Our inward eyes and spiritual eyesight and vision have been darkened by the Fall, and so Jesus Christ in the flesh began to bring us back to inward spiritual vision and memory by appearing to us on the outside of ourselves, so that we could begin to see what we it looks like to obey God, fear God, and to perfect God’s will as a human being. We needed another self outside of ourselves in order to become reacquainted with the selves we are made to become but have willfully forgotten. And so Christ re-enacted our original condition and relation to God for us –the condition that we had in Adam but forsook, in order to acclimate us to our real selves, who and what we should be in the presence of God the Father and through the power of the Holy Spirit. For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. (1 Corinthians i. 21) To those who are full of their own wisdom, Christ Jesus is a fool. But to those who realize that their wisdom can’t save them and has, actually, got them into more trouble than they expected, the foolishness of God in Jesus Christ is a welcome medicine! Let us look at this Jesus, listen to Him, see what He does in order to bring us back to our true selves. Let us follow Him even into suffering and death so that we might die and come alive to Him, at length, on the inside of ourselves and in the secrets of our hearts.
Commentary on St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, i. 12
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