Why did God become human? (Thomas Joseph White, OP)

so uh i'm going to begin just by talking a little bit about a term which is incarnation incarnation in latin uh that word is actually coming from the prologue of saint john's gospel the fourth gospel in the new testament where it says the word became flesh and the translation in latin is incarnation became took on human flesh but that being said when you talk about the incarnation in traditional christian theology we don't just mean the idea that the eternal word the eternal son of god became human that god became sorry that god took on a human body but then he took on a full human nature and so god became human not just took on human flesh the incarnation didn't just mean that god became one with a body but god became a human being with a body and soul so that's what the term means god became human at least as it's used traditionally building out of that original new testament language and i'm going to look at tonight a famous question that aquinas asks that all medieval theologians asked and that is also still frequently posed in modern theology what are the motives of the incarnation what was god thinking of what was he doing what's at work in his wisdom or his intentions in becoming human and aquinas writes about this in the famous summa theologies his last masterwork of theology and his most famous work in the beginning of the third part of the summa that's to say the last part of the summa in which the entire section is about christ the mysteries of the life of jesus and that entire section begins with this question about the motives of the incarnation so when aquinas begin studying the mystery of jesus christ in general he begins with this specific question first what are the motives of the incarnation why did god become human and the ques the reason is obvious i mean he's looking at the divine you might say intentions or the design of god what was the logic of god becoming human and that that answer to the question will in a certain way help frame the the entire study of the life of jesus the the childhood and nativity of jesus the um uh apostolic ministry of christ his miracles his teaching his way of life his suffering his passion and his resurrection so aquinas has a series of questions in the first uh well he calls them questio questiones the first is body of questions really what we call in english a question is a series is what he he calls the what he uses for the word in latin a question is actually a series of articles and each article contains what we call a question right so he has a series of i think six questions or so interior to this first part of the summa and in the second article which is where i'm going to begin he asks the question was the incarnation necessary for human salvation and i'm going to spend a lot of time on this first article now the first thing i want to say is just something about theology in general when aquinas is asking um whether the incarnation was necessary for our salvation you might think he's trying to prove that god had to become incarnate to save us and therefore christianity must be true and any reasonable person if they just listen to the arguments of theologians will embrace christianity as the rational way to understand reality because we can demonstrate it you know more or less like you might say scientifically or from obvious premises or evident premises to to sound conclusions that is not what he's doing okay so aquinas is beginning from a standpoint of faith and he believes that certain things can be known by natural reason for example we might study the cause this is his example the cause of lunar eclipses and we might be able to explain them scientifically he actually knows the right scientific explanation for them in the middle ages but when we come to know it comes to the analysis of mysteries of the faith we don't begin from evident premises of natural reason or something like you know mathematics scientific observations even philosophical truths about good and evil ethical behaviors or whether a human being has a spiritual soul or these kinds of things that can be argued about philosophically we begin from first principles that we can know only by the grace of faith and so basically aquinas thinks god can be known to exist by natural reason through argument from the existence of god he thinks are good arguments of god from philosophical premises to sound conclusions but he thinks that knowing god in himself in his own mystery is a higher gift complementary to not opposed to natural reason or natural argument of theseus of god this higher knowledge of god is the gift of grace and the faith that is a gift affords us a new judgment so you and i make judgments all the time we may make simple judgments like that the door is before us or that we're on aisle five of the grocery store and the milk is on the other end of the aisle or something very simple or we might judge more complicated make a more complicated judgment that's natural like i think this person really treats me as their friend believes that i'm their friend i'm their friend i'm the friend of this other person okay we make natural judgments like that which are more estimative but important this is a judgment that's supernatural above the above nature as it were that's to say we can judge by the grace of faith that christ is alive in the resurrection that he's real and that he is both god and human it's a gift of faith received by grace okay that being said it's not as if as if we just received the grace of faith and then our as it were blind to believe whatever other people tell us there's an interior intelligibility or an intrinsic intelligibility to the mystery that god became human and that's what we're beginning to study what