Apotheosis

Hymn on the Trinity

God is one supreme yet threefold, a triple semblance, a single power. From the Father's heart Wisdom was begotten — the Son himself; the Holy Spirit subsists from the eternal mouth. The Father is not older in time, nor greater in godhead, for God, wise from of old, has ever brought forth from himself, through Word, that whereby he always was, the Word to be begotten for the ages. But to bring forth the Word belongs to the Father; the rest belongs to the Word: to bear the manhood he assumed, to restore what had perished, to reconcile it to the Father, and to set it on the seat at his right hand. The Spirit fills these things, himself God: ready to pour his grace upon the faithful peoples, he carries the power of both the Father and of Christ into our bodies.

Preface

Is there a true belief? I ask you, Master: do we keep the right faith? Or do we fail to shun the serpent's teachings, and slip without knowing it? Hard it is to make out the narrow path of salvation among the twisting byways; so many crossroads of the faithless rise up, their torch-stakes polished smooth with errors; slanting partings of the road interweave, with wheel-ruts crossing this way and that. Should anyone, straying and wandering, follow these, leaving behind the straight track, he will rush headlong into the pit of a hidden trench, which a hostile hand has dug — the hand of brigands, who lie in wait for travellers that follow the wandering road. What does the lust of the human mind not contrive? What evils does it not itch to do? They assail the standing of almighty God with slanderous lawsuits; they cut the faith apart with petty quibbles, each man as his tongue is the more wicked; they loose and bind the chains of their questions through twisted syllogisms. Woe to the captious tricks of these sycophants! Woe to their shifty cunning! The straight rule breaks the stubborn knots, deadly to those who dispute. Therefore God has chosen the foolish things of the world, that the sophistries may fall, and out of the weak he has subdued the strong, that believing might be simple. See, a stone is set as our stumbling-block, on which vanity may dash itself, a sign to the wary, to the unwary a scandal: this one it lays low, that one it sets right, while the blind man, trying many things with uncertain step, runs into what stands in his way. The torch of faith alone must be borne before our steps, that our footprints may be straight. What foe in the darkness still strikes the wanderers, drags and tramples them down, who, savage, devours the grain scattered along the very passage where men go, who, a thief, adulterates the glad tillage of Christ, adding rival wild oats — which the husbandman suffers to grow up fruitful into the blade from poison's milk, lest perhaps, torn out together, the empty stalk-fibre should destroy the eared corn as well. He waits, then, until the seething ripeness ripens both the treacherous and the wheat, that he may give to the winnowing-fan each chosen grain for the barns, and burn the refuse in the fire; but it concerns the husbandman himself to know which seeds of the tares destroy the harvest.

Many are the heresies, but I shall speak of few, lest grim to tell their teachings, evilly published, should stain a catholic tongue. That man, driving the Father from his throne, thrusts him down into the cramped burden of a human body, nor does he shrink from giving him over to death and nailing him to the hard wood. Is God capable of suffering — God whose form and likeness none has ever seen? For that majesty is not easily grasped by sense, by eyes, or by hand. The famous saying of great John stands ready, which testifies that God could never be seen. That Father, whom no violent gaze, looking from afar, has pierced with the keen edge of burning sight, who did not clothe himself in the form of man, nor temper the boundless of his Godhead with an assumed face or measure — either the reverence of the Gospel book must now, O blasphemer, be despised by you, or else the untouched might of the blessed Father, never seen, must not be mingled with what perishes. Yet there is also a semblance of the Father which it is lawful to behold, ready at times to meet human eyes, which, though the dull gaze, with grey-clouded mirror and moistened sight, could approach all misted over; each man of those said to have seen God saw the Son poured forth from him; for the Son is this: that which, flashing forth from the Father, offered itself to be looked upon in such forms as a man could grasp with sight. For pure majesty is infinite, and does not enter our gaze, unless it shapes itself by some moderation. This Abraham saw, prince of a noble seed, when Christ, already then deigning to visit the earth as a guest in human shape, shone forth as godhead in a threefold figure. This the arms of wrestling Jacob handled, when the giver of the divine law himself, bidden to draw near face to face, stood with countenance turned in friendship, joined words to him close at hand in holy speech, and knew that he beheld Christ in the likeness of flesh. But, seeking greater things, he stretched his mind in prayer toward what is not granted to man, striving beyond the mortal, to see Christ himself, as great as he was, without a body; and at length, after the exchange of much talk, and after the sight of his present Lord and long companionship, "Grant me," he says, "to know you now, most gracious God." The Lord answered: "My back parts, not myself, I will give the righteous to see." What clearer than this — that without an alien face the Word cannot be seen, yet can, when he chooses, though the Father is never seen, show himself to earthly eyes in our likeness, and often be brought, governed, into angelic or mortal forms, that he may be perceived under an image? This is the Word which, darted forth from the Father's kindly mouth, took fragile form from a virgin's body. Hence the figure of a man, not yet beneath flesh, set before Moses, had marked out the likeness of our face, because God, one day about to take a body forced together by the power of the Word, was foreshadowing that same face. Yet a kindled flame was also seen to burn the bramble-bush; God was hovering amid the sharp thorns, and the harmless fire drove on the wounding tresses, that it might be an emblem of God about to glide into limbs full of thorns, which crimes interweave with thick stakes and sins fill bristling with the prickles of pain. For from an untended stock the vicious shrub had begun to pour out rank growth on its wicked twigs with foul sap, and bound its knots with crowding spikes. One might see the barren leaves suddenly grow bright, and, the foliage set ablaze, God flashing far and wide with great onset, yet not harming the thorny web, licking the bloody fruits and the gory apples, grazing the living shoots of the death-bearing wood, since dismal guilt is purged by the blood which the twisted bramble yields with thick torments. Therefore nothing was seen save what was to be seen beneath flesh: light, the image of God, the Word God, and God a fire, who fills the bramble of our sinful body; for the begetter of light, sower of the Word, author also of fire, is believed to be beyond our eyes, as the apostle, our authority, teaches, who denies that the fount of Godhead can be approached by the gaze: "believe me, no one has seen God; believe me, no one." A visible God from the fount, but not the very fount of God visible; he can be seen who is born, but not the unbegotten can be seen: that face of the Father lies hidden whence comes the God who once offered himself visible, shaping in himself something such as the suffering followed which claims a body for itself; for the lofty power is incapable of suffering, since