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| The Word Incarnate, as is the case with the Invisible God, is known to us by His works. By them we recognise His deifying mission. Let us be content to enumerate a few of them, leaving their dazzling plentitude to him who will behold.
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§54. The Word Incarnate, as is the
case with the Invisible God, is known to us by His works. By them we
recognise His deifying mission. Let us be content to enumerate a few of
them, leaving their dazzling plentitude to him who will behold.
As, then, if a man should wish to see God, Who is
invisible by nature and not seen at all, he may know and apprehend Him
from His works: so let him who fails to see Christ with his
understanding, at least apprehend Him by the works of His body, and
test whether they be human works or God’s works. 2. And if they
be human, let him scoff; but if they are not human, but of God, let him
recognise it, and not laugh at what is no matter for scoffing; but
rather let him marvel that by so ordinary a means things divine have
been manifested to us, and that by death immortality has reached to
all, and that by the Word becoming man, the universal Providence has
been known, and its Giver and Artificer the very Word of God. 3. For He
was made man that we might be made God347
| 347 θεοποιηθῶμεν. See Orat. ii. 70, note 1, and many other passages
in those Discourses, as well as Letters 60. 4, 61. 2.
(Eucharistic reference), de Synodis 51, note 7. (Compare also
Iren. IV. xxxviii. 4, ‘non ab initio dii facti sumus, sed primo
quidem homines, tunc demum dii,’ cf. ib. præf. 4.
fin. also V. ix. 2, ‘sublevat in vitam Dei.’ Origen
Cels. iii. 28 fin. touches the same thought, but Ath. is
here in closer affinity to the idea of Irenæus than to that of
Origen.) The New Test. reference is 2 Pet. i. 4, rather
than Heb. ii. 9 sqq; the Old Test., Ps. lxxxii. 6, which seems to
underlie Orat. iii. 25 (note 5). In spite of the last mentioned
passage, ‘God’ is far preferable as a rendering, in most
places, to ‘gods,’ which has heathenish associations. To us
(1
Cor. viii. 6) there are no such things as ‘gods.’ (The best
summary of patristic teaching on this subject is given by Harnack
Dg. ii. p. 46 note.) | ; and
He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the
unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might
inherit immortality. For while He Himself was in no way injured, being
impossible and incorruptible and very Word and God, men who were
suffering, and for whose sakes He endured all this, He maintained and
preserved in His own impassibility. 4. And, in a word, the achievements
of the Saviour, resulting from His becoming man, are of such kind and
number, that if one should wish to enumerate them, he may be compared
to men who gaze at the expanse of the sea and wish to count its waves.
For as one cannot take in the whole of the waves with his eyes, for
those which are coming on baffle the sense of him that attempts it; so for him that would take in
all the achievements of Christ in the body, it is impossible to take in
the whole, even by reckoning them up, as those which go beyond his
thought are more than those he thinks he has taken in. 5. Better is it,
then, not to aim at speaking of the whole, where one cannot do justice
even to a part, but, after mentioning one more, to leave the whole for
you to marvel at. For all alike are marvellous, and wherever a man
turns his glance, he may behold on that side the divinity of the Word,
and be struck with exceeding great awe.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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