How Can God Increase?

The Gospel reading for the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord concludes with these words: And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him (Lk 2: 40). Twelve verses later, the chapter ends with these words: And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man (Lk 2: 52). What could these verses possibly mean?

St Cyril of Alexandria has left us a homily which deals in part with precisely this question:

TO say that the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, being filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him, must be taken as referring to His human nature. And examine, I pray you, closely the profoundness of the dispensation: the Word endures to be born in human fashion, although in His divine nature He has no beginning nor is subject to time: He Who as God is all perfect, submits to bodily growth: the Incorporeal has limbs that advance to the ripeness of manhood: He is filled with wisdom Who is Himself all wisdom. And what say we to this? Behold by these things Him Who was in the form of the Father made like unto us: the Rich in poverty: the High in humiliation: Him said to "receive," Whose is the fulness as God. So thoroughly did God the Word empty Himself! For what things are written of Him as a man shew the manner of the emptying. For it were a thing impossible for the Word begotten of God the Father to admit ought like this into His own nature: but when He became flesh, even a man like unto us, then He is born according to the flesh of a woman, and is said also to have been subject to the things that belong to man's state: and though the Word as being God could have made His flesh spring forth at once from the womb unto the measure of the perfect man, yet this would have been of the nature of a portent: and therefore He gave the habits and laws of human nature power even over His own flesh.

Be not therefore offended, considering perchance within thyself, How can God increase? or how can He Who gives grace to angels and to men receive fresh wisdom? Rather reflect upon the great skill wherewith we are initiated into His mystery. For the wise Evangelist did not introduce the Word in His abstract and incorporeal nature, and so say of Him that He increased in stature and wisdom and grace, but after having shewn that He was born in the flesh of a woman, and took our likeness, he then assigns to Him these human attributes, and calls Him a child, and says that He waxed in stature, as His body grow little by little, in obedience to corporeal laws. And so He is said also to have increased in wisdom, not as receiving fresh supplies of wisdom,----for God is perceived by the understanding to be entirely perfect in all things, and altogether incapable of being destitute of any attribute suitable to the Godhead:----but because God the Word gradually manifested His wisdom proportionably to the age which the body had attained.

The body then advances in stature, and the soul in wisdom: for the divine nature is capable of increase in neither one nor the other; seeing that the Word of God is all perfect. And with good reason he connected the increase of wisdom with the growth of the bodily stature, because the divine nature revealed its own wisdom in proportion to the measure of the bodily growth.

The simple answer, then, to the question we posed is that Jesus "increased in wisdom and stature" according to His humanity, but not according to His divinity. But there is more in this rich passage that is worthy of consideration. St Cyril bids us first to examine the profundity of Christ's self-emptying. He Who always gives is now, for the first time, on the receiving end. The saint then asks that we "reflect upon the great skill wherewith we are initiated into His mystery." The Evangelist, as St Cyril points out, introduces first not "the Word in His abstract and incorporeal nature," but rather Christ the human child, subject as He is to the laws of growth and maturity. We are here first given the flesh, and only then the spirit; first we are given the fact, and only then are we given the paradox. Special note should also be taken of St Cyril's words that "God the Word gradually manifested His wisdom proportionably to the age which the body had attained" and that "the divine nature revealed its own wisdom in proportion to the measure of the bodily growth." Bearing this point in mind should help us resist the facile temptation of thinking of the young Christ as a sort of adult trapped in a child's body, amusing Himself by playing tricks on His childish companions – an image we find both in early paracanonical writings and in such modern books as Anne Rice's unfortunate Christ the Lord series. It is in fact a measure of the depths of Christ's kenosis that He, being omniscient, should require a human education.