Conclusion
JESUS CHRIST:
THE COMING TOGETHER
OF TWO ECSTASIES
It all begins, really, with a jest. The spirituality of Thomas Aquinas begins not with rational speculation, not with “proofs” and demonstrations, but with the wonderful, surprising, and wholly incongruous event of God becoming a creature. This jest is such that Christians have not ceased for the past two millennia to laugh at it in delight. In the light of this Incarnation, the strangeness and ungraspable mystery of God’s love is, for the first time, revealed to human beings. The spiritual life, for Thomas, is nothing but the stunned and sustained reaction to this disclosure.
As was hinted at in the introduction, one of the most powerful spiritual critiques of Thomas Aquinas is that he thinks his way to God, basing his entire theology on rational proofs and philosophical arguments. There seems to be, some say, a sort of hubris or dangerous pride in this approach, a certain lack of docility and humility before the mystery of God. And from some Protestant critics one hears the charge that Thomas’ thought is insufficiently Christological, that Jesus Christ is not the cornerstone and culmination of his system. If either or both of these charges were true, Thomas would be not only an inadequate theologian, but more importantly, a misleading Christian spiritual director.
What I hope to show in the course of this chapter is that neither reproach is justified. Aquinas never storms the gates of heaven with prideful reason, nor does he in any sense bracket or dismiss the unsurpassable event of God’s self-disclosure that is the Incarnation. Rather, taking Jesus Christ as his point of departure, Thomas invites his reader into a stance of wonder and openness in the presence of the God whose generosity and love know no bounds. With the icon of the incarnate God in mind, Aquinas endeavors to lure us into an ecstatic appreciation of the ecstasy that is God, to find the God of self-forgetting love in our own self-forgetfulness.
I will explore these themes by looking at some of Thomas’ texts dealing with, first, the event of revelation and then with the person and work of the ultimate “revealer,” Jesus of Nazareth.
The very first question posed in the Summa theologiae has to do with the nature of what Thomas calls sacra doctrina, or sacred doctrine.1 What exactly is theology, this “talk about God,” and why is it necessary? We recall that in the great universities of Thomas’ time, philosophers were boldly using reason to probe the mysteries of nature and God. Aristotle’s metaphysics, his study of the principles of being, seemed to allow the philosopher access even to the inner life and reality of God as cause and principle of the world. Given this rational confidence, why did the medieval scholar require the science of theology, or sacra doctrina?
Thomas’ extremely illuminating answer to this question is the key to reading his entire project:
It was necessary for man’s salvation that there should be a teaching revealed by God beyond philosophical disciplines, which are investigated by human reason.
Firstly, indeed, because the human being is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason.2
We require a science beyond the philosophical and natural sciences precisely because we human beings are oriented to an end that surpasses our powers of rational comprehension. We are destined to be united to a power that is beyond whatever the eye can see or the mind can know, beyond the world in all of its richness, beyond the web of contingent things. Here in some of the first lines of the Summa we see the theme of ecstasy and self-transcendence, a motif that will be repeated throughout Thomas’ work: human beings are made to go beyond themselves, their end or purpose is to surrender themselves to a transcendent power.
And we notice something interesting in the subtle play of the language: there must be knowledge that goes beyond those sciences built up by human reason—that is to say, constructed by our minds and for our purposes. Purely “human” sciences are those that are expressions of the ego’s desire to grasp and cling and control. Thomas seems to imply that even if these disciplines gave us some insight into God, they would not give us saving insight precisely because they are still too much in our hands, still too marked by the desire to grasp God, to have God, to know God in a manipulative way. But the God who is known in this manner is an idol, a creation of the ego—and thus a God who could in no way correspond to the deep and abiding desire for self-transcendence. It is not so much what the philosophical sciences tell us about God that is problematic; it is rather how they do so. Augustine said, “Si comprehendis, non est Deus” (If you understand, it is not God that you understand), and the Buddhists have a saying, “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”3 Both of these maxims of the soul make a similar point: the moment you have the mystery or you see the divine, you have, in fact, ceased to have and failed to see. In insisting on God’s revelation as the starting point of his project, Thomas is holding off the enormous tendency of the ego to control.
Sacra doctrina, or knowledge revealed by God, is necessary because the final goal of human life is not to grasp but to be grasped, not to rise up but to be raised up, not to ascend but to be drawn. The mind’s hunger to control the world, to be the absolute power, must be disciplined before the human being can come to proper fulfillment. Of course, this theme of docility, passivity, and openness in the presence of the divine power is a commonplace among the great mystics. What I find intriguing is that Thomas Aquinas, the supposed rationalist, invokes it at the very beginning of his principal theological work. The spiritual master Aquinas is inviting the spirit to find itself in losing itself, to discover its richest power and destiny in surrendering to that reality that it cannot in principle control or have. In some ways, Thomas’ entire understanding of God is implicit in this last statement. If the power to which human beings are oriented is radically and in principle ungraspable, uncontrollable, unreachable, then that power cannot be a thing or a being in or alongside the world. It cannot be one reality among many. It cannot even be the supreme or highest being. Rather, it must be a reality that breaks all bonds and that surpasses all the categories of thought. It must be that reality in whose presence awe and worship are the only proper responses. Whatever Thomas says about God throughout his writings flows from this great insight given in revelation.
The spiritual focus of this discussion becomes even sharper when we attend to the first words of Thomas’ response: God’s self-disclosure was necessary “for human salvation.” God does not reveal himself in order to illumine our minds or satisfy our curiosity. Rather, God does so in order to move us, to shake us, to push us outside of and beyond ourselves in order that we might be saved. The implication is that without revelation we would tend to rest in ourselves, to remain comfortable with our ordinary lives among the finite things of the world. Revelation is a sort of spiritual wake-up, a radical reorientation of human beings, touching them at the center of their being and spurring them out and beyond. And thus sacra doctrina, theology, cannot be seen as a mere academic discipline; rather, as a codification of God’s breakthrough, it is a matter of spiritual life and death, a way of conducting human beings to their final destiny.
