through the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus._
It is a great and very rare thing for a man, after he has
contemplated the whole creation, corporeal and incorporeal, and has
discerned its mutability, to pass beyond it, and, by the continued
soaring of his mind, to attain to the unchangeable substance of God,
and, in that height of contemplation, to learn from God Himself that
none but He has made all that is not of the divine essence. For God
speaks with a man not by means of some audible creature dinning in
his ears, so that atmospheric vibrations connect Him that makes with
him that hears the sound, nor even by means of a spiritual being
with the semblance of a body, such as we see in dreams or similar
states; for even in this case He speaks as if to the ears of the
body, because it is by means of the semblance of a body He speaks,
and with the appearance of a real interval of space,--for visions are
exact representations of bodily objects. Not by these, then, does God
speak, but by the truth itself, if any one is prepared to hear with
the mind rather than with the body. For He speaks to that part of
man which is better than all else that is in him, and than which God
Himself alone is better. For since man is most properly understood
(or, if that cannot be, then, at least, _believed_) to be made in
God's image, no doubt it is that part of him by which he rises above
those lower parts he has in common with the beasts, which brings him
nearer to the Supreme. But since the mind itself, though naturally
capable of reason and intelligence, is disabled by besotting and
inveterate vices not merely from delighting and abiding in, but even
from tolerating His unchangeable light, until it has been gradually
healed, and renewed, and made capable of such felicity, it had, in
the first place, to be impregnated with faith, and so purified. And
that in this faith it might advance the more confidently towards the
truth, the truth itself, God, God's Son, assuming humanity without
destroying His divinity,[444] established and founded this faith,
that there might be a way for man to man's God through a God-man. For
this is the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. For
it is as man that He is the Mediator and the Way. Since, if the way
lieth between him who goes, and the place whither he goes, there is
hope of his reaching it; but if there be no way, or if he know not
where it is, what boots it to know whither he should go? Now the only
way that is infallibly secured against all mistakes, is when the very
same person is at once God and man, God our end, man our way.[445]