104:24); concerning that Beginning with which the Father Himself is one Beginning, and in which, being co-eternal with Himself, He made heaven and earth, that is, every spiritual and corporeal nature; concerning the only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, as I have said—receive all these things personally: preserving nevertheless the eternity, immensity, immortality, unchangeableness, and invisibility of His divinity. These things the Son of God has so naturally and equally in common with God the Father, that, although for our sake He was truly made man, He nonetheless remained equal to God the true Father, of whom He was born, true God and Truth. He therefore emptied Himself, but 'of His fullness have we all received' (John 1:16):
which fullness, if in emptying Himself He had lost it, He would surely not have that which He might give us from it. And if He did not have it, we without doubt could receive nothing. But of His fullness have we all received. From this, therefore, that He gave us of His fullness, He shows also that when He emptied Himself He did not lose the fullness which He had: because if He were to lose His fullness, He could in no way give from it. He took, therefore, the form of a servant: for that emptying of the most high God was nothing else than the acceptance of the servile form, that is, of human nature. 21. Both forms, therefore, are in Christ, because both substances are true and full in Christ.
Therefore the holy Evangelist proclaims Him full of grace and truth (ibid., 14), because both in the divine nature, in which God is Truth, He is full; and in the human nature, in which the true man was made by grace, He is full. In that fullness He is God, in the form of God, equal to God; in this fullness a servant, in the form of a servant, because being made in the likeness of men, He was found in fashion as a man. Emptying Himself, therefore, He took the form of a servant that He might become a servant; but He did not lose the fullness of the form of God, in which He is always the eternal and unchangeable Lord: being made, according to the form of a servant, a true man, of the same nature as His handmaid mother;
and remaining in the form of God true God, of the same nature of which the Father the Lord also is. In the form of God, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, He is one sole God, Fashioner of all things; according to the form of a servant, He alone is fashioned by His own operation and that of the Father and the Holy Spirit: in that He is Creator, having this in common naturally with the Father and the Holy Spirit; but in that He is created, having personally in Himself alone the form of a servant according to which He was created. His future nativity according to the flesh, and His death and resurrection, and His ascension into the heavens, the Law and the prophets never ceased to foretell, just as He Himself commanded, being obedient both in words and in deeds. 22.
For also in the sacrifices of fleshly victims, which the holy Trinity itself, which is the one God of the New and the Old Testament, commanded to be offered by our fathers, there was signified that most acceptable gift of that sacrifice, by which God the Son alone was mercifully to offer Himself for us according to the flesh. For He Himself, according to apostolic teaching, 'offered Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor' (Eph. 5:2). He Himself is true God and true high priest, who for us entered once into the holy places, not with the blood of bulls and goats, but with His own blood (Heb. 9:12).
This is what that high priest signified, who year by year entered into the holy of holies with blood. He therefore is the One who exhibited in Himself alone all that He knew to be necessary for the effecting of our redemption, namely the same priest and sacrifice, the same God and temple: priest, through whom we are reconciled; sacrifice, by which we are reconciled; temple, in which we are reconciled; God, to whom we are reconciled. Yet He alone is priest, sacrifice, and temple, because all these He is as God according to the form of a servant; but not God alone, because this He is with the Father and the Holy Spirit according to the form of God. 23. We are therefore reconciled through the Son alone according to the flesh, but not to the Son alone according to divinity:
for the Trinity reconciled us to itself by this, that the Trinity itself made the Word alone flesh. In whom the unchangeable reality of the human and divine nature so abides, that just as His divinity, which He has unchangeable from the Father, is ever true, so His humanity, which the supreme divinity bears united to itself, is ever true and unchangeable. 24. These few things concerning the faith of the holy Trinity, which alone and truly is naturally God, I have inserted, as far as the brevity of time and of speech has permitted. Now I will intimate what you ought to believe without doubt concerning the creature. CHAPTER III. — 25. Whence created natures make progress and fall away. — Hold therefore principally that every nature (or: creature)
which is not the Trinity, God, was created out of nothing by that same holy Trinity, which alone is the true and eternal God. And thus that all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether Thrones, or Dominations, or Principalities, or Powers, are the work and creature of the holy Trinity, which is the one God, Creator and Lord of all things, eternal, almighty, just, and good, having naturally that it should always be, and that it can never at any time be changed. And this God, who is always without beginning, because He supremely is, gave to the things created by Him that they should be: not, however, without beginning, because no creature is of the same nature of which the Trinity, the one true and good God, is, by whom all things were created.