is it as it were the logic the wisdom the interior structure the the mystery just like you can study in philosophy what is a human being you can study in theology what is the being of christ they're not the same kind of study but they have similarities now the next thing i just want to say before i actually talk about the article is that he uses the word necessity and salvation was the incarnation necessary for human salvation well i'm gonna actually look at these two words as we study the article but what he's doing is in fact trying to explore what it even means to call something that god does necessary and what it means to talk about salvation so it's not like these terms are front loaded with meaning so that we already know everything they mean before we ask the question actually it works the other way in aquinas to study he's provoking thought on what we mean by those terms is it necessary for god to become human for our salvation what do you mean by necessary is it necessary for god to do anything like create the world if he creates the world does he have to redeem the world if we fall into sin what is salvation from sin anyway or what is sin for that matter you know so there's there's a kind of exploration of what these questions mean now with no further ado let me then analyze this important article of the summa theologia he says at the beginning i answer that a thing is said to be necessary for a certain end in two different ways first when the end cannot be attained without it as when food's necessary to preserve human life so now we have what you might call the strong sense of practical necessity of a means to an end unless we have food to eat we will starve to death and in that sense food is vital and of essential necessity as a practical means to stay alive then he says secondly when the end is attained better and more conveniently in latin the word convenience can mean also more beautifully more fluidly more fittingly as a horse is necessary for a journey right so you're walking from paris to rome which was something that aquinas had did many times and the dominicans in his own era by a sign of poverty unlike the regular clergy at the time did not ride horses but walked you see so the the example is poignant because the dominicans walked everywhere and so he says well it's necessary to have a horse for a journey to make clear that just as dominicans don't actually they kind of might feel like they need horses for the journey they don't technically need them it can be done far more fittingly eloquently beautifully and um conveniently if we have a horse to go from paris to rome but we can walk that means that in this less strong sense it's fitting and maybe even highly congruent that god should become human to save us but not essential and then he says that in the first way it was not necessary for the restoration of human nature for god in his omnipotent power could have restored the human our human nature in many other ways but in the second way it was necessary that he should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature now you know okay so far so good he's saying that god is omnipotent he can do things in other ways but he doesn't do things arbitrarily he does things wisely and and with a fitting goodness so there's something beautiful something good something uh uh decorous and you might say with wisdom something kind of logical if not if not occasional biologic necessity in the way god's done things but what is this thing about restoration of the human race restoration of human nature well this obviously presupposes something's wrong that god wants to fix and you could say well is it going to be the old moral claim that what's wrong with us is that we are sinners that we've done things wrong that we're morally frail that we are ethically imperfect that we sinned against god that we you know need forgiveness well yes actually but not first yeah that will come up but that's actually you might say metaphorically on the back burner restoration of human nature for aquinas in this context means first and foremost the restoration of friendship with god to put the human race back on the path of orientation towards its true homeland and end which is divinization or union with god you might say we are disoriented we don't know why we are where we came from why we should live where we're meant to go and the incarnation is a great flare sent up to bring us a point of orientation on the horizon to send us back home toward where we're meant to be or go that's to say toward life in god and also we are wounded by sin we are frail we do have weaknesses we have made mistakes and so the incarnation is sent as we'll see not only to teach us that but also to help us extricate ourselves from it to get out of the the the problems so then he says basically these two things the incarnation took place for two reasons for our furtherance in the good and four our as as a fitting way of healing us from our misery or suffering he doesn't say first and foremost uh healing us or from our sin he takes a more general approach it's you might say almost more medical there's a lot of medical analogies of healing in aquinas so healing is the second general reason the first general reason is elevation to go up into god uh furtherance in the good the second reason is to heal us and to bring us integrity integral union of person healing okay so now he's going to talk about each of these tables you might say furtherance and the good and removal of miseries or evils the remedies to suffering each of these themes i should mention historically has an important has an important precedent in earlier great teachers of christian theology and he's purposely appealing to them so on the one side this idea of divinization of