Orations (other than the Theological Orations) 20.1–21.13

When I see the present itch of the tongue, and the wise men made in a day, and the theologians appointed by a show of hands, for whom merely wishing is enough to be wise, I long for the highest philosophy, and seek “a lodging farthest off,” as Jeremiah says, and wish to be with myself alone. For nothing seems to me as good as to close the senses, to be outside flesh and world, to touch nothing human except where it is altogether necessary, conversing with oneself and with God, to live above visible things, and always to carry within oneself the divine impressions pure, unmixed with the forms of things below that lead astray; to be a spotless mirror of God and of divine things, both being and always becoming such, receiving light upon light, a clearer light upon a dimmer, until we come to the source of the radiances here and attain the blessed end, when the mirrors are dissolved by the truth. Hardly could anyone master the matter that drags us down, whether by training himself with long philosophy and gradually breaking away the noble and luminous part of the soul from the lowly part yoked to darkness, or by finding God merciful, or both, while making it his chief study to look upward. And before one has overcome this, as far as possible, and sufficiently cleansed both ears and mind, I know it is not safe either to accept the oversight of souls or to venture upon theology.

And why I have been brought to this fear (so that you may not think me more timid than I should be, but may even praise my foresight): I hear of Moses himself that, when God was giving him oracles and many had been called up to the mountain, among them Aaron with his two sons, the priests, all the rest were ordered to worship from afar, and Moses alone to draw near, and the people not to go up with him. And a little before this, lightnings and thunders and trumpets, the whole mountain smoking, terrifying threats, and such terrors kept the others below; and it was a great thing for them merely to hear the voice of God, and that after they had purified themselves thoroughly. But Moses both goes up and enters within the cloud, is with God, and receives the law: for the many, the law of the letter; for those above the many, that of the spirit. [3] I know Eli the priest, and a little later a certain Uzzah: the one was punished for the lawlessness of his sons, which they dared to commit against the sacrifices, even though he did not approve their impiety but often rebuked them; the other, because he merely dared to touch the ark when it was shaken by the calf, saved the ark but perished himself, God evidently guarding the reverence due to the ark. I know that it was not safe for the many even to touch the walls of the temple, and that for this reason they needed other walls outside; nor might the sacrifices themselves be consumed by those, or at a time, or in a place, where it was not fitting; so far was anyone from being allowed to approach the Holy of Holies boldly, or to look at the veil, or the mercy seat, or the ark, let alone touch them. [4] Knowing these things, then, and that no one is worthy of the great God, sacrifice, and high priest who has not first presented himself to God as a living sacrifice, or rather has become a holy temple of the living God, and living, how could I either readily undertake discourses about God myself, or approve one who undertakes them rashly? The longing is not praiseworthy; the undertaking is fearful. For this reason one must first purify oneself, and then converse with the Pure; unless we are to suffer what Manoah suffered, and say when God has appeared to us, “We are lost, wife; we have seen God”; or, like Peter, send Jesus away from the boat as unworthy of such a visit; or, like that centurion, ask for the healing but not receive the healer. Let anyone of us say, while he is a centurion, commanding many in wickedness and still serving as a soldier to Caesar, the world ruler of those dragged downward: “I am not worthy that you should come under my roof.” But when I see Jesus, though I am small in spiritual stature, like Zacchaeus, and am lifted above the sycamore, having put to death my members on earth and withered the body of humiliation, then I shall receive Jesus and hear, “Today salvation has come to this house”; and I shall obtain salvation and practise a more perfect philosophy, scattering well what I gathered badly, whether money or doctrines. … We worship, then, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, distinguishing the properties and uniting the Godhead; and we neither merge the three into one, so as not to be sick with the disease of Sabellius, nor divide them into three alien and foreign things, so as not to share the madness of Arius. For why must we, like a plant bent wholly to one side, forcibly bend it over to the other side, correcting distortion by distortion, instead of straightening it to the middle and standing within the boundaries of godliness? [6] When I say the middle, I mean the truth, to which alone we do well to look, rejecting both the bad contraction and the still more absurd division. So that neither, by contracting the account into one hypostasis for fear of polytheism, do we leave ourselves mere names, supposing the same one to be Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and defining not so much that all are one as that each is nothing (for they would cease to be what they are by