Incarnation as Recapitulation
Incarnation as Recapitulation
The prophetic appearances of the Word pointed ahead to the one mystery: the union of God and man. All the threads in God’s saving plan are here entwined. Now the stupendous exchange takes place: God becomes ‘nothing’, so that the ‘nothings’ might become God, Irenaeus calls this wonderful thing recapitulation (ana-kephalaiosis). What he means is this: the second Adam is the repetition, in divine truth, of the first Adam, the Adam who turned away from God. The second Adam repeats the whole natural development of man at the higher level of divine reality. Sinful, lost, and wandering man is not just put back on course by the companionship of love; more profoundly, he is taken into that love.
St. Paul coined the word ‘recapitulation’ to express the meaning of the Incarnation: it was God’s plan to ‘bring everything together under Christ as Head, everything in the heavens and everything on earth’ (Eph 1:10, Jerusalem Bible translation). As recapitulation (ana-kephalaiosis), Christ is the Head (caput, kephale) of the world.
In Him everything becomes clear and has meaning: the ‘salvific order of sin’, which makes possible the revelation of God’s superabundant mercy (Irenaeus here puts forward his boldest ideas); the self-abasement of Christ, by which He gets down to man and lifts him up to God; the reconciliation of the world and God, of nature and grace, which has its foundation in the one Incarnation.
This indestructible interweaving of things is the true touchstone of what is Catholic. The Gnostics tear Christ into two pieces; a mortal man and a spiritual being incapable of suffering; in so doing, they disown the heart of Christianity. Only when matter, Christ’s very body, is safeguarded in God, is man redeemed. That is why Irenaeus regards the Eucharist as the pledge of redemption: here the fruit of the dark earth itself is transformed into grace.
The exchange between God and man
(94) The Son of God became the Son of Man, so that through Him we might receive adoption. This takes place when man receives and bears and embraces the Son of God.
III 16, 3
(95) He became the Son of Man to accustom man to receive God and God to dwell in man.
III 20, 2
(96) In His immeasurable love, He became what we are in order to make us what He is.
V, preface
(97) The proclamation of the Church alone is true, namely, that God’s own creation, which depends for its existence on God’s power and art and wisdom, has borne God. In an invisible way, the creation is borne by the Father, but in a visible way, it does indeed bear the Word. And this is the truth.
V 18, 1
(98) Spiritual though it was (cf Rom 7:14), the law only manifested sin; it did not suppress it, for sin did not hold sway just over the spirit, but over the [whole] man. It was necessary, therefore, that the One who came to slay sin, and to redeem man deserving of death, should become precisely what man is, namely, man. It was man who was dragged by sin into slavery and held fast by death, and so it had to be a man by whom sin was slain, a man who went forth from death.
III 18, 7
(99) [In this way] He attached and united man to God. Had man not vanquished the enemy of man, the enemy would not have been justly vanquished. On the other hand, had it not been God who granted salvation, we could never have possessed it securely. And if man had not been united to God, he could never have become a partaker of incorruptibility. It required the Mediator of God and men, through His kinship with both, to bring back both to friendship and concord, presenting man to God, revealing God to man.
III 18, 7
(100) There was no other way for us to receive incorruptibility and immortality than to be united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be united to incorruptibility and immortality without incorruptibility and immortality first becoming what we are, the perishable putting on imperishability, the mortal putting on immortality (cf 1 Cor 15:54), ‘so that we might receive adoption as sons’ (Gal 4:5)?
III 19, 1
Creation in Christ
Heaven and earth united in Christ
(101) Into the paradise of life the Lord leads those who obey His preaching, ‘recapitulating all things in Himself, things in heaven and things on earth’ (cf Eph 1:10). ‘Things in heaven’ are those which are spiritual, while the phrase ‘things on earth’ refers to that work of God which is man. Both these He has recapitulated in Himself, uniting man to the Spirit and making the Spirit to dwell in man. He became the head1 of the Spirit and gave the Spirit to be the head of man, for it is by the Spirit that we see and hear and speak.
V 20, 2
Created spirit and uncreated Spirit
(102) The Father bears the creation and His Word simultaneously, and the Word borne by the Father bestows the Spirit on all as the Father wills. To some, in the order of creation, He gives the spirit belonging to creation, the spirit that is created. To others, in the order of adoption, He gives the Spirit who comes from the Father, the Spirit brought forth by Him.2 And thus one God the Father is revealed, ‘who is above all and through all and in all’ (Eph 4:6). The Father is above all, and He is the head of Christ (cf 1 Cor 11:3). But the Word is through all, and He is the head of the Church (cf Eph 5:23). And the Spirit is in all, and He is the living water, which the Lord grants to those who believe rightly in Him and love Him and know that there is one Father, ‘who is above all and through all and in all’.
V 18, 2
Through the Incarnation the image of God is shown forth
(103) The truth of this was shown when the Word of God became man, assimilating Himself to man and man to Himself, so that, by His resemblance to the Son, man might become precious to the Father. For in times past it was said that man was made in the image of God, but not shown, because the Word, in whose image man was made, was still invisible. That is why man lost the likeness so easily. But when the Word of God was made flesh, He confirmed both things: He showed the true image, when He Himself became what His image was; and He restored and made fast the likeness, making man like the invisible Father through the visible Word.
V 16, 2
Man brought back by persuasion, not violence
(104) Apostasy reigned over us unjustly, and, though by nature we belonged to almighty God, it alienated us against our nature, making us its own disciples. And so, in all things mighty, in His justice indefectible, the Word of God turned justly against this apostasy, redeeming from it His own property. He did not use violence, as the apostasy had done at the beginning when it usurped dominion over us, greedily snatching what was not its own. No, He used persuasion. It was fitting for God to use persuasion, not violence, to obtain what He wanted, so that justice should not be infringed and God’s ancient handiwork not be utterly destroyed.
V 1,1
The Incarnation of the Word fulfils God’s first plan
(105) [The Gnostics] reject the commixture of the heavenly wine. They only want to be the water of this world and will not admit God into commixture with them.3 And so they remain in the Adam conquered and cast out of Paradise. They fail to see that, as at the beginning of our formation in Adam the breath of life which comes from God was united to what had been formed, animated man, and showed him to be a rational animal, so, at the end, the Word of the Father and the Spirit of God, united to the ancient substance of Adam’s formation, made man living and perfect, capable of knowing the perfect Father. This was so that, as in the ‘animal man’ we all die, so in the ‘spiritual man’ we might all be made alive (cf 1 Cor 15:22). Adam at no time escaped the Hands of God [the Son and the Spirit], to whom the Father said, ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness’ (Gen 1:26). That is why, at the end, ‘not by the will of the flesh or the will of a man’, but by the good pleasure of the Father, the Hands of God made the living Man, so that Adam might come into the image and likeness of God.
V 1, 3
Our Teacher had to become visible to us
(106) There was no other way by which we could learn the things of God than for our Teacher, who is the Word, to become man. No other could have revealed to us the secrets of the Father, none but the Father’s very own Word. ‘For who (else) has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counsellor?’ (cf Rom 11:34). Again, there was no other way for us to learn than to see our Teacher and hear His voice with our own ears. It is by becoming imitators of His actions and doers of His words that we have communion with Him. It is from Him who has been perfect from before all creation that we, so lately made, receive fulfilment.
V 1, 1
The only definitive thing is the Incarnation
(107) Vain indeed are those who claim that He only seemed to appear. These things took place in actual reality, not in mere imagination. If He had appeared as man without actually being man, He would not have remained what in truth He was, the spiritual reality that is God, for the spiritual is invisible. Nor would the truth have been in Him, because He would not have been what He seemed to be.
