"And the Word became flesh" (John 1, 14) Saint Augustine's teaching on the incarnation

Abstract

"I sought a way to obtain strength enough to enjoy you [0 God]; but I did not find it until I embraced 'the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus' (1 Tim 2,5), 'who is above all things, God blessed for ever' (Rom 9,5) .... The food which I was too weak to accept him mingled with flesh, in that 'The Word was made flesh' (John 1,14), ... To possess God, the humble Jesus, I was not yet humble enough. I did not know what his weakness was meant to teach. I had rather a different notion, since I thought of Christ my Lord only as a man of excellent wisdom which none could equal. I thought his wonderful birth from a virgin was an example of despising temporal things to gain immortality for us, and such divine care gave him great authority as teacher. But the mystery of the Word made flesh I had not begun to guess .... I thought that he excelled others not as the personal embodiment of the Truth, but because of the great excellence of his human character and more perfect participation in wisdom .... [Here follows a digression about Alypius who like the Apolinarians believed that Christ had no rational soul.] ... I admit it was some time later that I learnt, in relation to the words 'The Word was made flesh' , how Catholic truth is to be distinguished from the false opinion of Photinus (Conf. VII 18.24-1 9.25). Thus book seven of St. Augustine's Confessions describes his idea of Christ at the time of his conversion, in 386, albeit with the knowledge and the vocabulary of the bishop in 398. Apart from the terms Augustine uses which, as he admits himself, he did not yet know at the time of his conversion, he obviously believed Christ to be only a man, a complete man it is true, extraordinarily born from a virgin, but nevertheless a solely human being as all the others. What set Christ apart from the rest of his fellow beings in the eyes of Augustine was not his divinity, but his unique human qualities, the perfection of his life, and his unique and all others outshining wisdom and merits, selected by God in order to be the most outstanding example and teacher of how to achieve immortality, but nothing more. He did not think of him as Son of God, nor as divine, nor as mediator. He did not even think in these terms at all and certainly did not yet know either, who Photinus and his heresy was, which he was implicitly committing. At the time of his conversion Augustine's christology plainly did not exceed the limits of philosophy. For at this stage the fact that he accepted the full humanity of Christ has nothing to do with theology or the knowledge of Apolinarianism, because the explicit defense of Christ's rational soul as he presents it in the Confessions presupposes the notion of the divinity of Christ to which the flesh is united, and that precisely Augustine did not yet believe in. Augustine took the complete humanity simply for granted from a philosophical point of view. Being the most outstanding man of all, it never entered his mind that he could lack any human quality, and the testimony of the Scriptures confirmed it; he lived, he uttered ideas, he made decisions - all of it movements of a rational mind and soul. Nevertheless the quoted passage from the Confessions shows at the same time, what Augustine had learned about Christ in the meantime: That he was the mediator between God and man, God's Word and wisdom through whom all things were created' divine, and extraordinarily humbling himself so deeply for man's sake becoming a man himself, taking upon him the complete humanity, body, mind and soul, united to the Word. Truly God and really become man "and dwelt among us".