The Word Became Man for Us

For look: as if they were not yet tired of their impious talk, but hardened like Pharaoh, they hear and see the Savior’s human traits in the Gospels, and, like the man of Samosata, they have utterly forgotten the Son’s Godhead, which is the Father’s. With arrogant and reckless tongues they say: “How can the Son be from the Father by nature, and be like him in substance, when he says, ‘All power has been given to me,’ and, ‘The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son,’ and, ‘The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand; whoever believes in the Son has eternal life,’ and again, ‘All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him,’ and again, ‘All that the Father gives me will come to me’?” On this they remark: “If he were, as you say, Son by nature, he would have had no need to receive; he would have had these things by nature, as a Son.” And: “How can he be the natural and true Power of the Father, when near the time of his suffering he says, ‘Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ And he said the same thing another time: ‘Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.’ And: ‘When Jesus had said this, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’” Then these perverse men argue: “If he were Power, he would not have been afraid; rather, he would have supplied power to others.” [a]

They say further: “If he were by nature the true and very own Wisdom of the Father, how is it written, ‘And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man’?” In the same way, when he had come into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked the disciples who people said he was; and when he was at Bethany he asked where Lazarus had been laid; and besides, he said to his disciples, “How many loaves do you have?” “How then,” they say, “is he Wisdom, when he increased in wisdom, and did not know what he asked others?” They press this too: “How can he be the Father’s very own Word, without whom the Father never was, and through whom, as you think, the Father makes all things, when on the cross he said, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ and before that had prayed, ‘Glorify your name,’ and, ‘Father, glorify me with the glory that I had with you before the world existed’? And he used to pray in the deserts, and told his disciples to pray that they might not enter into temptation; and he said, ‘The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ And: ‘Concerning that day and that hour no one knows, not even the angels, nor the Son.’” On this the wretched men say again: “If the Son, according to your interpretation, existed eternally with God, he would not have been ignorant of the day, but would have known it as Word. He would not have been forsaken, since he existed together with God. He would not have asked to receive glory, since he had it in the Father. And he would not have prayed at all, for, being the Word, he would have needed nothing. But since he is a creature and one of the originated things, that is why he spoke in this way, and needed what he did not have. For it belongs to creatures to require and to need what they do not have.”

This, then, is what the impious men put forward in their discourses. And if they argue like this, they might as well, to be consistent, speak more daringly still: “Why did the Word become flesh at all?” And they might add, “How could he, being God, become man?” or, “How could the immaterial bear a body?” Or they might speak still more like the Jews, with Caiaphas: “Why did Christ, being a man, make himself God at all?” For this and the like is what the Jews muttered then when they saw him, and what the Ario-maniacs now refuse to believe when they read it; and so they have fallen away into blasphemies. If, then, someone carefully sets the words of the one beside the words of the other, he will certainly find that both arrive at the same unbelief, that the daring of their impiety is equal, and that their quarrel with us is a common one. For the Jews said, “How can he, being a man, be God?” And the Arians: “If he were true God from God, how could he become man?” The Jews took offense then and mocked, saying, “If he had been the Son of God, he would not have endured the cross.” And the Arians, standing over against them, press us: “How dare you say that he is the Word proper to the Father’s substance, when he had a body, so as to endure all this?” Next, while the Jews sought to kill the Lord because he said that God was his own Father, and made himself equal to him, since he did the works the Father does, the Arians too have not only learned to deny both that he is equal to God and that God is the very own and natural Father of the Word, but they seek to kill those who hold it. Again, the Jews said, “Is this not the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How then does he say, ‘Before Abraham was, I am,’ and, ‘I came down from heaven’?” And the Arians, for their part, answer back in the same tune: “How can he be Word or God, who slept as a man, and wept, and asked questions?” So both parties deny the eternity and Godhead of the Word because of the human traits the Savior took on himself by reason of the flesh he bore. [e]

