born of Mary, except by the Word becoming flesh, that is, by the Son of God, though in the form of God, taking the form of a slave? When He Who was in the form of God took the form of a slave, two opposites were brought together. So it was just as true that He received the form of a slave as that He remained in the form of God. Using the one word 'form' to describe both natures compels us to recognize that He truly possessed both. He Who is in the form of a servant is also in the form of God. And though He is the latter by His eternal nature and the former in accordance with the divine Plan of Grace, the word has its true meaning equally in both cases, because He is both: as truly in the form of God as in the form of Man. Just as taking the form of a servant is nothing other than being born a man, so being in the form of God is nothing other than being God; and we confess Him as one and the same Person, not by loss of the Godhead but by assumption of the manhood: in the form of God through His divine nature, in the form of man from His conception by the Holy Spirit, being found in appearance as a man. That is why, after His birth as Jesus Christ, His suffering, death, and burial, He also rose again. We cannot separate Him from Himself in all these various mysteries, so that He would no longer be Christ; for Christ, Who took the form of a servant, was none other than He Who was in the form of God: He Who died was the same as He Who was born; He Who rose again the same as He Who died; He Who is in heaven the same as He Who rose again; and lastly, He Who is in heaven the same as He Who earlier descended from heaven.

So the Man Jesus Christ, Only-begotten God, at once Son of Man and Son of God, as flesh and as Word, took true humanity in the likeness of our humanity without ceasing to be Himself, that is, God. But when, in this humanity, He was struck with blows or with wounds, or bound with ropes, or lifted on high, He felt the force of suffering, but not its pain. In the same way, a dart passing through water, or piercing a flame, or wounding the air, does everything its nature is to do: it passes through, it pierces, it wounds; but none of this has any effect on the thing it strikes, since it is against the order of nature to make a hole in water, or pierce flame, or wound the air, even though it is the nature of a dart to make holes, to pierce and to wound. So our Lord Jesus Christ suffered blows, hanging, crucifixion and death: but the suffering that attacked the Lord's body, without ceasing to be suffering, did not have the natural effect of suffering. It carried out its work of punishment with all its violence; but the body of Christ, by its power, underwent the violence of the punishment without being conscious of it. It is true that the Lord's body would have been capable of feeling pain as our natures do, if our bodies had the power to tread on the waters and walk over the waves without weighing them down with our tread or forcing them apart by the pressure of our steps, if we could pass through solid substances, and barred doors were no obstacle to us. But since only the body of our Lord could be held up on the waters by the power of His soul, could walk on the waves, and pass through walls, how can we judge the flesh conceived of the Holy Spirit by analogy with a human body? That flesh, that is, that Bread, is from Heaven; that humanity is from God. He had a body to suffer, and He suffered: but He did not have a nature that could feel pain. For His body had a unique nature of its own: it was transformed into heavenly glory on the Mount, it put fevers to flight by its touch, it gave new eyesight with its spittle.

Perhaps someone will say, 'We find Him giving way to weeping, to hunger and thirst: must we not suppose that He was subject to all the other passions of human nature?' But if we do not understand the mystery of His tears, hunger, and thirst, let us remember that He Who wept also raised the dead to life: that He did not weep for the death of Lazarus, but rejoiced; that He Who thirsted gave rivers of living water from Himself. He could not be parched with thirst if He was able to give the thirsty a drink. Again, He Who hungered could condemn the tree that offered no fruit for His hunger: but how could hunger overcome His nature if He could strike the green tree barren by His word? And if, besides the mystery of weeping, hunger and thirst, the flesh He assumed, that is, His entire humanity, was exposed to our weaknesses, even then it was not left to suffer their indignities. His weeping was not for Himself; His thirst needed no water to quench it, and His hunger no food to satisfy it. It is never said that the Lord ate or drank or wept when He was hungry, or thirsty, or sorrowful. He conformed to the habits of the body to prove that His own body was real, and to satisfy the custom of human bodies by doing as our nature does. When He ate and drank, it was a concession not to His own needs, but to our habits.

For Christ did have a body, but a unique one, as suited His origin. He did not come into existence through the passions involved in human conception: He came into the form of our body by an act of His own power. He bore our collective humanity in the form of a servant, but He was free from the sins and imperfections of the human body, so that we might be in Him, because He was born of the Virgin, and yet our faults might not be in Him, because He is the source of His own humanity, born as man but not born under the defects of human conception. It is this mystery of His birth that the Apostle upholds and demonstrates when he says, He humbled Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of a man and being formed in fashion as a man: that is, in taking the form of a servant, He was born in the form of a man; in being made in the likeness of a man and formed in fashion as a man, the appearance and reality of His body testified to His humanity; yet, though He was formed in fashion as a man, He did not know what sin was. For His conception was in the likeness of our nature, not in the possession of our faults. For so that the words He took the form of a servant would not be understood as referring to a natural birth, the Apostle adds, made in the likeness of a man, and formed in fashion as a man. In this way the truth of His birth is kept from suggesting the defects that belong to our weak natures, since the form of a servant implies the reality of His birth, and found in fashion as a man implies the likeness of our nature. He was born man of Himself through the Virgin, and found in the likeness of our degenerate body of sin, as the Apostle testifies in his letter to the Romans: For what the law could not do, because it was weak through the flesh, God did: sending His Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin, He condemned sin on account of sin. He was not found in the fashion of a man, but found in fashion as a man; nor was His flesh the flesh of sin, but the likeness of the flesh of sin. So the fashion of flesh implies the truth of His birth, and the likeness of the flesh of sin removes Him from the imperfections of human weakness. So the Man Jesus Christ was truly born as man, and as Christ He had no sin in His nature: for on His human side He was born, and could not be anything but a man; on His divine side He could never cease to be Christ. Since, then, Jesus Christ was man, He submitted as man to a human birth; yet as Christ He was free from the weakness of our degenerate race.

The Apostles' belief prepares us to understand this mystery when it testifies that Jesus Christ was found in fashion as a man and was sent in the likeness of the flesh of sin. For in being fashioned as a man, He is in the form of a servant, but not in the imperfections of a servant's nature; and in being in the likeness of the flesh of sin, the Word is indeed flesh, but is in the likeness of the flesh of sin and not the flesh of sin itself. In the same way, Jesus Christ, being man, is indeed human, but even so cannot be anything other than Christ: born as man by the birth of His body, but not human in defects, as He was not human in origin. The Word made flesh could not help being the flesh that He was made; yet He always remained the Word, though He was made flesh. As the Word made flesh could not abandon the nature of His Source, so by virtue of the origin of His nature He could not help remaining the Word: but at the same time we must believe that the Word is the flesh that He was made, always with this reservation, however: that when He dwelt among us, the flesh was not the Word, but was the flesh of the Word dwelling in the flesh. Though we have proved this, we will still see whether, in the whole range of suffering He endured, we can detect anywhere in our Lord the weakness of bodily pain. For a time we will put off discussing the passages on the strength of which heresy has attributed fear to our Lord; now let us turn to the facts themselves, for His words cannot signify fear if His actions display confidence.

