Childishness or the Spirit of Childhood?
Jesus says: ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God.’ [Luke 18:16]
If that is how things are, growing up means, loss. Why should I desire to grow up if adulthood deprives me of the right to the kingdom? Can you explain why God should have given us physical development which favours vice, not virtue? And for what reason did the Lord not turn to children but to grown men when he was choosing his Apostles? In brief, why does he say that children are fit to enter the kingdom?
Someone will suggest this reason: because children do not bear malice, they do not know how to swindle their neighbour, they are not vindictive, they do not desire wealth, they do not covet honours.
Maybe: but virtue is not founded on ignorance. Still less is self-control praiseworthy if it is only due to impotence.
Therefore the Lord is not offering us childhood as our example but the goodness that imitates the simplicity of childhood. He does not put before us inability to sin – which would not be virtue – but the will not to sin, a steady will not to sin, for which we ought to take childhood as our model.
For the rest, the Lord himself says: ‘Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ [Matt. 18:3]
Ambrose, On the Gospel of St Luke, 8, 57[f. (PLI5, 1782)
The Conception and Birth of our Spiritual Being
The foetus already has all the parts of its body, but it cannot use them inside its mother’s womb. When it is born into the world, the body develops in its senses and parts and acquires the ability to use them. Physically, it is in the world that the human being comes to perfection.
The same is true for our spiritual being. It begins as a foetus. Then it leaves the womb and bit by bit it develops until it comes ‘to mature manhood, measured by the stature of the fullness of Christ.’ [Eph. 4: 13]
The foetus is formed from the seed and the ovum; our spiritual being is conceived in the waters of Baptism and thanks to the fire of the Spirit.
The foetus in the realm of nature passes from nonbeing to being; the foetus in the spiritual realm passes from not having divine sonship or daughterhood to the condition of being a child of God.
The foetus in the realm of nature develops slowly; our spiritual being, once it has been conceived as a child of God, grows in the world as if in the womb, according to the measure of justice in this world.
Finally, the foetus in the realm of nature leaves its mother and is born into the world; the foetus in the spiritual realm, when it has fulfilled all justice according to the law of the world, leaves the world to be born again.
It enters then into another world, which is the world of Christ’s justice.
Philoxenus of Mabbug, Homily 9, 260ff. (SC44, pp. 247ff.)
~Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain: A Patristic Breviary, Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
