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BUT since we cannot (as we should much prefer) ignore them, it is now
time to expose the rest of your more subtle and insidious blasphemies that
at least they may not deceive ignorant folk. In one of your pestilent
treatises you have maintained and said that "Since man is the image of the
Divine nature, and the devil dragged this down and shattered it, God
grieved over His image, as an Emperor over his statue, and repairs the
shattered image: and formed without generation a nature from the Virgin,
like that of Adam who was born without generation; and raises up man's
nature by means of man: for as by man came death, so also by man came the
resurrection of the dead." They tell us that some poisoners have a custom
of mixing honey with the poison in the cups which they prepare; that the
injurious ingredient may be concealed by the sweet: and while a man is
charmed with the sweetness of the honey, he may be destroyed by the deadly
poison. So then, when you say that man is the image of the Divine nature,
and that the devil dragged this down and shattered it, and that God grieved
over His image as an Emperor over his statue, you smear (so to speak) the
lips of the cup with something sweet like honey, that men may drain the cup
offered to them, and not perceive its deadliness, while they taste what is
alluring. You put forward God's name, in order to speak falsehoods in the
name of religion. You set holy things in the front, in order to persuade
men of what is untrue: and by means of your confession of God you contrive
to deny Him whom you are confessing. For who is there who does not see
whither you are going? What you are contriving? You say indeed that God
grieved over His image as an Emperor over his statue, and repaired the
shattered image, and formed without generation a nature from the Virgin,
like that of Adam who was born without generation, and raises up man's
nature by man, for as by man came death, so also by man came the
resurrection of the dead. So then with all your earnestness, with all your
professions, you crafty plotter, you have managed by your smooth
assertions, by naming God in the forefront, to come down to a (mere) man in
the conclusion: and in the end you degrade Him to the condition of a mere
man, from whom under colour of humility you have already taken away the
glory of God. You say then that the Divine goodness has restored the image
of God which the devil shattered and destroyed, for you say that He
restores the shattered image. Now with what craft you say that He restores
the shattered image in order to persuade us that there was nothing more in
Him, in whom the image is restored, than there was in the actual image, of
which the restoration was brought about. And thus you make out that the
Lord is only the same as Adam was: that the restorer of the image is
nothing more than the actual destructible image. Finally in what follows
you show what you are aiming and driving at, when you say that He formed
without generation a nature from the Virgin like that of Adam, who was born
without generation, and raises up man's nature by man. You maintain that
the Lord Jesus Christ was in all respects like Adam: that the one was
without generation, and the other without generation: the one a mere man,
and the other a mere man. And thus you see that you have carefully guarded
and provided against our thinking of the Lord Jesus Christ as in any way
greater or better than Adam: since you have compared them together by the
same standard, so that you would think that you detracted something from
Adam's perfection, if you added anything more to Christ.
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