We said earlier that Abraham and the other prophets saw Him prophetically; by vision, they prophesied what was to come. If He had now appeared in that way, not being what He seemed to be, He would have given a kind of prophetic vision to men; we would then have to await another coming of this same Lord, in which He would be exactly what He had then been seen prophetically to be.
V 1, 2
(108) If the Lord had become incarnate in some other dispensation and taken flesh from another substance, He would not have recapitulated man in Himself. In fact, one could not then really use the word ‘flesh’, because the flesh is in continuity with the first fashioning of man, when he was made from the dust of the earth. Had it been necessary for Him to have matter from another substance, the Father, at the very beginning, would have used another substance to mould His handiwork. In fact, the saving Word made Himself precisely what lost man was, by His own act bringing man into communion with Himself and obtaining man’s salvation. Now what was lost had flesh and blood. For man was fashioned by God from the dust of the earth, and for the sake of man the whole dispensation of the Lord’s coming took place. He too, therefore, had flesh and blood, recapitulating in Himself not something else, but that original handiwork of the Father, ‘seeking [and saving] the lost’ (cf Luke 19:10).
V 14, 2
(109) What He appeared to be, He really was. God recapitulated in Himself that ancient handiwork of His which is man, in order to kill sin, to destroy death, and to give life to man. These are His true works.
III 18, 7
(110) When He became incarnate and was made man, He recapitulated in Himself the long history of mankind and, in that summing up, procured for us the salvation we lost in Adam.
III 13, 1
In the flesh the Word works by silence
(111) Just as He was man in order to be tempted, so He was Word to be glorified. The Word went [so to speak] into ‘repose’, so that He could be tempted, dishonoured, crucified, and put to death, while the manhood [in its natural weakness] was ‘absorbed’ [into the infinite power of the Word] when the Lord conquered, endured, rose again, and ascended.4
III 19, 3
(112) Scripture says that Christ, though He is God and spiritual, had to become a man capable of suffering. The Bible is, as it were, astonished at His sufferings, amazed that the One under whose ‘shadow we said we wanted to dwell’ should have to endure such agonies. By ‘shadow’ Scripture here means His body. For just as a shadow is made by the body, so the body of Christ is made by His Spirit. But He also indicates the lowliness of His body and the contempt to which it was subjected by this word ‘shadow’, in the sense that just as the shadow of an upright body lies on the ground and is trodden on, so the body of Christ was thrown to the ground and, as it were, trampled underfoot in His Passion. Finally, Scripture calls Christ’s body a ‘shadow’ because it shaded and enfolded the glory of the Spirit. People plagued with all kinds of illnesses were often laid in the street as Jesus passed by, and those touched by His shadow were healed.
D 71
(113) How could we be partakers of adoption as God’s sons without receiving from Him, through the Son, the gift of communion with Him?. . . This is why He passed through all the ages of human life, restoring to all men communion with God.
III 18, 7
The mystery of the Virgin
(114) The first formed man, Adam, received his substance from the untilled and still virgin earth (‘for God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground’, Gen 2:5) and was fashioned by the Hand of God, that is, the Word of God (for ‘all things were made through Him’, John 1:3, and ‘God took dust from the earth and formed man’, Gen 2:7). Similarly, the Word, recapitulating Adam in Himself, very fittingly received from Mary, who was still a virgin, the birth which made recapitulation possible . . . Why did God not take dust again? Why did He make the formation come from Mary? Precisely so that there was not some different formation, that it was not some different handiwork which was saved, that it was the very same one which was recapitulated, the likeness being preserved.
III 21, 10
(115) [The prophets] who proclaimed Him as Emmanuel, born of the Virgin, were showing forth the union of the Word of God with His own handiwork. They were announcing that the Word would be made flesh, that the Son of God would become the Son of Man, that the Pure One, in a pure way, would open that pure womb which regenerates men in God, that pure womb which He Himself made to be pure.
IV 33, 11
(116) Consequently, the Virgin Mary is found to be obedient, when she says, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word’ (Luke 1:38). Eve was disobedient; while still a virgin, she did not obey. She had Adam for a husband, but she was nonetheless still a virgin, for in Paradise ‘they were both naked and not ashamed’ (Gen 2:25). The reason for this was that they had only been created a short time before and so had no understanding of the procreation of children. They had first of all to grow up; only then could they multiply. Just as Eve, by disobeying, became the cause of death for herself and the whole human race, so Mary, betrothed to a predestined man and yet a virgin, by obeying, became the cause of salvation for herself and the whole human race. This is why the law gives the name ‘wife’ to a woman who is betrothed to a man but still a virgin, thereby indicating the circular movement from Mary back to Eve. What was bound could not be untied without a reversal of the process of entanglement. The first bonds had to be untied by the second, so that the second might set free the first. And, in fact, this is what happened: the first entanglement was untied by the second bond, the second bond playing the role of loosener of the first. This is why the Lord said that the first would be last and the last first (cf Matt 19:30; 20:16). And the prophet made the same point when he said: ‘Instead of fathers sons shall be bom to you’ (Ps 44:17), For the Lord, born as ‘the first-born from the dead’ (Col 1:18), took to His bosom the ancient ‘fathers’ and regenerated them into the life of God. He became the beginning of those who live, as Adam had been the beginning of those who die. St. Luke, therefore, begins his genealogy with the Lord and then takes it back to Adam, thereby showing that it was not the fathers who gave life to the Lord but the Lord who gave them rebirth in the Gospel of life. Similarly, the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied through the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve tied through unbelief, the Virgin Mary set free through faith.
III 22, 4
The recapitulation of suffering
Only real flesh suffers
(117) Had He received nothing from Mary [as the Gnostics believe], He would never have taken the foods which come from the earth, the foods by which the body taken from the earth is nourished. Nor would He have felt hunger after fasting, like Moses and Elijah, for forty days, if His body had not been seeking its proper nourishment. Nor would John his disciple have written: ‘Jesus, wearied by the journey, sat down’ (John 4:6), nor would David have prophesied of Him: ‘They added to the pain of my wounds’ (cf Ps 68:27). Nor would He have wept over Lazarus, nor would He have sweated drops of blood, nor would blood and water have flowed from His pierced side. For these are all signs of flesh taken from the earth, the flesh which the Lord recapitulated in Himself, in order to save His own handiwork.
III 22, 2
Real blood must flow if there is to be redemption
(118) Were it not a question of saving the flesh, the Word of God would not have been made flesh, and if the blood of the just had not required a reckoning, He would certainly not have had blood. But, in fact, from the beginning the blood of the just has had a voice. God said to Cain when he had killed his brother: ‘The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me’ (Gen 4:10). And since He required a reckoning for their blood, He said to those with Noah: ‘For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it’ (Gen 9:5). And again: ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed’ (Gen 9:6). Similarly, the Lord said to those who were to shed His blood: ‘All the just blood shed upon earth will be required, from the blood of just Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Truly I say to you, all this will come upon this generation’ (cf Matt 23:35-36; Luke 11:50-51). In saying this, He is pointing to the coming recapitulation in Himself of the blood shed by the prophets and all the just from the beginning; He is pointing to the ‘requiring’ of their blood in Himself. Now this blood would not have been required unless it had the capability of being saved. Nor would the Lord have recapitulated all this in Himself if He had not been made flesh and blood in conformity to the original handiwork. In the end he saved in Himself what in the beginning had perished in Adam.
