His father saw him returning, while he was still far off, and emotion racked him [esplangkhnisth
], so he ran out, threw his arm around his neck, and hugged him. (Lk 15.20)
Anselm, as we saw in the last chapter, bound God himself in the chains of necessity. The Father had to save man by the sacrifice of his Son, since that was the just and honorable and perfect way of acting—so how could God do other? Even more audaciously he bound members of the Trinity, one by one, in the straitjacket of his argument: the Father could not become incarnate, as the Spirit could not become Mary’s son—so the Second Person, the Logos, had to perform the task. This not only imposed a division of labor within the Trinity but introduced discord there. As the advocate of sinners, the Son had to placate the anger of the Father. It has been left to recent theologians to point out that the rescue of humankind was the work of the Trinity as a whole, not of a single Person of it.1
These thinkers not only do not restrict salvation to the work of a single divine Person; they do not restrict redemption to a single act of that incarnated Person, his death. They point out that the Incarnation is the great mystery, and that Jesus was sent by the Father and guided by the Spirit in his whole saving life, from his birth through his ministry and miracles to his death and Resurrection. Those making this argument were preceded by Augustine, who also saw the entire Trinity working in the life of Jesus. The Father sent the Son, which in all cases other than the Trinity would mean that the Father was the prime agent. But in the Trinity, all agency is united.2 And the Spirit was infused in all aspects of the Incarnation of Jesus:
So it was said of John the Baptist, “He will be filled with the Holy Spirit from the moment he is in the womb” (Lk 1.15), and his father Zachary was seen to be full of the Spirit when he spoke those words of his son. And Mary was filled with the Holy Spirit to proclaim the wonder of the Lord she was bearing in her womb, and Simeon and Anna were filled with the Spirit to acknowledge the majesty of the baby Christ.3
Augustine rejected Anselm’s argument seven centuries before it was made.
Can one really say that, because God the Father was angry at us, he looked on at his Son’s death, and that made him accept us again? Does that mean that the Son already accepted us to the extent of dying for us, while the Father remained so angry that he would not have accepted us if the Son had not died for us? If so, what are we to make of these words from the teacher of the Gentiles [Paul]: “How shall we consider our situation? Since God is with us, who can oppose us? He did not exempt his own Son, but surrendered him for our sake—and is that not to give us everything?” (Rom 8.13). How could the Father deny exemption for his own Son, but surrender him for us, if he had not already accepted us? This text refutes an earlier one. There the Son first dies for us, and only then does the Father accept us because of that death. But here the Father is, as it were, the first to act from love, and because of that did not exempt his Son but surrendered him for our sake. The Father’s love takes precedence, since he loved us not only before his Son died for us but before he created the universe. As the same Apostle said, “He chose us to be his even before the initiation of the universe” (Eph 1.4). And when it is said that the Father did not exempt his Son, that does not mean that the Son did not volunteer his death, since it is written, “He loved me [Paul] and volunteered himself for me” (Gal 2.20). Everything, therefore, was done at once and equally and interactively [concorditer] by the Father, the Son, and, proceeding from them both, the Spirit.4
Augustine was always less interested in the Passion than in the Incarnation, which is why his sermons made more of Christmas than of Good Friday. For him, the great saving mystery was the fact that God became man. He lowered himself to raise us: “When he took on flesh in time, in order to share our temporal life, he did not lose eternity in the flesh but honored flesh with eternity.”5 Dealing with the holy patriarchs who were saved before Jesus lived (or died), Augustine says that they had a prophetic sense, not by the Passion and death, but by the Incarnation:
Christ the Lord is the Beginning [Principium], by whose Incarnation we are cleansed…Thus the Beginning, by receiving its own flesh and blood, purified both flesh and blood…We, fleshly, weak, vulnerable to sin, cloaked in dark error, could not recognize the Beginning till we were purified and made whole by it, because of what we were and what we were not—we were men, but not innocent, whereas he was by his Incarnation both man and innocent, without sin. Mediating thus, he reached his hand out to us in our fallen state…It was by believing in this sacred bond that the men of old were purified and returned to innocence by living virtuously.6
Augustine presents the Incarnation as a second (and better) Creation, by which God not only restores fallen man but exalts him to a higher state by incorporation of the whole body of believers into the Son.
