The Truth of the Humanity. 19
verbum Patris, the Word of the Father. And there is not one of all the fathers that says that Christ, according to both His natures, is the Mediator so, as His only humanity is the formal cause of His mediatorship and the actions thereof. For the whole person compounded of God and man, according to both natures, is the beginning of all the operations of the God-man. Therefore, it is a fiction of the schoolmen to say that Christ is the Mediator only according to His humanity.
The Truth of the Humanity 1. The ancient fathers, when they call Christ's humanity deified, and partaker of the deity, and supreme glory, in these and like phrases they express the personal union. And they are to be understood with this caution, as far as these things agree with the nature of the humanity, and do not infringe the properties thereof. Or, they speak thus in respect that the flesh is as the instrument of the Divinity, by which and in which it exercises the power and actions thereof. "The Lord's flesh," says Damascene (lib. 3, cap. 17), "is enriched with divine efficacy because of the personal union, neither yet does it fall or depart from His own proper nature, nor from the natural properties thereof." And Nazianzene says (Orat. 42), that the humanity is endowed with divinity, and is God together with it. But this is in respect of the personal union, not essentially nor formally.
2. When the fathers sometime say that God's omnipotency is communicated unto the manhood of Christ, or to Christ as man, they must be expounded two ways: First, in respect that the man Christ is called omnipotent, because of the communication of the properties.
Second, in respect that the proper works of God are ascribed unto the flesh, as the organ or instrument of the Divinity. So do Damascene
(lib. 3, cap. 18) and Nicetas (Thesaur., lib. 3, cap. 38) use these sayings.
3. Some of the fathers say that Christ's nativity was without miracle, as other men's ordinarily are. So affirms Ambrose upon the text
Omne masculum aperiens vulvam (Comm. in Luc., lib. 2); and also Origen (Homil. 14, in Luc.); Tertullian (in fine lib. De carne Christi).
Cyprian or Ruffinus (in Symbol. Apost.), and Leo (Epist. 83 and 97), is not far from this opinion also. "It is possible," says Durandus (lib.
4, dist. 44, q. 6), "that by the operation of the Deity, there was made a dilatation or enlarging of the natural parts and passages in the virgin Mary, without any breach or interruption." And to confirm this, he cites Gregory upon the second of Luke: "Again Jesus came in when the doors were shut, but it is not said that He came through the doors being shut;, they might be opened and shut again in a moment, so as the disciples might not perceive it."
4. The fathers, affirming the fullness of grace in Christ, do mean of Christ as God, or of the whole person, not of His soul. So means
Athanasius in his 4th sermon against the Arians, and Nazianzene in his oration upon Basil.
5. The fathers do not with one consent affirm that Christ had the fullness of knowledge from His conception, so as He could never have more. "He received a soul," says Origen (Περὶ Ἀρχῶν, lib. 4), "in nature and essence like unto one of ours." "Therefore did Luke notify his age," says Ambrose (de Incarnat. Dom., cap. 7), "because you should know that he spoke of His manhood. For it is the body, not the deity, that is the object of age. Wherefore, if He increased in the years of man, He also increased in the wisdom of man." Augustine is variable in this point, and yet that place of Luke, Puerulus crescebat, he held to be meant of Christ's humanity (De Genes. ad liter., lib. 10,