Commentary on Galatians

To Antioch and to the whole inhabited world. Therefore, it is improper to teach these things to others, from whose care you have turned away and to which you have devoted yourself with your own dogma. Regarding Galatians 2:19– The law of bodily things possesses the work and the enjoyment: this eat and that do not eat, keep the Sabbath, circumcision. Grace does not wish to be pleased in you through these things. It was crucified, he says, by these. What need have I of law? I live no longer, but Christ lives in me. What I was living to myself, I was under law. But since Christ lives in me—he who is no longer under law but is in the heavens at the right hands of the Father—I do not nullify the one living in me. But what I now live in the flesh, in faith I live. For I believe into the Son of God. And if the Son of God whom I believe is at the right hand of the Father, in the heavens I live as a citizen; but the law in those on earth had the observances. Therefore I am not subject to law. Regarding Galatians 3:19–22 The law was more burdensome, and a ministry of death because of this it is named. How then, for the sake of the transgressions, was it added, he says? In a short word it is such: before the law, the mind of men with the flesh labored toward sin and cherished the evil; once the law was given, the mind was disciplined, but the flesh was still held captive. Since, therefore, the one not knowing the sin—that it was sin—treating impiety as piety and more eagerly attending to it, but the one having known that it is evil, this indeed gains the conscience that it transgresses and desires to obey God. Because of this the law was given, the one capable of giving life, instead of 'if a law was given, it was not given,' he says, according to the promises of God, but it was not even able to hold on to all. Regarding Galatians 3:23 Even if the law restrained nothing else, it provided the knowing of God. And that knowing of God it made ready for the reception of grace. Regarding Galatians 3:27–28 Not the keeping of the law, he says, makes the believers better, the ones from the Gentiles than the Jews, but the power of baptism, providing to clothe oneself with Christ, makes the grace common to all together: barbarians, Greeks, Jews, female, male. And not simply did the female and the male mix—insofar as one sought by the word toward what was set before him—but if the male and the female, differing, the baptism brings together into one grace, how much more the Greek and the Jew. Regarding Galatians 4:8–10 Now it wishes to show that after the grace has come, even if someone seems to keep the Sabbath and new moons and feasts according to law, just as if an idolater worships the elements while being a Gentile, he is serving otherwise. And not...

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