Little Fish Born in Water

On Baptism

How happy is our sacred sign of water! By it the sins of our early blindness are washed away, and we are set free and let into eternal life. A book on the subject will not be wasted. It has something to teach people who are only now being shaped in the faith, and something too for people who were content simply to believe, without ever looking into the reasons behind what has been handed down to them, and who carry around, out of ignorance, a faith that is likely enough but has never been tested. The result is that a viper of the Cainite party, lately at work in this part of the world, has carried off a great many with her poisonous teaching, whose first aim is to destroy baptism. Which is entirely in character: vipers and asps and basilisks themselves are drawn to dry, waterless places. But we are little fish, following our Fish, Jesus Christ. We are born in water, and we are safe no other way than by staying in the water. So that monstrous creature, who had no business teaching even sound doctrine, knew perfectly well how to kill little fish — by taking them out of the water. [b]

But see how strong a thing perversity is: it shakes faith, or blocks it from ever taking hold at all, by attacking faith at the very points faith is made of. Nothing hardens people’s minds so much as the plainness of what God does, seen in the act itself, set beside the greatness promised as its result. A man is let down into water and dipped while a few words are said over him, and comes up again not much cleaner, or not cleaner at all. It is all so plain — no ceremony, no striking new equipment, no expense — that the eternity he is said to gain by it seems all the more unbelievable. Call me a liar if it is not the other way around with the rites and mysteries of idols: their credit and their authority are built up out of display and staging and cost. What a wretched thing unbelief is, denying God the two things most his own — simplicity and power. Well then: is it not astonishing that death should be washed off in a bath? But if the very wonder of it is the reason people will not believe it, that is all the more reason to believe. What should the works of God be like, if not beyond all wonder? We wonder too, but we wonder because we believe. Unbelief wonders and does not believe: it stares at the plain acts as though they were pointless, and at the great results as though they were impossible. And suppose it is exactly as you think. God’s own word, spoken long before, is enough to meet both halves of it: “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound its wisdom,” and, “The things that are very hard for men are easy for God.” For if God is wise and powerful — and even the people who pass him by do not deny that — he has good reason to lay the raw material of his own working in the opposites of wisdom and of power, that is, in foolishness and impossibility. Every strength takes its occasion from the thing that calls it out. [e]

Holding that word of God as a ruling that settles the case, we will still go on and take up the question: “How foolish it is, and how impossible, that a man should be made new by water! What has this stuff done to deserve so high an office?” The standing of the liquid element, I take it, is what has to be looked into. And there is plenty of it to find, from the very beginning. Water is one of the things that lay still with God, in an unshaped state, before the world was furnished at all. “In the first beginning,” Scripture says, “God made the heaven and the earth. But the earth was invisible and unshaped, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of the Lord was hovering over the waters.” [g]

The first thing you have to respect, my friend, is the age of the waters: the substance is ancient. The second is their standing: they were the seat of the Spirit of God, who plainly liked them better than anything else then in existence. For so far the darkness was total and shapeless, with no stars to decorate it; the deep was grim, the earth unfurnished, the sky not yet made. Water alone — always a finished thing, bright, plain, pure in itself — offered God a worthy place to ride. And what about this: that the waters were in a way the governing powers by which God arranged the world from then on? He hung the vault of the sky in the middle by “dividing the waters,” and he set the dry land in place by “separating the waters.” Once the world had been put in order element by element, and inhabitants were being given to it, the waters were the first to be told to “bring forth living creatures.” Water was the first to produce a thing that had life in it — so it should be no wonder in baptism if water knows how to give life. And was not the making of man himself done with water’s help? The right material is found in the earth, but earth is no use for the purpose unless it is damp and workable; and the waters, drawn off into their own place three days earlier, temper it with the moisture they leave behind until it works like clay. If I went on from there and set out at large all the evidence I could bring for this element’s standing — how great its power is, or its grace; how many ingenious devices, how many services, how useful an instrument it supplies the world — I am afraid I would look as though I had collected a set of praises of water rather than the reasons for baptism. Though it would teach the point all the better. There is no doubting that God has made the substance he has laid through all his products and works obey him in his own sacred rites as well, and that the material that runs life on earth does his work in heavenly matters too.