Do you suppose, heretic, that the Lord of glory was afraid to suffer? When Peter made this error through ignorance, did He not call him 'Satan' and a 'stumbling-block?' So Peter, who protested against the mystery of the Passion, was established in the faith by so sharp a rebuke from the lips of the gentle Christ, Whom not flesh and blood, but the Father in Heaven had revealed to him. What phantom hope are you chasing when you deny that Christ is God and attribute to Him a fear of suffering? Was He afraid, He Who went out to meet the armed bands of His captors? Was there weakness in His body, when at His approach the pursuers reeled and broke their ranks and fell flat on their faces, unable to endure His Majesty as He offered Himself to their chains? What weakness could enslave His body, when His nature had such power?

But perhaps He feared the pain of wounds. Tell me, then: what terror did the thrust of the nail hold for Him Who, merely by His touch, restored the ear that was cut off? You who assert the Lord's weakness, explain this work of power at the very moment when His flesh was weak and suffering. Peter drew his sword and struck: the High Priest's servant stood there with his ear lopped off. How was the flesh of the ear restored from the bare wound by the touch of Christ? Amid the flowing blood and the wound left by the cutting sword, when the body was so maimed, where did an ear that was not there spring from? Where did what had not existed before come from? From where was the missing part restored? Did the hand that created an ear feel the pain of the nails? He kept another from feeling the pain of a wound: did He feel it Himself? His touch could restore the flesh that was cut off; was He sorrowful because He feared the piercing of His own flesh? And if the body of Christ had this power, do we dare allege weakness in that nature whose natural force could counteract all the natural weaknesses of man?

But perhaps, in their misguided and impious perversity, they infer His weakness from the fact that His soul was sorrowful to death. It is not yet the time to blame you, heretic, for misunderstanding the passage. For now I will only ask you: why do you forget that when Judas went out to betray Him, He said, Now the Son of Man is glorified? If suffering was to glorify Him, how could the fear of it have made Him sorrowful? How, unless He was so devoid of reason that He feared to suffer when suffering was to glorify Him?

But perhaps someone may think He was afraid, to the point of praying that the cup might be removed from Him: Abba, Father, all things are possible for You: remove this cup from Me. To argue on the narrowest ground, could you not have refuted this dull impiety for yourself by reading the words, Put your sword back into its sheath: the cup which My Father has given Me, shall I not drink it? Could fear lead Him to pray for the removal of what He was hurrying to fulfill in His zeal for the Divine Plan? It is inconsistent to say that He shrank from the suffering He desired. You grant that He suffered willingly: would it not be more reverent to confess that you had misunderstood this passage than to rush with blasphemous and headlong folly into asserting that He prayed to escape suffering, though you grant that He suffered willingly?

Yet I suppose you will also arm yourself for your godless dispute with these words of the Lord, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Perhaps you think that after the disgrace of the cross, the favor of His Father's help left Him, and that this is why He cried out that He was left alone in His weakness. But if you regard the contempt, the weakness, the cross of Christ as a disgrace, you should remember His words, Truly I say to you, From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of Heaven.

Where, I ask, can you see fear in His Passion? Where is the weakness? Or the pain? Or the dishonor? Do the godless say He was afraid? But He declared with His own lips that He was willing to suffer. Do they maintain that He was weak? He revealed His power when His pursuers were struck with panic and did not dare to face Him. Do they contend that He felt the pain of the wounds in His flesh? But when He restored the wounded flesh of the ear, He showed that, though He was flesh, He did not feel the pain of fleshly wounds. The hand that touched the wounded ear belonged to His body; yet that hand created an ear out of a wound: how, then, can that be the hand of a body subject to weakness?

But, they say, the cross was a dishonor to Him; yet it is because of the cross that we can now see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and that He Who was born man from the womb of the Virgin has returned in His Majesty with the clouds of heaven. Your irreverence blinds you to the natural relation between cause and effect: not only does the spirit of godlessness and error that fills you hide the mystery of faith from your understanding, but the obtuseness of heresy drags you below the level of ordinary human intelligence. For it stands to reason that whatever we fear, we avoid; that a weak nature falls prey to terror by its very feebleness; that whatever feels pain has a nature always liable to pain; that whatever dishonors is always a degradation. On what reasonable principle, then, do you hold that our Lord Jesus Christ feared what He was pressing toward; or struck awe into the brave, yet trembled Himself with weakness; or stopped the pain of wounds, yet felt the pain of His own; or was dishonored by the degradation of the cross, yet through the cross sat down beside God on high and returned to His Kingdom?

But perhaps you think your impiety still has one opportunity left: to see in the words, Father, into Your hands I commend My Spirit, a proof that He feared the descent into the lower world, and even the necessity of death. But when you read these words and could not understand them, would it not have been better to say nothing, or to pray devoutly to be shown their meaning, than to go astray with such brazen assertions, too mad with your own folly to see the truth? Could you believe that He feared the depths of the abyss, the scorching flames, or the pit of avenging punishment, when you hear His words to the thief on the cross, Truly, I say to you, Today you will be with Me in Paradise? A nature like this, with such power, could not be shut up within the confines of the lower world, or even be made subject to fear of it. When He descended to Hades, He was never absent from Paradise (just as He was always in Heaven when He was preaching on earth as the Son of Man), but promised His martyr a home there, and held out to him the ecstasy of perfect happiness. Bodily fear cannot touch Him Who indeed reaches down as far as Hades, but by the power of His nature is present in all things everywhere. Just as little can the abyss of Hell and the terrors of death take hold of the nature that rules the world, boundless in the freedom of its spiritual power, confident of the raptures of Paradise; for the Lord Who was to descend to Hades was also to dwell in Paradise. Separate from His indivisible nature, if you can, a part that could fear punishment: send one part of Christ to Hades to suffer pain; the other part you must leave in Paradise to reign, for the thief says, Remember me when You come in Your Kingdom. It was the groan he heard, I suppose, when the nails pierced our Lord's hands, that drew this blessed confession of faith from him: he learned of the Kingdom of Christ from His weakened and stricken body! He begs Christ to remember him when He comes in His Kingdom; you say that Christ was afraid as He hung dying on the cross. The Lord promises him, Today you will be with Me in Paradise; you would subject Christ to Hades and the fear of punishment. Your faith expects the opposite. The thief confessed Christ in His Kingdom as He hung on the cross, and was rewarded with Paradise from the cross; you who impute to Christ the pain of punishment and the fear of death will miss Paradise and His Kingdom.

We have now seen the power that lay in the acts and words of Christ. We have proved beyond dispute that His body did not share the weakness of a natural body, because its power could drive out the weaknesses of the body; that when He suffered, suffering took hold of His body but did not inflict on it the nature of pain; and that this is because, though the form of our body was in the Lord, He, by virtue of His origin, was not in the body of our weakness and imperfection. He was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin, who performed the role of her sex but did not receive the seed of His conception from a man. She gave birth to a body, but one conceived of the Holy Spirit; a body that had inherent reality, but no weakness in its nature. That body was truly and really a body, because it was born of the Virgin; but it was above the weakness of our body, because it had its beginning in a spiritual conception.