V 14, 1
The meaning of history
Everything takes place at its appointed time
(119) [The heretics] err from the truth, because their doctrine is far removed from the true God. They are ignorant of the fact that His only-begotten Word, who has always been present to the human race, and who, by the Father’s good pleasure, has been united and mingled with His own handiwork and made flesh, is our Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered for us, rose again for us, and will come again in the glory of the Father to resurrect all flesh, to manifest salvation, and to apply the rule of just judgement to all submitted to Him.
There is one God the Father . . . and one Jesus Christ our Lord, who came by means of this whole dispensation, recapitulating all things in Himself. Now this ‘all’ includes man, the handiwork of God, and so He recapitulated man in Himself, the invisible becoming visible, the incomprehensible becoming comprehensible, the impassible becoming passible, the Word becoming man. He recapitulated all things in Himself, so that, as the Word of God rules over the supercelestial, spiritual, and invisible, so He has primacy over the visible and corporeal. Appropriating the primacy and appointing Himself Head of the Church, He draws all things to Himself (cf John 12:32) at the proper time.
With Him, there is nothing out of keeping, nothing out of season, just as with the Father there is nothing incongruous. For all things have been foreknown by the Father and accomplished by the Son in the way and at the time decreed. This is why, when Mary urged Him to perform the miraculous sign of the wine and wanted to partake, before the time, of the cup of recapitulation,5 the Lord checked her untimely haste and said: ‘O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come’ (John 2:4). He was waiting for the hour foreknown by the Father . . . It is clear, then, that everything foreknown by the Father was accomplished by our Lord in the fitting order and at the foreknown time and hour. He is one and the same Lord, but rich and multiple.
III 16, 6-7
Christ the Saviour forms Adam with Himself in view
(120) He recapitulates in Himself all the nations dispersed since Adam, and all the languages and generations of men, including Adam himself. This is why St. Paul calls Adam the ‘type of the One who was to come’ (cf Rom 5:14), because the Word, the maker of all things, did a preliminary sketch in Adam of what, in God’s plan, was to come to the human race through the Son of God. God arranged it so that the first man was animal in nature and saved by the spiritual Man, Since the Saviour existed already, the one to be saved had to be brought into existence, so that the Saviour should not be in vain.
III 22, 3
The old covenant as man’s preparation for Christ
(121) At the beginning, God, out of His generosity, formed man. For their salvation, He chose the patriarchs. And to teach the ignorant to follow God, He formed a people in advance . . . He thus accustomed man to bear His Spirit and to live in communion with God. He Himself needed no one, but He bestowed communion with Himself on those who needed Him. For those who were pleasing to Him, He sketched, like an architect, the plan of salvation. In Egypt, to those who could not see Him, He gave Himself as guide. In the desert, to the restless, He gave a most suitable law. In the promised land, to those who entered, He supplied a noble inheritance. For those who returned to the Father, He killed the fatted calf and presented them with the finest robe (cf Luke 15:22-23). In all these different ways, He prepared mankind for the harmonious music of salvation (cf Luke 15:25). St. John therefore says in the Apocalypse: ‘His voice was like the sound of many waters’ (Apoc 1:15). Yes, the waters of God’s Spirit are many, for rich and great is the Father. And at every stage the Word ungrudgingly gives His assistance to those subject to Him by drawing up a law adapted and appropriate to every creature.
IV 14, 2
(122) The giving of the law had to come to an end when the new covenant was revealed. For God does everything in measure and order; with him, there is nothing unmeasured, because there is nothing disordered. He spoke well who said that the immeasurable Father is measured in the Son, because the Son is the measure of the Father; He comprehends Him.
IV 4, 2
The meaning of creatureliness
(123) This is what distinguishes God from man: God makes, man is made. The Maker is always the same, while what is made has to have a beginning, a middle, and a final state of maturity. God makes well, man is well made. God is perfect in everything, like and equal to Himself, wholly light, wholly mind, wholly substance, the fount of all good, whereas man receives increase and progress towards God. Just as God is always the same, so man in God always makes progress towards God. God never ceases to benefit and enrich man, and man never ceases to receive the benefit and enrichment from God.
IV 11, 2
(124) God is uncreated, without beginning or end, in need of nothing, and the existence of all other things is His gift to them. Everything made by Him has received a beginning, and everything with a beginning is liable to dissolution, is subject to, and in need of, the One who created it.
III 83, 3
(125) Someone may at this stage raise this objection: ‘Could God not have created man perfect from the beginning?’ To this we must answer that, for God, who as regards Himself is uncreated and always identical with Himself, all things are possible. But the things He created come into existence later; their createdness has a beginning; and so they are of necessity inferior to the One who made them. The newly created cannot be uncreated. They are not uncreated, and so they fall short of perfection. Being younger, they are little children, and as little children, they are unaccustomed to and unskilled in perfect discipline. A mother could give her child grown-up food, but she does not, because the child is still incapable of receiving stronger nourishment. Similarly, God had the power to give man perfection from the beginning, but man was incapable of receiving it, because he was an infant. This is why our Lord came to us in these last times, recapitulating all things in Himself, not as He might have done, but as we were capable of beholding Him. He could have come to us in His indescribable glory, but we could not have endured the greatness of that glory. Therefore, as if to infants, the perfect Bread of the Father gave Himself to us as milk . . . He nourished us at the breast of His flesh, a suckling which was to prepare us for eating and drinking the Word of God. All this was to enable us to contain within ourselves the bread of immortality, which is the Spirit of the Father.
IV 38, 1
(126) It was for this reason that the Word of God, though perfect, became a child in solidarity with mankind. He did not do this for His own sake but because of the state of childhood in which man then existed. He wanted to be received in a way that suited man’s capacity to receive.
IV 38, 2
(127) God’s power and wisdom and goodness are displayed simultaneously. He reveals His power and goodness by creating and establishing, by His own free will, things which have no previous existence. He manifests His wisdom by making things part of one coherent and harmonious whole. His creatures, given, by His immeasurable kindness, increase and continued existence through the length of days, show forth the glory of the Uncreated, of the God who ungrudgingly gives what is good. As created, they are not uncreated, but as continuing in existence through long ages, they receive something of the power of the Uncreated; their permanent existence is God’s gratuitous gift. Thus God will have the primacy in all things, since He alone is uncreated and before all things; He causes everything to be. All other things remain in subjection to God. But subjection to God is incorruptibility, and the permanence of incorruptibility is the glory of the Uncreated. This is the order, this is the rhythm, this is the movement by which man, that created and organized being, is established in the image and likeness of the uncreated God. The Father, in His good pleasure, commands, the Son works and fashions, the Spirit nourishes and gives increase, and slowly but surely man makes progress and attains perfection, that is to say, comes close to the Uncreated. For the perfect is uncreated, and the uncreated is God. Thus man had first to be made, once made to grow, once grown to become an adult, once adult to multiply, once multiplied to grow strong, once strong to be glorified, and once glorified to see His Lord. For it is God whom one day we shall see, and the vision of God procures immortality, and ‘immortality brings one near to God’ (Wisd 6:19).
IV 38, 3
The meaning of sin
(128) It is, therefore, totally unreasonable when people refuse to await the time of growth, and ascribe the frailty of their nature to God. They know neither God nor themselves. They are insatiable and ungrateful, unwilling to be at the outset what they were made to be, human beings subject to passions. Passing beyond the law of the human race, they want, before becoming men, to be like God the Creator and abolish the difference between uncreated God and recently made man. They are more stupid than dumb animals, for they after all do not reproach God for not having made them men, but each gives thanks for being made what it has been made. We, by contrast, blame God because He has not made us gods from the beginning, but first men and then gods later . . .