And therefore what will follow in the rest of Thomas’ great Summa is a type of spiritual direction, an articulation and explanation of that divine self-disclosure that is necessary for our salvation. It might be worthwhile to pause and reflect here on the fundamental meaning of the word “salvation,” salus in Thomas’ Latin. In common Latin parlance, salus meant “health,” and thus an ancient Roman might have greeted his neighbor with the term “salve” (good health to you). It is only by analogy that salus came to mean “salvation” or “health of the soul.” Interestingly, when the first Christians endeavored to designate the significance of Jesus Christ, they called him “healer”: sōtēr in Greek, salvator (bearer of the salus) in Latin. In short, Jesus, precisely as the revealer of God, was experienced as the one who carries the healing salve, the soothing balm. As a Christian theologian, Thomas will explicate dogma and doctrine as expressions of the healing power of revelation, as signposts or landmarks on the journey into God, and therefore as solutions to the fundamental dilemmas and struggles of human life.
This existential quality of theology becomes even more apparent when Thomas moves to consider the seemingly dry question of whether sacred doctrine is a science. At first glance, it appears rather cold and abstract to refer to theology as a science: the self-disclosure of God reduced to principles and formulas. But Thomas’ theological science, as he defines it, has nothing to do with disinterested knowledge at a distance. He tells us that sacra doctrina is a subalternate science—that is to say, one derived from the principles of a higher science. In a similar way, he explains, music is derived from, or subalternate to, the study of arithmetic. But what is the higher discipline from which theology draws its principles and perspectives? It is, states Thomas, the “science of God and of the blessed.”4 Now, the word scientia can designate an intellectual discipline, but it can also denote a direct, experiential type of knowing, a sort of knowledge through contact and touch. In what amounts to a delightful play on words, Thomas is telling us that the academic science of theology is drawn from the direct experience (scientia in the second sense) of God that is had by God himself and by the “blessed,” those saints who are now enjoying the vision of God in heaven. He means that the science of sacred doctrine is a kind of participation in the inner life of God, or better, an anticipation of the beatific vision of God that is our proper goal as human beings. The ultimate source and orientation of theology is once again the transforming and transfiguring “taste” for God.
One of the problems involved with reading these texts of Aquinas on revelation is that we interpret them from a post-Cartesian, post-Enlightenment perspective. Descartes wanted a philosophy that was purely rational, constructed along the lines of mathematics and geometry, and the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century wanted all branches of human knowing to reflect the clarity and precision of Newtonian physics. In both perspectives, the ideal knowers are the detached observers, careful that their prejudices, desires, and traditions do not cloud the objectivity of their judgment. Thomas’ science of God, his attempt to know the source and end of his life, has little to do with these more modern points of view. When Aquinas speaks of knowing God, his words have a biblical resonance and overtone. In a biblical perspective, “knowledge” can designate sexual union, the most intimate participation of one person in another: “How shall this be done, because I know not man?” (Luke 1:34 DRV) says the puzzled Mary to the angel of the Annunciation. In enticing us into knowledge of God, in drawing us onto the ground of sacra doctrina, Thomas Aquinas is offering us not clear and distinct ideas but rather a loving participation in God, a foretaste of heaven. He presumes that the one touched by this knowledge of God will be seared and shaped and overwhelmed by the contact.
Now, if it is indeed the case that Thomas Aquinas’ theology is radically revelation based, why does it seem to depend so fully on rational arguments, on philosophy? Why does Thomas so often use language borrowed from natural science, from metaphysics, from pagan thought, sometimes, it seems, setting aside the terminology and style of the Scripture? In constructing his great Gothic cathedral of rational theology is he not indeed guilty of that charge of intellectual hubris that we alluded to above? Does he not, as Luther and some of the reformers implied, effectively deny the primacy of God’s revealed Word in the Bible and in Jesus Christ, prostituting himself, as it were, with secularists and nonbelievers? In order to respond to these questions, and to grasp the master’s spiritual strategy, it is vitally important to understand precisely how and why Thomas Aquinas uses philosophical tools in his work.
The wisdom of pagan philosophers and scientists, the insights of Jewish rabbis, the speculation of Muslim metaphysicians, all of it is employed by Thomas in his pedagogical task as teacher of revelation. Theology, he claims, in no sense depends upon this wisdom; it is not derived from it; it does not presuppose it or stand upon it. However, theology can use these intellectual treasures in order to entice and lure the human mind to a deeper vision of the truth of revelation.
Thomas tells us that theology must utilize philosophy, not because of some defect of its own, but rather because of the debilitas or weakness of the human mind.5 Like many of the Fathers before him, Aquinas takes seriously the problem of the “fallen” mind. Like the will, the mind is profoundly and negatively affected by the power of sin. Instead of gazing naturally at the vision of God, the fallen mind tends to contemplate the things of the world, to concentrate upon the ordinary realm of creatures. In his Commentary on the Gospel of John, Thomas speaks of “inordinate lovers of the world” and those “who have fixed their eyes on the ground”—that is to say, whose minds are mired in the world of everyday experience.6 This fallen mind is simply overwhelmed by the intensity of the light that comes from God’s self-disclosure:
It may well happen that what is in itself the more certain may seem to us the less certain on account of the weakness of our intelligence, which is dazzled by the clearest objects of nature as the owl is dazzled by the light of the sun.7
The “weak” mind cannot easily take in the strangeness and otherness of God that appears in revelation; it is dazzled by such a vision. And thus it requires help in the form of a more natural, more down-to-earth wisdom. For Thomas, philosophical and scientific arguments are precisely these teaching devices, these tools, used to lead the fallen mind to a richer participation in the vision of God. In his language, they are handmaids of theology, servants of the divine science, “leading by the hand” (manuducentes) those who seek to see.8
In Thomas’ own lifetime there were many voices raised in protest against his somewhat unconventional use of pagan and philosophical sources. His colleague St. Bonaventure charged that Aquinas was diluting the wine of the Gospel with the insipid water of pagan philosophy. But Thomas responded: “Those who use the works of the philosophers in sacred doctrine, by bringing them into the service of faith, do not mix water with wine, but rather change water into wine.”9 He was claiming, in other words, to ennoble and reanimate philosophy precisely by putting it into service of the divine science; he was allowing all provisional truth to find its proper place as a handmaid to the Truth itself.
