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ESSAY
XI
JESUS
CHRIST, GOD AND MAN
by
Rev. George D. Smith
I.
INTRODUCTORY
An essay so
small upon a subject so vast as “Jesus Christ, God and Man” seems to
require a few preliminary words to define its scope.
This is the first of four essays in the present volume devoted to
the theology of the Incarnation, and its object is to explain, so far as
space will permit, the doctrine of the hypostatic union, that is, the
admirable union of the human and the divine nature in the adorable Person
of our Lord Jesus Christ. For
this is the fundamental truth regarding our holy Redeemer, and if this is
denied or misconstrued all else that is said of him must be either false
or inadequate.
Christ is the
model of manhood, he is the exemplar of every human virtue and perfection,
he is the man who has been loved and reverenced more than any other since
the world began. But his
human nature is perfect because it is the humanity of God himself; his
love has won all hearts because it is the human love of God.
He is the Man of Sorrows, he stands out in history as the Sufferer.
Well could he say through the mouth of his prophet, “Attend and
see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow” (Jer. Lament. i 12);
there could be no other such sorrow because there could be no other human
nature so sensitive and so perfect, none with such capacity for suffering
as the humanity which God had made his own.
He is our High Priest and Redeemer.
But he could have been neither, unless he were both God and Man.
By reason of his very Person he is the ideal Mediator between God
and men; being man he can offer sacrifice to God; and because he is God
his sacrifice is of infinite value.
The
hypostatic union, therefore, is the foundation of the whole of the
Catholic teaching about Christ. In
fact, so dominated are Catholic theologians by the vital importance of
this fundamental truth that they have been accused of emphasizing the
divinity of Christ at the expense of his true manhood.
“Although the Church theoretically maintains the humanity of
Christ side by side with his divinity,” wrote Sabatier (Esquisse
d’une philosophie de la religion (Paris, 1897), pp. 179—180),
“the latter inevitably absorbs everything.
The traditional Christology is incurably docetist; so much so that
from this point of view it has become practically impossible to write a
serious life of Jesus Christ.” How
little this accusation is justified may be seen from several monumental
works on the life of Christ which have appeared in late years from the pen
of Catholic scholars (E.g. L. Fillion: The Life of Christ,
tr. (Herder, 1928-30), 3 vols.; Archbishop Goodier: The Public Life of
Jesus Christ (Burns Oates and Washbourne), 1930, 2 vols.),
and also from the two immediately succeeding essays in which an account is
given of the human life and experience of our Savior.
If the Church jealously safeguards the true divinity of Christ, she
is no less intransigent upon his real humanity; for the one no less than
the other is revealed by God, the one no less than the other is essential
to the work of the Redemption.
Comparatively
little space will be devoted in the present essay to the purely scriptural
basis of our faith in the divinity of Christ, in the first place because
for those who accept the gospels as the inspired word of God, as all
Catholics do, it is enough to read a few pages of the gospel of St. John
to be persuaded that Christ is truly God, and secondly because the faith
of the Church on this point becomes luminously clear as we follow the
Christological controversies of the first six centuries.
The Catholic Church has ever re-echoed the profession of faith of
St. Peter, the rock and foundation upon which she is built: “Thou art
the Christ, the Son of the living God”: so that the dogmatic letter of
Pope Leo I (449), in which the dogma of the hypostatic union was defined
in precisely the same terms in which theologians teach it today, was
acclaimed by the Fathers of the Council of Chalcedon with the cry:
“Peter has spoken by the mouth of Leo.”
To the
history of these controversies more particular attention will be paid,
since the study of them will enable us to understand the exact meaning of
the famous dogmatic definitions of the Church on the union of the two
natures in the one person of Christ.
The fuller appreciation of all that is involved in the hypostatic
union will lead us to consider its consequences as far as they concern the
Person of the Word Incarnate, and in particular the preternatural and
supernatural perfections of his human nature.
The
theme is profound–for we are dealing with a mystery–and the manner of
treatment must accordingly reflect something of the abstruse character of
the subject. “So then, let our human weakness sink under God’s glory,
and ever find itself inadequate to the exposition of the works of his
mercy. Let our thoughts fail,
let our minds be at a loss, let our utterance fade; for it is good that we
should feel how imperfect are even our true thoughts concerning the
majesty of the Lord” (St. Leo, Serm. 11, de Passione Domini).
II.
GOD WITH US
1.
The Fatherhood of God
Christianity
has been defined as the religion of the Fatherhood of God; and, properly
understood, the definition is perhaps as good as any that could be given.
Even a superficial reading of the Gospels leaves the predominant
impression that God is the Father; and St. John himself seems to regard
this as a suitable summing up of the Christian revelation when he says,
“No man hath seen God at any time.
The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath
declared him” (John i, 18).
But the
definition is one which needs explanation.
An entirely inadequate conception of Christianity would restrict
the revelation of Christ to the bare statement that God is the provident
Father of all his creatures, and in particular that he has a special care
for the human race. If this
were so then Christ would have added little to what was already common
knowledge among the Patriarchs of the Old Testament, or indeed to what the
human reason is able, even without revelation, to discern.
The Jews, who knew their Scriptures well, could have found in any
one page of their sacred books abundant evidence of the providential care
of God for the chosen people of Israel, and the author of the Book of
Wisdom speaks clearly enough of the wisdom of God that “reacheth from
end to end mightily and ordereth all things sweetly (viii 1), ordering all
things in measure and number and weight” (xi 21); for “he made the
little and the great, and he hath equally care of all.”
But the revelation of Christ concerning the Fatherhood of God is a
mystery “which in other generations was not known to the sons of men”;
it had been “hidden from eternity in God, who created all things”
(Eph. iii 5, 9); it is a “wisdom which is hidden, which God ordained
before the world, unto our glory.”
Hence when St. Peter made his profession of faith in Christ,
saying: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Christ
answered him: “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona, because flesh and blood
hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven.”
Thus the apparently simple statement, that God is the Father, has a
meaning unspeakably profound. Let
us try, with all reverence, to penetrate it.
2.
Christ the natural Son of God
It
is clear, first of all, that Christ presents himself as standing in a
unique relation to God his Father. Already
St. Augustine had acutely remarked that he never places himself on a level
with the rest of mankind by addressing God as “our Father” (In
Joannem, tr. 21, 3).
He refers to God as his Father, and when he has occasion to
associate himself with us he seems careful to preserve the distinction
between our sonship and the much higher relationship in which he himself
stands to God (See Matt. xxv 34; xxvi 29; Luke xxiv 49). What that relationship is emerges clearly from numerous
passages of the New Testament: he is the only-begotten of the Father.
“God hath sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we may
live by him” (1 John iv 9);
formerly God had spoken to men through the prophets, now he spoke in his
son (Heb. i 1-2); formerly
he had sent his “servants,” and these had been mocked and spurned, now
he sent “his own most dear son,” whom he thought they might reverence (Mark
xii 1-12).
He sent him that he might reveal the Father to mankind; for he
alone had seen the Father.
It
was an axiom with the Jews that no man could see God and live.
“No man,” says St. John, “hath seen God at any time; the
only-begotten son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared
him” (John i 18). The consequence is evident: Christ is God.
He is the Son of God in the strictest sense of the word, the Son of
God because he has received the divine nature from the Father by eternal
generation. “All things,”
he says, “are delivered to me by my Father. And no one knoweth the Son but the Father, neither doth
anyone know the Father but the Son and he to whom it shall please the Son
to reveal him” (Matt. xi 27).
The Father and the Son have an intimate and exclusive knowledge of
each other, a knowledge which can be imparted to others only a special
favor. Christ could not have
expressed more clearly his claim to be God; for none but God can see God
as he is.
3.
Our adoptive sonship
Christ,
then, is the son of God by nature; and he came to reveal to us the Father,
whose sons we are by adoption. “Behold,”
says St. John (1 John iii 1 seq.)
“what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should
be called and should be the sons of God.
Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God, and it hath not yet
appeared what we shall be. We
know that when he shall appear we shall be like to him, for we shall see
him as he is”; or, according to St. Paul, “then I shall know even as I
am known” (1 Cor. xiii 12). We are the sons of God by adoption, partakers of the divine
nature, as St. Peter calls us, because we are destined by divine
supernatural favor to enjoy that vision of God which is naturally proper
to God himself alone. Christ
is shown to be the only-begotten son of God, not merely a partaker of the
divine nature, but truly and essentially God, because he enjoys this
intimate and intuitive knowledge of the divinity as his own natural right.
This then is
the meaning of the divine Fatherhood which Christ came to reveal to us:
the true and only-begotten Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed
Trinity, assumes our human nature that we may be made partakers of his
divinity; the divine life, which is in the Word incarnate in all its
fullness, is communicated to us through his humanity; God’s own Son
lives and dies as man in our midst in order that we may become co-heirs
with him of eternal life, adopted sons of God by a real participation in
that divine nature which is his by eternal generation.
This association of mankind with Christ in his filial relation to
the Father, and yet this contrast between his natural filiation and our
own adoptive sonship, may truly be said to constitute the essence of the
Christian revelation.
4.
Christ truly God
In
the light of Christ’s divine sonship strictly so-called the mysterious
announcement of the Angel Gabriel to his blessed Mother becomes luminously
clear: “The Holy Ghost
shall come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee,
and therefore also the Holy that shall be born of thee shall be called (A
hebraism for “shall be”) the
Son of God” (Luke 1 35).
No wonder then that her cousin Elizabeth hailed her as blessed
among women, humbly confused by the honor of this visit from the “mother
of the Lord”; no wonder that the Precursor himself, though yet unborn,
is constrained to give testimony to the presence of the divine Messias by
leaping in his mother’s womb. We
may also note as particularly significant the fact that the first spoken
words of Christ related in the Gospel are a reference to his divine
Sonship–“Know you not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke
ii 49)–and that his public life
begins with a most solemn revelation of his unique relationship to the
Father: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt.
iii 17). Hence he justly claimed a love and a reverence due to God
alone (John vi 29-47; xi 26; xiv 1; xiv 21-28; xvi 7-13);
since he is eternal he lived before the time of Abraham (ibid.
viii 52-56); he has power to
forgive sins by his own authority, a power which the Pharisees recognized
to be divine (Mark ii 1-12). Being the Son of God he spoke with authority, no longer
merely conveying a message from God, as the prophets had done, “Thus
saith the Lord,” but making laws in his own name: “I say unto you”;
he had power to perfect, and if necessary even to set aside as obsolete,
the prescriptions of the Old Testament; he is greater than David, he is
Lord of the Sabbath. Nor did
the Jews misunderstand his claim. They
knew well that he was calling himself God.
“Art thou then the Son of God?” asked Caiphas; and when Jesus
answered that he was indeed, he was accused of blasphemy and regarded as
worthy of death (Luke xxii 67-71). This was the reason why from the beginning they had sought to
kill him. It was not because
of his works that they took up stones to cast at him, but for blasphemy,
and because being a man, he made himself God (John x 30-33),
and “because he said that God was his Father, making himself equal to
God” (Ibid. v 18).
His
disciples, too, had well understood their Master’s teaching.
“Being in the form of God,” says St. Paul (Phil. ii 6-7),
“he thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself,
taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in
habit found as a man.” The
same Apostle in his epistle to the Collossians gives us a sublime
description of the person and prerogatives of Christ.
Having called him the image of the invisible God, the first born of
all creatures (i.e. born before all creatures), he continues, in a
passage so magnificent that any commentary would but weaken its force:
“In him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and
invisible . . . and he is before all, and by him all things consist” (i
15 seq). The opening words
of the epistle to the Hebrews are reminiscent of the first chapter of the
Gospel of St. John, so explicitly do they affirm that Christ is God:
“God . . . in these days hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath
appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world.
Who being the brightness of his glory and the figure of his
substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power . . . sitteth
on the right hand of the majesty on high.
Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath inherited a
more excellent name than they. For to which of the angels hath he said at any time, ‘Thou
art my Son, today have I begotten thee’?”
But
most clearly of all speaks St. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved.
It was to prove that Christ was God that he wrote what we know as
the fourth gospel. “These
things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son
of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (xx 31).
His account of the life of Christ opens with words very similar to
the first words of the book of Genesis.
But whereas the author of the Pentateuch was concerned only with
the origin of created things, St. John speaks of the timeless origin of
the Word, born of the Father from all eternity: “In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
When the universe came into being he, the Word, already was, for it
was through him that all things were made.
He came forth from God into the world as the light into the
darkness, to reveal the Father to mankind and to enable men to be born
again as the adopted sons of God, raised by God’s favor to be brethren
of Christ, the only-begotten of the Father.
Such is the theme of the prologue of the fourth gospel; such is the
theme throughout: “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
5.
Christ truly man
But
he who proclaims himself so clearly to be God is undoubtedly also a man.
He is conceived and born of a human mother.
We see him now as an infant, now as a young boy, growing in stature
and in wisdom. He grows to manhood, living in subjection to his parents.
We see him finally as a grown man; he is truly a man, subject to
the ordinary laws of human life; he is hungry and eats, he is weary and
rests, he is sorrowful and weeps, he suffers and dies.
In all things he behaves as a man; he is a man.
St. John, who is so solicitous to show that Christ is God, is no
less emphatic concerning the reality of his human nature.
The Apostles had touched him with their hands, they had seen him
with their eyes; they knew that he was a man (1 John i 1).
And they knew also that he was God.
God
with us; Jesus Christ, God and Man. This
is the mystery of the Incarnation.
III.
DENIALS AND DEFINITIONS
The doctrine of
the Incarnation as stated above is a stupendous truth, but its formulation
contains no words that may be called technically philosophical.
Equally simple is the language of the Apostles’ Creed in which we
profess our belief in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was crucified and
died for us. And so indeed
the dogma of the Incarnation was expressed during the first two centuries
of the Christian era. The
early (or Apostolic) Fathers, in teaching this, as the other doctrines of
the Church, use the terminology of Scripture.
It was only when, with the rise of heresy, it became important to
emphasize now this and now that aspect of the truth, that the dogmas of
the faith were formulated with greater technical precision.
1.
Gnostics, Manicheans, Docetists
Of
the first heresies concerning the Person of Christ we already find mention
in the New Testament. These
errors take the form either of denying the true humanity of Christ or of
rejecting his true divinity, and in either form they had a more or less
continuous history during the first four centuries of the Christian era.
The Gnostics, and later the Manicheans of the second and third
centuries, held that matter was essentially evil, the product of the god
of evil. For this reason they
denied the resurrection of the body and also the possibility of any
association of God with matter. Evidently
to such the idea of a divine incarnation was repugnant.
In the endeavor to make a compromise between Christianity and their
philosophical tenets they taught that Christ had not a real body, but
merely the appearance of a body, thus reducing the whole of Christ’s
human life to a pretence; hence the name given to these heretics, the
Docetists (from a Greek word meaning “to appear”).
St. Paul is probably referring to early advocates of this view
when, in his second epistle to Timothy (vi 20),
he speaks of the followers of a false science that merits not the name,
and insists upon the mediatorship of the man Christ Jesus.
The epistles of St. John also contain clear references to these
early opponents of the Incarnation. “Every
one,” he says, “that confesseth not Jesus in the flesh is not of
God” (1 John iv 3; cf. 2 John 7). Hence the emphatic opening of his first letter: “What we
have seen with our eyes and touched with our hands of the word of life . .
. that which we have seen and heard we declare unto you.”
Docetism
was refuted later in turn by St. Irenaeus, Tertullian, and St. Augustine. Tertullian, in particular, wrote a complete work, De Carne
Christi, against the docetism of the Marcionites.
2.
Ebionites
But more
dangerous and more long-lived were the heresies that denied the divinity
of Christ. A Jewish sect, the
Ebionites, held that Christ, the son of Joseph and Mary, was a great man
indeed, but yet a mere man. The
spirit of God, they said, descended upon him at his baptism, raising him
to the dignity of adopted son of God.
