The Milk of the Word

We have plenty of ways to meet the people who like to find fault. We are not called children and infants because our schooling is childish and beneath contempt, as those who are swollen with their own knowledge have slanderously claimed. The moment we were born anew we reached the completeness we had been reaching for. For we were illuminated, and to be illuminated is to know God. A man who knows what is complete is not himself incomplete. And do not scold me when I say openly that I know God; for that is how the Word chose to speak, and he is free. At the moment of the Lord’s baptism a voice sounded out of heaven, bearing witness to the Beloved: “You are my beloved Son; today I have begotten you.” So let us put the question to the wise. Christ, born anew today — is he already complete, or, most monstrous of all, incomplete? If he is incomplete, there is still some addition he has to make. But that he should make any addition to his knowledge is absurd, since he is God. No one can be greater than the Word, or the teacher of the only Teacher. Will they not admit, however unwillingly, that the complete Word, born of the complete Father, was born anew in completeness, according to the plan appointed beforehand? And if he was complete, why was he, the complete one, baptized? It was necessary, they say, to fulfill what he had professed as a human being. Excellent. Well then, I say: at the same moment as his baptism by John, does he become complete? Obviously. So he did not learn anything further from John? Certainly not. But he is made complete by the washing alone — the washing of baptism — and made holy by the coming down of the Spirit? That is exactly the case. [a]

The same thing happens with us, whose pattern Christ became. Baptized, we are illuminated; illuminated, we become sons; made sons, we are made complete; made complete, we are made immortal. “I said,” he says, “that you are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.” This work goes by a whole set of names: a gift, and illumination, and completeness, and washing. Washing, because by it we wash our sins away; a gift, because the penalties owed for our wrongdoing are cancelled; illumination, because by it the holy light of salvation is seen — that is, because by it we see God clearly. Now we call complete whatever lacks nothing. What is still lacking to the man who knows God? It would truly be monstrous for something unfinished to be called a gift of God’s grace. Being complete himself, he gives complete gifts. As everything was made at his command, so on his merely wishing to give the gift, the completing of the gift follows. What time still holds in the future is outrun by the power of his willing.

Further, release from evils is where salvation begins. Merely by first laying hold of the borders of life, then, we are already complete; and we are already alive, because we have been cut off from death. Salvation, then, is following Christ: “for what is in him is life.” “Truly, truly, I tell you, whoever hears my words and believes the one who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has crossed over from death to life.” So believing alone, and the new birth, is completeness of life; for God is never weak. As his will is his work, and this is called the world, so his purpose is the salvation of human beings, and this has been called the church. He knows, then, whom he has called and whom he has saved; and he called them and saved them at one and the same moment. “For you are,” says the apostle, “taught by God.” It is not permitted, then, to think of what he teaches as incomplete; and what is learned from him is the eternal salvation of the eternal Savior — to whom be thanks forever and ever. Amen. And a man who has merely been born anew, as the name itself must mean, and has been given light, is at once set free from darkness and on the instant receives the light.

Think of people who have shaken off sleep: at once they are wide awake inside. Or rather, think of people trying to get a film off their eyes. They do not supply the eyes from outside with a light the eyes do not have; they take away the obstruction and leave the pupil free. In the same way we who are baptized wipe off the sins that darken the light of the divine Spirit, and the eye of the spirit is left free and unhindered and full of light, and by it alone we look on what is divine, while the Holy Spirit flows down to us from above. This is the permanent adjustment of the sight that can see the eternal light, since like loves like; and what is holy loves the source holiness comes from, which has fittingly been called light. “Once you were darkness; now you are light in the Lord.” That, I think, is why the old writers called a human being phōs. But he has not yet received the complete gift, they say. I agree with that too — but he is in the light, and the darkness does not overtake him. There is nothing in between light and darkness. The end, though, is held back until the resurrection of those who believe; and it is not the receiving of something else, but the obtaining of the promise made earlier. We do not say that the two happen together at the same moment, the arrival at the end and the anticipating of that arrival. Eternity and time are not the same, and neither are the attempt and the final result; but both have to do with the same thing, and one and the same person is concerned in both. Faith, so to speak, is the attempt, and it is generated in time; the final result is the obtaining of the promise, and it is secured for eternity.

