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18. What, then, is the righteousness by which the devil was
conquered? What,except the righteousness of Jesus Christ? And how
was he conquered? Because, when he found in Him nothing worthy of
death, yet he slew Him. And certainly it is just, that we whom he
held as debtors, should be dismissed free by believing in Him whom he
slew without any debt. In this way it is that we are said to be
justified in the blood of Christ. For so that innocent blood was shed
for the remission of our sins. Whence He calls Himself in the
Psalms, "Free among the dead." For he only that is dead is free
from the debt of death. Hence also in another psalm He says, "Then
I restored that which I seized not;" meaning sin by the thing
seized, because sin is laid hold of against what is lawful. Whence
also He says, by the mouth of His own Flesh, as is read in the
Gospel: "For the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in
me," that is, no sin; but "that the world may know," He says,
"that I do the commandment of the Father; arise, let us go
hence." And hence He proceeds to His passion, that He might pay
for us debtors that which He Himself did not owe. Would then the
devil be conquered by this most just right, if Christ had willed to
deal with him by power, not by righteousness? But He held back what
was possible to Him, in order that He might first do what was
fitting. And hence it was necessary that He should be both man and
God. For unless He had been man, He could not have been slain;
unless He had been God. men would not have believed that He would
not do what He could, but that He could not do what He would; nor
should we have thought that righteousness was preferred by Him to
power, but that He lacked power. But now He suffered for us things
belonging to man, because He was man; but if He had been unwilling,
it would have been in His power to not so to suffer, because He was
also God. And righteousness was therefore made more acceptable in
humility, because so great power as was in His Divinity, if He had
been unwilling, would have been able not to suffer humility; and thus
by Him who died, being thus powerful, both righteousness was
commended, and power promised, to us, weak mortals. For He did one
of these two things by dying, the other by rising again. For what is
more righteous, than to come even to the death of the cross for
righteousness? And what more powerful, than to rise from the dead,
and to ascend into heaven with that very flesh in which He was slain?
And therefore He conquered the devil first by righteousness, and
afterwards by power: namely, by righteousness, because He had no
sin, and was slain by him most unjustly; but by power, because having
been dead He lived again, never afterwards to die. But He would
have conquered the devil by power, even though He could not have been
slain by him: although it belongs to a greater power to conquer death
itself also by rising again, than to avoid it by living. But the
reason is really a different one, why we are justified in the blood of
Christ, when we are rescued from the power of the devil through the
remission of sins: it pertains to this, that the devil is conquered by
Christ by righteousness, not by power. For Christ was crucified,
not through immortal power, but through the weakness which He took
upon Him in mortal flesh; of which weakness nevertheless the apostle
says, "that the weakness of God is stronger than men."
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