It was against this heresy that St. John wrote his Gospel to prove
the divinity of Christ, and it is to this sect that he refers in his first
epistle as the antichrist who denies that Jesus is the Son of God (ii 22,
23). Certain Jews who set the
angels higher than Jesus are refuted by St. Paul in his epistle to the
Colossians, and the same are probably in his mind when, at the beginning
of his epistle to the Hebrews, he extols the majesty of Christ above all
the categories of the heavenly spirits: “To whom of the angels hath he
said at an time, ‘Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee’?”
3.
Adoptionists
This
error appeared again in Rome at the end of the second century under the
name of Adoptionism, associated with the names of Theodotus the Currier
and Theodotus the Banker. Here
too the champion of orthodoxy was Tertullian, who in this connection has
given us a treatise on the divinity of Christ, Adversus Praxean.
In fact it is in this work that Tertullian provides the first
attempt at a technical formulation of the mystery of the Incarnation:
“We see plainly the twofold state, which is not confounded, but
conjoined in one Person, Jesus Christ, God and man. . . . Forasmuch as the
two substances (“Natures,” we should say)
acted distinctly each in its own character, there necessarily accrued to
them severally their own operations and their own issues” (Ch.
27. Note the similarity
between this passage and the famous Dogmatic Letter of Leo the Great. Cf.
p. 373).
4.
Paul of Samosata–Antioch and Alexandria
A
similar doctrine to that of Theodotus–but with a more important
outcome–was taught in the East by Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch (c.
260). The mention of the see
of Antioch makes it opportune at this point to call attention to the two
great theological schools of Alexandria and Antioch, which played so
important a part in the Christological conotroversies of the fifth
century. The school of Antioch was characterized by a spirit of rigid
adherence to the letter of Scripture and by the tendency to view
theological problems from a positive standpoint.
Thus the Antiochenes approached the study of the Person of Christ
from what we may call the historical angle.
Christ was portrayed in the Gospels as being God and as being also
man; hence they tended to insist upon the distinction of the two natures
in Christ. The Alexandrian
spirit, on the other hand, was mystical and speculative, and the
theologians of that school were inclined to stress rather the unity of
Christ than the distinction of his two natures.
The exaggeration of these tendencies led respectively to the
heresies of Nestorianism and Monophysism.
Paul of Samosata, then, taught that Christ was a man, but a man in
whom the mind of God–the Logos–dwelt in a special way; if he is called
God it is only by reason of his intimate union with the Word of God.
This doctrine, condemned in a synod of Antioch (267-268), is
important because it was the prelude to Arianism which denied the divinity
of the Word.
The
end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth were occupied
with the great Trinitarian heresies, into which we cannot enter here,
except to remark that the Christological problem could not be precisely
formulated or solved until the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity of Persons
in God had been put beyond misunderstanding.
It was obviously premature to discuss the exact relation of the
human nature to the divine nature in Christ until the divinity of the Word
was vindicated against heretics. With
the Council of Nicaea in 325 this was done, and the arena was thus cleared
for the great Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth
centuries.
5.
Diodore
We may
conveniently resume our study of these with Diodore, Bishop of Tarsus
(378), founder of the second great school of Antioch.
Anxious, in accordance with the Antiochene tradition, to safeguard
the integrity of the two natures in Chrsit, Diodore, as far as we are able
to gather from the fragments of his works that remain, accentuated the
distinction between Christ’s humanity and divinity to the point of
separation, so that for him God is one person and Christ another.
These two were intimated united, indeed, but only as God is
intimately united with a creature in whom he dwells as in a temple and in
whom he works his will. The influence of Paul of Samosata is manifest.
Nevertheless it is only fair to remember that other influences were
at work. The school of
Alexandria at the same time had a leader whose exaggerations in the
opposite sense Diodore justly reprobated, namely, Apollinaris, Bishop of
Laodicea (360).
6.
Apollinaris
The
teaching of Apollinaris is typical as showing the excesses to which
insistence upon the unity of Christ could lead.
It seemed to him that if the human nature of Christ was admitted to
be complete it must constitute a human person distinct from the Person of
the Word. One would thus, he
argued, be reduced to the heresy of Paul of Samosata, now renewed by
Diodore of Tarsus, that Christ the son of Mary was one person and the Son
of God another. The only way,
he thought, of saving the unity of Christ was to admit that his humanity
was incomplete, lacking in some essential element which the Word, by
uniting himself with it, would supply.
He therefore taught that Christ lacked an intellectual soul (Arius
had taught that the Word took the place of a human soul in Christ.
But Apollinaris differed from Arius inasmuch as he distinguished
three elements in man: body, soul, and spirit, i.e. intellect.
The last-named is proper to man and this, according to Apollinaris,
was lacking to the humanity of Christ),
the place of this being taken by the second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
Hence while Diodore sacrificed the unity of the Person of Christ to
the integrity of his two natures, Apollinaris had recourse to the
mutilation of his humanity in order to save the unity of his Person.
These
two opposite excesses, that of Diodore and that of Apollinaris, led
subsequently to the two famous heresies of Nestorianism and Monophysism.
It may not, however, be out of place here to remind the reader that
these men were, as far as we know, sincerely groping after a precise
statement of the scriptural truth that Christ is both God and man.
Neither school, Antiochene or Alexandrian, set out with the
professed object of denying either the integrity of his human nature or
the unity of his Person. It
was no doubt their honest endeavor to safeguard both; but the fact is that
in seeking for an expression of the truth they fell into heresy.
7.
Theodore
More
famous than Diodore was his pupil Theodore of Mpsuestia (392-428), who
synthesized and developed the theory already outlined by his master.
True to the Antiochene tradition, he emphasized the reality and the
completeness of Christ’s human nature.
The humanity of Christ was united to God, he said, because God
dwelt therein as in a temple. In Christ God had put his complacence, and in him willed to
accomplish all things; and since Christ was the temple of the divinity he
shared with God the honors of divine worship.
Nevertheless, in spite of the exuberant terms in which Theodore
extols the union of Christ with God, it remains that Christ and God are
two different persons; God was in Christ, but Christ was not God.
Throughout
this controversy it is the so-called “communication of properties”
that is the touchstone of orthodoxy.
If Christ was one individual who was truly God and truly man, then
the properties and activities of either the human or the divine nature
might with equal truth be attributed to him.
If God truly became man, while remaining God, one might say of him
that God died on the cross, that he was born of the Virgin Mary, that Mary
was the mother of God, that Christ, who was passible and mortal according
to his humanity, was omnipotent, eternal, the Creator of all things,
according to his divinity. Now it was precisely here that the Christology of Theodore
failed. He refused to admit
that Mary was Theotokos–Mother of God.
The same acid test revealed the heresy of his still better known
disciple, Nestorius.
8.
Nestorius
This
man, with whom the heresy we have been describing is historically always
associated, became Patriarch of Constantinople in the year 427.
In the following year he made known his views on the Person of
Christ when he defended one of his priests, Anatasius, who in a sermon had
refused to Our Lady the title of Mother of God.
It was the teaching of Theodore of Mopsuestia publicly proclaimed,
and it caused a great stir in Constantinople, where both clergy and laity
soon became divided into two parties.
9.
St. Cyril of Alexandria
St.
Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, now entered the lists against Nestorius,
and in acrimonious dispute followed which culminated in the condemnation
of the latter at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
It is beyond the scope of this little essay to describe at any
length the intrigues that preceded, accompanied, and followed the Council. Some modern historians have tried to show that Cyril was
actuated chiefly, if not solely, by motives of jealousy in his opposition
to Nestorius; the latter being represented as the champion of orthodoxy,
unjustly persecuted by his powerful rival in Alexandria.
But a sober consideration of the documents leads one inevitably to
the conclusion that, while the antagonism between the rival sees cannot be
overlooked as a factor in the situation, nevertheless Nestorius was
definitely unorthodox, while Cyril, despite some inexactitudes of
expression–not unnatural in view of the vagueness of current
terminology–stood for the traditional teaching of teh Church on the
Person of the Word Incarnate.
10.
