Therefore, at the head of the Lord's generation, Scripture so often mentions David, so that when the truth about the author has become plain, there can be no doubt about the offspring. For, to pass over that in the Gospels two blind men were crying out with one voice of consonant faith: Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David (Matt. XV, 22)—knowing that one born of the patriarch is rightly believed a man, and that nonetheless supplication is fruitfully made to the merciful God for the health of their eyes—who expounds this more evidently than holy Paul? Set apart, he says, for the Gospel of God, which He had promised before in the holy Scriptures through His prophets concerning His Son, who was made to Him of the seed of David according to the flesh (Rom. I, 1, 2). He asserted a twofold nature by a full description.
One in which, according to divinity, He is the maker of all; and the other in which He was made of the seed of David according to the flesh. In neither of which substances can a suspicion of phantasm be found; because, just as by itself the divinity was invisible which was bowed down from heaven, so the truth of Christ's flesh, descending from the stock of David, could have nothing illusory: which is traced back not only as far as David through His forefathers, but through David himself as far as Adam, with the express naming of the parents. And therefore the Apostle says He is of the seed of David according to the flesh, so that when he set forth that He was consubstantial with the mother—from whom indeed He took also death (since a phantasm can neither be born nor die, but its beginning would be a deceiving and its end a vanishing).