Chapter 6 investigates Augustine’s explanation, in De trinitate, of how the single paschal mystery of Christ’s dead and resurrected flesh harmonizes with our double paschal mystery, serving both as the sacrament of the spiritual death and resurrection of our interior man and as the example of the fleshly death and resurrection of our exterior man. As Augustine recognizes, the sacramentality and exemplarity of Christ’s fleshly death and resurrection are furnished to us on account of our spiritual blindness. In exegeting the theophany of God’s back to Moses, Augustine observes that living faith in Christ’s resurrection makes us friends with God and socializes us anew within the Catholic Church. Augustine articulates how Christ, the humble mediator of life, has vanquished the devil, the proud mediator of death, and his demonic and human associates, by the justice of Christ’s obedience unto death, and by the power of Christ’s resurrection to eternal life.

In this chapter I argue that we should take seriously the numerous vivid images of material begetting in Gregory of Nyssa’s Against Eunomius because they provide him with a more experientially based, and so intuitive, way to conceive of the hard-to-grasp idea that the first and second Person of the Trinity were both distinct entities and also unified in essence or nature. However, I shall also argue that Gregory was at the same time continuously correcting problems that an intuitive model of begetting might bring to the divine by returning to more theologically correct, reflective ways of conceiving of the divine. I shall argue that via this oscillation between intuitive ways of thinking about the divine and reflective and theological ways of thinking about it, which Ilkka Pyysiӓinen has argued is normal for theological discourse, Gregory was able to present the Trinity as what Dan Sperber has defined as a ‘relevant mystery’.