But even now that we have proved what the Apostle's faith was, the heretics think they can counter it with the text, My soul is sorrowful even to death. These words, they say, prove an awareness of natural weakness, which made Christ begin to be sorrowful. First, then, I appeal to common sense: what do we mean by sorrowful to death? It cannot mean the same as 'to be sorrowful because of death': for where there is sorrow because of death, death is the cause of the sadness. But sadness even to death implies that death is the end, not the cause, of the sadness. If, then, He was sorrowful even to death, and not because of death, we must ask where His sadness came from. He was sorrowful not for a certain time, or for a period that human ignorance could not determine, but even to death. Far from being caused by His death, His sadness was removed by it.

So that we may understand the cause of His sadness, let us look at what comes before and after this confession of sadness: for at the Passover supper our Lord fully signified the whole mystery of His Passion and of our faith. After He had said that they would all fall away because of Him, but promised that He would go ahead of them into Galilee, Peter protested that though all the rest might fall away, he would stay faithful and not fall away. But the Lord, knowing by His Divine Nature what was going to happen, answered that Peter would deny Him three times, so that we might learn from Peter how the others fell away, since even he slipped into such great peril to his faith by his triple denial. After that, He took Peter, James and John, who were chosen, the first two to be His martyrs and John to be strengthened for the proclamation of the Gospel, and declared that He was sorrowful to death. Then He went ahead and prayed, saying, My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will. He prays that the cup may pass from Him when it was certainly already before Him: for even then the pouring out of His blood of the New Testament for the sins of many was being fulfilled. He does not pray that it may not be with Him, but that it may pass away from Him. Then He prays that His will may not be done, and wills that what He wishes to bring about may not be granted to Him. For He says, Yet not as I will, but as You will: by His spontaneous prayer for the cup's removal He signifies His fellowship with human anxiety, yet He associates Himself with the decree of the Will that He shares inseparably with the Father. Moreover, to show that He does not pray for Himself, and that He seeks only a conditional fulfillment of what He desires and prays for, He begins the whole request with the words, My Father, if it is possible. Is there anything whose possibility is uncertain for the Father? But if nothing is impossible for the Father, we can see what this condition, if it is possible, depends on: for this prayer is immediately followed by the words, And He came to His disciples and finds them sleeping, and says to Peter, Could you not keep watch with Me for one hour? Watch and pray so that you do not enter into temptation: for the spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh is weak. Is the cause of this sadness and this prayer still in doubt? He tells them to keep watch and pray with Him for this purpose, so that they may not enter into temptation; for the spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh is weak. They were bound by the promise, made in the steadfastness of faithful souls, not to fall away; yet through the weakness of the flesh they were going to fall away. So it is not for Himself that He is sorrowful and prays: it is for those whom He urges to watchfulness and prayer, so that the cup of suffering may not be their lot, and the cup He prays may pass away from Him may not remain with them.

And the reason He prayed that the cup might be removed from Him, if that were possible, was that, though nothing is impossible with God, as Christ Himself says, Father, all things are possible for You, for man it is impossible to withstand the fear of suffering, and faith can be tested only by trial. So as Man He prays for men that the cup may pass away, but as God from God, His will is in harmony with the Father's effective will. He teaches what He meant by If it is possible in His words to Peter, Listen, Satan has sought you so that he might sift you like wheat: but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. The cup of the Lord's Passion was to be a trial for them all, and He prays to the Father for Peter that his faith may not fail, so that when he denied Him through weakness, he might at least not fall short of penitent sorrow, for repentance would mean that faith had survived.

So the Lord was sorrowful to death because, in the presence of the death, the earthquake, the darkened day, the torn veil, the opened graves, and the resurrection of the dead, the faith of the disciples would need to be established, shaken as it had been by the terror of the night arrest, the scourging, the striking, the spitting, the crown of thorns, the carrying of the cross, and all the insults of the Passion, but most of all by the condemnation to the accursed cross. Knowing that all this would be over after His Passion, He was sad to death. He knew, too, that the cup could not pass away unless He drank it, for He said, My Father, this cup cannot pass from Me unless I drink it: Your will be done: that is, with the completion of His Passion, the fear of the cup, which could not pass away unless He drank it, would pass away; the end of that fear would come only when His Passion was completed and terror destroyed, because after His death the stumbling-block of the disciples' weakness would be removed by the glory of His power.

Although by His words, Your will be done, He surrendered the Apostles to the decision of His Father's will regarding the offense of the cup, that is, of His Passion, He still repeated His prayer a second and a third time. After that He said, Sleep on now, and take your rest. It is not without awareness of some secret reason that He Who had reproached them for sleeping now told them to sleep on and take their rest. Luke is thought to have given us the meaning of this command. After telling us how Satan had sought to sift the Apostles like wheat, and how the Lord had been asked that Peter's faith might not fail, he adds that the Lord prayed earnestly, and then that an angel stood by Him strengthening Him, and as the angel stood by Him, He prayed more earnestly still, so that the sweat poured from His body in drops of blood. So the Angel was sent to watch over the Apostles, and when the Lord had been strengthened by him, so that He no longer grieved for them, He said, without fear of sadness, Sleep on now, and take your rest. Matthew and Mark say nothing of the angel or the devil's request; but after the sorrow of His soul, the reproach of the sleepers, and the prayer that the cup may be taken away, there must be some good reason for the command to the sleepers that follows, unless we assume that He Who was about to leave them, and had Himself received strength from the Angel sent to Him, meant to abandon them to their sleep, soon to be arrested and held in custody.

We must not pass over the fact that many manuscripts, both Latin and Greek, say nothing of the angel's coming or the Bloody Sweat. But while we suspend judgment on whether this is an omission where it is missing or an interpolation where it is found (for the disagreement among the copies leaves the question uncertain), do not let the heretics take encouragement from the claim that it confirms His weakness, that He needed the help and comfort of an angel. Let them remember that the Creator of the angels does not need the support of His creatures. Moreover, His comforting must be explained in the same way as His sorrow. He was sorrowful for us, that is, on our account; so He must also have been comforted for us, that is, on our account. If His sorrow concerned us, His comfort concerned us. His comfort has the same object as His sadness. And let no one dare to attribute the Sweat to weakness, for it is contrary to nature to sweat blood. It was no infirmity, for His power reversed the law of nature. The bloody sweat does not for one moment support the heresy of weakness, while against the heresy that invents an apparent body, it establishes the reality of His whole body. Since, then, His fear concerned us and His prayer was on our behalf, we are forced to conclude that all this happened on our account, for whom He feared and for whom He prayed.