This transformation of water into wine is an extremely instructive spiritual strategy. Thomas teaches us that all things, all objects, all stories, in some way can speak of the transcendent and infinite mystery that is given in revelation. He implies that the spiritual directors, the mystagogues, the theologians, should get up into any pulpit that they can, even those offered by “pagans” and “nonbelievers.” Since sacra doctrina speaks not of some being sequestered above or alongside the world but rather of that all-embracing power that suffuses and sustains the universe, then all wisdom, even the most secularized, can be used to lead us to God. In a sense, Aquinas’ method presupposes that a sharp distinction between the sacred and the secular, between nature and grace, is misleading, since all of nature is destined for the supernatural and can be used in its service. In the contemporary context, the follower of Thomas’ spiritual strategy should feel at home utilizing the findings of depth psychology, sociology, anthropology, and mythology. Thomistic spiritual guides do not establish sacra doctrina as an independent discipline, a sort of fortress careful to defend itself against the other sciences. Rather, inspired by the breadth of theology itself, they welcome the secular disciplines as allies in the spiritual quest.
Having examined some of the key texts at the very beginning of the Summa, we can say with confidence that Thomas Aquinas sees his entire theological and spiritual project as a response to the unexpected and overwhelming act of God’s self-disclosure. Theology begins in wonder at the revealing power of God and ends in the rapture of the vision of God; the theologian, as spiritual master, explores the mystery in order to guide others to salvation. But what exactly is revelation and where does it come from? How is one grasped by the all-embracing power of being, lifted up beyond oneself and oriented to the pure communion with God? To answer these questions, we must turn to the third and final section of the Summa, more specifically to the questions and articles dealing with Jesus Christ. What becomes clear when we read the first questions of part one and part three together is that Christ himself is the locus, the event, of revelation, that energy by which the spirit is opened up and directed to God.
It is most instructive to attend carefully to the prologue to part three, Thomas’ more poetic presentation of the scope and purpose of the last section of his masterpiece:
Forasmuch as our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ, in order “to save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21) . . . showed unto us in his own person the way of truth, whereby we may attain to the bliss of eternal life by rising again, it is necessary, in order to complete the work of theology . . . [that] there should follow the consideration of the Savior of all and of the benefits bestowed by him on the human race.10
Here we see that Jesus Christ is the “way of truth,” the path that leads us to that beatitude that is the ultimate goal of human life. Jesus is the consummatio of theology, the summing up, the fulfillment, the completion and goal of the spiritual project. Indeed, Thomas implies in this passage that Jesus’ Resurrection from the dead is the signal that we are destined to rise again as well, that our final end is beyond the confines of this dimension. The conclusion is unavoidable: the illuminating revelation by which Thomas’ theological endeavor begins and by which it is conditioned is Jesus of Nazareth, the definitive via, or way, to God. Jesus Christ is the light in which we see who God is (transcendent and alluring power) and who we are in relation to God (spirits oriented toward transcendence); he is the one in whom we appreciate the power that raises us up beyond ourselves to salvation. And therefore, far from holding a peripheral or incidental position in the Thomistic system, Jesus is the icon, the symbol that determines and shapes the whole of Thomas’ theology and spiritual direction.
What and how Jesus reveals becomes clearer when we examine the articles dealing with the “fittingness” of the Incarnation. Aquinas argues that it was altogether fitting that God become incarnate precisely because in that surprising, unexpected act, the fullness and richness of the divine being could shine through:
By the mystery of the Incarnation are made known at once the goodness, the wisdom, the justice, and the power or might of God—his goodness for he did not despise the weakness of his own handiwork; his justice, since on man’s defeat, he caused the tyrant to be overcome by none other than man, and yet he did not snatch men forcibly from death; his wisdom, for he found a suitable discharge for a most heavy debt; his power or infinite might, for there is nothing greater than for God to become incarnate.11
It is the last comment that I find the most intriguing. Had God never become incarnate, human beings would never have developed an adequate sense of the greatness, the sheer transcendence, the unknowability of God. Prior to the Incarnation, Thomas implies, humans indeed worshiped and reverenced God, reflected on God philosophically, and honored God in various ways. But they always fell short of seeing the true extent of God, the strangeness and uncanniness of God’s being. It is the condescension of the Incarnation, God’s stooping low to join us as one of us, that “blows open” the mind, introducing the human spirit for the first time to an adequate conception of God’s otherness and transcendence. What Thomas implies is this: only a reality that is not a being in the world, even the supreme being, could ever become a creature while at the same time remaining true to itself. The God who comes to join us in Jesus Christ must be a reality with a greater “stretch,” a greater flexibility, a greater power of being than we could possibly have imagined. Whatever notion one might have had of God must be discarded in the presence of the Incarnate Word; even the highest titles of praise fall short of the glory revealed in the face of Christ. That God creates and governs the world, that God loves and nurtures the beings of the universe, even that God guides us to a life after death—all of that was, to varying degrees, accepted and believed prior to the Incarnation. But that God would become a creature while still remaining God, that God would take on all of the “weakness of his handiwork,” feeling limitation, suffering, death itself, that was simply unimaginable before Jesus Christ. That was simply too great to be hoped for, simply too ludicrous to be believed. In Paul’s terms, it is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23). It is in this unheard-of surprise, Thomas hints, that true revelation takes place, for it is only in this shock that we realize how marvelous God is and therefore what a transcendent destiny is open for us.