the nature of the supernal fire knows not how to descend to horrible penalties, nor admits being racked by human anguish — pure, serene, gleaming, supremely free in fluent motion, subject to none, mistress as it is of all things, having no beginning from time, but above all time and before the day, majesty with the Father most high, nay, the very mind of the Father and his reason, the way of his counsels, which, neither made by hand nor created by a commanding voice, brought forth its rule, breathed out from the Father's depth. This, then, no scourges cut, no spittle of saliva besprinkles, no palm wearies it with struck blows, nor do the wounds of nails, pierced on the cross, drive it through: with these the flesh of man was afflicted, which a pregnant woman brought forth under the law of the womb, without the law of a husband. He suffers hunger, drinks gall and swallows vinegar, he dreads the face of death, he trembles at pain. Say, sacrilegious teachers, you who contend that by the Father most high the throne was left deserted to lie empty in that time when God glided into fragile limbs — did the Father, then, suffer? What would wicked error not dare? Was he himself conceived and grew from a maiden's blood? Did he himself stretch the womb of a modest virgin? And is the page of the divine book then false-speaking, which tells that the Word flowed into the form of flesh? But no: he who is Father of the Word is not held to be made flesh. Halt your step, O Scripture; nothing shifting and ambiguous is fit to affirm. The Father is one whom none is permitted to behold; the Father is one who was never seen on earth, nor shone forth in person among the lights of the world. He sent forth the visible Word, and received it back when sent, when he willed; with the Word he touched the inward parts of the pure virgin, and with the Word he framed the limbs of the child. He himself, indeed, present on earth in power and godhead, is ever present, wherever it be, nor is any part empty of the Father's majesty; nowhere is God the begetter absent, but through the Word is ever present; and thence to Philip Christ says: "So long a time I dwell with you, and you deny that you know the Father, whom you behold in me?" It is the gift of the invisible Father to bring forth the Son visible, through whom the Father himself may be seen — and not by the eyes of saints alone, but to the light-bereft eyes of the blind; I speak of the blind, whose dull sloth in a darkened heart cannot weigh the truth, whom, if you deny him plain to mortals, come, say, whom did the tyrant see from Babylon's tower ranging far amid harmless flames, treading the swift fires with his brethren unscorched? Surely he says: "O nobles, three men the vast burning received into its panting furnaces; one added, behold, laughing, cuts apart the steaming fires. That is the Son of God; I confess it, and, vanquished, I adore. Take away the mocked torches, and withdraw the warm brands; the heat of the kindled brimstone grows cold. The Son — there is no doubt — works these wonders of nature, whom I see, God himself, the most certain offspring of God; he commands the boundless blazes and tames their wrath, mocking the fire that serves him, and the pitchy ragings he presses down, and forces the madness of the flames to freeze; the warm breath, bidden not to touch the barbarian folds of their robes, passes by and hisses across their thin garments; the very vapour fears to go among the Assyrian turbans, lest the hair flowing over their shoulders be soiled with bitter smoke." This he says, and bids the varied music fall silent — organs, harps, lyres, reed-pipes, and trumpets. Foolish superstition was hushed, the festal voice grew still that wickedly celebrated the gold of the conspicuous image. Now sound the songs of holy men alone, praising the King of heaven with threefold harmony, who made the sea, the lands, the shining stars, and amid the fires sheltered his fosterlings unharmed. Always to bring aid the Word of the almighty Father came down to save mankind; ever he took care that mortal things should be mingled with him by his own love, so that the flesh, to be joined to him and filled by the eternal Lord — the flesh that then led a degenerate, animal life — might grow accustomed to see itself a sharer in an earthly face, and to know its partner by sight as by a pledge, and little by little to draw near to its kinsman Christ. So man, once animal, the Spirit now has carried over to the nature of the supernal seed, by pouring into him the very God who gives mortal things their life. Now a new substance, solidified by breath within the skin — yet our substance still, drawn from a virgin — puts off the corrupted beginnings of the old life, taking immortal good by his own breathing: that one is the son of man, yet that one is the Son of the Thunderer, who now alone beholds the Father's face and sees him. No one knows the Father save the Son, and he to whom the Son shows him — the mediator both of us and of the Almighty. At last, to sum up briefly the substance of the whole: not the Father came down into flesh, but the assumed flesh ascended to the Father's height; the Son ran through both.

Yield, profaner of Christ, yield now, Sabellius, who set the Father aside and madly deny the Son: do you not violate the Father while you refuse to acknowledge the Son? Since there is no begetter unless a son exists, nor can you call him father whom you defraud of offspring; but perhaps you wish, by the honour of fatherly affection, to despoil God, content with a bare name, namely that he is God, and to strip the Father of his glory and the power of his line. Is there anyone, reclining in his idol-shrine among a thousand rites and worshipping ridiculous gods with salt, with turf, with incense, who does not think there is one supreme God, alone above all things? Though to the Saturns and Junos and Venuses, and to other portents, he consecrate smoking altars, yet, as often as he has looked up to heaven, in one God he has placed all right, whom a vast order of powers serves, marshalled with its various ministers. What nation is so stupid in mind, so barbarous in tongue, or what superstition so sordid, as to set the dog-shaped, barking Anubis before the throne of heaven? No one gives a seat above the stars to the goddesses Cloacina or Epona, though he pays a reeking censer and with sacrilegious hands probes the meal-cake and the entrails. Consult the ravings of bearded Plato, consult too the sinews that the goatish Cynic dreams of and that Aristotle weaves in his tortuous spinning: though a doubtful labyrinth and winding error drive all these about, though they themselves are wont to promise a hen or a cock, that the physician-god may deign to show himself fair to the dying — yet, when it comes to the rule of reason and of art, their muddled notions and quarrelsome arguments they conclude, by rough-broken methods, in one godhead, at whose will the moving, rounded sphere is rolled, and the wandering stars keep their courses. Man's nature does not admit — provided he be no quadruped, but gaze on heavenly things with upright face — man's nature does not admit that he deny the supreme governance to be in power; this Numa's soothsayer too silently felt within himself, and the half-wild Scot feels it, baser than a dog of war. But we, who have now twice seen the Lord, in books and in body — first by faith, then in flesh and blood before our eyes — and who, by the volumes of the prophets, proved with the cross as witness, have plunged our probing fingers into the raw wounds of his ribs, and, with sight still doubting, have searched the hollows of his hands, and known Jesus the eternal King — to abjure for God the title and the fatherly name we believe a crime, who