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| Chapter XXXV
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Chapter
XXXV.
But the
descent into the water, and the trine immersion of the person in it,
involves another mystery. For since the method of our salvation was
made effectual not so much by His precepts in the way of teaching2026
| 2026 ἐκ
τῆς κατὰ
διδαχὴν
ὑφηγήσεως. This is what Krabinger finds in three Codd., and Morell
and Hervetus have rendered in the Latin. But the editions have
διαδοχὴν ῾Υφήγησις does not refer to any “preceding”
(“præeunte,” Hervetus) teaching; but to
“instruction” of any kind, whether “in the way of
teaching,” or of example, as below. | as by the deeds of Him Who has realized an
actual fellowship with man, and has effected life as a living fact, so
that by means of the flesh which He has assumed, and at the same time
deified2027
| 2027 the flesh which He has assumed, and at the same time
deified. “Un terme cher aux
Pères du IVe siècle, de nous
déifier” (Denis, Philosophie
d’Origène, p. 458). This θεοποίησις
or θέωσις is
more than a metaphor even from the first; “vere fideles
vocantur θεοί, non naturâ
quidem, sed τῇ
ὁμοιώσει, ait Athanasius;” Casaubon, In Epist. ad Eustath.
“We become ‘gods’ by grasping the Divine power and
substance;” Clement, Stromata, iv. That the Platonists had
thus used the word of τὸ
πρὸς μείζονα
δόξαν
ἀνυψωθὲν is clear. Synesius in one of his Hymns says to his
soul:—
“Soon commingled with the
Father
Thou shalt dance a
‘god’ with God.”
Just as elsewhere (in
Dione, p. 50) he says, “it is not sufficient not to be bad;
each must be even a ‘god.’” Cf. also Gregory Thaum.
Panegyr Origenis, §142. When we come to the Fathers of the
4th century and later, these words are used more especially of the
work of the Holy Spirit upon man. Cf. Cyrill. Alex.: “If
to be able to ‘deify’ is a greater thing than a creature
can do, and if the Spirit does ‘deify,’ how can he be
created or anything but God, seeing that he
‘deifies’?” “If the Spirit is not God,”
says Gregory Naz., “let him first be deified, and then let him
deify me his equal;” where two things are implied, 1. that the
recognized work of the Holy Spirit is to ‘deify,’ 2. that
this “deification” is not Godhead. It is “the
comparative god-making” of Dionysius Areopag. whereby we are
“partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Pet. i. 4). On the word as
applied to the human nature of our Saviour Himself, Huet
(Origeniana, ii. 3, c. 17), in discussing the statement of
Origen, in his Commentary on S. Matthew (Tract 27), that
“Christ after His resurrection ‘deified’ the human
nature which He had taken,” remarks, “If we take this word
so as to make Origen mean that the Word was changed into the human
nature, and that the flesh itself was changed into God and made of the
same substance as the Word, he will clearly be guilty of that deadly
error which Apollinaris brought into the Church (i.e. that the
Saviour’s soul is not ‘reasonable,’ nor His flesh
human); or rather of the heresy perpetrated by some sects of the
Eutychians, who asserted that the human nature was changed into the
Divine after the Resurrection. But if we take him to mean that
Christ’s human nature, after being divested of weakness after
death, assumed a certain Divine quality, we shall be doing Him
no wrong.” He then quotes a line from Gregory’s
Iambics:—
“The thing
‘deifying,’ and the thing ‘deified,’ are one
God:”
and this is said even of
Christ’s Incarnation; how much more then can it be said of His
Resurrection state, as in this passage of the Great Catechism?
Huet adds one of Origen’s answers to Celsus: “His mortal
body and the human soul in Him, by virtue of their junction or rather
union and blending with that (deity), assumed, we assert, qualities of
the very greatest kind.…What incredibility is there in the
quality of mortality in the body of Jesus changing, when God so planned
and willed it, into an ethereal and Divine” (i.e. the
matter, as the receptacle of these qualities, remaining the same)? It
is in this sense that Chrysostom can say that “Christ came to us,
and took upon Him our nature and deified it;” and Augustine,
“your humanity received the name of that deity” (contr.
Arian.). | , everything kindred and related may be
saved along with it, it was necessary that some means should be devised
by which there might be, in the baptismal process, a kind of affinity
and likeness between him who follows and Him Who leads the way.
Needful, therefore, is it to see what features are to be observed in
the Author of our life, in order that the imitation on the part of
those that follow may be regulated, as the Apostle says, after the
pattern of the Captain of our salvation2028
.
For, as it is they who are actually drilled into measured and orderly
movements in arms by skilled drill-masters, who are advanced to
dexterity in handling their weapons by what they see with their eyes,
whereas he who does not practise what is shown him remains devoid of
such dexterity, in the same way it is imperative on all those who have
an equally earnest desire for the Good as He has, to be followers by
the path of an exact imitation of Him Who leads the way to salvation,
and to carry into action what He has shown them. It is, in fact,
impossible for persons to reach the same goal unless they travel by the
same ways. For as persons who are at a loss how to thread the turns of
mazes, when they happen to fall in with some one who has experience of
them, get to the end of those various misleading turnings in the
chambers by following him behind, which they could not do, did they not
follow him their leader step by step, so too, I pray you mark, the
labyrinth of this our life cannot be threaded by the faculties of human
nature unless a man pursues that same path as He did Who, though
once in it, yet
got beyond the difficulties which hemmed Him in. I apply this figure of
a labyrinth to that prison of death, which is without an egress2029
| 2029 ἀδιέξοδον…φρουράν. Krabinger’s excellent reading. Cf. Plato,
Phæd. p. 62 B, “We men are in a sort of
prison.” | and environs the wretched race of mankind.
