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But if, as is much more probable and credible, it must needs be that
all men, so long as they are mortal, are also miserable, we must seek
an intermediate who is not only man, but also God, that, by the
interposition of His blessed mortality, He may bring men out of their
mortal misery to a blessed immortality. In this intermediate two
things are requisite, that He become mortal, and that He do not
continue mortal. He did become mortal, not rendering the divinity of
the Word infirm, but assuming the infirmity of flesh. Neither did
He continue mortal in the flesh, but raised it from the dead; for it
is the very fruit of His mediation that those, for the sake of whose
redemption He became the Mediator, should not abide eternally in
bodily death. Wherefore it became the Mediator between us and God to
have both a transient mortality and a permanent blessedness, that by
that which is transient He might be assimilated to mortals, and might
translate them from mortality to that which is permanent. Good
angels, therefore, cannot mediate between miserable mortals and
blessed immortals, for they themselves also are both blessed and
immortal; but evil angels can mediate, because they are immortal like
the one party, miserable like the other. To these is opposed the good
Mediator, who, in opposition to their immortality and misery, has
chosen to be mortal for a time, and has been able to continue blessed
in eternity. It is thus He has destroyed, by the humility of His
death and the benignity of His blessedness, those proud immortals and
hurtful wretches, and has prevented them from seducing to misery by
their boast of immortality those men whose hearts He has cleansed by
faith, and whom He has thus freed from their impure dominion.
Man, then, mortal and miserable, and far removed from the immortal
and the blessed, what medium shall he choose by which he may be united
to immortality and blessedness? The immortality of the demons, which
might have some charm for man, is miserable; the mortality of
Christ, which might offend man, exists no longer. In the one there
is the fear of an eternal misery; in the other, death, which could
not be eternal, can no longer be feared, and blessedness, which is
eternal, must be loved. For the immortal and miserable mediator
interposes himself to prevent us from passing to a blessed immortality,
because that which hinders such a passage, namely, misery, continues
in him; but the mortal and blessed Mediator interposed Himself, in
order that, having passed through mortality, He might of mortals make
immortals (showing His power to do this in His own resurrection),
and from being miserable to raise them to the blessed company from the
number of whom He had Himself never departed. There is, then, a
wicked mediator, who separates friends, and a good Mediator, who
reconciles enemies. And those who separate are numerous, because the
multitude of the blessed are blessed only by their participation in the
one God; of which participation the evil angels being deprived, they
are wretched, and interpose to hinder rather than to help to this
blessedness, and by their very number prevent us from reaching that one
beatific good, to obtain which we need not many but one Mediator, the
uncreated Word of God, by whom all things were made, and in
partaking of whom we are blessed. I do not say that He is Mediator
because He is the Word, for as the Word He is supremely blessed and
supremely immortal, and therefore far from miserable mortals; but He
is Mediator as He is man, for by His humanity He shows us that, in
order to obtain that blessed and beatific good, we need not seek other
mediators to lead us through the successive steps of this attainment,
but that the blessed and beatific God, having Himself become a
partaker of our humanity, has afforded us ready access to the
participation of His divinity. For in delivering us from our
mortality and misery, He does not lead us to the immortal and blessed
angels, so that we should become immortal and blessed by participating
in their nature, but He leads us straight to that Trinity, by
participating in which the angels themselves are blessed. Therefore,
when He chose to be in the form of a servant, and lower than the
angels, that He might be our Mediator, He remained higher than the
angels, in the form of God, Himself at once the way of life on earth
and life itself in heaven.
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