In His generosity, He has bestowed the good and made man in His likeness, endowed with free will. By His foreknowledge, He knew the frailty of man and what would result from it, but in His love and power, He will triumph over the substance of created nature. It was necessary that, first, nature appeared, then that the mortal was conquered and swallowed up by immortality, the corruptible by incorruptibility, and that man should be made in the image and likeness of God, having received the knowledge of good and evil.
IV 38, 4-5
(129) Man has received the knowledge of good and evil. Now it is good to obey God, to believe in Him, and to keep His commandments; that is the life of man. And it is evil not to obey God; that is the death of man. Through the magnanimity which God gave him, man has known both the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience, so that the eye of his mind, having experienced both, might with discernment choose the better, and be neither slothful nor neglectful of the commandment of God. He learns from experience that disobeying God, which robs him of life, is evil, and so he never attempts it . . . Thus he has a twofold faculty for knowing the two, to enable him to choose the better with discernment. But how could he have discerned the good without knowing its opposite? For first-hand experience is more certain and reliable than conjecture. The tongue experiences sweet and bitter by taste, the eye distinguishes black from white by sight, and the ear perceives different sounds by hearing. Similarly, the mind acquires the knowledge of the good through the experience of both, and becomes more firmly committed to preserving it by obeying God. First, by penance, he rejects disobedience, because it is bitter and evil. Then he realizes what it really is—the opposite of goodness and sweetness, and so he is never tempted to taste disobedience to God. But if you repudiate this knowledge of both, this twofold faculty of discernment, unwittingly you destroy your humanity.
IV 39, 1
God showed forbearance when man apostasized, because He foresaw the victory which one day would be given Him through the Word. For when ‘power was made perfect in weakness’ (cf 2 Cor 12:9), the Word revealed God’s loving kindness and His magnificent power. Man can be compared to the prophet Jonah. God allowed him to be swallowed by a sea monster, not so he should be devoured and totally perish, but so that, having been vomited out, he might be more submitted to God and glorify Him more . . . In the same way, at the beginning, God permitted man to be swallowed by the great monster who was the author of transgression. He did not want man to be devoured and utterly destroyed; He was simply premeditating and preparing the gaining of salvation by the Word through ‘the sign of Jonah’ (cf Matt 12:39f) for the benefit of those who think of God as Jonah did and confess. . . ‘I cried to the Lord my God in my distress, and He heard me from the belly of hell’ (Jonah 2:2). God wanted man to go on glorifying Him for ever and to give thanks unceasingly for the salvation received from Him, ‘so that no flesh should glory in His presence’ (1 Cor 1:29). He did not want man ever to go astray in his thinking about God, by imagining the incorruptibility he enjoys to be a natural property, and by boasting in vanity and conceit, in abrogation of the truth, as if he were naturally like God. Such pride increased man’s ingratitude to his Creator, obscured God’s love for him, and blinded his mind. It prevented him from thinking worthily about God, and led him to compare himself with God, judging himself to be God’s equal.
This, then, was the forbearance of God. He permitted man to pass through every situation, to undergo death, and then to come to the resurrection of the dead, discovering from experience the evil from which he had been delivered. Thus man will for ever give thanks to the Lord for the gift of incorruptibility, and will love Him more, for the one to whom more is forgiven loves more (cf Luke 7:42f). He will recognize that he himself is mortal and weak, and that God, by contrast, is immortal and so mighty that He can give immortality to the mortal and eternity to the temporal. He will also have an insight into the other divine attributes he has been shown; these will teach him to have thoughts about God that are worthy of God. For the glory of man is God, and the receptacle of God’s work and wisdom and power is man. Just as a doctor proves himself among the sick, so God manifests Himself among men. As St. Paul says, ‘God has shut up all things in unbelief, that He may have mercy on all’ (Rom 11:32).
III 20, 1-2
(130) Things which fall into our lap and things acquired after much effort are not cherished in the same way. Now we were called to love God more, and that, according to what the Lord taught and the apostle handed on, involves struggle. Were this not so, we would not appreciate the good; where there is no exertion, there is no appreciation. Sight would not be so desirable if we did not know what a great evil blindness is. Health, too, is made more precious by the experience of sickness; light by comparison with darkness; life with death. In the same way, the heavenly kingdom is more precious to those who have known the earthly one. But the more precious it is, the more we love it; and the more we love it, the more glorious shall we be in the presence of God. God, therefore, permitted all these things, so that we, instructed by them all, might in future be prudent in all things, and, wisely taught to love God, might abide in that perfect love (cf John 15:9f). God showed forbearance at the apostasy of man, and man learnt from it, as the prophet says: ‘Your apostasy will instruct you’ (Jer 2:19). Thus God planned everything in advance for the perfection of man, and for the realization and revelation of His dispensations, that His goodness might be displayed, His justice fulfilled, the Church conformed to the image of His Son (cf Rom 8:29), and that man might one day be mature, mature enough to see and understand God.
IV 37, 7
(131) How could man have ever known that he was weak and mortal by nature, whereas God was immortal and mighty, if he had not had experience of both? To discover his weakness through suffering is not in any sense evil; on the contrary, it is good not to have an erroneous view of one’s own nature. But when man rises up against God, when he is presumptuous and glorifies himself, he becomes ungrateful and does himself great harm, depriving himself both of truth and of love for his Creator. However, the experience of both [good and evil] has produced in man the true knowledge of God and of man, and increased his love for God. And where there is an increase of love, a greater glory is procured by God’s power for those who love Him.
V 3, 1
(132) [Those who deny the freedom of the will] present to us a powerless Lord, as if He were incapable of doing what He wants . . . They say that He should not have created angels capable of transgression or human beings who would immediately become ungrateful to Him. These are rational beings, endowed with the power of examining and judging. They are not like irrational or inanimate creatures, which can do nothing by their own will, but are attracted to the good by necessity and constraint. In these creatures there is only one tendency and one behaviour, inflexible and without judgement; they cannot be anything other than what they were made to be.
Now, on this supposition, the good would have no charm for men, nor would communion with God be precious. If the good were attainable without movement, interest, or application, produced mechanically and without effort, it would have no great appeal. Good things would have no superiority, since they would be good by nature rather than by will; they would possess goodness mechanically rather than by free choice, and so would never know the beauty of the good and would never delight in it.
IV 37, 6
Patient maturing
(133) How can you be a god when you have not yet become a man? How can you be perfect when you have only just been made? How can you be immortal when, in your mortal nature, you do not obey your Maker? You must hold the rank of man before you partake of the glory of God. You did not make God; God made you. If you are the handiwork of God, await the Craftsman’s hand patiently; He does everything at a favourable time, favourable, that is, to you, whom He made. Offer him your heart, pliant and unresisting. Preserve the form in which the Craftsman fashioned you. Keep within you the Water which comes from Him; without it, you harden and lose the imprint of His fingers. By preserving the structure, you will ascend to perfection; God’s artistry will conceal the clay within you. His hand formed your substance; He will coat you, within and without, in pure gold and silver; He will adorn you so well that ‘the King Himself will delight in your beauty’ (Ps 44:12). But if you harden and reject His artistry, if you show Him your displeasure at being made a man, your ingratitude to God will lose you both His artistry and His life. Making is a property of God’s generosity; being made is a property of man’s nature. If, therefore, you hand over to Him what is yours, faith in Him and subjection to Him, you will receive the benefit of His artistry and be God’s perfect work of art. If, on the other hand, you resist Him and flee from His hands, the cause of your imperfection will lie in you . . . The light does not fail because of those who have blinded themselves; it remains the same, while the blinded are plunged in darkness by their own fault. Light never forces itself on anyone, nor does God use compulsion on anyone who refuses to accept His artistry. IV 39, 2-3
Continuity and discontinuity in salvation history
The New Testament hidden in the Old
(134) The new covenant was known and proclaimed by the prophets, and the One who, by the Father’s good pleasure, was to establish it was proclaimed by them. He was manifested to men in the way that God willed, so that those who believe in Him might always make progress and grow, through the Testaments, into the perfection of salvation. For there is only one salvation and one God, but the precepts for forming man are many, and the steps leading him to God are not a few. An earthly and temporal king, though he is just a man, is allowed frequently to grant his subjects great favours. Is it not, then, lawful for God, who is eternally the same, to grant the human race ever greater grace and honour those who please with ever richer gifts?