Such error, then, is Jewish, and Jewish after the mind of Judas the traitor. So let them openly confess themselves pupils of Caiaphas and Herod, instead of cloaking Judaism under the name of Christianity; and let them deny outright, as we said before, the Savior’s coming in the flesh, for that teaching is akin to their heresy. Or, if they are afraid to go openly over to Judaism and be circumcised, out of servility toward Constantius and for the sake of those they have led astray, then let them not say what the Jews say. For if they disown the name, let them in fairness give up the teaching too. For we are Christians, you Arians; Christians are we. It is our privilege to know well what the Gospels say about the Savior, and neither to join the Jews in stoning him when we hear of his Godhead and eternity, nor to join you in stumbling at such lowly sayings as he may speak for our sakes as man. If, then, you would become Christians, put off Arius’s madness, and with the words of true religion cleanse those ears of yours that blasphemy has defiled. Know that by ceasing to be Arians you will also cease from the malice of the Jews of today. [f]

Then at once the truth will shine on you out of darkness, and you will no longer reproach us with holding two eternal beings. You will yourselves acknowledge that the Lord is God’s true Son by nature, and not merely eternal, but revealed as existing together with the Father in the Father’s eternity. For there are things called eternal of which he is the Maker. In the twenty-third Psalm it is written, “Lift up your gates, you rulers, and be lifted up, you everlasting gates”; and it is plain that these things were made through him. But if he is the Maker even of everlasting things, who of us can any longer dispute that he is before those eternal things, and so is shown to be Lord not so much from his eternity as from his being God’s Son? For being the Son, he is inseparable from the Father; there never was a time when he was not, but he always was; and being the Father’s Image and Radiance, he has the Father’s eternity. What has been briefly said above may be enough to show how they misunderstood the passages they put forward before. And that they certainly give an unsound interpretation of what they now put forward from the Gospels, we can easily see if we now consider the aim of the faith that we Christians hold, and, using it as a rule, apply ourselves, as the apostle teaches, to the reading of inspired Scripture. For Christ’s enemies, not knowing this aim, have wandered from the way of truth, and have stumbled on the stone of stumbling, thinking otherwise than they should think.

Now the aim and character of Holy Scripture, as we have often said, is this: it contains a double account of the Savior. It tells that he was always God, and is the Son, being the Father’s Word and Radiance and Wisdom; and that afterwards, for our sake, he took flesh of a virgin, Mary the Bearer of God, and became man. This aim is found throughout inspired Scripture, as the Lord himself said: “Search the Scriptures, for they are the ones that testify about me.” But so as not to write too much by gathering together all the passages on the subject, let it be enough to mention a sample. First, John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him not one thing was made.” Next: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” And next, Paul writes, “Who, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a prize, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” Anyone who begins with these passages and goes through the whole of Scripture with the interpretation they suggest will see how in the beginning the Father said to him, “Let there be light,” and, “Let there be an expanse,” and, “Let us make man”; but in the fullness of the ages he sent him into the world, not to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him. And he will see how it is written, “Look, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a Son, and they will call his name Emmanuel, which means, God with us.” [j]

So the reader of divine Scripture may learn these things from the ancient books; and from the Gospels, on the other hand, he will see that the Lord became man. For “the Word,” it says, “became flesh, and dwelt among us.” And he became man; he did not come into a man. This must be understood, in case these impious men fall into this notion too, and lead anyone astray into thinking that, as in former times the Word used to come into each of the saints, so now he came to stay in a man, making him holy too, and showing himself in him as he did in the others. For if that were so, and he had only appeared in a man, it would have been nothing strange, and those who saw him would not have been startled and said, “Where is this man from?” and, “Why do you, being a man, make yourself God?” For they were familiar with the idea from the words, “And the word of the Lord came” to this or that one of the prophets. But as it is, since the Word of God, through whom all things came into being, consented to become also Son of man, and humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, that is why the cross of Christ is a stumbling block to the Jews, but to us Christ is “the power of God” and “the wisdom of God.” For, as John says, “the Word became flesh.” It is the custom of Scripture to call man by the name of “flesh,” as it says through the prophet Joel, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,” and as Daniel said to Astyages, “I do not worship idols made with hands, but the living God, who created heaven and earth and has dominion over all flesh.” For both he and Joel call humankind flesh. [l]