This theme of the superabundance of God is further developed in a second argument. Thomas tells us that something is fitting or appropriate if it corresponds to nature. Thus, it is fitting that human beings engage in speech and thought because they are, by nature, rational animals. But the very nature of God is to be good, and, as Pseudo-Dionysius reminds us, it is in accord with the nature of the good to be “diffusive of itself,” to express itself.12 As we will see later in our treatment of creation, this effervescence of God can be seen in the exuberant multiplicity and variety of the universe, in the countless galaxies, in the dinosaurs, in the countless forms of life. God is undoubtedly playful in his self-expression. And therefore it is fitting that God, the highest good, should express himself in the fullest possible manner—and this, says Thomas, takes place only when God joins to himself a created nature, becoming one with creation. The key words in this argument are maxime (greatest) and summo modo (in the highest manner). Thomas is implying that it is only in the Incarnation that we can possibly know how good God is, since it is only there that the highest type of self-gift or self-expression takes place. In and through Jesus Christ, we can begin to glimpse for the first time the full range and intensity of the divine goodness, for only in Christ do we see the price that God was willing to pay, the self-emptying that God was willing to endure. This supreme and surpassing reality by which the human being is radically transformed and given a new ultimate purpose is none other than the strange God who is powerful enough to become powerless, great enough to become small.
I would like to return to that striking description offered by Pseudo-Dionysius, a theologian to whom Thomas is deeply indebted: the good is diffusive of itself. For the great mystic Pseudo-Dionysius, goodness is like a fountain, constantly overflowing, or like the sun, naturally radiating out, communicating almost in spite of itself. Or in more psychological terms, it is like a joyful person who simply cannot keep his good cheer to himself. The good spills over, speaks itself, shines forth. What the first Christians sensed in Jesus Christ is that God has utterly spoken himself, that God has indeed sent his Word, his very self, his own life. And, for Thomas Aquinas, it is precisely this insight into God’s playfulness and capacity for self-offering that convinces Christians of the unspeakable goodness of the divine power. It is the self-forgetfulness of God, made visible in Jesus, that persuades us finally of God’s superabundant generosity. If God had not become incarnate, if God had not joined us in our creatureliness, God would remain a limited, finite good, still to some degree restricted in love. In a word, the Christian discovers in Jesus Christ that God’s being is fully ecstatic. God’s nature is to go beyond himself, to step outside of himself, to forget himself in love.
This theme is further developed in the intriguing tension between the second objection and response. Animated by an artistic concern for harmony and balance, the objector maintains that it is particularly unfitting (inconveniens) for two things that stand at an infinite distance to be united.13 Thus, goes the argument, it would be inappropriate for a painter to depict a human being with the head of a horse. But the divine and human natures are separated by an infinite distance, since the former is altogether simple and transcendent while the latter is finite and material. This counterargument is intriguing: there seems to be something inappropriate about the Incarnation. The combination of the divine and human appears to the aesthetically sensitive objector as a sort of monstrosity. Would it not be cleaner, he seems to imply, if the two natures simply remained distinct, each in its own proper sphere?
Once again, it is most important to attend to the subtle moves of Thomas’ language as he responds to this objection:
To be united to God in unity of person was not fitting to human flesh, according to its natural endowments, since it was above its dignity; nevertheless, it was fitting that God, by reason of his infinite goodness, should unite it to himself for human salvation.14
Aquinas holds that from the standpoint of the human being the coming together of the two natures would be inconveniens, inappropriate, since such a union would be beyond the dignity of men and women. He seems to imply that there is nothing in the lowliness and sinfulness of human nature that would warrant the gift of the Incarnation, that would justify the condescension of God—and further that we human beings could never reach up to Incarnation on our own, forcing the issue as it were. That sort of sinful grasp would indeed be inconveniens, aesthetically displeasing, monstrous. However, when the Incarnation is seen from God’s side, when it is appreciated as God’s self-offering, as an expression of God’s superabundant goodness, then it is entirely appropriate. When glimpsed from the standpoint of the ecstatic God, the Incarnation is, in its surprise, altogether reasonable. As we saw in the texts on revelation, Thomas battles here against the human pretension to rise up to God, to build a tower of Babel to heaven. The coming together of the divine and human is life-giving and salvific only when it takes place through the initiative of God; what saves us is being lifted up to a share in the divine life, not raising ourselves, but accepting God’s self-offering as a gift, not as something due to us.
If article 1 is an exploration of the fittingness of the Incarnation from the side of God, article 2 is an analysis of the same issue from the side of the human being. Thomas wonders whether it was necessary for the restoration of the human race that God should become incarnate. We should note that Thomas is indirectly entering into dialogue here with his predecessor St. Anselm of Canterbury. In his book Cur Deus Homo? (Why God Became Man), Anselm had argued that the Incarnation was strictly necessary in order that the human race might be saved.15 Anselm logically demonstrated that the Incarnation and cross were the necessary means to effect the forgiveness of sins and thus that God, in his goodness and justice, was practically obliged to enter into the human condition. Thomas distances himself from the position of Anselm, convinced that such a view puts too many constraints on the freedom and flexibility of God.
What one notices, in the course of the complex play of objection and response in this article, is once more the emphasis upon the divine surplus. The Respondeo begins with a distinction between two types of necessity: strict necessity and “convenient” necessity. Thomas says that food, for instance, is strictly necessary for the preservation of life, since that end could not be attained without food, whereas a horse is conveniently necessary for a journey in the sense that the journey is most pleasurably and economically undertaken on horseback.
In the first way, it was not necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. For God with his omnipotent power could have restored human nature in many other ways. But in the second way it was necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. Hence Augustine says (De Trin. 12.10): “We shall also show that other ways were not wanting to God, to whose power all things are equally subject; but that there was not a more fitting way of healing our misery.”16
Though God could have brought human beings back into right relationship with him in a lesser way, there was no more fitting, no more extravagant, and no more perfect a way to inaugurate salvation than through Incarnation. God’s becoming human was not a merely sufficient means to obtain the end of redemption; it was salvation through surplus and surprise. A gift is wonderful, but it is even more satisfying when it comes as a surprise. In one of his poems, John Shea paints the picture of a little girl who, upon hearing the Christmas story, turns over and buries her head under the cushion of the sofa: and this, says Shea, is the only proper response to the good news of the Incarnation.17 Nothing could be more Thomist.
