Preface

In treating of God as the Author of Nature and the Supernatural,¹ we showed how the harmony of angelic as well as human nature was seriously disturbed by sin.

For some reason not revealed to us the fallen angels were beyond redemption. St. Thomas thinks that, as they were pure spirits, once they had determined upon evil, their free will became unalterably fixed therein. Other divines hold that the fallen angels were unable to undo their choice because the decision they had made terminated the status viae.

The human race immediately after the Fall was reinstated in grace by virtue of the Protevangelium, i.e., God’s solemn promise that the Second Person of the Trinity should redeem the sinful race and reconstitute it in the state of adoptive sonship. “Where sin abounded, grace did more abound.”²

Intimately bound up with the mystery of the Incarnation is that of the Redemption. Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, Son of God, and Himself true God,³ offered Himself up as a sacrifice (in His human nature), and gave adequate satisfaction for our sins by His agonizing death on the Cross. “For God indeed was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself by Christ, not imputing to them their sins.”⁴

In this dogmatic treatise on the Incarnation, we assume the existence of Jesus Christ as a historical fact, leaving it to Apologetics to refute such infidel objections as that the Gospel story is merely a legendary reflex of the Gilgamesh epic,⁵ etc.

In regard to the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption, Divine Revelation proposes to our belief two distinct series of truths. Those which concern the Person of the Redeemer form the ground-work of the dogmatic treatise called Christology; those which refer specifically to the Redemption are dealt with in Soteriology, to which we shall devote a separate volume. The Blessed Virgin Mary, as Deipara, is causally related both to the Incarnation and the Redemption, and must therefore be treated in connection with both. This gives us another separate treatise, called Mariology, which will form the sixth volume of the present series.

Notes