passing over and changing into one another); nor, by dividing them into three foreign, unlike, and broken-off essences, according to the well-named madness of Arius, or into three without beginning and without order and, so to speak, rival gods, do we fall, in the one case, into Jewish narrowness, confining the Godhead to the Unbegotten alone, or, in the other, into the opposite but equal evil, supposing three principles and three gods, which is more absurd than the former. We must neither be such lovers of the Father as to take away even his being Father (for whose Father would he be, if the Son’s nature were estranged and alienated along with creation?), nor such lovers of Christ as not even to preserve this, that he is Son (for whose Son would he be, if he were not referred to the Father as cause?), nor to diminish the Father’s dignity as principle, as Father and begetter; for he would be the principle of small and unworthy things if he were not the cause of the Godhead contemplated in the Son and the Spirit. Since one must both keep the one God and confess the three hypostases, that is, three persons, each with its own property … [7] The one God would be kept, in my account, when the Son and the Spirit are referred to one cause, not compounded or merged; and according to the one and the same movement and will of the Godhead, so to speak, and the identity of the essence. And the three hypostases are kept when no merging, dissolution, or confusion is conceived, lest the whole be destroyed by honouring the one more than is right. And the properties: of the Father, that he is conceived and spoken of both as without beginning and as principle (principle as cause, as source, as eternal light); of the Son, that he is by no means without principle, but is the principle of all things. When I say principle, do not insert time, nor set anything between the begetter and the begotten, nor divide the nature by something wrongly inserted between things coeternal and conjoined. For if time were older than the Son, clearly the Father would first be the cause of time. And how is he the maker of times who is under time? How is he Lord of all, if time has preceded him and is lord over him? The Father, then, is without beginning, for he has his being neither from elsewhere nor from himself. The Son, if you take the Father as cause, is not without beginning, for the Father is the Son’s principle as cause; but if you think of a beginning in time, he is also without beginning, for the Master of times does not begin in time. … so do bodies. For those whose being is not alike do not beget alike either; unless God is also subject to the other things that belong to material beings, such as suffering, grieving, hungering, thirsting, and all the passions of the body or of the composite. But your mind does not admit these, for the discourse is about God. Do not, then, conceive the generation otherwise than as befits God … [9] “But if he was begotten,” he says, “how was he begotten?” Answer me, you inescapable dialectician: if he was created, how was he created? Then ask me, “How was he begotten?” Is there passion in generation? There is passion in creation too; for are not shaping, and planning, and the unfolding of what was conceived all at once into its parts, a passion? Is there time in generation? Created things too are in time. Is there place here? There is place there. Failure in generation? Failure in creation too. These things I have heard you philosophizing about; for often what the mind sketched, the hand did not carry out. “But by a word,” he says, “he established all things, and by will; for he spoke, and they came to be; he commanded, and they were created.” When you say that all things were created by the word of God, you do not bring in human creating; for none of us does what is done by a word. Nothing would be loftier or easier for us than we are, if saying were the completion of the deed. So if God creates created things by a word, his creating is not human. Either show me a man who does something by a word, or admit that God does not create as a man does. Come then, sketch a city by will, and let the city appear; wish a son to be born to you, and let the child appear; wish anything else that is done, and let the wish pass into deed. But if none of these follows from wishing, while God’s willing is action, then man creates in one way and God, the creator of all, in another. How then does he create not in human fashion, but is compelled to beget in human fashion? You did not exist, then came to be, then beget; therefore you bring into being what did not exist. Or, to say something deeper, perhaps you do not even bring it out of nonexistence; for Levi too, it says, was still in his father’s loins before coming into being. And let no one cavil at the statement. For I do not say that the Son exists from the Father in such a way as first being in the Father and afterwards proceeding into being; nor first imperfect and then perfect, as is the law of our birth. [10] These are the arguments of cavillers, of those who rashly pounce on everything said. But we do not think so, nor hold so; but at the same moment as the Father exists unbegottenly (and he always was, for the mind does not fall upon a time when he was not), the Son also was, begottenly. So the being of the Father coincides with the having been begotten of the Only-begotten, who is from him and not after him, except only in the conception of principle, principle, that