MONITUM.
What follows are questions we had sought with much expense and great diligence for a long time in vain. At last, with the volume already finished, it was granted to us to discover them in Venice in the Greek Codices X, XI, and XII of the Marcian Library. Since they can no longer hold their proper place, we hope the reader will not find it ungrateful that they have been appended to the end of the volume. EDIT.
SUPPLEMENT TO THE AMPHILOCHIAN QUESTIONS
A Q. CXLVIII. [Missing in the Coislin and Taurin Codices.] *“But if you bite and devour one another, take heed that you are not consumed by one another.”* (Gal. v, 15).
Paul, whose tongue is an instrument of the Holy Spirit, says: *“For you, brothers, have been called to liberty”* (Gal. v, 13), and having taught that they are not subject to the servitude of circumcision, nor are they to be worn down by the yoke of the law—lest they think that liberty and all things that are not proper were granted to them, and out of the right of liberty they perpetrate injustice, being submissive to the flesh—he adds: *“but through love, serve one another.”* You are called, he says, to liberty; flee the servitude of the flesh; for the servitude of the flesh is a source of many and other passions and evils, and indeed it casts out love itself. B In order, then, to pass over other things for now, as regards this wound born of the flesh against us—that is, that which kills love—do not by any means permit it to become a temptation among yourselves. How will this be done? If you serve one another through love; for service through love is a pure pledge of the freedom from above, and it makes peace dwell in the hearts of men. Then, showing that the sum of the law is to *“love your neighbor as yourself”* (Gal. v, 14), and having thus set forth the height and utility of love from the accidents that accompany human life, he tightens the teaching. For since the common man is not so much willing to be made temperate by laws and [threats]—those that threaten final punishments—he counsels as much as he can regarding the temporal things and those that are approaching for punishment, and from there he brings in the exhortation: But if neither the matter of liberty moves you, nor [the fact] that it is fitting to serve one another in love, nor that the accomplishment of love is the fulfillment of the law, but esteeming all these things as naught, you bite and devour one another, yet, if nothing else, consider at least this: that such an action will turn to your ruin and destruction. Beware, therefore, lest you fall from charity; for falling from it leads you into battles and contentions, and dispo-
disposes you to arm yourselves one against another; but this also assists in bringing about your destruction and ruin. A Here, he timely interjects charity, even while he is primarily introducing the abolition of circumcision, and while this concern is set before him: so that, when those who make a boast of circumcision are divided from those who are led by the words of Paul to the legislation, they might not make themselves vulnerable to factions, tumults, and battles, by which it is commonly seen that they are the more quickly consumed by one another. These things we have transcribed from rough drafts as we were able; for the books, as your priestly highness knows, along with others from which it would have been possible to live, the captivity has taken as spoils. B
QUESTION CLXXV. Why did the Son become flesh, and not another person of the Trinity?
1. Why, I ask, did the Son, and not another person of the Holy Trinity, taking our nature, become flesh? Why, then? In order that the Son might remain the Son both on high and below, being incarnated from the most pure and virginal blood, and that the immutable nature might be proved to have undergone no change or alteration from the changing state. This, then, is one reason.
2. But there is another: it was necessary that the Creator, when the creature was broken, should restore it, not another, but he himself; for if one fashioned it, and another restores it, what the former who fashioned it once had but now does not have, that which the restorer grants, the need for another demonstrates that the fashioner did not possess. But nothing of the sort exists in the divine and omnipotent Trinity; the Son creates, while the Father and the Spirit are also present; again, the Son restores, while the Father and the Spirit also favor and participate in the restoration. The will of the three is one, the power one, there is no other energy, the kingdom is one. C
3. Again, since the Son is the Word of the Father, it was fitting that He should recall those who had fallen into irrationality (for irrationality is regulated by reason, and the correction of those who have fallen from grace has its reference to the Word); it is clear that the incarnation of the Son looks solely to the salvation of men. If, therefore, the Father had assumed human nature, or the all-holy Spirit, not only would our race have gained nothing, but they would have D shown themselves aimed at something even more difficult. For if He, clothed in flesh and present in life, had said, "I am the Father of God," or, with the density of the flesh appearing, had said, "I am the Spirit," how would the Jew have endured even to receive into his hearing the sound of the voice itself? For if, when the Savior said that He was the Son of God (which was nonetheless often said to them as well), they, inflamed in their hearts by anger, and driven to murder, shouted: "For a good work we do not stone you, but because you, being a man, make yourself God," what then would they not have committed of absurdity, what then would they not have dared, and how
would they have endured to receive instruction or legislation, if the Holy Spirit, or the Father of God, had confessed Himself to be the one who was working out the salvation of the race? But the one through whom the philanthropic and all-holy Trinity knew that we would more certainly obtain salvation, through Him it arranged our incarnation and recall. B Otherwise, it was more fitting for those inclined toward irrationality and those who had fallen to be delivered from their irrationality by the Word; for this reason, He who sits upon the Cherubim is ordered to be laid in a manger of irrational creatures, and the Creator of all creation, wrapped in swaddling clothes, to recline in the midst of irrational creatures. You might reasonably consider that it was necessary for the immutable and natural image of the Father—since those who were made according to the image of God and by grace, but who had corrupted and falsified that likeness—to be brought back to their ancient form and beauty through the unchangeable and natural image.
