The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
114 The Son's Descent manity so as to impart divinity to human persons. Attributes which were once predicated solely of God are now attributed to humanity and, conversely, those qualities which were once reserved for humanity become God's own in Jesus Christ. In this way, exchange language is much more unificatory and much further reaching in what it accomplishes. The attributes to be exchanged are primarily those qualities which have become characteristics of what was lost in the fall of Adam.
Most often the qualities in question are simply gathered together under very generic terms, such as that which is weak [infirmitas] or moribund [mortalitas] about postlapsarian humanity. For example: "we should not find it surprising that to meet our weakness he descended to the discrete sounds we use, for he also descended to take to himself the weakness of our human body."77 While we later hear: "we cannot take his divinity, if he himself did not take our mortality and come to us to speak the gospel to us; if what is ignoble and least in us he had not wished to share with us, we would think that he did not wish to give us his greatness, who took on our smallness."78 We thus see how fallen human qualities, such as bodily frailty [infirmitas corporis] or human mortality, are taken up by the Son's incarnation [ad suscipiendam] and in return, replaced with Christ's own integrity and immortality. From these representative examples, we can see three paradoxical factors used by Augustine: (1) the Son's descent for human persons' ascent, (2) God's smallness for human greatness, (3) and the remunerative tone which lends itself naturally to the language
77. en. Ps. 103, exp. 4.1; Boulding, Expositions (III/19), 167; "nec mirandum nobis sit, quia propter infirmitatem nostram descendit ad particulas sonorum nostrorum, cum descenderit ad suscipiendam infirmitatem corporis nostri"; CCL 40.1521; cf. en. Ps. 102.22; en. Ps. 33, exp. 1.6.
78. Jo. eu. tr. 22.1; Rettig, Tractates, 2.197; slightly adjusted; "quia capere non possumus diuinitatem ipsius, si non caperet ipse mortalitatem nostram, et perueniret ad nos ut loqueretur nobis Euangelium; si quod in nobis abiectum et minimum est, noluisset communicare nobiscum; putaremus eum noluisse nobis dare magnum suum, qui suscepit paruum nostrum."