The treatise of St
Hippolytus, On the Refutation of All
Heresies (Ch. 10, 33-34)
The word made flesh makes us divine.
Our faith is not founded upon empty words; nor are we
carried away by mere caprice or beguiled by specious arguments. On the
contrary, we put our faith in words spoken by the power of God, spoken by the
Word himself at God’s command. God wished to win men back from disobedience,
not by using force to reduce him to slavery but by addressing to his free will
a call to liberty.
The Word spoke first
of all through the prophets, but because the message was couched in such
obscure language that it could be only dimly apprehended, in the last days the
Father sent the Word in person, commanding him to show himself openly so that
the world could see him and be saved.
We know that by
taking a body from the Virgin he re-fashioned our fallen nature. We know that
his manhood was of the same clay as our own; if this were not so, he would
hardly have been a teacher who could expect to be imitated. If he were of a
different substance from me, he would surely not have ordered me to do as he
did, when by my very nature I am so weak. Such a demand could not be reconciled
with his goodness and justice.
No. He wanted us to
consider him as no different from ourselves, and so he worked, he was hungry
and thirsty, he slept. Without protest he endured his passion, he submitted to
death and revealed his resurrection. In all these ways he offered his own
manhood as the first fruits of our race to keep us from losing heart when
suffering comes our way, and to make us look forward to receiving the same
reward as he did, since we know that we possess the same humanity.
When we have come to
know the true God, both our bodies and our souls will be immortal and
incorruptible. We shall enter the kingdom of heaven, because while we lived on
earth we acknowledged heaven’s King. Friends of God and co-heirs with Christ,
we shall be subject to no evil desires or inclinations, or to any affliction of
body or soul, for we shall have become divine.
Whatever evil you
may have suffered, being man, it is God that sent it to you, precisely because you
are man; but equally, when you have been deified, God has promised you a share
in every one of his own attributes. The saying Know yourself means therefore
that we should recognise and acknowledge in ourselves the God who made us in
his own image, for if we do this, we in turn will be recognised and
acknowledged by our Maker.
So let us not be at
enmity with ourselves, but change our way of life without delay. For Christ who
is God, exalted above all creation, has taken away man’s sin and has re-fashioned
our fallen nature. In the beginning God made man in his image and so gave proof
of his love for us. If we obey his holy commands and learn to imitate his
goodness, we shall be like him and he will honour us. God is not beggarly, and
for the sake of his own glory he has given us a share in his divinity.
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