brought forth a king from himself, not the king of the Parthian people nor of the sons of Romulus, but the king of the highest, middle, and lowest reason, and therefore lord of all and king above all things: he holds the middle of the flesh, the height of the Father, the depth of the Styx. He flows down by these steps and is rolled back again into himself; he is God, and is also man; he becomes dead, and the same is God. He runs through all the offices of stooping nature, that he may carry back, folded up into the Father's bosom above, the things that had been dead, and bear up even our limbs. When the instruments of the ancient prophets had sung that this would be, we, by eyes, hands, meeting, voice, and speech having tested it, understood at last the utterances of the heroes of old, and the oracles laid open when Christ was seen. This is our salvation; by this we live, by this we are quickened. This we follow: never, the Son's name withdrawn, to call upon the Father; and never, without the Father's name, to know the Son as God; never, unless the Holy and one Spirit be present, to name both Son and Father; yet so that these three stand together, that not by a separate course I make them three, but that in these three God subsists as one. Nor again is the Father himself the same as the Son, so that — because we know the begotten from the unbegotten — truly is he Father, and truly the offspring is begotten, and the Son is not his own begetter. For it is utterly ridiculous and idle that one born from himself, or born above himself, should suddenly be for himself a new material of being born, and that God of his own accord should bring himself forth and make himself his own son. The divine names devise nothing false or lying: he who is Father, by begetting is Father; then the Son, from this, is Son, begotten in that the Father most high is his author, and himself the highest none the less; for he is neither less than nor unlike the Father. Whence, in both, the form of their work is undivided — unless the noble Son held the whole might of the Father's majesty, and the begetting God were that very thing the Son is. They go further, searching out what that very thing is, to beget — if it is lawful to stretch human senses all the way to that secret which forestalls all times and the ancient days, and stands out above the very beginning, and passes beyond whatever a man can ask. Since hard is the way to know the seeds of beginnings, how shall it be granted to a mortal to inquire what beyond the beginning God has done, or in what manner he brought forth the Word, which lacks all beginning? This alone we know, that he who is handed down to be God, whom the unbegotten begetter has begotten, is one and one, whole and whole, not begun yet sprung into being, and co-eternal in the past with the Father, and born of the Father; yet the Father is not cut off, so that the Son should be a part of the Father, nor did the substance, extending itself by degrees, produce him and diminish something from the full godhead, while a changed portion forged the new Son. God is never convertible nor changeable, nor by begetting does he take anything from himself; but rather he is whole and from the whole God, light from light. But when is light without light? When does the gleaming brightness lack splendour? When is it that fire brought forth should diminish fire? When is Father and God and light not the God and Father of light? Who, if he was not Father of old, and begot the Son late, after the ages, becomes new, and advances into a new right — far be it that ever the full should advance, who needs no increase. He was ever both God and begetter, light and glory, nor did he afterward confer on himself that he be Father. So it comes that we believe Christ eternal with the Father, sprung from that author who had no author before him. If you doubt these mysteries of Christ the Son, O lost one, you are not of the catholic folk, but one of the incense-bearing herd, a worshipper of the Deucalions, devoted to a stake, an anointer of a fig-tree stump. Rather search out the signs of God at the very fount of antiquity; run through the records of the first writer, whom no foolish father or augur grandfather, no fable of old report, no chattering nurse, nor the crow loud and shrill with hoarse cawing taught the matter of God, but God himself, brought forth in person, God himself, gently with friendly converse, instructed the trembling mortal and unveiled himself and his highest things. Surely that most learned writer remembered that at the beginning of the world the Father did not alone, nor without Christ, shape the substance of the new creation. "God," he says, "made man, founding him, and gave him the face of God." What else is this than to say "he was not alone, but God stood by the working God," when the Lord made his work after the image of the Lord? Christ is the form of the Father, we the form and image of Christ; we are framed after the face of the Lord by fatherly goodness, since Christ would come, after the ages, into our face. I could draw many examples from the sacred books, unless you shrink from them, to teach you that not in the Father alone is the might of majesty placed, but that with the Father Christ is God, as the same genealogist says: "From the Lord the Lord rained flame upon the men of Sodom." What Lord, from what Lord, if the Father alone from the starry height looks down or blazes into wrath? The Son was scattering the wrath of the Lord and Father, armed with fires, the Son a Lord: both are one thunderbolt. Had these things, thus understood, watered the Jewish ears so as to touch their stupid hearts, they would have heard the Lord of hosts, who had come to save the perishing sheep; but from their ears all adornment had slipped away, and the head had already shaped a molten Baal, and stripped its little ears of their honour. The leader of the sinning people stands forth from the mountain of glittering light and from God's address, and the tablets carved by a dread finger he brings down to the blind tents; but the people fall on their faces, not to see, in the image of the deep law, Christ written in riddles — unhappy folk, who veiled their fearful eyes, dazzled by the light, and hid their face under a pressed-down covering! But we, the veil cast off, behold Christ face to face, and look upon God with open countenance, nor lie cast down beneath a heavy law with lowered brow, but recognize the ray of the law with uplifted face. Alas, tree once leafy with fruitful boughs, alas, root once rich with fatted olive-berries! See, with a wild olive grafted on you now your trunk grows green again and is clothed with the bark of a foreign book; have pity now upon yourself. The shoot of the wild olive, exulting, does not vaunt itself upon an alien stock, but warns you, mindful of your own kind, to leave off saddening your foliage with bitter rind, and not from the lowest root to envy the twigs sent up to the lofty tops — you who blaspheme the Lord Christ, most ungrateful race. Tell me of your Passover; tell me, from whose blood is the feast so solemn to you? What lamb, after all, is slain, a yearling? Sacred is that to you as the years return, but sacred in the beast. Foolish it is so to believe a thing sacred, that with the blood of a bleating sheep the lintels at the top should be touched, to revel in dances, to eat the unleavened bread of fine flour, while your morals swell, leavened with crime. You have no sense, imprudent man, that you are figuring forth our Passover, and tracing it out in the foredrawn furrows of the ancient law. The whole sacrament that the true Passion keeps — the Passion which guards our brow with blood and smears our bodily house, the doorpost marked — this the