235. How God could have suffered and died
235. HOW GOD COULD HAVE SUFFERED AND DIED
God is not passive, but “pure act”. We cannot change Him, He changes us. And suffering is a change. Therefore it seems that God cannot suffer. God is also immortal and cannot die, yet Christ is God, and Christ suffered and died. Is this not a contradiction and therefore impossible?
The union of the human nature with the divine was effected in the Person . . . yet observing the distinction of natures; so that it is the same Person . . . while each nature retains that which is proper to it. And therefore, the Passion is to be attributed to the suppositum (Person) of the divine nature (i.e., the single divine Person Who has a divine nature as well as a human nature) not because of the divine nature, which is impassible (i.e., the divine nature cannot suffer, because it is not passive, vulnerable, and changeable) but by reason of the human nature. Hence in . . . Cyril we read: If any man does not confess that the Word of God suffered in the flesh and was crucified in the flesh, let him be anathema. Therefore Christ’s Passion belongs to the suppositum of the divine nature (the single Person Who possessed the divine nature as well as the human nature) by reason of the passible (human) nature assumed. . . . As is said in . . . the Council of Ephesus, Christ’s death being . . . God’s death . . . destroyed death, since He Who suffered was both God and man (III,46,12).
The Second Person of the divine Trinity is one Person, but by the Incarnation this one Person has two natures, divine and human, and thus can be both impassible (not passive, not changeable) and passible (changeable). That is not a contradiction. Even you, though you are only one person and have only one nature (human), have opposite attributes: you are invisible, immaterial, and immortal because your soul is invisible, immaterial, and immortal, but you are also visible, material, and mortal because your body is visible, material, and mortal. The same person—you—is both visible and invisible. This is a paradox but not a contradiction. A paradox is only an apparent contradiction. A real contradiction is impossible. It is unthinkable. It is meaningless. It is nothing. It would be a contradiction to say that God did become incarnate and that God did not, or to say that you had an immortal soul and that you did not. But to say that the same person has two opposite attributes, like us, or even two opposite natures, like Christ, is not a contradiction, even though it is a paradox. It is possible. “With God all things are possible” (Mt 19:26). Contradictions are not things at all.
Since Christ is a divine person, His divine impassibility acts on and changes His human passibility rather than vice versa. Just as when Christ was baptized, it was He Who changed the water (giving it the power to give new spiritual life in Baptism) rather than the water that changed Him (see #221 above), so when He suffered and died, He changed suffering and death rather than suffering and death changing Him. His death was active, not passive. He entered death, and conquered it. Death did not enter Him and conquer Him.
St. Thomas explains how this is metaphysically possible by referring to the Church’s infallible Christological creedal formulations about the relationship between His single divine Person and his two natures, human as well as divine. The categories that the Church uses to express this divine mystery are only human, rational, philosophical categories, but they are the best we have and the most commonsensical, once they are understood.
Bottom line: Christ, the single divine Person, really suffered and died, because He really had a human nature. He lacked nothing we had. He was “in all things like us, except for sin” (Heb 4:15). He was not a puppeteer and His humanity was not a puppet. He came all the way down so that we could be lifted all the way up.