Terminology
It
is impossible to form anything like a just estimate of the merits of this
monumental controversy without some understanding of the terms used by the
participants. In fact the
vagueness of the language of either side contributed in no small measure
to the prolongation of the dispute. The
words used nowadays by the Catholic theologian in formulating the dogma of
the Incarnation have a definite meaning, so that, to the Catholic at any
rate, it is clear enough what is meant when it is said that in Christ
there are two natures and one person.
Not so to the Greek of the fifth century. He
did not possess even the clear Greek equivalents of “nature” and
“person.” The difficulty of terminology had already been acutely felt
in the discussion on the Trinity, in which it had been necessary to find
words to express the unity of the divine essence or nature on the one
hand, and the Trinity of divine persons on the other.
Four words were avaiable: ousia,
phusis, hypostasis, prosopon. After
a great deal of discussion it was agreed to use the word ousia to indicate
the one divine essence and to reserve the word hypostasis for
person. The word phusis
(nature) was little used in connection with the Trinity.
The word prosopon, the exact Greek equivalent of the Latin
persona, was for a long time suspect, since it had been used by the
Sabellians in an unorthodox sense (The Sabellians used the word in
the etymological sense of a mask, or character, and said the one person
was called Father, Son or Holy Ghost according to the activities he
exercised in relation to creatures. See Essay iv); but
eventually it was accepted as the equivalent of hypostatis.
For the purposes of Trinitarian doctrine the rough and ready
distinction made by St. Basil between ousia and hypostatis
served well enough. The
essence, he said, is that which is common to all the individuals of a
species, while the person adds to the essence the individual
characteristics that distinguish them one from another.
But the explanation is superficial, and its inadequacy became
apparent when applied to the Christological problem of two concrete
natures subsisting in one person.
Nestorius
said that in Christ there were two physical persons, but only one person
of union. What did he mean?
Apparently, that so far as their physical reality was concerned the
human nature and the divine nature in Christ were distinct.
This, of course, was perfectly true.
But what did he mean by the “person of union”?
The person of union, for Nestorius, had a particular name:
“Christ,” and was simply the man Christ, considered as endowed with
the special indwelling of God. Hence
Mary, he said, was Christotokos, Mother of Christ; to call her Theotokos,
Mother of God, was to confuse the natures and to make Mary the mother of
the divinity.
On
the other hand, Cyril of Alexandria made frequent use of the word phusis,
nature. His axiom was :
“The incarnate nature of the Word is one.”
Nestorius said that this was siimply the heresy of Apollinaris; and
surely enough it was, if Cyril had used the words in the sense in which
Apollinaris had used them. But
by phusis or nature Cyril did not mean what Apollinaris meant, nor
what we mean by nature. When
Cyril said that the incarnate nature of the Word was one he meant that
Christ was one concrete individual, God and Man, which of course was
perfectly orthodox. Why,
then, did he not say that Christ was one person who had two natures?
Simply because there were no words which were quite unequivocal to
indicate person and nature. If
he had said “one prosopon” he would not sufficiently have
distinguished his doctrine from that of Nestorius, who also, but in his
own sense, admitted one prosopon in Christ, namely, the prosopon
of union, by which God dwelt in Christ as in a temple.
Hence Cyril, to indicate that the union of divinity and humanity in
Christ was in the substantial order of personality, used the word phusis,
and spoke of a “physical union” as opposed to a moral union.
“A physical union,” he explains, “that is, a true union, . .
. a union according to hypostatis” (Apol. pro xii cap. (P.G.
76, 332, 405).
But
it is easy to understand why Nestorius, and many others, took exception to
the language of Cyril. To
speak of a physical union of the two natures in Christ was to lay himself
open to the accusation of holding with Apollinaris that the two natures
are merged in one, and that the human nature of Christ was not complete.
He found it necessary on this account to justify himself and to
explain the sense in which he used these equivocal phrases.
11.
Theotokos
This
being so, the real discussion was centered upon a point which is really a
consequence of the unity of Christ’s person, that of the divine
Motherhood of Mary. Here
Cyril was on firm ground and here the heresy of Nestorius became manifest.
It was vain for the latter to declare that to admit the Divine
Motherhood of Mary was to make Mary the mother of the divine nature.
What Cyril insisted was, not that Mary had given birth to the
divinity–that would be absurd–but that the same individual, the Word,
who was born eternally of the Father according to the divinity, was born
in time of the Virgin Mary according to his humanity.
It was precisely this that Nestorius denied, and his denial of
Mary’s divine Motherhood showed him to be unorthodox on the Incarnation.
12.
Ephesus–“Symbol of Union”
Nestorius,
then, was condemned and deposed from his see by the Council of Ephesus.
John, the Patriarch of Antioch, for some time defended Nestorius,
but two years later he was reconciled with Cyril, and the agreement of
Alexandrians and Antiochenes was recorded in the “Symbol of Union” of
433. In this document the
Antiochene contention that the two natures of Christ, human and divine,
were complete and unmingled was embodied, while the Alexandrian solicitue
for the unity of the person of Christ was fully satisfied by the statement
that one and the same individual who was born eternally of the Father
according to the divinity was the son of Mary according to his humanity,
and the right of Mary to the title of “Mother of God” was explicitly
acknolwedged.
13.
Monophysism
The
exaggerations of what we may call the “separatist” school of thought
had been condemned and the unity of the person of Christ was vindicated.
But not everybody was yet satisfied.
There was still no terminology sufficiently exact to exclude all
misunderstanding. It has been
seen that Cyril had spoken of one nature in Christ, and although this
expression had been excluded from the “Symbol of Union” and Cyril, for
the rest, had used it in an orthodox sense as meaning one person in
Christ, yet some of the disciples of Cyril were not so orthodox as their
master. Among these was
Eutyches who, by his indiscreet zeal and ignorance, gave rise in the year
448 to a further doctrinal dispute, regrettable no doubt for the peace of
his contemporaries, but providential inasmuch as it led to that
amplification and exaactness given to the formularies of belief which made
all further equivocation impossible.
Eutyches
refused to admit that the body of our Lord was consubstantial (of the same
nature) with ours, or that after the union in him of human and divine
natures it was legitimate to speak of two natures.
Whatever may have been the inner belief of the simple old monk, the
refusal to admit that Christ had a body like ours gave rise to suspicion
since it left room to doubt whether, according to such a view, there had
been any real Incarnation at all. As
for his rejection of the phrase “two natures,” he said, Cyril had
spoken of one nature, and he did not intend to depart from the teaching of
his master. It was the old
difficulty of terminology again.
14.
Leo I
Without
considering the various phases of the new heresy of Monophysism, it is
sufficient to note two things: first, that just as Nestorianism
represented the reductio ad absurdum of the Antiochene tendency to
separate the natures, so Monophysism is the heresy involved in
exaggerating the unity of Christ. Cyril
had said “one nature” and had been orthodox in meaning; the
Monophysites said “one nature” and were unorthodox, because they meant
that the two natures were merged into one.
The second important thing about Monophysism is that, on appeal
being made to Rome to settle this further dispute, the Dogmatic Letter of
Pope Leo I was written, a letter afterwards adopted as the rule of faith
by the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451.
This famous
letter is important by reason of its wonderful precision of language.
While in the East there had been the verbal misunderstandings which
we have described, the theologians of the West had been but little
troubled with such difficulties. We
have seen that the Latin terminology was already clearly defined at the
beginning of the third century with Tertullian, who already speaks of a
“twofold state, not confounded but conjoined in one Person Jesus
Christ.” Thanks to this
early crystallization of the dogma, theologians in the West were little
affected by the Christological controversies which divided the East for
well-nigh a hundred years. Clear
thinking, clearly expressed is the keynote of Pope Leo’s letter: “The
properties of the two natures being safeguarded and being united in one
person, majesty took upon itself humility, power weakness, eternity
mortality; and to pay our debts an impassible nature was united to a
passible one, so that one and the same mediator of God and men, the man
Jesus Christ, might on the one hand die and on the other be immortal. . .
. Each nature keeps what is proper to it, and just as his divine condition
does not destroy his human condition, so his condition of servant does not
diminish his divinity.”
15.
