Colossians 2:15Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

See verse 13.

"Having taken the powers from the principalities and authorities." The Apostle says this about the powers of the devil, either because they were clothed with human nature, or because Christ held them as one holds the hilt of a sword and, having become man, laid them bare. This is what it means: "He made a public spectacle of them."

This is well said, because the devil was never so disorderly. He hoped to take possession of Him, Christ, but lost even those whom he had. While Christ's body was being nailed, the dead were rising. Then the devil suffered defeat, receiving a mortal wound from a dead body. As a wrestler who thinks his opponent has been defeated himself receives a mortal wound from him, so He showed that to die with a calm spirit means to put the devil to shame.

“Having disarmed the principalities and powers.” The Apostle says this of the devilish powers, either because they had clothed themselves with human nature, or because the Son of God Himself, having become man, knew their nakedness and exposed it.

That is, He proved unconquerable by the principalities and powers. For although He took upon Himself a sinful nature, He did so without sin.

You may understand the saying in this way. The devil ruled over human nature in two ways: through passions and through sufferings. Therefore the Lord also clothed Himself in a body, in order to fight for us against the devil’s principalities and powers.

Where the devil was able to do anything, there he was defeated on every side. From the place where he received outward power to put the Lord’s body to death, his inward power, by which he held us, was cast down.

For this was accomplished: the bonds of many sins, leading to many deaths, were loosed through the one death of Him whose death was preceded by no sin.

The Lord endured this undeserved death for our sake, so that the death deserved by us might not harm us. He was not deprived of life in the flesh by the right of any power, but He Himself laid aside the flesh.

He who truly could have not died, had He wished, certainly died because He wished. By this He firmly made a spectacle of the principalities and powers, triumphing over them in Himself.

If someone descends even into Hades and marvels at the heroes who went down there as gods, let him see His Resurrection and victory over death. Let him conclude that among them also Christ alone is the true Lord and God. The Lord touched all parts of creation, freed the universe from every deception, and exposed it, as Paul says, by stripping the principalities and powers and openly putting them to shame on the Cross. He did this so that no one could be deceived any longer, but might everywhere find the true Word of God.

He not only destroyed the curse, but also stripped the idols of the name of deity with which they had adorned themselves. He took power away from the principalities and powers, that is, the idols, and openly put them to shame before all with boldness. For He taught that they were created, and showed on them the signs of His victory. They proved unable to help their worshipers, so that these would not be drawn away from them and so that He would not deprive them of the name with which they adorned themselves.

Because demons held dominion over us through bodily passions, Christ clothed Himself in a body and became the victor over sin. Therefore He shattered the dominion of the adversaries and showed all people their manifest weakness, granting all of us victory over them by His own body.

The Eutychians received the name of this heresy from Eutyches. They say that our Lord Jesus Christ did not receive flesh from the holy Virgin Mary. Instead they claim that He was incarnate in some more divine manner. They did not understand that the very man liable to the sin of their forefather Adam was united to Himself by God the Word from the Virgin Mary. Having stripped the principalities and powers, He openly put them to shame, triumphing over them in Himself (Col 2:15), as it is written. He triumphed over the principalities and powers that entered the world through the transgression of the first-formed man.

QUESTION 21. What does it mean: "Having stripped the principalities and powers," and what follows? In what way, then, was the Lord, who was born without sin, wholly clothed with them?

Answer. The God-principled Word, in all things like us except sin, unchangeably clothed Himself in our nature and became perfect Man. He had in Himself the first Adam, who was manifested in Him both according to the mode of origin and according to the mode of birth. The first man received being from God and came forth from Him. By the very origin of his being he was free from corruption and sin, for these were not created together with him. But when he sinned by transgressing the commandment, he was consequently condemned to birth that arose through passion and sin.

Therefore sin, in the passibility that appeared because of it, already had its origin as though according to a law of nature. Because of this passibility, no one is without sin. Everyone by nature is subject to the law of birth, introduced after the original origin because of sin.

Thus through Adam's transgression sin entered human nature, and through sin came the passibility belonging to birth. Since the first transgression also flourished through sin together with this passibility of birth, there was no hope of salvation for human nature. By its own will it was inseparably bound with evil bonds. The more it strove to strengthen itself through birth, the more it bound itself with the law of sin. It possessed active transgression because of passibility.

Since it contained within passibility itself, because of the naturally compelling circumstances, the multiplication of sin, it was subjected to the actions of all the heavenly powers, principalities, and authorities. This occurred because of the ancestral sin lodged in passibility. These actions were manifested through unnatural passions and hidden within natural passions. Through them every evil power acted, using the passibility of nature to urge the will, through natural passions, to turn toward the corruption of unnatural passions.

