17.3 Some Comments on SCG 4,27–49
17.3 Some Comments on SCG 4,27–49
It is important to keep in mind that SCG 4,27–49 is Aquinas’s account of the Incarnation. In one sense, of course, it is obviously this since, undeniably, “Aquinas’s account of the Incarnation is Aquinas’s account of the Incarnation.” Nevertheless, we should not assume that in SCG 4,27–49 Aquinas exactly affirms what others have held about the Incarnation, even though he might appear to do so. SCG 4,27–49 incorporates ideas that are characteristic of him. The fact that these chapters state that Christ is truly God and truly human should not automatically lead us to suppose that they are affirming what others are thinking when speaking in that way. Unlike many who believe that Christ is truly God and truly human, Aquinas takes God the Word to be a distinct person in a Trinity constituting one simple divine nature. He also thinks that we should focus on a distinction between subject and nature so as to allow for the Word being one hypostasis with two natures. In addition, of course, he has an understanding of human nature that not everyone shares. He is clear, for example, that to be human is to be a composite of body and soul, not an essentially incorporeal substance. SCG 4,27–49 should therefore be read in the light of thoughts that Aquinas articulates independently of what he says in these chapters. That Christ is truly God and truly human has been affirmed by many people, but not all of them are saying quite what Aquinas does in SCG 4,27–49.
It might even be suggested that what Aquinas maintains in SCG 4,27–49 is not what those who drafted the Chalcedonian position on the Incarnation were thinking. It is clear that he takes his stand on Chalcedon and that he refers to Christ as one person with two natures. But SCG 4,27–49 goes beyond the text of Chalcedon’s definition of faith. Chalcedon does not elaborate on the meaning of “person” and “nature.” Nor does it try to give an account of how we might think in detail when it comes to the union of divinity and humanity in Christ. It asserts that Christ is one person in two natures, fully God and fully human, and then it falls silent. It presents no detailed analysis of the terms that it employs. It does not offer an account of the divine nature such as we find in SCG 1. It makes no attempt to harmonize the statements “Christ is human” and “Christ is divine.” Nor does it present a theological or philosophical discussion of the Incarnation. To be sure, Chalcedon claims to teach truly about the Incarnation. Yet it does not elaborate on what the Incarnation involves in the way that Aquinas does while trying to defend the language that Chalcedon employs. In this sense, SCG 4,27–49 is not just a bald reassertion of Chalcedon when it comes to the Incarnation.36
In order to evaluate these chapters, therefore, we should be treating them in their own right and not as contributions to a single discussion in which everyone is agreed when it comes to what has to be defended concerning the Incarnation. This, in turn, means that when evaluating SCG 4,27–49 we should ask questions like “Is Aquinas right to approach the Incarnation in the conviction that God is simple and unchangeable?” and “Is Aquinas right to think that what he calls a hypostasis or person can be both divine and human?”37 In addition, perhaps, we need to ask whether Aquinas is right in his reading of the biblical texts that he cites when defending his account of the Incarnation. Again and again in SCG 4 Aquinas thinks of the Bible, and especially the New Testament, as teaching something like the doctrine of the Incarnation as defined by the Council of Chalcedon. But do we really find a Chalcedonian view of Christ in the Bible?
In one sense, we obviously do not since the Bible does not explicitly declare that Christ is one person with two natures. Yet Aquinas is perfectly aware of this fact. On the other hand he does believe that the New Testament presents Christ as being divine and that the Chalcedonian definition effectively summarizes what the New Testament says about Christ. Is he, however, right to believe this? For that matter, is he right to think, as he clearly does, that Christ claimed to be divine or thought of himself as such?
With respect to these questions, I suggest that you take a look at how biblical scholars these days write about the New Testament and the assertion that Christ is God. Some of them suggest that the New Testament does not provide backing for the blunt statement “Jesus of Nazareth is divine.” Some of them also suggest that the notion of Jesus being divine does not reflect what he could himself have entertained. On the other hand, however, there are biblical scholars who find many New Testament verses that say or imply that Jesus is what Old Testament authors refer to as God.