Councils of Chalcedon and Constantinople II
Litttle
else remained to be done in the Councils of Chalcedon (451) and
Constantinople II (553) than to consolidate the advance already made, by
enshrining in an official formula the terminology upon which agreement had
been achieved. The following
extracts from their decrees need no commentary.
From the Council of Chalcedon: “In accordance with the teaching
of the holy Fathers we all profess our faith in one and the same Son and
Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in his divinity, perfect in his humanity,
having a rational soul and a body (As against Apollinarianism),
consubstantial with the Father according to the divinity (As
against Arianism), the
consubstantial with us according to his humanity, ‘in all things like as
we are except sin’; born before all ages of the Father according to the
divinity, and the same in these last days born of Mary athe Virgin Mother
of God for us and for our salvation; one and the same Christ the Lord and
only-begotten Son in two natures without confusion, change,
division or separation, the difference of the natures being in no way
suppressed by their union, but the proper manner of existence of each
being safeguarded, while each nature is united with the other in one
person and hypostasis” (As against Monophysismand
Nestorianism).
From the second Council of Constantinople: “If any one understand
the one hypostasis of our Lord Jesus Christ as if it might mean several
hypostases and therefore attempt to introduce into the mystery of Christ
two hypostases or two prosopa, saying that the two prosopa thus
introduced are one according to dignity and honor and adoration, as
Theodore (of Mopsuestia) and Nestorius in their madness wrote;
calumniating the holy Synod of Chalcedon as if it had used the words
“one hypostasis’ in this impious sense; and does not rather confess
that the Word of God was united to flesh according to hypostasis,
and that on this account his hypostasis or prosopon is one, and that in
this sense the holy Council of Chalcedon confessed the hypostasis of our
Lord Jesus Christ to be one, let such a one be anathema.”
IV.
ONE PERSON
1.
“Person” and “Nature”
The doctrine of
the Incarnation as revealed to us in scripture may be stated in these
simple terms: Christ is one
individual who is both God and man. The
Council of Chalcedon defined that Christ is one person who has two
natures, united by a hypostatic union.
The second formulation of the mystery contains nothing more than
the first: it merely states
the same truth in technical and precise terms.
But although the terms nature and person may have a particular
philosophical connotation, the Fathers of the Council of Chalcedon in
defining the dogma of the hypostatic union had not in mind any esoteric
meaning to be attached to them: the words were used in their popular
sense.
What
they meant when they said that Christ was one person may be clearly seen
from the controversies which led up to the definition.
They meant that he is one individual, one subject of attribution;
and this is the meaning that we ordinarily attach to the word.
When we speak of a person we mean a complete existing rational (The
name “person” is reserved for rational or intellectual beings.
An irrational or inanimate individual is called by the generic name
of “individual,” philosophically a “hypostasis,” or suppositum)
being who has his own distinct
individuality, incommunicable to others; one to whom we attribute his own
actions, saying that he thinks, he sits, he walks,
and so on. This
“selfness” or personality we understand to be absolutely
incommunicable; and it is here, perhaps, that we reach the essential
element of personality. The
sense of being alone when I am in mental distress, the feeling that “I
must work this out for myself,” that nobody can possibly understand my
difficulties, these are but evidences in my consciousness of that
splendid, yet in many ways awesome, isolation from every other individual
of my species which constitutes my personality.
The
word nature, too, has a definite meaning in popular usage.
The nature is that which makes a thing what it is; it is
that composite unity of substances, qualities, and powers by means of
which a person acts in a particular way, and in consequence of which he
belongs to a particular category or class of being.
Now ordinarily a complete existing human nature is a human person. But the Council of Chalcedon defined that there is a unique
exception to this rule in the case of the humanity of Christ which,
although it is complete and existing, is nevertheless not a human person. The humanity of Christ was from the very first moment
assumed, appropriated, by the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, so
that Christ is a divine Person, having two natures, a human nature and the
divine.
2.
The hypostatic union
It can hardly
be stressed too much that the doctrine of the hypostatic union thus
defined is nothing more than the revealed doctrine of the Incarnation:
“The Word was made flesh.” It
is not the fruit of human speculation upon the revealed word of God; it is
not a theological conclusion; it is itself a divine revelation.
Hence the hypostatic union precisely as such can never be the
subject of debate among Catholic theologians.
Upon this all Catholics are, and must be, agreed: that the human
nature of Christ, though real and complete, does not constitute a human
person distinct from the Son of God; that the one person of Christ is the
divine Person of the Word who, subsisting eternally in the divine nature,
in the fullness of time took upon himself a human nature and thus is both
truly God and truly man.
3.
Theological theories
But
the theologian is not content to stop here.
In his legitimate desire to enter more deeply into the meaning of
the divine mysteries by applying to them the principles of human reason,
in order to show that although these mysteries are beyond our
comprehension they are not contrary to reason, he analyzes the idea which
are used in the formulation of revealed truth, thus arriving at what the
Vatican Council calls “a most fruitful understanding of mysteries.”
Hence Catholic theologians, while admitting, as in duty bound, that
the humanity of Christ is not a human person, proceed further to inquire
the reason why. What is
lacking, they ask, to this humanity, the presence of which would make it a
human person? What does the
Word supply in this mysterious union so as to make Christ a divine Person?
What, in other words, precisely constitutes personality?
Three questions, clearly, which are really one; put in the first
two forms the question is theological; in its last form it is purely
philosophical. And as the
answer given to the third question varies, so also different answers are
given by theologians to the other two.
Since the
problem of personality is primarily a philosophical one it does not belong
to the theologian as such to attempt to solve it.
Nevertheless the Catholic philosopher is not entirely free to solve
it as he wills. Suppose, for
example, that he forms the opinion–for the rest an erroneous one–that
what constitutes personality is the human soul; there have been
philosophers who have held this view.
Even apart from the metaphysical objects to the theory, such a
position is impossible for the Catholic as a theologian, because it would
lead him logically to the heresy of Arius concerning the person of Christ.
Holding as a Catholic theologian that the humanity of Christ lacked
what was necessary to make him a human person, he would be forced to the
conclusion that Christ had no human soul and that the place of this was
taken by the Word; this is exactly what Arius taught.
Or, if as a philosopher he held that the human intellect is the
essential element in personality, as a theologian he would logically be an
Apollinarist, holding that Christ lacked a human intellect, the place of
this being supplied by the divine Logos.
Hence the
answer given to the philosophical question is by no means a matter of
indifference to the theologian. He
cannot accept a philosophical view of personality which is irreconcilable
with the dogma of the Incarnation. In
fact a moment’s thought will show that, if the truth of the hypostatic
union is to be safeguarded, the constitutive element of personality must
be sought outside the nature itself.
Any philosophical theory identifying the notion of person with that
of nature, or making some element of the nature (such as intellect, will,
consciousness) the essential constituent of personality cannot but have
disastrous results in Christology. And
the reason is that Christ has a perfect and complete human nature, and yet
is not a human person. Whatever
it may be, therefore, that the Word supplies to the humanity of Christ to
make him a divine person, it is certainly not a part of his human nature.
That
this distinction between nature and person is crucial in the matter of the
hypostatic union was felt strongly by the Fathers of the Vatican Council,
who, in view of certain errors current in Germany in the nineteenth
century, had prepared the following draft for a definition on the mystery
of the Incarnation: “Just as in the holy Trinity three distinct persons
subsist in one nature, so in Christ, on the other hand, one person
subsists in two distinct and different natures.
Therefore, in accordance with the teaching of the Fathers all must
understand that the notion of essence, substance, or nature is by no means
to be confused with the notion of hypostasis, subsistence (The
Latin equivalent of hypostasis)
or person, lest one be led into making the statement–manifestly
subversive of the sacred dogmas–that there are as many persons as there
are intellectual or–to use the modern expression–conscious natures”
(It is important, however, to notice that the above statement enjoys no
greater authority than that of the theologians who formulated it.
It is a theological statement upon which all Catholics are agreed;
but, since it was never discussed or embodied by the Council in its
published decrees, it is not as such an article of faith).
But within
the just limits set by orthodoxy theologians enjoy freedom of discussion.
