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Translated by P.E. Pusey
St Cyril of Alexandria Resources Online and in Print
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31 Pages
Page 7
The Prophet Isaiah says, There was sent unto me one of the Seraphim and in his hand a live coal which he took with the tongs from off the altar and he said to me, Lo this touched thy lips and shall take away thine iniquities and purge thy sins. But we say that the live coal fulfils to us the type and image of the Incarnate Word, Who, if He touch our lips, i. e., when we confess the faith Him-ward, doth then both make us pure from every sin and free us from the pristine charges against us.
Natheless one may see in the coal, as in an image, the Word of God united to the human nature, yet not losing the being what He is, but rather trans-elementing what He had taken, or united, unto His own glory and operation. For as fire having to do with wood and entering into it, seizes hold of it, and removes it not from being wood, but transmutes it rather into the appearance and force of fire, and inworks all its own property therein, and it is now reckoned one with it, so shall you conceive of Christ too. For God united ineffably with the manhood, hath kept it what we say that it is, and Himself hath remained what He was; but once united, is accounted one with it, making His own what is its, and Himself too introducing into it the operation of His own Nature.
10. That the flesh having a reasonable soul hath become the Body of the unembodied Godhead, and that by severing them one from another, we shall wholly and surely undo the plan of the economy in Christ.
In the Song of Songs our Lord Jesus Christ Himself has been introduced to us saying, I am the flower of the plain, the lily of the vallies. As then the smell is something unembodied, for it uses as its own body that wherein it is, yet is the lily conceived of as one out of both, and the failing of one utterly destroys the plan thereof, for in the object is the smell and the object is its body: so shall we conceive of the Nature of the Godhead in Christ too, that it sheds forth on the world the savour of His own more than earthly Excellence [10], as in the object His human Nature, and that the unembodied by Nature became by economic union all-but embodied also, because It willed to be recognized through the Body; for It hath wrought therein things God-befitting. Hence will the Unembodied be rightly conceived of as in His own Body, even as in the flower too, the object, is the scent, yet both together is called lily.
10. [j] "Being therefore the savour of God the Father, He will not be of other Essence than He; but as the scent naturally and essentially issuing forth from flowers, is indicative of the species which begat it, thus the Son too, being as it were a savour of the Father's Essence whence Himself is, makes known Him That begat Him: hence no creature is He, seeing that the Father is not." Thes. cap. 32, p. 274 d.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/cyril-alexandria/incarnation-only-begotten.asp?pg=7