God wants to make you God, not merely by his own only begotten, but by a free adoption. Just as he, in becoming man, shared in your death, so he makes you, by his exaltation, share in his deathlessness…Thus man, thoroughly deified, will be united to the endless and changeless truth.7
Being at one with Christ is a higher state than being at one with Adam in his original condition: “Don’t be Adam any more.”8 The Incarnation is God’s way of harmonizing the universe. Augustine searches for a way to describe Christ’s union with his believers, rejecting noun after noun as inadequate until he comes up with a new noun:
This joining together [congruentia]—or say the fitting together [convenientia], or the adjusting together [concinentia], or sounding together [consonantia]—or, to put it better where notes in octave are concerned, this joining is essential in whatever is held together [compaginatio], or, to be even more precise, whatever is tuned together [coaptatio].9
He goes on to discuss coaptatio in musical terms, as the notes sounded at “one and two” (i.e., when a lyre string is one length or two), what we can modernize as “at the octave.” He says that Jesus sounded his one death (of the body) in accord with our two deaths (of the soul and of the body): “Our present task is to learn, with God’s help, how the single death of our Lord and Savior fits our double death and somehow accords with [congruat] our rescue.”10 The harmony results not simply from Christ’s dying but from his becoming man.
Christ lowered himself in humility to lift us in dignity, meeting us halfway, as it were, entering our time to bring us to his eternity.11
Since we were not fitted to appreciate the eternals, so mired were we in the muck of sin—so stuck in our affection for the temporals, naturally coated with the consequences of our death—that we needed to be cleansed. But if our cleansing were to be suited for eternals, it had to be through temporals, like those that suited our captivity. Health, it is true, is the opposite of sickness, but cure mediates between the two—if it did not engage the sick, it could not draw him toward the healthy. Malignant temporals frustrate the sick, but benignant temporals revive those being cured and strengthen them toward the eternals…So the Son of God came to us to be the Son of Man, so he could attach our faith to him, by which he would draw us on to his truth, adopting our mortality without losing his immortality. For the Beginning is to eternity as truth is to faith. Thus we had to be cleansed by the one who began here while remaining eternal, so he could be the same in our faith as he is in truth. Our Beginning could not take us to eternals unless he became our partner in passing toward his eternity. That is how our faith goes along with the one we believe in, as he rose up. After he began among us, he died, he was raised, he was vindicated. Of those four things we have experienced two, since we know how men begin here and die. Of the last two, being raised and being vindicated, we rightly hope for that for us because we believe in that for him. As he goes from his earthly beginning to eternity, we hope to pass over from our beginning to eternity, our faith attaining his truth.12
Compare Sermon 190.2:
This Christmas we celebrate not only the birth of a divinity but the birth of a man, by which he is attuned [contemperatus] to us that, by his invisible self made visible, we may travel through his visibles to his invisibles.13
Augustine explains the Incarnation in his commentary on the passage of John’s Gospel (9.1–7) where Jesus takes earth, spits on it, and cures a blind man’s eyes with it. The flesh Jesus takes is a medicine for the blindness of humanity. In his Interpretations of John’s Gospel, Augustine says that Jesus took flesh to cure humanity’s lack of faith: “He spat on the dirt, and from his spittle he made a paste—that is, the Word was made flesh.”14 In Genesis (2.7) it is said that God made man “from the dust of the ground.” The scriptural passage that Augustine used most often in his Christmas sermons was Psalm 85.12, which read in his Latin Bible Veritas de terra orta est, “Truth takes its rise from dirt.”15 Though dirt was unclean in Jewish thought, Augustine argues that the dirt from which Jesus rose up—“that is, the flesh of the Virgin”—was not unclean, because she preserved an aboriginal innocence (integritas).16
Mary was like the uncontaminated earth from which Adam was made. But Jesus, the Truth, the Logos, the Origin, does not simply repeat the “clean” first birth of Adam. He is far superior to the merely natural man. But he, too, springs from dirt. So, in the healing of the blind man, he takes dirt and sanctifies it by his saliva. This is another case of the “halfway” attuning of man to God—the flesh of Jesus is dirt but it is holy, like the paste he plasters over the blind man’s eyes.