N. T. Wright is a good example. He is aware of objections to the view that the New Testament teaches that Christ is truly divine, not just metaphorically or in a manner of speaking. On the other hand he provides reasons for saying that the New Testament contains much that claims divinity for Christ. Wright even gives reasons for supposing that, in doing so, the New Testament is reflecting what Christ himself taught and supposed.38 Wright, of course, might be wrong in his reading of the New Testament and on what he infers on its basis. The fact, however, is that here we have a well-known and highly acclaimed biblical scholar talking about the Incarnation and the New Testament in ways that would have been congenial to Aquinas. So it is not obvious that the ways in which Aquinas appeals to the New Testament as he defends what he takes to be the Chalcedonian definition are clearly untenable.
Yet, one might say, SCG 4,27–49 as a whole is untenable since no sense can be made of its presiding thesis that Christ is truly divine and truly human. For is it not obvious that nothing can be truly both divine and human? Does not anything coming close to the Chalcedonian definition reek of self-contradiction? Is it not clear that Christ cannot be divine if Christ was human since God is not a spatiotemporal thing? Is it not equally clear that God cannot be identified with anything human since being human cannot involve what being divine involves?
Questions along these lines have been raised for centuries. And, although people raising them have not always attacked accounts of Christ such as we find in the SCG as being self-contradictory or logically impossible, some have. A quite famous example is John Hick (1922–2012). In the much-discussed book The Myth of God Incarnate, he says:
Orthodoxy insisted upon the two natures human and divine. But orthodoxy has never been able to give this idea any content. It remains a form of words without assignable meaning. For to say, without explanation, that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was also God is as devoid of meaning as to say that this circle drawn with a pencil on paper is also a square.”39
Even people sympathetic to what Aquinas says about the Incarnation have drawn attention to questions of coherence concerning it. Hence, for example, Eleonore Stump writes:
There is certainly a prima facie case to be made for the objection that the doctrine of the Incarnation attributes contradictory properties to one and the same thing. On the doctrine of the Incarnation, one and the same thing is said to be limited in power and not limited in power, for example. Being limited in power and not being limited in power are contradictory properties, and both properties are attributed to Christ. So, on the face of it, it seems as if the objection is right.”40
Should we not therefore conclude that SCG 4,27–49 is effectively asking us to believe the impossible?
You might think that we should since in these chapters Aquinas does not present a full-blown proof of the consistency of the doctrine of the Incarnation as he understands it. He obviously thinks that the doctrine is consistent, but he does not formally try to prove that it is. This fact, however, might be taken as favoring his approach to the Incarnation since proofs of consistency are notoriously hard to come by. Given the work of Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), this seems to be evident in mathematics. Gödel is generally recognized by philosophers as having shown that one cannot prove a mathematical theory to be free of internal contradiction without having recourse to another theory resting on assumptions that are stronger and less reliable than the theory the consistency of which is being proved.
That said, however, we might still wonder whether it could possibly be true that one thing is both divine and human. “My cat is unqualifiedly a dog” cannot be true.41 Yet Aquinas does not claim, without qualification, that Christ is human and divine. His claim is that, when it comes to the Incarnation, there is one subject with two distinct natures. He regards “___ is divine” and “___ is human” as predicating something of an individual. He does not think that these expressions stand for or refer to or name something or other. He thinks of them as telling us what is to be said about something.
Logicians sometimes refer to what is called the “two-name” theory of predication. According to this, sentences like “A is B” should be viewed as telling us that one class of things is included in another.42 And if Aquinas subscribed to this theory, he would have to be thought to mean that “Christ is divine” and “Christ is human” tell us that Christ is included in the class of both divine things and human ones. But Aquinas did not subscribe to the two-name theory of predication. Instead, he recognized the serious logical difference between naming and predicating.
So he thinks that to say “Christ is divine” and “Christ is human” is to assert different things of one subject. He thinks the same when it comes to “the Word is divine” and “the Word is human.” Hence his insistence on the Incarnation amounting to there being one hypostasis, person, or subject having two natures, not to there being two things of different kinds that are one thing as, say, two dogs are one thing because they share a nature. Two dogs can, indeed, share a nature. Two dogs, indeed, do share a nature since they are both canine. But Aquinas does not regard the Word as sharing a nature with what is human. He thinks of God as having two distinct natures: human and divine. He also thinks that, with the Incarnation, the divine nature of the Word and the human nature of the Word are had by one thing: the Second Person of the Trinity.