Following Augustine’s lead, Aquinas spells out in detail the significance of this excess. Our faith is infinitely strengthened by contact with the sheer power of God’s own mind; our hope is superabundantly enlivened by the conviction that God loves us so intensely that he gives us his only Son; our love is supremely awakened in response to God’s overwhelming gesture of love; and, perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this book, our participation in the life of God, which is our proper end, is infinitely intensified through contact with the divinized humanity of Jesus Christ. Once more we notice the presence of superlatives: greatly, infinitely, supremely.
In short, it is none other than the excess of God’s love expressed in Christ that shakes us out of our self-complacent finitude and orients us to the supernatural love that is our proper end; it is in Christo that we encounter the revealing God who is the ground and source of all authentic theological speculation.
We see the essentially Christological nature of revelation explicitly affirmed, once more, in Thomas’ commentary on John’s Gospel. In analyzing the grounds for the Incarnation, Thomas remarks that
creatures were not sufficient to lead to a knowledge of the Creator. . . . Thus it was necessary that the Creator himself come into the world in the flesh, and be known through himself. And this is what the Apostle says: “Since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God by its wisdom, it pleased God to save those who believe by the foolishness of our preaching” (1 Cor. 1:21).18
The Incarnation is the foolishness of God that shames the wisdom of the philosophers, the novelty that calls into question all that had been assumed to be the case concerning God. It is the surest sign that God is best described as ecstasy. Without the breakthrough of the divine power in Jesus, there could be no complete and saving knowledge of the Creator, that reality that is radically outside the net of contingent relations.
Commenting on the passage from the prologue of John’s Gospel concerning the “seeing of the glory” of the incarnate Word, Thomas speaks of the healing power of God’s presence in Christ:
Hence in order that the divine light might be seen by us, he healed our eyes, making an eye salve of his flesh, so that with the salve of his flesh the Word might heal our eyes, weakened by the concupiscence of the flesh.19
The fleshly humanity of Christ is the balm that heals the eyes of the soul, the light by which the hiddenness of God is revealed and hence the power by which the human being is raised up out of a preoccupation with finitude to a contemplation of her proper end. Once again, it is in this sense that Jesus is savior, the bearer of the salve that enables us to see.
After surveying these remarkable and often overlooked passages concerning the Incarnation, we can conclude that for Thomas Aquinas, Jesus Christ, God made human, is the light by which the goodness, the power, the strangeness, and especially the ecstasy of God are revealed. In his great leap out of himself, God discloses, superabundantly and overwhelmingly, who he is. In this ecstatic leap, God opens up the human mind and heart, illumines and heals the eyes of the human spirit, and thereby sets us on the path that leads to him.
Jesus as the Archetype of the Human Race
If Jesus Christ is the “place” and moment of God’s revelation, then he must be, at the same time, the disclosure of the proper human stance with regard to God. We recall from the first question of the Summa that revelation is never abstract, never received coldly or at a distance. On the contrary, it involves the lifting up and reorienting of the one who receives it. Thus, precisely as the bearer of divine revelation, precisely as the one who shows us the ecstasy of God, Jesus Christ also discloses what the human being should look like in the presence of God. And there is, in the thought of Thomas, a wonderful coming together of these two disclosures: Jesus reveals the ecstasy that is God in the measure that he, as a human being, is ecstasy before God. Jesus becomes transparent to God’s self-forgetting because he, in his humanity, is nothing but self-forgetting love. In a word, the person of Jesus Christ is the joining of two ecstasies, the moment when the passionate human thirst for God meets the equally passionate divine thirst for us. Indeed, these two dimensions of revelation must be given together, since one implies the other. If human beings are not in a stance of obedience and love, we cannot see God, and if we do not see God, we cannot be in a stance of radical obedience. What appears in Jesus Christ, therefore, is a sort of interpersonal play of two freedoms, created and uncreated, each one in perfect openness and surrender to the other.
Before looking at some of the texts dealing with the humanity of Jesus, it is most important to recall that Thomas defends the classical Chalcedonian definition of the person of the Savior. He holds, in short, that in Christ there is a coming together of a divine and human nature in such a way that neither nature is compromised or overpowered by the other. The humanity of Christ is not a mere cover or veneer for his divinity, not, to use Karl Rahner’s language, only a “livery” donned briefly by God.20 Rather, it is an essential and fully integral aspect of who he is. Thus, for Thomas, it is altogether possible to speak of what pertains to Jesus precisely as a human being in relation to the revealing God, and in relation to us, his brothers and sisters.
It is to this issue that he turns in question 7 of the tertia pars, treating of the “grace of Christ as an individual human being.” In article 1 of question 7, Thomas considers the following question: whether in the soul of Christ there was any habitual grace. Now, habitual grace is the ongoing, determinative, and transformative presence of God in the heart and mind of a human being. A real participation in the life of God, it is the power by which one is grafted on to the divine source. Aquinas insists that this type of grace is present in the soul of the Christ
first, on account of the union of his soul with the Word of God. For the nearer any recipient is to an inflowing cause, the more does it partake of its influence. . . . Second, on account of the dignity of his soul, whose operations were to attain so closely to God by knowledge and love. . . . Third, on account of the relation of Christ to the human race. For Christ, as man, is the “Mediator of God and men,” as is written in 1 Tim. 2:5, and hence it behooved him to have grace which would overflow upon others, according to John 1:16, “and of his fullness we have all received, and grace for grace.”21
It behooves us to dwell on each of these three arguments that Thomas puts forward, for they reveal with great clarity Aquinas’ view on the nature and importance of Jesus’ humanity. First, the human heart of Christ is filled with habitual grace due to its proximity to the inflowing cause of grace that is the Word of God. The soul, the spiritual center of Jesus is, in other words, pressed close to the fountain that is God’s ecstasy, God’s tendency to flow out in love. The man Jesus is, if you will, a sheer receptivity to the outpouring of God’s life, an ecstasy in the presence of divine ecstasy. Second, the soul of Christ is filled with grace because grace is necessary in order that any human nature can attain to God in knowledge and love. Once again we recall here Aquinas’ understanding of the term scientia (knowledge) as intimate sharing in another. What Thomas tells us is that the humanity of Christ was raised up by the grace of God to a full participation in and experience of the divine reality. The presence of habitual grace in the soul of the savior means that Jesus is, in the depths of his being, a dialogue of love between the divine and the human, a play of invitation and response.