And because He is supremely good, He gave to all the natures (or: things) which He made that they should be good: not, however, as good as the Creator of all good things, who is not only supremely good, but is also the supreme and unchangeable good, because He is the eternal good; having no defect, because He is not made from nothing; having no growth, because He has no beginning. For this reason indeed the natures made by God can fall away, because they began to be; for this reason they can fail, because they were made from nothing. The condition of their origin leads them toward defect, but the operation of the Creator advances them toward progress.
In this, therefore, first, the natural eternity of the Trinity without beginning, which is the true God, is recognized: because it made certain things in such a way that, although they indeed began to be, yet they can never at any time not be. But in this, His omnipotence is understood: because He made every creature, visible and invisible, that is, corporeal and spiritual, out of nothing; in which the very diversity of things much more commends the goodness and omnipotence of the Creator. For unless He were omnipotent, He would not have made the highest and the lowest with one and the same ease; and unless He were supremely good, He would not have granted Himself to the governing even of the lowest things. 26.
Heavenly and earthly bodies differ. — Therefore in things great as well as small that have been established, great is the goodness and omnipotence of the Founder. For the supreme and true Wisdom made all things wisely, to which this is naturally the same—to be, and to be wise; to make, and to make wisely. The simplicity, therefore, of the manifold Wisdom of God commends the greatness of His sublimity not only in the greatness of lofty creatures, but also in the smallness of the lowest: since all the good things which He created are not only far inferior and unlike their Creator, being not brought forth from Him but made utterly from nothing;
but they are also not equal among themselves, but each thing remains just as it received from God that it should be, one indeed thus, another otherwise. For it was not given to bodies to be as spirits received: since bodies themselves are not equal, and even among heavenly and earthly things some diversity is found: since heavenly things as well as earthly ones not only differ in unequal quantity of mass, but also shine with dissimilar brightness. For there is, as the Apostle says, one glory of heavenly bodies, and another of earthly. Among the heavenly ones too there is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differs from another star in glory (1 Cor.
15:41). The diversity of corporeal natures, therefore, shows that each of them is not what it could have of itself forever, but what it received from the disposition and work of the most omnipotent, unchangeable, and most wise Creator. 27. God is everywhere. — But if any corporeal creature were of the one and same nature of which the holy Trinity is, which is the one God, it would neither be locally in a place, nor ever feel the change of time, nor pass from place to place, nor be circumscribed by the quantity of its mass.
All which things show that the Maker of such natures is One to whom no place is broad or narrow, because He is no less whole in the narrow than in the broad; nor is He changed by time, because He alone can wondrously order the courses of the ages, not by temporal mutability but by eternal stability: for He does not think in time how the series of the ages runs on by the passing away and succession of things; nor is He bounded by any quantity of mass, because He is enclosed by no limit; nor is He Himself diffused through the parts of the world by His own parts, so as to fill the greater parts of the world with His greater and the smaller with His smaller, and yet nowhere pour Himself out whole. For He is the God who says:
'I fill heaven and earth' (Jer. 23:24). Therefore all things which He made, that is, spirits and bodies, the highest and the lowest, heavenly and earthly, living things and those to which He did not give the faculty of living, the Lord God ineffably fills and contains everywhere as a whole; nor is He Himself divided in those things which are divided, nor is He varied by any change in those things which are changed. For unless He were naturally unchangeable, never in changeable things would a certain unchangeable order of His counsel and disposition remain. 28. God is the life of all.