The Lord himself made the equality of salvation altogether plain when he said, “For this is my Father’s will, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” So far as it is possible in this world — which is what he means by the last day, the world being kept in being until the time when it will end — we believe that we are made complete. For faith is the completion of learning; that is why he says, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.” If, then, those who have believed have life, what is left beyond possessing eternal life? Nothing is lacking to faith, since it is complete and finished in itself. If anything is lacking to it, it is not wholly complete. But faith is not lame in any respect. Nor, once we have left this world, is anything different waiting for those who have believed, who have all alike received the down payment here. Having grasped in advance by faith what is still to come, we receive it as present after the resurrection, so that what was spoken may be fulfilled: “Let it be according to your faith.” And where faith is, there is the promise; and the completing of the promise is rest. So what we receive in illumination is knowledge, and the end of knowledge is rest — the last thing a person can think of to long for. As inexperience is brought to an end by experience, and being at a loss by finding a clear way out, so darkness must disappear through illumination. The darkness is ignorance, and through it we fall into sins, half-blind about the truth. Knowledge, then, is the illumination we receive; it makes ignorance disappear and gives us clear sight. Further, giving up what is bad is taking up what is better. What ignorance has bound badly, knowledge unbinds well; and those bonds are loosened with all speed by human faith and divine grace, our wrongdoing being taken away by one healing medicine — the baptism of the Word.

We are washed of all our sins and are no longer tangled up in evil. This is the one grace of illumination: that our characters are not what they were before our washing. And since knowledge springs up along with illumination and sheds its beams around the mind, the moment we hear we are turned from untaught men into disciples. Does this, I ask, happen when the teaching arrives? You cannot name the time. For teaching leads to faith, and faith along with baptism is trained by the Holy Spirit.

That faith is the one universal salvation of the human race, that there is the same equal standing before the God who is righteous and loving, and the same fellowship between him and everyone alike — this the apostle showed with the greatest clarity when he said: “Before faith came we were kept under the law, shut up for the faith that was going to be revealed, so that the law became our instructor to bring us to Christ, that we might be counted righteous by faith; but now that faith has come, we are no longer under an instructor.” Do you not hear that we are no longer under that law which came with fear, but under the Word, the Instructor of free choice? Then he added the saying that leaves no room for favoritism: “For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” So it is not the case that within the same Word some are “knowers” and others “merely creatures of soul.” All who have given up the cravings of the flesh are equal and spiritual before the Lord. And in another place he writes: “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we have all drunk of one cup.” It would not be absurd to borrow the language of the people who call the recollection of better things the filtering of the spirit, understanding by “filtering” the separating out of what is baser that comes from remembering what is better. A man who has come to remember what is better must necessarily repent of what is worse. So they admit that in repentance the spirit retraces its steps. In just the same way we too, repenting of our sins, renouncing our lawless acts, cleansed by baptism, run back to the eternal light, children to the Father.

So Jesus, rejoicing in the Spirit, said, “I thank you, Father, God of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and the clever and revealed them to infants” — the Instructor and Teacher giving us the name of infants, since we are readier to take hold of salvation than the wise men of the world, who think themselves wise and are swollen with pride. And he cries out in delight and overflowing joy, as if lisping along with the children, “Yes, Father, for so it seemed good in your sight.” That is why what has been hidden from the wise and clever of this present age has been revealed to infants. Truly, then, we are the children of God: we have laid aside the old man, stripped off the clothing of wickedness, and put on the immortality of Christ, so that by the new birth we may become a new and holy people and keep the man undefiled. And an infant, as God’s little one, is cleansed of sexual immorality and of wickedness.