Though Augustine speaks of the general “attuning” of God to man throughout the whole life of Jesus, he must face the general emphasis on one aspect of that life, its ending—the Crucifixion. He does not treat this as a sacrifice meant to placate the Father. For one thing, he remains enough of a Neoplatonist to believe that God is changeless. Thus his emphasis is always on the effect of Jesus’ action on the believer, not on God himself. He says that even the atonement, the “justification” of other theories, does not effect a change in the Godhead:
We believe, accordingly, that God does not require the sacrifice of a bull, or of anything else on earth and corruptible, or even of man’s justification [justitia], since every proper homage to God is meant for the benefit of man, not of God. One does not, after all, oblige a fountain by drinking from it, or oblige light by seeing it.17
God cannot change in order to grant something in return for a sacrifice. Even prayer cannot make him grant favors. The true aim of prayer is to make the believer acknowledge that the will of God is better than one’s own will—he knows better than I do what is good for me: “For when I pray for the recovery of a sick person, my motive is not at all for a magic cure, but that I may submit willingly to whatever You will” (C 10.56). In a famous part of the City of God (book 10), Augustine renounced all previous notions of sacrifice. He said that the only true sacrifice is a sacrifice of one’s own will to God’s. For this sacrifice the proper altar is man’s heart, the proper incense his affections, the proper fire his love.18
We cannot deflect what God has timelessly willed for the universe. God created time, but he did not create it in time—Creation was an eternal willing that time would be (C 11.14). Developments within time correspond in general to the seminales rationes (“provisions in their origin”)—that is, to what is sometimes called natural law.19 God can depart from his own natural provisions if he wills it, as when working miracles, but even these “departures” were foreseen and fore-ordained. Man’s ability to sin is a freedom to defy the will of God, but that does not change or defeat the will of God. Jesus by the Incarnation came to attune man’s will, through his will, to a restored harmony with God.
Augustine repeats the prophetic protests that God does not need anything we can give him in sacrifice. But he goes further. He says that the realm of sacrifice is that of the devil: “That liar, who had been a diplomat [mediator] of death to man, blocked the way to life by promising to cleanse man from sin by rites and irreligious sacrifices, by which the self-sufficient were taken in.”20 Here he means, principally, the heathen sacrifices to pagan gods. But even the sacrifices of the Jews, he says, were only symbols of true sacrifice, that of the heart, not true sacrifices in themselves.21
How, then, can the Crucifixion be considered a sacrifice? Augustine says that true sacrifice, submission of one’s will to God, is supremely effected when Jesus incorporates the wills of all his believers in his Mystical Body and brings them into accord with the Father’s will:
Four things count in any sacrifice—the one it is being offered to, the one offering it, what is being offered, and for whom it is being offered. In this case the one offering is our truest Mediator, uniting us to God in the peace that is being offered, while he is united with the one to whom the offering is made, and is himself the offerer and the offered.22
But Augustine also speaks of the Crucifixion as breaking the hold of the devil upon men’s hearts, as when he tempts them to sin. Christ broke this hold, not by paying the devil a ransom (the old theory) or by outbidding the devil with a priceless gift to the Father (Anselm’s theory). No, he tricked the devil. He lured him into a trap, so the devil was non ditatus sed ligatus, not paid but betrayed—lured by a bait into the trap that held him tight.23
The devil celebrated when Christ died. But by that very death the devil was done in. He took the bait, as in a mousetrap. He was happy at this death, since he was the herald [praepositus] of death. But what delighted him, ensnared him. The mousetrap for the devil was the Lord’s cross. The bait that lured him was the Lord’s death. But just look! The Lord Jesus Christ was resurrected! What has happened to that death on the cross?24