Egyptian plague fled, the storms shut out, this loosed the deadly kingdom of the Pharian king, and from the thick hail of worldly power rescued Abraham with his stock and faithful race. Abraham's race is the true one, for whom the blood on the doorpost, believed and inscribed, glows red, for whom God was seen on earth with faith that does not doubt, God true from the true Father. He saw God, and at once believed what he saw; but you, posterity of the flesh, beholding all things carnally, do the work of the flesh under a law which the inner spirit fulfils; for the fleshly law did not flow from heaven, the law which you keep in the flesh, but it was pregnant with Christ and would bring forth from its womb my hope — what hope but the kindly light of the godhead and the coming of the Lord, whom Abraham's first faith had seen, and whom the Father had once promised to our eyes to behold and to the voice of the law to attest? And not the law alone; for what letter does not now hold Christ, or what bookcases of the scribes do not, crammed with Christ's praise, celebrate his miracles in new books? The Hebrew pen composes, the Attic abundance composes, and the eloquence of the Ausonian tongue, the third, composes. Pilate, unknowing, commands: "Go, scribe, set forth in tri-painted verses what power is fixed below; let the title at the head of the cross be threefold, that in a threefold tongue Judaea may know it as she reads, and Greece learn it, and golden Rome, in reverence, take account of God." Whatever the curved trumpet bellows, re-echoing through hollow bronze, whatever the great breath spews from its hidden draught, whatever the chaste lyre, whatever the lute resounds, whatever the organs blend in consonance with their unequal reeds, whatever the rival caves give back to shepherds' voices, all celebrate Christ together, all sound Christ, all things even the mute, given soul by sacred strings, speak Christ. O name most sweet to me! light and glory and hope and my defence, O sure rest from labours, soothing savour on the lips, fragrant scent, watering fount, chaste love, fair beauty, sincere delight! If the deaf race denies that so many heraldings of you, so many voices of things and elements, messengers of such great gladness, enter its stupid ears, let it hear the mad ravings of a raging monster's frenzy, which the frantic demon cries within the seized vitals, and let the wretched race believe its own. Apollo is tortured, struck by the name of Christ, nor can he bear the thunderbolts of the Word; so many lashes of the tongue rack the wretch as the praised miracles of God's Christ resound. The Lord's priest thunders: "Flee, cunning serpent, strip yourself from these limbs, and loose your hidden coils. You vex what is Christ's bondman, most corrupt thief. Cease, Christ is here, the avenger of the human body: you may not seize as plunder one to whom Christ has cleaved. Driven out, begone, windy fluid; Christ commands — get out." Amid these very words the burning Cyllenian howls, and Jupiter sighs out his familiar fires. Behold, into the Gerasene swine the fierce legion rushes, and, after the many chains beneath the tomb's rock, it utters the groans of its torments in long gruntings. It had cried, but from the mouth of a man: "We know you, Jesus, born of God, born of the sceptre and seed of David, what you are, why you come; by what power you drive us away we know, and we lie prostrate in the terror of your coming." Did this voice, O Judaea, not reach your ears? It reached them, but did not pierce the mind bereft of light, and, shut out at the very threshold, fled back. It heard the coming of the Lord, whom only the Iberian evening holds, and the new dawn that receives the rosy risings. The gospel voice, with its piercing word, loosed the Scythian frosts, and fervent thawed the Hyrcanian winters too, so that the river, now softer, stripped of its ice, the Rhodopean Hebrus, flows from the Caucasian crag. The Getae have grown gentle, and the savage Geloni, bloodthirsty, gladly mix their bloodless cups with wine, about to taste sacred draughts from the blood of Christ. The treacherous land of Atlantic Moors has long known him too, and has given its long-haired kings to Christ's altars, since the Spirit touched a mortal womb — that Spirit, who is God, who clothed himself in a mother's body and made man out of virginity. The Delphic caverns have fallen silent, their oracles condemned; the cauldron no longer rules the tripods, no longer does the panting fanatic foam out fates, the doom published in the Sibyl's books; lying Dodona has lost its mad vapours, dead now, mute Cumae mourns its oracles, nor does Hammon bring back answers in the Libyan Syrtes. The Romulean Capitol itself grieves over its own princes that Christ shines as God, and that its temples, destroyed, have fallen by the rule of leaders; now the suppliant purple of the Aeneadic ruler is laid low before the courts of Christ, and the supreme sovereign adores the standard of the cross. Yet of all the princes there was not lacking one, in my boyhood, as I remember, a leader most mighty in arms, a founder of laws, most renowned in word and hand, counsellor of his country — but no counsellor of religion to be kept, a lover of three hundred thousand gods. Faithless to God, though not faithless to the world, he would bow his august head before the feet of clay-made Minerva, and lick the sandals of Juno, roll himself before the soles of Hercules, smear the knees of Diana with wax, nay, submit his brow to Apollo's gypsum, or perfume Pollux's horse with burning entrails. Once, by chance, sacrificing, he was appeasing Hecate with much blood; there, to be struck by the festal axes of the priests, herds of cows had stood, and the twisted cypress shaded the heifers crowned with garlands on their bound brows. And now, the knife thrust in, the old man, fillet-decked according to custom, had laid bare the entrails, and with bloody hands handled the fibres trembling with the chill of death, and the cunning interpreter marked the last beats of life in the warm heart, by their number and their end: when suddenly amid the rites the priest cries out, pale: "What am I doing? A greater, best king, a greater godhead, I know not what, intervenes at our altars than the foaming bowls of milk can support, the blood of the slain cattle, the sacred boughs, the garlands. I see the summoned shades scattered afar; terrified Persephone turns her steps backward, her torches quenched, a fugitive, her scourge dragged behind; the secret murmur does nothing, the Thessalian spells avail nothing, no victim calls back the troubled ghosts. Do you not see how, the censers growing cold, the fire withers, how the coal grows sluggish in its hoary ash? Behold, the Palatine attendant cannot hold the bowl in his hand; from his shattered grip the balsam drips down; the priest himself wonders to see the laurels yield from his crown, and the doubtful iron disappoints the victim. Surely some Christ-worshipper has crept in here, some one of these young men; this kind of men the fillet trembles at, and every couch of the gods; far off be the washed and anointed; let fair Proserpine return, the rites set right." He said, and bloodless he collapses, and, as if he himself beheld Christ threatening with brandished thunderbolt, the prince too, half-dead, his diadem laid aside, grows pale and looks round at the bystanders, whether any nursling of the chrism would seal his brows with the inscribed wood — one who, by his brow, had thrown into confusion the Zoroastrian whispers. A squire from the troop of golden-haired boys, guard of the purple side, one alone is caught out, and does not deny it, and casts away his twin-pointed, gem-studded spears, and confesses that he bears the sign