— God therefore, the boundless Creator of corporeal and incorporeal things, first shows Himself to be no body by this, that He did not give life to certain bodies, although He Himself created all bodies. But He Himself is naturally life, because if He were not life, He would not have made living bodies. For a living thing makes nothing except a living thing (unless the making be that of a living thing). Bodies, therefore, which cannot live at all, are not of one nature with God. And thus neither are those bodies of one nature with God into each of which He inserted individual brute and irrational spirits, by which those same bodies might be made alive and endowed with sensation.
But neither are the brute spirits themselves of one nature with God, which, although they are known to have been inserted for the making alive and giving sensation to bodies, yet He bestowed on those very spirits no light of understanding by which they might be able either to know or to love their Creator. 28b. As for those spirits also, which there is no doubt are rational and intellectual, who would dare, with blasphemous spirit and blind heart, either to think or to say that they are of the same nature of which God is, since God is assuredly by nature altogether unchangeable and boundless? He who, though He can have no diversity in Himself, yet in those same spirits, which He made rational and intellectual, shows the diversity of His operation.
For in certain of them, that is, those which are inserted into earthly and mortal bodies, even though there is no local motion—because through the parts of corporeal places, since they themselves are in bodies, they are not present part by part, but as they are whole in whole bodies, so they are whole in the parts of those same bodies—yet the variety of their thoughts shows in them a diversity of a certain temporal motion and mutation; since now they are ignorant of something, now they know it; now they will, now they are unwilling; now they are wise, now foolish; now unjust from just, now just from unjust; now they are illumined by the light of piety, now depraved by the dark error of impiety. 29.
Those also whom no muddy matter of earthly bodies weighs down, that is, the angelic spirits, who would not see that they are not of one nature with God, but made from nothing? Their natural mutability is recognized in this, that a part of the same nature was changed for the worse.
Then, because those which have not been depraved (although, by the gift of Him by whom they were made when they were not, they unceasingly receive the multitude of the Lord's sweetness with untiring and, as far as is freely given to the angelic creature, perfect love, contemplation, and exultation, nor fall away from Him by their natural condition)—even though in those cleaving to God there is nothing of the variety of time, because by the gift of eternal incorruption and unchangeableness conferred upon them, they feel in themselves no change—yet there is in each a natural limit by which they are distinguished from one another, because none of them is in another;
And when some work or other is enjoined upon one of them, another too is appointed by the decision of the divine power to fulfil another work. All these things show that even the holy angels are a creature of the holy Trinity, in whose every work—which he assuredly made just as he willed—there appears both a marvellous wisdom in the ordering and a power in the performing. Some spirits, then, God so created that they should exist forever; but others, so that they should at some time cease to be spirits. Those, therefore, that were destined to cease he brought forth—some out of water, and some, because the Almighty so willed, out of earth. But the higher spirits he made to have no natural fellowship with bodily elements;
these he created both eternal, and into them he implanted the faculty and the intelligence for thinking upon, knowing, and loving the Godhead. Yet he so created them that they should love him above their very selves—him by whose work they knew themselves to have been created such—since no merits of theirs had gone before that they should be made such. But that this love might have just and fitting praise, he granted them also freedom of will: so that it should be possible for them either to raise the intention of holy love toward him who is above them, or to bend themselves down, by the weight of a depraved (or: grievous) desire, toward themselves or toward the things that are beneath them.
There is therefore no nature which can subsist in eternity, whether living wretchedly or blessedly, except that which can think about God by the gift of God himself. Now this intellectual nature exists in the souls of men and in the spirits of angels. For God has bestowed the faculty of knowing and loving him upon none but angels and men. To these, on account of the freedom of the will—which above all ought to be conferred upon the intellectual creature by the Creator's kindness (or: goodness)—he so gave the faculty and the will of knowing and loving him, that each one could both possess it and lose it; yet if anyone should lose it of his own accord, he would afterward not be able by his own decision to take it up again.
