John

PROLOGUE

The Gospel excels all the pages of Holy Scripture, because what the law and the prophets foretold as to come, this the Gospel declares to be fulfilled. But among the writers of the gospels themselves John stands out in the profundity of the divine mysteries: he who, from the time of the Lord's Ascension, for sixty-five years preached the word of God without the aid of writing, down to the last times of Domitian. But when Domitian had been slain, and he had returned from exile to Ephesus by Nerva's permission, being compelled by the bishops of Asia he wrote of the divinity of Christ, coeternal with the Father, against the heretics who in his absence had broken in upon his churches, and who denied that Christ had existed before Mary. Whence he is deservedly compared, in the figure of the four living creatures, to the flying eagle, which flies higher than the other creatures and looks upon the rays of the sun with eyes unstruck by them. For the other evangelists, who sufficiently set forth the temporal nativity of Christ and his temporal deeds, which he wrought in his manhood, and said few things of his divinity, walk with the Lord upon the earth like creatures that go on foot. But this one, expounding few things of his temporal deeds, yet contemplating more loftily the power of his divinity, flies with the Lord to heaven. For he who reclined upon the Lord's breast at the supper drank the draught of heavenly wisdom more excellently than the rest from that very fount of the Lord's breast. He had read, indeed, the gospels of the three evangelists, and had approved their faith and truth, in which he saw that some things of the history of the deeds done were wanting, and chiefly those which the Lord wrought in the first season of his preaching, that is, before John the Baptist was shut up in prison. These things, therefore, as left aside by them, John writes: what Jesus did before John was delivered up; but above all he took care to commend the divinity of Christ and the mystery of the Trinity. For the three other evangelists, having followed out more copiously the temporal sayings and deeds of the Lord, which avail most for the shaping of the manners of the present life, were occupied about the active life. In which there is labour, that the heart may be cleansed for the seeing of God. But John tells few deeds of the Lord, while the words of the Lord which intimate the unity of the Trinity and the felicity of eternal life he writes down more diligently; and thus, in commending the virtue of the contemplative life, he held to his own purpose and preaching. In which contemplative life there is leisure, that God may be seen. For this is that John whom the Lord called out of the wave-tossed storm of wedlock, and to whom, a virgin, he commended his virgin mother.