The blessed Paul has settled this question for us with the greatest clarity in his first letter to the Corinthians, where he writes: “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking; be infants in malice, but in your thinking be grown men.” And the saying, “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I spoke like a child,” points to his manner of life under the law: thinking childish things he persecuted, and speaking childish things he blasphemed the Word — not because he had yet reached the simplicity of childhood, but because he was in its folly; for the word nēpios has two senses. “When I became a man,” Paul says again, “I put away childish things.” It is not undersized stature, nor a fixed stretch of time, nor extra secret teachings about things manly and more complete, that the apostle has in view — he who says he has done away with it — when he sends childishness, so to speak, into exile. He gives the name of children to those who are under the law, who are frightened by fear the way children are by bogeymen, and the name of men to us who obey the Word and are our own masters, who have believed and are saved by a choice freely made, and whose fear of what is fearful has reason in it and is not without reason.

The apostle himself will testify to this, since he calls the Jews heirs according to the first covenant and us heirs according to promise: “Now I say that as long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave, though he is lord of everything; he is under guardians and stewards until the time set by his father. So we too, when we were children, were enslaved under the elementary rules of the world; but when the fullness of time came, God sent out his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” through him. See how he has admitted that those who are under fear and sins are children, but has granted manhood to those who are under faith by calling them sons, marking them off from the children who are under the law: “For you are no longer a slave,” he says, “but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.” What is lacking to a son once the inheritance is his? So the words “When I was a child” may be neatly explained like this: that is, when I was a Jew — for he was a Hebrew by descent — I thought like a child, since I was following the law; but after becoming a man I no longer hold a child’s opinions, that is, the law’s, but a man’s, that is, Christ’s, whom alone the Scripture calls man, as we have said before. “I put away childish things.” But the childhood that is in Christ is maturity compared with the law.

Having got this far, we must now defend our childhood. And we still have to explain what the apostle says: “I fed you with milk, as children in Christ, not with solid food; for you were not able to take it, and you are not able even now.” It does not seem to me that this is to be taken in a Jewish sense; for I shall set against it that other Scripture: “I will bring you into that good land, which flows with milk and honey.” A very great difficulty arises when we hold these two passages side by side. If the infancy marked by the milk is the beginning of faith in Christ, then it is being run down as childish and incomplete. How is it, then, that the rest which comes after the solid food — the rest of the complete man, the man who has knowledge — is marked out once more by an infant’s milk? Does not the word “as,” which marks a comparison, point to something like this? Should the sentence not be read something like this: “I fed you with milk in Christ” — and then, after a slight pause, let us add, “as children.” By dividing the words as we read, we may bring out a sense like this: I taught you in Christ with simple, true, and natural nourishment, that is, with what is spiritual. For that is what the nourishing substance of milk is, swelling out from the breasts of love. So the whole matter may be understood this way: as nurses feed newborn children on milk, so I too, by the Word, the milk of Christ, instill spiritual nourishment into you.

So the milk that is complete is complete nourishment, and it brings a man to the consummation that cannot come to an end. That is also why the same milk and honey were promised in the rest. Rightly, then, does the Lord again promise milk to the righteous, so that the Word may be plainly shown to be both, “the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” — the Word being pictured as milk. Homer says something like this against his will, when he calls righteous men milk-fed.