Yet is it not the case that “X is human and divine” cannot be true since “___ is human” takes away what is given by “___ is divine”? Is not “X is human and divine” like “X is square and circular”? Evidently, Aquinas thinks not, and that is because he takes seriously the distinction of natures in God incarnate. Hence, for example, when denying that Christ is a creature, he notes qualifications to be made when it comes to the natures of Christ. Yes, he says, “Christ is a creature” is true. But only if qualified by “so far as he is human” (secundum quod homo) or “in his human nature” (secundum humanam naturam).
In other words, Aquinas holds that different and indeed contrary things can be said of God incarnate as long as one bears in mind whether it is the divine or human nature of the Word that is under discussion. In his view, to single out a subject of predication is not to say anything about it. There is a “saying about” John only if some predicate is asserted of John. He also thinks that, when we speak of the Word, we need to be clear whether we are speaking with a view to its divine nature or its human one. If we speak about the Word only with reference to its divine nature, then we will say things that we would never say concerning something merely human. Again, if we speak of Christ (considered as God the Word incarnate) with reference to his human nature, we will say things that we would never say of the divine nature. Yet, Aquinas maintains, these different ways of talking are in order on the supposition that the Word has two distinct natures.
As becomes much clearer from Summa Theologiae 3a,16 than from SCG 4,27–49, Aquinas’s approach to the Incarnation relies heavily on the idea that something can be said to be such and such considered under one description and something else considered under another. Without contradiction, one might, for example, say that, in virtue of being president of the United States, someone has control over the U.S. military even though that person does not have control of the U.S. military just in virtue of being a U.S. citizen. So one might consistently say (1) “X, as U.S. president, has control of the U.S. military,” and (2) “X, as a U.S. citizen, has no such control.” Similarly, thinks Aquinas, one can consistently say (1) “Christ, as human, is spatiotemporal,” and (2) “Christ, as divine, is eternal and immaterial.”
For Aquinas, it is the distinction of natures in God incarnate that allows both of the last two propositions to be possibly true. You might say that if Christ exists in space and time, and if Christ is eternal and immaterial, then Christ is spatiotemporal, eternal, and immaterial, which cannot be so. However, Aquinas is not declaring that Christ is unqualifiedly spatiotemporal and eternal and immaterial. He is saying that in the Incarnation something with one nature took on another nature and that our talk about this thing (the Word) has to respect the difference of natures taught by the claim that in the Incarnation we have one subject with distinct natures.
One can understand why Aquinas takes this line. For, as Peter Geach observes:
Instead of saying “Christ’s human nature was passible, his divine nature impassible,” we may say “Christ as man was passible, Christ as God is impassible”: and so in other cases. But the feasibility of this depends, as Aquinas pointed out, on taking seriously the distinction of subject and predicate. The term “as” occurs predicatively—“Christ as man” means “Christ in so far as he is a man”; if we take the subject-predicate distinction seriously, we may therefore distinguish between what is predicable with truth of the subject “the man Christ” and what is predicable of “Christ as man.” Such distinctions are indispensable in the theology of the Incarnation.43
Aquinas does not think of the human and divine natures of the Word as parts of God. Given his account of divine simplicity, how could he? He is not saying that, considering one part of God, we can assert “It is human” while saying of another part “It is divine.” Once again, he is emphasizing that in Christ there is one subject with two distinct natures. He does not claim that we have exact parallels to the Incarnation to appeal to so as simply to say, “Well, the Incarnation is just another example of something with which we are familiar.” What he claims is that it is not contradictory to say that Christ or the Word is such and such with respect to his human nature and that Christ or the Word is such and such with respect to his divine nature.
My example concerning the U.S. president might be thought to imply that Aquinas held that there being one subject with two natures is a commonplace. But he clearly does not think this. He does not believe that there is any straightforward parallel to the Incarnation. As I have noted, he does not even think that the analogy of a conjoined instrument gets us to the reality of the Incarnation without falling short. I intended the U.S. president example only to indicate how we might, without contradicting ourselves, speak of one thing in apparently contradictory ways without actually contradicting ourselves. President X can certainly be such and such as president and not such and such as a U.S. citizen. Of course, Aquinas does not think that predications like “___ is president” or “___ is a U.S. citizen” tell us what anything is by nature. Nor does he think of humanity and divinity as conventional. He maintains that to be human is to have a distinct essence. And, though he denies that God has an essence as human beings do (though he claims that God and God’s essence are not distinct), he takes the divine essence to be a reality distinct from other essences. He does, however, think that if we focus on a distinction of natures, there is nothing to stop us saying that the Word is human and that Christ is divine.