of Christ. The prince leaped forth in fear, the priest cast down, fleeing to his marble shrine, with no companion, while the trembling cohort, forgetful of its lord, raises its upturned faces to heaven and calls on Jesus. Now does it not grieve you for the deed? Now do you not repent? Behold for you Christ as God, unhappy Judaea, who, dissolving the earthly sabbaths, took mortals into the eternal sabbaths. He shone forth to the nations, blazed before kings, possesses the world, compelled Rome, mistress of empire, to yield to him, and subdued the Tarpeian images of the gods. Learn from your own evils, pitiable one, by what avenger at last your vain superstition and law carnally observed is punished, whose avenging power tramples you down. Do the Solomonic stones lie now, their metal destroyed, built by hand? That noble temple lies fallen. Why does it lie? Because the builder's hand, dissoluble, piled up that dissoluble cement; rightly it is loosed and lies, since all that is polished returns to nothing. What admits being made admits one day to perish. But if you wish to learn what our temple is by contrast, it is that which no craftsman, fitting it together by skill, composed, which no fir nor hewn pine wove, which never grew from cut marble; whose burden, lofty, propped on no columns, hung over a curved arch by slender art, but was made by the word of the Lord — not by a ringing voice, but by the Word that always was. The Word was made flesh. This temple is eternal, this has no end; this you, wishing to storm, attacked with scourges, cross, and gall. Destroyed, it lay beneath tormenting punishments — be it so; for it had from its mother's womb that which should be destroyed, but what by a brief death was loosed on the mother's side the majesty of the Father restores living on the third day's light. You saw it go on high, my temple, attended by angelic companies, by whose protection I am kept; the summits of that eternal gate hang on high, and through the inaccessible towers of the stairway glory is lifted up, and on the topmost steps shines the white-gleaming way. But ruins heaped together entomb your holocausts. What you deserve Titus taught, the Pompeian armies taught by plunder, by whom your members, uprooted, are carried through all the regions of the lands and seas. You will go forth, wandering here and there; the Jew strays afloat, since, torn from his native seat, he pays the penalty for the murder, and besprinkled with the blood of Christ denied, he settles the crimes he committed. See to what the valour of his ancient forefathers has flowed down! The heir nobility, fallen away from the ancient faithful, has perished, but is no longer noble; it, a captive, looks up to the recent faith — so great is the force of the new believing; the once faithless race, confessing Christ, triumphs, but, vanquished as a denier of Christ, is subjected to his rule, having drawn faithful lords by lot.

There are those who set up a teaching akin to the Jewish frenzy, following Christ by a middle reason — this only, that he is true man; but that from heaven he is not God, they affirm; in piety they confess him, in majesty they deny him: for the praise of his character they celebrate him as hallowed, but take away the heights of the supernal nature. Every excellent work, through which prevailing skill flashes forth, is of genius or of strength: that thrives by a keen heart, this excels by hard force. But each is mortal to man; for hoary genius grows old, and the ages consume strong arms. These things, in the Lord's power and eternal praise, we do not follow: we follow that which from no earthly seed springs, which takes no impure beginning from manly taint; a tender fire sows him, not flesh nor a father's blood nor foul pleasure. The divine power, untouched in marriage, weds the maiden with a pure breath through her chaste womb; the unfamiliar newness of his birth bids that God be believed to be Christ, thus conceived; the unwedded virgin weds the Spirit, nor feels the flaw of love; her sealed maidenhood remains; heavy within and without unharmed, blooming with chaste fruitfulness, now a mother, yet a virgin still, a mother knowing no man. Why do you refuse? Why do you shake your empty, unbelieving head? An angel announces this with holy mouth: does it please you to believe and to open your ear to angelic words? The sacred virgin herself believed the warning of the gleaming minister, and therefore, believing, conceived Christ; for Christ comes to those who believe; the doubting breast, with its faith staggering, he scorns with averted honour. Virginity and ready faith drink Christ in the womb of the heart, and, about to bring forth, hide him in untouched recesses. Believe what the angel, sent from the Father's throne, declares. Or, if your blunted hearing cannot grasp the clear voice from on high, hear what the woman, pregnant by her husband, the believing old woman, cries, and at last grow sober. Wondrous faith! the child, caught up in the aged womb, salutes the virgin's Lord from his mother's mouth, and first the unborn infant, himself not yet born, announces the infant now ours; for the babe knew not yet to wail for himself, and opened his chattering lips to God, to Christ. Bring forth the secret utterances; come, open the book which holy Isaiah poured out with God breathing in him. It pleases me to scan and unroll the pen's furrows, which that golden hand drew with starry marks. Go hence, while humbly I adore the ruddy letters, while weeping I revere them and press sweet kisses on them; joys conceive tears, joys give weeping. The promised day has come which that little verse had said would come, when the virgin in childbed, with the witness without doubt of her betrothed, to whom the care of the pledged chastity belonged, brought forth, and made me behold my Emmanuel. Is he now our God? A man, he dwells and stands with us, and proves his name, and the verse, obscure to the ancient ages, he illumines with his present face. Is he God, whose cradle the Eastern man, in reverence, on gilded dishes brings royal viands as a suppliant to the virgin's lap amid the child's swaddling-clothes? Who, so winged and most like the swift south wind, a messenger, reached the peoples of the Dawn and farthest Bactra, as the hours boasted that the day had dawned on which the tender Christ would hang from an unwedded breast? "We have seen this child," they say, "borne among the stars, and blazing above the ancient tracts of the signs." The all-night astrologer froze, trembling on the Chaldean peak: the Serpent had yielded, the Lion had fled, the Crab had drawn in its sidelong feet, retreating in its order, the Bull, his horns broken, bellowed tamed, and the Goat-star withered with torn shaggy hair; hence, driven off, slips the Water-boy, thence the Arrows; flight parts the wandering Twins; the shameless Virgin betrays her silent lovers in the vault of the world; and the other fires that hang in the dreadful clouds feared the new Day-star: the wan wheel of the sun sticks fast, and feels its ruin now, now coming, and that it must be veiled at midday with a grey covering, and the splendour of the sky perish in a daytime night, darkness suddenly clouding the world's head. Shall I not heap this child with gifts of myrrh and frankincense and gold? I know whom I see, what gifts to repay. Shall I not revere him, who, seen in heaven and found on earth, as king and God governs each emblem of nature, and, shattering the nether realms in the tomb, bids the buried rise and go with him? He dwells in heaven, intervenes on earth, breaks open the hidden Tartarus — true is the faith; he is God, who wholly is everywhere. Did vain mind or tongue, perchance, deceive those men? Did they give frustrating gifts by chance