Some content themselves with the theory that the humanity of Christ
was prevented from being a human person by the very fact that it was
assumed by the Word. A human
nature is a person, they maintain, if it is not assumed by another; but
the humanity of Christ was assumed by the Word; therefore it is not a
human person. But this
explanation, it is urged, fails to explain anything.
The question is precisely why the humanity of Christ was capable of
being assumed, why, in other words, it was not incommunicable.
To answer that in fact it was assumed, or communicated seems
equivalent to evading the point at issue.
If, as these theologians maintain, the humanity of Christ possessed
the whole reality that is required to constitute it as a human person, it
is difficult to see why it actually lacked human personality.
Hence others, dissatisfied with this theory, have seen the need of
postulating some real complemental entity which, added to the nature,
makes it a person, and have held that personality consists in what they
call a “substantial mode” distinct from the nature, which has the
effect of rendering the nature complete in itself and incommunicable.
Others, finally–and with these the writer is inclined to
agree–find the constituent of personality in the real act of existence
which is the connatural complement of every created nature or essence.
It
has been pointed out elsewhere (Essay iii, The One God)
that “the universe and the minds of men are composite, for in them
essence and existence are not one, but are two distinct (though
inseparable) principles. . . . The distinction between ‘essence’ and
‘existence’ in the universe (whether considred in part or whole) is no
invention of the human mind, but, like all other real distinctions, is
objective in things themselves. Observation
makes us aware that things not only have existence, but over and above
existence they have each also a distinct fabric of a given kind which we
call their nature or essence. Existence
tells us that a thing is, while knowledge of its essence tells us what
a thing is. To know that a
thing exists is very different from knowing what particular nature it
consists in. Consequently we
always think of things and persons as possessing existence rather than as
constituing it.”
Hence,
according to this commonly accepted view, an individual nature receives
that incommunicability which is characteristic of the hypostasis or person
from its own act of existence, an activity distinct from the nature as
such. Why is the human nature
which I possess incommunicable to any other individual of the same
species? Precisely because I
exist, because this nature of mine has the act of existence which is its
natural complement. If,
therefore, a human nature were without its own connatural existence it
would not be a human person. And
this was the case with the humanity of Christ which, having all that is
required for the perfection of humanity–body, soul, and faculties–even
as we have, existed not by its own connatural act of existence, but by the
infinite subsistence of the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who thus
communicated to that human nature a divine Personality.
Christ, therefore, is a divine Person because that in him which
constitutes personality, namely, the act of existence, is not human but
divine.
4.
The mystery remain
But
whatever may be the solution of the metaphysical problem of personality,
the hypostatic union still remains a mystery, a truth beyond human
comprehension. That a human
nature should not possess its own connatural human personality is a fact
which transcends the order of nature; that upon this humanity should be
bestowed a divine Personality is a sublime and ineffable condescension of
God to our race; and no theologian by his speculations intends or hopes to
explain the hypostatic union as if it were a natural phenomenon.
All that he is able to do is show that, since the concepts of
nature and person are distinct from each other, there is no evident
contradiction involved in the revealed truth that God has made a created
nature his own, by uniting it to his own Person.
Whatever be his method of showing this, whether he favor the theory
of “mere assumption,” or of the substantial mode, or of substantial
existence communicated to the humanity of Christ, in common with every
other Catholic theologian or layman, learned or unlettered, he bows in
humility before the mystery of a God who unites a human nature to his own
Person in order, through that lowly nature of ours, to raise us up to a
participation of his.
5.
The “communication of properties”
The
first important consequence of the hypostatic union is what is known as
the “communication of properties.”
The person is the subject of attribution; hence it is to the person
that the nature and all the properties and activities of the nature are
attributed. But Christ is one
person who has two natures. It
follows that to him may be rightly attributed either the human nature or
the divine nature, and the properties and activities of each.
We may say with equal truth that Christ is God and that he is man,
that he is the Creator and that–according to his human nature–he is
finite. Hence also concrete names signifying or referring to the
other; thus, God is man; the Eternal died upon the cross; God was born of
the Virgin Mary; Mary is the Mother of God.
It will be noted that only concrete names may be used in this way;
and the reason is evident, for only concrete names indicate the person in
whom the two natures subsist. Abstract
names signify the nature–or properties of the nature–“abstracting”
from its existence in a given individual or person.
Thus while it is true to say that Mary is the Mother of God, it is
false to say that she is the Mother of the divinity.
It has been seen in the previous section how the whole discussion
between Cyril and Nestorius centered in the title of Theotokos given
to Our Lady. Whatever might
be the meaning attached by either side to such words as nature, person, or
hypostasis, here was an infallible means of testing the orthodoxy of
Nestorius. Were Christ and
the Word the same person or two different persons?
In answering this question it was possible to dissemble; but with
regard to the divine Motherhood of Our Lady all equivocation was
impossible. If this were
admitted, then Christ and God were evidently recognized to be one and the
same individual, the same person, the same subject of attribution.
6.
Christ not the adopted Son of God
From the fact
that Christ is one Person, God and man, it follows also that he may not be
called the adopted son of God. He
is God’s own son. A heresy
arose in the eighth century called Adoptionism (To be distinguished from
the Adoptionism of the third century to which reference is made above),
which consisted in asserting that Christ, admitted to be the natural son
of God according to his divinity, was nevertheless his adopted son
according to his human nature. This
doctrine was condemned by Pope Hadrian I in the year 794.
The truth is that in no sense can Christ be said to be the adopted
son of God. If Christ, the
Word Incarnate, is the natural son of God, born of the Father from all
eternity, God cannot adopt him, because to adopt is to elevate to the
condition of sonship one who by nature does not possess that status.
This form of Adoptionism is thus seen to be a thinly veiled
compromise with Nestorianism.
7.
Worship due to Christ
Logically
connected with the doctrine of the hypostatic union is the obligation of
paying to Christ divine worship. If
Christ is God, then we must adore him; the conclusion is evident.
What is perhaps less obvious is the duty of paying divine cult to
the human nature of Christ: less obvious, because to worship the humanity
of Christ would seem at first sight equivalent to worshipping a creature.
However, it should be noted that theologians distinguish between
what they call the material object and the formal object of worship. By the material object they mean the person to whom worship
is rendered, by the formal object, the excellence or the perfection in the
person which is the motive of the honor paid to him.
Clearly, when we worship Christ we worship his whole person, the
Word Incarnate, God and man. It
is not because he is man that we adore him, but because he is God;
nevertheless we do not dissect him, we do not separate his humanity from
his divinity in order to adore the latter alone.
“The incarnate Word of God,” says St. Cyril (Apol
contra Orient. 8.), “since
he is the one Son of God, is to be adored, not apart from his flesh, but
together with it, just as in honoring a man we honor his soul together
with his body.” Likewise
St. Athanasius (Ad Adelphium, 3):
“Although the flesh (i.e. the humanity of Christ) regarded
separately is a part of created things, yet it has become the body of God.
Thus we do not divide this body from the Word to adore it, nor when
we wish to adore the Word do we separate him from his body; but mindful of
the words ‘The Word became flesh’ we recognize as God the one Word
incarnate. Who then will be
so foolish as to say to the Lord: ‘Depart from thy body that I may adore
thee’?” Theologians
express this truth technically when they say that the humanity of Christ
is part of the material object of divine worship, while its formal object
is the divinity.
Hence
devotion to Christ is not devotion to a mere man, it is the worship of the
Word Incarnate, and that worship embraces all that is in him, all that is
united with his divine Person. It
is here that the wisdom of God’s merciful dispensation becomes
especially apparent. God
became man, in the words of the beautiful Preface for Christmas, ut dum
visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur,
“that while we know God visibly we may be led to the love of things
invisible.”
8.
The devotion to the Sacred Heart
This
doctrine has an important application in the popular devotion to the
Sacred Heart of Jesus. The
Jansenists in the synod of Pistoia (1794) attacked this practice on the
ground that to worship the human heart of Christ was to give divine honor
to a creature. Pope Pius VI
in condemning the Jansenists indicated the dogmatic truth which underlies
the devotion to the Sacred Heart; for he accused the Jansenists of
“detracting from the pious and proper cult which the faithful pay to the
humanity of Christ.” In paying divine honor to the Sacred Heart of Jesus the
faithful do nothing more than worship the Word Incarnate, with special
reference, however, to his humanity, and indeed to that part of his
humanity–his Sacred Heart–which custom regards as chiefly affected by
human emotions and consequently uses as the symbol of love.
