The Subject of This Treatise

In what came before, we gave a sufficient account, choosing a few points out of many, of the error of the pagans about idols and the worship of idols, and of how these were first invented: how, that is, men out of wickedness devised the worship of idols for themselves. By God’s grace we also noted something of the divinity of the Word of the Father, of his providence over all things and his power, and of how the good Father orders all things through him, all things are moved by him, and in him all things are given life. Come now, Macarius, worthy of that name and a true lover of Christ, let us follow up the faith of our religion and set out also what concerns the Word’s becoming man and his divine appearing among us. The Jews slander it and the Greeks laugh it to scorn, but we worship. Let us set it out so that, the lower the Word may seem to have come, the more your devotion to him may be increased and multiplied. [a]

For the more he is mocked among unbelievers, the more witness he gives that he is God. What men mistakenly think impossible, he himself shows to be possible. What men ridicule as unfitting, he by his own goodness clothes with fitness. And what men, in their conceit of wisdom, laugh at as merely human, he by his own power shows to be divine. By his supposed humiliation, by the cross, he overthrows the pretensions of idols, and those who mock and disbelieve he invisibly wins over to recognize his divinity and his power.

But to treat this subject we must recall what has already been said. Then you will not fail to know why the Word of the Father, so high and so great, appeared in a body, and you will not think it a consequence of his own nature that the Savior has worn a body. Rather, though he is without a body by nature, and the Word from the beginning, he has been shown to us in a human body for our salvation, out of the love for humankind and the goodness of his own Father. It is right, then, for us to begin this subject by speaking of the creation of the universe and of God its Craftsman. In that way it may be properly seen that the renewal of creation has been the work of the very same Word who made it in the beginning. For it will not appear at all out of keeping for the Father to have worked its salvation through the one by whom he made it.