By Water & Blood

Chapter 10: What the divine Scriptures teach about the Saviour’s flesh, and how Marcellus held the opposite

You see what utterances he has dared to let loose against the flesh of our Saviour. He did not notice that even before the ascension into heaven, while it was still on earth and before the passion, the Saviour so glorified it on the mountain, showing to his three chosen disciples alone an image of his kingdom, that his face flashed like lightning and gleams of light shone forth

(for the divine Scripture says, “His face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light”). Nor did he understand what kind of “body of glory” of Christ the divine apostle spoke of, and how he taught that our bodies too will be conformed to that body, saying, “Who shall change our body of humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto his body of glory.” Nor did he grasp in what manner the apostle wrote that the mortal would be swallowed up by life, saying, “Not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.” Being ignorant of these things, he firmly asserts that the Word will become one and the same with God, just as he was before, while the flesh, left behind by the Word, will become I know not what.

Hear, then, how he says these things (Nr. 108):

“But if anyone should inquire concerning this flesh which has become immortal in the Word, what do we say to him? That we do not consider it safe to lay down doctrine about things we have not learned precisely from the divine Scriptures. For how could this be done by those who overturn even the doctrines of others?

“But to those who wish to learn from us the precise account of this, we shall say that, obeying the holy apostle, we know that we ought to view the hidden mysteries in the way he said: ‘For now we see,’ he says, ‘through a glass, in a riddle; but then face to face,’ and what follows. So do not inquire of me about things I have not clearly learned from the divine Scripture; for this reason, then, I shall not be able to speak clearly even about that divine flesh which shared in the Word.”

Then he who confesses that he can say nothing, and that he has learned nothing from Scripture,

declared such things about the flesh—neither taking them from Scripture, nor receiving them from others, nor learning them from the Church, but fashioning for himself and devising from his own imagination an offspring foreign and alien to the truth. He did not even bear in mind the Scripture which says, “Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar,” and “Woe unto them that prophesy out of their own heart.”

See, then, into how great an impiety he has fallen. For he who brought down the whole theology of the pre-existing only-begotten Son to the flesh, and in his very words proclaimed it a crown of victory (for so he said (Nr. 114), that the Word of God had prepared the human flesh to become immortal through the resurrection, and, as though binding on a kind of crown of victory, sits at the right hand of the Father)—this same man says that it will be deserted and orphaned at the end of the universe. He unites the Word to God but separates the flesh from the Word’s activity, and leaves it, I know not how, immortal and incorruptible, yet lifeless and deprived of activity by the Word.

And again he tries to establish these things from the divine readings, which he has not understood. For when our Saviour had said to those who did not understand his teachings about his flesh and blood, “Doth this offend you? What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life,”