§ 1
In what came before, we treated sufficiently, choosing a few points from many, the error of the nations concerning idols: their superstition, and how idolatry was first invented, how out of wickedness men devised for themselves the worship of idols. And by the grace of God we said something also of the divinity of the Word of the Father: of His providence and power over all things; that the good Father orders all things through Him; that all things are moved by Him, and in Him are given life.
Come now, blessed Macarius, true lover of Christ, and let us follow the faith of our religion to what comes next. Let us set forth what concerns the Word's becoming man, and His divine appearing among us. The Jews slander it, the Greeks mock it, but we worship it. And the lowlier the Word seems, the greater and fuller your devotion to Him may become.
For the more He is mocked by unbelievers, the greater the witness He gives of His own divinity. What men fail to grasp and call impossible, He shows to be possible. What men mock as unfitting, He by His own goodness clothes with honor. What men in their pretended wisdom laugh at as merely human, He by His own power shows to be divine, overthrowing the illusion of idols by His supposed lowliness on the Cross, and invisibly winning over the mockers and unbelievers to acknowledge His divinity and His power.
To tell this rightly, we must recall what was said before. For you should know the cause of the bodily appearing of the Word of the Father, so great and so exalted. And you should never suppose that the Savior wore a body by any necessity of His nature. He is bodiless by nature; He is the Word from the beginning. Yet by the love for mankind and the goodness of His own Father, He was made manifest to us in a human body for our salvation.
It is fitting, then, to begin with the creation of the universe, and with God its Maker. For so it will rightly appear that the renewal of creation was the work of the very same Word who made it in the beginning. And there is nothing strange in this: the Father worked the salvation of the world in the same One through whom He first created it.
§ 2
Concerning the making of the world and the creation of all things, many have held different views, and each has laid down the law as he pleased. Some say that all things came to be of themselves, by mere chance. Such are the Epicureans, who dream, against their own interest, that there is no providence over the universe, speaking in the face of plain fact and evidence.
For if all things came to be of themselves, without providence, as they claim, then everything would simply have come into existence alike and without distinction. The universe, as one body, would be all sun or all moon; and in man, the whole would be hand, or eye, or foot. But this is not how things are. We see one thing the sun, another the moon, another the earth; and in human bodies, one part a foot, another a hand, another a head. Such ordered arrangement declares that these things did not come to be of themselves. It shows that a cause went before them. And from that cause we may perceive God, who ordered and made all things.
Others, among them Plato, so great among the Greeks, say that God made all things out of matter that already existed and had no beginning. For God could make nothing, they say, unless the matter lay ready at hand, just as the wood must lie ready for the carpenter before he can work at all. But in saying this, they do not see that they are clothing God with weakness. For if He is not Himself the cause of the matter, but makes what exists only out of matter already lying before Him, then He proves to be weak, unable to make anything without the material. In just the same way, it is a weakness of the carpenter that he cannot make anything he needs without his timber. By their own supposition, had the matter not existed, God would have made nothing.
And how could He then be called Maker and Creator, if His power to make came from another source, that is, from the matter? If this were so, God would be, on their theory, only a craftsman, and not a Creator of being: one who works up the matter lying before him, but is himself no cause of the matter. He could not be called Creator at all, if He does not create the very matter from which created things are made.
The heretics, again, invent for themselves a different maker of all things, other than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And in this they are deeply blind, even about the words they use. For the Lord says to the Jews: "Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said: For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?" And then, pointing to the Creator, He says: "What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." How then can these men claim that the creation is foreign to the Father? And if, as John says, embracing all things: "All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made," how could the maker be another, apart from the Father of Christ?
§ 3
Such are the myths they tell. But the God-inspired teaching and the faith according to Christ exposes their vain talk as godlessness. For it knows that the world came to be neither of itself, since it is not without providence; nor from pre-existing matter, since God is not weak. It knows that out of nothing, out of what in no way existed at all, God brought the universe into being through the Word. As He says through Moses: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." And through the most profitable book of the Shepherd: "First of all believe that God is one, who created and framed all things, and brought them out of nothing into being." Paul points to the same when he says: "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that appear."
