Works 4 part 2/3

For I neither confound nor divide our Savior. I do not confound, lest I should proclaim either incorporeal and imaginary flesh, or carnal and mortal deity. I do not separate, lest I should seem to introduce one offspring of God the Father according to the flesh, and another according to majesty; because the same Son of God both proceeded without beginning from the Father, and according to time deigned to be born of the Virgin. Impassible in his own, suffering in ours, while he deigned to clothe his incomprehensible majesty as with a certain garment of flesh. From both is one person of the mediator, not one substance. One person, I say, lest he be less than Christ;

not one substance, lest, the dispensation of the mediator being removed, he be called either of God only, or the Son of man only. Therefore I do not extend the flesh assumed in Christ by the perpetuity of the divine generation, nor do I enclose the immense deity within the age of corporeal origin; because the same is in divinity the author of all things, who in the flesh is the Redeemer of men — the same impassible in himself, who suffered in the body — while he so truly expressed the property of each nature, born from both, similar to his begetter, that it is established both that he assumed true flesh from the mother, and that he has identical deity from the Father.

These being joined into one person by the incomprehensible dispensation of the mediator, he preserved to each its own properties, but joined to the proper the qualities foreign to them. He preserved the proper, since he neither lost the immensity of divinity, nor rejected the weakness of the flesh. He joined the foreign to the proper, since the same and inseparable Christ is both slain by the property of the flesh, and by the property of deity is not held among the dead. By the property of the flesh he tasted a violent death; and by the property of deity he restored the flesh to perpetuity. Therefore it is not rightly said that the Father suffered in the Son, since in the flesh, which is not common to him with the Father, the Son suffered. And so the flesh was glorified by the majesty, while the majesty is taught to be humbled in the flesh.

But both of these are predicated, not of two Christs as you think, but of one and the same, whom after the birth of the Virgin we know to be God and man — this it is certain we proclaim. CHAPTER XIII. Fel. If therefore Christ was born of the Virgin, how is he said to be coeternal with God the Father? Aug. Concerning this indeed we have diverse contention even against others; and therefore, lest the explanation of the truth be more difficult, let us first set forth the cause of the error. For having begun from one beginning of evil belief, they pour out, in a manner, into two dissimilar ravings of understanding. For it is common to both to proclaim one nativity of Christ, not two.

But some receive, by the definition of their own dogma, that principal nativity by which before all things God was born of God; others receive only this, by which from the Virgin this Lord proceeded. Through the consequence of badly cast seed, they fell into the abyss of a similar blasphemy. For behold, those who do not believe that he was born of the Virgin subvert, as by a certain blindness of Jewish incredulity, all the faith of the Gospels, all the usefulness of baptism, all the preaching of the apostles, and in sum all the authority of the New Testament. And therefore they are not even to be thought to have known the majesty itself in the Son of God, because they cast away the sacrament of the mediator, by which the Father willed to make himself known to the nations.

But truly those who contend that he was born not from the Father before all beginning, but in time by the birth of the Virgin, have not learned that he is the creator of all, the Lord similar to the Father in omnipotence and majesty. For how will he be thought to have made all things, before whose origin it is certain that all things existed? Or how is his divinity to be professed, when, he being not yet born, the individual things were made? Or how is his divinity believed to be perpetual, when it is proclaimed to have been produced not always as the Father's, but from time? Therefore these too in a manner deny, by the necessity of consequent things, the mystery of the mediator; because they proclaim Christ not God and man, not from eternity but from time, not from power but from weakness,

not the Son from the Father before all things, similar to the Father, but from the mother among all things; not a true, but an imaginary son of man; born in the open, not through the likeness of truth — such a Christ they proclaim. Whence it happens that they are not even to be thought to know him as God in the flesh, whom before the assumption of the flesh they do not think to have been begotten of the Father. CHAPTER XIV. You see therefore by what manner among these men, though with differing means, yet the same beginning and the same outcome of error is taught? We on the contrary so defend both nativities, that we take away neither by the affirmation of the other. For we neither condemn the temporal nativity by the perpetuity of that first one, nor do we enclose the eternal nativity by the brevity of this temporal one;

knowing the inseparable offspring of the true God, and afterward the most true flesh of this true offspring. We do not confess that the divinity of Christ began when the Virgin conceived; nor that the flesh then began when, by a certain ineffable birth, that Monad — without the interval of any intervening time, in nothing differing from the Monad, save that it is called Monad — begot. The omnipotent majesty of Christ did not shrink from his voluntary weakness, nor did corporeal weakness extinguish his omnipotence. I know that the divinity of the Son of God descended to the lower regions by the property of the flesh; I know that the flesh ascended to heaven by the merit of deity. It is not proper to God that he felt hunger; but it is proper to God that with a few loaves he satisfied so many thousands of men.