furtherance and the good to be united with god in grace to be friends with god and to be united with god by grace this is a theme that we see originally uh strongly emphasized by athanasius in the fourth century and by augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries in the east and in the west in greek and then latin or ancient theology and he's going to appeal especially to augustine and then on the other side the theme of christ becoming human to extricate us from suffering evil and sin is from ensem the uh from just the sort of the early scholastic period just before aquinas and ensem is has written this theory up in a famous book called curdeos omo in latin why did god become human and we'll come to him eventually or to aquinas's verse and his theories so we start then with furtherance in the good how is it that we're divinized by god becoming human and aquinas here takes five reasons i'm going to go through each of them briefly but they're all united by a kind of common link and the first three have to do with the so-called three theological virtues these are virtues that we have not by nature but by grace virtues that we can acquire only because god first acts in us by grace and they are named by saint paul in the in the new testament the virtues of faith hope and charity so aquinas begins with those that basically god became human so that we could grow in faith hope and charity and as we'll see in a minute that this leads to divinization faith is faith unto union with god hope is hope unto union with god and charity is charity or love of god unto final union with god and beatitude or eternal happiness so he says first first with regards to faith it's made more certain by believing god himself who speaks for as augustine says in order that man might journey more trustworthy towards the truth the truth itself having assumed human nature established and founded faith now i said to you before the faith is a grace given into the intellect to allow us to make new judgments that we can't make by our own nature so that we know with certitudes truth to god is revealed such as the fact that he has chosen the ancient hebrew people the jews through his covenant that he's become human himself that he's that jesus and his human nature has been raised from the dead and so forth why couldn't god give us the strength and grace of the strength of the grace of faith without becoming incarnate well of course aquinas thinks he could it's not strictly necessary that he'd do it this way but it's more fitting because we are embodied human persons that's to say we have spiritual souls with intellect and free will that we live out in an embodied and animal state we are rational animals you might say we're spiritual animals persons who are corporeal so for god to become human himself is the most fitting way for him not necessary but fitting way for god to speak to us to make it certain who he is you might say to manifest himself and to communicate the life of grace to us through his own human life human conception human growth in the womb birth eventual maturation as a human being adolescence adulthood human life and career suffering torment execution and bodily resurrection through the whole course of his human life among us god has manifested to us who he is made himself in a certain sense humanly visible spoken with human words felt with human emotions sensed with the human heart and manifest his in his human words in his human intellect and his human decisions who he truly is right so that's deeply fitting as a way to speak to our faith the faith doesn't just terminate in the humanity of jesus in all the things i've just described the faith terminates in the mystery of god in himself the holy trinity the father the son and the holy spirit but the faith is deeply nourished educated aided by god's harmonization as the theologians say god's being human right so god being human he comes to us in our state so that we might come to him in his state he takes a strong step toward us so that we can know who he is then return to him okay so that's the idea that faith is a sort of initiation of divinization or union with god because it acquires says elsewhere it unites us to god or weds our intellect god he says in a way faith is a certain kind of wedding spiritual wedding of the soul with god and it's allowed or it's it's a invited because we can know who god is personally because he's revealed himself to us so perfectly now secondly with regards to hope aquinas says our hope is greatly strengthened by the incarnation because nothing was so necessary for raising our hope as to show us how deeply god loved us what stronger proof could he afford us all right so hope is a virtue that desires and aims at eternal life with god eternal union with god supernatural hope hopes in for union with god through the means god has given us okay so you know i think you know despite my frailties or my my limitations or my ignorance or my simple incapacities the confusingness of life i can be united with god because god has resolved a lot of my problems and questions by revealing himself to me by becoming human yeah i can't figure it all out for myself left to myself i might be very confused about the sense of the world maybe i'd make maybe if i'm a great philosopher i'd come to a few important conclusions but as for sorting out all the religious traditions all the claims about the absolute it could be very difficult and very murky and i would be paralyzed because i would be humble enough not to think i knew the answer to everything but god has taken the step toward us to illuminate us by faith so we can really know who he is through this great means of the incarnation and he suffered and died for us in in in his human state so the