Catechetical Oration 6–11

Perhaps you ask also for the cause of the failure of the will; for the sequence of the argument leads to this. So again a reasonable starting point will be found for us, which will also clarify this question. We have received from the Fathers an account of this kind; and the account is not a mythical tale but draws its credibility from our very nature. There is a twofold apprehension of the things that exist, contemplation being divided into the intelligible and the sensible; and nothing can be found in the nature of things apart from these that falls outside this division. These are separated from each other by a wide interval, so that the sensible is not among the marks of the intelligible, nor that among the marks of the sensible, but each is characterized by opposite marks. For the intelligible nature is something incorporeal, intangible, and without form; the sensible, as its very name says, falls within perception through the senses. But just as in the sensible world itself, though the elements are greatly opposed to one another, a certain harmony has been devised, fitted together out of opposites by the wisdom that presides over the universe, and so the whole creation comes into concord with itself, the natural opposition nowhere dissolving the chain of agreement, in the same way there comes about, by divine wisdom, a mixing and blending of the sensible with the intelligible, so that all things may share equally in the good and nothing that exists be without a portion of the better nature. For this reason the region corresponding to the intelligible nature is the fine, rational, and mobile substance, which, in the supramundane region, has by the peculiarity of its nature great kinship with the intelligible. But by a higher providence a certain blending of the intelligible with the sensible nature takes place, so that nothing in creation may be rejected, as the Apostle says, nor be without a share in the divine fellowship. For this reason the mixture that is man, composed of intelligible and sensible, is brought forth by the divine nature, as the account of the creation of the world teaches. For God, it says, taking dust from the earth, formed man, and by his own inbreathing breathed life into what he had formed, so that the earthly might be raised up together with the divine, and one grace, equal in honour, might pervade the whole creation, the lower nature being blended with the supramundane. Now the intelligible creation had come into existence first, and to each of the angelic powers a certain activity for the maintenance of the universe had been assigned by the authority that presides over all things; and there was a certain power appointed to hold together and govern the region around the earth, empowered for this very purpose by the power that orders the universe. Then the earthly formation was constructed, an image of the power above; and this living being is man. And in him was the godlike beauty of the intelligible nature, blended with a certain ineffable power. The one who had been allotted the government of the earthly region thinks it terrible and intolerable that from the nature subject to him there should be brought forth a substance made like the transcendent dignity. How he who had been created for no evil by him who constituted the universe in goodness slid down into the passion of envy, it is not the task of the present treatise to relate in detail; but it would be possible to set out the account briefly for those who are harder to persuade. The contrast of virtue and vice is not seen as between two things appearing in hypostasis; but just as non-being is contrasted with being, and one cannot say that non-being is contrasted with being as a hypostasis, but we say that non-existence is contrasted with existence, in the same way vice is set against the idea of virtue, not being something in itself, but conceived by the absence of the better. And just as we say that blindness is contrasted with sight, not that blindness exists in nature by itself, but as the privation of a prior condition, so we say that vice is seen in the privation of the good, like a shadow that follows upon the withdrawal of the ray. Since, then, the uncreated nature does not admit movement by way of turning, change, and alteration, while everything that subsists through creation has a kinship with alteration, because the very subsistence of creation began from alteration, non-being being transferred into being by divine power; and since the power mentioned above was also created, choosing what seemed good to it by a self-determining movement: when it shut its eyes to the good and ungrudging thought, just as one who lowers his eyelids in sunlight sees darkness, so he too, by the very fact of not willing to perceive the good, perceived the opposite of the good; and this is envy. Now it is agreed that the beginning of any matter is the cause of what follows upon it in sequence: for instance, health brings well-being, activity, a pleasant life; sickness brings weakness, inactivity, a life of discomfort; and so everything else follows in sequence from its own beginnings. Just as, then, freedom from passion becomes the beginning and foundation of the life of virtue, so the inclination toward vice that came about through envy became the road for all the evils that appeared after it. For once he who had begotten envy in himself by turning away from goodness had taken the inclination toward evil, just as a stone broken off from a ridge is driven downhill by its own weight, so he too, torn from his natural union with the good and weighed down and sinking toward vice, was carried away of himself, as by a weight, pushed to the uttermost limit of wickedness; and making the power of thought, which he had received from the Creator to cooperate in the participation of the better, his accomplice in devising the schemes of vice, he cunningly circumvents man by deceit, persuading him to become his own murderer and slayer. For man, empowered by the divine blessing, was lofty in dignity (for he was appointed to rule over the earth and all that is on it), beautiful in form (for he had come into being as an image of the archetypal beauty), free from passion in nature (for he was an imitation of the passionless), and full of freedom of speech, delighting in the divine manifestation itself face to face. These things were fuel for the Adversary's passion of envy. But he could not accomplish his purpose by strength and force of power, for the power of God's blessing prevailed over his force. Therefore he contrives to separate man from the power that strengthened him, so that he might become easy to capture for his plot. And just as, when the fire of a lamp has taken hold of the wick, someone who cannot put out the flame by blowing mixes water into the oil and by this device dims the flame, so the Adversary, by deceit mixing vice into man's will, brought about a certain quenching and dimming of the blessing. When that failed, its opposite necessarily entered in its place. Death is opposed to life, weakness to power, curse to blessing, shame to freedom of speech, and to all the goods the things conceived as their opposites. For this reason the human race is now in its present evils, since that beginning provided the starting points for such an end.

