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Chapter
XVI.
“But,” it is said, “this change in our body by
birth is a weakness, and one born under such condition is born in
weakness. Now the Deity is free from weakness. It is, therefore, a
strange idea in connection with God,” they say, “when
people declare that one who is essentially free from weakness thus
comes into fellowship with weakness.” Now in reply to this let us
adopt the same argument as before, namely that the word
“weakness” is used partly in a proper, partly in an adapted
sense. Whatever, that is, affects the will and perverts it from virtue
to vice is really and truly a weakness; but whatever in nature is to be
seen proceeding by a chain peculiar to itself of successive stages
would be more fitly called a work than a weakness. As, for instance,
birth, growth, the continuance of the underlying substance through the
influx and efflux of the aliments, the meeting together of the
component elements of the body, and, on the other hand, the dissolution
of its component parts and their passing back into the kindred
elements. Which “weakness,” then, does our Mystery assert
that the Deity came in contact with? That which is properly called
weakness, which is vice, or that which is the result of natural
movements? Well, if our Faith affirmed that the Deity was born under
forbidden circumstances, then it would be our duty to shun a statement
which gave this profane and unsound description of the Divine Being.
But if it asserts that God laid hold on this nature of ours, the
production of which in the first instance and the subsistence
afterwards had its origin in Him, in what way does this our preaching
fail in the reverence that befits Him? Amongst our notions of God no
disposition tending to weakness goes along with our belief in Him. We
do not say that a physician is in weakness when he is employed in
healing one who is so1982
1982 So
Origen (c. Cels. iv. 15) illustrates the κένωσις and συγκατάβασις
of Christ: “Nor was this change one from the
heights of excellence to the depths of baseness (τὸ
πονηρότατον), for how can goodness and love be baseness? If they were,
it would be high time to declare that the surgeon who inspects or
touches grievous and unsightly cases in order to heal them undergoes
such a change from good to bad.” | . For though he
touches the infirmity he is himself unaffected by it. If birth is not
regarded in itself as a weakness, no one can call life such. But the
feeling of sensual pleasure does go before the human birth, and as to
the impulse to vice in all living men, this is a disease of our
nature. But then the Gospel mystery asserts that He Who took our nature
was pure from both these feelings. If, then, His birth had no
connection with sensual pleasure, and His life none with vice, what
“weakness” is there left which the mystery of our religion
asserts that God participated in? But should any one call the
separation of body and soul a weakness1983
1983 There
is no one word in English which would represent the full meaning
of πάθος.
“Sufferance” sometimes comes nearest to it, but not here,
where Gregory is attempting to express that which in no way whatever
attached to the Saviour, i.e. moral weakness, as opposed to
physical infirmity. | ,
far more justly might he term the meeting together of these two
elements such. For if the severance of things that have been connected
is a weakness, then is the union of things that are asunder a weakness
also. For there is a feeling of movement in the uniting of things
sundered as well as in the separation of what has been welded into one.
The same term, then, by which the final movement is called, it is
proper to apply to the one that initiated it. If the first movement,
which we call birth, is not a weakness, it follows that neither the
second, which we call death, and by which the severance of the union of
the soul and body is effected, is a weakness. Our position is, that God
was born subject to both movements of our nature; first, that by which
the soul hastens to join the body, and then again that by which the
body is separated from the soul; and that when the concrete humanity
was formed by the mixture of these two, I mean the sentient and the
intelligent element, through that ineffable and inexpressible
conjunction, this result in the Incarnation followed, that after the
soul and body had been once united the union continued for ever. For
when our nature, following its own proper course, had even in Him been
advanced to the separation of soul and body, He knitted together again
the disunited elements, cementing them, as it were, together with the
cement of His Divine power, and recombining what has been severed in a
union never to be broken. And this is the Resurrection, namely the
return, after they have been dissolved, of those elements that had been
before linked together, into an indissoluble union through a mutual
incorporation; in order that thus the primal grace which invested
humanity might be recalled, and we restored to the everlasting life,
when the vice that has been mixed up with our kind has evaporated
through our dissolution, as happens to any liquid when the vessel that
contained it is broken, and it is spilt and disappears, there being
nothing to contain it. For as the principle of death took its rise in
one person and passed on in succession through the whole of human kind,
in like manner the principle of the Resurrection-life extends from one
person to the whole of humanity. For He Who reunited to His own proper
body the soul that had been assumed by Himself, by virtue of that power
which had mingled with both of these component elements at their first
framing, then, upon a more general scale as it were1984
1984 upon a more general scale as it were. The Greek here is somewhat obscure; the best reading is
Krabinger’s; γενικωτέρῳ
τινι λόγῳ τὴν
νοερὰν
οὐσίαν τῇ
αἰσθητῇ
συγκατέμιξεν. Hervetus’ translation is manifestly wrong;
“Is generosiorem quandam intelligentem essentiam commiscuit
sensili principio.”—Soul and body have been reunited by the
Resurrection, on a larger scale and to a wider extent (λόγῳ), than in the former instance of a single Person (in the
Incarnation), the new principle of life progressing to the extremities
of humanity by natural consequence: γενικωτέρῳ
will thus refer by comparison to “the
first framing of these component elements.” Or else it
contrasts the amount of life with that of death: and is to be explained
by Rom. v. 15, “But not as the offence, so also is the free gift.
For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the
grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ,
hath abounded unto many.” Krabinger’s translation,
“generaliori quâdam ratione,” therefore seems correct.
The mode of the union of soul and body is described in Gregory’s
Treatise on the Soul as κρείττων
λόγος, and in his
Making of Man as ἄφραστος
λόγος, but in neither
is there any comparison but with other less perfect modes of union;
i.e. the reference is to quality, not to quantity,
as here. | , conjoined the intellectual to the sentient
nature, the new principle freely progressing to the extremities by
natural consequence. For when, in that concrete humanity which He had
taken to Himself, the soul after the dissolution returned to the body,
then this uniting of the several portions passes, as by a new
principle, in equal force upon the whole human race. This, then, is the
mystery of God’s plan with regard to His death and His
resurrection from the dead; namely, instead of preventing the
dissolution of His body by death and the necessary results of nature,
to bring both back to each other in the resurrection; so that He might
become in Himself the meeting-ground both of life and death, having
re-established in Himself that nature which death had divided, and
being Himself the originating principle of the uniting those separated
portions.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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