Exhortation to the Greeks 1.10

John, the herald of the Word, exhorted people in this way to be ready for the coming of God, the Christ; and this was what the silence of Zechariah hinted at, as it waited for the fruit that would go before Christ, so that the light of truth, the Word, might break the mystic silence of the prophetic riddles by becoming the Gospel. But you, if you long to see God truly, take part in purifications worthy of God: not with laurel leaves and fillets embroidered with wool and purple, but crowning yourself with righteousness and wreathing your head with the leaves of self-control; and seek out Christ. “For I am the door,” he says somewhere. Those who wish to know God must learn to know this door, so that he may throw open for us all at once the gates of heaven; for the gates of the Word are gates of reason, opened by the key of faith. “No one knows God except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals him.” And I know well that he who opens the door that has been shut until now afterward reveals what is inside, and shows what could not be known before, except by those who have made their way through Christ, through whom alone God is beheld.