Section CVI

And entirely consonant with these are the things which Arnobius in more than one place confirms and teaches concerning the whole economy of the Savior and the counsel of the assumed man. For, explaining¹ why Christ willed to endure so many and such great things and to undergo death itself, he adduces these causes:

That, as master and author, he might direct his laws and statutes to the ends of fitting duties; that he might crush the haughtiness of pride; that he might extinguish the flames of lusts; that he might close the maw of greed; that he might wrest weapons from hands and cut away all seeds of every vice; and finally, that, gentle, peaceful, easy of approach, familiar in address, and not proud amid human miseries, having pitied absolutely all those afflicted by crosses and bodily evils with that one benignity, he might render and restore them to health.

Then, addressing the gentiles², he adds:

For what merit, I ask, tell me, for the fault of what sin do you burn so fiercely against Christ? What was committed by him which bent the tenor of rectitude and roused you to bitter hatreds with furious goads? Because he indicated that he had been sent by the King alone as the guardian of your souls? Because he persuaded you by the human assertions of a few that he brought you the immortality which you trust you possess? But even if it were certain among you that he spoke false things and promised most empty hopes, even thus I do not see that there was a cause why you ought to hate him or condemn him by hostile censure. Indeed, if your disposition had been clement and gentle, for this alone you ought to have embraced him: because he promised you desirable and prosperous things, because he was a messenger of good things, because he preached things which injured no one’s disposition and indeed filled it with a more secure expectation.

He immediately illustrates this by applying a comparison³, writing:

If some physician had come to you from regions remote and never known to you, promising a medicine of such a kind that it would keep every kind of disease and sickness entirely from your bodies, would you not all run to him in rivalry? Would you not receive him into your familiar walls, cherished with every blandishment and honor? Would you not desire that kind of medicine to be most certain and true, which promised that you would remain immune from such innumerable afflictions of the body even unto the furthest bounds of age? And although the matter were doubtful, nevertheless you would entrust yourselves and would not hesitate to drink the unknown potion, with the hope of salvation set before you and inflamed by love of well-being. Christ shone forth and appeared, the messenger of a matter of the greatest importance, bearing a propitious omen and a salutary proclamation for believers. What is this cruelty, what so great an inhumanity—indeed, to speak more truly, what disdain and arrogance—not only to rend with curses of words the messenger and bearer⁴ of so great a gift, but also to pursue him with grievous war and with every discharge and destruction of weapons? Do the things he says displease you, and are they heard by you with offense? Reckon those predictions among trifles. Does he speak the most foolish things and promise empty gifts? Laugh, as wise men, and leave his folly to wallow in its errors. What is this savagery?… What lust so executioner-like, to declare an inexpiable war upon one who has deserved nothing from you? To wish, if it be permitted, to tear him apart through his entrails, who not only inflicted no evil on anyone, but, equally benign toward enemies, declared what salvation was brought to them from God the first principle; what it was necessary to do that they might flee destruction and attain unknown immortality? And when the novelty of the things and the unheard-of promise disturbed the minds of the hearers and caused belief to hesitate, the Lord of all powers and—

—the destroyer of death itself permitted his man to be killed, so that from the things which followed they might know that their hopes, which they had long before received concerning the salvation of souls, were safe, and that they could avoid the peril of death by no other rationale.

Whence he adds concerning Christ⁵:

Even if he were not worthy that you ought to listen to and believe him, for this very thing he was not to be despised by you: that he showed you the ways to heaven and desired for you the objects of immortality, as though he had not extended the light of life to all and removed the peril of ignorance.

Not even in the least do the things differ from these which Marius Victorinus, disputing against the Physicists⁶ concerning the cause of the Lord’s incarnation, embraces in precisely these words:

But if you seek the cause of his coming, man had to appear again. Such great⁷ divinity had to lie hidden, not from those who believed, but from the prince of the world, for whose overthrow he had descended, but for the sake of our liberation.

He did not hold him by his own authority but by the Lord’s sentence⁸, because the Lord had commanded the sinner who did not repent to die. But the merciful one had to free the penitent. Justice and divine possibility demanded this: that he who held the guilty by sentence, if he seized one not guilty, passing beyond the sentence, would lose his power.

But there is no one who is not guilty, since both by origin and birth they are from mortals. Yet he who was born is proved to have himself given the sentence; by which sentence he himself is not held guilty, who, although he assumed flesh, lived among men without sin. As it is written⁹: “This is our God, and another shall not be accounted beside him. He found every way of prudence and gave it to Jacob his servant. After these things he was seen on earth and conversed with men.” This is he who conversed without sin, as it is again written¹⁰: “Who did not commit sin, nor was guile found in his mouth.” He produced this flesh without sin; the prince of this world, foreseeing it opposed to himself and not inclined to his own wills, but judging him to be only a man, dared to invade it when it permitted him. But the Lord permitted this so that the prince himself might be the cause of losing his power: for although he claimed the guilty for himself by the sentence, by usurping this one who was not guilty he went against the sentence which he held¹¹ and lost his power. Thus it belonged to the plan that he perform the functions of the body, so that he indeed might show it to be the same flesh which he had assumed, that which was formerly condemned; but he, seeing the functions of the flesh, would not understand the Deity, and thus, going against the sentence of God—

—would lose his power, because he dared to assail one whom he perceived to be without crime.

“Having freed us from death by this economy of wisdom and goodness,” Victorinus adds¹², “by the Lord’s Passion he led us back to the state of immortality; and us who formerly were unequal to heavenly things, he has now associated with the heavenly.”

Lest this restoration and indeed elevation appear incredible to anyone, he proceeds thus¹³:

Yet to some this appears unjust—not because God is unable, but because it seems not to agree with his justice. For when he had made the first-formed man, still free of fault and alien to crime, lord only of paradise, judging this gift of God to be suitable, now after sin and offense, when he had been recalled, although it was no small thing to return to what he had been, he also granted the heavenly kingdoms. This, however, is proved most just. For if previously by his grace, when man merited nothing by duties of devotion, he had granted man a seat in paradise, assuredly now, when he fought against the impatience of the flesh and the desires of iniquity already aroused, against the prince of the world and his powers, after trampling upon the age, it was fitting to weigh out a heavenly reward; so that he who, imitating God, lived a divine life on earth while constituted in the body, might dwell in heaven with the same body now made immortal, earthly things having now been taken away. Then to the cause of this gift is added the fact that it is fitting to bring into heaven the flesh of man whose inhabitant God deigned to be. Nor can man appear to have been made an inhabitant of heaven beyond his merit when the Spirit who is God himself did not disdain his sheath. And it was just to place also among the heavenly things the body in which God, by dwelling, deigned to visit the earth and through which, having become a participant in our nature, he led our race to immortality. For where ought the habitation of God to be except in the kingdom of God? And where is his kingdom except in heaven?