of the supreme good, man needs such mediation as is furnished
not by a demon, but by Christ alone._
I am considerably surprised that such learned men, men who pronounce
all material and sensible things to be altogether inferior to those
that are spiritual and intelligible, should mention bodily contact
in connection with the blessed life. Is that sentiment of Plotinus
forgotten?--"We must fly to our beloved fatherland. There is the
Father, there our all. What fleet or flight shall convey us thither?
Our way is, to become like God."[349] If, then, one is nearer to God
the liker he is to Him, there is no other distance from God than
unlikeness to Him. And the soul of man is unlike that incorporeal and
unchangeable and eternal essence, in proportion as it craves things
temporal and mutable. And as the things beneath, which are mortal and
impure, cannot hold intercourse with the immortal purity which is
above, a mediator is indeed needed to remove this difficulty; but not
a mediator who resembles the highest order of being by possessing an
immortal body, and the lowest by having a diseased soul, which makes
him rather grudge that we be healed than help our cure. We need a
Mediator who, being united to us here below by the mortality of His
body, should at the same time be able to afford us truly divine help
in cleansing and liberating us by means of the immortal righteousness
of His spirit, whereby He remained heavenly even while here upon
earth. Far be it from the incontaminable God to fear pollution from
the man[350] He assumed, or from the men among whom He lived in the
form of a man. For, though His incarnation showed us nothing else,
these two wholesome facts were enough, that true divinity cannot be
polluted by flesh, and that demons are not to be considered better
than ourselves because they have not flesh.[351] This, then, as
Scripture says, is the "Mediator between God and man, the man Christ
Jesus,"[352] of whose divinity, whereby He is equal to the Father,
and humanity, whereby He has become like us, this is not the place to
speak as fully as I could.