“The faithful adore the Heart of Jesus,” says Pope Pius VI (l.c.),
“considered as the heart of Jesus, that is, as the Heart of the Person
of the Word to whom it is inseparably united, just as the body of Christ
was adorable when for three days it lay dead in the tomb, unsevered and
unseparated from the divinity” (The same may be said of the
living soul of Christ in Limbo). The object of devotion to the Sacred Heart, therefore, is the
physical heart of the Word Incarnate considered as the symbol of his human
love for God and for mankind. In
addition we adore that human love itself, for it is the human love of the
Word Incarnate, the sacred love with which he loved Mary and Joseph, the
merciful love that converted the Magdalen and Peter, the love that poured
itself out in pity upon all that suffer, the heroic love for mankind that
knew no limit, the love of him who “having loved his own who were in the
world, loved them unto the end.”
The
popularity of this devotion among all faithful Catholics is in fact a sign
of their unfailing adherence to the traditional faith of the Church in the
unity of the divine Person of Christ.
For the Catholic Christ is not merely a great moral teacher, not
merely a lovable man, not merely a man who lived in the closest possible
union with God; he is God himself. The
human perfections that we admire in him and strive to imitate are the
human perfections of God, the sympathetic understanding, the human
lovableness which has attracted men in all ages to follow him and, if nee
be, to die for him, have their seat i nthe heart that has won all hearts,
in the human Heart of God himself.
V.
TWO DISTINCT NATURES
1.
Athanasian Creed
Since
the hypostatic union is essentially supernatural, there is no union in
nature with which it can properly be compared.
Nevertheless, as it is only by comparison with the natural that we
are able to form any conception of the supernatural, the Fathers have made
use of various analogies in order to illustrate what can never in this
life be adequately understood. Of
these the best known and most striking is certainly that of the union of
body and soul in man. “Just
as rational soul and flesh are one man,” we read in the Athanasian
Creed, “so God and man are one Christ.”
In man body and soul are two (incomplete) substances substantially
united to form one person; likewise the humanity of Christ and the
divinity are substantially united to constitute one person.
But, like all analogies, this must not be pressed too far.
Body and soul in man indeed constitute one person, but they form
one nature too; whereas in Christ the human nature and the divinity remain
distinct and physically unaltered by each other.
Thus to exaggerate the analogy used in the Athanasian Creed would
be to fall into the error of Apollinaris or of Eutyches.
2.
Kenotic theories
The
Incarnation involves no change in the Godhead.
In God there is no change or shadow of alteration.
Hence when St. John tells us that the Word became flesh he does not
mean that God was changed into man; he can only mean that God, remaining
truly God, became truly man also. “Man was raised up to God,” says St. Augustine; “God
did not descend from himself” (Ep. 136).
It has been suggested by some non-Catholic theologians that the
Word in becoming man abdicated his divinity for the period of his life
upon earth, or at least voluntarily deprived himself of those divine
attributes which he found to be incompatible with a truly human
experience. The Catholic
Church has always resisted such an idea.
She has ever strenuously maintained the reality of Christ’s human
nature against the Docetists; but she is no less emphatic in asserting his
perfect and immutable divinity. In
the words of St. Leo: “Each nature keeps what is proper to it, and just
as his divine condition does not destroy his human condition, so his
condition of servant does not diminish his divinity.”
The
words “conditions of servant” show that St. Leo has in mind the famous
text of St. Paul in the epistle to the Philippians (ii 6-7):
“Who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with
God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the
likeness of men and in habit found as a man.”
Now it is to this text that appeal is made by the supporters of the
“kenotic” theory above mentioned.
The words, “emptied himself,” they claim, can only mean that
God deprived himself either wholly or partially of his divinity.
And in this, they say, God has given us the most sublime example of
humility, inasmuch as he was vouchsafed for our sakes to strip himself of
his divine omnipotence. The
metaphysical difficulties in the way of this doctrine are, they admit,
insuperable, but these are more than counterbalanced by its moral value.
Such a
doctrine, however, is quite inadmissible; and no statement can have any
moral value if it is a contradiction in terms.
however useful it may appear–and the moral utility of the
doctrine is, to say the least, debatable–that God should cease to be
God, the necessary Being cannot change his nature.
The words of St. Paul, therefore, must be interpreted as not to
contradict the evident truth that God is immutable.
The following paraphrase, perhaps, better renders the meaning of
the original text: “Christ while he was in the form of God, that is,
while he had the nature of God, did not regard his equal rank with God as
something to be jealously guarded, but he deprived himself of this, taking
the form (or nature) of a servant, so that he appeared externally to be
nothing more than a mere man.” The
second Person of the Blessed Trinity was willing to forgo the external
honor which man owed to him as God, being content to appear in the eyes of
the world as if he were not God, but merely a man.
God deprived himself, therefore, not of the divinity, but of the
outward marks of honor due to his divine nature, which was hidden from the
eyes of men.
But
if God loses nothing by his ineffable union with the humanity of Christ,
still less is this divine perfection increased thereby.
God incarnate is not greater than God, considered simply as God.
One may be inclined, perhaps, by a process of mathematical
addition, to think of the Word Incarnate as being in sum of reality more
than God before the Incarnation. The
truth is that, far from any perfection accruing to the infinite essence of
God by his union with humanity, it is the human nature which the Word
assumed that is raised to an infinite dignity. But at least, it may be urged, God acquires a new relation to
finite reality, inasmuch as he is now united personally to a human nature,
whereas formerly he was not. To
which it may be answered that the divine relation to finite reality
involved in the hypostatic union is no more an increment of divine
perfection than the act whereby God creates the universe.
The whole change is in the creature; the Creator is eternally
changeless. We may apply to
the humanity of Christ what St. Augustine says of the relation of
creatures to God in general: “Without God thou wouldst be less; if thou
art with God, he is not the greater on that account.
He is not the greater because of thee; but thou without him are
less” (In Joannem, tr. xi.). Hence instead of saying that God formerly was not united to a
human nature, but now is united to it, it is more accurate to say with St.
Thomas that “the humanity which formerly was not united to the divinity
now becomes united thereto” (S. Theol. III, Q. 1, art. 1,
ad 1).
3.
Incarnation proper to the Son
Another
difficulty needs to be faced. It
is shown in the Essay on The Blessed Trinity that in God
“everything is common to all three Persons of the Blessed Trinity with
the exception of those properties which are radicated in the relative
opposition between the Persons” (Essay iv).
Thus all the operations of God in regard to creatures are common to
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. How then is it true that the Incarnation or the assumption of
a human nature, is peculiar to the second Person of the Blessed Trinity?
The answer is seen if we distinguish a twofold aspect of the
hypostatic union. This may be
regarded actively, that is, as a divine operation whereby God creates a
human nature and unites it to a divine Person; and in this sense the work
of the Incarnation is common to all three Persons of the Blessed Trinity.
But it may also be considered passively, that is, in its term,
inasmuch as the divine Personality is communicated to the human nature
assumed; and in this sense the Incarnation is proper to the Son of God,
since he alone made that humanity his own by giving to it his own distinct
Personality. To illustrate
this point the Fathers used the analogy of three men combining to clothe
one of themselves. As St.
Thomas puts it: “The three Persons operated to united humanity to the
one Person of the Son” (S. Theol. III, Q. 3, art. 4).
4.
A true human nature
The
hypostatic union, therefore, does not change the nature of God.
But nor is the humanity of Christ physically altered by the
divinity to which it is personally united.
The human nature receives personality indeed; but it has been shown
that what constitutes personality as such is something distinct from the
nature–in the view of the writer, the act of substantial existence–and
this does not change the nature to which it is united.
The humanity of Christ, therefore, is in all essential respects
similar to our own; Christ became “in all things like as we are, except
sin.”
The
Docetists denied the reality of the body of Christ; they held it
impossible that God should be intimately associated with anything
material, which they conceived to be essentially evil.
