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.