And let no one ask why God, foreseeing the misfortune that would befall man from his thoughtlessness, came to create man, for whom not to have come into being would perhaps have been more profitable than to be in evils. For those who have been swept away by deceit into the Manichaean doctrines put this forward to establish their error, as proving on this ground that the creator of human nature is evil. For if God is ignorant of nothing that exists, and man is in evils, the account of God's goodness could no longer be maintained, if he brought man into life knowing that he would live in evils. “For if activity in accordance with the good belongs altogether to a good nature,” he says, “this painful and perishable life could no longer be referred to the workmanship of the good; one must think that there is another cause of such a life, owing to which our nature is inclined toward wickedness.” All these and similar arguments seem to have some strength, through their superficial plausibility, to those who have absorbed the heretical deceit deeply, like a falsifying dye; but to those who see more keenly into the truth they are clearly seen to be unsound and to offer ready proof of their deceit. And I think it well to set up the Apostle in this matter as advocate of the plea that accords with him. For in his discourse to the Corinthians he distinguishes the fleshly and the spiritual states of souls, showing, I think, by what he says, that one should not judge good or evil by sense perception, but, withdrawing the mind from bodily appearances, discern the nature of good and its opposite by itself. For “the spiritual person,” he says, “judges all things.” This, I think, was the cause of the myth-making of these doctrines for those who put such things forward: they define the good by the pleasure of bodily enjoyment; and since the nature of the body, being composite and flowing toward dissolution, is necessarily subject to sufferings and sicknesses, and some painful sensation somehow follows upon such sufferings, they suppose the making of man to be the work of an evil being. Whereas if their mind looked to what is higher, and, removing their thought from its attachment to pleasures, they examined the nature of things dispassionately, they would not have thought anything evil except wickedness. And all wickedness is characterized by the privation of the good, not existing by itself nor seen as a hypostasis. For nothing evil lies by itself outside the will; but it is so named from the absence of the good. And what does not exist does not subsist; and the maker of what subsists is not the maker of what does not subsist. So God is outside the cause of evils, being the maker of the things that exist, not of those that do not; he created sight, not blindness; he manifested virtue, not its privation, as the prize of the will, setting before those who live according to virtue the goal of the goods, not yoking human nature by any violent necessity to what seemed good to himself, drawing it unwillingly to the good like some animate tool. But if, when the light shines clear from a cloudless sky, someone of his own will closes his eyelids over his sight, the sun is outside the cause of his not seeing.

[Heading: On those who are indignant, asking why man dies, when this is rather for man's benefit, and that this is why there is death.] But one who looks at the dissolution of the body is certainly indignant, and considers it hard that our life is dissolved by death. Let him, then, consider through this gloomy thing the surpassing greatness of the divine beneficence. For perhaps by this he may rather be led to wonder at the grace of God's care for man. To live is desirable to those who share in life because of the enjoyment of things to their liking; so that if someone should live in pains, for such a person not to exist is judged far preferable to existing in pain. Let us examine, then, whether the giver of life looks to anything else than how we may live among the fairest things. Since by the self-determining movement we drew fellowship with evil to ourselves, mixing evil into our nature through some pleasure, like a poison seasoned with honey, and thereby falling from the blessedness conceived as freedom from passion, we were transformed toward vice; for this reason man, like an earthen vessel, is dissolved again into earth, so that, the filth now caught in him being separated off, he may be refashioned through the resurrection into his original form. Moses sets out such a doctrine for you more in the manner of history and through riddles; yet the riddles too contain plain teaching. For when, he says, the first human beings came to be among forbidden things and were stripped of that blessedness, the Lord put garments of skin on the first-formed. I do not think the account carries its meaning to such skins; for from what animals slaughtered and flayed is the covering devised for them? But since every skin separated from the animal is dead, I certainly think that the power of mortality, which had been reserved by providence for the irrational nature, was afterwards put upon human beings by him who heals our vice, not so as to remain forever. For a garment is one of the things put on us from outside, giving its use to the body for a time, not grown together with its nature. So mortality, taken from the nature of irrational creatures, was by dispensation wrapped around the nature created for immortality, covering its outside, not its inside, and taking hold of the sensible part of man, but not touching the divine image itself. And the sensible part is dissolved, not annihilated. For annihilation is passing into non-existence; dissolution is the scattering back into the elements of the world from which it had its composition. And what has come to be in these has not perished, even though it escapes the grasp of our perception. The cause of the dissolution is clear from the illustration we mentioned. For since perception is akin to what is gross and earthy, and the better and higher judgment about the good went astray in the testing done by the senses, and the failure to attain the good produced the existence of the opposite condition, the part of us that was made useless is dissolved by its reception of the opposite. The point of the illustration is this. Suppose a vessel made of clay, and that through some malice it has been filled with molten lead; the lead, poured in, has hardened and remains unpourable; the owner claims the vessel, and, having the potter's skill, breaks the earthenware off around the lead, and then remoulds the vessel again in its former shape for his own use, emptied of the material mixed into it. So too the fashioner of our vessel, since