On the Seals

Contents

Reading pages: 1–4 · 5–6

1. 1The word of God is the soul’s food and true wisdom, unlike the world’s sophistry; the Gospel is the good news of God’s coming among human beings, and Christ takes many names—according to his benefits, not his nature—to meet the famine of the divine word.
2. 2Christ answers every human need with his own names—bread, drink, clothing, way, resurrection, rod, door, gate, priest and Lamb—as David foresaw in “the gate of the Lord”; Severian rejects the heretics’ claim that the Son, as mediator, is a servant standing between created and uncreated nature: he stands as priest out of love, but sits with the Father by right.
3. 3Against heretics who take “No one comes to the Father except through me” as a servant’s role, Severian shows that the Father also brings people to the Son: the Son revealed the Father’s name to the nations, while the Father revealed the Son to Paul and to Peter among the Jews; “standing” and “sitting” are said of God only figuratively.
4. 4Severian rebukes the Anomoean for prying into God’s essence and the Son’s generation when he cannot explain even the visible creation, and presents Christ as the treasure hidden in the prophets’ sealed books, which neither Jews nor Greeks could read until it was revealed.
5. 5The sealed prophecies were opened when the risen Christ explained the Scriptures to the two disciples at Emmaus and was known in the breaking of bread; the first three evangelists, like lightning, told of the dispensation in the flesh, preparing for John, the son of thunder, who proclaimed “In the beginning was the Word.”
6. 6Severian explains that “the Word became flesh” means the Word took up flesh, not that his nature changed, illustrating it by the human word, which is begotten without division, goes out whole to all hearers, and is “embodied” in writing without being destroyed when the book is torn, as Jeremiah’s scroll showed.