Again, the Gospels supply what is lacking in one another: we learn some things from one, some from another, and so on, because all are the proclamation of the same spirit. So John, who especially brings out the working of spiritual causes in the Gospel, preserves this prayer of the Lord for the Apostles, which all the others passed over: how He prayed, namely, Holy Father, keep them in Your Name....while I was with them I kept them in Your Name: those whom You gave Me I have kept. That prayer was not for Himself but for His Apostles; nor was He sorrowful for Himself, since He tells them to pray that they may not be tempted; nor is the angel sent to Him, for He could summon from Heaven, if He wished, twelve thousand angels; nor was death the cause of His fear when He was troubled to the point of death. Again, He does not pray that the cup may pass by Him, but that it may pass away from Him, though before it could pass away He had to drink it. But further, 'to pass away' does not mean merely 'to leave the place,' but 'to cease to exist altogether:' as the language of the Gospels and Epistles shows: for example, Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not perish: and the Apostle says, Behold, the old things have passed away; they have become new. And again, The form of this world shall pass away. The cup, then, that He prays to the Father about cannot pass away unless it is drunk; and when He prays, He prays for those whom He kept safe as long as He was with them, and whom He now hands over to the Father to keep. Now that He is about to accomplish the mystery of death, He asks the Father to guard them. The presence of the angel sent to Him (if this explanation is true) has no doubtful significance. Jesus showed He was certain the prayer was answered when, at its close, He told the disciples to sleep on. The Evangelist notes the effect of this prayer, and the confidence that prompted the command, 'sleep on,' in the course of the Passion, when he says of the Apostles just before they escaped from the hands of their pursuers, So that the word He had spoken might be fulfilled, Of those whom You have given Me I did not lose a single one. He Himself fulfills the request of His prayer, and they are all safe; but He asks the Father to keep, from now on, in His own Name those whom He has kept. And they are kept: Peter's faith does not fail: it cowered, but repentance followed at once.

Put together the Lord's prayer in John, the devil's request in Luke, the sorrow to the point of death, and the protest against sleep followed by the command, Sleep on, in Matthew and Mark, and every difficulty disappears. The prayer in John, in which He commends the Apostles to His Father, explains the cause of His sorrow and of the prayer that the cup may pass away. The Lord does not pray that the suffering may be taken away from Himself. He asks the Father to keep the disciples safe during His coming passion. In the same way, the prayer against Satan in St. Luke explains the confidence with which He allowed the sleep He had just forbidden.

There was, then, no room for human anxiety and fear in that nature, which was more than human. It was above the ills of earthly flesh; it was a body not sprung from earthly elements, although His origin as Son of Man came through the mystery of the conception by the Holy Spirit. The power of the Most High gave its power to the body that the Virgin bore from the conception of the Holy Spirit. The living body draws its conscious existence from its union with a soul, which is spread throughout it and gives it the life to perceive pains inflicted from outside. So the soul, warmed by the happy glow of its own heavenly faith and hope, rises above its own origin in the beginnings of an earthly body, and lifts that body into union with itself in thought and spirit, so that it ceases to feel the suffering that it is undergoing all the while. Why, then, do we need to say more about the nature of the Lord's body, the body of the Son of Man Who came down from heaven? Even earthly bodies can sometimes be made indifferent to the natural necessities of pain and fear.

Did the Jewish youths fear the flames that blazed up with the fuel thrown on them in the fiery furnace at Babylon? Did the terror of that terrible fire overpower their nature, though it was conceived like ours? Did they feel pain when the flames surrounded them? Perhaps, however, you will say they felt no pain because they were not burned: the flames were stripped of their burning nature. Certainly it is natural for the body to fear burning and to be burned by fire. But through the spirit of faith their earthly bodies (that is, bodies that had their origin according to the principles of natural birth) could neither be burned nor made afraid. So what was, in the case of men, a violation of the order of nature, produced by faith in God, cannot in God's case be judged natural, but must be seen as an activity of the Spirit beginning with His earthly origin. The youths were bound in the middle of the fire; they had no fear as they climbed onto the blazing pile: they did not feel the flame as they prayed: though they were in the middle of the furnace, they could not be burned. Both the fire and their bodies lost their own natures; the one did not burn, the others were not burned. Yet in every other respect both fire and bodies kept their natures: for the bystanders were consumed, and the agents of punishment were themselves punished. Impious heretic, you insist that Christ suffered pain from the piercing of the nails, that He felt the bitterness of the wound when they were driven through His hands: why, I ask, did the youths not fear the flames? Why did they feel no pain? What nature was it in their bodies that overcame the nature of fire? In the zeal of their faith and the glory of a blessed martyrdom they forgot to fear what was terrible; should Christ then be sorrowful from fear of the cross, Christ, Who even if He had been conceived with our sinful origin would still have been God on the cross, Who was to judge the world and reign forever and ever? Could He forget such a reward and tremble with the anxiety of dishonorable fear?

Daniel, whose food was the scanty portion of a prophet, did not fear the lions' den. The Apostles rejoiced in suffering and death for the Name of Christ. To Paul his sacrifice was the crown of righteousness. The Martyrs sang hymns as they offered their necks to the executioner, and climbed with psalms onto the blazing logs piled for them. The consciousness of faith takes away the weakness of nature and transforms the bodily senses so that they feel no pain, and so the body is strengthened by the fixed purpose of the soul and feels nothing except the impulse of its enthusiasm. The body does not feel the suffering that the mind despises in its desire for glory, as long as the soul gives it strength. It is, then, a natural effect in man that the soul's zeal, glowing for glory, should make him unaware of suffering, heedless of wounds, and indifferent to death. But Jesus Christ the Lord of glory, the hem of Whose garment can heal, Whose spittle and word can create; for at His command the man with the withered hand stretched it out whole, the man born blind no longer felt the defect of his birth, and the wounded ear was made as sound as the other; dare we think of His pierced body as subject to that pain and weakness from which the spirit of faith in Him rescued the glorious and blessed Martyrs?

The Only-begotten God, then, suffered in His person the attacks of all the infirmities to which we are subject; but He suffered them in the power of His own nature, just as He was born in the power of His own nature, for at His birth He did not lose His omnipotent nature through being born. Though He was born under human conditions, He was not conceived under them: human circumstances surrounded His birth, but His origin went beyond them. So He suffered in His body in the way our infirm body suffers, yet bore the sufferings of our body in the power of His own body. The prophet bears witness to this article of our faith when he says, He bears our sins and grieves for us: and we considered Him stricken, struck, and afflicted: He was wounded for our transgressions and made weak for our sins. It is, then, a mistaken human judgment that thinks He felt pain because He suffered. He bore our sins, that is, He took on our body of sin, but was Himself sinless. He was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh, bearing sin indeed in His flesh, but our sin. In the same way He felt pain for us, but not with our senses; He was found in appearance as a man, with a body that could feel pain, but His nature could not feel pain; for though His appearance was that of a man, His origin was not human: He was born by conception of the Holy Spirit. For the reasons mentioned, He was considered 'stricken, struck and afflicted.' He took the form of a servant: and 'man born of a Virgin' gives us the idea of One Whose nature felt pain when He suffered. But though He was wounded, it was 'for our transgressions.' The wound was not the wound of His own transgressions: the suffering was not a suffering for Himself. He was not born a man for His own sake, nor did He transgress by any action of His own. The Apostle explains the principle of the Divine Plan when he says, We beg you through Christ to be reconciled to God. He made Him Who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf. To condemn sin through sin in the flesh, He Who knew no sin was Himself made sin; that is, to condemn sin in the flesh by means of the flesh, He became flesh on our behalf but did not know flesh: and so He was wounded because of our transgressions.

