But now in that part of the reading that sounded most recently in your ears, what did you hear Thomas saying? I won’t believe, unless I touch. And the Lord says to this Thomas, Come, touch, put your hands into my side, and do not be incredulous but believing.^[1] I, he is saying, if you do not think it is enough for me to offer myself to your eyes, am also offering myself to your hands. Perhaps, you see, you are one of those who sing in the psalm, ‘In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord with my hands in the night in his presence.’ Why was he seeking with his hands? Because he was seeking in the night. What does that mean, was seeking in the night? He was carrying the darkness of unbelief in his heart.

Let us flee from here. You can flee in spirit, even though you are kept back in body. You can both be here and be in the presence of the Lord, if your soul clings to him and you walk after him in your thoughts, if you follow his ways, not in pretense but in faith, and take refuge in him. For he is a refuge and a power, and David says to him, I fled to you for refuge, and I was not deceived. And so, because God is a refuge, and because he is, moreover, in heaven and above the heavens, surely we must flee from here to there, where there is peace and rest from labors and where we can feast upon the great sabbath, even as Moses said, And the sabbaths of the land shall be food for you.^[1] For it is a banquet, and one filled with enjoyment and serenity, to rest in God and to look on his delight. We have taken refuge with God; shall we return to the world? We have died to sin; shall we seek sins again? We have renounced the world and the use of it; shall we stick fast again in its mire?

Notice, too, what the psalmist said. When he told them, On the day of my distress I sought God, he also added, My hands were stretched out; further, by night and also before him. What is distress? What does it mean to stretch out one’s hands, and what does it mean to do so before God? There is distress when we suffer annoyances and stretching out of hands [when we engage] in good deeds. Searching by night occurs in this world when the truth has not yet shed light. This world will certainly come to an end and will meet Christ [in judgment]. And when Christ comes, he will be like the sun shining in the hearts of all people. Why did he add before him? The person who stretches out his hands performs good deeds. However, the person who thus performs good deeds in order to please people does not do so before God; that is, in order to please him rather than human beings. Quite rightly, then, I was not deceived follows; a person who has sought God in this way [may say,] I have not been deceived. He has found what he was seeking, and therefore he has told us, Ask, seek, knock.^[1]

Prayers are recited early in the morning so that the first movements of the soul and the mind may be consecrated to God and that we may take up no other consideration before we have been cheered and heartened by the thought of God, as it is written: I remembered God and was delighted, and that the body may not busy itself with tasks before we have fulfilled the words To you will I pray, O Lord; in the morning you shall hear my voice. In the morning I will stand before you and will see.^[1]

Now, I think we have to be clear about the nature of time and eternity in the Scriptures. When describing things as eternal, the intention of Scripture is not always to suggest that they are absolutely uncreated, everlasting, incorruptible, immortal, unchanging and immutable. I have in mind here texts such as Rise up, you eternal doors.^[1] Actually, the designation eternity is frequently given to something very ancient or, again, to the whole course of earthly time, since it is characteristic of eternity to be very old, unchanging and the measure of being. Time, [by contrast], has to do with the process of change manifested, for instance, in birth, death and variety. Hence theology tells us that we who are bound in by time are destined to have a share of eternity when at last we attain the incorruptible, unchanging eternity.^[2] And then Scripture talks sometimes of the splendors of a temporal eternity and of an eternal time. But of course it is clear to us that, strictly speaking, what Scripture discusses and denotes is that eternity is the home of being, while time is the home of things that come to be. Therefore it must not be imagined that things named as eternal are simply co-eternal with the God who precedes eternity. No. Better here to follow carefully the sacred words of Scripture and to take eternal and temporal in the sense appropriate to them. And we should look on those things that share partly in eternity and partly in time as somehow midway between things that are and things that are coming to be. One can take eternity and time to be predicates of God since, being the Ancient of Days, he is the cause of all time and eternity. Yet he is before time and beyond time and is the source of the variety of time and of seasons. Or, again, he precedes the eternal ages, for he is there before eternity and above eternity, and his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom.^[3]

Let no man then so understand the words of the Psalmist, Shall God forget to be gracious? shall he shut up in his anger his tender mercies as if the sentence of God were true of good men, false of bad men, or true of good men and wicked angels, but false of bad men. For the Psalmist’s words refer to the vessels of mercy and the children of the promise,^[1] of whom the prophet himself was one; for when he had said, Shall God forget to be gracious? shall he shut up in his anger his tender mercies? and then immediately subjoins, And I said, Now I begin: this is the change wrought by the right hand of the Most High, he manifestly explained what he meant by the words, Shall he shut up in his anger his tender mercies? For God’s anger is this mortal life, in which man is made like to vanity, and his days pass as a shadow.^[2] Yet in this anger God does not forget to be gracious, causing his sun to shine and his rain to descend on the just and the unjust;^[3] and thus he does not in his anger cut short his tender mercies, and especially in what the Psalmist speaks of in the words, Now I begin: this change is from the right hand of the Most High; for he changes for the better the vessels of mercy, even while they are still in this most wretched life, which is God’s anger, and even while his anger is manifesting itself in this miserable corruption; for in his anger he does not shut up his tender mercies. And since the truth of this divine canticle is quite satisfied by this application of it, there is no need to give it a reference to that place in which those who do not belong to the city of God are punished in eternal fire. But if any persist in extending its application to the torments of the wicked, let them at least understand it so that the anger of God, which has threatened the wicked with eternal punishment, shall abide, but shall be mixed with mercy to the extent of alleviating the torments which might justly be inflicted; so that the wicked shall neither wholly escape, nor only for a time endure these threatened pains, but that they shall be less severe and more endurable than they deserve. Thus the anger of God shall continue, and at the same time he will not in this anger shut up his tender mercies.

