Chapter 18. The Fittingness of the Incarnation, the Sacraments, the Resurrection, and the Final State of People and of t
CHAPTER 18. THE FITTINGNESS OF THE INCARNATION, THE SACRAMENTS, THE RESURRECTION, AND THE FINAL STATE OF PEOPLE AND OF THE WORLD (SCG 4,50–97)
1. ND, 4, 212 [1].
2. Aquinas’s approach to Original Sin owes much to St. Augustine. For an outline of Augustine on Original Sin, see William L. Mann, “Augustine on Evil and Original Sin,” which is chapter 3 of The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, edited by Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
3. See SCG 4,81, in which Aquinas refers to death as accidental. See ND, 4, 302 [3].
4. ND, 4, 213 [3].
5. ND, 4, 214 [10].
6. ND, 4, 214 [11].
7. ND, 4, 215 [2].
8. ND, 4, 216 [6].
9. ND, 4, 216 [7].
10. ND, 4, 216 [8].
11. ND, 4, 216 [9].
12. ND, 4, 219 [4].
13. ND, 4, 219 [6].
14. ND, 4, 220 [7].
15. ND, 4, 222 [14].
16. In SCG 4,53, Aquinas uses the words “unbecoming” (indicens) and “inharmonious” (incongruum) as meaning the opposite of conveniens. See ND, 4, 53 [1].
17. ND, 4, 224 [6].
18. ND, 4, 224 [7].
19. This objection to the fittingness of the Incarnation presumes that defenders of belief in the Incarnation take the Incarnation to have saved people somehow. This presumption is understandable because many who have believed in the Incarnation have, indeed, taken it to have saved people in some way. Aquinas himself holds that the Incarnation resulted in us being freed from sin and being given grace to be united with God.
20. ND, 4, 225 [12].
21. When Aquinas refers to satisfaction he is thinking of it as a making up for an offense committed. You might wrong me, and I might forgive you. According to Aquinas, however, matters between you and I are not made right just by my forgiving you. He thinks that justice requires that you make some reparation or restitution for the wrong that you have done me, reparation or restitution that balances or matches the wrong done. And he takes Christ to have made reparation or satisfaction for human sin. In doing so, he stands in a long Christian tradition, one most famously, perhaps, expressed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in his Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man). This notion of Christ as satisfying for sin runs throughout Aquinas’s SCG treatment of God’s saving work for humans, as it does throughout his account of God’s saving work as given in other texts that he wrote, such as Summa Theologiae 3a,31–59.
22. The reference to satisfaction by death here reflects the Christian tradition, which Aquinas accepted, that Christ’s death satisfied for human sin.
23. ND, 4, 227 [28].
24. ND, 4, 228 [2].
25. ND, 4, 229 [3].
26. Here, again, we find Aquinas insisting on a sharp distinction between faith and knowledge while denying that the articles of faith are things we can know to be true in this life given what we are and what we can know by using our natural faculties. As I have shown, he thinks that, by means of causal reasoning, we can demonstrate certain truths about God. But, in the SCG, as elsewhere in his writings, he never wavers when it comes to the idea that the articles of faith have to be revealed to us by one who knows that they are true. One might suppose that God could reveal things to us without becoming one of us and giving us instruction. One might, for example, wonder whether God might not have revealed things to us by presenting us with writing in the sky or something like that. Aquinas, however, does not consider this possibility. Why not? I have no idea. Perhaps he would have said that writing in the sky or the like would leave us unacceptably coerced in some way.
27. ND, 4, 230–231 [5].
28. Here I assume that Aquinas would, for example, say that, much as I love my cat, it is not my equal since it lacks intellect and freedom of choice. Aquinas thinks that people have intellect. He thinks that they can understand what things are and can express their understanding in words the meaning of which anyone can grasp. And he thinks that we can draw on these understandings so as to reason with an eye on what to do in the future. So, he would say, my cat is not my equal or my friend. Friendship, for Aquinas, is a relationship between equals. He does not think that a pet can be a friend of a human being in anything like the way in which two human beings can be friends.
29. ND, 4, 231 [7].
30. ND, 4, 232 [9]. Aquinas’s approach to satisfaction has been challenged. For a defense of it, see Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (Routledge: London: 2003), chapter 15.
31. ND, 4, 232 [9].
32. ND, 4, 232 [9].
33. ND, 4, 233 [2].
34. ND, 4, 233 [3].
35. ND, 4, 234 [4].
36. ND, 4, 234 [5]. I take it that Aquinas is here suggesting that while angels are wholly immaterial, and while stones are wholly material, the Incarnation fittingly amounts to God becoming something both bodily and immaterial since it amounts to God becoming what he produces as the creator of all things considered as divided into material and immaterial ones.