Again, the Apostle knows nothing of fear of pain in Christ. When he wants to speak of the dispensation of the Passion, he includes it in the mystery of Christ's Divinity. Forgiving us all our trespasses, blotting out the bond written in ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us: taking it away and nailing it to the cross; stripping His flesh off Himself, He made a show of principalities and powers, openly triumphing over them in Himself. Was that power, do you think, the kind to yield to the wound of the nail, to flinch under the piercing blow, to turn itself into a nature that can feel pain? Yet the Apostle, who speaks as the mouthpiece of Christ, in recounting the work of our salvation through the Lord, describes the death of Christ as 'stripping His flesh off Himself, boldly putting the powers to shame and triumphing over them in Himself.' If His passion was a necessity of nature and not the free gift of your salvation: if the cross was merely the suffering of wounds, and not His fixing on Himself the decree of death drawn up against you: if His dying was violence done by death, and not the stripping off of the flesh by the power of God: lastly, if His death itself was anything other than a dishonoring of powers, an act of boldness, a triumph: then ascribe infirmity to Him, because in this He was subject to necessity and nature, to force, to fear and disgrace. But if the mystery of the Passion, as it was preached to us, is the exact opposite, who, I ask, can be so senseless as to reject the faith the Apostles taught, to overturn every religious feeling, and to distort into the dishonorable charge of natural weakness what was an act of free will, a mystery, a display of power and boldness, a triumph? And what a triumph it was, when He offered Himself to those who sought to crucify Him, and they could not endure His presence: when He stood under sentence of death, He Who was shortly to sit at the right hand of power: when He prayed for His persecutors while the nails were driven through Him: when He completed the mystery as He drank down the vinegar; when He was numbered among the transgressors and meanwhile granted Paradise: when He was lifted on the tree and the earth quaked: when He hung on the cross and sun and day were put to flight: when He left His own body, yet called life back into the bodies of others: when He was buried a corpse and rose again God: when as man He suffered all weaknesses for our sake, and as God triumphed in them all.

There is still, the heretics say, another serious and far-reaching confession of weakness, all the more so because it is in the mouth of the Lord Himself: My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? They read this as the expression of a bitter complaint that He was deserted and handed over to weakness. But what a forced interpretation from an irreligious mind! How contrary to the whole drift of our Lord's words! He hurried toward the death that was to glorify Him, after which He was to sit at the right hand of power; with all those blessed expectations, could He fear death, and so complain that His God had betrayed Him to its necessity, when it was the entrance to eternal blessedness?

Further, their heretical ingenuity presses on along the path their own godlessness has prepared, to the point of absorbing God the Word entirely into the human soul, and so denying that Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, was the same as the Son of God. So either God the Word ceased to be Himself while He performed the function of a soul in giving life to a body, or the man who was born was not the Christ at all, but the Word dwelt in him as the Spirit dwelt in the prophets. These absurd and perverse errors have grown so bold and godless that they assert that Jesus Christ was not Christ until He was born of Mary. He Who was born was not a pre-existent Being, but began to exist at that moment. From this follows the further error that God the Word, as if He were some part of the Divine power extending itself in unbroken continuity, dwelt within the man who received the beginning of his being from Mary, and endowed him with the power of Divine working, though that man lived and moved by the nature of his own soul.

This subtle and harmful doctrine draws them into the error that God the Word became the soul of the body, His nature working the change on itself through self-humiliation, so that the Word ceased to be God; or else that the Man Jesus, in the poverty and remoteness from God of His nature, was animated only by the life and motion of His own human soul, in which the Word of God, that is, as it were, the might of His uttered voice, resided. So the way is opened to every kind of irreverent theorizing, which comes down to this: either God the Word was merged into the soul and ceased to be God, or Christ had no existence before His birth from Mary, since Jesus Christ, a mere man of ordinary body and soul, began to exist only at His human birth and was raised to the level of the Power that worked within Him by the outside force of the Divine Word extending itself into Him. Then, when God the Word, after this extension, was withdrawn, He cried, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? or at least, when the divine nature of the Word once again gave way within Him to a human soul, He Who until then had relied on His Father's help, now cut off from it and abandoned to death, lamented His solitude and reproached the one who had deserted Him. So in every way a deadly danger of error in belief arises, whether one thinks the cry of complaint shows a weakness of nature in God the Word, or that God the Word was not pre-existent because the birth of Jesus Christ from Mary was the beginning of His being.

Amid these irreverent and baseless theories the faith of the Church, inspired by the teaching of the Apostles, has recognized a birth of Christ, but no beginning. It knows of the dispensation, but of no division: it refuses to make a separation in Jesus Christ, by which Jesus is one and Christ another; nor does it distinguish the Son of Man from the Son of God, for fear that the Son of God might not be regarded as Son of Man also. It does not absorb the Son of God into the Son of Man; nor does it, by a threefold belief, tear apart Christ, Whose coat, woven from the top throughout, was not torn, dividing Jesus Christ into the Word, a body and a soul; nor, on the other hand, does it absorb the Word into body and soul. In its view He is perfectly God the Word, and perfectly Christ the Man. In the mystery of our confession we hold fast to this alone: the faith that Christ is none other than Jesus, and the doctrine that Jesus is none other than Christ.

I am well aware how far the grandeur of the divine mystery baffles our weak understanding, so that language can scarcely express it, reason define it, or thought even embrace it. The Apostle, knowing that the hardest task for an earthly nature is to grasp God's way of acting unaided (for then our judgment would be keener to discern than God is mighty to accomplish), writes to his true son in the faith, who had received the Holy Scripture from childhood, As I urged you to stay at Ephesus when I was going into Macedonia, so that you might command certain men not to teach a different doctrine, nor to pay attention to fables and endless genealogies, which give rise to questions rather than to the edification of God which is in faith. He tells him to keep away from wordy genealogies and fables, which give rise to endless questions. The edification of God, he says, is in faith: he limits human reverence to the faithful worship of the Almighty, and does not allow our weakness to strain itself trying to see what only dazzles the eye. If we look at the brightness of the sun, our sight is strained and weakened: and sometimes when we scrutinize the source of the shining light with too curious a gaze, the eyes lose their natural power, and the sense of sight is even destroyed. So it happens that by trying to see too much we see nothing at all. What, then, must we expect in the case of God, the Sun of Righteousness? Won't foolishness be the reward of those who try to be too wise? Won't dull and brainless stupor take the place of the burning light of intelligence? A lower nature cannot understand the principle of a higher one: nor can Heaven's way of thinking be revealed to human conception, for whatever lies within the range of a limited consciousness is itself limited. So the divine power exceeds the capacity of the human mind. If the limited strains to reach so far, it becomes even feebler than before. It loses what certainty it had: instead of seeing heavenly things, it is only blinded by them. No mind can fully comprehend the divine: it punishes the obstinacy of the curious by taking away their power. If we want to look at the sun, we must remove as much of its brilliance as we need to in order to see it: otherwise, by expecting too much, we fall short of what is possible. In the same way we can only hope to understand the purposes of Heaven as far as is permitted. We must expect only what He grants to our understanding: if we try to go beyond the limit of His indulgence, it is withdrawn altogether. There is something in God that we can perceive: it is visible to all if we are content with the possible. Just as with the sun we can see something if we are content to see what can be seen, but lose everything if we strain beyond the possible, so it is with the nature of God. There is something we can understand if we are content with understanding what we can: but aim beyond your powers and you will lose even the power to reach what was within your grasp.

