Ark below / mercy-seat above; kenosis and exaltation; forerunner in heaven

Cyril: …the blind. An ark to become from unrotting woods and pure gold, he says, and the law was in it—that is, the divine word, or the testimonies. For the matter was a type of the Word sprung from God, who tented among us, and became in a likeness of flesh, according to the Scriptures. Then a veil somehow stretched upon four pillars, he said must be hung from the ark. And a name for the veil—the mercy-seat. And Christ is also this. ‘For he is propitiation for our sins, and a mercy-seat through faith.’ For Paul was naming him thus; and the cherubim had also somehow been written in a circle of the mercy-seat, signifying very well the slavery under God of the uppermost powers—for the Word is God—and the being very near, and indeed also the standing beside liturgically. Then God said toward Moses: ‘And I will be known to you from there, and I will speak to you from above the mercy-seat between the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the testimony.’ And the ark was, as I said, Christ, as God Word in an incorruptible body, yet the ark unto earth; and the Only-begotten has also become in a lowering and in the lowliness according to us. For he put on the slave-fitting form, and emptied himself. And he himself again is the mercy-seat, lying high, and escorted by the upper Powers. For the Son is not known to us only from the modes of the emptying, but also from those by which he is God and Lord of the wholes. For even if he has humbled himself because of the human, having come down economically in the things according to us, yet ‘God highly exalted him and gifted him a name, the one above every name.’ And a type of this also would be the mercy-seat having been set high, the cherubim having been written unto right and left. For where the liturgy fitting for God alone would appear, there somehow would altogether also be the glory of the divinity, and the superiority of the dignities beyond word. ‘And from above the cherubim I will be known to you,’ says the Master of all, commanding the ineffable nature not to be sought in what creation is, but altogether beyond what has been called unto existence; for by nature both word and most fitting place of God is the beyond and above every generated thing. So then the place above the cherubim, even sense-wise in the holy tent, all but makes clear the divine nature for us; for this reason he has commanded the gold altar, having become unto a type of Christ, to lie opposite the one who both oracles and is understood above the cherubim—somehow signifying this: that the things according to us have become in Christ as into God’s sight and in the Father’s eyes. For the human being in turning-away, and having struck against God through the stepping-beyond and much sin, Christ set again in the face of the Father as in himself and first. ‘For a forerunner for us he has entered into the heaven, now to be shown to the face of God for us,’ as the wise Paul writes to us. For the one existing always with his own