INCARNATION
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INCARNATION
the Jews to Jahweh (see Rom., xiv, 6; Is., xlv, 24).
The testimony of St. Paul could be given at much
greater length. These texts are only the chief among
many others that bear Paul's witness to the Divinity
of Jesus Christ.
C. Witness of Tradition. — The two main sources wherefrom we draw our information as to tradition, or the unwritten Word of Clod, are the Fathers of the Church and the general councils.
(a) The Fathers are practically unanimovis in ex- plicitly teaching the Divinity of Jesus Christ. The testimony of many has been given in our exegesis of the dogmatic texts that prove the Christ to be God. It would take over-much space to cite the Fathers adequately. We shall confine ourselves to those of the Apostolic and apologetic ages. By joining these tes- timonies to those of the Evangelists and St. Paul, we can see clearly that the Holy Office was right in con- demning these propositions of Modernism: "The Di- vinity of Christ is not proven by the (iospels but is a dogma that the Christian conscience has evolved from the notion of a Messiah. It may be taken for granted that the Clirist Whom history shows us is much inferior to the Christ Who is the object of Faith" (see prop, xxvii and xxix of Decree " Lamentabili"). (a) St. Clement of Rome (a. d. 93-95, according to Harnack), in his first epistle to the Corintliians, xvi, 2, speaks of "The Lord Jesus Christ, the Sceptre of the Might of God" (Funk, "Patres Apostolici", Tii- bingen ed., 1901, p. 118), and describes, by quoting Is., lii, 1-12, the humiliation that was foretold and came to pass in the self-immolation of Jesus. As the writings of the Apostolic Fathers are very scant, and not at all apologetic but rather devotional and exhor- tive, we should not look in them for that clear and plain defence of the Divinity of Christ which is evi- denced in the writings of the apologists and later Fathers. (/3) The witness of St. Ignatius of Antioch (a. d. 110-117, according to Harnack) is almost that of the apologetic age, in whose spirit he seems to have written to the Ephesians. It may well be that at Ephesus the very same heresies were now doing havoc which aljout ten years before or, according to Har- nack's chronology, at the very same time, St. John had written liis Gospel to undo. If this be so, we understand the I)old confession of the Divinity of Jesus Christ which this grand confessor of the Faith brings into his greetings, at the beginning of his letter to the Ephesians. "Ignatius .... to the Church
. . . which is at Ephesus in the will of the
Father and of Jesus Christ Our God (toD 6eoO tj/jluip)." He says: "The Physician in One, of the Flesh and of the Spirit, begotten and not begotten, who was God in Flesh (iv aapKl yevifums Seis) . . . Jesus Christ Our Lord" (c. vii; Funk, 1,218). "For Our God Jesus Christ was borne in the womb by Mary" (c. xviii, 2; Funk, I, 226). To the Romans he writes: " For Our God Jesus Christ, abiding in the Father, is manifest even the more" (c. iii, 3; Funk, I, 256). (7) The witness of the Letter of Barnabas (Sanday, A. d. 70- 79; Harnack, a. d. 130): "Lo, again, Jesus is not the Son of man but the Son of God, made manifest in form in the Flesh. And since men were going to say that the Christ was the Son of David, David himself, fearing and understanding the malice of the wicked,
made prophecy: The Lord said to my Lord
Lo, how David calls Him the Lord and not son" (c. xiii; Funk, I, 77). (5) In the apologetic age. Saint Justin Martyr (Harnack, a. d. 150) wrote: "Since the Word is the first-born of God, He is also God" (Apol. I, n. 63; P. G., VI, 423). It is evident from the con- text that Justin means Jesus Christ by the Word ; he had just said that Jesus was the Word before He be- came Man, and used to appear in the form of fire or of some other incorporeal image. St. Irenaeus (Har- nack, A. D. 181) proves that Jesus Christ is rightly called the one and only God and Lord, in that all
things are said to have been made by Him (see " Adv-
H»r.",III,viii,n.3:P.G.,Vn,86S;Lk.IV, 10,14,36).
Deutero-Clement (Harnack, A. d. 166; Sanday, a. d.
150) insists: "Brethren, we should think of Jesus
Christ as of God Himself, as of the Judge of the living
and the dead" (see Funk, I, 184). St. Clement of
Alexandria (Sanday, A., d. 190) speaks of Christ as
"true Ciod without any controversy, the equal of
the Lord of the whole universe, since He is the Son
and the Word is in God" (Cohortatio ad Gentes, c. x;
P. G., VIII, 227).
To the witness of these Fathers of the Apostolic and apologetic age, we add a few witnesses from the contemporary pagan writers. Pliny (1. d. 107) wrote to Trajan that the Christians were wont before the light of day to meet and to sing praises "to Christ as to God" (Epist., X, 97). The Emperor Hadrian (a. d. 117) wrote to Servianus that many Egyptians had become Christians, and that converts to Chris- tianity were "forced to atlore Christ", since He was their God (.see Saturninus, c. vii). Lucian scoffs at the Christians because they had been persuatled l)y Christ "to throw over the gods of the Greeks and to adore Him fastened to a cross" (De Morte Peregrini, 13). Here also may be mentioned the well-known graffito that caricatures the worship of the Crucified as God. This important contribution to archaeology was found, in 1857, on a wall of the Paedagogium, an inner part of the Domus Gelotiana of the Palatine, and is now in the Kircher Museum, Rome. After the murder of Caligula (.1. d. 41) this inner part of the Domus Gelotiana became a training-school for court pages, called the Pa?dagogium (see Lanciani, "Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome", ed. Boston, 1897, p. 186). This fact and the language of the graffito lead one to surmise that the page who mocked at the religion of one of his fellows has so become an impor- tant witness to the Christian adoration of Jesus as God in the first or, at the very latest, the second century. The graffito represents the Christ on a cross and mockingly gives Him an ass's head; a page is rudely scratched kneeling an<l with hands outstretched in the attitude of prayer; the in.scription is ".Vlexa- menos worships his God" (AXeld^ei-o! ai^trai -rbv debv) In the second century, too, Celsus arraigns the Chris- tians precisely on this account that they think God was made man (see Origen, "Contra Celsum", IV, 14; P. G., XI, 1043). Aristides wrote to the Emperor Antonius Pius (a. d. 138-161) what seems to have been an apology for the Fajth of Christ: " He Himself is called the Son of God; and they teach of Him that He as God came down from heaven and took and put on Flesh of a Hebrew virgin" (see"Theol. Quartal- schrift", Tubingen, 1892, p. 535).
(b) Witness of the Councils. — The first general council of the Church w-as called to define the Divin- ity of Jesus Christ and to condemn Arius and his error (see Arius). Previous to this time, heretics had denied this great and fundamental dogma of the Faith; but the Fathers had been equal to the task of refuting the error and of stemming the tide of heresy. Now the tide of heresy was so strong as to have need of the authority of the universal Church to withstand it. In his "Thalia ", Arius taught that the Word was not eternal (^v ttStc Sre oiiK ^j-) nor generated of the Father, but made out of nothing (^? ovk 6vTav yiyoviv X67os) ; and though it was before the world was, yet it was a thing made, a created thing (ttoi'tj/xo or kt-iVis). Against this bold heresy, the Council of Nicaea (325) defined the dogma of the Divinitjr of Christ in the clearest terms: "We believe ... in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, generated of the Father {yivvqd^vra 4k toO iraTpds fxavoyevrj) ^ that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God, begotten not made, the same in nature with the Father {o/jiooiinoi' t^ irarpl) by Whom all things were made" (see Denzinger, 54).