We may take this Scripture the same way: “And I, brothers, could not speak to you as to spiritual people, but as to people of flesh, as to infants in Christ.” The people of flesh can be understood as those who have only lately been taught and are still infants in Christ. He called those who had already believed in the Holy Spirit spiritual, and those newly taught and not yet cleansed people of flesh — and he calls them, justly, still of the flesh, since they mind the things of the flesh exactly as the heathen do: “For where there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving like mere men?” “That is why I gave you milk to drink,” he says — meaning, I instilled into you the knowledge that comes from teaching and nourishes up to eternal life. But the phrase “I gave you to drink” is the sign of taking a thing fully as one’s own; for the full-grown are said to drink and infants to suck. “For my blood,” says the Lord, “is true drink.” In saying, then, “I gave you milk to drink,” has he not pointed to the knowledge of the truth, the complete gladness in the Word, who is the milk? And what comes next, “not solid food, for you were not able,” may point to the clear revelation in the world to come, which is like food, face to face. “For now we see as in a mirror,” says the same apostle, “but then face to face.” That is why he added, “and you are not able even now, for you are still of the flesh” — minding the things of the flesh, desiring, loving, feeling jealousy, anger, envy. “For we are no longer in the flesh,” as some suppose we are; for even with the flesh, having a face like an angel’s, we shall see the promise face to face. But then how can men who did not perceive it by the Spirit, but got it from teaching, say that they know “what eye has not seen, nor has entered the mind of man,” “what ear has not heard”? Or does only that one ear know it which “was caught up into the third heaven”? And even then it was commanded to keep it unspoken.

But if human wisdom, so far as we can still make it out, means boasting in knowledge, hear the law of Scripture: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, and let not the strong man boast in his strength; but let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” We, though, are taught by God, and we boast in the name of Christ. How then are we not to suppose that this is the sense the apostle attaches to the milk of the infants? And if those who preside over the churches are shepherds after the image of the good Shepherd, and we are the sheep, are we not to suppose that the Lord keeps his figure of speech consistent when he speaks of the milk of the flock as well? In this sense too, secondly, we may take the words, “I gave you milk to drink, and did not give you food, for you were not yet able” — not treating the solid food as something different from the milk, but as the same in substance. For the very same Word is fluid and mild, like milk, or firm and packed, like solid food. Taking that view, we may regard the proclamation of the good news, spread everywhere, as milk; and as solid food, faith, which out of teaching is packed together into a foundation, and which, being more substantial than hearing, is likened to solid food and works nourishment of that kind into the soul itself.

Elsewhere the Lord brought this out by symbols, in the Gospel according to John, when he said, “Eat my flesh and drink my blood” — describing distinctly, by a figure, the drinkable properties of faith and of the promise. By them the church, like a human being made up of many members, is refreshed and grows, and is welded and packed together out of both: out of faith, which is the body, and out of hope, which is the soul — as the Lord too is made of flesh and blood. For the blood of faith is in fact hope, and faith is held in hope as by its vital principle; and when hope gives out, it is as though the blood ran out, and the life of faith is destroyed. If some want to object that milk means the first lessons — the first food, so to speak — and that solid food means those spiritual insights they attain by raising themselves to knowledge, let them understand this: in saying that solid food is the flesh and blood of Jesus, they are brought by their own boastful wisdom back to the true simplicity.

For blood is found to be the original stuff in a human being, and some have therefore dared to call it the substance of the soul. And this blood, changed by the ordinary process of assimilation while the mother is pregnant, through the sympathy of a parent’s affection blossoms and ripens, so that there is nothing to fear for the child. Blood, too, is the moister part of flesh, a kind of liquid flesh; and milk is the sweeter and finer part of blood. For whether it is the blood supplied to the fetus and sent through the mother’s navel, or whether it is the monthly flow itself, shut off from its usual passage and by a natural diffusion — at the bidding of the God who feeds and creates everything — moving on to the breasts, which are already swelling, and there transmuted by the heat of the spirits: whichever of the two it is, what is changed into food fit for the baby is blood. For of all the members, the breasts have the most sympathy with the womb. When the birth comes, the vessel by which blood was carried to the fetus is cut off; the flow is blocked, and the blood is driven toward the breasts. A considerable rush takes place, they are distended, and they change the blood into milk in a way that corresponds to the change of blood into pus in a sore. Or else the blood from the veins near the breasts, which have been opened during pregnancy, is poured into the natural hollows of the breasts; and the breath discharged from the neighboring arteries mixes with it; and the substance of the blood, still remaining pure, turns white by being agitated like a wave, and by that sort of disturbance is changed by being frothed up — the way the sea is, which, at the assault of the winds, as the poets say, “spits out briny foam.” Yet even so, the essence is supplied by the blood. In the same way rivers, carried along in a rush and fretted by contact with the surrounding air, murmur out foam. The moisture in our mouths, too, is whitened by the breath. What nonsense it is, then, to refuse to admit that blood is turned by the breath into that very bright white substance! The change it undergoes is in quality, not in essence. You will certainly find nothing more nourishing, or sweeter, or whiter than milk. In every respect, then, it is like spiritual nourishment, which is sweet through grace, nourishing as life, and bright as the day of Christ.