so that it might belong to him to pour anew into whomever he willed, by the gift of gratuitous goodness, the beginnings of that holy thought—to him whose it was, in the very outset of creation, with no preceding merits, wondrously to arrange spirits and bodies, in places and dispositions fitting, just as he in his wisdom willed. Angels therefore and men, inasmuch as they were made rational, received divinely the gift of eternity and blessedness in the very creation of their spiritual nature: so, namely, that if they had clung continually to the love of their Creator, they would likewise have remained eternal and blessed; but if by the choice of their own freedom, against the (or: his own)
Creator's command they strove to do their own will, then blessedness would at once depart from the obstinate, and a wretched eternity would be left to them for punishment, to be tormented thereafter by errors and by pains. And concerning the angels indeed he ordained and fulfilled this: that if any of them should lose the goodness of his will, he should never repair it by any divine gift. That portion of the angels, therefore, which departed from God its creator—by whom alone, as its good, it was blessed—by an utterly voluntary aversion, found, by the judgment of the heavenly equity, the beginning of its own damnation in that very aversion of the will: so that for it, to begin now to be punished was nothing else than to be deprived of the love of that beatific good;
which God so ordained to remain wholly in eternal punishment that he even prepared for it an eternal fire: in which all those transgressor angels can never be without either an evil will or punishment; but while the evil of their unjust aversion abides in them, the eternal damnation of a just retribution likewise abides. The prince of these evils, the devil, who out of envy led the first men to the precipice of sin, engrafted the desert of death, together with the fault of sin, not only upon them but also upon their whole posterity.
But God, merciful and just, just as—when the devil and his angels fell by their own will—he confirmed the other angels in the eternity of his love, so likewise he did not permit the whole mass of the human race to perish forever, but predestined those whom his gratuitous goodness willed to be led back to the light, the darkness being repelled in which all human birth lies under the condemnation of original sin: showing especially in this, that he was releasing these from the bonds of original sin by the undeserved grace of the Deliverer; while eternal damnation held others—and most of all little children, in whom there can be no merits, whether good or bad, of their own will—bound by an indissoluble bond.
God plainly shows also that the beginning of good will and good thought is not born to man from himself, but is prepared and bestowed in him divinely, by this: that neither the devil nor any of his angels, from the time when by the desert of that ruin they were thrust down into this lower gloom, has been able or will be able to recover a good will. For if it were possible that human nature, after it had turned away from God and lost the goodness of its will, could of itself possess it again, this would be much more possible for the angelic nature, which, the less it is weighed down by the burden of an earthly body, so much the more would be endowed with this capacity.
But God has shown whence good will is given to men—the very will which the angels so lost while they possessed it, that, once lost, they can thereafter possess it no more. Since therefore that same good will is worthy, through the grace of God, of the reward of eternal blessedness, and since the iniquity of angels and of men ought not to be unpunished, therefore, according to the rule of the catholic faith, we faithfully await that the Son of God will come to punish all the sinning angels and to judge the living and the dead. For blessed Peter testifies that God did not spare the angels that sinned, but thrusting them down into the prisons of the gloom of hell, delivered them to be kept for punishment in the judgment (2 Peter 2:4).
Concerning the living and the dead who are to be judged, blessed Paul says this: I charge you before God and Christ Jesus, who shall judge the living and the dead, and by his coming and his kingdom (2 Tim. 4:1). At his coming all men will be raised—from the body of that first man which God fashioned out of the earth, down to the bodies of all men that at any time began to live once animated—by him by whose working they were created. And in the resurrection each single body will be restored to each of its own souls, which they began to have in their mothers' wombs so that they might begin to live:
namely, that at that examination of the just Judge the souls may receive, in those same individual bodies of theirs, retribution—whether of the kingdom or of punishment—in which bodies they possessed either the good or the evil quality of the present life. The origin of the evil life. The evil quality of life, however, begins from unbelief, which takes its beginning from the guilt of original sin. In which if anyone begins so to live that he ends his life before he is loosed from its obligation, even if that soul has lived in the body for the space of a single day or a single hour, it must necessarily, together with that same body, endure the endless torments of Gehenna, where the devil with his angels is to burn forever, who both sinned first and persuaded the first men to sin:
where, together with him, also fornicators, those who serve idols, adulterers, the effeminate, men who lie with men, thieves, the covetous, drunkards, revilers, the rapacious, and all who do the works of the flesh—concerning whom the blessed Apostle says that they shall not inherit the kingdom of God (Gal. 5:21)—if before the end of this life they have not turned from their evil ways, shall be burned in eternal fires. For every man who in this world remains to the end in the delight of iniquities and in hardness of heart, just as here a harmful delight in crimes held him, so without end an everlasting torment shall hold him. The bodies of the impious.