In former times he used to come to the saints one by one, and to make holy those who received him rightly. But when they were born, it was not said that he had become man; and when they suffered, it was not said that he himself suffered. But when he came among us from Mary, once for all, at the end of the ages, to do away with sin (for so it pleased the Father, to send his own Son, “born of a woman, born under the Law”), then it is said that he took flesh and became man, and in that flesh he suffered for us, as Peter says: “Since therefore Christ suffered for us in the flesh.” This was so that it might be shown, and all might believe, that although he was always God, and made holy those to whom he came, and ordered all things according to the Father’s will, afterwards for our sakes he became man, and, as the apostle says, the Godhead dwelt in the flesh “bodily.” It is as much as to say, “Being God, he had his own body, and using it as an instrument, he became man for our sakes.” Because of this, the properties of the flesh are said to be his, since he was in it: to hunger, to thirst, to suffer, to grow weary, and the like, of which the flesh is capable. On the other hand, the works proper to the Word himself, such as raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, and curing the woman with the flow of blood, he did through his own body. And the Word bore the weaknesses of the flesh as his own, for the flesh was his; and the flesh served the works of the Godhead, because the Godhead was in it, for the body was God’s. And the prophet spoke well when he said “carried.” He did not say, “He remedied our weaknesses,” in case, being outside the body and only healing it, as he has always done, he should leave men still subject to death. Rather, he carries our weaknesses, and he himself bears our sins, so that it might be shown that he has become man for us, and that the body which bore them in him was his own body. And while he himself suffered no harm by “bearing our sins in his body on the tree,” as Peter puts it, we men were redeemed from our own sufferings, and were filled with the righteousness of the Word. [m]

So when the flesh suffered, the Word was not outside it, and that is why the suffering is said to be his. And when he did his Father’s works in a divine way, the flesh was not outside him; it was in the body itself that the Lord did them. That is why, having become man, he said, “If I am not doing the works of my Father, do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know that the Father is in me and I in him.” So when there was need to raise up Peter’s wife’s mother, who was sick with a fever, he stretched out his hand in a human way, but he stopped the illness in a divine way. In the case of the man blind from birth, the spittle he gave from the flesh was human, but he opened the eyes through the clay in a divine way. And in the case of Lazarus, he gave a human voice as man, but in a divine way, as God, he raised Lazarus from the dead. These things were done in this way, and shown in this way, because he had a body, not in appearance but in truth. And it was fitting for the Lord, in putting on human flesh, to put it on whole, with the sufferings proper to it, so that, as we say the body was his own, we may also say that the sufferings of the body were proper to him alone, though they did not touch him in his Godhead. If, then, the body had been someone else’s, the sufferings too would have been attributed to that other. But if the flesh is the Word’s (for “the Word became flesh”), then of necessity the sufferings of the flesh are also ascribed to him whose the flesh is. And to the one to whom the sufferings are ascribed, such as being condemned, being scourged, thirsting, the cross, death, and the other weaknesses of the body, to him also belong the triumph and the grace. For this reason, then, such sufferings are consistently and fittingly ascribed not to another but to the Lord, so that the grace too may come from him, and so that we may become, not worshipers of anyone else, but truly devout toward God. For we call on no originated thing, no ordinary man, but the natural and true Son from God, who has become man, and yet is no less Lord and God and Savior. [p]

Who will not marvel at this? Or who will not agree that such a thing is truly divine? For if the works of the Word’s Godhead had not been done through the body, man would not have been deified. And again, if the properties of the flesh had not been ascribed to the Word, man would not have been thoroughly set free from them. Even if they had ceased for a little while, as I said before, sin and corruption would still have remained in him, as was the case with mankind before him. And here is why. Many, for instance, have been made holy and clean from all sin. Indeed, Jeremiah was made holy even from the womb, and John, while still in the womb, leapt for joy at the voice of Mary the Bearer of God. Nevertheless, “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of Adam’s transgression.” And so man remained mortal and corruptible as before, liable to the sufferings proper to their nature. But now that the Word has become man, and has made his own what belongs to the flesh, these things no longer touch the body, because of the Word who has come into it. Instead they are destroyed by him, and from now on men no longer remain sinners and dead according to their own sufferings, but, having risen by the Word’s power, they remain forever immortal and incorruptible. [q]