It is enough to have called up at the outset the points in which the first principle of baptism can be recognized — a principle marked out even then by the very posture that stood as a figure of baptism: that the Spirit of God, who hovered over the waters from the beginning, would go on lingering over the water of the baptized. A holy thing hovered over a holy thing, of course; or else the thing hovered over borrowed holiness from the thing hovering. Whatever lies underneath is bound to take on the quality of what hangs above it — most of all a bodily thing from a spiritual one, since the spiritual, being fine in substance, can get into a thing and work its way through it. So the nature of the waters, made holy by the Holy One, itself conceived the power of making holy. Let nobody say: “Are we baptized, then, in the very waters that were there in the first beginning?” Not in those waters, of course — except that the kind is one, though the sorts of it are many; and what belongs to the kind runs over into every sort of it. So it makes no difference whether a man is washed in the sea or in a pool, in a river or a spring, in a lake or a tub. There is no difference between the people John baptized in the Jordan and the people Peter baptized in the Tiber — unless the eunuch whom Philip baptized on the road, out of whatever water was at hand, got more salvation from it than the rest, or less. [i]

So all waters, by the old privilege of their origin, come to hold the sacred power of making holy, once God has been called down upon them. The Spirit arrives at once out of heaven and rests over the water, making it holy out of himself; and the water, made holy, drinks in at the same moment the power to make holy in its turn. The comparison fits the plain act well enough: since we are dirtied by sins as though by grime, we should be washed clean of the marks in water. But sins do not show on our flesh — nobody carries the stain of idolatry, or of sexual immorality, or of cheating on his skin — so people like that are filthy in the spirit, which is the author of the sin. The spirit is master and the flesh is servant. Still, they share the guilt between them: the spirit for ordering, the flesh for obeying. So, once the water has in a way been given healing power by the angel’s coming, the spirit is washed bodily in the water and the flesh is cleansed spiritually in the same water.

“But the nations, who understand nothing at all about spiritual powers, credit their idols with putting this very same power into water.” So they do — but they cheat themselves with widowed water. A washing is the channel by which they are initiated into certain rites, of some celebrated Isis or Mithras. They honor the gods themselves with washings too. They carry water around and sprinkle it, and by that they purify country estates, houses, temples, whole cities. At the Apollinarian and the Eleusinian games, at any rate, they are dipped, and they take it that what they get by it is a new birth and a release from the penalties owed for their broken oaths. And among the ancients, anyone who had polluted himself with a killing would go looking for water to purify him. [k]

So if the mere nature of water — being the material fit for washing things off — leads men to flatter themselves that it carries some omen of cleansing, how much more truly will water do that service on the authority of God, who made all its nature what it is. If people think religion gives water a healing power, what religion works better than the religion of the living God? Grant that, and here too we recognize the devil’s eagerness to compete with the things of God, since we find him practicing baptism on his own subjects. What likeness is there in it? The unclean one cleanses! The ruiner sets free! The condemned one acquits! He will undo his own work, no doubt, by washing away the sins he himself puts into people. I set this down as evidence against those who refuse the faith: they will not trust the things of God, while they do trust the counterfeits of them put out by God’s rival. And are there not other cases too where unclean spirits brood over water with no sacred rite at all, in a fake copy of the Spirit of God brooding over it at the very beginning? Think of every shaded spring and every out-of-the-way brook, the pools at the baths, the water channels in private houses, the cisterns and wells that are said to snatch people away — by the power, that is, of a spirit that means harm. People whom water has drowned, or driven mad, or filled with terror, they call nymph-taken, or water-struck, or water-fearing. Why have I brought these up? So that nobody finds it too hard to believe that a holy angel of God is present at water and tempers it for a man’s salvation, when the evil angel has unholy dealings with that same element all the time, to a man’s ruin.

If an angel being present in water sounds like something new, a sample of what was coming had already run on ahead. An angel used to come and stir the pool at Bethsaida. People who were complaining of their health would watch for him: whoever was first down into the water stopped complaining after his washing. That figure of bodily healing was singing of a spiritual healing, by the rule that bodily things always come first as figures of spiritual ones. So when the grace of God moved up to higher degrees among men, an increase of power was granted to the water and to the angel. What used to cure defects of the body now heals the spirit; what used to work a rescue for the moment now renews an eternal one; what set one man free once a year now saves whole peoples together, every day, with death done away through the washing off of sins. Take the guilt away and the penalty goes with it, of course. So man will be given back to God in his “likeness” — the man who long ago had been shaped to the “image” of God. (The image is reckoned to lie in his form, the likeness in his living forever.) For he receives back that Spirit of God which he first received from God’s breath and afterward lost through sin.

