Tractates on the Gospel of John
INTRODUCTION
Faith reorients the soul to God, but it reorients the soul through the mediator, Christ, who heals it of its sin. Faith, love, grace, and understanding are concepts repeatedly emphasized all through these Tractates.
Jesus Christ, the Mediator
(13) The Prophets, the apostles. Scriptures, preachers, bishops, and our fellow Christians, are all intermediaries that assist God in helping us bridge that metaphysical abyss that separates our nature from his nature. But the mediator is Jesus Christ. God's revelation is given us through his Word, the Logos, the second person of the Trinity; and the Word of God is the historical Jesus Christ. John's Gospel^^ particularly emphasized the divinity of Jesus, the identity of the historical Jesus with the Messianic Christ with the Trinitarian Word.
These Tractates then are necessarily involved with much Trinitarian and Christological theology. Augustine's teachings explain and defend the orthodox position established at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) and the Council of Constantinople (381 A.D.), although from the posture of the Western mind, and conditioned by the Latin language.
(14) Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, is the major theme that runs through all these Tractates.^'^ Christ is the center of the Christian life. He is the way and the destination; he is the truth and the light; he is the true life who by his death as a man has triumphed over that death which is the temporal life that he shared with us. He is the Word of God who made us, who as our interior teacher gives us the inner illumination to see, to know, and to love the Father, who sends
45. See Hardy, 83-109, for a detailed discussion of the matters presented here.
46. Augustine accepts the Gospel, the three Epistles, and the Apocalypse all as the writings of the Apostle John. See DDC 2.8.13. In the De Haeresibus 30 (CCL 46.304) he mentions certain heretics whom he calls the Alogi who deny that the Gospel and the Apocalypse were written by John. See Berrouard, H omelies I— XVI, 55—57.
47. See Berrouard, Home lies I -XVI, 64-77.