The following comes from:
Sermons of St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, S. J., 3
vols. (trans. Kenneth Baker; Keep the Faith, Inc., 2017), volume 2
Annunciation First Sermon on The Angel Gabriel Was Sent
from God to a City of Galilee Named Nazareth, etc. (Luke 1:26ff)
The angel Gabriel was sent.
The angels (dear listeners) are intellectual spiritual beings that are eternal,
heavenly and almost divine. Their place is the empyrean heaven. For they have
been placed there by Almighty God as guardians of the world. The treasure of
their riches is infinite wisdom. Their office is to glow with perpetual love of
the Creator to admire, love and praise his beauty and majesty and to cry out
always with amazement: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts. In
addition they have an excellent and beautiful nature, so that rightly men, when
they want to praise someone for his beauty, say that he has the face of an
angel . . . (p. 309)
Annunciation Fifth Sermon on The Angel Gabriel Was Sent
from God to a City of Galilee Named Nazareth, etc. (Luke 1:26ff)
Therefore, he said, the
child to be born of you will be called holy, the Son of God. But what is
the meaning of that word “therefore”? Why therefore? It is because the Holy
Spirit will come upon you, therefore also the child to be born of you will be
called holy, the Son of God? Is it that just as the Father generated the Word according
to the form of God, so the Holy Spirit will generate the Word according to the
form of a servant? Not at all. For the Holy Spirit cannot for any reason be
said to be the father of the Word. For anyone who does something is not immediately
its father, otherwise also the potter would be said to be the father of his
vessels, and the shoemaker shoes, and an architect of houses, and every artisan
of what he makes. But they only are thought to be worthy of the name of the
father, who generate children from their own substance. Therefore the Word
according to the form of God acknowledges his Father in heaven, since he is the
one from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, according to
the form of a servant he acknowledges as his mother on earth her, who is
greeted by the angel as full of grace. For he received both from God the Father
the substance of divinity and from his Virgin Mother the substance of the
flesh. In addition, the Holy Spirit who produced the body of the Son of God not
from the substance alone of the Virgin, must not be called his father or generator,
but the maker or architect of the Lord’s body. Therefore it is not because the
Holy Spirit will come the child to be born of you will be called holy, the Son
of God. For instance the true and natural Son of God is called the Word and
wisdom and arm and power of the Most High, he will descend into the womb of the
mother, and the human flesh taken form her he will unite with his own
hypostasis, and hence the one who is conceived and born of the Virgin is not from
the Virgin alone, btu also is called the Son of God. (pp. 359-60)