vice has been mixed into the sensible part (I mean the bodily), will dissolve the matter that received the evil, and, refashioning it through the resurrection unmixed with the opposite, will recompose the vessel into its original beauty. And there is a certain bond and fellowship between soul and body in the passions that belong to sin, and a certain analogy of bodily death to the death of the soul: for as in the flesh we call separation from sensible life death, so in the soul we name separation from true life death. Since, then, there is one fellowship in evil, as has been said, seen in soul and body (for wickedness proceeds into act through both), for this reason the death of dissolution, which comes from the putting on of the dead skins, does not touch the soul. For how could what is not composite be dissolved? But since there is need that the stains grown into it from sins should also be removed by some treatment, for this reason in the present life the medicine of virtue has been applied for the healing of such wounds. But if it remains unhealed, the healing is reserved in the life after this. And just as there are differences among bodily sufferings, some admitting treatment more easily, others with more difficulty, for which incisions, cauteries, and bitter medicines are employed to remove the disease that has struck the body, so the judgment to come also announces something of this kind for the healing of the sicknesses of the soul. To the more careless this is a threat and a stirring of gloomy things, so that by fear of a painful requital we may be brought to our senses to flee vice; but by the more intelligent it is believed to be a treatment and healing from God, bringing his own creature back to its original grace. For just as those who remove by cutting or burning the calluses and warts that have grown unnaturally on the body do not bring the cure without pain to the one they benefit, yet do not apply the cutting to harm the one who undergoes it, so too whatever material excrescences harden on our souls, made fleshly by fellowship with the passions, are cut and scraped away at the time of the judgment by that ineffable wisdom and power of him who, as the Gospel says, heals those who are ill. “For those who are strong,” he says, “have no need of a physician, but those who are ill.” And because the soul has grown into great natural union with evil, just as the cutting of a wart stings the surface (for what has grown into the nature against nature clings to the subject through a certain sympathy, and there comes about an unnatural blending of the foreign with what is ours, so that the sensation is pained and stung when separated from what is against nature), so too, when the soul is wasted and melted away in the reproofs for sin, as the prophecy says somewhere, there necessarily follow, because of its deep-rooted familiarity with evil, certain unspeakable and inexpressible pains, the description of which is as ineffable as the nature of the goods hoped for. For neither these nor those fall under the power of words or the conjecture of thought. So whoever looks to the end of the wisdom of him who orders the universe would no longer reasonably, from pettiness of mind, call the creator of human beings the cause of evils, saying either that he did not know what would be, or that, knowing and having made him, he is not free from the impulse toward wickedness. For he knew what would be, and did not prevent the impulse toward what happened. For he who comprehends all things by his power of foresight, and sees what follows equally with what is past, was not ignorant that humanity would turn aside from the good. But just as he beheld the deviation, so he also planned its recall back to the good. Which, then, was better: not to bring our nature into existence at all, since he foresaw that what would come to be would fail of the good; or, having brought it into being, when it had fallen sick, to recall it to its original grace? But to call God the maker of evils because of the bodily pains that necessarily befall our fluid nature, or to think him not the creator of man at all, so that he may not be suspected of being the cause of what pains us, belongs to the extreme pettiness of those who judge good and evil by sense perception, who do not know that that alone is good by nature which perception does not touch, and that alone evil which is estrangement from the good. To judge good and evil by pains and pleasures is proper to the irrational nature, in whose case the apprehension of what is truly good has no place, because they have no share in mind and understanding. … naming him the maker of man, we have not forgotten what we established in the introduction against the Greeks, where it was shown that the Word of God, being substantial and subsisting as a hypostasis, is himself both God and Word, embracing all creative power, or rather being power itself, having an impulse toward every good work and accomplishing whatever he wills, because his power runs together with his will; whose will and work is the life of the things that exist; by whom man too was brought into life, adorned in godlike fashion with all the fairest things. But only that which does not have its origin through creation is unchangeable by nature, while all the things that came into subsistence from non-being by the uncreated nature, having begun to exist straight away from a change, always proceed through alteration: if they act according to nature, the alteration is always toward the better for them; but if they are turned aside from the straight path, movement toward the opposite takes them over. Since, then, man too was among these, and the changeableness of his nature slipped toward the opposite; and since, once the withdrawal from the goods had brought in in sequence every form of evil, so that death was brought in by turning from life, darkness came upon the privation of light, vice was brought in by the absence of virtue, and the list of opposites was counted against every good: through whom was he who had fallen by thoughtlessness into these and similar things (for it was not possible for one who had turned away from prudence to be prudent, or for one who had withdrawn from wisdom to plan something wise) to be recalled again to his original grace? To whom did the raising up of the fallen belong, the recall of the lost, the guiding of the wanderer by the hand? To whom else, surely, than to the Lord of the nature? For only to him who had given life in the beginning was it possible, and fitting as well, to recall it when it was perishing. This is what we hear from the mystery of the truth, learning that God made man in the beginning and saved him when he had fallen.

