Christmas: The Emptying of God

“He was conceived by the Virgin, who was purified beforehand in both soul and flesh by the Spirit, for it was necessary that procreation be honored and that virginity be honored more.

He comes forth, God with what he has assumed, one from two opposites, flesh and spirit, the one deifying and the other deified. O the new mixture! O the paradoxical blending! He who is comes into being, and the uncreated is created, and the uncontained is contained, through the intervention of the rational soul, which mediates between divinity and the coarseness of flesh. The one who enriches becomes poor; he is made poor in my flesh, that I might be enriched through his divinity. The full one empties himself; for he empties himself of his own glory for a short time, that I may participate in his fullness.”

(St. Gregory of Nazianzus – d. 391AD, Festal Orations, pg. 71)

Links to all of this year’s blogs related to the Nativity of Christ can be found at Christmas Blogs 2012.

2 thoughts on “Christmas: The Emptying of God

  1. Pingback: Orthodox Collective

  2. Pingback: Nativity Blogs 2012 | Fr. Ted's Blog

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.