IV 9, 3
(135) The writings of Moses are Christ’s own words. He shows this Himself when He says to the Jews, according to the testimony of John: ‘If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?’ (John 5:46f). He makes it abundantly clear that the writings of Moses are His own words.
IV 2, 3
(136) All things are thus of one and the same substance; in other words, they come from one and the same God. As the Lord says to His disciples, ‘Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old’ (Matt 13:52). He did not say that the one who brought out the old and the one who brought out the new were two different people; no, one and the same person brings out both. For the householder is the Lord, who has authority over the whole paternal house. He draws up an appropriate law for slaves who are still untrained, gives suitable precepts to those who are free and justified by faith, and opens up his inheritance to those who are sons . . . The things ‘new and old’ which He brings out of his treasure are, without doubt, the two Testaments: the old are the earlier giving of the law, the new are life according to the Gospel. As David says, ‘Sing to the Lord a new song’ (Ps 95:1; 97:1). . . The two testaments have been brought forth by one and the same householder, the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who spoke with Abraham and Moses. And it is He who has restored us anew to freedom, and multiplied the grace which comes from Him.
‘Something greater than the temple’, He says, ‘is here’ (Matt 12:6). Now the words ‘greater’ or ‘less’ cannot be applied to things which have nothing in common, which are of an opposite nature and in conflict with each other, but rather to things which are of the same substance, which have something in common, differing from each other only in quantity and magnitude, for example, water from water, light from light, grace from grace.
IV 9, 1-3
(137) Through secondary things He called the people’s attention to what was primary, that is to say, through the figurative to the true.
IV 14, 3
(138) ‘For Christ is the end of the law, that everyone who has faith may be justified’ (Rom 10:4). How could Christ be the end of the law if He were not its beginning? For the one who brought in the end carried out the beginning.
IV 12, 4
(139) The people received all these gifts, oblations, and sacrifices as figures, as was shown to Moses on the mountain by one and the same God, whose name is now glorified in the Church among all the nations. It is fitting that earthly things, which are ordered towards us, should be types of the heavenly, both being made by the same God. No one else could have made the earthly the image of the heavenly.
IV 19, 1
The commandment of love was already contained within the law
(140) The tradition of their elders, which they claimed to observe as equal to the Law, was contrary to the Law given by Moses. That is why Isaiah said: ‘Your tavern-keepers mix water with wine’ (Is 1:22). What he meant was that the elders were in the habit of mixing the water of tradition with the full-bodied commandment of God. In other words, they set up an adulterated law, a law opposed to the true Law. The Lord made this clear to them when He said: ‘Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?’ (Matt 15:3). Not content with violating God’s law by their transgression, by their mixing wine with water, they have set up against it their own law, the law still called today the ‘Pharisaical law’. Some things in the Law they suppress, other things they add, others they interpret as they will, a method which their teachers exploit, each one in his own way. By trying to defend their traditions, they have failed to submit themselves to the Law of God, which prepares them for the coming of Christ. They even reproached the Lord for healing on the sabbath, which the Law did not forbid . . . But they did not reproach themselves for transgressing God’s commandment by their tradition and. . . Pharisaical law, and for not having the principal thing in the Law, namely, love for God.
For this is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is love of neighbour; on these commandments, as the Lord said, hang all the law and the prophets (cf Matt 22-.37-40). And He Himself did not bring any commandment greater than this one; He simply renewed it, commanding His disciples to love God with their whole heart and their neighbour as themselves. If He had descended from a different Father, He would never have made use of the first and greatest commandment of the law; He would have strived in every way possible to bring down a greater commandment than this from the ‘perfect Father’, so as not to use the one given by the ‘God of the law’. But, as St. Paul says, ‘love is the fulfilling of the law’ (Rom 13:10). . .
The founder of the Law and the Gospel is shown to be one and the same. The commandments of the perfect life are the same in the two Testaments and point to the same Lord. True, He promulgated particular precepts appropriate to each, but the highest and most excellent, without which one cannot be saved, He proposed in both Testaments.
IV 12, 1-3
(141) All these [commandments of Christ] contain no contradiction to those which preceded them, nor do they abolish them, as Marcion’s followers loudly allege; no, they fulfil and extend them . . . For since the Law was imposed on slaves, it educated the soul by means of external and corporeal things, so that man, led to obey the commandments by, as it were, a chain, might learn to say Yes to God. But the Word set the soul free, and showed by His teaching how the body, through the soul, could be purified in a voluntary way. Once this was accomplished, the chains of slavery to which man had become accustomed had to be removed; now he had to serve God without chains. But, at the same time, the laws of liberty were extended, and submission to the King was increased, so that no one should turn back and and show himself unworthy of his Liberator. Devotion and obedience to the Master of the house were to be the same among both slaves and free men, but he wanted the trust of the sons to be greater, for the working of freedom is greater and more glorious than the docility of slavery. That is why, in place of the commandment ‘You shall not commit adultery’, He says ‘You shall not lust’ (cf Matt 5:27f). In place of ‘You shall not kill’, ‘You shall not even be angry’ (cf Matt 5:21f). . . ‘And if anyone forces you’, He says, ‘to go one mile, go with him two miles’ (Matt 5:41), so that you do not follow him as a slave but go before him as a free man. . . As we have said, all this could not be said by someone who was abolishing the Law, but by the One who came to fulfil, extend, and widen it among us. You might say that the greater working of liberty implies a more complete and deeply rooted submission and devotion to our Liberator. For He did not liberate us in order to detach us from Himself (after all, no one, outside the good things of the Lord, can procure the food of salvation for himself). No, the idea was that, the more we receive His grace, the more we should love Him, and the more we love Him, the greater the glory we receive from Him when we are for ever in the sight of the Father.
IV 13, 1-3
The Church
(142) He fulfilled all things by His coming, and still, in the Church, to the final consummation, He fulfils the new covenant foretold by the Law.
IV 34, 2
The choice of the harlot
(143) Hosea the prophet, therefore, took ‘a wife of harlotry’. The prophetic significance of this action was that the earth—in other words, the human beings who live on earth—was committing great harlotry by forsaking the Lord (cf Hos 1:2). From these human beings it would please God to form the Church, who would be sanctified by her union with the Son of God, as the woman was by her union with the prophet. For this reason, too, St. Paul said that ‘the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her husband’ (cf 1 Cor 7:14). . . What the prophet did byway of type has been shown by the apostle to have been done in reality in the Church by Christ. Thus Moses took an Ethiopian woman as his wife . . . which signifies the Church taken from among the Gentiles. Those who disparage, criticize, and mock her will not be pure; they will be leprous and cast out of the camp (cf Num 12:10-14). Rahab the harlot, who accused herself of being a Gentile guilty of every sin, nonetheless welcomed the three spies who went to view all the land and hid them in her house (the three were a type of the Father and the Son with the Holy Spirit) (Josh 2:1ff). And when the whole town where she lived fell into ruins at the sound of the seven trumpets, Rahab the harlot, with her whole household, was saved by faith in the scarlet sign (cf Josh 2:18). As the Lord said to the Pharisees, who did not welcome Him when He came and despised that scarlet sign which was the Pasch, the ransom and exodus of the people from Egypt: ‘The tax-collectors and harlots go into the kingdom of God before you’ (Matt 21:31).
