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| We Say that Future Blessedness is Truly Eternal, Not Through Human Reasonings, But by the Help of Faith. The Immortality of Blessedness Becomes Credible from the Incarnation of the Son of God.
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Chapter 9.—We Say that
Future Blessedness is Truly Eternal, Not Through Human Reasonings,
But by the Help of Faith. The Immortality of Blessedness Becomes
Credible from the Incarnation of the Son of God.
12. Whether human nature can
receive this, which yet it confesses to be desirable, is no small
question. But if faith be present, which is in those to whom Jesus
has given power to become the sons of God, then there is no
question. Assuredly, of those who endeavor to discover it from
human reasonings, scarcely a few, and they endued with great
abilities, and abounding in leisure, and learned with the most
subtle learning, have been able to attain to the investigation of
the immortality of the soul alone. And even for the soul they have
not found a blessed life that is stable, that is, true; since they
have said that it returns to the miseries of this life even after
blessedness. And they among them who are ashamed of this opinion,
and have thought that the purified soul is to be placed in eternal
happiness without a body, hold such opinions concerning the past
eternity of the world, as to confute this opinion of theirs
concerning the soul; a thing which here it is too long to
demonstrate; but it has been, as I think, sufficiently explained by
us in the twelfth book of the City of God.804
But that faith promises, not by
human reasoning, but by divine authority, that the whole man, who
certainly consists of soul and body, shall be immortal,
and on this account truly blessed. And so, when it had been said in
the Gospel, that Jesus has given “power to become the sons of God
to them who received Him;” and what it is to have received Him
had been shortly explained by saying, “To them that believe on
His name;” and it was further added in what way they are to
become sons of God, viz., “Which were born not of blood,
nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of
God;”—lest that infirmity of men which we all see and bear
should despair of attaining so great excellence, it is added in the
same place, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among
us;”805
that, on the
contrary, men might be convinced of that which seemed incredible.
For if He who is by nature the Son of God was made the Son of man
through mercy for the sake of the sons of men,—for this is what
is meant by “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”
men,—how much more credible is it that the sons of men by nature
should be made the sons of God by the grace of God, and should
dwell in God, in whom alone and from whom alone the blessed can be
made partakers of that immortality; of which that we might be
convinced, the Son of God was made partaker of our
mortality?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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