I will not yet touch on the mystery of that other, timeless birth: treating it requires more space than this. For now I will speak only of the Incarnation. Tell me, I ask, you who pry into the secrets of Heaven, about the mystery of Christ born of a Virgin and about His nature: how will you explain that He was conceived and born of a Virgin? What, according to your disputations, was the physical cause of His origin? How was He formed within His mother's womb? Where did His body and His humanity come from? And lastly, what does it mean that the Son of Man, Who remained in heaven, descended from heaven? By the laws of bodies the same object cannot both remain and descend: the one is the change of downward motion; the other the stillness of rest. The Infant wails but is in Heaven: the Boy grows but remains forever the immeasurable God. By what perception of human understanding can we grasp that He ascended to where He was before, and that He Who remained in heaven descended? The Lord says, What if you should see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before? The Son of Man ascends to where He was before: can the senses grasp this? The Son of Man, Who is in heaven, descends from heaven: can reason cope with this? The Word was made flesh: can words express this? The Word becomes flesh, that is, God becomes Man: the Man is in heaven: the God is from heaven. He Who descended ascends: but He descends and yet does not descend. He is as He always was, yet He was not always what He is. We review the causes, but we cannot explain the manner: we perceive the manner, and we cannot understand the causes. Yet if we understand Christ Jesus even in this way, we will know Him: if we try to understand Him further, we will not know Him at all.

Again, what a great mystery of word and act it is that Christ wept, that His eyes filled with tears from the anguish of His mind. Where did this defect in His soul come from, that sorrow should wring tears from His body? What bitter fate, what unbearable pain, could move the Son of Man Who descended from heaven to a flood of tears? Again, what was it in Him that wept? God the Word? Or His human soul? For though weeping is a bodily function, the body is only a servant; tears are, as it were, the sweat of the soul in agony. Again, what was the cause of His weeping? Did He owe Jerusalem the debt of His tears, Jerusalem, the godless parricide, whom no suffering could punish enough for slaughtering the Apostles and Prophets and murdering her Lord Himself? He might weep for the disasters and death that come upon mankind: but could He grieve over the fall of that doomed and desperate race? What, I ask, was this mystery of weeping? His soul wept for sorrow; was it not the soul that sent out the Prophets? The soul that would so often have gathered the chicks together under the shadow of His wings? But God the Word cannot grieve, nor can the Spirit weep: nor could His soul possibly do anything before the body existed. Yet we cannot doubt that Jesus Christ truly wept.

The tears He shed for Lazarus were no less real. The first question here is: what was there to weep for in the case of Lazarus? Not his death, for it did not lead to death but served the glory of God; for the Lord says, This sickness does not lead to death, but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be honored through him. A death that caused God to be glorified could not bring sorrow and tears. Nor was His absence from Lazarus at the time of his death any reason for tears. He says plainly, Lazarus is dead, and for your sakes I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. So His absence, which helped the Apostles to believe, was not the cause of His sorrow; for with the knowledge of Divine omniscience He announced the sick man's death from far away. So we can find no need for tears, yet He wept. And again I ask: to whom must we attribute the weeping? To God, or to the soul, or to the body? The body by itself sheds no tears except those it sheds at the command of the grieving soul. Still less can God have wept, for He was to be glorified in Lazarus. Nor is it reasonable to say that His soul called Lazarus back from the tomb: can a soul joined to a body, by the power of its command, call another soul back to the dead body it has left? Can the One Who is about to be glorified grieve? Can the One Who is about to restore the dead to life weep? Tears do not belong to Him Who is about to give life, nor grief to Him Who is about to receive glory. Yet the One Who wept and grieved was also the Giver of life.

If we treat many points briefly, it is not because we have nothing to say or do not know what has already been said; our aim is to make the results as attractive as possible to the reader by avoiding an overly laborious process of argument. We know the deeds and words of our Lord, and yet we do not know them: we are not ignorant of them, yet they cannot be understood. The facts are real, but the power behind them is a mystery. We will prove this from His own words: This is why the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I received this commandment from the Father. He lays down His life of His own accord, but I ask: who lays it down? We confess without hesitation that Christ is God the Word; but on the other hand, we know that the Son of Man was made up of a soul and a body. Compare the angel's words to Joseph: Get up, take the child and His mother, and go into the land of Israel; for those who sought the child's soul are dead. Whose soul is it? His body's, or God's? If it is His body's, what power does the body have to lay down the soul, when the body is made alive only by the working of the soul? Again, how could the body, which without the soul is inert and dead, receive a command from the Father? But if, on the other hand, anyone supposes that God the Word laid aside His soul so that He might take it up again, he must prove that God the Word died, that is, remained without life and feeling like a dead body, and took up His soul again to be made alive once more by it.

Further, no one endowed with reason can attribute a soul to God, even though it is written in many places that the soul of God hates sabbaths and new moons, and also that it delights in certain things. But this is merely a conventional expression, to be understood in the same way as when God is spoken of as having a body, with hands and eyes and fingers and arms and heart. As the Lord said, A Spirit does not have flesh and bones: so He Who is, and does not change, cannot have the limbs and parts of a tangible body. He is a simple and blessed nature, a single, complete, all-embracing Whole. So God is not made alive, as bodies are, by the action of a soul dwelling within, but is Himself His own life.

How then does He lay down His soul, or take it up again? What does this command He received mean? God could not lay it down, that is, die, or take it up again, that is, come to life. But neither did the body receive the command to take it up again; it could not do so by itself, for He said of the Temple of His body, Destroy this temple, and after three days I will raise it up. So it is God Who raises up the temple of His body. And Who lays down His soul to take it up again? The body does not take it up again by itself: it is raised up by God. Whatever is raised up again must have been dead, and whatever is living does not lay down its soul. So God was neither dead nor buried; and yet He said, In pouring this ointment on My body, she did it for My burial. Because it was poured on His body, it was done for His burial; but the word His is not the same as Him. It is quite another use of the pronoun when we say, 'it was done for the burial of Him,' and when we say, ' His body was anointed.' nor does ' His body was buried,' mean the same as ' He was buried.'