mishaps, or dedicate their vow under blind honour? What cause or reason, moreover, to bow their necks before the feet of Mary and the rattles of the little child, if he were only mortal, and no supreme power filled the tender limbs with divine breathings? But now take away the Magi, the frankincense, gold, the gifts of myrrh, which taught the true God, the manger, the swaddling-clothes, the mother's lap adored by the burning torch of the star: let the very power of his deeds and the marvels speak God. I see the raging winds suddenly grow gentle when Christ commands; I see the seas, struggling with great whirlwinds, stretched into a calm marble plain at Christ's command; I see, when he is trodden, the very gulf, while it suffers it, solidify its surface with hardening water. He himself walks over the flowing waves on shining soles, and steadies his footsteps on the pressed-down flood; he himself rebukes the south winds, and bids the gusts be still. Who would command the savage north winds, "Go, be silent in your prison-cells, and quit the wide sea," unless it were the same heaven-mighty founder of the north winds? Snowy Boreas acknowledges, and the rain-bringing Eurus, the lord of clouds and master of tempests, and, the calm sky watching, they sweep away the storm they had stirred. Who has trodden the waters of the sea? Who, with footsteps pressed in, ranging over the grey shallows, has worn the wet path not sunk, hung in the air and with dry foot, save the maker of the sea-water, who once as the Spirit, poured over the surface from the Father's mouth, hovered upon the waves not yet divided nor enclosed by a fixed shore? The water bore the step of its Lord-servant, and, losing its mobility, drew itself together for solid use. Why should I recount the diverse renowned deeds of God's Christ? When you have looked into them more deeply, O denier of his majesty, not doubting him man, you yourself will confess his godhead. He smeared blind eyes, and gave them light, with mud, making the earth moist with sacred spittle, handling it with his fingers: covered night had held the clay-medicine, the spreading moisture removed the darkness; moreover he showed in what laver the gloom must be cleansed: Siloam pours back its waters at varied moments, nor always gasps out its stream, but by distinct turns receives its great draughts into its pool. The crowds of the languid thirst for the hope of the grudging fount, to wash the stains of their limbs in its pure swimming. Meanwhile they vie, awaiting the hoarse gushings from the dripping rock, and hang on the dry edge. This Christ bids the mud, set on from the fount, be washed away, and the face grow bright with the light poured in. For he knew that with mud he had once formed the figure, darksome before, and had added the medicine of his own mouth to Adam, the new man whom he first had fashioned. For without the divine breath of the most high Lord the earth was dry, fit before for no healing; but after the liquid Spirit, from the heavenly mouth, besprinkled the virgin soil, it is curable. Thence it draws sap, and with its slow moisture anoints its salvation, and pours in the day, washed by baptism. The blind man comes forth, his eyes now restored by Christ's mouth, and cries that from mud and bright streams he has taken light, and points out the author through the astonished towns, the author of light and giver of days, who did not disdain to show, in his own body, the cleansing of healing water to erring sick men. Out of many thousands I shall unfold the very fewest, and review in sum what the whole world cannot contain. Five loaves in the desert he bids, and two fishes, be set before the peoples for food, who by chance, not recalled by hunger, thronged the Master round the enclosure, and, forgetful of food, the villages, forts, market, towns, fairs, meeting-places, and cities had spurned, content to feed on his bounteous teaching. Many banquets of men seethe on the strewn hay; the comrades sat down a hundred at a time together, and the throngs spread themselves over countless tables, to be filled — now believe him God — with two little fishes and a few crusts, the food growing through its fragments. The feast eaten, the heaped-up courses overflow in piles; they fill twice six baskets with masses of crumbs after the supper; the gorged guest sweats out the heap of his belly, and the servant groans beneath the load. Who can heap small fare into great abundance? Who, but he who, framing the body and the food and all the body, created from nothing, no matter existing, the world? Not as a sculptor is wont to make a mass melted from the dross of bronze live, but God almighty fashioned the world without seed; nothing was all that is: that nothing should proceed and be and become new was bidden, then soon to grow great. From nothing it was small at first; increments added to the small enlarged all things in full measure. Therefore I, when I see thus, by the hands of Christ, the small nourishment of men grow, can I doubt that through him the scanty kinds of things and the elements of the world grew from nothing, first modest and then by degrees great, which from small things we see brought to completion? And lest, after men were fed, the leavings, trodden, should perish, nor lie a prey, left to wolves or foxes or little mice, with no keeper, twice six baskets were set by, which heaped up should keep the good things of Christ, displayed afar from the laden hampers. But why do I unfold these things with faltering voice, unworthy to sing what is holy? Come forth from the tomb, Lazarus, tell whose voice beneath the deepest earth you heard, what power penetrated the hidden things of death; that, when Christ, you being plunged in the blackening deep, calls you to return, you hear as if close by, and without delay are present? What Charybdis so near joins to the world above the kingdoms of darkness, parted by a thin boundary? Where are the gloomy Taenarian gates cast headlong into the vast chaos, and that lurking river, rolling its fires on its insatiable banks? Before the doors of the tomb, which huge stones, with a hard barrier, had sealed, built up on the hollowed rocks, stands the Lord and calls the name of his cold friend; and without delay the funeral horror, the rocks rolled back, casts out the obsequies, the corpse walking forth alive. "Loose now the fragrant bands, glad sisters" — only the scent of the sprinkled spice breathes out its perfume, nor does the foul air bring back the stench from the body's corruption; the eyes, dissolved with dripping gore, the former beauty rouses to a mirror, and the rotted cheeks the purple, dyed with redness, little by little clothes. Who could pour a soul through the dissolving limbs? Surely he who gave the limbs, who breathed through the moist vein of the clay-made reed, for whom the wasting clod drew its blood-red colours, dyed with moisture. O death, now gentle by laws given ears, O death deaf before, now taught to follow whatever is bidden, to whom was so much over you allowed? Convicted, confess him to be God who alone snatches me from you — Jesus. Hide the deniers of Christ; no one envies you; hide them; use your own lot, the blasphemers to be held in perpetual night; release the captive folk of the righteous, who know how to call Christ man and God, so that the true and supreme God should bear what is mortal. He himself wears the work that he built, nor is the maker ashamed to bear what he brought forth — I mean the body and the power of the soul. This he had fashioned with his fingers, the soul he had breathed from his mouth. God takes the whole man, since the whole is from himself, and redeems the whole he had taken, leading back all, whatever man is — this to the tomb, but that to the abyss.

