It is a very
beautiful doctrine of the Fathers that Christ submitted to the
conditions and experiences of our life in order to restore and sanctify
and endue them with the virtue of His merits. Hence Thomassini,
after the Fathers, thus discourses in his treatise on the
Incarnation: “The Fathers have been careful to attribute to
the Word of God” (incarnate) “not only the physical
parts—body and soul—but even the smallest and most
particular things: grief, fear, tears; and all the
emotions: conception, birth, babyhood; all the stages of life and
growth: hunger, thirst, fatigue, and sadness, in order that a
remedy might be applied at every place where sin had crept in, and
that, as death had corrupted all, so upon all might the water of life
be sprinkled.” Gregory of Nazianzus strikingly observes
(Or. 37): “Perchance indeed He sleeps, in order to
bless sleep: perchance, again, He is weary, in order to sanctify
weariness: and perchance weeps, to give dignity to
tears.” Hurter ad loc., who also cites Cyril of
Alexandria on S. John xii. 27—“You will find each and every
human experience duly represented in Christ, and that the affections of
the flesh were called out into energy, not that, as in us, they might
gain the upper hand, but that, by the might of the Word dwelling in
flesh, they might be tamed and kept within bounds, and our nature
transformed into a better state.”