On the Making of Man quotes

for it says, “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the beasts of the earth, and the fowls of the heaven, and the cattle, and all the earth.”

O marvellous! a sun is made, and no counsel precedes; a heaven likewise; and to these no single thing in creation is equal.

So great a wonder is formed by a word alone, and the saying indicates neither when, nor how, nor any such detail.

if, on the contrary, it should fall away from the vital energy, it will reduce its motion to destruction.

Thus, neither is there perception without material substance, nor does the act of perception take place without the intellectual faculty.

Let us now resume our consideration of the Divine word, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”

How mean and how unworthy of the majesty of man are the fancies of some heathen writers, who magnify humanity, as they supposed, by their comparison of it to this world!

for they say that man is a little world, composed of the same elements with the universe.

In what then does the greatness of man consist, according to the doctrine of the Church?

Not in his likeness to the created world, but in his being in the image of the nature of the Creator.

What therefore, you will perhaps say, is the definition of the image? How is the incorporeal likened to body? how is the temporal like the eternal? that which is mutable by change like to the immutable?

For this reason the whole race was spoken of as one man, namely, that to God’s power nothing is either past or future, but even that which we expect is comprehended, equally with what is at present existing, by the all-sustaining energy.

Our whole nature, then, extending from the first to the last, is, so to say, one image of Him Who is

; but the distinction of kind in male and female was added to His work last, as I suppose, for the reason which follows.

… hope, deems it a burden and a loss that we are not more speedily placed in that good state which is above man’s sense and knowledge, and is dissatisfied with the extension of the time that intervenes between him and the object of his desire.

Let him cease to vex himself like a child that is discontented at the brief delay of something that gives him pleasure

; for since all things are governed by reason and wisdom, we must by no means suppose that anything that happens is done without reason itself and the wisdom that is therein.

for Jesus “when He saw her,” it says, “had compassion”; “and He came and touched the bier; and they that bare him stood still;” and He said to the dead, “Young man, I say unto thee, arise,” “and He delivered him to his mother” alive.

Observe that no short time had intervened since the dead man had entered upon that state, he was all but laid in the tomb

; the miracle wrought by the Lord is greater, though the command is the same.

… by its proper food—therefore the channels of the blood, issuing from the liver as from a fountainhead, accompany the warm spirit everywhere in its way throughout the body, that the one may not by isolation from the other become a disease and destroy the constitution.

Let this instruct those who go beyond the bounds of fairness, as they learn from nature that covetousness is a disease that breeds destruction.

But since the Divinity alone is free from needs, while human poverty requires external aid for its own subsistence, nature therefore, in addition to those three powers by which we said that the whole body is regulated, brings in imported matter from without, introducing by …