Reading again through Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”: Day 14 (Christ, the Perfect Man, and the Wisdom of God)

“I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I could not find this meas until I embraced the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ, who is a man, like them, and also rules as God over all things, blessed for ever. He was calling to me and saying I am the way; I am truth and life. He it was who united with our flesh that food which I was too weak to take; for the Word was made flesh so that your Wisdom, by which you created all things, might be milk to suckle us in infancy. For I was not humble enough to conceive of the humble Jesus Christ as my God, nor had I learnt what lesson his human weakness was meant to teach. The lesson is that your Word, the enteral Truth, which far surpasses even the higher part of your creation, raises up to himself all who subject themselves to him. From the clay of which we are made he built for himself a lowly house in this world below, so that by this means he might cause those who were to be made subject to him to abandon themselves and come o his side. He would cure them of the pride that swelled up in their hears and would nurture love in its place, so that they should no longer stride ahead confident in themselves, but might realize their own weakness when at their feet they saw God himself, enfeebled by sharing this garment of our mortality. And at last, from weariness, they would cast themselves down upon his humanity, and when it rose they too would rise…

So, granted that what the Scriptures say is true, I accepted that Christ was perfect man. I did think of him as having only the body o fa man or man’s body and sensitive soul without his reasoning mind, bu as a man complete. And I thought he was superior to other men, not because he Truth in person, but because in him human nature had reached the highest point of excellence and he had a more perfect share of divine wisdom.”