Idle word-fights; pregnant struck; faith as embryo; Galatians travail

Cyril: …he has also invented something other, which the divine Paul himself also made for us a most excellent of lessons, saying: ‘Not to word-fight upon nothing useful, or upon overturn of the hearers.’ For superfluous dialogues, and the contentious altogether about inquiries, generate fights not necessary, and strike the mind of the hearers; for some, from lightness, sometimes receive readily and ignorantly what is not upright and said, and are eager to praise it; and others, bringing the more shameful vote upon the best things, having sickened the equal lack of education with the others, would be caught; and altogether few are those who know how to discern, and to set what benefits before what is naturally harmful. And these barely keep the mind unstruck in the word-fights of the others. So that the matter will not be without penalty for those wanting to do it, the law again hints to us, saying: ‘And if two men should fight, and should strike a woman having in belly, and her child should come out not yet formed, he will be fined with a fine, according as the husband of the woman should lay on, and he will give with dignity. And if it should be formed, he will give soul instead of soul.’ A word then: in the womb the embryo is barely seen human-formed, and goes into a type of the body according to us then, when also a number of a fortieth day is completed upon it. For this very reason they say that Moses the all-excellent, somehow travailing and reshaping Israel from the wandering in Egypt unto the life in law, abstained from foods and drinks; ‘For bread,’ he says, ‘I did not eat, and water I did not drink forty days.’ And unto us ourselves one must suspect that Christ both did and endured this. For in him the nature was reshaped unto sanctification through self-control, having from unbridled appetite in beginnings in the first-formed sickened the pollution unto sin and transgression. These things it is not unpersuasive for us to think; yet however the word of the history may somehow hold, let it be set aside now; but how it would be fitting to understand that a woman having in belly is struck by those accustomed to word-fight—come already, come, let us examine; for to speak very thinly in these things is not unpleasant. So a fruit and conception of mind would be the faith unto Christ, reshaping us unto him through complete knowledge, and forming us into a divine type; and indeed those who have believed through a voice of Isaiah, marking this somehow, I think, have cried out very well: ‘Through your fear, Lord, we received in belly, and we travailed, and we bore, we made a spirit of your salvation upon the earth.’ So a fruit and spiritual and saving conception of mind would be the faith unto Christ, which also seals the divine characters in us. To those then who from more perfect knowledge have flowed ignorantly unto the lesser and more incomplete—Galatians these are—the divine Paul was addressing, saying: ‘My little children, whom I again travail, until Christ should be formed in you.’ For having begun in spirit, the