The Teacher Who Comes Down to His Pupils

A kind teacher who cares for his disciples, if some of them cannot profit by higher subjects, comes down to their level and teaches them at least by simpler lessons. So too did the Word of God. As Paul also says: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.” For men had turned away from the contemplation of God. With their eyes cast down, as though sunk in the deep, they were searching for God in nature and in the world of the senses, inventing gods for themselves out of mortal men and demons. To this end the loving Savior of all, common to all, the Word of God, takes to himself a body, walks as man among men, and meets the senses of all men halfway. He does this so that those who think God is bodily may perceive the truth from what the Lord does through his body, and through him recognize the Father. [a]

So, men as they were, and human in all their thoughts, wherever they fixed their senses they found themselves met halfway and taught the truth from every side. If they looked with awe on creation, still they saw how it confessed Christ as Lord. If their minds leaned toward men, so as to think them gods, still, if they compared the Savior’s works, the Savior alone among men appeared as Son of God; for no such works were done among the rest as have been done by the Word of God. If they were inclined even toward evil spirits, still, seeing them driven out by the Word, they were bound to know that he alone, the Word of God, was God, and that the spirits were not gods at all. If their minds had already sunk even to the dead, so that they worshiped heroes and the gods spoken of in the poets, still, seeing the Savior’s resurrection, they were bound to confess that these were false gods, and that the Lord alone is true, the Word of the Father, who was Lord even of death. For this reason he was both born and appeared as man, and died and rose again, dimming and casting into the shade the works of all earlier men by his own. In this way, whatever direction men’s leanings took, from there he might call them back and teach them about his own true Father, as he himself says: “I came to save and to find what was lost.”