Therefore the Only-begotten Son and Word of God, in His love for mankind, became perfect Man in order to deliver human nature from this evil impasse. From the first formation of Adam He received the sinlessness belonging to origin, and He had it without incorruption. From the birth subsequently introduced into nature by sin, He received only passibility, without sin.

As I have said, because of sin the evil powers exercised various actions upon Adam's passibility. These were invisibly hidden in the compulsory law of nature. Seeing in God the Savior the natural passibility of Adam because of the flesh, they supposed that the Lord too, as a mere man, had necessarily and compulsorily drawn upon Himself the law of nature. They did not suppose that He was moved by the self-determination of His will. Therefore they attacked Him, hoping to persuade Him and, through natural passions, to implant unnatural passions in His imagination. In this way they hoped to make Him do something pleasing to them.

At the first trial, through temptations of pleasure, He allowed them to play out their tricks. Then He stripped them from Himself and cast them out of nature, while Himself remaining inaccessible and beyond their reach. He of course ascribed the victory to us, not to Himself. As the Good One, He presented everything He had accomplished to those for whose sake He became Man.

For He Himself, being God, Master, and by nature free from every passion, had no need of temptation. Yet He permitted it so that, luring the evil power to Himself by our temptations, He might strike it down by a single contact with Himself. He put to death the one that expected to destroy Him, as it destroyed Adam in the beginning.

Thus, at the first temptation, He stripped from Himself the principalities and powers that attacked Him, driving them far away from human nature. He healed its passibility in relation to pleasure, and in Himself blotted out Adam's "written bond" (Col 2:14). This bond consisted in the voluntary consent to passions of pleasure. Because of this written bond, man had a will inclined toward pleasure. Even silently, by his deeds, he proclaimed the evil despotism over himself, since from fear of death he did not free himself from the yoke of pleasure.

Therefore the Lord, having undergone the first temptation through pleasures, exhausted the evil powers, principalities, and authorities. Then He permits them to make a second assault and to inflict on Him another trial of temptations, through torment and suffering. Thus He completely exhausted within Himself the destructive poison of their malice, as fire exhausts and entirely destroys it in human nature. He stripped from Himself the principalities and powers at the time of His death on the Cross.

Remaining unconquerable by sufferings and, even more, showing Himself fearful to death, the Lord expelled from human nature its passibility in relation to pain. From this passibility the human will had fled in cowardice. Because of it, man was constantly and against his desire oppressed by fear of death, clinging to slavery to pleasure in order to live.

Thus the Lord stripped from Himself the principalities and powers in the first trial of temptations in the wilderness, healing the passibility of the whole nature in relation to pleasure. He again stripped them from Himself at the time of death, likewise expelling from nature its passibility in relation to pain. In His love for mankind, He made Himself responsible for our correction. More than this, as the Good One, He even reckoned to us the glory of what He had accomplished.

Like us, He accepted the passibility of nature, excluding sin. By means of this passibility every evil and destructive power had been accustomed to carry out its actions. Yet He stripped them from Himself at the time of death, "triumphing over them" when they approached Him for their plots. He made them a laughingstock on the Cross at the departure of the soul, after they found absolutely nothing in His passibility that belonged to nature in the sense they sought. They had especially expected to find something human in Him because of His natural passibility according to the flesh.

Therefore, of course, by His power and through His holy flesh received from us, as through a certain "firstfruits" (Col 1:18), He freed the whole of human nature from the evil mingled with it through passibility. He subjected to the very passibility of nature the evil dominion that had once reigned over nature within that passibility.

It would also be possible to consider this passage otherwise, in a more mystical and exalted sense. But since, as you know, the most ineffable mysteries of divine doctrines should not be put on display by being sealed in writing, let us be content with what has been said, which brings restless thought to perplexity. If God is pleased to deem us worthy to behold this with spiritual eyes, then we shall together examine the apostolic thought attentively.

The word apechdusamenos is understood here in its literal meaning, "removing," which the Church Slavonic translation conveys rather accurately.

By "origin" he means the first formation of man by God. By "birth" he means bodily succession from one another, which appeared afterward as condemnation for the transgression.

Genesis is the original creation of man according to the image and likeness of God. By the power of this creation, man was originally free from sin and corruption. His flesh was dispassionate, foreign to physical needs, illnesses, and every conflict of the elements. The very multiplication of mankind was intended to occur in a special spiritual manner, not by way of marriage. The fall introduced gennesis, birth according to the likeness of animals.

Sin was now connected with birth, specifically in the sinful sweetness of pleasure preceding birth. Together with man's condemnation to animal-like birth, the composition of his fleshly nature was also transformed after the image of the coarse and heavy flesh of animals. As a result, his body became subject to various bodily needs, deprivations, and infirmities. In short, it became subject to "blameless," or natural, passions. All this was for man a slow "corruption" of nature, which in the end was completed by death.