37. ND, 4, 234 [6].
38. ND, 4, 235 [7]. In the SCG Aquinas does not offer an explanation for how angels came to sin. But he does in the Summa Theologiae. See my Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa Theologiae”: A Guide and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 122–124.
39. ND, 4, 234–235 [7].
40. ND, 4, 234–235 [7].
41. ND, 4, 235 [7].
42. ND, 4, 235 [7]. It is not obvious what Aquinas is driving at here. I presume that he is thinking (1) that spatiotemporal things, at one extreme, are purely material, (2) that human beings are closer to God than purely material things since they are not purely material, and (3) that God is wholly immaterial. And I presume that, in the light of (1)–(3) here, Aquinas thinks that it was appropriate for God to assume the spatiotemporal nature closest to him rather than something other than this.
43. ND, 4, 235–236 [8].
44. ND, 4, 236 [9].
45. ND, 4, 236 [10].
46. ND, 4, 236–237 [11].
47. ND, 4, 238–239 [12].
48. ND, 4, 239 [13].
49. ND, 4, 239–240 [14].
50. ND, 4, 246 [30].
51. ND, 4, 246 [31].
52. ND, 4, 246–247 [1].
53. ND, 4, 247 [2].
54. ND, 4, 247 [4].
55. ND, 4, 248 [1].
56. ND, 4, 250 [2].
57. ND, 4, 251 [6]. Donatists were a schismatic group active in Africa from the fourth to eighth centuries. Their most famous opponent was St. Augustine. Donatists were rigorists who held that sacraments celebrated by sinful ministers were invalid. Accordingly, they demanded that converts to Donatism should be rebaptized.
58. ND, 4, 251–252 [1].
59. ND, 4, 252 [1].
60. ND, 4, 253 [3].
61. In SCG 4,69 Aquinas asks whether leavened or unleavened bread can be used in the celebration of the Eucharist. He replies that either will do. What is important for Aquinas is that genuine bread and wine are used when celebrating the Eucharist.
62. ND, 4, 257 [1].
63. For an account of the history of Eucharistic theology, see David N. Power, The Eucharistic Mystery (New York: Crossroad, 1992).
64. ND, 4, 268 [1].
65. ND, 4, 257 [4].
66. By “the words of consecration” I mean the words used by a celebrant of the Eucharist repeating Christ’s words “This is my body” and “This is my blood.”
67. Some would say that his teaching to this effect leaves Aquinas open to the charge that God is a deceiver. For if God brings about what seems to be what it is not, then God is misleading us. I assume, though, that Aquinas takes the Eucharist to be not so much a deception as a revelation, just as he thinks that Jesus was God incarnate without looking like God (whatever that would mean). He thinks that Christ is in the Eucharist because revelation teaches us that this is the case. When it comes to recent discussions of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, texts that I think worth noting include (1) Michael Dummett, “The Intelligibility of Eucharistic Doctrine,” which is chapter 13 of The Rationality of Religious Belief: Essays in Honour of Basil Mitchell, edited by William J. Abraham and Steven W. Holtzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), and (2) chapters 10–13 of Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), in which McCabe debates P. J. FitzPatrick concerning the Eucharist.
68. ND, 4, 260 [9].
69. ND, 4, 263 [3].
70. ND, 4, 267 [10].
71. ND, 4, 268, [4].
72. Here I am taking “what Aquinas says about the Eucharist” to include not only what he says about it in the SCG but also what he says about it in the Summa Theologiae, which I do not take to deviate from what we find in the SCG.
73. I quote from Luther’s Works, edited by Abdel Ross Wentz (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1959), 6:29.
74. The word “transubstantiation” was widely used in reference to the Eucharist in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Attention was drawn to the word by the Council of Trent in chapter 4 of its decree on the Eucharist, where we read: “Since Christ our redeemer said that it was truly his own body which he was offering under the form of bread, therefore there has always been complete conviction in the church of God … that, by the conversion of the bread and wine, there takes place the change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. And the holy catholic church has suitably and properly called this change transubstantiation.” I quote from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, edited by Norman P. Tanner (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 2:695.