Not that we get the Holy Spirit in the water. In the water, with the angel presiding, we are cleansed and made ready for the Holy Spirit. Here too a figure came first: John went ahead of the Lord as his forerunner, “preparing his ways.” In the same way the angel who presides over baptism “makes the paths straight” for the Holy Spirit, who is about to come upon us; and he does it by the washing away of sins, which faith obtains when it is sealed in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. For if “every word will stand in the mouth of three witnesses,” and if by the blessing we have the same three as witnesses of our faith whom we have as guarantors of our salvation, how much more does that number of divine names serve to make our hope sure! And after the pledging of both — the attestation of faith and the promise of salvation — under those three witnesses, mention of the church is necessarily added; because wherever there are three (that is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) there is the church, which is a body of three. [q]

After that, when we have come up out of the water, we are thoroughly rubbed with a blessed oil — a practice that comes from the old rule, where men entering the priesthood used to be anointed with oil out of a horn, ever since Aaron was anointed by Moses. That is why Aaron is called “Christ,” from the chrism, which is the anointing. Made spiritual, the same word gave the Lord a name that fits him, since he was “anointed” with the Spirit by God the Father, as it is written in Acts: “For truly they were gathered together in this city against your holy servant, whom you anointed.” So with us the anointing runs on the body but does its good in the spirit — just as the act of baptism itself is bodily, since we are plunged into water, while its effect is spiritual, since we are set free from sins. [s]

Next the hand is laid on us, calling on the Holy Spirit and inviting him in through a blessing. Human cleverness is allowed to summon a breath down into water and, by laying hands on it from above, to bring the two, joined in one body, to life with another breath of so clear a tone. Shall God not be able, on his own instrument, to produce by “holy hands” a high spiritual music? But this, like the anointing before it, comes from an old sacred sign: Jacob blessing his grandsons, Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh, with his hands laid on them and exchanged — slanted so far across one another that, by drawing the figure of Christ, they even foretold the blessing that was to come in Christ. Then that most holy Spirit comes down gladly from the Father on our cleansed and blessed bodies. He rests over the waters of baptism, recognizing there something like his first seat — he who came gliding down on the Lord “in the shape of a dove,” so that the nature of the Holy Spirit might be declared by the creature that stands for plainness and innocence; for the dove, even in the make of her body, has no gall in her. That is why he says, “Be plain as doves.” Even this does not stand without the backing of a figure that ran ahead of it. After the waters of the flood, by which the old wickedness was purged — the baptism of the world, so to speak — a dove was the herald that announced to the earth that heaven’s anger had settled. She had been sent out of the ark, and she came back with an olive branch, a token that even among the nations stands for peace. By the same arrangement of heavenly working, to the earth — that is, to our flesh — as it comes up out of the water, after its old sins, flies the dove of the Holy Spirit, bringing us the peace of God, sent out from the heavens where the church is, the ark that the old one stood for. But the world went back to sin, and on that point baptism would compare badly with the flood. So the world is marked out for fire; and so is the man who takes up his sins again after baptism. That too ought to be taken as a sign to warn us. [u]

How many, then, are the pleas nature enters, how many the privileges of grace, how many the observances of our rule, the figures, the preparations, the prayers, that have appointed water its holiness! First, when the people got clear at last, with no conditions attached, and escaped the violence of the Egyptian king by crossing over through water, it was water that put out the king himself along with all his forces. What figure is more plainly carried out in the sacred rite of baptism? The nations are set free from the world by water, that is; and they leave the devil, their old tyrant, well behind them, drowned in the water. Again, water is brought back from the fault of bitterness to its own natural sweetness by Moses’ tree. That tree was Christ, healing out of himself the veins of a nature once poisoned and bitter, into the all-healing water of baptism. This is the water that ran down without stopping for the people from “the rock that went with them”; for if Christ is “the rock,” then without doubt we see baptism blessed by the water in Christ. How great is the grace of water in the sight of God and his Christ, for making baptism sure! Christ is never without water. He is baptized in water himself. He opens the first rough showings of his power in water, at the wedding he was invited to. When he preaches, he calls the thirsty to his own water that never runs out. When he teaches about love, he approves, among the works of love, the cup of water handed to a poor man. He gets his strength back at a well. He walks over the water. He crosses the sea when he chooses. He serves water to his disciples. And the witness of baptism holds on right up to the passion. As he is handed over to the cross, water comes in — look at Pilate’s hands. When he is wounded, water bursts out of his side — look at the soldier’s spear. [z]