And then, in the third argument, Thomas arrives at the heart of the matter. There must have been habitual grace in the soul of Christ because Jesus stands as the mediator Dei et hominum (the mediator between God and human beings). As mediator, Jesus must have been in possession of a superabundance of grace so that this power might overflow from him upon the rest of the human race. There is a beautiful vision that stands behind Thomas’ perhaps cold philosophical vocabulary: Christ is the human being who drinks deeply from the fountain of love that is God and who then overflows in love, pouring out what he has received on the rest of humanity. In his ecstatic embrace of God’s ecstasy, Jesus becomes the condition for the possibility of our ecstasy before the divine source. Because he has been embraced, raised up, filled with love, we see the route that leads to life; because he was love before God, we see who we must become. A century before Thomas, St. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of the kiss between the Father and Son, the mutual sharing of love between the two divine persons. And then, borrowing from the opening lines of the Song of Songs, he said that the Christian longs to be “kissed with the kiss” of Jesus’ mouth, to receive, in other words, a share in what the Father has given to the Son.22
This theme of Christ as the mediator for all is a commonplace in the biblical and patristic tradition but is, unfortunately, too often overlooked in ordinary Christian piety and reflection. For Thomas Aquinas, Jesus is not meant so much to be worshiped as followed, or better, shared in, participated in. Thomas loved and commented upon the Gospel of John, which contains those beautifully organic descriptions of the relation between Christ and his disciples: “I am the vine, you are the branches” (John 15:5), and “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life” (John 6:54). Christ does not want to be admired as a metaphysical wonder or exception; on the contrary, he wants to be eaten and drunk, consumed, taken on. He wants to be source of life for the rest of us, to give what has been given to him. In a word, he longs, precisely as a human being, to be a model of love and receptivity to the divine source of his being. For Aquinas, the grace-filled humanity of the savior sets up a sort of field of force in which the whole of humanity can be transformed and energized. The human Christ’s habitual grace, his fundamental orientation to God, is the exemplar and power by which all Christians are turned toward the ever greater revealer. The grace, found in excessive quantity in the humanity of Jesus, overflows, as it were, into the minds and hearts of those who are grasped by God through him.
There is a lovely passage in question 8, article 3, where Thomas speaks of the all-embracing quality of Christ’s grace as head of the Church, as exemplar for the entire race:
For first and principally, he is the head of such as are united to him by glory; second, of those who are actually united to him by charity; third, of those who are actually united to him by faith; fourth, of those who are united to him merely in potentiality, which is not yet reduced to act, yet will be reduced to act according to divine predestination.23
Jesus Christ is the mediator of the divine power for those who are already in full union with God, those in glory; for those on earth who are currently at one with God through faith and love; and even for those who are not now with God but who nevertheless long for union. The ecstasy of the human Christ is the mode of access to the divine power for those at all levels of the spiritual life: for those who have already “tasted and seen” and for those who remain in various ways hungry.
In his response to the first objection in this third article, Thomas addresses himself to a problem that is quite contemporary—namely, whether Christ is the exemplar, the head, for all people. The objector maintains that Jesus cannot be the head of those who are unbaptized and hence outside of the Church that is the Body of Christ. In answer, Thomas says that even the unbaptized, though not actually in the Church, are yet potentially so inasmuch as they long for salvation. In some ways anticipating Karl Rahner’s theory of anonymous Christianity, Thomas implies that all human beings, basically longing for the coming together of divine and human love that has in fact occurred in Christ, are, implicitly or explicitly, formed according to the icon of Jesus the Messiah.24 Christ is, for all, the unifying and organizing power, the imago of divine-human union that all people long to realize in themselves. This is not a type of Christian imperialism; rather, it is a wager that what has appeared in Christ—the shared ecstasy of God and the human—will indeed prove captivating, fascinating, entrancing to any person of any cultural background.
In order to understand with greatest clarity this alluring play between the human and divine in Jesus, we have to turn to the eighteenth question of the tertia pars, dealing with the unity of wills in the interior life of Christ. In the course of this discussion, Thomas spells out the dynamic that is at the core of his entire theological and spiritual project: exactly how human and divine excessus (ecstasy or self-surrender) come together in a mutually illuminating fashion. To grasp this is to learn how to live a life in imitation of Christ.
In the first article of question 18, Aquinas distances himself from the so-called monothelite position of Apollinaris, the view that in Christ there is only one divine will, and he unambiguously affirms the classical orthodox view that there are, in fact, two wills, divine and human, in Jesus. If in Christ God has assumed an integral human nature, it must follow, says Thomas, that he has “assumed” a fully constituted human will. Once again, the humanity of Jesus is not a vague front for his divinity, not simply the form under which divine power presented itself. On the contrary, Jesus is to the center of his being a play and tension between the created and the uncreated, including and especially at the level of will, of desire.
Now, as is often the case in Thomas’ texts, it is in the back-and-forth movement of objection and response that this baldly stated position is fleshed out. The first objector maintains that the will is the first mover or “first commander” in whoever wills. But in Christ, he continues, the divine will was supreme, since everything human in Jesus was moved by that will. Thus, it follows that, de facto, whatever was proper to the human will in Jesus was swallowed up, overwhelmed by, the divine will. Indeed, he seems to imply, how could a will that is perfectly subordinate and subservient, that is wholly transparent to a higher power, possess any integrity of its own?
