The Necessity of the God-Man[1] It was in the power of none other to turn the corruptible to incorruption, except the Saviour Himself, that had at the beginning also made all things out of nought; and that none other could create anew the likeness of God’s image for men, save the Image of the Father; and that none other could render the mortal immortal, save our Lord Jesus Christ, Who […]
Read moreThe Fisher of Men The object of [the] mystery of the Incarnation … was that the divine virtue of the Son of God, as though it were a hook concealed beneath the form and fashion of human flesh (He being, as the Apostle Paul says, “found in fashion as a man”), might lure on the Prince of this world to a conflict, to whom offering His flesh as a bait, […]
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The work is certainly hazardous and it is exposed to the attacks of my calumniators, who maintain that it is through contempt of the Seventy that I have set to work to forge a new version to take the place of the old. They thus test ability as they do wine; whereas I have again and again declared that I dutifully offer in the Tabernacle of God what I can, […]
Read moreWherefore all the human qualities of the Lord Christ, hunger,… and thirst and weariness, sleep, fear, sweat, prayer, and ignorance, and the like, we affirm to belong to our nature which God the Word assumed and united to Himself in effecting our salvation. But the restitution of motion to the maimed, the resurrection of the dead, the supply of loaves, and all the other miracles we believe to be works […]
Read moreMediator between God and Man “There is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all.” … in this passage that very name ‘mediator’ stands indicative both of Godhead and of manhood. He is called a mediator because He does not exist as God alone; for how, if He had had nothing of our nature could He have mediated […]
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The First Exile After the departure of Epiphanius, John, when preaching in the church as usual, chanced to inveigh against the vices to which females are peculiarly prone. The people imagined that his strictures were enigmatically directed against the wife of the emperor. The enemies of the bishop did not fail to report his discourse in this sense to the empress; and she, conceiving herself to have been insulted, complained […]
Read moreMassacre in the Cathedral When the Emperor Constantius, who then held his court at Antioch, heard that Paul [bishop of Constantinople] had again obtained possession of the episcopal throne, he was excessively enraged at his presumption. He therefore despatched a written order to Philip, the Prætorian Prefect,… to drive Paul out of the church again, and introduce Macedonius into it in his place. … Philip, dreading an insurrectionary movement among […]
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