For God is good; or rather, He is the very source of goodness. And one who is good grudges nothing. Grudging existence to none, He made all things out of nothing through His own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ. And among all things on earth, He took special pity on the race of men. Seeing that by the terms of its own origin it could not endure forever, He gave it a further grace. He did not simply create men, as He created all the irrational animals on the earth. He made them after His own image, and gave them a share even in the power of His own Word, so that, having in themselves as it were shadows of the Word, and being made rational, they might be able to abide in blessedness, living the true life, the life of the saints in paradise.
And knowing again that the free choice of men could turn either way, God secured in advance, by a law and by a place, the grace He had given. For He brought them into His own paradise and gave them a law. If they guarded the grace and remained good, they should keep the life of paradise, without sorrow, without pain, without care, and beyond it hold the promise of incorruption in heaven. But if they transgressed, and turned back, and became evil, they should know that they would endure the corruption of death, which was theirs by nature: no longer to live in paradise, but cast out of it from that time forth, to die, and to abide in death and in corruption.
This is what holy Scripture foretells when it speaks in the person of God: "Of every tree in the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat; for on the day you eat of it, dying you shall die." And what can "dying you shall die" mean, but this: not merely to die, but to remain forever in the corruption of death?
§ 4
Perhaps you wonder why, having set out to speak of the Word's becoming man, we are now telling of the origin of mankind. But this too belongs to the purpose of our account. For in speaking of the Savior's appearing among us, we must also speak of how men began, so that you may know that our own condition was the occasion of His descent, and that our own transgression called forth the love of the Word for mankind. It was so that the Lord came even to us, and appeared among men: we were the cause of His taking a body. For our salvation He so loved us that He came to be, and to be seen, in a human body.
God made man, then, as we have said, and willed that he should abide in incorruption. But men, growing careless, turned away from the contemplation of God. They devised and contrived evil for themselves, as was told in the first part, and so received the condemnation of death with which they had been threatened. From then on they no longer remained as they were made, but were corrupted as they had contrived; and death reigned over them as a king. For the transgression of the commandment turned them back toward their own nature, so that, just as they had come to be out of nothing, so in due time they should justly endure the corruption that leads back to nothing.
For men have non-existence as their nature, and were called into being by the presence and the love for mankind of the Word. It followed, then, that when they were emptied of the knowledge of God, and turned back to what is not, they should be emptied also of being forever. For evil is what is not, and good is what is, since it comes from the God who is. That is to say: dissolved, they should remain in death and in corruption.
For man is by nature mortal, since he was made out of nothing. But by reason of his likeness to Him who is, if he had guarded it through the contemplation of God, he would have blunted his natural corruption and remained incorrupt, as Wisdom says: "The keeping of the laws is the assurance of incorruption." And being incorrupt, he would have lived thereafter as God, as somewhere holy Scripture also declares: "I said, you are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High; but you die like men, and fall like one of the princes."
§ 5
For God did not only make us out of nothing. He also gave us freely, by the grace of the Word, a life according to God. But men, turning away from things eternal, and by the counsel of the devil turning toward the things of corruption, became to themselves the cause of the corruption in death. They were, as I said before, corruptible by nature; but by the grace of their sharing in the Word, they might have escaped what their nature demanded, had they remained good. For because of the Word dwelling with them, even their natural corruption did not come near them, as Wisdom says: "God created man for incorruption, and made him an image of His own eternity; but by envy of the devil, death entered into the world."
When this happened, men began to die, and corruption from then on prevailed against them, gaining over the whole race even more than its natural power, because it held besides the threat of God against them for the transgression of the commandment.
And even in their wrongdoing, men did not stop at any fixed limit. Advancing little by little, they came at last beyond all measure. They were inventors of evil from the beginning, and had called down upon themselves death and corruption. Then, turning aside to injustice and exceeding every lawlessness, stopping at no single evil but contriving ever new evils upon the old, they became insatiable in sinning.
Adulteries and thefts were everywhere. The whole earth was full of murders and plunder. There was no care for law, but only for corruption and injustice; and every evil was committed, by each alone and by all together. Cities warred against cities, and nations rose up against nations. The whole world was torn apart by factions and battles, and every man vied with his neighbor in lawlessness.
Nor were crimes against nature far from them, but as the Apostle and witness of Christ says: "Their women exchanged the natural use for that which is against nature; and likewise the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their desire toward one another, men with men working shame, and receiving in themselves the recompense that their error deserved."