IV 20, 12
Christ hands over the Truth that He is to the Apostles. They in turn proclaim it orally and in writing and hand it over to the successors publicly instituted by them.
(144) The Lord of all gave to His apostles the power to preach the Gospel. It is through them that we have come to know the truth, that is, the doctrine of the Son of God. The Lord says to them: ‘He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me and the One who sent me’ (Luke 10:16). We have come to know the dispensation of our salvation through none other than those through whom the Gospel came to us. First of all, they preached the Gospel; then, by the will of God, they transmitted it to us in the Scriptures to be the foundation and pillar of our faith . . . After our Lord had risen from the dead, and after the Holy Spirit had come upon them, investing them with power from on high (cf Luke 24:49), they were filled with all His gifts and possessed perfect knowledge (gnosis). They went to the ends of the earth, proclaiming the good news of the good things which come from God, and announcing heavenly peace to men. All of them together and each of them on his own possessed the Gospel of God. . . They have all passed on to us this teaching: that there is one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, who was announced by the Law and the prophets, and one Christ, the Son of God. Anyone who refuses to assent to these truths shows contempt for the ‘partakers of the Lord’ (cf Heb 3:14), indeed for the Lord Himself and for the Father; such a person condemns himself, because he resists and opposes his salvation—that is what all the heretics do.
When Scripture is used to demolish their arguments, [the heretics] turn round and start accusing Scripture itself: they say that it is inaccurate and untrustworthy, that its language is ambiguous, and that the truth cannot be extracted from it by people ignorant of their [secret] tradition . . . Each of them claims that this wisdom is his own discovery . . . but they are all so thoroughly perverted that they deprave the rule of truth and shamelessly preach themselves.
But when we appeal to the tradition that comes from the apostles, the tradition preserved in the Churches thanks to the succession of presbyters, they oppose tradition. They claim to be wiser than not only the presbyters but the apostles themselves, and to have discovered the pure truth. They allege that the apostles mixed the prescriptions of the Law with the words of the Saviour. Indeed, they say that not only the apostles but the Lord Himself uttered words which came from ‘Demiurge’ or the ‘Intermediary’. . .
These, my dear friend, are our adversaries. Like slippery snakes, they try to escape at every point. They must, therefore, be opposed at every point in the hope that, by our refutation, at least some of them may be converted to the truth.
III 1, 1-2, 3
(145) The tradition of the apostles, which has been manifested throughout the world, can be examined by all who want to see the truth. We can enumerate the bishops instituted by the apostles in the Churches, and their successors down to our own day. These men neither taught nor knew of anything like what [the heretics] rave about. Had the apostles known of abstruse mysteries to be taught to the ‘perfect’ and kept from everyone else, they would have passed them on especially to those to whom they entrusted the Churches. For they wanted their successors, the ones to whom they bequeathed their teaching office, to be blameless in all things (cf 1 Tim 3:2). If these men carried out their mission correctly, it would be a great boon, but if they failed, an appalling calamity.
It would be too tedious, in a work like this, to go through the succession lists of all the Churches. We shall, therefore, take just one, the greatest, most ancient Church, the Church known to all, the Church founded and established in Rom by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul. By showing that the tradition which she received from the apostles, the faith which she proclaims to men, has come down to us through the succession of bishops, we confute all those who, in whatever manner, . . . set up conventicles. With this Church, because of its more excellent origin, every Church (in other words, the faithful everywhere) must agree.
[Now follows a proof of the uninterrupted succession of the twelve bishops from Peter to Eleutherus. The third of these is the author of the important Epistle of Clement.] This is a most complete proof of the unity and identity of the life-giving faith, which has been preserved in the Church from the apostles until now and handed down in truth.
III 3, 1-3
(146) With such proofs as these, we do not need to seek the truth elsewhere; it is easy to obtain it from the Church. In the most thorough way, the apostles have amassed in the Church, as in a treasure chest, all that pertains to the truth, so that everyone who so desires may drink the water of life (cf Apoc 22:17). She is the entrance to life; all the others are thieves and robbers (cf John 10:8). We must, therefore, reject them, but love with the greatest zeal everything to do with the Church and lay hold of the tradition of truth. What does this come down to? Well, if controversy arises about some minor matter, should we not have recourse to the most ancient Churches, the one which had contact with the apostles, in order to obtain a sure and accurate resolution of the disputed issue? And supposing the apostles had not left us their writings, would we not then have to follow the order of the tradition which they handed down to the men to whom they entrusted the Churches?
Many of the barbarian nations who believe in Christ have given their assent to this order. Salvation has been written in their hearts (2 Cor 3:3), without paper and ink, by the Spirit. Preserving the ancient tradition, they believe in one God, the Creator of heaven and earth and everything in them, and in Christ Jesus our Lord, who, in His superabundant love for His creation, condescended to be born of the Virgin, uniting man to God through Himself, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, rose again and was taken up in splendour, who will come in glory as Saviour of those who are saved . . . Thanks to the ancient tradition of the apostles, they reject, even in thought, the lying inventions [of the heretics].
III 4, 1-2
(147) Since the tradition which comes down from the apostles exists in this way in the Church and abides among us, let us return to the scriptural proof provided by those of the apostles who wrote the gospels. In their writings they expounded the doctrine of God, showing that our Lord Jesus Christ is the truth (cf John 14:6), and that no lie is in him (cf 1 Peter 2:22; 1 John 2:21,27). . . The apostles, being disciples of the Truth, are above all falsehood. Falsehood has no partnership with the truth, just as light has nothing in common with darkness (cf 2 Cor 6:14); the presence of the one excludes the other. Our Lord, being the Truth, did not tell lies. If He had known of some being that was the ‘fruit of a fall’, He would never have acknowledged Him as God, the Lord of all, King Most High, and His own Father.
The Lord implanted [true] knowledge in His disciples. Through it He cured the sick and turned sinners from their sin. He did not conform His speech to their earlier [Old Testament] opinions, nor His answers to the prejudices of His questioners. No, He spoke in accordance with the doctrine of salvation, without hypocrisy or respect of person.
III 5, 1-2
(148) Anyone who reads the Scriptures in this way will find in them a message about Christ and a foreshadowing of the new vocation [i.e., the new covenant]. He is the ‘treasure hidden in the field’ (cf Matt 13:44) . . . hidden in the Scriptures. For He was pointed out by types and parables, which, humanly speaking, could not be understood before the prophecies were fulfilled, that is to say, before the coming of Christ. That is why the prophet Daniel was told: ‘Shut up the words, and seal the book, until the time of the fulfilment, until many learn, and knowledge be complete. At that time, when the dispersion comes to an end, they will know all these things’ (cf Dan 12:4,7) . . . For this reason, when the Law is read by the Jews in our own time, it is like a fable, because they lack the explanation of everything relating to the Son of God’s coming as man. But when it is read by Christians, it really is the ‘treasure hidden in the field’, made dear and explained by the Cross of Christ . . . This was how the Lord expounded it for His disciples after His resurrection from the dead. He showed them, from Scripture itself, that ‘it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and enter into His glory’ (cf Luke 24:26), and that ‘the remission of sins should be preached in His name throughout the world’ (cf Luke 24:47). . .
We must, therefore, obey the presbyters in the Church. They are the successors of the apostles, and by the Father’s good pleasure, they have received, together with the succession in the episcopate, the sure charism of the truth.
