|
MAN, then, was thus snared by the assault of the arch-fiend, and
broke his Creator's command, and was stripped of grace and put off
his confidence with God, and covered himself with the asperities of a
toilsome life (for this is the meaning of the fig-leaves); and was
clothed about with death, that is, mortality and the grossness of
flesh (for this is what the garment of skins signifies); and was
banished from Paradise by God's just judgment, and condemned to
death, and made subject to corruption. Yet, notwithstanding all
this, in His pity, God, Who gave him his being, and Who in His
graciousness bestowed on him a life of happiness, did not disregard
man. But He first trained him in many ways and called him back, by
groans and trembling, by the deluge of water, and the utter
destruction of almost the whole race, by confusion and diversity of
tongues, by the rule of angels, by the burning of cities, by
figurative manifestations of God, by wars and victories and defeats,
by signs and wonders, by manifold faculties, by the law and the
prophets: for by all these means God earnestly strove to emancipate
man from the wide-spread and enslaving bonds of sin, which had made
life such a mass of iniquity, and to effect man's return to a life of
happiness. For it was sin that brought death like a wild and savage
beast into the world s to the ruin of the human life. But it behoved
the Redeemer to be without sin, and not made liable through sin to
death, and further, that His nature should be strengthened and
renewed, and trained by labour and taught the way of virtue which leads
away from corruption to the life eternal and, in the end, is revealed
the mighty ocean of love to man that is about Him. For the very
Creator and Lord Himself undertakes a struggle in behalf of the work
of His own hands, and learns by toil to become Master. And since
the enemy snares man by the hope of Godhead, he himself is snared in
turn by the screen of flesh, and so are shown at once the goodness and
wisdom, the justice and might of God. God's goodness is revealed in
that He did not disregard the frailty of His own handiwork, but was
moved with compassion for him in his fall, and stretched forth His
hand to him: and His justice in that when man was overcome He did not
make another victorious over the tyrant, nor did He snatch man by
might from death, but in His goodness and justice He made him, who
had become through his sins the slave of death, himself once more
conqueror and rescued like by like, most difficult though it seemed:
and His wisdom is seen in His devising the most fitting solution of
the difficulty. For by the good pleasure of our God and Father, the
Only-begotten Son and Word of God and God, Who is in the bosom
of the God and Father, of like essence with the Father and the Holy
Spirit, Who was before the ages, Who is without beginning and was
in the beginning, Who is in the presence of the God and Father, and
is God and made in the form of God, bent the heavens and descended to
earth: that is to say, He humbled without humiliation His lofty
station which yet could not be humbled, and condescends to His
servants, with a condescension ineffable and incomprehensible: (for
that is what the descent signifies). And God being perfect becomes
perfect man, and brings to perfection the newest of all new things,
the only new thing under the Sun, through which the boundless might of
God is manifested. For what greater thing is there, than that God
should become Man? And the Word became flesh without being changed,
of the Holy Spirit, and Mary the holy and ever-virgin one, the
mother of God. And He acts as mediator between God and man, He
the only lover of man conceived in the Virgin's chaste womb without
will or desire, or any connection with man or pleasurable generation,
but through the Holy Spirit and the first offspring of Adam. And
He becomes obedient to the Father Who is like unto us, and finds a
remedy for our disobedience in what He had assumed from us, and became
a pattern of obedience to us without which it is not possible to obtain
salvation.
|
|
