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| Why the Son of God Took Man Upon Himself from the Race of Adam, and from a Virgin.
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Chapter
18.—Why the Son of God Took Man Upon Himself from the Race of
Adam, and from a Virgin.
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.841
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.”842
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.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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