To grasp this divine mystery, we must see the God in Him without ignoring the Man, and the Man without ignoring the God. We must not divide Jesus Christ, for the Word was made flesh; yet we must not call Him buried, though we know He raised Himself again; we must not doubt His resurrection, though we do not dare deny that He was buried. Jesus Christ was buried, for He died: He died, and even cried out at the moment of death, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Yet He Who uttered these words also said, Truly I say to you, Today you shall be with Me in Paradise, and He Who promised Paradise to the thief cried aloud, Father, into Your hands I commend My Spirit; and having said this, He gave up His Spirit.

You who divide Christ into three parts, the Word, the soul and the body, or reduce the whole Christ, God the Word Himself, to a single member of our race: explain to us this mystery of great godliness that was revealed in the flesh. What Spirit did Christ give up? Who commended His Spirit into the hands of His Father? Who was to be in Paradise that same day? Who complained that God had deserted Him? The cry of the deserted One signifies the weakness of the dying; the promise of Paradise signifies the sovereign power of the living God. Commending His Spirit showed confidence; giving up His Spirit meant His departure in death. Who then, I ask, was it that died? Surely the One Who gave up His Spirit? But Who gave up His Spirit? Certainly the One Who commended it to His Father. And if the One Who commended His Spirit is the same as the One Who gave it up and died, was it the body that commended its soul, or God Who commended the body's soul? I say 'soul' because it is undoubtedly often synonymous with 'spirit,' as could be gathered from the language here alone: Jesus gave up His 'Spirit' when He was about to die. If, then, you are convinced that the body commended the soul, that the perishable commended the living, the corruptible the eternal, the thing to be raised again the thing that remains unchanged, then, since He Who commended His Spirit to the Father was also to be in Paradise with the thief that same day, I would gladly know whether He was dwelling in heaven while the sepulchre held Him, or whether He was dwelling in heaven when He cried out that God had deserted Him.

It is one and the same Lord Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, Who expresses Himself in all these utterances. He is man when He says He is abandoned to death; yet while man, He still rules in Paradise as God; and though reigning in Paradise, as Son of God He commends His Spirit to His Father, and as Son of Man He gives up to death the Spirit He commended to the Father. Why then do we treat as a disgrace what is a mystery? We see Him complaining that He is left to die, because He is Man; we see Him, as He dies, declaring that He reigns in Paradise, because He is God. Why should we harp, in support of our irreverence, on what He said to make us understand His death, and hold back what He proclaimed to show His immortality? The words and the voice are equally His when He complains of desertion and when He declares His rule: by what method of heretical logic do we split up our belief and deny that He Who died was at the same time He Who rules? Did He not bear witness to Himself equally in both, when He commended His Spirit and when He gave it up? But if the One Who commended His Spirit and gave it up is the same, if He dies while ruling and rules while dead, then the mystery of the Son of God and Son of Man means that He is One, Who reigns as He dies and dies as He reigns.

Stand aside, then, all you godless unbelievers for whom the divine mystery is too great, who do not know that Christ wept not for Himself but for us, to prove the reality of the manhood He assumed by yielding to the emotion common to humanity; who do not see that Christ died not for Himself but for our life, to renew human life by the death of the deathless God; who cannot reconcile the complaint of the deserted One with the confidence of the Ruler; who would teach us that because He reigns as God and complains that He is dying, we have here a dead man and the reigning God. For the One Who dies is none other than the One Who reigns, the One Who commends His spirit none other than the One Who gives it up: He Who was buried rose again; ascending or descending, He is wholly one.

Listen to the Apostle's teaching and see in it a faith taught not by the understanding of the flesh but by the gift of the Spirit. The Greeks seek wisdom, he says, and the Jews ask for a sign; but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles; but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ Jesus, the power of God, God. Is Christ divided here, so that Jesus the crucified is one and Christ, the power and wisdom of God, is another? This is a stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles; but to us Christ Jesus is the power of God and the wisdom of God: a wisdom, however, not known by the world nor understood by secular philosophy. Hear the same blessed Apostle when he declares that it has not been understood: We speak the wisdom of God, hidden in a mystery, which God foreordained before the world for our glory, which none of the rulers of this world has known; for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. Does the Apostle not know that this wisdom of God is hidden in a mystery and cannot be known by the rulers of this world? Does he divide Christ into a Lord of Glory and a crucified Jesus? No; rather, he refutes this most foolish and impious idea with the words, For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

The Apostle knew nothing else, and he decided to know nothing else; we men of weaker understanding and weaker faith split up, divide and double Jesus Christ, making ourselves judges of the unknown and blaspheming the hidden mystery. For us, Christ crucified is one, and Christ the wisdom of God another; Christ Who was buried is different from Christ Who descended from Heaven; the Son of Man is not at the same time also Son of God. We teach what we do not understand; we try to refute what we cannot grasp. We men improve on the revelation of God; we are not content to say with the Apostle, Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God Who justifies; who is the one who condemns? It is Christ Jesus Who died, yes, rather, Who was raised from the dead, Who is at the right hand of God, Who also intercedes for us. Is the One Who intercedes for us other than the One Who is at the right hand of God? Is the One Who is at the right hand of God not the very same One Who rose again? Is the One Who rose again other than the One Who died? The One Who died other than the One Who condemns us? Lastly, is the One Who condemns us not also God Who justifies us? Distinguish, if you can, Christ our accuser from God our defender, Christ Who died from Christ Who condemns, Christ sitting at the right hand of God and praying for us from Christ Who died. So whether dead or buried, descended into Hades or ascended into Heaven, all is one and the same Christ; as the Apostle says, Now this 'He ascended,' what does it mean but that He also descended to the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who also ascended far above all the heavens, so that He may fill all things. How far, then, will we push our babbling ignorance and blasphemy, claiming to explain what is hidden in the mystery of God? He who descended is the same one who also ascended. Can we doubt any longer that the Man Christ Jesus rose from the dead, ascended above the heavens and is at the right hand of God? We cannot say that His body, which lay in the grave, descended into Hades. If, then, the One Who descended is one with the One Who ascended; if His body did not go down into Hades, yet truly rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, what remains except to believe in the secret mystery, which is hidden from the world and the rulers of this age, and to confess that, ascending or descending, He is only One, one Jesus Christ for us, Son of God and Son of Man, God the Word and Man in the flesh, Who suffered, died, was buried, rose again, was received into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God: Who holds in His one single self, according to the Divine Plan and nature, in the form of God and in the form of a servant, the Human and Divine without separation or division.

So the Apostle, shaping our ignorant and haphazard ideas to conform to the truth, says of this mystery of the faith, For He was crucified through weakness, but He lives through the power of God. Preaching the Son of Man and Son of God, Man through the Divine Plan and God through His eternal nature, he says that He Who was crucified through weakness is He Who lives through the power of God. His weakness comes from the form of a servant; His nature remains because of the form of God. He took the form of a servant, though He was in the form of God; so there can be no doubt about the mystery by which He both suffered and lived. There was in Him both weakness to suffer and the power of God to give life; and so He Who suffered and lived cannot be more than One, or other than Himself.

