Section CXL

Now, if God in the present life chastises only by loving, and manifests his love by the very penalties themselves, will there be any who doubt whether all of us who are men are situated within the order of reparation and salvation—within an order which benevolence has chosen, over which piety presides, and which mercy administers? There will be absolutely no one whose mind is sound and who holds worthy of faith Paulinus, bishop of Nola, whose excellent and illustrious gifts Ausonius¹, Prudentius², Jerome³, Ambrose⁴, Augustine⁵, Sulpicius Severus⁶, Eucherius⁷, Sidonius Apollinaris⁸, Gennadius⁹, and Cassiodorus¹⁰ celebrated with abundant praises.

For, according to him¹¹:

Christ says to all¹²: “Come to me, you who are burdened and labor, and you shall find rest for your souls.” For, as far as lies in him, he wills every man¹³ to be saved, who made all. For this reason also he descended to us, that we might ascend to him; therefore he was conformed to the body of our flesh, which was serving sin, that he might conform us to the body of his flesh, which did no sin, that we might truly be reformed to original glory if, through imitation of Christ, we should take on the divine likeness. For Genesis itself, which narrates the workmanship of the divine hand, shows¹⁴ that in Adam the image alone remained to us¹⁵: in it, likeness together with the image of God is named while the making of man is still in its very undertaking; but in the following chapter, in which man, now made, is written to be only according to the image of God, it indicates that likeness was withdrawn, as it were, from one about to sin—manifestly through foreknowledge of the future—so that it might be reserved for men in Christ, who through the obedience of his piety reconciled to the Father the world which the disobedience of the first parent had rendered unreconciled¹⁶. And therefore the Lord himself¹⁷, emptied into the form of a servant, received the likeness of God which the servant, made illustrious through a desire for the Lord’s equality, had lost; and man, who in his pride¹⁸ had fallen through the fraud of the devil, arose through faith in him in the humiliation of the most high Lord, the devil having been laid low.

Again explaining the force and abundance of this divine liberality¹⁹, he says:

The treasuries of his good things lie open, and the riches of his goodness are at hand, so that each one need not wait to receive, but may of his own accord seize for himself as much as he wills. For in this the good Lord and holy Father made us: that we should be good for our own good. For²⁰ what external good would he need, who, in the whole extent of what he is, is himself goodness and beatitude? For this reason, as far as lies in him, he wills every man²¹ to be saved, because in every man he loves his own work; and he is lavish toward you from his own resources, if you yourself are not envious and avaricious toward yourself concerning those things which God made yours—not that they might be a cause of death for you, but that they might be a price unto life. O abundance of the goodness of God! He wills to lend at interest from those things which he himself bestowed; he desires to become the debtor of his own gifts, so that with manifold reckoning he may return your interest to you.

But after recalling the excellent benefits²² “by which God always so nourishes our hope that he does not relax solicitude, and so takes counsel for infirm flesh that the spirit does not cease to be prompt,” he adds²³ “that God wills these same gifts of his piety to be exercised throughout the whole world.”