One might object to this idea by saying that what we mean by “human” is “something created” and that something human cannot, therefore, be both human and divine. Thus, for example, Maurice Wiles (1923–2005) writes: “It seems to me not unreasonable to regard ‘being created’ as part of the meaning of man … and ‘not being created’ as part of the meaning of God.”44 And, if you agree with Wiles, you will think that anything human has to be created and that the doctrine of the Incarnation as Aquinas presents it is dubious. For if it is part of the meaning of “human” that anything human is created, then how can Christ be both human and uncreated? But there are problems with this line of thinking.
One is that it conjures up the specter of a novel and implausible proof of God’s existence. This would run: (1) all human beings are created things; (2) if there are created things, then they have to be created by God; (3) so God evidently exists. Why, however, should any atheist think that all human beings are created? Why should an atheist think that anything is created? It would seem to be absurd to say that we can cogently prove the existence of God by insisting that “created” is part of the meaning of “human” and that anything created must be created by God. Doubtless, though, Wiles would not have wanted to commit himself to the argument I just derived from what he writes. His real point seems to be that to be human is to be something the essence of which involves being created, something that has an essential property of being created. Yet we can intelligibly deny that point since, even if God does exist, there is no essential property of being created. If things have essential properties, they exist with properties, attributes, or powers that belong to them and that mark them out as things of different kinds. Hence, for example, whales are essentially mammalian, and snakes are essentially reptilian. Essential properties distinguish things of one natural kind from another. But if God makes all creatures to exist, “being created” cannot be a distinguishing feature of any creature. “All creatures are created” is, of course, trivially true. But it is not true that being created serves to mark out one creature from another. As Herbert McCabe notes:
Being created could not possibly be part of the meaning of man or of anything else (except, of course, “a creature”); being created could not possibly make any difference to anything. If it did, creation would be impossible. God might set out cheerfully to create, let us say, a Nicaraguan Okapi, but he would never be able to do so; all he would be able to create would be a created Nicaraguan Okapi, which would on this hypothesis be different. But maybe all he ever proposes to create is a created Nicaraguan Okapi? Alas for the vanity of divine wishes; he would have to end up with a created created Nicaraguan Okapi, and that would be different again.45
What McCabe says here is in line with Aquinas’s teaching that God’s act of creating does not involve him bringing about a change in anything (see chapter 9, section 6 here). And, as McCabe goes on to say, if we can accept the point that Aquinas is making about creation not being a change, we should also be able to see that the point has a bearing when it comes to Aquinas’s view of the Incarnation.
It is easy to see why Aquinas, for example, insisted that creation is not a change; being created cannot make any difference at all to what anything is any more than existence can; it could not enter into the description of anything. We could not ever say “If this is created, then it must be like this and not like that.” This truth is not only of interest to logicians and metaphysicians; it also matters to theologians, because part of the doctrine of the Incarnation [sc. as Aquinas takes it to be] is that the person of Jesus is uncreated. Being uncreated doesn’t make any difference either. Just as we cannot infer from the fact that Fred is created that he must be this kind of being rather than that, so we cannot infer from the fact that Jesus is uncreated that he is this kind of being rather than that. To be divine is not to be a kind of being, just as to be a creature is not to be a kind of being (the word “nature” is used only analogically in the phrase “divine nature”). To be a man, on the other hand, is to be a kind of being, and this is the kind of being that Jesus was and is.46
It has sometimes been suggested that Aquinas’s overall position on the Incarnation does not seem to leave much room for the Son of God being a man. Indeed, Aquinas has sometimes been accused of Monophysitism, according to which the Son of God has only one divine nature, not two, as proclaimed by Chalcedon.47 Yet that Aquinas denies that the Son of God is a man or that he, even inadvertently, has Monophysite tendencies, seems to be an odd suggestion. Aquinas viewed Monophysitism as attacking the doctrine of the Incarnation taught by Chalcedon. So it is highly unlikely that he ever thought of the Incarnation in Monophysite terms. His approach to the Incarnation takes Chalcedon to be the touchstone of faith concerning the Incarnation. Admittedly, in the Summa Theologiae, much more than in the SCG, Aquinas elaborates on the Incarnation in ways that suggest that Christ was not like your average human being. In Summa Theologiae 3a,7, for instance, he says that Christ was always graced by God and had all the moral virtues that most of us merely strive to acquire. Again, in Summa Theologiae 3a,9 we find him ascribing the beatific vision to Christ.48 However, even the Summa Theologiae account of Christ never affirms of Christ what cannot, in Aquinas’s view, be affirmed of a human being, albeit one graced by God. And the account of the Incarnation in SCG 4,27–49 is at one with that in the Summa Theologiae when it comes to this matter. That, yet again, is because it insists on there being a real distinction of natures in God incarnate.
