Section CXXVII

Concerning this universal reparation through Christ, the things which Phoebadius of Agen has are signal. He says¹:

Therefore this Word, since² he was in the form of God, constituted by wisdom and reason and by the reason of spirit and the power of spirit³, that is, possessing the whole power of God, did not make himself equal to God the Father, but, taking the form of a servant, humbled himself unto death. For he had put on that which could serve and which could die: namely, man, whom, when raised, he presented to heaven, so that the second Adam might through obedience restore what the first—

—had lost through transgression.

But the first Adam had through transgression lost for all both preternatural and supernatural goods: he had lost a) immortality, b) freedom from sin, and c) the means and power of obtaining salvation. The second Adam therefore restored all these things, and plainly to all, through obedience.

And he restored 1) immortality, since, with Phoebadius as witness⁴:

When he deigned to put on man, he did not introduce a stain into eternity, so that he might change the Spirit⁵ into flesh, but so that, man having been assumed, he might furnish immortality and the eternity of heavenly life. For although the Apostle says⁶ that he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, we certainly do not understand him to have been emptied in such a way that the same Spirit became something other than what he had been; but so that, setting aside for a time the honor of his majesty, he put on a human body, by the assumption of which he became the salvation of the nations. For just as when the sun is covered with a cloud its brightness is compressed, not blinded, and that light which, diffused throughout the whole world, floods all things with clear splendor, is enclosed by the very small obstacle of a cloud, not taken away; so also that man whom the Lord Jesus, our Savior, that is, God and the Son of God, put on, nevertheless did not intercept God⁷ in him, but concealed him.

By the same mercy he restored 2) freedom from sin, concerning which Sedulius sings⁸:

O ready piety! Lest a servile yoke, With sin as master, hold us, the supreme Lord Took servile members; and he who from the first origin Of the world clothes all things that arise with his own gifts Had coverings made of scanty swaddling-clothes.

But when he laments both Adam expelled from paradise and the most wretched lot and condition of his whole posterity, he writes that all hope—

—would have been cut off⁹,

unless that pious creator and founder of things, to whom it is proper to pour pardon upon offenses rather than to threaten them with punishment, should deign to raise more firmly again through the same stone the structure of his work, which was weak from its very foundation: namely, lest the living image which had been made according to the likeness of God should be held dissimilar because of death; and that he should bestow the gift of pardoning indulgence and ward off the fruits¹⁰ which the fathers ate unripe and at which the teeth of the children were set on edge; and, most gentle and appeased, should grant that, from the same source whence sins had contracted death, immense piety might nourish life. And just as a sweet and most tender rose is born from thorny turf, about to harm in no way its mother, whom it obscures by the grace of its pleasantness, so from the stock of guilty Eve, Mary coming with sacred light, the virgin who followed might wash away the corruption of the first virgin; so that the nature which previously, defiled by vices, had been subjected to the condition of hard death, when Christ was born through man, might itself also as man be reborn through Christ, about to put off the deformity of the original stain by the renewal of the body.

For which reason¹¹ the prophet called Christ¹² “beautiful in form above the sons of men”:

And altogether rightly he defined him as “beautiful above the sons of men,” because although he assumed the appearance of human incarnation and frequently called himself the Son of Man in the preaching of the Gospel, original sin had nevertheless defiled us, which he did not possess, who cleansed us by the purity of his nativity. O piety, clement and ready for salvation! Lest the yoke of long servitude oppress us by reason of the condition of sin, the Lord assumed the members of a servant.

The servitude of sin having been dissolved through Christ and freedom for justice having been made, by a new, 3) added benefit the human race obtained again, as though by the right of postliminy, the means and faculty of attaining salvation. “I know, dearest brethren,” writes¹³ Caesarius of Arles,

that your holy charity cannot be ignorant that—

—our father Adam was placed amid the delights of paradise; but, at the persuasion of the devil, contemning the commandments of God, he was cast down into the miseries of this world as from a higher place to a lower. Paradise, therefore, is above; this world is below. There is another hell, into which after death sinners and the impious are plunged. For that there are two hells the prophet clearly shows¹⁴, saying: “O God, who hast rescued my soul from the lower hell.” For he would not say “the lower hell” unless he knew that there was also an upper. But our God¹⁵, compassionate and merciful, patient and greatly merciful, when by his just judgment he placed us in our father Adam from the height of paradise into the hell of this world, did not will, in his ineffable piety, that by our fall we should arrive at the lower hell; but he placed us in a certain manner between paradise and the lower hell, as though in the middle, so that, if we willed to do penance, we might merit to ascend to the height of our principal homeland; but if we willed continually to remain in that tyranny of pride through which, at the persuasion of the devil, we fell, we might be pressed down by the weight of sin into the depths of the lower hell, whence no return can now be possible. Therefore, dearest brethren, considering these things not in passing but with great fear and trembling, let us understand that we have been placed in this upper hell through the mercy of God, so that we may desire rather to return by the steps of good works to him who created us than to descend with him who deceived us into the depths of the lower hell. And because we have been placed as though between water and fire, as between the supreme evil, as it were, between the fall of the lower hell and the height of paradise, let us hear the Lord crying out in the Scriptures with admirable piety¹⁶: “I have placed thee between death and life. Choose life, that thou mayest live.”