It is not proper to the flesh that he walked with dry feet over the raging waves; but it is proper to the flesh that he endured spittle, slaps, and scourges. Yet one and the same is Christ, who both bore so many injuries and did not sink his limbs in the deep. And in this way, in the mediator of God and men, I confess the deity to have been affected by the injury of its body, just as we know the flesh to have been glorified by the majesty of deity. Therefore Christ died, who also rose again; nor yet is each done by one nature, but the individual things by individual natures. Yet in both he himself, perfect, accomplished them, since one and inseparable he accomplished things so diverse: by the one he tasted death, by the other he raised the dead.

And thus he showed himself God and man, the true mediator of both, neither with doubled person nor with confused substance. The Son of God entered the womb of the Virgin, that he, already begotten before, might be born again; and he took on the whole man, who already had from the Father the fullest deity. Not dissimilar to his begetter when he was born, perpetual from the eternal; not dissimilar to man, when from a mother he was born, about to die. Yet the same, both eternal in his own nature, and about to die in ours, while he contains both from himself, and loses neither from the other. And thus from God and man Christ was born not imperfect, but most full in the diverse property; just as from soul and body each of men is taught to be perfect.

The body is not one man, the soul another, although the soul is one thing and the body another; yet one and the same man is taught to be both body and soul. Again, the body and the soul are not one and the same thing, because from both one man was made. For these things neither confound the substance in the truth of the person, nor double the person by the diversity of substance, since from these one man is known to have existed. They do not lose their own properties, but because they came together into one and inseparable thing, from being proper they are seen to have become common. The mind is affected in the body by the pains of the body; the body is wearied by the thoughts of the mind; and yet one of these is proper to the body, the other to the mind.

Which, when it befalls one man, seems common both to the body and to the mind. So after the birth of the Virgin there was not one Son of God and another of man, but the same Christ was the Son of God and of man. And just as in one man the soul is one thing, the body another, so in the mediator of God and men, one thing was the Son of God, another the son of man; yet one Christ the Lord from both there was. Another thing, I say, by the distinction of substance, not another person by the unity of person. CHAPTER XV. Fel. In the foregoing you had indeed compelled me to believe the nativity of Christ from the mother, with his perpetuity preserved; but because things arisen against reason by the force of speech cannot remain lasting in us,

therefore, when with anxious attention I look back to my proposition, I do not yet seem to myself to have found in the things said by you what I seek. For I know not in what manner you teach that he was born in time, whom you say to have already been coeternal with the Father. For to be born is, as it were, a certain motion of a thing not existing before it is born, accomplishing this by the benefit of nativity, that it should be. Whence it is gathered that Christ, who already was, could not be born; and if he could be born, he was not. Aug. By a new curiosity of questioning you compel us to the inquiry of incomprehensible things; and therefore what you seek can be explained only by certain outlines of examples. Allow me therefore to bring forward, in place of an affirmed thing, the matter of another question:

because, since I now bring it forward not for belief in itself, but for the demonstration of another thing, do not cast me into explaining within it what I believe; but think me for the present to believe thus, that you may more easily understand the things I shall say. Let us imagine therefore, as very many wish, that there is in the world a universal soul, which by an ineffable motion so vivifies all seeds, that it is not concreted with the things begotten, but itself furnishes life to the things to be begotten. Now when this soul comes into the womb, to form the passible matter for its own uses, it makes there to be with itself the person of that thing, which is established not to have the same substance; and there comes to be, the soul operating and the matter undergoing, from two substances one man — since the soul is taught to be one thing, the flesh another:

and thus we confess that the soul is born from the womb, the soul which, coming to the womb, we say conferred life on the conceived. It is said, I say, to be born from the mother, because from her it acquired for itself a body in which it could be born — not because, before it was born, as far as pertains to itself, it utterly did not exist. And here, if as an observer of daily speech you attend to the force of words, we propose contraries, we proclaim opposing things; and yet in these it is established that what we say is true. We know that the soul is born from the mother's womb together with the body, but we also see the soul proclaimed prior to the mother. In the son the mother begets the soul, but yet even in the mother herself nothing but the soul lives, without which not even she herself who begot can exist.