The blood of the Word has been shown to be milk as well. Milk, provided at the birth, is supplied to the infant; and the breasts, which until then looked straight out toward the husband, now bend down toward the child, having been taught to furnish the substance nature has worked up, in a form easily taken, for wholesome nourishment. For the breasts are not like fountains full of milk that flows into them ready-made; by working a change on the food they form the milk in themselves, and then discharge it. And the nourishment that suits the newly formed and newborn baby and keeps it healthy is worked up by God, the nourisher and Father of all who are born and born again — as manna, the heavenly food of angels, flowed down out of heaven on the ancient Hebrews. In fact, even now nurses call the first milk poured out by the same name as that food: manna. Further, pregnant women, on becoming mothers, discharge milk. But the Lord Christ, the fruit of the Virgin, did not call the breasts of women blessed, nor pick them out to give nourishment; when the kind and loving Father had rained down the Word, he himself became spiritual nourishment for the good.

What a mystic marvel! The universal Father is one, and the universal Word is one, and the Holy Spirit is one and the same everywhere, and one is the only virgin mother. I like to call her the Church. This mother alone had no milk, because she alone never became a wife. But she is at once virgin and mother — pure as a virgin, loving as a mother. And calling her children to her, she nurses them with holy milk, that is, with the Word for their childhood. That is why she had no milk: the milk was this child, fair and lovely, the body of Christ, which nourishes with the Word the young brood that the Lord himself brought to birth in the throes of the flesh, and that the Lord himself wrapped in his own precious blood. What an amazing birth! What holy swaddling bands! The Word is everything to the child — father and mother and Instructor and nurse. “Eat my flesh,” he says, “and drink my blood.” Such is the food that suits us, which the Lord supplies; he offers his flesh and pours out his blood, and nothing is lacking for the children’s growth. What an amazing mystery! We are ordered to throw off the old corruption of the flesh, and the old food along with it, and to take in exchange another and new way of eating, the way of Christ — receiving him, if we can, and hiding him inside us, so that, enshrining the Savior in our souls, we may set right the passions of our flesh.

But you are not inclined to understand it that way; perhaps you would take it more generally. Then hear it this way as well. The flesh stands in figure for the Holy Spirit, since the flesh was created by him. The blood points us to the Word, since the Word has been poured into life like rich blood; and the union of the two is the Lord, the food of the infants — the Lord who is Spirit and Word. The food, that is, the Lord Jesus, that is, the Word of God, the Spirit made flesh, the heavenly flesh made holy. The nourishment is the milk of the Father, and by it alone we infants are fed. The Word himself, then, the beloved one, our nourisher, poured out his own blood for us, to save humanity; and through him we, believing in God, run for refuge to the Word, the Father’s “breast that soothes away care.” And he alone, as is fitting, supplies us children with the milk of love, and only those are truly blessed who suck at this breast. That is why Peter says: “So lay aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander, and like newborn babies long for the milk of the word, so that by it you may grow up to salvation, if you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