Aquinas’ response to this commonsensical objection is worthy of careful study:
Whatever was in the human nature of Christ was moved at the bidding of the divine will; yet it does not follow that in Christ there was no movement of the will proper to human nature, for the good wills of other saints are moved by God’s will. . . . For although the will cannot be inwardly moved by any creature, yet it can be moved inwardly by God.25
Thomas grants that the human will of Christ was totally subordinate to the divine will, but he refuses to admit that such passivity amounted to a blotting out of Christ’s human freedom. In defense of this rather peculiar claim, Thomas offers the observation that though the created will cannot, in its freedom, be moved inwardly by any creature, it can be so moved by God. But how is this possible? What is the difference between manipulation by a creature and manipulation by God?
In answer, Aquinas refers us to question 105 of the prima pars, where he discusses the presence of God in the will for the first time. There the Dominican master argues that God is irresistibly present to the will precisely as the ground of the will, precisely as the ultimate good that is always desired in any concrete act of the will.26 Whenever a person makes a particular choice—whether it is the trivial decision to see this movie rather than that or a significant decision to pursue a given career—she is, says Thomas, implicitly desiring her ultimate happiness. All individual acts of the will rest upon, depend upon, the final and all-embracing desire for the good itself—which is none other than God. For example, in deciding to paint, the artist is seeking the ultimate good that is the beautiful itself; in choosing to take on a particular case, the lawyer is motivated (at least ideally!) by the love for the final value that is justice itself. To be fully itself, the will must give itself radically to this good, must be totally conformed to it. Therefore, God’s “manipulation” of the will is tantamount not to the destruction of the will but to its preservation. The will finds itself in surrendering to the good that is its ground and end and raison d’être. Authentic freedom for the human will consists, paradoxically, in enslaving itself to the divine power.
This is but a particular example of the general principle of what I will call noncompetitiveness between God and creatures. Because God is not a being in the world—that is to say, not something that exists alongside of other creatures—God can enter into the being of a finite thing with great intimacy and without compromising the independence and integrity of that thing. A creature can enter into the reality of another creature only in an aggressive and domineering sense, the former forcing the latter as it were to cede something of itself. To give a perhaps crude example, a tiger assimilates, takes into itself, the being of the antelope only through attack, destruction, and finally ingestion; the antelope has to cede its being to the aggressor, “becoming” the tiger only through total loss of identity. What Aquinas implies in this entire discussion is that God does not operate in this way; when God becomes a creature, the creature is raised up, not diminished, brought to fulfillment, not overcome.
Now, for Thomas the great paradigm and archetype of this nonaggressive, noncompetitive relationship between God and the world is the Incarnation itself: the two natures of Christ are present together in a personal unity, but neither is mixed or mingled or confused with the other, neither is compromised or overwhelmed by the other. And therefore the absolute control of the divine will over the human will in Christ is not a negation of Jesus’ humanity but rather an elevation of it. The human will of Jesus is perfectly aligned with, totally dependent on, and completely surrendered to the divine will.
It was Anselm of Canterbury who gave classic expression to this principle when he reminded us that authentic freedom is not to hover sovereignly above the “yes” and the “no,” but instead to be bound to “yes” alone.27 To be torn between yes and no is, says Anselm, to be caught in the intolerable situation of the sinner. What appears to be freedom in the eyes of the world—the ability to choose this or that, good or evil—is in fact the deepest type of slavery. God’s freedom is equivalent to God’s fidelity in love, to his capacity to say nothing but yes, and our freedom is found in imitation of that divine liberty. For Thomas, we know this in light of Jesus Christ, the human being fully alive and fully free precisely in his complete openness to, and passivity before, the will of God.
And thus, once again, our principle is confirmed: the excessus, the ecstasy or self-surrender, of Christ is what allows the excessus of God to manifest itself in him. And we who participate in the energy of Christ, we who are “kissed with the kiss of his mouth,” are those who become most fully ourselves in a similar act of obedience and self-transcendence. The great tragedy of sin is forgetting this mutual ecstasy and imagining God and oneself as self-contained rivals and competitors. In the heart of the sinner is the conviction that letting go of himself is tantamount to losing himself. The illusory sense is that the more the sinner affirms herself over and against God, the more she asserts the independence of her mind and will, the more she finds herself. What is disclosed in Christ is the unmasking of that illusion: the humanity of Jesus is elevated and fulfilled precisely in Jesus’ willingness to be an instrumentum (instrument) of the ever-greater God, precisely in surrender to the authority of the Father. What the humanity of Jesus shows us is that leaving the confines of one’s puny ego and allowing the excessus of God to come to birth is the only route to self-discovery.
At the very beginning of the Summa, Thomas told us that he would speak of God from the standpoint of the experience of being lifted out of himself by God’s own self-disclosure. He would speak of the power that moves him and shakes him, turning him toward the infinite and thus to his own salvation. And toward the end of his masterpiece, Aquinas explicitly tells us where and how that salvation takes place: in the mutual ecstasy that is the God-human, Jesus Christ. In him we see simultaneously the grace that saves and the stance of the saved.
Thus, the icon, the image, in whose light Thomas Aquinas’ teaching should be read is that of Christ, the meeting of divine and human self-forgetting. Whenever Thomas speaks of God, he describes not some philosophical abstraction, but the ever-greater, ever-more-surprising power that appeared in Jesus the Christ. And consequently, whenever he speaks of God, he implicitly describes the proper human stance vis-à-vis God, that attitude of obedience, openness, and self-transcending love that alone allows the fullness of the divine to emerge. As a theologian of revelation, Thomas is a doctor of the soul, a spiritual master trying to show the reader how to see God with the eyes of Christ, to touch God with the hands of Christ, to feel God with the heart of Christ.
