💡 The True Light that Lightens Every Man ✨ The Word of God lightens every man that comes into the world, not after the manner of teaching, as the angels for example or men, but rather as God after the mode of creation, He engraves in each of those that are called unto being, the seed of wisdom or of Divine knowledge, and implants a root of understanding and so renders the living creature rational, showing it participate of His own Nature, and sending into the mind as it were certain luminous vapours of the Unutterable Brightness, in way and mode that Himself knows: for one may not, I deem, say on these subjects anything overmuch. (...) By participation with the Light the creature shines forth, and is therefore called and is light, mounting up to what is above its nature by the kindness of Him Who glorified it and Who crowned it with divers honours… For verily does the Lord mercies, rendering those that are little and a mere nothing according to their own nature, great and worthy of marvel through His Goodness toward them, even as He has, as God, willed to adorn us ungrudgingly with His own goods, and hence calls us gods and light, and what of good things does He not call us? St Cyril the Great, On John 1: 9; LFC 1, 86-87. #DivineLight #Logos #Creation #StCyril #Patristics #Theology

📈 Unceasing Progress Unto All the Fulness of God 📈 It was for this that intelligent beings came into existence; namely, that the riches of the Divine blessings should not lie idle. The All-creating Wisdom fashioned these souls, these receptacles with free wills, as vessels as it were, for this very purpose, that there should be some capacities able to receive His blessings and become continually larger with the inpouring of the stream. Such are the wonders that the participation in the Divine blessings works: it makes him into whom they come larger and more capacious; from his capacity to receive it gets for the receiver an actual increase in bulk as well, and he never stops enlarging. The fountain of blessings wells up unceasingly, and the partaker's nature (...) makes the whole influx an enlargement of its own proportions, and becomes at once more wishful to imbibe the nobler nourishment and more capable of containing it; each grows along with each, both the capacity which is nursed in such abundance of blessings and so grows greater, and the nurturing supply which comes on in a flood answering to the growth of those increasing powers. _St. Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection; NPNF, 2nd Ser., Vol. V, p. 452. #SpiritualGrowth #DivineGrace #Theosis #Patristics #EverMovingForward