Chapter 17. God Incarnate (SCG 4,27–49)
CHAPTER 17. GOD INCARNATE (SCG 4,27–49)
1. Reference to Jesus as “Christ” historically derives from the fact that “Christ” was applied to Jesus in the belief that Christ was the Messiah promised in the Old Testament.
2. I quote from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, edited by Norman P. Tanner (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:86.
3. ND, 4, 147 [1].
4. ND, 4, 147 [1].
5. ND, 4, 147–148 [2–4]. In this passage Aquinas is relying on the Vulgate edition of the Bible. Note also that the phrase “in his assumed humanity” is not to be read as implying that Christ’s humanity was some kind of lie (as in “Iago assumed the guise of a friend in Shakespeare’s Othello”). Aquinas is thinking that, in the Incarnation, God the Son assumed humanity by, in the course of time (our time, not God’s), taking on (assuming) a genuine human nature.
6. Here I pass over the questions “What are Aquinas’s sources for the teachings of the heretics to which he refers in SCG 4?” and “Does Aquinas correctly report what these people taught?” These are difficult historical questions with which I am not competent to engage.
7. ND, 4, 160 [9].
8. ND, 4, 161 [2]. Also see chapter 11 here.
9. ND, 4, 189–190 [1, 2, and 3]. For introductions to Aquinas on the Incarnation, see the following: Richard Cross, “Aquinas on Nature, Hypostasis, and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation,” Thomist 60 (1966); Michael Gorman, “Incarnation” (chapter 31 of The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, edited by Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]); Eleonore Stump, “Aquinas’ Metaphysics of the Incarnation” (chapter 9 of The Incarnation, edited by Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002]); Joseph Wawrykow, “Hypostatic Union” (chapter 10 of The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, edited by Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005]).
10. While happily agreeing that both computers and prime ministers can be said to exist, Aquinas denies that they exist as naturally occurring things with a definite way of being that does not just reflect human concerns or human ways of dividing up things in the world. Those things that primarily exist, says Aquinas, are substances with natures or essences. So, he would say, human beings or horses primarily exist. These he refers to as entia per se (beings in and of themselves). He would call computers or prime ministers entia per accidens (beings only in a manner of speaking). Why? Because he would take a computer to amount to an assemblage of things brought together by people for a reason, and because he would say that prime ministers are people holding a conventional office, not something that defines them as the human beings that they are essentially and before they even plan on running for office.
11. ND, 4, 189 [2].
12. ND, 4, 190 [2].
13. ND, 4, 147 [1].
14. ND, 4, 191 [4].
15. ND, 4, 191 [6].
16. ND, 4, 192 [12].
17. ND, 4, 193 [13].
18. ND, 4, 194 [3].
19. ND, 4, 194 [3].
20. ND, 4, 194 [3].
21. ND, 4, 195 [7].
22. ND, 4, 196 [9].
23. The analogy recurs in Summa Theologiae 3a,6,2,5 and 3a,64,3.
24. ND, 4, 196–197 [11 and 12].
25. ND, 4, 197 [13].
26. ND, 4, 199 [1].
27. See Fabrizio Amerini, Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), chapter 3. For chronological reasons, one can suppose that Aquinas had arrived at this position by the time that he was writing SCG 4.
28. ND, 4, 201 [2].
29. ND, 4, 201–202 [4].
30. Aquinas knew nothing about how conception can now be brought about without male and female human beings having sexual intercourse with each other.
31. ND, 4, 203 [4].
32. ND, 4, 207 [2].
33. ND, 4, 209 [4].
34. ND, 4, 209 [7].
35. ND, 4, 211 [15].
36. Here I find helpful Sara Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not? Some Reflections on the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition,’ ” which is chapter 7 of Davis, Kendall, and O’Collins, The Incarnation. See also Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, 2nd rev. ed. (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975), 545. Having briefly summarized the goals of the fathers of Chalcedon, Grillmeier observes: “Even now we find among them no ‘theologians,’ in the sense of medieval or modern theological techniques. There is no attempt at a philosophical definition or speculative analysis! In theological method Chalcedon is no different from any of the earlier councils. Even if abstract concepts find their way in, the theological method here consists only in ‘listening to’ the proven witness of the Christian faith. True, the formulas are carefully developed, but only in connection with an already formed tradition. The work of the Fathers of Chalcedon is really ‘dogmatic.’ Moreover, their grasp of the content of their expressions is more intuitive than speculative. They produce formulas as witnesses to the Word and not as scholars. None of them could even have given a definition of the concepts with which they had now expressed christological dogma.”
37. Not all people concerned to defend what they take to be Christian orthodoxy think of God as simple and immutable, as Aquinas does. For two contemporary examples, see Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Richard Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), chapters 9 and 10.
38. N. T. Wright, “Jesus’s Self-Understanding,” which is chapter 3 of Davis, Kendall, and O’Collins, The Incarnation.
39. John Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate, edited by John Hick (London: SCM Press, 1977), 178. In “Letter to the Editors: Incarnation,” Theology 80 (1977), 205, Hick says “Incarnation … becomes a matter of degree: God is incarnate in all men insofar as they are Spirit-filled, or Christ-like, or truly saintly.”
40. Stump, “Aquinas’ Metaphysics of the Incarnation,” in Davis, Kendall, and O’Collins, The Incarnation, 211.
41. “My cat is a dog” can be thought to be true if it is taken to mean something like “My cat behaves as dogs typically do.” Yet, since being feline excludes being canine (cats and dogs being things of different kinds), “My cat is a dog” says something that cannot possibly be literally true.
42. Peter Geach summarizes the two-name theory of predication as follows: “In an affirmative predication the subject is a name and so is the predicate, and the predication is true if and only if the subject-name and the predicate-name stand for the same thing or things.” See Geach, Logic Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), 289.
43. Geach, Logic Matters, 295.
44. Wiles says this in a response to a review by Herbert McCabe of The Myth of God Incarnate. This response originally appeared in New Blackfriars 58 (1977). It was republished in Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987). My quote from Wiles appears on p. 63 of God Matters.
45. McCabe, God Matters, 70.
46. McCabe, God Matters, 70–71.
47. For someone suspecting Aquinas of Monophysite leanings, see Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
48. Even contemporary Catholic theologians have denied that Christ enjoyed the beatific vision, and many non-Catholic theologians have done so as well. For what I take to be an excellent account and discussion of the thesis that Christ indeed enjoyed the beatific vision, see Simon Francis Gaine, Did the Saviour See the Father? (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
49. McCabe, God Still Matters (London: Continuum, 2002), 109.
50. See Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). In The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, Cross also maintains that the Son of God suffers as God. For a discussion of God and suffering that supports Aquinas’s claim that God incarnate can suffer without the divine nature doing so, see Anselm K. Minn, “Why Only an Immutable God Can Love, Relate, and Suffer,” which is chapter 9 of Christian Philosophy of Religion: Essays in Honor of Stephen T. Davis, edited by C. P. Ruloff (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). For an impressive contemporary account of the Incarnation aiming to follow the teaching of Aquinas, see Thomas Joseph White, The Incarnate Lord (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015).
51. For notable examples of these, see Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), and Swinburne, The Christian God, chapter 9.