Just as he knows how to remove the punishment from the one who is converted, so in the one who refuses to be converted, never does he allow the sin to remain unpunished. Therefore, if there are those whom the pious goodness of God does not free from the domination of sin in this present world, his just severity condemns them in the future. From this it comes about that the evil ones are tirelessly admonished for their salvation by the divine words lest they remain in the servitude of sin, but they are exhorted rather to seek the mercy of a just God while they are in this life- St Fulgentius, On the Forgiveness of Sins

#St_Fulgentius
#Soteriology

For when the Lord, who made male and female, said that she was of bone of his [Adam’s] bones and flesh of his flesh, the Lord himself announced through Adam that which was to be wholly accomplished in Adam. . . . for since the Word was made flesh, the Church also was a member of Christ. . . .-St Hilary of Poitiers

#St_Hillary_Poitiers
#Biblical_Commentary
#Genesis
#Eve

Although he was the Lord and indeed God, he was made a slave “by taking the form of a slave,” so that he might free us from perpetual servitude and the devil’s power and might lead us back to true freedom.

As a result, he said this to the Jews: “Then you will be truly free if the Son sets you free.”

They thought they were truly free, but in fact by their most vain intention they were slaves to human cares. In order that false freedom might become true freedom (that is, that human freedom might become Christian freedom), that very freedom needed a liberator, through whose grace it might be able to turn away from human cares so as to contemplate and long for the things that pertain to life eternal. Indeed, without this grace human freedom can contemplate and long for human things, but it cannot contemplate or desire or long for divine things. - Letter of the Scythian monks to the Bishops

#Monastic_fathers
#Soteriology

God touches our hearts in this way so that we may not think that our choice is absent in any particular good action of the human will, and even more, so that we may not doubt that his grace precedes that will. For God works in the hearts of men, and in free choice itself, in such a way that holy thoughts, pious counsels, and every motion of the good will may all be from God. Through him we are able to do any sort of good thing, but “apart from him we can do nothing.”- Pope St Celestine, Epistle 21

Note: This quotation appears in the Letter of the Scythian monks as part of a large Patristic(and also biblical) prooftext for the view that Divine Grace precedes the will in conversion. The idea here is Augustinian in nature.

#St_Celestine
#Soteriology

when “the Word was made flesh,” divinity thus deigned to unite humanity miraculously to itself in such a way that for the life of the world, that humanity of his would come into being as divine humanity in one and the same God and man, Christ, while preserving the reality of both natures. For God, “not withholding his mercies in his anger,” was made man for this purpose: that whatever he had created whole in man, God might make it completely whole again once he had taken it into himself.- St Fulgentius

#St_Fulgentius
#Soteriology

By the power and work of prevenient grace, the Holy Spirit came over her and the power of the Most High overshadowed her. As she was about to conceive the one who was God and the Son of God, she neither desired nor engaged in intercourse, but instead, while maintaining her virginity in both mind and body, she received from him what she was about to conceive and give birth to, by a gift of uncorrupted fertility and fertile purity.

Thus did the holy Virgin conceive God the Word as he, the Creator of angels and men, was himself made according to the flesh; and in the same way she gave birth to the Redeemer of men. For the holy Virgin Mary did not conceive God without his assuming flesh, or conceive flesh without its union with God, because the one whom the Virgin conceived belonged jointly to the God of the Virgin and to the flesh of the Virgin.- St Fulgentius

#St_Fulgentius
#Mariology

The Lord has created me, has brought me from nonentity into being, and after I had fallen, has restored me through His sufferings and death; He has cleansed me, a sinner, has made me His son by adoption; He has promised me the inheritance of eternal bliss; He has enlightened me through the light of His Gospel; He punishes and forgives me like a father; He lights me with the sun; He gives me daily food and drink; and above all He gives me His sweetest and lifegiving food—His Body and Blood; He has diffused air for me to breathe, and above all He has poured upon me His Holy Spirit. He clothes me in beauteous garments; above all, He inwardly clothes me with Himself, as it is said: "For as many of you as have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ."

He gives me rest in a spacious and clean dwelling, and promises me an eternal, resplendent abode in the heavens; He endows me with health: above all, He gives me spiritual health in abundance, through prayer and especially through the Holy Sacraments and other means. What shall I render to Him for all this? What can I do for Him in return? I cannot do anything, except to be faithful to Him with all my might, through fulfilling His Commandments and by offering a firm and unchanging resistance to sin and the Devil.- St John of kronstadt, My Life in Christ, pg.142

#Orthodox
#St_John_Kronstadt
#Soteriology
#Eucharist
#Baptism