And if someone were to concede to them that the solid food was something different from the milk, how will they avoid being run through on their own spit, for want of paying attention to nature? In winter, when the air is condensed and prevents the enclosed heat from escaping, the food, transmuted and digested and changed into blood, passes into the veins; and these, with nothing exhaling out of them, are greatly distended and show strong pulsations — and so nurses are then fullest of milk. And we showed a little above that in pregnancy blood passes into milk by a change that does not affect its substance, just as in old people yellow hair turns gray. But in summer, on the other hand, the body, having its pores more open, lets the food sweat away more easily, and the milk is scantiest, since the blood is not full and the whole of the nourishment is not retained. If, then, the digestion of the food results in the production of blood, and the blood becomes milk, then blood is the preparation for milk, as seed is for a human being and the grape-pip for the vine. With milk, then, the Lord’s nourishment, we are nursed the moment we are born; and as soon as we are born again we are honored with the good news of the hope of rest, the Jerusalem above, where it is written that milk and honey fall in showers — receiving through what is material the pledge of the sacred food. “For foods are done away with,” as the apostle himself says; but this nourishment on milk leads to the heavens, rearing up citizens of heaven and members of the choirs of angels.

And since the Word is the gushing fountain of life, and has been called a river of olive oil, Paul, using the fitting figure and calling him milk, adds, “I gave you to drink”; for we drink in the Word, the nourishment of the truth. In fact liquid food is also called drink; and the same thing may somehow be both solid food and drink, depending on how you look at it — as cheese is the solidifying of milk, or milk solidified. I am not concerned here to pick a word nicely, only to say that one substance supplies both articles of food. Besides, for children at the breast milk alone is enough; it serves as both food and drink. “I,” says the Lord, “have food to eat that you do not know about. My food is to do the will of him who sent me.” You see another kind of food which, like milk, stands in figure for the will of God. Besides, he also called the completing of his own suffering “a cup,” stretching the word to do it, when he alone had to drink it and drain it. So to Christ the doing of his Father’s will was food; and to us infants, who drink the milk of the word from the heavens, Christ himself is food. That is why seeking is called sucking; for to the infants who seek the Word, the Father’s breasts of love supply milk.

Further, the Word declares himself to be the bread of heaven. “For Moses,” he says, “did not give you that bread from heaven; but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. And the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” Here the mystery of the bread is to be noticed: he speaks of it as flesh, and therefore as flesh that has risen through fire, as the wheat springs up out of decay and germination; and in truth it has risen through fire for the joy of the church, like bread that has been baked. But this will be shown more clearly further on, in the chapter on the resurrection. And since he said, “And the bread that I will give is my flesh,” and since flesh is moistened with blood, and blood is figuratively called wine, we are meant to know this: as bread crumbled into a mixture of wine and water seizes on the wine and leaves the watery part, so also the flesh of Christ, the bread of heaven, absorbs the blood — that is, those among men who are heavenly — nourishing them up to immortality, and leaving only the cravings of the flesh to destruction.

So the Word is described in figures in many ways: as solid food, and flesh, and food, and bread, and blood, and milk. The Lord is all of these, to give enjoyment to us who have believed in him. Let no one think it strange, then, when we say that the Lord’s blood is figuratively represented as milk. Is it not figuratively represented as wine? “He washes his robe in wine,” it is said, “and his garment in the blood of the grape.” He says that with his own blood he will clothe the body of the Word, just as by his own Spirit he will nourish those who hunger for the Word. And that the blood is the Word is testified by the blood of Abel, the righteous man, pleading with God. Blood would never have uttered a voice if it had not been regarded as the Word; for the righteous man of old is the pattern of the new righteous one, and the old blood that pleaded pleads in place of the new blood. And the blood that is the Word cries out to God, since it signified that the Word was going to suffer.