Here the doubting disputant meets us and objects this: whether faith allows that a substance, breathed in by inspiring God, should feel torment, and that it should seek the lowest depths of the nether sky and be cooked in the pit. Believe that the soul is not God, but believe it greater than all created things; believe it created too. For it was formed by the mouth of God, it which was not before, but formed most beautiful in its nature and painted with divine things, full of God and like its creator — yet not itself God, since it is not a begetting, but a making of God; alone from the Parent's heart the Son flashed forth; true, true God is he. It was granted to the soul that suddenly, what was not, should be. That one is co-eternal with the Father and always in him, and, not made but born, holds whatever is the Father's; this is like, as it were a shadow of God. So the maker himself spoke, planning to build man, of both ranks joined together, in his own likeness; but the shadow has not that solid body whose imitation is in the shadow, and the one is true, the other a counterfeit of the true. It is like in this, that it is consumed by no ages, that, wise and capable of justice and queen of things, it commands, foresees, weighs, takes precaution, begins to speak, the maker of words and morals, and equipped with a thousand arts, and taught to range the heaven with its sense. In these the founder shaped the soul like himself, in the rest unlike: for it is easy to grasp it, which measure and form define; but God, immense and outpoured beyond all things, has in himself nothing final, that he might be enclosed or held by sense. His incomprehensible power remains, which lacks a last line, which a space not to be measured extends. Therefore the soul, made and less than its great maker and greater than the rest and ruling over all, the turbid corruption of the rotting flesh conceives at its birth, and, infused through the decaying limbs, shares it from its own dregs; then there comes to be mingled a nature of sinning, with the simple breath and the clay. But perhaps you may deny that the soul, because it flowed from the Lord's mouth, is compounded and made, as being itself a part of God — which to say is a crime — that it, forgetful, should draw foul guilt and, plunging ruined and condemned, enter the covered chaos. That it is a thing of God, I do not deny; yet that part is by no means to be called God, which began in time, nor is it to be thought earlier or older than the first creature. For then I see it made, when into the friendly heart's home its sister entered, and, guest of the fresh clay, itself fresh, sat in the brotherly hall. That, indeed, is the Lord's breath, but it is not the full spirit and power of God, sent in such governance as he who breathed willed to keep the tenor of his breathing. It is impossible to behold the deep things of Sabaoth, but man is the mirror of the Godhead: in the body you may learn the incorporeal thing, skilful, with Christ as interpreter, who shows his own Father in a mortal body. Mark how varied are the vapours we pour from the mouth, as often as we breathe the gusts of the breathable soul. Now exhaled heat pants out a warm breath, breathing dewy mists from moist throats; when it pleases, into a cold wind with chilling blast the breath comes forth thin, and the air hisses. Add too the distinct breath which the musical pipe conceives: either it is sparing in pressed-down measure, or lifts a swelling boom on high with a full blast, or breaks hoarse measures, or softly whispers, or, drawing out a thin sound, prolongs sharp notes, or beats down a tender murmur with a small voice. Since you see that you can do these things in a mortal body, why not believe that the Eternal could pour in what soul he willed? Because, framing it, he breathed it out and poured it by prescribed measures, it must needs be made. In short, our soul's power knows much, but does not know all things — appointed to know and foreknow what is certain. Now what has a fixed limit, and to which to know all things is denied, is a creature; for it is proved founded and increased. Gather from a like case whether this is a creature: surely the Lord's hand created and composed the mortal body and the clay with its fingers — is the hand of God, then, disposed in joints? Has he a palm? Has he nails to close, bending, or to stretch the open hand? That figure is of our hand, which the uncircumscribed Lord has not in himself; but a form was handed down which, known to human minds, might give understanding, so that through a bodily semblance he is said to have moulded the figure of the body. So in turn the breathable thing was moulded by an incorporeal breath, and is said to be the work of the mouth, through which the slender form of the soul, built up, shone forth, and felt itself made by a fresh gift. If our flesh is not the making of a hand, neither is the soul the making of a mouth — begun by breath and inspiration and led into some place; for all that the hour of birth brings forth, a place receives; and any place that can contain a thing is limited, not poured into all things; and what is so limited as to be set in a fixed seat can now waver; and what has wavered is within the nature of fault; in short, the faulty, sad, falls back into punishment: this, believe me, is not God. Or, if the soul is majesty, show me what it is that floods the fallen and Christ-bereft soul with new grace, and that the Holy Spirit, justified by baptism, ennobles, and adds to the servant the glory it lacked; which, because it is granted to merits and denied to the mind, absurdly is the soul called God, or a part of God, which now drinks the divine and highest good from the eternal fount by obedience, now by fault or crime loses it, and now receives punishment, now, free, treads it down. Do you wonder that the soul sins, which has drawn by lot to dwell in a house compelled by flesh, when even the angel himself sins, who knows not to enter the perishable lodging of a wasting frame? He sins because he too is made, not begotten; in whatever way he is made, the maker Lord alone knows: let it be enough for me to believe it made. Alone free from the stain of sin is the founder of the world, the unbegotten and begotten God, Father and born of the Father, who alone and exempt, to admit grim torment inviolate, performs it, and feels nothing bitter. Say that the soul is exempt from cross and pain, if you know it free from guilt and void of crime; but it which can sin can also yield to punishment. It indeed was pure while once it was founded, which, infused, made the rude clay come to life, inasmuch as, from the liquid seed of nature, its first habits it received, and, expressed from the serene height above — but soon, when it was bidden to be bound to the heavy field, soothed too much by sweet allurements, it grew cold, and from the wallowing-places defiled the precious fire, while, transgressing the law set by God, it wickedly tramples it. This is the first nature of the soul; so, founded simple, it fell into vice through the foul covenants of the flesh, and thence, stained with the evil sinning of the first Adam, infected the whole race of men that sprouts from him, and infancy holds at its rising the inborn stains of the first man, nor is anyone born guiltless. Yet an error must be shunned, lest by the propagation of the flesh the fount of souls be believed transfused into the offspring after the example of blood, whose vein is woven by descent. Souls do not give birth to souls, but by a hidden law nature pours forth its work, whereby the little vessels may breathe, and a vital spark be present to the things compelled. Although it, infused, ever penetrates each new moulded thing as new, yet it is called old, from the crime of our forefathers, since it is congealed in unwashed decay. Hence a second generation returns, and hence is washed the impurity of nature, and again we are reborn, drenched within, that the shining soul may put off the old Adam. Because the soul, joined to it, draws the matter of sin from the kindling of the flesh, and likewise is itself an incentive of sinning to its companion, the avenging punishment implicates both as guilty, sinning under one mind, and burns the partners in sin with equal torments. From these crosses Christ frees us, sole bearer of an undefiled mother and of an innocent body. The nature exposed to punishment, but not the nature of vices exposed to contacts, Jesus put on, and therefore, undefiled, he owed nothing to punishment, free from fraud, free from every stain of guilt. What would the savage attendant of sin, punishment, do in the limbs of Christ? What could the death of man, without crime, avail? Surely with empty efforts and without sinews they would fall barren, with no kindling of sin. Death is fed by guilt; he who has no guilt, fed by that very lack, consumes empty death. So death was consumed in the body of the Lord Christ, so it perished, while, parched, it had not its accustomed food. Look up, therefore, only to the blameless godhead, the power of the Father and of Christ, and now cease to kindle envy against our soul, that it is God or that it is a small portion of God, since to cut anything from Christ and to lop a part from God or to pluck off so much of the godhead is not allowed — full ever to itself and in itself.

