5. See Lk 20:36.
SERMON 229G 293
The only Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ.
"So godhead dies?" No, godhead doesn't die. "So Christ didn't die?" Christ, who is God, died.
"How did Christ, who is God, die, if godhead doesn't die?" In the same way as the apostles too died, in the flesh, not in the soul. So in the part in which the apostle died, in the flesh, in the same way, then, Christ died in the flesh. And yet it was Christ who died, even if it was in the part in which he could die, while in his godhead he couldn't die.
In the beginning, after all, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (Jn 1:1). Where's the possibility of death? Nowhere. In the beginning the Word wasn't made, as in the beginning God made heaven and earth (Gn 1:1). That's what the Word made, which was in the beginning.17 So, the Word was, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Look for death there, you can't find it. There isn't any place for it, any source for it, anyone for it. There isn't any place for it, because he is not in the hands of the Jews; any source for it, because he hasn't got flesh and blood; anyone for it—he's God, equal to the Father. So what made it possible for him to die? The Word became flesh, and dwelt amongst us (Jn 1:14).
NOTES
1. The scholars are not all agreed on the day; some think the sermon was preached on the Wednesday, some on the Thursday of Easter week. It survives as a series of fragments, which have been shrewdly stitched together by Dom Morin, but were in a different order in the manuscript he was editing. That manuscript order is indicated by the numbers in brackets after the section numbers.
It is an interesting sermon on a point of trinitarian doctrine; the approach is rather different from that in which it is dicussed in On the Trinity. See notes 10 and 12 below.
2. The Arians. They would deny that they thereby make two Gods, as he goes on to assert, because they refused to accord the Son and Holy Spirit the title of "true God." For them only the Father was God in the full sense; the other two persons, being in their view creatures, were only divine in a lesser or "honorary" sense. But Augustine is making a good debating point.
3. The devil, who aspired to be equal to God; the texts of Is 14:12-14 and Ez 28:11-19 were generally interpreted as depicting the fall of Satan. Culmann, in an exegesis of Phil 2:5-11 more satisfactory than the traditional patristic one proposed by Augustine (see the appropriate chapter of his Christology of the New Testament), suggests that in this hymn Christ is being contrasted not with Satan but with Adam. See Sermon 117, note 18.
4. usurpatio est, non dignatio. I am not at all sure of what he means by dignatio in this context. 5. See Lk 20:36.
6. See Wis 9:15.
7. The sentence, interrupted once, never gets finished.
8. That is, "Father-suffered-ites."
9. Alternative, indeed opposite to Arianism.