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23. For assuredly God could have taken upon Himself to be man,
that in that manhood He might be the Mediator between God and men,
from some other source, and not from the race of that Adam who bound
the human race by his sin; as He did not create him whom He first
created, of the race of some one else. Therefore He was able,
either so, or in any other mode that He would, to create yet one
other, by whom the conqueror of the first might be conquered. But
God judged it better both to take upon Him man through whom to conquer
the enemy of the human race, from the race itself that had been
conquered; and yet to do this of a virgin, whose conception, not
flesh but spirit, not lust but faith, preceded. Nor did that
concupiscence of the flesh intervene, by which the rest of men, who
derive original sin, are propagated and conceived; but holy virginity
became pregnant, not by conjugal intercourse, but by faith, lust
being utterly absent, so that that which was born from the root of the
first man might derive only the origin of race, not also of guilt.
For there was born, not a nature corrupted by the contagion of
transgression, but the one only remedy of all such corruptions. There
was born, I say, a Man having nothing at all, and to have nothing
at all, of sin; through whom they were to be born again so as to be
freed from sin, who could not be born without sin. For although
conjugal chastity makes a right use of the carnal concupiscence which is
in our members; yet it is liable to motions not voluntary, by which it
shows either that it could not have existed at all in paradise before
sin, or if it did, that it was not then such as that sometimes it
should resist the will. But now we feel it to be such, that in
opposition to the law of the mind, and even if there is no question of
begetting, it works in us the incitement of sexual intercourse; and if
in this men yield to it, then it is satisfied by an act of sin; if
they do not, then it is bridled by an act of refusal: which two things
who could doubt to have been alien from paradise before sin? For
neither did the chastity that then was do anything indecorous, nor did
the pleasure that then was suffer anything unquiet. It was necessary,
therefore, that this carnal concupiscence should be entirely absent,
when the offspring of the Virgin was conceived; in whom the author of
death was to find nothing worthy of death, and yet was to slay Him in
order that he might be conquered by the death of the Author of life:
the conqueror of the first Adam, who held fast the human race,
conquered by the second Adam, and losing the Christian race, freed
out of the human race from human guilt, through Him who was not in the
guilt, although He was of the race; that that deceiver might be
conquered by that race which he had conquered by guilt. And this was
so done, in order that man may not be lifted up, but "that he that
glorieth should glory in the Lord." For he who was conquered was
only man; and he was therefore conquered, because he lusted proudly to
be a god. But He who conquered was both man and God; and therefore
He so conquered, being born of a virgin, because God in humility did
not, as He governs other saints, so govern that Man, but bare Him
[as a Son]. These so great gifts of God, and whatever else there
are, which it is too long for us now upon this subject both to inquire
and to discuss, could not exist unless the Word had been made flesh.
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