The difference between genesis and gennesis is therefore clear. The first includes everything natural in man, everything good and beautiful that was the work of God's hands. The second is a synonym for ancestral sin in all its evil consequences. Both appeared in the first Adam. The same was also manifested in the New Adam, Christ, but in such a way that the Lord had the sinlessness proper to the first Adam, yet without his incorruption. He also had the corruption to which Adam became subject through condemnation to "birth," yet without his sin. Sinful sweetness did not precede His birth without man. The distinction between genesis and gennesis is explained by Saint Maximus in the Ambigua (PG 91, 1316d-1317b).

Patheton means passibility, subjection to sufferings, or to "natural passions": hunger, thirst, weariness, and other manifestations of "corruption" in man from birth until death. This passibility was introduced because of sin as condemnation under the law of sin, that is, pleasure. It was punishment by suffering for pleasure as the "sin" of nature, which appeared as the necessary consequence of the sin of deliberate choice. Yet for man's sinful and egoistic will, gnome, it served chiefly as the ground for the development of sin.

Man strove in every way to use the passibility of the flesh so that, by satisfying its needs, he might obtain as many pleasures as possible and avoid sufferings as far as possible. This pleasure-loving disposition of the will in relation to the passibility of the flesh constituted the dominion of sin. Therefore natural and blameless passions always formed the basis for unnatural and sinful passions.

For man's sinful will, such a state of affairs was in its own way a natural necessity. Passibility bound man by will with unbreakable bonds, composing in him, as it were, a new "natural law" that lay upon him with the whole weight of necessity. According to Saint Maximus, the Lord also received this passibility, but without the sin of birth. Moreover, all manifestations of corruption in Him were governed by the will. They were voluntary and did not act upon Him with the force of necessity. This is the usual patristic viewpoint concerning the voluntariness of Christ's "passions."

All are subject to the law of birth, and with it to passibility, and in that passibility to sin.

He is speaking of the vices in which the spirit of uncleanness acts. There are two kinds of passions. One kind consists of passions that are contrary to nature. These are vices, always opposed to the virtues, and they can never impel toward them. The other kind consists of passions which, though not created by God in human nature, attached themselves to it immediately after the fall. Considered in themselves, they are evil. Nevertheless they can be turned to good by those who use them well. Such are pleasure and sorrow, desire and fear. Vices hide within them for those accustomed to commit unrighteous deeds that do not correspond to the natural powers.

He is speaking of the movements of the soul, that is, pleasure and sorrow, desire and fear. These are appropriated both for good and for evil, and vices are accustomed to hide within them.

By the birth introduced into nature he means the succession of generations of men born like beasts through bodily intercourse. If human nature had not sinned in the first man, the multiplication of the human race would not have occurred through bodily intercourse, which is punishment for sin. It would have occurred in a wondrous and divine manner, without any action of male seed.

He is speaking of the succession of human births through intercourse and from male seed. This is not proper to human nature, but was introduced into it as punishment for sin.

A fighter is shown to be strongest and most skillful when, after being overcome by the attacks of his opponents and then freed from them, he throws them down to the ground.

For this reason Christ also entered into battle with the demons by the Cross, so that He might put them to shame by the most evident signs of victory.

This is the meaning of what you wished to know: “He stripped the principalities and powers, made a spectacle of them openly, exposing them in Himself.” For the demons were truly exposed, being conquered by the Athlete whose hands and feet were nailed.

The devil was truly disgraced, conquered and forced to yield mastery over himself to one Flesh, hanging upon the Cross.

Through the stripping off and laying aside of the flesh, He overthrew the opposing powers. For our Lord, until the Cross and death itself, concealed that He was God and the Son of God.

Although He astonished men by miracles, He remained hidden by the body. Therefore Satan also tempted Him, desiring to learn whether He was the One preached by the prophets.

If he had discovered that it was He, he would have hindered the divine economy of salvation. But the evil one learned nothing and could not know, so long as Christ remained hidden.

When He was nailed, died, was buried, rose again, and fulfilled the whole divine economy of salvation, He ceased to hide Himself. He showed that the Godhead could be seen with the body, with unveiled face; cf. Ex 34:29-35.

"Having stripped the principalities and powers." Here the principalities and powers are already understood as the dark powers, whom Jesus Christ exposed to shame by His victory over death.

Saint Paul began from Col 2:10 to depict what fullness is received from the Lord and Savior by those who believe in Him. First he showed that by His grace the sin living in us is cut down (see Col 2:11-12). Then, under the image of the torn written bond, he portrayed the granting of forgiveness of sins (see Col 2:13-14).