75. McCabe, God Matters, 146.
76. See Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1:245.
77. This is the drift of SCG 4,70.
78. ND, 4, 275 [5].
79. This is the drift of SCG 4,71.
80. ND, 4, 277 [1].
81. Aquinas holds that a sinner may be sufficiently repentant and devoted to Christ so as to achieve by contrition not only the grace of forgiveness but also the grace of becoming free from the need to accept some punishment due to sin. But he takes this to be something rare. See ND, 4, 280 [8].
82. See Leviticus 8:10–12.
83. ND, 4, 284 [4]. Aquinas agrees that lots of people can be in danger of death without being sick. But he does not think that people in this state are candidates for extreme unction since he takes that to be offered only to those who seem close to death due to illness or whatever. See ND, 4, 284 [5].
84. When referring to minor orders, Aquinas has in mind that to which people are deputed so as to perform functions distinct from those reserved to priests. He would have recognized four minor orders: those of acolyte, lector, exorcist, and ecclesiastical door keeper.
85. ND, 4, 290 [1].
86. In the SCG, as in other writings, Aquinas is clear that sacraments should not be thought of in magical terms. He always insists that sacraments cannot confer grace on those who receive them while wedded to sin.
87. ND, 4, 285 [1]. Here, Aquinas labors the point that sacraments can be validly celebrated by sinners.
88. ND, 4, 286 [2].
89. ND, 4, 289 [1].
90. ND, 4, 290 [1].
91. ND, 4, 291 [4].
92. ND, 4, 293 [2].
93. ND, 4, 295 [2].
94. ND, 4, 296 [6].
95. ND, 4, 297–298 [1 and 3].
96. Perhaps I should say that Aquinas takes the resurrection of people from the dead to be a future event every bit as predictable as, say, astronomers take eclipses to be. This is obvious from what he says in SCG 4,79–89, though I take its obviousness to be reinforced by the fact that the title of SCG 4,79 is Quod per Christum resurrectio corporum sit futura (“That, through Christ, the resurrection of bodies is to come”) and by the fact that, also in SCG 4,79, he explicitly denies that what Scripture says about human resurrection should be interpreted as teaching that God has now forgiven us (see ND, 4, 298 [6]).
97. See SCG 4,97.
98. Puzzlement you might have about Aquinas’s teaching on resurrection in the SCG might be allayed a bit if you get a sense of patristic and medieval thinking concerning resurrection. For an account of this, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). For good accounts of Aquinas on resurrection, see Montague Brown, “Aquinas on the Resurrection of the Body,” Thomist 56 (1991); Silas Langley, “Aquinas, Resurrection, and Material Continuity,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 75 (2001). For recent works of biblical scholarship relevant to Aquinas’s discussion of resurrection, see Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection from the Dead (London: Epworth Press, 1958); Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2008); Robert Gundry, Sôma in Biblical Theology with Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Murray Harris, Raised Immortal: Resurrection and Immortality in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983).
99. ND, 4, 297 [1].
100. ND, 4, 299 [10].
101. SCG 4,79 (ND, 4, 299 [11]).
102. SCG 4,79 (ND, 4, 299–230 [11–12]).
103. ND, 4, 300 [1].
104. ND, 4, 300–301 [2].
105. ND, 4, 301 [3].
106. ND, 4, 301 [4].
107. ND, 4, 301 [5].
108. ND, 4, 301 [6].
109. ND, 4, 301 [7].
110. ND, 4, 301 [4].
111. ND, 4, 303 [5].
112. ND, 4, 303 [6].
113. ND, 4, 306 [12].
114. ND, 4, 307 [13].
115. SCG 4,82.
116. SCG 4,82 [5].
117. SCG 4,83.
118. SCG 4,84.
119. SCG 4,85.
120. SCG 4,86.
121. SCG 4,87. Aquinas clearly thinks that there is a physical place “on high” to which the bodies of the blessed can be transported.
122. SCG 4,88.
123. SCG 4,89.
124. SCG 4,90.
125. SCG 4,91.
126. ND, 4, 338–339. In SCG 4,92 Aquinas argues that the will of those to be rewarded with beatitude is unchangeable once they have died. Correspondingly, he argues in SCG 4,93 that the will of those to be damned is unchangeable once they have died. In SCG 4,94 he argues that souls in purgatory also have a will that is fixed in what it is aiming at. In SCG 4,95 he goes on to argue that our wills are fixed at death since death is the end of our bodily (or preresurrection) life in which we make choices as bodily human beings. It has sometimes been suggested that God might give us a series of bodily lives in which we might end up finally conforming ourselves to God. But Aquinas has no time for this notion. He thinks that, at death, we have come to the conclusion of our lives and need to be judged accordingly. For modern defenses of an approach to life after death that counters this view, see John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed. with new preface (London: Macmillan, 1985), 341–345, and Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chapter 8.