4. And consider this as well. Since the Son is the judge of the living and the dead—for, he says, "He has given all judgment to the Son"—it was necessary for the One who was to judge and pass sentence on those who have lived to be seen also as lawgiver and guide of those things to be practiced, not merely exhorting toward imitation by words (for this has been the effort and pursuit of many others, and it is otherwise difficult for the multitude to confirm words with deeds), but by examples given through which He existed as both maker and teacher, He destroys the way of error and shows to those who imitate Him the method. But it is a cup of love that He keeps for His disciples and imitators, by which He is even more revealed and demonstrated.
5. Indeed, and because the Son is the wisdom and the living and unchangeable image of the Father, it was necessary for Him to deliver from ignominy that soul which had been formed and adorned according to the image of God, but which, by spurious dyes and counterfeit colors, had been transformed into the unsightly and shapeless state of sin; therefore, it was necessary for Him to remove this deformity, and, as if applying a painter's hand to a torn and mangled character, to reshape it and repaint it to its ancient beauty, and to turn back to Himself the image which had been C beautifully formed but senselessly insulted and obscured, and to restore it again to its ancient nobility. But if the Spirit, or the Father, and not the Son, had become incarnate for us, nothing regarding the human infirmity that struggles against us, or the will that is carried away toward wrongdoing, would have been accomplished for those recalled toward salvation. For how would it have been tolerable to the ears of the Jews if the Savior, while present in the flesh, had said that He—who gave the oracle to Moses on Mount Sinai, and was both known to them as the Father of all and invoked by them—that He Himself was the one who was conversing as a man with men, and that He Himself was the one who long ago wrote the divine laws inscribed by His finger on tables, and who scourged Egypt with plagues for their sake, and granted them to make their way through the humid nature of the sea with dry feet, and did miraculously everything that would lead them toward piety toward God? How could such things be...
A be believed if he had said these things? And would they not have been provoked to perform reprehensible acts? For if, even when he called himself the Son of the Savior—although the ungrateful and senseless Israel itself was often called 'son'—they nevertheless leaped upon this expression, and grumbled against the truth, and attributed a cause for blasphemy to the speaker, to what zenith of evils would they not have run, if the One who took our flesh and came to save the human race had proclaimed himself the Father? For this reason, therefore (as far as human reasoning can attain), it is not the Father who becomes man, but the Son, so that the message of salvation might be most acceptable to men, and so that the masterful and philanthropic work, exceeding every word of compassion and providence, might be brought to its conclusion.
6. Likewise, if the Holy Spirit had undergone the incarnation, it would have afforded the Jews the same pretext for ingratitude and unbelief, and a refuge for annoyance and self-willed stubbornness, B under the guise of averting calumny. For if they held in their minds a certain dim conception of the all-holy Spirit, it was nonetheless because, by hearing the oracles of the prophets, they learned that it was something superior to human nature, and that nothing was common to flesh and spirit, and thus they imagined a certain divinity concerning it—this, from the prophecy of Isaiah: *The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for which he has anointed me*, and that of David: *Take not thy holy Spirit from me*, and Moses describing the generation of the world: *The Spirit of God was moving over the water*, and a myriad of other things; C from which they reasoned that the nature of the Spirit was more divine than that of man, even if they did not attain to a purely theological understanding of Him. Rather, the Sadducees would have mocked and ridiculed the mystery, and would have torn and mangled with their hands and teeth, had one given it to them, the One who had appeared in the flesh, since they could not even endure to say or conceive that anything could come into existence at all, just as they did not for the nature of angels. Since, therefore, the incarnation of the Father and of the Spirit would have been utterly unacceptable to the Jews, and the salvation of the race—which was the goal and providence of the Divine, and for which the emptying of the Unemptiable attained its purpose, through the Incarnate Son—would have been far from being accepted, D it is fitting that the Son, both according to much other wisdom, ineffable and incomprehensible to human reasoning, by the good pleasure of the Father and the operation of the all-holy Spirit, taking on our flesh, accomplished the salvation common to the race.
QUESTION CCXXVIII. [Coisl. Taur. LXXVI.] De natura et persona. What was that which appeared in Christ? Was it nature or per-