Up to this point perhaps one who looks to the sequence will agree with the argument, since nothing said seems to be outside the conception fitting for God; but toward what follows he will not be similarly disposed, the things by which above all the mystery of the truth is established: human birth, and growth from infancy to maturity; eating and drinking, weariness and sleep, grief and tears, false accusation and court, cross and death, and the laying in the tomb. For these, being included in the mystery, somewhat blunt the faith of the more small-minded, so that because of what was said before they do not accept what follows either. For they do not admit what is fitting to God in the resurrection from the dead because of what is unfitting in the death. But I think one must first withdraw reasoning a little from the grossness of the flesh and consider the good itself by itself and what is not such, and by what marks each of these is apprehended. For I think no one who has reasoned will dispute that in the nature of things one thing only is shameful: the passion of vice; and what is outside vice is foreign to all shame. And that in which nothing of the opposite is mixed is certainly apprehended in the portion of the good; and what is truly good is unmixed with its opposite. And everything seen in the domain of the good befits God. So either let them show that birth, upbringing, growth, progress to the maturity of nature, the experience of death, the return from death are vice; or, if they agree that the things mentioned are outside vice, they will necessarily admit that what is foreign to vice is nothing shameful. And since it is shown to be altogether good, how are those not pitiable in their unreason who teach that the good is not fitting in the case of God?

“But human nature,” he says, “is small and circumscribed, while the Godhead is infinite; how could the infinite be contained by the atom?” And who says that the infinity of the Godhead was contained by the circumscription of the flesh as in a vessel? Not even in our own life is the intellectual nature shut up within the boundaries of the flesh. The bulk of the body is circumscribed by its own parts, but the soul by the movements of thought spreads freely over the whole creation: it ascends to the heavens, treads the depths, traverses the breadth of the inhabited world, and penetrates by its curiosity to the regions below the earth; and often it is in contemplation of the heavenly wonders, not weighed down at all by the burden of the body. If the soul of a man, blended with the body by the necessity of nature, is present everywhere at will, what necessity is there to say that the Godhead is enclosed by the nature of the flesh, and not rather to form, through examples we can grasp, some fitting conjecture about the divine economy? For fire is seen on a torch taking hold of the underlying material; reason distinguishes the fire on the material from the material that kindles the fire, but in fact it is not possible to cut these apart and show the flame by itself, disjoined from the material, but the two together become one (and let no one take along with the illustration the destructiveness of fire, but, accepting only what is fitting in the image, let him reject what is inappropriate and incongruous). In the same way, then, as we see the flame both attached to its subject and not shut up in the material, what prevents us, perceiving a certain union and drawing near of the divine nature to the human, from preserving even in this drawing near the conception fitting to God … even though he was in man?

If you ask how the Godhead is blended with the human, it is time for you to ask first what the coalescence of the soul with the flesh is. And if the manner in which your own soul is united to the body is unknown, do not think that that other matter must by all means come within your comprehension. But just as here we believe that the soul is something other than the body, because the flesh, left alone without the soul, becomes dead and inactive, and yet we do not know the manner of the union, so there too we confess that the divine nature differs from the mortal and perishable in being more majestic, but we are not able to perceive the manner of the blending of the divine with the human. That God came to be in human nature we do not doubt, because of the miracles recorded; but how, we decline to investigate, as being beyond the approach of reasoning. For although we believe that all corporeal and intelligible creation came into subsistence from the incorporeal and uncreated nature, we do not examine the whence or the how along with our faith about these things; but, accepting that it came into being, we leave the manner of the constitution of the universe uninvestigated, as being altogether ineffable and inexplicable.