So what Aquinas is saying in SCG 4,27–49 is this:
1. God the Word exists from eternity sharing and being what all the Persons of the Trinity are by nature. The Word is not an instance of a natural kind but is the divine nature: something that is entirely simple or noncomposite.
2. At the conception of Jesus, God the Word took on a human nature with no change to his divine nature.
3. At the conception of Jesus, a human being was born who was the same person (hypostasis) as the Word.
4. The Incarnation was not a mixing together of things of different kinds or natures; it was not like a single item on a menu that a chef might bring to a table having followed various cooking recipes and having brought their ingredients together; it resulted in there being one individual with both the nature of God and the nature of a human being.
5. So when we say that Jesus is God, we mean that there is one subject with two distinct natures. There is one subject to refer to while predicating different things of it: things that we cannot consistently predicate of something having only one nature, but things that can consistently be predicated of Christ given the distinction of natures in God the Word and Christ.
You might suppose that if Aquinas takes the Word incarnate to be divine, then he cannot take it to be truly a man. But he does take the Word incarnate to be just this because of the predicate “___ is human” and because of what he thinks about distinction of person or hypostasis and nature. He does not take “person” or “hypostasis” to mean “a human individual with a center of consciousness,” or something like that. He takes these words to signify “a subject of which things can be affirmed or predicated” with respect to its nature, and he does not believe that, apart from the Incarnation, there is one thing with two distinct natures. Nonetheless, he does think that the doctrine of the Incarnation tells us that God has become a man and that a man is God. When he writes about the Incarnation and says things like “The Word is divine” and “Christ is divine,” he always has in mind the question “Who is the Word?” and “Who is Christ?,” not “What is the Word?” and “What is Christ?” And his answer to “Who is the Word?” and “Who is Christ?” is always “The Second Person of the Trinity.” But, he thinks, “the Second Person of the Trinity” is a phrase that refers to a subject or individual (as “my best friend” might refer to Joe Smith, or as “my cat” refers to the animal I live with and have named “Sweetie”). “Joe Smith” and “Sweetie” are not words that state what anything is. They are names or subject terms to which we need to add descriptions or predications so as to end up making true assertions. Having singled out Joe as a subject for discussion, we might say that he is, for example, human, has Irish ancestors, and teaches theology. Similarly, we can make little of the name “Sweetie” unless we are told, for example, that Sweetie is feline and inclined to sleep for most of the day. Once again, we need to distinguish between what is referred to and what is said of it. We need to distinguish between subjects and predicates. And, thinks Aquinas, if we do this when it comes to Christ, we can truly and without inconsistency say things like “God (i.e. God the Son) was born and died” or “Christ (i.e. God the Son) is eternal and immutable.” As McCabe puts it, Aquinas maintains that “to say ‘Jesus is son of God’ is to say something quite different from saying ‘Jesus is son of Mary’ because here ‘son of God’ and ‘son of Mary’ are in the predicate place. But to say ‘The son of God died on the cross’ is to make the same assertion as is expressed by ‘The son of Mary died on the cross.’”49 On this account, “The son of God died on the cross” and “The son of Mary died on the cross” are, as logicians would say, extensionally equivalent but not intensionally equivalent.