What, then, have we beheld in the case of the Captain of our salvation?
A three days’ state of death and then life again. Now some sort
of resemblance in us to such things has to be planned. What, then, is
the plan by which in us too a resemblance to that which took place in
Him is completed? Everything that is affected by death has its proper
and natural place, and that is the earth in which it is laid and
hidden. Now earth and water have much mutual affinity. Alone of the
elements they have weight and gravitate downwards; they mutually abide
in each other; they are mutually confined. Seeing, then, the death of
the Author of our life subjected Him to burial in earth and was in
accord with our common nature, the imitation which we enact of that
death is expressed in the neighbouring element. And as He, that Man
from above2030
, having taken deadness on Himself,
after His being deposited in the earth, returned back to life the third
day, so every one who is knitted to Him by virtue of his bodily form,
looking forward to the same successful issue, I mean this arriving at
life by having, instead of earth, water poured on him2031
| 2031 ἐπιχεόμενος. This may be pressed to imply that immersion was not
absolutely necessary. So below τὸ ὕδωρ τρὶς
ἐπιχεαμενοι | , and so submitting to that element, has
represented for him in the three movements the three-days-delayed grace
of the resurrection. Something like this has been said in what has gone
before, namely, that by the Divine providence death has been introduced
as a dispensation into the nature of man, so that, sin having flowed
away at the dissolution of the union of soul and body, man, through the
resurrection, might be refashioned, sound, passionless, stainless, and
removed from any touch of evil. In the case however of the Author of
our Salvation this dispensation of death reached its fulfilment, having
entirely accomplished its special purpose. For in His death, not only
were things that once were one put asunder, but also things that had
been disunited were again brought together; so that in this dissolution
of things that had naturally grown together, I mean, the soul and body,
our nature might be purified, and this return to union of these severed
elements might secure freedom from the contamination of any foreign
admixture. But as regards those who follow this Leader, their nature
does not admit of an exact and entire imitation, but it receives now as
much as it is capable of receiving, while it reserves the remainder for
the time that comes after. In what, then, does this imitation consist?
It consists in the effecting the suppression of that admixture of sin,
in the figure of mortification that is given by the water, not
certainly a complete effacement, but a kind of break in the continuity
of the evil, two things concurring to this removal of sin—the
penitence of the transgressor and his imitation of the death. By these
two things the man is in a measure freed from his congenital tendency
to evil; by his penitence he advances to a hatred of and averseness
from sin, and by his death he works out the suppression of the evil.
But had it been possible for him in his imitation to undergo a complete
dying, the result would be not imitation but identity; and the evil of
our nature would so entirely vanish that, as the Apostle says,
“he would die unto sin once for all2032
.” But since, as has been said, we only
so far imitate the transcendent Power as the poverty of our nature is
capable of, by having the water thrice poured on us and ascending again
up from the water, we enact that saving burial and resurrection which
took place on the third day, with this thought in our mind, that as we
have power over the water both to be in it and arise out of it, so He
too, Who has the universe at His sovereign disposal, immersed Himself
in death, as we in the water, to return2033
| 2033 ἀναλύειν. Cf. Philip. i. 23
(ἀναλῦσαι). | to
His own blessedness. If, therefore, one looks to that which is in
reason, and judges of the results according to the power inherent in
either party, one will discover no disproportion in these results, each
in proportion to the measure of his natural power working out the
effects that are within his reach. For, as it is in the power of man,
if he is so disposed, to touch the water and yet be safe, with
infinitely greater ease may death be handled by the Divine Power so as
to be in it and yet not to be changed by it injuriously. Observe, then,
that it is necessary for us to rehearse beforehand in the water the
grace of the resurrection, to the intent that we may understand that,
as far as facility goes, it is the same thing for us to be baptized
with water and to rise again from death. But as in matters that concern
our life here, there are some which take precedence of others, as being
those without which the result could not be achieved, although if the
beginning be compared with the end, the beginning so contrasted will
seem of no account (for what equality, for instance, is there between
the man and that which is laid as a foundation for the constitution of
his animal being? And yet if that had never been, neither would this be
which we see), in like manner that which happens in the great
resurrection, essentially vaster though it be, has its
beginnings and its causes here; it is not, in fact, possible that that
should take place, unless this had gone before; I mean, that without
the laver of regeneration it is impossible for the man to be in the
resurrection; but in saying this I do not regard the mere remoulding
and refashioning of our composite body; for towards this it is
absolutely necessary that human nature should advance, being
constrained thereto by its own laws according to the dispensation of
Him Who has so ordained, whether it have received the grace of the
laver, or whether it remains without that initiation: but I am thinking
of the restoration to a blessed and divine condition, separated from
all shame and sorrow. For not everything that is granted in the
resurrection a return to existence will return to the same kind of
life. There is a wide interval between those who have been purified,
and those who still need purification. For those in whose life-time
here the purification by the laver has preceded, there is a restoration
to a kindred state. Now, to the pure, freedom from passion is that
kindred state, and that in this freedom from passion blessedness
consists, admits of no dispute. But as for those whose weaknesses have
become inveterate2034
| 2034 οἷς δὲ
προσεπωρώθη
τὰ πάθη. | , and to whom no
purgation of their defilement has been applied, no mystic water, no
invocation of the Divine power, no amendment by repentance, it is
absolutely necessary that they should come to be in something proper to
their case,—just as the furnace is the proper thing for gold
alloyed with dross,—in order that, the vice which has been mixed
up in them being melted away after long succeeding ages, their nature
may be restored pure again to God. Since, then, there is a cleansing
virtue in fire and water, they who by the mystic water have washed away
the defilement of their sin have no further need of the other form of
purification, while they who have not been admitted to that form of
purgation must needs be purified by fire.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