And so, if we seek the origin of the living power, it is prior to the mother, and again it seems to be born from her together with her offspring. Prior, I say, is the soul, by which the mother is animated; prior is the mother, through whom in the son both the soul too seems to be born. Yet the mother did not turn the soul into flesh, nor did she change the flesh into soul; rather, the one Creator of flesh and of soul and of the whole man brought forth, out of the mother's womb, flesh already ensouled. He, by the dispensation of an analogy that joins diverse things, in one and the same man both joined the two by an indissoluble unity, and confounded neither through participation in the other. CHAPTER XVI.

Thus then—nay, far more incomprehensibly and sublimely—the Son of God was born of his mother by the assumption of a perfect man, He who by his singular omnipotence is to all that are begotten not merely the means but also the cause of their being born. According to his manhood, I say, God was born of the Virgin, in that same manner whereby the soul too is taught to be born together with the body: not because there is one substance of the two, but because of the two one person is made. The body is not one man and the soul another, but the body and soul are one man. So after the Virgin's childbearing, the Son of God is not one and the Son of man another, but the same Christ is Son of God and of man. And just as in one man the body is one thing and the soul another, so in the one Mediator the Son of God is one thing, the Son of man another:

yet the same, and no other, is the Son of God than the Son of man—although in one respect Son of God and in another Son of man. We do not say that the Son of God began from the beginning of the flesh, lest anyone believe in a deity that is temporal. We do not acknowledge the flesh of the Son of God to be from eternity, lest we suppose he assumed not the truth of a human body but some sort of image. For the truth of the flesh does not consume the majesty of the Son of God, nor does the immensity of the deity consume the truth of the flesh; while the one shines forth in its own powers, the other is taught in our infirmities. But the one and inseparable Christ is both humbled in what he has assumed and glorified in what is his own, since he does not disdain to be afflicted by injuries and yet keeps his equality with the Father.

Mary therefore both bore and did not bear the Son of God. She bore him, when from her, according to the flesh, Christ was given; she did not bear him, when from the Father, without beginning, the Son existed. She bore him, when from her the Word came forth as flesh, that he might dwell among us; she did not bear him, when in the beginning the Word was God, which gave origin to all things. Do not, then, by the Virgin's childbearing set a limit to the origin of God the Word. Do not call the body begotten of the Virgin coeternal with the deity; for the Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5), by his first nativity is coeternal with the Father, and by the second a sharer in our time: in the former the author of time, in the latter a sharer of an age. CHAPTER XVII. Felician.

Felician: Since you have treated the mystery of the Mediator with clear reasoning and sufficiently for anyone's belief, therefore I ask you to bid it be explained to me what also ought to be thought concerning the soul of Christ. For it has always been handed down by our forefathers that Christ's body, in place of a common soul, was animated by the very habitation of the Son of God; nor did it stand in need of the accession of a vital spirit, since the indwelling fount of life could bestow upon it the fact that it lived. Augustine: We could indeed teach by the testimonies of the divine volumes that which in this question is prescribed by the definition of catholic authority; but since it has now pleased us to discuss everything not by the evidence of books, but by reason alone:

therefore, reserving the records of the Scriptures for another time, as was done above, so also shall we treat of the inquiry concerning the soul. That this may be done the more easily, let us briefly inquire—with only a single reading of the Apostle set before us—what was the cause for our Savior of assuming manhood; once that is found, we shall without any difficulty pass on also to these matters that follow from what precedes. From the beginning, therefore, God made man of body and soul; and he, transgressing the precepts of the law, after his usurpation of the forbidden tree, received in a manner the sentence of capital punishment. To that state from which he had fallen, restored only by the grace of his author, he could in a manner return by the right of postliminy:

just as one who has cast himself headlong from a height by his own will, indeed had in his own power what he did, but it is certain that what falls is no longer subject to its own choice. And so he who fell by his own act rises by another's benefit. Nor is he therefore to be said not to have fallen by his own act, because he is known to rise by another's; nor on that account to have risen by his own, because it is certain he did not fall by another's. But of this elsewhere; now let us return to the point proposed. CHAPTER XVIII. The venerable Paul therefore says that for this reason Christ was born according to the flesh: That as through one man sin entered into this world, and through sin death; and so it passed unto all men, in whom all have sinned (Rom. 5:12). And a little after:

But not as the offense, so also is the grace. For if by the offense of one many died, much more has the grace of God and the gift, in the grace of the one man Jesus Christ, abounded unto many. And not as it was by one sin, so also is the gift: for the judgment was from one unto condemnation, but grace is from many offenses unto justification. For if by the offense of one death reigned through one, much more shall they who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of justice reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ. Therefore, as by the offense of one, unto all men unto condemnation, so also by the justice of one, unto all men unto justification of life. For as by the disobedience of one man many were made sinners,

so also by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous (Rom. 5:15–19). Christ therefore came to save that which had perished (Luke 19:10). First, then, let us see what it was that perished by the transgression of the first-formed man, and we shall easily be able to know this: what the Lord by his coming could save. We must therefore inquire who it was that received the Creator's law. For he without doubt sinned, because he despised the precepts; he despised the precepts, who committed what was forbidden. Now the Scripture says: The Lord commanded Adam, saying: Of every tree that is in paradise you shall eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat of it. For in whatever day you shall eat of it, you shall die the death (Gen. 2:16–17).

Let us therefore now ask whether the whole man received this law. For if, as is contained in the book of Genesis, he received it already perfect, consisting of body and soul, then the whole man sinned in transgressing; and if the whole sinned in transgressing, the whole then perished by the fault of its own sin. But if the whole perished, the whole stood in need of the Savior's benefit. And if the whole stood in need of the Savior's benefit, Christ by his coming saved the whole; and if by coming he saved the whole, he assumed not body without soul, but body and soul—of which the whole man is seen to consist, and to have sinned before. For if, when the whole man sinned, Christ assumed only his flesh, the soul would have remained even now subject to the penalty of that first transgression without any hope.

But if this is so, I do not know what the person of the Mediator has conferred upon us, who, not redeeming our better part in its entirety, assumed brute flesh by itself—flesh which, without soul, could not even feel his benefit. CHAPTER XIX. I would, however, ask of preachers of this sort why the dispensation of the Mediator, having taken flesh, omitted the soul. Unless perhaps either, knowing it to be guiltless, he did not believe it to be in need of medicine; or, deeming it foreign to himself, he did not endow it with the benefit of redemption; or, judging it wholly incurable, he was unable to heal it; or, as worthless and seeming fit for no uses, he cast it away. Two of these, by the unbelief of a blasphemous spirit, rave senselessly against the very Creator of the whole man.

For the first held him impossible, the second held him not the God of all. For how is he taught to be almighty, if he could not heal what was despaired of? Or how is he the God of all, if he himself did not make our soul? But by the other two, in the one the cause of the soul is not known, in the other its merit does not appear. Or is he to be thought to understand the cause of the soul, who strives to separate it—instructed by the habit of innate reason for the receiving of the law—from the sin of a voluntary transgression? Or how does he know its nobility, who says it has been despised through the defect of ignobility, preferring the flesh, which it is agreed was molded not by the breath of God like the soul, but from the slime of the earth?

But if none of these things is rightly thought concerning the soul, let us believe that our Redeemer assumed the whole man, lest we should seem in some way to let the eternal benefit lapse from our soul. Alas! they say, Christ assumed only the flesh, he did not seek the soul. Here, if you attend as a contemplator skilled in the origin of both, the substance of the soul is the more precious; if as to the fault of transgression, on account of its understanding the soul's case is the worse. But I know Christ to be perfect in wisdom, and I do not doubt that he is most loving: of these, by the first he did not despise the better part, capable of prudence; by the second he assumed that which had been the more deeply wounded. For it neither befits wisdom, of two things equally its own, to love the more foolish the more;

nor does it befit perfect piety not to have helped the more needy. CHAPTER XX. Felician: All the things that have been said by you not only reasonably but also truly, I confess that I have understood in what precedes, and I do not deny that I have approved them; but in what manner the divinity of Christ is said to have felt death, I do not know. Whether about this you have said something obscurely, or I, by the slowness of my wit, could not sufficiently grasp what was said, I know not. For I would not dare to believe that that fount of life, from which all things have what they live by, fell so far away from the property of its own nature during the three days that the body lay in the tomb—that, if it is right to say so, with its senses buried, it lost all motion of vital substance;