The others, the people who have broken away from the original succession to set up in various places conventicles of their own, are to be regarded with suspicion. They are heretics with false opinions, or schismatics puffed up and self-indulgent, or again hypocrites interested only in money and vainglory . . . There are some who are regarded by many as presbyters. In fact, they serve their own lusts and do not give the fear of God priority in their hearts. They insult other people and swell with pride at the thought of their superior position. . . Of them the Lord said: ‘If the wicked servant says to himself, “My master is delayed”, and begins to beat his fellow servants and maids, and eats and drinks and gets drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day he is not expecting and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him short and assign him a place with the unbelievers’ (Matt 24:48ff).
We must keep away from all such persons, but stay close to those who, as we have said, preserve the succession of the apostles, and who, together with the order of priesthood, display sound speech and blameless conduct as an example to others and for their improvement . . . As St. Paul, with a good conscience, said to the Corinthians: ‘We are not, like so many, adulterators of God’s Word, but with sincerity, as from God, before God in Christ we speak’ (2 Cor 2:17) . . . Such priests nourish the Church . . . St. Paul tells us where we can find them: ‘God has appointed in the Church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers’ (1 Cor 12:28). Where God has placed His gifts, we must learn the truth, that is to say, from those in whom we find succession from the apostles in the Church, sound and blameless conduct, and incorruptible purity of teaching.
IV 26, 1-5
Jews and Gentiles
(149) It is the ‘one God’ who led the patriarchs towards His dispensations, and ‘justified the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith’ (cf Rom 3:30), Just as we [the Gentiles] were prefigured and heralded in the first, so they [the Jews] find their completed form in us, that is to say, in the Church, and there they receive the reward for their labours. As the Lord said to His disciples . . . ‘In this is the saying true: one sows, another reaps’ (John 4:37). It is clear that the patriarchs and prophets . . . foreshadowed our faith and sowed the coming of the Son of God on earth . . . This is why Philip, on finding the eunuch of the Queen of Ethiopia reading the words of Isaiah, ‘He was led as a sheep to the slaughter. . .’ (cf Acts 8:32f; cf Is 53:7), and all the other details of [the Lord’s] Passion and coming in the flesh, easily convinced the eunuch to believe that Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and suffered everything foretold by the prophet, really is the Son of God who gives eternal life to men. As soon as he had baptized him, Philip left the eunuch. He had already been instructed by the prophets, so there was nothing he lacked. He was ignorant not of God the Father, nor of the rules of moral life, but only of the coming of the Son of God . . .
The Fathers heralded things in a fatherly way, the prophets prefigured things in a legal way, [Christians], endowed with the grace of adoption, give to things a form corresponding to their conformity to Christ, and all things are shown forth by one God. Abraham was only one man, but he prefigured in his own person the two covenants, in which some sowed while others reaped . . . The patriarchs and prophets sowed the word about Christ, but the Church reaped it, that is, received the fruit.
IV 22, 2-25, 3
(150) [Through Isaiah] the Lord Himself has given us a sign, in the depth below and in the height above (cf Is 7:11ff). Mankind [in the person of King Ahaz] did not ask for it, because he never expected that a Virgin, while remaining a virgin, could conceive and give birth to a Son. Mankind never expected that this Son would be ‘God with us’ (cf Is 7:14), that He would descend into the lower parts of the earth (cf Eph 4:9), seeking the lost sheep (cf Luke 15:4ff), in other words, His own handiwork. Mankind never expected that the Son would ascend to the height above, offering and commending to His Father the humanity He had found again, becoming in Himself the first fruits of humanity’s resurrection, and that, as the Head had risen from the dead, so the rest of the Body, in other words, every man ‘found’ in Him who is Life (cf Phil 3:9), would in turn rise again, once the time of punishment, due to disobedience, had been fulfilled; yes, that the Body, knit together and strengthened ‘through its joints and ligaments’, would grow with the increase that comes from God (cf Col 2:19), each member having its own proper and fit position in the Body. For there are many mansions in the Father’s house (cf John 14:2), because there are many members in the Body (cf Rom 12:4).
III 19, 3
(151) If someone believes in the one God, who made all things by the Word (as Moses says, ‘And God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light’ (Gen 1:3)) . . . . he will, in the first place, be attached to the Head, ‘from whom the whole Body is compacted and fitly joined together, and through every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and builds itself up in love’ (Eph 4:16). Then every word emanating from him will be trustworthy, provided he diligently reads the Scriptures with the presbyters in the Church, for they, as we have shown, have the teaching of the apostles.
Now the apostles all taught that there are two Testaments for two peoples, but that it was one and the same God who decreed them both for the benefit of the human beings who, when the Testaments were given, would believe in God . . . We have already shown that the first Testament was not given in vain, without reason or by chance. First, it subdued its recipients for the service of God; this was for their own advantage, for God does need to be served by man. Secondly, it provided a type of heavenly things, because man could not yet see the things of God with his own eyes. It offered an anticipated image of the realities of the Church, in order to strengthen our faith, and it contained a prophecy of things to come to teach man that God has foreknowledge of all things.
(152) The truly ‘spiritual’ disciple is the one who has received the Spirit of God, the Spirit who, from the beginning, in all the dispensations of God, has been present to men, who announced things future, revealed things present, and explained things past. Such a disciple ‘judges all men, but is himself judged by no man’ (1 Cor 2:15).
He judges the Gentiles, because they ‘serve the creature rather than the Creator’ (Rom 1:25), and with a depraved mind waste their energy on vanity.
He also judges the Jews because they do not accept the Word of freedom, because they do not want to go off in liberty, even though the Liberator Himself was in their midst . . . They did not want to see that all the prophets proclaimed His two comings: at the first, He was a man covered in wounds, bearing our weakness (cf Is 53:3) . . . at the second, He will come on the clouds [as judge] . . .
He also judges the doctrine of Marcion. How can there be two gods, separated from each other by an infinite distance? How can he be good who draws men who are not his own possession from their creator and invites them into his own kingdom? Why does his goodness fall short of saving all men?. . . And if the Lord came from a different Father, how could He say that the bread which is part of the creation to which we belong was His Body and affirm that the mixed cup was His Blood?. . . And if He was not flesh, but only seemed to be man, how could He have been crucified, and how could blood and water have streamed from His pierced side?. . .
And He judges all the disciples of Valentinus. With their lips they confess one God the Father, from whom all things come, but they also maintain that the Maker of all things is Himself the fruit of a fall. Similarly, with their lips they confess that there is one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, but in their minds they think of the Only-begotten as one emission, the Word as another, Christ as another, and the Saviour as yet another. On their view, though these are spoken of as if they were one person, they are to be thought of as having a separate existence, each with his own emission according to the rank of his ‘syzygy’. In other words, their lips assent to the unity, but their thoughts and minds, in ‘searching the depths’ (cf 1 Cor 2:10), dissent to the unity, and so they come under the manifold judgement of God . . . Their own prophet Homer, under whose instruction they invented their doctrines, will, in fact, accuse them: ‘Who dares think one thing, and another tell, my heart detests him as the Gates of Hell’ (Iliad 9, 312-313, Alexander Pope’s version). . .
He will judge the Ebionites, too . . . How can men leave behind birth into mortality without a new birth, a birth wonderfully and unexpectedly given by God as a sign of salvation? I mean the Virgin Birth [of the Son of God], which leads to the rebirth of men through faith. . . How could [Jesus] have been greater than Solomon and Jonah (cf Matt 12:41f) and the Lord of David (cf Matt 22:43), who was of the same substance as they were? How could He have defeated him who was strong against man (cf Matt 12:29), who had not only overcome man, but also held him in his power? How could He conquer the conqueror and liberate the conquered if He were not Himself greater than conquered man? Who else is superior to man, made in the image of God, who more excellent than the Son of God, to whose image man was made? . . .