It has been suggested that, in order to claim “The Son of God died on the cross,” we need unqualifiedly to ascribe change, pain, and development to God and should, therefore, reject Aquinas’s claim that the divine nature is eternal and immutable. If God does not really suffer in Christ, it has been argued, then God is remote from us and our suffering.50 On this account, the suffering of God who became flesh is real suffering and involves real change in God. The argument then is that Aquinas’s approach to the Incarnation is wrong since it is presented by him together with the insistence that God is eternal and immutable. Yet Aquinas’s approach to the Incarnation positively embraces the conclusion that God, the Word, can be truly and not metaphorically spoken of as undergoing suffering. Aquinas thinks that it is as true to say “God suffers” as it is true to say “God is immutable.” Why? Because of the distinctions between subject and predicate and hypostasis and nature. If “God” in “God suffered” means that Christ (where “Christ” refers to the Second Person of the Trinity) suffered, then Aquinas will agree that “God suffered” is literally and not metaphorically true just because Christ clearly underwent a great deal of suffering. But Aquinas does not think that this conclusion obliges us to give up on divine immutability. He thinks that God suffers since one person in two natures suffered, but he does not take this belief to mean that the divine nature undergoes suffering.
In other words, Aquinas can say that his account of the Incarnation does not deny that God really suffers. Of course, it denies that the divine nature is capable of suffering. Yet, following Chalcedon, Aquinas does not think that God incarnate has only one nature. So he maintains that God the Word incarnate really did have hard and painful experiences. Indeed, he effectively says that if one denies the Chalcedonian account of the Incarnation, then one has no legitimate way of inferring from the statement “Jesus suffered and died” that “God suffered and died” without recourse to a notion of God observing the sufferings of Jesus while undergoing some kind of mental discomfort concerning how people could treat someone like him. And, as I have shown (see chapters 4 and 5 here), Aquinas would regard the idea of God as observing, while reacting accordingly, to spring from an idolatrous view of the divine nature as one thing alongside other things, some additional item to register when compiling a list of things that exist that are not ipsum esse subsistens.
One might, however, think that Aquinas’s way of presenting the doctrine of Chalcedon in SCG 4,27–49 could be improved on. I doubt, though, that Aquinas would have rejected that idea. Just as he read with interest accounts of the Incarnation expressed before his time, he would, I assume, have read with interest attempts to say what the Incarnation involves written since then. In recent years, many such accounts have been offered by both theologians and philosophers.51 Some of them come very close to or are equivalent to what Aquinas has to say about the Incarnation. Some of them arguably discard what Chalcedon taught while purporting to take that council as laying down what is doctrinally binding. Others, again, proceed while assuming that “the Word became flesh” cannot be understood along Chalcedonian lines but has to be understood as metaphor or myth or a matter of God somehow giving up divine attributes. It is obviously impossible to be sure how, in detail, Aquinas would have reacted to such modern accounts of God incarnate. Yet we can, I think, be certain that he would have approached them while asking whether they positively deny what he takes Chalcedon to teach. That Jesus is one person with two natures is a theological interpretation of Jesus grounded in the teaching of Chalcedon; and one might reasonably surmise that theological interpretations of Jesus other than that of Chalcedon are possible. After all, Christians managed to profess belief in Christ as divine long before the Council of Chalcedon; and there is no reason to suppose that they cannot do so these days without expressing how the Incarnation should be thought about in terms presented by Chalcedon. But it is one thing to use the same terms as Chalcedon, and it is another to deny the doctrine that it teaches. Were he alive now, therefore, I suspect that Aquinas would be open to new ways of talking about the Incarnation while resisting any of them that seem to imply, contrary to the language of Chalcedon, that Christ is not truly God and that God the Word is not truly a human being.
Yet, as I have shown, Aquinas takes the Incarnation to be beyond what human reasoning can fathom. He thinks that we can speak truly about God and can know ourselves to be doing so. In keeping with his claim that we do not know what God is, however, he denies that we can understand what the Incarnation amounts to. You might think that SCG 4,27–49 tries to describe God in clear ways; but you would be wrong to do so. In these chapters, Aquinas defends certain traditional formulae as cohering with Scripture and as not being inconsistent. The extent to which he succeeds in doing so is what we need to consider when reading SCG 4,27–49.