Martin Luther was sharply critical of Thomas and other scholastic thinkers for theologizing about God in se (in himself) without reference to God’s embrace of the human race, God’s activity pro nobis (for us).28 Our reading of Thomas’ texts on revelation and Christology show that this charge is unfair. Aquinas is not interested in God in himself but only in that God who seizes us, turns us around, and frankly shocks us by the strangeness and unpredictability of his love shown forth in Christ.
Given this assumption concerning Thomas’ method, I think it is possible to rediscover an enormous spiritual vitality in his seemingly arid texts. As we have seen, the Thomistic style is marked by the back-and-forth movement of objection and response, the dialectical play of question and answer. If Thomas’ final purpose is to lure the reader into the attitude of Christ, then the objections can be appreciated not simply as intellectual counterpositions but as spiritual counterpositions. The objector is cleverly resisting the demanding spiritual attitude that Thomas is trying to inculcate, and the soul master, Aquinas, in his responses, is patiently tracking him down, correcting him, putting him back on the beam. An incorrect understanding of God is always in correlation with an improper human attitude toward God, with an un-Christlike perspective.
Why are there so many questions, so many articles, so many objections and responses in the Summa? One might respond: because there are so many ways that the sinful soul can evade the call to Christlike obedience and openness of heart. Like Ignatius and John of the Cross, Thomas is extremely sensitive to the darkness of the spirit, to the labyrinthine ways of sin, and, again like those two great masters of the soul, he has the patience and the love required to seek out the sinner despite all obstacles. Thomas will not rest until his reader is lured into wonder and ecstasy.
1. It is important to call attention here to the structure of the Summa theologiae. Thomas’ great work is divided into three major sections, the prima pars, the secunda pars, and the tertia pars. The prima pars deals with God, Trinity, and creation; the secunda pars with the human being; and the tertia pars with Incarnation, Jesus Christ, and the sacraments. Each major section is subdivided into questions that are, in turn, subdivided into articles that specify the questions. An article begins with the statement of a question, e.g., Does God exist? The statement of the question is followed by the listing of several objections or counterpositions to the one that Thomas will take. After the objections, there is usually a sed contra (but on the other hand), a quotation from a philosopher or theologian or a scriptural citation meant to bolster and illumine Thomas’ response. Following the sed contra, there is a respondeo (I respond), Thomas’ formal answer to the question. Finally, Aquinas returns to the objections and, one by one, answers them, usually placing them in the context of the respondeo. A Thomist scholar might cite the Summa as follows: Summa theologiae I, q. 2, art. 3, ad. 3 (or 1.2.3 ad. 3 in the approach of this book), meaning, the first part of the Summa, question 2, article 3, response to the third objection. We recall from the introduction that this approach mirrors the style and practice of the “disputed question” in the medieval context.
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1.1.1.
3. Augustine, Sermones de scripturis 117.3.5, in Patrologia cursus completus, series Latina (hereafter, PL), ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1845), 38:664 (translation mine). For a contemporary English translation of this work see The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, pt. 3: vol. 4, Essential Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2007), 195–202.
4. Summa theologiae 1.1.2.
5. See Summa theologiae 1.1.5 ad. 2: “That [theology] thus uses [other sciences] is not due to its own defect or insufficiency, but to the defect of our intelligence, which is more easily led by what is known through natural reason (from which proceed the other sciences) to that which is above reason, such as are the teachings of [theology].”
6. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John 1.5.138, 1.4.121.
7. Summa theologiae 1.1.5 ad. 1.
8. Summa theologiae 1.1.5 ad. 2.
9. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius 2.3 ad. 5, trans. Armand Maurer, in Faith, Reason, and Theology: Questions I–IV of His Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987), 50. For more on Bonaventure’s criticism of St. Thomas, see Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D’Aquino, 280.
10. Summa theologiae 3, prologue.
11. John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa 3.1. Quoted in Summa theologiae 3.1.1.
12. See, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names 4–5, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist, 1987), 71–103. For the phrase “the good is diffusive of itself” (bonum diffusivum sui), see Summa theologiae 1.5.4 ad. 2, 1.27.5 obj. 2, 1–2.1.4, and elsewhere.
13. Summa theologiae 3.1.1 obj. 2.
14. Summa theologiae 3.1.1 ad. 2.
15. See, for instance, Anselm, Why God Became Man 1.25, trans. Janet Fairweather, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 313: “it has been adequately demonstrated that, if we posit the non-existence of Christ, the salvation of mankind cannot be effected by any means.”
16. Summa theologiae 3.1.2.
17. John Shea, “Sharon’s Christmas Prayer,” in Seeing Haloes: Christmas Poems to Open the Heart (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2017), 36–38.
18. Commentary on the Gospel of John 1.5.141.
19. Commentary on the Gospel of John 1.8.182.
20. Karl Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” trans. Cornelius Ernst, in Theological Investigations (Baltimore, MD: Helicon, 1961), 1:156n8.
21. Summa theologiae 3.7.1.
22. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, in Selected Works, ed. J. Farina, trans. G.R. Evans (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1987), 212.
23. Summa theologiae 3.8.3.
24. For his theory of anonymous Christianity, see Karl Rahner, “Anonymous and Explicit Faith,” trans. David Morland, in Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury, 1979), 16:52–78.
25. Summa theologiae 3.18.1 ad. 1.
26. Summa theologiae 1.105.4.
27. See Anselm, On Free Will, trans. Ralph McInerny, chap. 1, “That the Power of Sinning Does Not Pertain to Free Will,” in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 175–176.
28. Catherine Mowry LaCugna describes Luther’s objection to Thomist and scholastic theology in similar terms in God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (Chicago: HarperOne, 1973), 144. For two primary-source examples of Luther’s objection to the scholastic methodology that St. Thomas supposedly exemplified, see his Disputation against Scholastic Theology and The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 3rd ed., ed. Timothy F. Lull and William R. Russell (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2012), 3–7, 196–224, esp. 206.