To follow Augustine’s thought here we must see it as the working out of his “harmonizing” theory of the Incarnation. He said that there was a two-to-one harmony between the two deaths of man (spiritual and physical) and the one death of Jesus (physical). There was also a two-to-one relation of the devil to man’s two deaths and the devil’s spiritual deadness. But the devil, who caused human death when he lured him into the Fall, cannot join man in a physical death. He foolishly thinks that Jesus, by dying, has entered his own realm of death; but Jesus has a spiritual life even in physical death. By Resurrection, he breaks free from death and takes his Followers with him to the Father. Jesus rescues us by joining us as what Augustine calls “our comrade in the fellowship of death” (in consortio mortis amicus), from which the devil is excluded.25 The Latin amicitia was a stronger term than our “friendship,” as anyone knows who has read Cicero’s treatise De Amicitia. It signifies “other-self-hood,” or camaraderie.26
The Incarnation gave Jesus an intimacy with man that the devil cannot equal:
Thus that liar, who had been a diplomat [mediator] of death to man, blocked the way to life by promising to cleanse man from sin by rites and irreligious sacrifices, by which the self-sufficient were taken in, since he could not share our [physical] death, nor have a resurrection from his [spiritual] death. He had, it is true, one death to match our two, but he could not achieve the one resurrection which is the mystery of our individual rescue and the pattern for a general raising of the dead at the end of time. By contrast, Christ, the true diplomat [mediator] of life to man, expelled from the souls of those who believe in him that dead spirit who conducted men to death, so the devil would no longer have an internal claim on man, but only an external hostility that could not overthrow him. The true conductor even let himself be tested, so that for resisting our tests he would offer us not only his help but also his company.27
Jesus did not so much get mankind out of the devil’s possession as he called in the “pawn tickets” (nexa) the devil held for claiming man:
For our rescue the blood of Christ was a kind of payment, but when the devil took it he was not paid but betrayed, since we were quit of his pawn tickets [nexibus] and he could no longer draw a man in a net of sins toward a second and lasting [spiritual] death, once the man had been freed from any obligation, by the blood Christ was not obliged to shed [in a physical death].28
Jesus came to earth to join us, just as the father of the Prodigal Son went to him:
His father saw him returning, while he was still far off, and emotion racked him [esplangkhnisth], so he ran out, threw his arm around his neck, and hugged him. (Lk 15.20)
He also came to seek as the shepherd hunts for his lost sheep:
Which of you, having a hundred sheep but losing one, would not leave the ninety-nine safe and go exploring for the lost one, till he found it? Having found it, he lifts it onto his shoulders out of pure joy, to carry it home, where he invites family and friends, telling them, “Be just as happy as I am, since I have found the sheep that was lost to me.” (Lk 15.4–6)
God initiates the salvation of man to express the Father’s love, not a punitive deflecting of the Father’s anger.
He ran to meet us at the end of our journey, our death, but not by the way we had journeyed. We traveled to death along our path of sin, but his path was toward what is right. Our death is what we deserved for sin, while his is a remedy-offering for that sin.29
Again it should be said that “He held it right to become our comrade in the fellowship of death” (in consortio mortis amicus).30 He traveled to death, to meet us there:
The mind of our Conductor made this clear—that he did not accept death in the flesh as a punishment for sin, since he did not give up his life of necessity but because he willed it, when he willed it, how he willed it. Since he was at one with the Word of God, he could say: “I have the authority to give up my life, and I have the authority to take it back. No one takes it from me, but I give it up and I take it back.” (Jn 10.17–18)31
Jesus directly achieves this harmonization of mankind with himself. One does nothing but disrupt this harmony by interjecting superfluous intermediaries between Jesus and his body of believers. When these “representatives” of Jesus to us, and of us to Jesus, take the feudal forms of hierarchy and monarchy, of priests and papacy, they affront the camaraderie of Jesus with his brothers.
