07.The reason for the incarnation

5 The reason for the incarnation of the Son of God A similar blindness makes Muslims ridicule the Christian Faith by which we profess that the Son of God died, since they do not understand the depth of such a great mystery. First of all, lest the death of the Son of God be misinterpreted, we must first say something about the incarnation of the Son of God. For we do not say that the Son of God underwent death according to his divine nature, in which he is equal to the Father who is the foundational life of everything, but according to our own nature which he adopted into the unity of his person. To say something about the mystery of the divine incarnation, we must observe that any intellectual agent operates through a conception of his intellect, which we call a word, as is clear in the case of a builder or any craftsman who operates outwardly according to the form that he conceives in his mind. Since the Son of God is the very Word of God, it follows that God made everything through the Son.

It is a rule that the principles which make something are also the principles for repairing it. If a house falls down, it is restored according to the plan by which it was first made. Among the creatures created through God’s Word, rational creatures hold the first rank, since all other creatures serve them and seem ordered to them. That is reasonable, because a rational creature has mastery over his action through free will, while other creatures do not act from free judgement but by force of nature. Universally what is free is higher than what is in bondage; slaves serve the free and are governed by them. Therefore the fall of a rational creature is truly considered more serious than the defect of any irrational creature. Nor is there any doubt that God judges things according to their real value. So it was fitting for Divine Wisdom to repair the fall of human nature, much more than to step in if the heavens were to fall or any other catastrophe occur in bodily things.

Rational or intellectual creatures are of two kinds: one separated from a body, which we call an angel, and the other joined to a body, which is the human soul. In either one there can be a fall because of freedom of the will. By a fall, I do not mean that they fall out of existence, but that they lapse from righteousness of the will. A fall or a defect refers specially to a principle of operation, as we say that a craftsman has gone wrong because he is deficient in the skill he needs to do his job, and we say that a natural thing is deficient or spoiled if the natural power by which it acts is corrupted, for example if a plant lacks the power of germinating or a piece of land lacks the power to be fruitful. A rational creature operates by its will, where it has freedom of choice. Therefore the fall of a rational creature is a defect of righteousness of the will, which takes place by sin. The defect of sin, which is nothing other than perversity of the will, is something especially for God to remove, and that by his Word by which he created all creatures. The sin of angels, however, could not be corrected, because the immutability of their nature makes them impenitent from any direction they once take. But men’s will is changeable by nature, so that they are not only able to choose different things, good or evil, but also abandon one choice and turn to another. This changeableness of the will remains in man as long as he is united to his body which is subject to variation. When the soul is separated from the body it will have the same immutability as an angel naturally has; so that after death the soul is impenitent, and cannot turn from good to evil or from evil to good. Therefore it was fitting for God’s goodness to restore fallen human nature through his Son. The way of restoring should correspond to the nature being restored and to its sickness. The nature to be restored was man’s rational nature endowed with free will, who should not be subject to exterior power but be recalled to the state of righteousness according to his own will. His sickness, being a perversity of the will, demanded that the will should be called back to righteousness. Righteousness of the human will consists in the proper ordering of love, which is its principal act. Rightly ordered love is to love God above all things as our supreme good, and to refer to him everything that we love as our ultimate goal, and to observe the proper order in loving other things by preferring spiritual to bodily goods. To excite our love towards God, there was no more powerful way than that the Word of God, through whom all things were made, should assume our human nature in order to restore it, so that he would be both God and man. First of all, because the strongest way God could show how much he loves man was his willing to become man for his salvation; and nothing can provoke love more than to know that one is loved.

Then also, man whose intellect and affections are weighed down towards bodily things cannot easily turn to things that are above himself. It is easy for any man to know and love another man, but to think of the divine highness and be carried to it by the proper affection of love is not for everyone, but only for those who, by God’s help and with great effort and labour, are lifted up from bodily to spiritual things. Therefore, to open the way to God for everyone, God willed to become man, so that even children could know and love God as someone like themselves; and so by what they can grasp they can progress little by little to perfection.

Also, for God to become man gave man the hope of eventually participating in perfect happiness, which only God naturally has. If man, knowing his weakness, were promised the eventual happiness of which angels are hardly capable, since it consists in the vision and enjoyment of God, he could hardly hope to reach it unless the dignity of human nature was demonstrated in another way, namely, by God valuing it so highly that he became man for his salvation. So God’s becoming man gave us hope that man can eventually be united to God in blessed enjoyment.

Man’s knowledge of his dignity, coming from God’s assuming a human nature, helps to keep him from subjecting his affections to any creature, whether by worshipping demons or any creatures through idolatry or by subjecting himself to bodily creatures through disordered affection. For if man has such a great dignity by God’s judgement and he is so close to him that God wanted to become man, it is unworthy of man to subject himself improperly to things inferior to God.