He will also judge those who introduce [the idea that Christ was man only in] appearance. How can they imagine they are presenting a real argument when their Master is only an imaginary being?. . . How can they truly be partakers of salvation if the One they claim to believe manifested Himself only in appearance?. . .
He will also judge the false prophets, who have not received the prophetic charism from God, and do not fear God . . . He will also judge the instigators of schism, who are devoid of the love of God, more concerned with their own advantage than with the unity of the Church. For trivial reasons, for any reason that occurs to them, they tear up and divide the great and glorious Body of Christ. In fact, they do all they can to destroy it, speaking peace and making war . . . No reform could come from them that would be sufficient to make up for the harm caused by their schism.
Finally, he judges all those outside the truth, that is to say, outside the Church. IV 32, 1-33, 1-7
The world at the service of believers
(153) God is, therefore, one and the same. He rolls up the heavens like a scroll (cf Is 34:4) and renews the face of the earth (cf Ps 103:30). He made things temporal for the sake of man, so that man, growing up up among them, might bear the fruit of immortality. And in His loving kindness, He clothes man with things eternal.
IV 5, 1
God’s creation in the service of His redemption
(154) The Lord did not carry out His great plan of salvation by means of someone else’s creation, but by His very own; not through things made out of ‘ignorance’ and ‘defeat’, but through things which owe their substance to the wisdom and power of the Father. He was neither unjust, coveting someone else’s property, nor needy, incapable of bestowing life on His own through His own. No, He used His own creation for the salvation of man. Creation could never have borne Him if it had been an emission of ‘ignorance’ and ‘defeat’ . . . And even if it had been made by the angels . . . how could angelic handiwork have borne simultaneously the Father and the Son?
V 18, 1
The world serves believers
(155) Where do the houses we live in come from, and the clothes we wear, and the pots and pans we use, and everything else serving our daily life, if not from the things which, when we were pagans, we acquired through avarice, or from parents, relations, or friends, who obtained them unjustly, not to mention what we still acquire now we are in the faith? Who sells without wanting to get some money from the buyer? Who buys without wanting good value from the seller? Is there a businessman not in business to make a living? And those believers who are in the royal palace, do they not receive their income from the coffers of Caesar? And does not each of them, according to his ability, give to those in need? The Egyptians [who were plundered by the Jews] were indebted to the people not just for their material property but for their very lives, because of the kindness of the patriarch Joseph in former times. In what way are the heathen in debt to us, the heathen from whom we receive profit and advantage? What they produce by labour, we in the faith use without labour.
IV 30, 1
The Eucharist
The Eucharist is based on creation
(156) True, the Lord could have provided the wedding guests with wine and filled the hungry with food without using any pre-existing created thing. But that is not what He did. He took loaves which earth had given and gave thanks (cf John 6:11). It was the same when He changed the water into wine, satisfying those reclining at table and quenching the thirst of those invited to the wedding (cf Matt 11:2-10; Apoc 19:9). By so doing, He showed that the God who made the earth and commanded it to bear fruit (cf Gen 1:11), who established the waters and brought forth the fountains (cf Gen 1:9), has in these last times granted mankind, through His Son, the blessing of food and the grace of drink, the Incomprehensible through the Comprehensible, the Invisible through the Visible [the incarnate Son].
III 11, 5
(157) They are totally foolish, these people who despise the whole saving plan of God, who deny the salvation of the flesh, and scorn its regeneration, claiming it is not capable of incorruptibility. If the flesh is not saved, the Lord did not redeem us by His Blood, the cup of the Eucharist is not communion in His Blood, and the bread we break is not communion in His Body. For blood can only come from veins, flesh, and whatever else makes up the substance of man. All this the Word of God really and truly became, in order to redeem us by His Blood. As the apostle says, ‘In Him we have redemption through His Blood, the remission of sins’ (Col 1:14).
And because we are His members, we are nourished by means of creation, the creation which He Himself gives us by making His sun to rise and sending the rain as He pleases (cf Matt 5:45). The cup, which is part of creation, He declares to be His Blood, by which our own blood is fortified, and the bread, which is part of creation, He affirms to be His Body, by which our own body is fortified.
So then, if the mixed cup and the manufactured bread receive the Word of God and become the Eucharist, that is to say, the Blood and Body of Christ, which fortify and build up the substance of our flesh, how can these people claim that the flesh is incapable of receiving God’s gift of eternal life, when it is nourished by Christ’s Blood and Body and is His member? As the blessed apostle says in his letter to the Ephesians, ‘For we are members of His Body, of His flesh and of His bones’ (Eph 5:30). He is not talking about some kind of ‘spiritual’ and ‘invisible’ man, ‘for a spirit does not have flesh and bones’ (Luke 24:39). No, he is talking of the organism possessed by a real human being, composed of flesh and nerves and bones. It is this which is nourished by the cup which is His Blood, and is fortified by the bread which is His Body. The stem of the vine takes root in the earth and eventually bears fruit, and ‘the grain of wheat falls into the earth’ (John 12:24), dissolves, rises again, multiplied by the all-containing Spirit of God, and finally, after skilled processing, is put to human use. These two then receive the Word of God and become the Eucharist, which is the Body and Blood of Christ. Similarly, our bodies, having been nourished by the Eucharist, having been laid to rest in the earth, and having there dissolved, will rise again at their appointed time, for the Word of God will grant them resurrection ‘to the glory of God the Father’ (cf Phil 2:11). He will clothe the mortal with immortality and freely bestow incorruptibility on the corruptible (cf 1 Cor 15:53), for God’s power is made perfect in weakness (cf 2 Cor 12:9). So we must never become puffed up, as if we had the source of life within ourselves, asserting ourselves, with ungrateful minds, against God. In fact, experience should teach us that it is through God’s grandeur and not our own nature that we possess eternal duration.
V 2, 2-3
The Eucharistic Sacrifice presupposes the Trinity
(158) It is right that we should make an oblation to God, and in all things show our gratitude to God our Maker, with a pure intention and a faith free of hypocrisy, in firm hope and fervent love, offering the first-fruits of His creation.
Only the Church offers the Creator this pure oblation, offering Him, with thanksgiving, things that are part of His creation. The Jews no longer offer, for their hands are full of blood; they did not accept the Word through whom an offering can be made to God, Nor do any of the conventicles of the heretics make an offering. For some of them say that the Father is different from the Creator, and so, in offering Him things from this created world of ours, they make Him look envious and covetous of someone else’s property. Other heretics say that our world is the outcome of defect, ignorance, and passion, and so, when they offer Him the fruits of ‘ignorance’, ‘passion’, and ‘defect’, they sin against their Father, insulting Him rather than giving Him thanks. And how can they say that the bread over which thanks has been given is the Lord’s Body and the cup His Blood, when they will not admit that that same Lord is the Son of the world’s Creator, that is, His Word, through whom trees bear fruit, the fountains gush forth, and ‘the earth gives first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear’ (Mark 4:28)?
Then again, how can they say that the flesh, which is nourished with the Body and Blood of the Lord, falls into corruption and does not partake of life? They should either change their opinions or stop offering what we have just mentioned! Our opinion, however, is in harmony with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist confirms our opinion. For we offer Him His own, consistently proclaiming the communion and unity of flesh and Spirit. For just as the bread which comes from the earth, having received the invocation of God, is no longer ordinary bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly, so our bodies, having received the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, because they have the hope of the resurrection.
IV 18, 4-5