The Only-begotten God did indeed suffer all that men can suffer; but let us express ourselves in the words and faith of the Apostle. He says, For I delivered to you first of all that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures. This is no unsupported statement of his own that might lead to error, but a warning to us to confess that Christ truly died and rose, not in name only, since the fact is certified by the full weight of Scripture's authority; and that we must understand His death in exactly the sense in which Scripture declares it. Out of regard for the perplexities and scruples of the weak and sensitive believer, he adds these solemn closing words, according to the Scriptures, to his proclamation of the death and the resurrection. He does not want us to grow weaker, driven about by every wind of empty doctrine, or troubled by hollow subtleties and false doubts; he would call faith back, before it is shipwrecked, to the harbor of piety, believing and confessing the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Son of Man and Son of God, according to the Scriptures; for this is the safeguard of reverence against the adversary's attack: to understand the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as it was written of Him. There is no danger in faith; the reverent confession of the hidden mystery of God is always safe. Christ was born of the Virgin, but conceived by the Holy Spirit according to the Scriptures. Christ wept, but according to the Scriptures: what made Him weep was also a cause of joy. Christ was hungry; but according to the Scriptures, when He had no food, He used His power as God against the tree that bore no fruit. Christ suffered; but according to the Scriptures, He was about to sit at the right hand of Power. He complained that He was abandoned to die; but according to the Scriptures, at that same moment He received into His kingdom in Paradise the thief who confessed Him. He died; but according to the Scriptures, He rose again and sits at the right hand of God. There is life in believing this mystery; this confession withstands every attack.

The Apostle takes care to leave no room for doubt: we cannot say, Christ was born, suffered, was dead and buried, and rose again: but how, by what power, by what division of the parts of Himself? Who wept? Who rejoiced? Who complained? Who descended? And Who ascended? He rests the merits of faith entirely on the confession of unquestioning reverence. The righteousness that comes from faith, he says, speaks this way: Do not say in your heart, Who has ascended into heaven, that is, to bring Christ down, or Who has descended into the abyss, that is, to bring Christ up from the dead? But what does the Scripture say? Your word is near, in your mouth and in your heart; that is, the word of faith that we preach: because if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved. Faith makes the righteous man complete, as it is written: Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Did Abraham challenge the word of God when he was promised the inheritance of the Gentiles and a lasting line of descendants as countless as the sand or the stars? For the reverent faith that trusts completely in the omnipotence of God, the limits of human weakness are no barrier. Disregarding all that is feeble and earthly in itself, it believes the divine promise, even when that promise goes beyond what human nature can do. It knows that the laws that govern man do not hinder the power of God, Who is as generous in fulfilling as He is gracious in promising. Nothing is more righteous than Faith. For just as in human conduct it is fairness and self-restraint that win our approval, so in the case of God, what is more righteous for man than to attribute omnipotence to Him Whose Power He perceives to be without limits?

So the Apostle, looking in us for the righteousness that comes from Faith, strikes at the root of incredulous doubt and godless unbelief. He forbids us to let the cares of anxious thought into our hearts, and points to the authority of the Prophet's words, Do not say in your heart, Who has ascended into heaven? Then He completes the thought of the Prophet's words with the addition, That is to bring Christ down. The perception of the human mind cannot reach the knowledge of the divine; but neither can a reverent faith doubt the works of God. Christ needed no human help, as if someone had to ascend into heaven to bring Him down from His blessed Home to His earthly body. No external force drove Him down to the earth. We must believe that He came just as He did come: true religion is to confess Jesus Christ not as brought down but as descending. The mystery of both the time and the manner of His coming belongs to Him alone. We may not think that because He came only recently He must have been brought down, or that His coming in time depended on another who brought Him down. Nor does the Apostle leave room for unbelief in the other direction. He at once quotes the words of the Prophet, Or Who has descended into the abyss, and immediately adds the explanation, That is to bring Christ back from the dead. The One Who was free to descend to the earth is free to return into heaven. So all hesitation and doubt are removed. Faith reveals what omnipotence plans: history relates the effect; God Almighty was the cause.

But an unwavering certainty is demanded of us. The Apostle, explaining the whole secret of the Scripture, goes on: Your word is near, in your mouth and in your heart. The words of our confession must not be slow or deliberately vague: there must be no gap between heart and lips, so that what ought to be the confession of true reverence does not become a cover for unbelief. The word must be near us and within us; no delay between the heart and the lips; a faith of conviction as well as of words. Heart and lips must agree, and reveal in thought and speech a religion that does not waver. Here too, as before, the Apostle adds the explanation of the Prophet's words: That is the word of Faith that we preach; because if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved. Piety consists in rejecting doubt, righteousness in believing, salvation in confessing. Do not play with ambiguities, do not be drawn into empty babbling, do not debate the powers of God in any way or set limits on His might; stop searching again and again for the causes of unsearchable mysteries: confess instead that Jesus is the Lord, and believe that God raised Him from the dead; in this is salvation. What folly it is to belittle the nature and character of Christ, when this alone is salvation: to know that He is the Lord. Again, what an error of human vanity it is to quarrel about His resurrection, when it is enough for eternal life to believe that God raised Him up. So faith lies in simplicity, righteousness in faith, and true godliness in confession. For God does not call us to the blessed life through difficult investigations. He does not lure us with the varied arts of rhetoric. The way to eternity is plain and easy: believe that Jesus was raised from the dead by God, and confess that He is the Lord. So let no one twist what was said because of our ignorance into an occasion for impiety. It had to be proved to us that Jesus Christ died, so that we might live in Him.

If, then, He said, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me, and Father, into Your hands I commend My Spirit, so that we might be sure that He did die, was this not, in His care for our faith, a scattering of our doubts rather than a confession of His weakness? When He was about to restore Lazarus, He prayed to the Father; but what need of prayer did the One have Who said, Father, I thank You that You have heard Me; and I know that You always hear Me, but I said it because of the crowd, so that they may believe that You sent Me? So He prayed for us, so that we may know Him to be the Son; the words of prayer did nothing for Him, but He said them to advance our faith. He did not need help; we needed teaching. Again He prayed to be glorified, and at once the voice of God the Father was heard from heaven glorifying Him; but when they marveled at the voice, He said, This voice has not come for My sake, but for your sake. The Father is asked on our behalf, He speaks on our behalf: may all this lead us to believe and confess! The Glorifier's answer is given not to the prayer for glory but to the ignorance of the bystanders: must we not then regard the complaint of suffering, when He found His greatest joy in suffering, as meant to build up our faith? Christ prayed for His persecutors, because they did not know what they were doing. He promised Paradise from the cross, because He is God the King. He rejoiced on the cross that all was finished when He drank the vinegar, because He had fulfilled all prophecy before He died. He was born for us, suffered for us, died for us, rose again for us. Only this is necessary for our salvation, to confess the Son of God risen from the dead: why then should we die in this state of godless unbelief? If Christ, always sure of His divinity, made His death clear to us, Himself indifferent to death yet dying to assure us that the humanity He had assumed was real, why should we use this very confession, that for us the Son of God became Son of Man and died, as our chief weapon for denying His divinity?