The Portrait Repainted

When the likeness painted on a panel has been spoiled by stains from outside, the one whose likeness it is must come again so that the portrait can be renewed on the same wood. For the sake of his picture, even the mere wood on which it is painted is not thrown away; the outline is renewed on it. In the same way the most holy Son of the Father, being the Image of the Father, came to our region to renew man, who had once been made in his likeness, and to find him, as one lost, by the forgiveness of sins. As he says himself in the Gospels, “I came to find and to save the lost.” That is why he also said to the Jews, “Unless a man is born again,” meaning not birth from a woman, as they thought, but the soul born and created anew in the likeness of God’s image. [a]

But since wild idolatry and godlessness had taken hold of the world, and the knowledge of God was hidden, whose part was it to teach the world about the Father? Man’s, someone might say? But it was not in man’s power to reach everywhere under the sun. They did not have the physical strength to travel so far, nor would they have been able to win belief on this subject, nor were they able by themselves to stand against the deceit and the tricks of evil spirits. For when all were struck and confused in soul by the deceit of demons and the emptiness of idols, how could they win over man’s soul and man’s mind, when they cannot even see them? Or how can a man convert what he does not see?

But perhaps someone might say that creation was enough. But if creation were enough, these great evils would never have happened. For creation was already there, and all the same men were groveling in the same error about God. Who, then, was needed, but the Word of God, who sees both soul and mind, who gives movement to all things in creation, and by them makes the Father known? He who by his own providence and ordering of all things was teaching men about the Father was the one who could renew this same teaching as well. How, then, could this have been done? Perhaps someone might say that the same means were open as before, for him to show the truth about the Father once more through the work of creation. But this was no longer a sure means. Quite the contrary: men had failed to see this before, and their eyes were turned no longer upward but downward. So, naturally, wishing to benefit men, he comes to dwell here as man, taking to himself a body like the others, and from things of earth, that is, by the works of his body, he teaches them. Then those who would not know him from his providence and rule over all things might, from the works done by his actual body, know the Word of God who is in the body, and through him the Father.