In addition to refuting the false presupposition of the Manicheans
concerning the origin of matter, the champions of Christian orthodoxy
insisted upon the axiom that God assumed our nature in order to save it,
and that consequently whatever he did not assume he did not save.
The reality of Christ’s body was re-asserted later against the
Monophysites in the Council of Chalcedon and in the Dogmatic Letter of
Pope Leo, where we read that “in order to pay our debt an impassible
nature was united to a passible one, so that for the sake of our salvation
there might be one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who on
the one hand was able to die, and on the other hand was immortal.”
The
Church was no less prompt to reject the error of the Arians who denied
that Christ had a human soul, and that of Apollinaris who denied him a
human intellect. It was vain for the latter to claim that the place of the
human soul was taken by the Word. Such
a substitution is impossible; God cannot become a part of the nature of
man; the result of such a combination would be monstrous, a being who is
neither man nor God. But of
the human intellect of Christ we shall have more to say in the following
section.
5.
The human will of Christ
It would seem
superfluous, when once it has been stated that the humanity of Christ is
perfect in all essentials, to emphasize the fact that he had a human will.
yet there were some in the seventh century who denied this. Just as the Adoptionism of the eighth century was an
attempted compromise with Nestorianism, so this heresy of Monotheletism
was a faint-hearted concession to Monophysism.
The Monotheletes argued somewhat after this manner: If in Christ we
admit two wills, the human will and the divine will, we must admit that
the will of Christ as man was not the will of God, and that the one was
contrary to the other; but Christ is impeccable; therefore in Christ there
can have been only one will, the will of God.
The argument is not conclusive.
If does not follow, if there are two wills in Christ, that they
must be contrary to each other. Christ himself has told us that he came not to do his own
will but the will of the Father who sent him; his whole life was one of
constant submission to the will of the Father.
Physically in Christ there were two wills, although morally
speaking there was but one, because the human will was in all things
subject to the divine. If he
had no human will his humanity would have been an inert instrument in the
hands of the divinity; without a human will all his submission to the will
of the Father–“Not my will but thine be done”–would have been a
hypocritical pretense. If he
had no human will he had no human virtue, he had no merit, his death was
no free-will offering, the Cross is void and we are still in our sins.
Christ, therefore, had a human will as well as his divine will, but
these were not contrary to each other.
In this consisted his obedience unto death; his human will was
perfectly free, but through grace it was ever in perfect conformity with
the divine will.
6.
Human and divine activity
To
say that in Christ there are two natures is equivalently to profess a
duality of operations in him; for to every nature corresponds its proper
operation. One and the same
divine Person, the Word Incarnate, performed through his human nature all
those operations which are proper to man, while as God he remained for
ever in the ineffable exercise of his divine life and activity. Yet although these operations are physically distinct from
each other, the oneness of the divine Agent lent to the whole complex of
his human and divine activities a wonderful unity and coherence.
All his human operations were under the complete and unfailing
control of his holy will, even those wayward emotions which in us are so
often an occasion of sin. He
was angry, but there was no sin in his anger; his heart was filled with
love for men, but in his human emotion of love there was none of that
selfishness that so often mars the perfection of human friendship; he wept
for the sorrows of others, but there was no despair in his grief; his
sensitive heart was cut to the quick by the betrayal of Judas, by the
desertion of his friends in his hour of need; he shrank from physical
suffering and from death. But
not for a moment did his will allow itself to be led by his emotions; he
was ever captain of his soul. Holding
all his human activities in complete subjection, his human will was none
the less itself completely, though freely, subject to the will of the
Father. Thus there is a true
sense in which we may speak of one operation in Christ, namely, by
reason of the complete subordination of the whole of his being and
activity to his own divine will. In
fact it seems to have been an undue insistence upon what we may call this
moral unity of operation in Christ that led to the heresy of Monotheletism
(It was for his failure to make a definite and unequivocal
pronouncement on the subject of two wills and operations in Christ that
Pope Honorius I was condemned. The
third Council of Constantinople (680-681) condemned him as “following
the false doctrine of heretics” and for “confirming the impious dogmas
of Sergius” of Constantinople, who was the leader of the Monotheletes.
But, as is well know, an Ecumenical Council has validity only in
asmuch as it is confirmed by the Pope, the head of the Council, and
therefore the condemnation of Honorius is to be understood in the sense in
which it was approved by Pope Leo II, who wrote as follows: “We
anathematize the inventors of this error . . . and also Honorius who did
not shed lustre upon this apostolic (Roman) Church by the doctrine of
apostolic tradition, but allowed this immaculate Church to be stained by a
false betrayal.” Hence
Honorius was anathematized for a practical rather than a dogmatic error,
because he failed to condemn a heresy when he should have done so.
For a fuller treatment of this controversial question see Dom
Chapman: The Condemnation of Honorius (C.T.S.).
7.
Theandric actions
One
further point remains to be explained before we conclude this section.
The Fathers and theologians of the Church use the expression
“theandric operations.” What
does this mean? It does not
mean that any action of Christ is a mixture of the human and the divine;
this would be equivalent to the error of the Monotheletes, and the
expression was used by them in that sense.
But as used by Catholics it means primarily those actions of Christ
in which both his human nature and his divine nature took part.
So when Christ worked a miracle his action was strictly theandric.
His divine nature was the principal cause of the miracle, while his
humanity co-operated as an instument.
In a wider sense all the human actions of Christ may be called
theandric, i.e. both human and divine, human by reason of the nature from
which they proceed as their principle, divine by reason of the hypostatis
or Person whose actions they are. It
is for this reason that theologians point out that the human actions of
our Redeemer, though they are finite from a physical point of view, are
nevertheless of infinite dignity since they are the acts of God himself,
and that therefore any act of the Word Incarnate would have been
sufficient to save the world from sin.
APPENDIX
ON MODERN ERRORS
Such
is the Catholic doctrine of the two natures in the one divine Person of
Jesus Christ. What we shall
have to say subsequently is but a consequence of this portentous fact that
Christ is one individual, God and Man.
But before we proceed to consider these consequences it may not be
out of place to give some account of modern erroneous views concerning the
Incarnation, not with a view to refuting them–that is not the object of
the present essays–but in order that Catholic doctrine by contrast may
stand out with greater clearness.
It
is significant that all those who, since the Reformation, have departed
from the traditional lines laid down so clearly in the Councils of
Chalcedon and Constantinople (II), have–at least equivalently–fallen
into one of the two heresies of Nestorianism or Monophysism.
Certain among the followers of Luther invented a doctrine known as
Ubiquitarianism. Having
rejected the Catholic teaching concerning the real presence of the body
and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, and faced with the necessity, under
pain of parting company with the whole of Tradition, of admitting some
sort of present of Christ in this sacrament, Chemnitz and other Lutherans
taught that some of the properties of the divinity were communicated to
the human nature of Christ, in particular the attributes of ubiquity.
In this manner, they said, the human nature of Christ, since it is
everywhere, is present also in the Eucharist.
Evidently this is to confuse the two natures.
It is true that the communication of properties is one of the
consequences of the hypostatic union.
But this does not mean that the properties of one nature are
communicated to the other. It
is one thing to attribute to the one Person of Christ the
properties and activities of both the human and the divine natures; but it
is quite another to predicate divine attributes of the human nature and
vice-versa. The basis of the
communication of properties is not the confusion of natures, but the unity
of Person.
The
philosophy of Descartes in the seventeenth century, and to an even greater
extent the critical system of Kant in the early nineteenth, resulted in a
secession from what we may call the philosophy of substance.
It came to be held by nearly all who were outside the current of
the Scholastic philosophy that the “thing in itself,” the substance,
as distinct from phenomena, was unknowable.
In fact the very existence of substance came later to be denied.
Nothing exists, it was held, but the modifications which we
experience either within ourselves or from without.
What we call substance is nothing else than the sum of the
qualities, activities and modifications which we perceive.
Hence for most modern philosophers outside the Church the person is
simply consciousness, “a series of feelings” as Stuart Mill called it,
“with a background of possibilities of feeling.”
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