Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| Come then, let us next say for what reason the bodiless Word of God used a body as his instrument and came to live among human beings. For how else could a divine essence, intangible, immaterial and invisible, have shown itself to people who look for God among things that come to be and down here on earth, and who in any case cannot, or will not, gaze upon the one who brought all things into being and made them, except through a human shape and form?
2| So it was through a mortal instrument, a fitting aid, that he came down to keep company with mortals, because this was dear to them; for like, as they say, is dear to like. To people who delight in perceiving what can be seen, who seek gods in statues and in the carved shapes of lifeless wooden images, who imagine that the divine is in matter and in bodies, and who proclaim men mortal by nature to be gods: to these the Word of God showed himself in some such way.
3| That is why he built for himself a most holy temple, a bodily instrument, a dwelling open to the senses for a rational power, a statue august and all-holy, more precious than any lifeless image. A figure made of lifeless matter, worked by the hands of artisans into a likeness in bronze and iron, gold and ivory, stone and wood, might well be a fitting dwelling for demons; but this God-filled statue, wrought by the power of divine wisdom, shared in life and in intelligent essence: a statue full of every virtue, a statue that was the dwelling of the divine Word and a holy temple of the holy God.
4| The Word who dwelt in it kept company with mortals and was made known to them through what was akin to them; yet he did not fall subject to passions like theirs, nor was he bound to the body as a human soul is, nor did he become worse than himself and change from his own divinity. For just as the sun's rays of light would suffer nothing, although they fill all things and touch bodies that are dead and impure, so far more would the bodiless power of the Word of God suffer nothing, nor be harmed in its essence, nor ever become worse than itself, when it touched a body in a bodiless way.
5| In this way, then, the common Savior of all showed himself beneficent and saving to all through the human instrument he had put forward, as a musician displays his skill through the lyre. A Greek myth relates that Orpheus enchanted every kind of beast with his song and tamed the fury of wild creatures by striking the strings of his instrument with the plectrum; the Greek chorus sings of it, and people believe that a lifeless lyre tamed the beasts and that even the trees, the oaks, moved, yielding to the music. So the all-wise and all-harmonious Word of God, bringing every kind of healing to human souls laid low by manifold vices, took up in his hands a musical instrument, the work of his own wisdom, man, and through it played songs and charms for beasts that were rational, not irrational. He cured every untamed temper of Greeks and barbarians, the wild and beastlike passions of souls, with the medicines of his divine teaching; and to sick souls that sought the divine among things that come to be and in bodies he presented, like the best of physicians, a remedy akin and suited to them: God in a man.
6| And caring for bodies no less than for souls, he let the eyes of the flesh see strange and wonderful sights, divine portents and powers, and again sounded his teachings into ears of flesh through a tongue of flesh. He accomplished all things through the man he had taken up, for the sake of those who could perceive such a divinity in no other way but this. In all this he served the Father's counsels, while he himself remained immaterial, just as he had been before with the Father: he did not change his essence, his own nature did not vanish, he was not fettered by the bonds of the flesh, and while he passed his time here, where his human vessel was, he was not prevented from being elsewhere in the universe.
8| No: even then, while he lived as a citizen among men, he filled all things, he was with the Father and indeed in him, and at that same time he cared for all things together, in heaven and on earth. He was in no way shut out, as we are, from being present everywhere, nor hindered from putting forth his divine works as was his custom; he imparted things from himself to the man while receiving nothing in return from the mortal, and he supplied the mortal with divine power while drawing from the mortal no share in return.
9| So he was not defiled when the body was born, nor did he, who cannot suffer, suffer in his essence when the mortal was in turn parted from him. For if a lyre should happen to be smashed, or its strings torn apart, it is not likely that the one who plays it suffers; nor, when a wise man's body is punished, would we reasonably say that the wisdom in the wise man, or the soul in the body, is beaten or burned.
10| Far more, then, is it reasonable to say that the power of the Word took no harm from the sufferings of the body, since even the example of light does not let us suppose that the sun's rays, sent down from heaven to earth, are stained when they touch mud and mire and every kind of filth. Nothing would stop us from saying that these things too are lit up by the beams of light; but the light is not muddied for all that, nor is the sun defiled by its mingling with bodies.
11| And these examples at least are not foreign to nature. But the Savior, the bodiless Word of God, is life itself and intelligible light itself: whatever he touches with his divine and bodiless power must live and abide in rational light. So whatever body he touches is at once hallowed and illumined, every disease and sickness and suffering gives way before him, and what was in want receives its fill from him.
12| So he passed his whole life in some such way: at one time showing that his bodily instrument suffered as we do, at another disclosing God the Word, working mighty deeds and marvels as God, uttering beforehand predictions of what was to come, and displaying by his very works the Word of God whom the many did not see, in prodigious acts, in wonders and signs and extraordinary powers, and indeed in divine teachings that lead souls on to make themselves ready for the place above the heavens.
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