Section CXLIX

Therefore no one perished through the fault of the first parents who was not restored by the economy of the Only-begotten. Paulinus, bishop of Nola, fittingly sings concerning him¹:

When it was granted, upon seeing this divine person, To have seen the Father also—he who bore our contagions, And suffered the mockeries of dire death, Taught that the way of eternal life could be traversed again; Nor only that the soul could return, but that with the whole body It could enter the heavenly regions and leave behind The empty mystery of the sepulcher, covered over with vacant earth.

And no less fittingly elsewhere², when he writes:

It is more just to mourn those shadows of men Which we, degenerate souls, make for ourselves, Forgetful of the first origins of the heavenly image, Which the Father, having mercy, recalls to his own kingdoms. Through love of it the Son assumed my members, Conceived by a Virgin, born man of a Virgin, Bearing man in all things³, and the Lord of all Assuming all servants in one body. For he was made the form of a servant, who lived as the Most High, Reigning in the form of God, God with the King and Father. He assumed the form of a servant and destroyed the guilt By which man was formerly a servant of penalty and death. And unto liberty the Lord restored the servant, Having become our flesh under the image of a servant.

So that through Christ the heavenly image may return to me, Who upon the cross stripped the earthly Adam. My Creator, therefore, bore my flesh and my death, And by death redeemed the work dear to him.

By this most excellent work of redemption, as the same man says⁴, the house of the devil fell and the kingdom of death was dissolved:

Although Christ, the Word of God, always lived—as he does live—and before his carnal advent lived in the majesty of his nature with God the Father, nevertheless⁵, throughout the ages disposed into their order from Adam even unto Moses, the power of death had reigned with license raging; and when through the law sin had been understood but not avoided⁶, it had grown. The King of kings and dispenser of times, the Son of God, divided and destroyed this kingdom by his Passion, being made⁷ under the law that he might loose those subjected to the law; being made through a woman, but a woman in sex and a virgin in childbirth, that the Creator of either sex might sanctify either sex by assuming man and being born through woman. Thus by dying he destroyed death itself, dissolving, as it is written⁸, the enmities in his flesh and making both one, that is, man and God, whom God and man Christ Jesus joined together in himself. In him the substance of either nature laid aside discord⁹ and acknowledged the eternal covenant of unifying grace. The brother in the Levite and the brother in the priest had passed by us, despoiled by the robbery of the devil and wounded on the way; the law had redeemed them neither by sacrifices nor by prophets. But that Samaritan did not pass by¹⁰, who for our sake underwent the insult even of this name. He did not pass by, because he was not a hireling¹¹, but the true and good shepherd, who had come to lay down his life for the sheep. He—

—had mercy upon the wounded man who had been passed by and not cared for by those who went before, approached him, and took him upon his own beast, that is, the Incarnation of the Word; and with the oil of grace and the wine of his Passion¹², having entrusted him to the innkeeper—that perfect teacher of the nations¹³—healed him by the wage of the denarius in the two Testaments, being about to render to him both abundant graces and innumerable crowns of blessed virginity from the innumerable fruits of this good, because, adding this counsel to the precept, he spent beyond what was required from his own.

By these things the fountain of reparation is opened, its mode is declared, its amplitude is shown, and its manifold fecundity is proved. a) The fountain of reparation is opened, and it is twofold: the love of the Creator for his own work and his mercy, by which he did not suffer it, depraved and corrupted, utterly to perish. b) The mode of reparation is shown as situated in this: that the evil and crime of original separation should be repaired by a new and far more intimate conjunction of humanity with God. c) Its amplitude is declared, which embraces either sex, the world, and the divine work infected by the poison of the devil. Finally, d) the manifold fecundity of reparation is explained, from which must be sought the restoration of former liberty, the renewal of the divine likeness, and full triumph over sin and death.