is, as cause. For I often turn back to the same point, fearing the grossness and materiality of your mind. But if you do not pry into the Son’s generation, or subsistence, or whatever more proper term than these one can conceive (for what is conceived and spoken defeats my tongue), do not busy yourself about the procession of the Spirit either. I am content to hear that he is Son, that he is from the Father, and that the one is Father and the other Son; and beyond this I busy myself with nothing, lest I suffer what happens to voices that fail altogether when strained beyond their pitch, or to the sight when it strains toward the sun’s ray. For the more and the more precisely one wishes to see, the more one damages the sense and is deprived of seeing at all, the object overcoming the sight by its excess, if one wishes to see it whole and not as much as is safe to see. … you will understand perhaps some day, when you receive what is perfect (“For I shall see,” it says, “the heavens, the works of your fingers,” so that we may suppose that the things now seen are not the truth but images of the truth). If you have not known yourself, you who discourse on these things, if you have not grasped these things, to which even sense is a witness, how do you suppose that you know God precisely, what and how great he is? This is great unreason. [12] But if you will be persuaded by me, a theologian who is not rash, hold what you have grasped, and pray to grasp the rest. Love what remains within you, and let the rest remain in the treasuries above. Ascend through your way of life; gain purity through purification. Do you wish one day to become a theologian and worthy of the Godhead? Keep the commandments; walk by the precepts; for action is a stepping stone to contemplation. Labour for the soul through the body. Is there anyone among men who can be lifted up so far as to reach the measure of Paul? Yet he says that he sees through a mirror and in a riddle, and that there will be a time when he will see face to face. You may be more philosophical than another in words, but you are certainly lower than God. You may perhaps be more intelligent than another, but you fall as far short of the truth as your being is second to God’s being. We have the promise that we shall one day know as we are known. If it is not possible to have perfect knowledge of beings here, what remains for me? What is hoped for? The kingdom of heaven, you will surely say. And I think this is nothing other than attaining what is purest and most perfect; and the most perfect of all things is the knowledge of God. But let us hold fast to part and grasp part while we are on earth, and let us store up the rest there, so that we may have this as the fruit of our labour: the whole illumination of the Holy Triad, what it is, of what kind, and how great, if it is lawful to say this, in Christ himself our Lord, to whom be glory and might for ever and ever. Amen.

He was brought up from the first in divine habits and lessons, having studied the general curriculum only a little, so as not to seem altogether inexperienced in such things, nor ignorant of what he had decided to despise. For the nobility and ambition of his soul would not endure being occupied with vain things, nor suffering the fate of unskilled athletes, who beat the air more than bodies and miss the prizes. Having meditated on every book of the Old and of the New Testament as no one else has on a single one, he grew rich in contemplation and rich in the brilliance of his life, and he wove the two together wonderfully, truly the golden chain, which most people cannot weave, using life as the guide of contemplation and contemplation as the seal of life. For “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” like a first swaddling band; and wisdom, passing beyond fear and lifting us up to love, will make us friends of God and sons instead of slaves.

Brought up and trained in this way, as those who are to preside over the people and handle the great body of Christ ought to be even now, he was, according to the great counsel and foreknowledge of God, which lays the foundations of great things far ahead, enrolled in this great order of the sanctuary, became one of those who draw near to the God who draws near, and was counted worthy of the sacred station and rank. And having passed through the whole sequence of grades (to cut short what lies between), he is entrusted with the presidency of the people, which is to say, with the oversight of the whole world. And I cannot say whether he received the priesthood as a prize of virtue or as the fountain and life of the Church. For she, fainting with thirst for the truth, had to be given drink, like Israel, or, like Elijah, to be refreshed from the brook when the earth was parched by drought, and, barely breathing, to be brought back to life, and a seed left for Israel, lest we become like Sodom and Gomorrah, whose wickedness is notorious and whose destruction is more notorious, overwhelmed by fire and brimstone. For this reason a horn of salvation was raised up for us when we had already fallen, and a cornerstone, binding us to himself and to one another, was laid in due time; or a fire purifying base and evil matter; or a farmer’s winnowing fan, by which the light and the weighty among doctrines are sifted; or a sword cutting out the roots of wickedness. And the Word finds his ally, and the Spirit takes hold of one who will breathe on his behalf.

