Section CL

Paulinus repeats all these things and illustrates them more abundantly¹ when, upon the words², “He made us, and not we ourselves,” he writes:

He, I say, the Lord, made us, who also remade us from the beginning through all the things which he worked and spoke in his saints, preparing the mysteries of our salvation, that is, of human reparation. For the holy generation in Seth immediately restored just Abel³, who reproduced his father, formed according to the image of God, with a similar countenance.

From there⁴, running down through the others from the first fountain, the vein of justice flowed continually; and although the flood intervened⁵, the seed-stock of the destroyed whole stood in one man indeed, yet a just one, the mystery of the one Redeemer already then operating, so that reconciliation might come through one because the offense had come through many. But when justice fell away again as the human race advanced, and nations and crimes increased together, lest the iniquity of the human race should again merit destruction, one was again chosen⁶ who would be called the father of faith, from whom both the promise of the kingdom and the seed of the eternal King would emerge. Christ fulfilled this, multiplied by the faith of the nations: he who was seen by the patriarchs, prefigured through the law, foretold through the prophets, and himself came to fulfill the law and the prophets, and so that grace might give the medicine which the law had been unable to confer through works.

In this discourse of Paulinus two things are plainly contained: first, that the work of reparation began together with the fall of the human race; and then, that this most noble work attained its summit and height by certain steps, as it were. Paulinus proceeds to explain when it attained that height and in what manner, adding⁷:

Now sin had so pervaded the whole body, that is, the whole race of men, that neither a poultice nor a bandage⁸ profited the weak and wounded; for, when the ill health of the vices had been strengthened, the disease, stronger than the remedies, had excluded every medicine of human assistance. And therefore he came who both is and is to come, conformed to the body of our humility⁹, that he might conform us to the body of his glory. Because no one except the artificer has power over his own work, and only the potter has right over his own clay¹⁰, the Lord of all, who had made all, thus deigned to descend to our things and to assume us in his own body—

—that he might remake by the same art or¹¹ power by which he had made. But he came not in the sublimity of the Lord, which he was, but in the form of a servant¹², which he was not. He was made as a man without help¹³, who is the power of God and the Lord of hosts, the helper and protector of all. He died for those to be freed¹⁴, who was free among the dead. He was reckoned among the iniquitous, who justifies the impious through faith. Like a sheep he was led to slaughter, that Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. He suffered death, who gives eternity.

To this counsel and office¹⁵ it must be attributed:

That we were found by the same paths by which we had perished: again from a tree, again from a Virgin; but not again to be cast down by pride, but, on the contrary, to return by humility. For this reason¹⁶ the King of glory and Lord of majesty emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and covered his invisible greatness with visible abasement, that he might raise us—outwardly exalted but inwardly crushed by that ancient disease of pride ill-conceived—into the form of his sublimity through the formula of our humility in himself. For the good Lord worked and daily works this: that we may attain the glory of divine conformity if we follow the exemplar of our conformity in Christ, recognizing in the governance of the Most High the tempered measure of our nature, so that we may be advanced beyond ourselves by his grace if we walk according to ourselves, mindful of ourselves.

For thus¹⁷:

Through Christ we have been bound and grafted into God, so that in our earth we may hold the Holy Spirit, whom he gave us, as God’s pledge¹⁸, and in God we may have the flesh of Christ as a pledge of ourselves; because Christ continues that immense interval by which mortal things are separated from divine things by his mediation, common to either side, like a certain bridge, so to speak—

—so that by its path earthly things may be joined to heavenly things, when¹⁹ incorruption shall have poured over this corruptible thing of ours and immortality, as it is written, shall have swallowed our mortal thing, and victorious life in Christ and from Christ shall have swallowed death conquered for us. That we may attain this, we can doubt not the truth of so great a good, but our capacity for merit. But let us do the things which Christ commanded, that we may attain the things which Christ promised. His truth is present to us; let our faith not be absent from him. He is life to all, way to all, gate to all²⁰. He closes his kingdoms to no one, for he even permits violence to be brought upon them.