NOTES
1. On salvation as the work of the Trinity, see especially Edward J. Kilmartin, Christian Liturgy: Theology and Practice (Sheed and Ward, 1988), and The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology (Liturgical Press, 2004), as well as Robert J. Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled: The True Meaning of Christian Sacrifice (T & T Clark, 2009). Daly draws on or praises a range of theologians who share Kilmartin’s and his approach: Raymund Schwager, Jesus of Nazareth: How He Understood His Life, translated by James Williams (Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), and Banished from Eden: Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation (Gracewing, 2006); Anthony W. Bartlett, Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement (Trinity Press, 2001); Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Baker Academic, 2004); Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement: The Origins of the Controversy About the Atonement Doctrine (Liturgical Press, 2005); S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross (Eerdmans, 2006); Gregory Anderson Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross: How the Nonviolent God Saves Us Through the Cross of Christ (Cascade Books, 2010).
2. Augustine, De Trinitate 4.29 (Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina 42, column 908).
3. Ibid. (columns 908–9).
4. Ibid., 13.17 (Migne 42, column 1025).
5. Augustine, Sermon 187.4 (Migne 38, column 1002).
6. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, edited by Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb, fifth edition (Teubner, 1981), 10.24–25, pp. 438–39.
7. Augustine, Sermon 166.4–5 (Migne 38, column 309).
8. Ibid.
9. Augustine, De Trinitate 4.4.
10. Ibid., 4.5.
11. Ibid., 4.13.
12. Ibid., 4.24.
13. Augustine, Sermon 190.2 (Migne 38, column 1007).
14. Augustine, In Joannem Tractatus 44.2.
15. Augustine, Sermons 184.1, 185.2, 189.2, 191.1, 192.1.
16. Augustine, Sermon 191.2.
17. Augustine, De Civitate 10.5, p. 408.
18. Ibid., 10.3, p. 406.
19. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram 9.32.
20. Augustine, De Trinitate 4.17 (Migne 42, column 899).
21. Augustine, De Civitate 10.5, pp. 408–10.
22. Augustine, De Trinitate 4.19 (Migne 38, column 901).
23. Ibid., 13.19 (Migne 42, column 1029).
24. Augustine, Sermon 263 (Migne 38, column 1210).
25. Augustine, De Trinitate 4.17 (Migne 42, column 900).
26. The Latin concept of amicitia was taken from extensive Greek writings on philia. Philos meant “one’s own,” a tie so close that Homer could talk of one’s own heart (philon 
tor, Iliad 3.31) or one’s own knees (phila gounata, Iliad 9.610). Linguists connect philos with reflexive uses of the pronoun spheis, intensifying the sense of “one’s own.” See Hjalmar Frisk, Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1969), p. 1020.
27. Augustine, De Trinitate 4.17 (Migne 42, column 899).
28. Ibid., 13.19 (Migne 42, column 1029). For the meaning of nexum, see Marcel Mauss, who discusses “one of the most controversial questions of legal history, the theory of the nexum.” He concludes that a nexum is the token of a pledge. It does not seal a bargain or conclude a purchase, but gives a claim on later fulfillment of the pledge; see Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by Ian Cunnison, with an introduction by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (W. W. Norton, 1967), pp. 47–48.
29. Augustine, De Trinitate 4.15 (Migne 38, column 898).
30. Ibid., 4.17 (Migne 42, column 900).
31. Ibid., 4.16 (Migne 41, column 898).