So, then, and for these reasons, by the vote of the whole people (not in the evil manner that prevailed later, nor by bloodshed and tyranny, but in an apostolic and spiritual way), he is raised to the throne of Mark, successor no less to his piety than to his presidency: in the latter he comes long after him, in the former immediately after him; and this, indeed, should properly be regarded as succession. For sameness of mind goes with sameness of throne, while contrary opinion makes a rival throne; and the one has the name of succession, the other its reality. For it is not the one who uses force that succeeds, but the true successor; not the one who breaks the law, but the one lawfully appointed; not the one who holds contrary opinions, but the one of the same faith; unless someone calls him a successor in the way that disease succeeds health, or madness good sense. … which is the work of human favour, not of the Spirit; men who, when they have gone through everything by force, at last tyrannize even over piety; whose rank is not entrusted to them because of their character, but whose character is trusted because of their rank, the order being quite reversed; who owe more sacrifices for themselves than for the people’s sins of ignorance; and they certainly err in one of two ways: either, because they themselves need pardon, they pardon without measure, so that vice is not checked but even taught; or they cover up their own faults by the harshness of their rule. He was neither. He was lofty in deeds and humble in mind; inaccessible in virtue but very accessible in meeting; gentle, free from anger, sympathetic, sweet in speech, sweeter in character, angelic in appearance, more angelic in mind; calm in rebuke, instructive in praise; spoiling neither good by excess, but making his rebuke fatherly and his praise worthy of a ruler; his gentleness not slack, his severity not harsh, but the one gentleness, the other prudence, and both philosophy; needing very little speech, because his character was enough to instruct; very little of the rod, because of his speech; and still less of the knife, because of the rod, which struck with moderation.

Why should I paint the man again for you? Paul has drawn him beforehand: partly where he hymns the great high priest who has passed through the heavens (for my discourse will dare even this far, since Scripture knows how to call those who live according to Christ christs), and partly where, writing to Timothy, he lays down the law, sketching in words the man who is to take charge of the episcopate. For if you apply that law as a rule to the one praised here, you will see clearly how straight he is. Come, then, join me in the festival around this discourse, as I labour, wishing to pass over most things, but held now by one, now by another, unable to find which excels, as in a body equally beautiful everywhere; for whatever strikes me seems always the finer, and carries off my discourse. Come then, divide his excellences among you, all of you who are his praisers and witnesses, and contend a good contest with one another, men and women together, young men and maidens, old men with the younger, priests and people, solitaries and cenobites, the simple and the exact, the contemplative and the active. Let one praise his fasting and prayer, as of someone bodiless and immaterial; another his vigour and tirelessness in vigils and psalmody; another his care for the needy; another his resistance to the powerful, or his condescension to the lowly. Let the virgins praise the one who led them to the Bridegroom; the married, the teacher of self-control; the hermits, the one who gave them wings; the cenobites, the lawgiver; the simple, the guide; the contemplatives, the theologian; those in gladness, the bridle; those in misfortune, the comfort; grey hairs, the staff; youth, the tutor; poverty, the provider; wealth, the steward. Widows too, I think, will praise their protector; orphans their father; the poor the lover of the poor; strangers the hospitable; brothers the lover of brothers; the sick the physician, of whatever disease and cure you like; the healthy the guardian of health; all of them, the one who became all things to all, to win all, or more. [11] These things, as I said, let others admire and extol, who have leisure to admire the small things of his. When I say small, I speak comparing him with himself and measuring his deeds against his own deeds (for what has been glorified has not been glorified, however bright, because of the surpassing glory, as we have heard); since even a few of his deeds would suffice others for renown. But we (for it is not to be borne that the discourse should leave the greatest and serve the lesser) must turn to the most important of his deeds. It is the work of God, for whose sake also the discourse is spoken, to say something worthy of his greatness of speech and soul.