and that, for the redemption of the human race, it forsook not only the Father, but also all the ornaments of spiritual glory. Augustine: Far, far be from the faithful this suspicion, that Christ so felt our death as to lose—inasmuch as he is life in himself—life itself. For if this were so, how do we say that during those three days anything could live, if we believe that the fount of life had dried up? The divinity of Christ therefore felt death by participation in the human affection which it had of its own accord assumed; it did not lose the power of its own nature, by which it gives life to all things. So in the tomb it did not forsake its own flesh in dying-together, just as in the Virgin's womb it formed it in being-born-together.

And so in both—to be born and to die—the Lord willed it not as compelled by another, but of his own accord, so that it is established that he endured that which he himself did: he is not therefore not-suffering, because he himself was doing it; nor not-doing, because no other was bearing it. For if you consider the mystery of the Lord's incarnation, with the cooperation of the indivisible Trinity preserved, in this humiliation he is to himself both author and work: the same author, because of his own accord he is born, of his own accord he suffers; the same work, because, though none other compels, he alone yet endures both. He made the flesh in the mother's womb—there you have the author of the work; he himself deigned to be born in it—there you have the work of the author:

yet there is one person, the property of each substance being preserved, both of the author and of the work. So then he died with life not departing, just as he suffered with power not perishing. No one takes his soul from him, for he has the power to lay it down and the power to take it up again (John 10:18). Here you have the author of the work. He lays down his soul for his friends—there you have the work of the author. To conclude this with a general definition: as often as Christ suffers anything in the flesh, it is the work of the author. But because he endures that very thing by his own power, none other compelling, he himself is the author of the work. CHAPTER XXI.

Therefore the divinity did not come to Mary by local motion, but by the ineffable manifestation of its own power, and it filled the womb that was to bring forth, and did not deprive of any part the whole that belongs to its substance in its fullness. He did not leave the Father when he came to the Virgin. Everywhere whole, everywhere perfect; for an incorporeal simplicity admits no division, and fullness knows no parts. He was therefore at one and the same time wholly even in hell, wholly in heaven. There suffering the injury of the flesh, here not relinquishing the glory of the deity. He was among the dead the resurrection of the dead; he was above the heavens the life of the living. Truly dead, truly alive; in whom both the assumption of mortality received death, and the deity, being preserved, did not lose life.

Whenever, therefore, you consider these things that were humbly endured by Christ, recognize him as the very author of his voluntary passion. So it will come to pass that, while humility is ascribed to the sufferer and power to the doer, the same Christ is at one and the same time taught to be weak when he suffers, almighty when he acts. But lest you should believe that we admit any insensibility in the death of the Son of God, it is not unfitting to investigate the things that are felt concerning death: in which, without doubt, our life forsakes the body, but does not perish; while the departing soul does not lose its own power, but lays down what it had quickened, and, as far as in it lies, itself causes the death of another, it does not receive it. It causes it, I say, by not quickening that which it forsakes—not by losing that which lives.

And so man's death is nothing other than the setting of the flesh: from which, when the force of the quickening power has withdrawn, it returns into the earth from which it was taken, having lost the senses which it did not possess through itself. CHAPTER XXII. "But," you say, "death is the contrary of life." I confess it; yet not from that kind of contraries which destroy one another by the opposition of an existing substance, but rather from those which, while they befall anything, indeed cannot exist together, but are produced by the possession and privation of one substance only. As, for example, we teach of night and day. For these too are taught to be contraries of the same kind, since there seems to be a substance not of both, but of one only. For lo, we say it is day when the sun is above the earth:

but it is agreed that the sun is a substance. When this, the course of the daytime being finished, has withdrawn from the contemplation of human sight, it presently makes night by departing. It makes it, I say, by subtracting the abundance of light, not by receiving into itself the substance of night. And so one substance of light seems to make both night and day; but not in one way. For when it comes, it produces day; when it recedes, it produces night. Whence also the not merely irreligious but even foolish division of the Manichees—by which they strive to separate good things from evil as from equally existing substances—we very often confound: showing them the greater luminary, by which we know day is made;