So too, since the flesh was born of Mary the Bearer of God, he himself is said to have been born, he who gives others their origin of being, so that he may transfer our origin into himself, and we may no longer, as mere earth, return to earth, but, being joined to the Word from heaven, may be carried to heaven by him. In the same way, then, and not without reason, he has transferred to himself the other sufferings of the body as well, so that we may share in eternal life, no longer as men, but as belonging to the Word. For we no longer die according to our former origin in Adam. From now on, since our origin and all the weakness of the flesh have been transferred to the Word, we rise from the earth, and the curse that came from sin is removed, because of him who is in us and who has become a curse for us. And rightly so. For as we are all from earth and die in Adam, so, being born again from above of water and Spirit, we are all made alive in Christ. The flesh is no longer earthly, but from now on is made Word, because of God’s Word, who for our sake “became flesh.”

And so that one may come to a more exact knowledge of how the Word’s nature is beyond suffering, and of the weaknesses ascribed to him because of the flesh, it will be good to listen to the blessed Peter, for he will be a trustworthy witness about the Savior. He writes this in his letter: “Since therefore Christ suffered for us in the flesh.” So when he is said to hunger and thirst, to toil and not to know, to sleep and to weep, to ask and to flee, to be born, to pray that the cup might pass, and in a word to undergo all that belongs to the flesh, let it be said, as is fitting, in each case: “Christ, then, hungering and thirsting ‘for us in the flesh’”; and saying he did not know, and being struck, and toiling, “for us in the flesh”; and being exalted too, and born, and growing, “in the flesh”; and fearing and hiding, “in the flesh”; and saying, “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me,” and being beaten, and receiving, “for us in the flesh”; and in a word, all such things “for us in the flesh.” For this is why the apostle himself said, “Christ, then, having suffered,” not in his Godhead, but “for us in the flesh”: so that these sufferings may be acknowledged as proper by nature, not to the very Word, but to the very flesh. [s]

So let no one stumble at what belongs to man. Rather, let a person know that the Word himself is by nature beyond suffering, and yet, because of the flesh he put on, these things are ascribed to him, since they are proper to the flesh, and the body itself is proper to the Savior. And while he himself, being by nature beyond suffering, remains as he is, not harmed by these sufferings, but rather wiping them out and destroying them, men, their sufferings changed, as it were, and done away in him who cannot suffer, from now on become themselves also beyond suffering, and free from them forever. So John taught, saying, “And you know that he appeared to take away our sins, and in him there is no sin.” And since this is so, no heretic will object: “Why does the flesh rise, when it is mortal by nature? And if it rises, why does it not also hunger and thirst, and suffer, and remain mortal? For it came from the earth, and how can its natural condition pass away from it?” For the flesh can now answer this very contentious heretic: “I am from the earth, mortal by nature, but afterwards I became the Word’s flesh, and he ‘carried’ my sufferings, though he is without them. And so I became free of them, no longer abandoned to their service, because of the Lord who has made me free of them. For if you object to my being rid of the corruption that is mine by nature, take care that you do not object to God’s Word having taken my servant’s form.” For as the Lord, putting on the body, became man, so we men are deified by the Word, being taken to him through his flesh, and from now on we inherit life “everlasting.”

We have found it necessary to examine these points first, so that when we see him doing or saying anything in a divine way through the instrument of his own body, we may know that he works in this way because he is God; and also, if we see him speaking or suffering in a human way, we may not fail to see that he bore flesh and became man, and that this is why he acts and speaks in this way. For if we recognize what is proper to each, and see and understand that both these things and those are done by one and the same, we are right in our faith, and will never go astray. But if someone, looking at what is done divinely by the Word, denies the body; or, looking at what is proper to the body, denies the Word’s presence in the flesh; or from what is human forms low thoughts about the Word; such a person, like a Jewish wine-seller mixing water with the wine, will count the cross a stumbling block, or, like a Gentile, will think the preaching foolishness. This, then, is what happens to God’s enemies the Arians. Looking at what is human in the Savior, they have judged him a creature. By the same reasoning, looking also at the divine works of the Word, they ought to deny that his body ever came into being, and from then on to rank themselves with the Manichaeans. But as for them, let them learn, however late, that “the Word became flesh.” And let us, holding on to the general aim of the faith, acknowledge that what they interpret badly has a right interpretation. [t]