127. The reference here is to Romans 8:21.
128. It should be obvious that SCG 4,79–97 raises many questions that could be considered at length. In what follows I confine myself to a brief discussion of two things that Aquinas concludes in these chapters.
129. For an account of the history of thinking about Original Sin, see Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (New York: Paulist Press, 2002).
130. See Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper Collins, 2015), Christopher Seddon, Humans: From the Beginning: From the First Apes to the First Cities (London: Glanville, 2015), and Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (London: Macmillan, 2013).
131. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Bodley Head, 1908), chapter 2.
132. Kenneth W. Kemp, “Science, Theology, and Monogenesis,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 85 (2011).
133. See Trent’s Decree on Original Sin. For the Latin text of this work with English translation, see Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:665–667.
134. For what I take to be an interesting and very clear discussion of Roman Catholic views on Original Sin, see Jerry D. Korsmeyer, Evolution and Eden (New York: Paulist Press, 1998).
135. I quote from the publication in L’Osservatore Romano, English ed., of John Paul II’s address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 22, 1996.
136. See Timothy McDermott, “Original Sin,” New Blackfriars 49 (January 1968 and February 1968). Also see Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters (London: Continuum, 2002), chapter 15.
137. 1 Corinthians 15:42–43.
138. P. T. Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 21.
139. ND, 4, 306 [12].
140. Geach, God and the Soul, 26–27. Sir John Cutler (d. 1693) was famous for his parsimony. The anecdote concerning his stockings became well known due to its telling by John Arbuthnot (1667–1735) in a text called First Lessons in Intellectual Philosophy. Unfortunately, Geach alludes to the anecdote incorrectly. Arbuthnot speaks of Cutler’s stockings as starting off as worsted and ending up as silk.
141. An especially famous philosopher connecting personal identity with memory is John Locke (1632–1704). According to Locke we should distinguish between “same person” and “same human being,” and should think that a person continues to exist as long as the person has continuity of “consciousness” of its previous life. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 2, chapter 27.
142. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh, 1785), essay 6, chapter 5.
143. See Peter van Inwagen, “The Possibility of Resurrection,” which is chapter 3 of van Inwagen, The Possibility of Resurrection and Other Essays in Christian Apologetics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). For a lively discussion of resurrection displaying knowledge of Aquinas, see Silas Langley, Death, Resurrection, and Transporter Beams (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014). For an intriguing defense of the view that our resurrection can be thought of as occurring right upon death, see James Ross, “Together with the Body I Love,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 75 (2001).
144. For a detailed discussion of Aquinas on the time of the resurrection of our bodies, see Bryan Kromholtz, On the Last Day: The Time of the Resurrection of the Dead According to Thomas Aquinas (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2010). This book also contains accounts of what Aquinas says about human resurrection throughout his various writings.
145. See Carlo Leget, “Eschatology,” which is chapter 15 of Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow (eds.), The Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 2005. For discussions of eschatology, see The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, edited by Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Aquinas does not feature much in this volume, but it provides copious accounts of eschatological views at odds with those of Aquinas.
146. Stephen T. Davis, “Resurrection,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical Theology, edited by Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 123.
147. I say “pretty much” since I do not think that Aquinas takes miracles to involve God intervening in the world. To intervene is to enter into a situation in which one did not exist to start with; for Aquinas, however, God is totally present in all things for as long as they have being.
148. John Morreall, “Perfect Happiness and the Resurrection of the Body,” Religious Studies 16 (March 1980).
149. Morreall, “Perfect Happiness,” 30 and 35.
150. Morreall cites Aquinas only once in his article: as believing that the beatific vision gives happiness to that which enjoys it. By implication, however, he is claiming that Aquinas should either abandon belief in the beatific vision as had by human souls or give up belief in human resurrection.
151. Morreall, “Perfect Happiness,” 30.
152. Richard E. Creel, “Happiness and Resurrection: A Reply to Morreall,” Religious Studies 17 (September 1981).
153. As Creel observes, the notion of unsurpassable human happiness seems incoherent, like the notion of a largest prime number. There is always a larger prime number than any one might care to cite. Similarly, no matter how happy a creature is, it is possible for an omnipotent God to make it still happier.
154. See Summa Theologiae 1a2ae,4,7, ad.1.
155. ND, 4, 97 [8].
156. Anthony Kenny, Christianity in Review (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2015), 36.