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| In What Manner the Son Was Sent and Proclaimed Beforehand. How in the Sending of His Birth in the Flesh He Was Made Less Without Detriment to His Equality with the Father.
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Chapter 19.—In What Manner
the Son Was Sent and Proclaimed Beforehand. How in the Sending of
His Birth in the Flesh He Was Made Less Without Detriment to His
Equality with the Father.
25. Behold, then, why the Son of
God was sent; nay, rather behold what it is for the Son of God to
be sent. Whatever things they were which were wrought in time, with
a view to produce faith, whereby we might be cleansed so as to
contemplate truth, in things that have a beginning, which have been
put forth from eternity, and are referred back to eternity: these
were either testimonies of this mission, or they were the mission
itself of the Son of God. But some of these testimonies announced
Him beforehand as to come, some testified that He had come already.
For that He was made a creature by whom the whole creation was
made, must needs find a witness in the whole creation. For except
one were preached by the sending of many [witnesses] one would not
be bound to, the sending away of many. And unless there were such
testimonies as should seem to be great to those who are lowly, it
would not be believed, that He being great should make men great,
who as lowly was sent to the lowly. For the heaven and the earth
and all things in them are incomparably greater works of the Son of
God, since all things were made by Him, than the signs and the
portents which broke forth in testimony of Him. But yet men, in
order that, being lowly, they might believe these great things to
have been wrought by Him, trembled at those lowly things, as if
they had been great.
26. “When, therefore, the
fullness of time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman,
made under the Law;”532
to such a degree lowly, that He was
“made;” in this way therefore sent, in that He was made. If,
therefore, the greater sends the less, we too, acknowledge Him to
have been made less; and in so far less, in so far as made; and in
so far made, in so far as sent. For “He sent forth His Son made
of a woman.” And yet, because all things were made by Him, not
only before He was made and sent, but before all things were at
all, we confess the same to be equal to the sender, whom we call
less, as having been sent. In what way, then, could He be seen by
the fathers, when certain angelical visions were shown to them,
before that fullness of time at which it was fitting He should be
sent, and so before He was sent, at a time when not yet sent He was
seen as He is equal with the Father? For
how does He say to
Philip, by whom He was certainly seen as by all the rest, and even
by those by whom He was crucified in the flesh, “Have I been so
long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that
hath seen me, hath seen the Father also;” unless because He was
both seen and yet not seen? He was seen, as He had been made in
being sent; He was not seen, as by Him all things were made. Or how
does He say this too, “He that hath my commandments and keepeth
them, he it is that loveth me; and he that loveth me shall be loved
of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to
him,”533
at a time
when He was manifest before the eyes of men; unless because He was
offering that flesh, which the Word was made in the fullness of
time, to be accepted by our faith; but was keeping back the Word
itself, by whom all things were made, to be contemplated in
eternity by the mind when cleansed by faith?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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