Sermons — Sermon 23

St. Leo the Great

Source: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360323.htm

1. Chapter 1

On the Feast of the Nativity, III.

The things which are connected with the mystery of today's solemn feast are well known to you, dearly-beloved, and have frequently been heard: but as yonder visible light affords pleasure to eyes that are unimpaired, so to sound hearts does the Saviour's nativity give eternal joy; and we must not keep silent about it, though we cannot treat of it as we ought. For we believe that what Isaiah says, who shall declare his generation Isaiah 53:8? applies not only to that mystery, whereby the Son of God is co-eternal with the Father, but also to this birth whereby the Word became flesh. And so God, the Son of God, equal and of the same nature from the Father and with the Father, Creator and Lord of the Universe, Who is completely present everywhere, and completely exceeds all things, in the due course of time, which runs by His own disposal, chose for Himself this day on which to be born of the Blessed Virgin Mary for the salvation of the world, without loss of the mother's honour. For her virginity was violated neither at the conception nor at the birth: that it might be fulfilled, as the Evangelist says, which was spoken by the Lord through Isaiah the Prophet, saying, behold the virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us Matthew 1:22-23. For this wondrous child-bearing of the holy Virgin produced in her offspring one person which was truly human and truly Divine, because neither substance so retained their properties that there could be any division of persons in them; nor was the creature taken into partnership with its Creator in such a way that the One was the in-dweller, and the other the dwelling; but so that the one nature was blended with the other. And although the nature which is taken is one, and that which takes is another, yet these two diverse natures come together into such close union that it is one and the same Son who says both that, as true Man, He is less than the Father, and that, as true God, He is equal with the Father.

This union, dearly beloved, whereby the Creator is joined to the creature, Arian blindness could not see with the eyes of intelligence, but, not believing that the Only-begotten of God was of the same glory and substance with the Father, spoke of the Son's Godhead as inferior, drawing its arguments from those words which are to be referred to the form of a slave, in respect of which, in order to show that it belongs to no other or different person in Himself, the same Son of God with the same form, says, The Father is greater than I John 14:28, just as He says with the same form, I and my Father are one. John 10:30 For in the form of a slave, which He took at the end of the ages for our restoration, He is inferior to the Father: but in the form of God, in which He was before the ages, He is equal to the Father. In His human humiliation He was made of a woman, made under the Law Galatians 4:4