Further, this flesh, and the blood in it, are moistened and increased by the milk through a mutual sympathy. And the seed takes shape in conception when it has mingled with the pure residue of the monthly flow that remains. For the force in the seed, curdling the substances of the blood as rennet curdles milk, brings about the essential part of the shaping. A suitable blend makes for fruitfulness, while the extremes work against it and tend toward barrenness. When the ground itself is flooded by too much rain, the seed is swept away; when there is scarcity, it dries up; but when the sap is thick, the ground holds the seed and makes it germinate. Some also hold the theory that an animal’s seed is in substance the foam of the blood, which, agitated and shaken up by the natural heat of the male, is turned into foam and deposited in the seminal veins. That, Diogenes of Apollonia will have it, is where the word aphrodisia comes from. From all this, then, it is evident that the essential principle of the human body is blood. What is in the womb, too, is at first milky, a curdling of fluid; then the same curdled substance is changed into blood; and when it is formed into a compact consistency in the womb, by the natural warm breath that shapes the embryo, it becomes a living creature. Further, the child after birth is nourished by the same blood; for the flow of milk is a product of the blood, and the source of nourishment is the milk. By it a woman is shown to have borne a child and to be truly a mother, and by it she also receives a strong charm of affection. That is why the Holy Spirit in the apostle, using the voice of the Lord, says in a hidden way, “I gave you milk to drink.” For if we have been born again into Christ, the one who has given us that new birth nourishes us with his own milk, the Word; it is only right that what has begotten should at once supply nourishment to what it has begotten. And as the new birth was spiritual, so the nourishment of the man was spiritual too. In every respect, then, and in all things, we are brought into union with Christ: into kinship through his blood, by which we are redeemed; into sympathy, through the nourishment that flows from the Word; and into immortality, through his guidance. “Among

The same blood and milk of the Lord is therefore the symbol of the Lord’s suffering and of his teaching. That is why each of us infants is permitted to make his boast in the Lord, while we proclaim: “Yet

And that milk is produced from blood by a change is already clear; but we may learn it from the flocks and herds as well. In the season of the year we call spring, when the air has more moisture in it and the grass and meadows are juicy and wet, these animals are first filled with blood, as the distension of the swollen vessels shows; and out of the blood the milk flows more freely. But in summer again, the blood, burned and dried up by the heat, prevents the change, and so they have less milk.

Further, milk has the most natural affinity for water, just as the spiritual washing has for the spiritual nourishment. So those who swallow a little cold water in addition to the milk just spoken of feel the benefit at once; for the milk is kept from souring by being combined with water — not because there is any antipathy between them, but because the water takes kindly to the milk while it is being digested. And the union of the Word with baptism is like the agreement of milk with water; for milk receives water alone of all liquids, and admits of being mixed with water for the purpose of cleansing, as baptism does for the forgiveness of sins. It is naturally mixed with honey as well, and this for cleansing along with sweet nourishment; for the Word blended with love at once cures our passions and cleanses our sins. And the saying,

seems to me to have been spoken of the Word, who is honey. And prophecy often praises him as “better than honey and the honeycomb.” Furthermore, milk is mixed with sweet wine, and the mixture is beneficial, as suffering is mixed into the cup for the sake of immortality. For the milk is curdled by the wine and separated, and whatever adulteration is in it is drained off. In the same way the spiritual fellowship of faith with a man’s suffering draws off the cravings of the flesh like watery matter, and commits the man to eternity along with those who are divine, making him immortal.

Further, many people also use the fat of milk, which is called butter, for the lamp — plainly indicating by this riddle the abundant anointing of the Word, since he alone it is who nourishes the infants, makes them grow, and gives them light. That is why Scripture says about the Lord, “He fed them with the produce of the fields; they sucked honey out of the rock, and oil out of the solid rock, butter of cows and milk of sheep, with the fat of lambs” — and what follows, he gave them. And the one who prophesies the birth of the child says, “Butter and honey will he eat.” And it occurs to me to wonder how some men dare to call themselves complete, and knowers, with a notion of themselves higher than the apostle’s, puffed up and boastful — when Paul admitted about himself: “Not that I have already obtained it, or am already complete; but I press on, to see whether I may lay hold of that for which I have been laid hold of by Christ. Brothers, I do not count myself to have laid hold of it; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and stretching out toward what lies ahead, I press on toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling in Christ Jesus.” And yet he reckons himself complete, in that he has been set free from his former life and strives after the better life — not complete in knowledge, but reaching out after completeness. That is why he adds, “All of us, then, who are complete, are of this mind” — plainly describing completeness as the renunciation of sin, the new birth into faith in the only complete One, and the forgetting of our former sins.