For there will be a resurrection even of the unrighteous, but without that transformation which God will give only to the faithful and to those who live justly by faith. For this is what blessed Paul says: We shall all indeed rise again, but we shall not all be changed (1 Cor. 15:51). And showing that the just are to be transformed by the divine gift, he says: And we shall be changed (ibid. 52). The unrighteous, therefore, will have a resurrection of the flesh in common with the just, yet they will not have the grace of transformation which will be given to the just: for from the bodies of the impious there will not be taken away the corruption, and the dishonour, and the weakness in which they are sown; which for this reason will not even be extinguished by death, that this perpetual torment may be to body and soul the punishment of eternal death.
But the just souls, whom here God the Redeemer justified freely by faith, and to the justified granted perseverance in living well unto the end, in those very bodies in which here they divinely received the grace of justification, and in which, justified by faith, they lived in the love of God and neighbour, shall flourish in the eternal blessedness of the heavenly kingdom: their bodies also glorified, which without doubt—the nature of the flesh which God created truly remaining—they will then have not, as here, animal, but spiritual. For the body of the saints is sown an animal body, it shall rise a spiritual body. In them, through that transformation which will be given only to the just, there shall be fulfilled what the Apostle says must come to pass (1 Cor.
15:53): that this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. In them the sex, male or female, just as those same bodies were created, will remain: whose glory will be diverse according to the diversity of their good deeds. Yet all the bodies, whether of men or of women, whatsoever shall be in that kingdom, will be glorious: but that Judge knows how much glory he is to give to each, since in this life he anticipates by mercy, justifying freely, those whom he there disposes (or: disposed) to glorify by justice. But the time for acquiring eternal life God has granted to men in this life only, where he also willed penitence to be fruitful.
Now penitence is fruitful here for this reason: that here a man can, laying aside his malice, live well, and, his unjust will being changed, change likewise both his merits and his works, and in the fear of God do those things which please God. Whoever does not do this in this life will indeed have penitence in the world to come concerning his evils, but will not find pardon in the sight of God: because although there will be there the sting of repentance, yet there will be there no further correction of the will. For by such persons their own iniquity will be so blamed that in no way can justice be either loved or desired by them. For their will shall be such that it always has within itself the punishment of its own malignity, yet can never receive the affection for goodness.
For just as those who will reign with Christ will have in themselves no remnants of an evil will, so those who will be reckoned in the punishment of eternal fire with the devil and his angels, just as they will have no further rest, so they will in no way be able to have a good will. And just as to the co-heirs of Christ there will be given the perfection of grace unto eternal glory, so upon the associates of the devil that very malignity will heap up their punishment, when, appointed to the outer darkness, they will be illumined by no interior light of truth.
The keys of Peter. Accordingly, penitence can be profitable to every man in this life: whensoever a man performs it—however wicked, however aged—if with his whole heart he renounces his past sins, and for them in the sight of God sheds tears not only of the body but also of the heart, and takes care to wash away the stains of evil works by good works, he shall straightway have pardon of all his sins. For this the Lord promises us by prophetic utterance, saying: If you are converted and groan, you shall be saved (Isa. 30:15, according to the Septuagint). And in another place it is said: Son, you have sinned; add not again, but pray also concerning your past sins, that they may be forgiven you (Sir. 21:1).