55.

But these affections were not proper to the nature of the Word, as far as He was Word; but in the flesh which was thus affected was the Word, O Christ’s enemies and unthankful Jews! For He said not all this prior to the flesh; but when the ‘Word became flesh,’ and has become man, then is it written that He said this, that is, humanly. Surely He of whom this is written was He who raised Lazarus from the dead, and made the water wine, and vouchsafed sight to the man born blind, and said, ‘I and My Father are one ¹.’ If then they make His human attributes a ground for low thoughts concerning the Son of God, nay consider Him altogether man from the earth, and not ² from heaven, wherefore not from His divine works recognise the Word who is in the Father, and henceforward renounce their self-willed ³ irreligion? For they are given to see, how He who did the works is the same as He who shewed that His body was passible by His permitting ⁴ it to weep and hunger, and to shew other properties of a body. For while by means of such He made it known that, though God impassible, He had taken a passible flesh; yet from the works He shewed Himself the Word of God, who had afterwards become man, saying, Though ye believe not Me, beholding Me clad in a human body, yet believe the works, that ye may know that “I am in the Father, and the Father in Me. ⁵” ‘And Christ’s enemies seem to me to shew plain shamelessness and blasphemy;’ for, when they hear ‘I and the Father are one ⁶,’ they violently distort the sense, and separate the unity of the Father and the Son; but reading of His tears or sweat or sufferings, they do not advert to His body, but on account of these rank in the creation Him by whom the creation was made. What then is left for them to differ from the Jews in? for as the Jews blasphemously ascribed God’s works to Beelzebub, so also will these, ranking with the creatures the Lord who wrought those works, undergo the same condemnation as theirs without mercy.