It is quite in vain, then, that some—indeed very many—yield to merely human feelings and deplore the notion of the eternal punishment of the damned and their interminable and perpetual misery. They do not believe that such things will be. Not that they would go counter to divine Scripture—but, yielding to their own human feelings, they soften what seems harsh and give a milder emphasis to statements they believe are meant more to terrify than to express the literal truth. God will not forget, they say, to show mercy, nor in his anger will he shut up his mercy. This is, in fact, the text of a holy psalm. But there is no doubt that it is to be interpreted to refer to those who are called vessels of mercy, those who are freed from misery not by their own merits but through God’s mercy. Even so, if they suppose that the text applies to all people, there is no ground for them further to suppose that there can be an end for those of whom it is said, Thus these shall go into everlasting punishment. Otherwise, it can as well be thought that there will also be an end to the happiness of those of whom the antithesis was said: But the righteous into life eternal.

Sufficient defense has been offered on these points, and as for that which Eunomius^[1] says by way of calumny against our doctrine, that Christ was emptied to become himself^[2] there has been sufficient discussion in what has been said above, where he has been shown to be attributing to our doctrine his own blasphemy. For a person who believes that the unchangeable [divine] nature has put on the created and perishable [human nature] is not one who speaks of the transition from like to like but one who believes that the divine nature does not change into the more lowly [human nature]. For if, as their doctrine asserts, he is created, and a human being is created also, the wonder of the doctrine disappears, and there is nothing marvelous in what is alleged, since the created nature comes to be in itself. But we who have learned from prophecy of the change of the right hand of the Most High—and by the Right Hand of the Father we understand that power of God, which made all things, which is the Lord (not in the sense of depending on him as a part upon a whole but as being indeed from him and yet contemplated in individual existence)—say thus: that neither does the right hand vary from him whose right hand it is, in regard to the idea of its nature, nor can any other change in it be spoken of besides the accommodation to the flesh. For truly the right hand of God was God himself; manifested in the flesh, seen through that same flesh by those whose sight was clear; as he did the work of the Father, being, both in fact and in thought, the right hand of God, yet being changed, in respect of the veil of the flesh by which he was surrounded, as regarded that which was seen, from that which he was by nature, as a subject of contemplation. Therefore he says to Philip, who was gazing only at that which was changed, Look through that which is changed to that which is unchangeable, and if you see this, you have seen that Father, whom you seek to see; for he that has seen me—not him who appears in a state of change, but my very self, who am in the Father—will have seen that Father in whom I am, because the very same character of Godhead is beheld in both.^[3] If, then, we believe that the immortal and impassible and uncreated nature came to be in the nature of the creature that is capable of suffering, and conceive the change to consist in this, on what grounds are we charged with saying that he set aside his divine powers to become incarnate, by those who keep presenting their own statements about our doctrines? For the participation of the created with the created is no change of the right hand. To say that the right hand of the uncreated nature is created belongs to Eunomius^[4] alone and to those who adopt such opinions as he holds. For the person with an eye that looks on the truth will discern the right hand of the Highest to be such as he sees the Highest to be—Uncreated of Uncreated, Good of Good, Eternal of Eternal without prejudice to its eternity by its being in the Father by way of generation. Thus our accuser has unawares been employing against us reproaches that properly fall on himself.

What mind can understand this mystery, what tongue has the capability of explaining this grace? Iniquity turns back into innocence, oldness into newness. Strangers come into adoption, and foreigners enter on an inheritance. Godless people have started to be just, the covetous to be beneficent, the incontinent to be chaste, the earthly to be heavenly.^[1] What has effected this change but the right hand of the Most High? For the Son of God came to undo the devil’s works.^[2] He grafted himself into us and us into himself in such a way that God’s descent to human affairs became the elevation of human beings to those divine.

I cannot express in words, most excellent son,^[1] how much I am delighted with your work and your life. For on hearing of the power of a new miracle in our days, to wit, that the whole nation of the Goths has through your excellency been brought over from the error of the Arian heresy to the firmness of a right faith, one is disposed to exclaim with the prophet, This is the change wrought by the right hand of the most High. For whose breast, even though stony, would not, on hearing of so great a work, soften in praises of almighty God and love of your excellency? As for me, I declare that it delights me often to tell these things that have been done through you to my sons^[2] who consult with me, and often together with them I marvel at these things. These things also for the most part cause me to become critical of myself, in that I languish sluggish and unprofitable in listless ease, while kings are laboring in the gathering together of souls for the gains of the heavenly country.

This is not the only example of the obedience of water available to us, for elsewhere we find it written, The waters saw you, O God; the waters saw you, and they were afraid. What is said here of the waters does not seem to be without a semblance of truth, since elsewhere the prophet also speaks in the same manner: The sea saw and fled; Jordan was turned back.^[1] Who does not know how in actual fact the sea fled at the crossing of the Hebrews? When the waters were divided, the people crossed over, believing because of the dust under their feet that the sea had fled and that the waters had vanished. Therefore, the Egyptian believed what he saw and entered in, but the waters that had fled returned for him. The waters, then, know how to gather, how to fear and how to flee, when commanded to do so by God. Let us imitate these waters, and let us recognize one congregation of the Lord, one church.

When our Lord had arrived and had entered the boat with Simon, the wind abated.^[1] The Arian,^[2] therefore, who contradicts the birth [of the Lord] is also rejected, through the word that those who were in the boat spoke, They came and worshiped him, and they were saying to him, ‘You are indeed the Son of God.’^[3] It is he of whom it is written, The waters saw you and trembled, and the depths too were stirred up. Your pathways are on many waters, and your footsteps are not known. So they confessed by their word that he, concerning whom these things were spoken, was indeed the Son of God.