There was a time when our affairs flourished and were in good condition, when this superfluous, glib, and artful kind of theology had no entrance into the divine courts, but it was thought the same thing to play with pebbles that cheat the eye by the speed of their moves, or to dance before spectators with all kinds of effeminate contortions, and to say or hear something novel and curious about God; and simplicity and nobility of speech was considered piety. But since the Sextuses and Pyrrhos and the habit of contradiction, like some terrible and malignant disease, have crept into our churches, and babble passes for education, and, as the book of Acts says of the Athenians, we spend our time in nothing else but saying or hearing something newer, O what Jeremiah will lament our confusion and dizziness, he who alone knew how to match lamentations to sufferings? [13] This madness was begun by Arius, who bears the name of madness, and who paid the penalty for his unbridled tongue by his death in a profane place, the result of prayer, not of disease, suffering the bursting of Judas for a like betrayal of the Word. Others, inheriting the disease, constructed an art of impiety: confining the Godhead to the Unbegotten, they banished from the Godhead not only the Begotten but also the Proceeding, honouring the Triad only by sharing a name, or not even keeping this for it. But not so that blessed man, truly a man of God and great trumpet of the truth. Knowing that to contract the three into one in number is godless, the innovation of Sabellius, who first devised the contraction of the Godhead, and that to divide the three by natures is an alien dismemberment of the Godhead, he both kept the One well, in the Godhead, and taught the three piously, in their properties, neither confusing them in the one nor separating them in the three, but remaining within the bounds of piety by avoiding excessive leaning or opposition to either side.

And for this reason, first, at the holy synod of Nicaea, among the three hundred and eighteen chosen men whom the Holy Spirit gathered into one, he checked the disease as far as it lay with him; not yet ranked among the bishops, but holding first rank among those assembled; for preference went to virtue no less than to rank. Then, when the evil had already been fanned by the breezes of the Evil One and was spreading further (here come the dramas with which almost every land and sea is filled), a great war gathered around him, as the noble champion of the Word (for the battle line is drawn up chiefly against whatever resists, and one dreadful thing after another poured round him from every side; for impiety is inventive of evils and very bold in attack; and how would those spare men who did not spare the Godhead?); but one of these attacks was the most grievous. I too contribute something to this drama; but let my homeland, dear soil, be excused; for the wickedness belongs not to the land that bore him but to those who chose him. She is holy and known to all for her piety; they are unworthy of the Church that bore them. You have heard that even in a vineyard a bramble grows; and Judas the traitor was one of the disciples. … at first the slave of another man’s table, sold for a barley cake, having learned to do and say anything for his belly; and at last having crept into public service and been entrusted with its lowest post, to be receiver of the pork on which the army is fed; then, having proved dishonest in his trust and having served his belly, when only his body was left, he plans flight; and, passing from one land and city to another, as fugitives do, at last, to the harm of the whole Church, like some Egyptian plague, he lays hold of Alexandria. Here he halts his wandering and begins his wickedness. In other respects he was worthless: he had no share in liberal education, was not fluent in conversation, did not wear even some form and empty pretence of piety, but was most skilled at doing evil and confounding all things. … his wife consoling him in his misfortune with worse things (for the trial strove that he be struck in soul as well as in body); and he had his most genuine friends as “miserable comforters,” as he himself says, not healers: they saw his suffering but, not knowing the mystery of the suffering, supposed the blow to be not a test of virtue but the exacting of a penalty for vice. And not only did they think so, but they were not even ashamed to reproach him with his calamity, when, even if he were suffering for vice, they ought to have softened the pain by consolation. [18] Such, then, was Job, and the first part of his story. For it was a contest of virtue and envy: the one striving to overcome the good, the other to remain unconquered, bearing everything; the one contending to make vice prosper by punishing the upright, the other to keep hold of the good, who have the advantage even in misfortune. And what of him who spoke to him through whirlwind and clouds, who is slow to punish and swift to help, who does not let the rod of sinners rest altogether on the lot of the righteous, lest the righteous learn wickedness? At the end of the contest he proclaims the athlete with a splendid proclamation and unveils the secret of the blow, saying, “Do you think I have dealt with you otherwise than that you might be shown righteous?” This was the remedy for the wounds, this the crown of the contest, this the reward of endurance. For what follows is perhaps small, even if it seems great to some, and arranged for the sake of small minds, even though he receives double what had been taken away.