It is worth the labour to bring forth the shadow of a misty teaching, which slender atoms set up in their minute structure; but it falls hollow and melts away like the wind, nor sustains itself in its empty flux. The Manichean says that God, airy, without a true body, flew about — a lying phantom and a hollow likeness of a body, having nothing tangible. And first consider whether it befits to assign anything counterfeit to God, whose pure glory admits nothing of falsehood; here, fitting himself with deceiving limbs, he would have feigned to be man by a windy, crafty art, lying so often, when he said: "To inveterate diseases I grant pardon, and at once I remit sins: he is the Son of man who can drive out the plague of the flesh and loose and dissolve the bonds of crimes: rise up sound, rise up unharmed, take up now your pallet: this the Son of man — do I command it?" Does he seem worthy who is witness to himself and knows himself and his own flesh? What? When he warned his disciples beforehand what the Son of man was about to suffer, foreknowing with faithful mouth, did he not confess that with fatherly power he was true man? But if I do not believe it, he deceived. If you ask, Manichean, what the nature of God is, all that is, is true. For if he does anything faulty, he is not God: divine practice admits no fault. You object against the eternal Lord that, slippery, to us he came, feigning something other than the true one had. Be dumb, frenzy; bite your own tongue, wicked dog, consuming your words with mangled palate. Matthew withstands the barker and refutes his rage, who notes every kind of fleshly stock down to the bodily Christ, descending through six times seven names of men, and weaving the vein of deep blood from forefathers through the genealogies with a long thread. The seventh week Christ came to add to the sixth, this number — Christ, who completes the peaceful year that remits all things ensnared in contracts of many kinds, and lifts man from man's death. For then the imperfect clay was mortal: the one perfect and whole man comes, Jesus, to whom nothing of the seven sevens was lacking, from which he might perfect the mortal race with everlasting power. This is he for us who completes the seventh sabbath, that our flesh, joined to God at last, may rest, which twice three sabbaths vexed with deadly evils. Let us run by the well-known steps and follow the line of kings: you will find that Christ flowed forth from the flesh of human parents, who is of the seed of David, to be reckoned, the stock reviewed, as heir of the blood. What? When holy-speaking Luke, the germ traced back, drives the series upward, the body of the descendant climbing and tracing back the course through ancient forefathers, Christ ascends to seventy-and-two beginnings (for he sent just as many teachers into the world); the steps descended in being born he retraced in returning, carried back to the very summit of the earthly body, Adam. Thence the parent Deity receives its own and ours, mingled, and through Christ Adam becomes the son of the most high God. It remains that you imagine an airy race from its origin, airy nobles, Levi, Judah, Simeon, airy David, the bodies of great kings airy, and the very womb of the fruitful virgin swelling with deceiving air and mists and cloud; let the windy blood vanish, the soft bones melt away, the texture of the flying sinews perish; let an idle south wind carry off all that was done; let thin breezes scatter it; let what we all are be a fable — and what does Christ do if he does not take me up? Or whom does he free, weak, if he disdains to approach the burden of the flesh and shudders at the monuments of his own hands? Does he think it unworthy to take on a clay body, he who once thought it not unworthy to handle the clay himself, when he composed the vessel from soil not yet of flesh, but, with the glue of inert clay, drew out the rotting limbs under his pressed thumb? So great is his love of the earth, so great his love of us, that he deigns to take up the soft clod of the rich soil with divine fingers, nor does he count sordid the contagions of the clinging mass. He had bidden light to be made, and it was made as he had bidden; all things at his bidding command drew forth new forms when brought out: man alone earned to take his shapeable face from the Lord's hand, and to be born from the maker-craft of the Godhead. To what end, then, did so great indulgence fall to our clay, that, handled by the Lord's hands with honourable art, it became sacred, ennobled now by the very touch? Because God had decreed to mingle Christ with the uncorrupted soil, what he wished to fashion for the saints he held worthy of holy fingers, and to found as a dear pledge. Nature indeed, destroyed, abandoned the form of the compelled earth, and yielded, liable to death: but the nature of God, never to be dissolved, willed the perishable earth, corrupted first by our use, to be his own, that it might be no longer corruptible. Christ is our flesh: for me it is dissolved and for me it rises; I am dissolved by my death, by Christ's power I rise again. When Christ dies, when he is buried with weeping, I see myself: when, able to return, he stands forth from the tomb, I behold God. If it is a phantom of my limbs, it is also a phantom of God; in both cases Christ must needs be a liar, if Christ knows how to deceive by appearance. If he is not true man — whom death itself proves a man — neither is he true God, whom the glory of his work betrays to be God. Either believe he dies, or refute that he is present, and by both reasons deny that Christ is true. For what is glorious, if Jesus did not die and return? That power of God is memorable, that, slain, he should come back to the world above and rise buried. Whoever wishes to call Christ God, let him say the same is man, lest his majesty lose its mighty deeds.

I know that my body rises in Christ. Why do you bid me despair? I shall come by those ways by which he came back, death trodden down: this is what we believe. And I shall come whole; for I shall be restored neither lesser nor other than I now am. Face, vigour, and the same colour, that now lives, shall be, nor shall the trench of the opened tomb vomit me back defrauded of tooth or nail. He who bids me return will give back nothing feeble; for if feebleness returns, it is no restoration. What chance has snatched, what disease, what grief has drained, what gnawing age has lopped with wasting decay, all shall return into the limbs repaired at my coming back. For conquered death owes faith, lest by the fraud of the tomb it give back something short, though it has now devoured shortened bodies; yet feebleness and the violence of disease was the power of death: it shall give back what piecemeal it had swallowed, in whatever way, lest the dead man wholly not return, if anything be lacking from the full body. Drive fear from your heart, my limbs, and believe yourselves about to return with Christ to God; for he bears you and recalls you with him. Laugh at threatening diseases, despise inflicted mishaps, spit upon the loathsome tombs; rising, go where Christ calls you forth.