conversation about whether we can know god and whether we can believe that god really loves us and cares about us or whether the universe is impersonal and just happen to produce us through a bunch of random chance mutations that conversation on the level of faith is resolved um we can argue about philosophically whether everything results from the gene pool accidentally or whether we're just pure chance haphazard beings of matter and we would want to give as christians good philosophical arguments against those uh reductio reductivist views but we can calmly pursue those philosophical arguments with hope that that can't be true because also on another level on a higher register that doesn't destroy reason that encourages reason we know by hope that god loves us and that god is personally interested in us and sort of the conversation about whether he can forgive our sins is over because he's been crucified for us so you know the idea that i'm so special my sins are so great god can't forgive me you know sometimes you hear people saying things like that well that conversation is sort of resolved because god has told us that he has died for us which means we can all have the humility of hoping in the forgiveness of sins and in union with god i mean if he bothers becoming human and being crucified for us then he can bother to demonize us he has the power to do it okay thirdly with regards to charity love is greatly enkindled in us as augustine says what greater cause is there for of the lord's coming than to show god's love for us this is about presence uh you know if you love someone who's a friend and you're never really ever around that person uh even though you have the voluntary choice to be then there's something odd about the way you love them right friendship is nourished through the real presence of the friends to the other person because of the way we are embodied personal creatures embodied rational animals we are present to others god has become present to us in our embodied state to manifest the intensity of divine love in and through the incarnation and he invites us to remain with him through his enduring presence in the world this is as you may imagine some of you who are catholic would imagine immediately that this was be connected to the eucharist and indeed when aquinas argues why god has perpetuated the real presence of christ in his body and blood among us in the mystery of the eucharist this is one of the key arguments he gives that god remains with the church albeit in a different way under the sacramental science but truly really present substantially in the eucharist so that we can nurture charity and love the fourth reason is that god gives us an example of how to be human so becoming himself the one who is most human of all god teaches us how to be human and to recognize our own dignity as human beings the greatness of our vocation of being human as something not to despair in or be just perplexed or paralyzed by but to be you might stay encouraged by as a way that we that our human vocation is a vocation that can be lived out in view of life with god and with one another in view of life with god so that we're afforded a great sense of dignity in the example of christ and finally he just says as it were the summary of all these points with regards to the full participation of the divinity that's why god became human so that we might participate fully in the divinity which is the true bliss of man happiness and the and the end of human life and which is bestowed on us by christ's humanity god was made man that man might be made god now he doesn't think we actually literally become the deity okay he doesn't think that heaven is that we get you know as it were melded into god into some kind of pantheistic blur where we become god the deity itself the divinization is a participation meaning a partaking without identification and the participation occurs primarily through our intellect and will through which we enjoy god through knowledge and love and then this in the beatific vision can eventually redound to the corporeal body in the life of the resurrection i'm not going to go into all that but the point is it's by knowledge and by love that human beings acquire their greatest happiness if you think about it i mean being healthy bodily is very important for human happiness and being sufficiently nourished and taken care of on a very fundamental level you know in terms of like you know the hierarchy of needs but deep happiness is the happiness of the mind and heart it's happiness of resting in the truth as ultimate perspective it's happiness of enjoying the pursuit of truth in a life of uh contemplation and pursuit of knowledge with others it's the the truth of meaningful human work and it's the happiness of friendship of family life of the happiness of being loved and loving especially the happiness of loving god and being loved by god right so that culminates for aquinas in the happiness of seeing god in the beatific vision the grace of heaven is the grace of eventually seeing god face to face and of loving god they say well why does god becoming human lead to us becoming united with god by knowledge by love in this life by faithful beloved and in the world to come uh through the vision of god well in because god has begun to begun in the incarnation to reveal himself to us in view of the perfecting of that knowledge so he's begun to tell us who he is in the incarnation in view of the illuminati through the illumination of faith knowing god in christ so we can begin to know god in this life already this holy trinity in view of a perfection of that in the world to come and that we can begin to love god who's manifested himself to us and hope in god in view of divine union in the world to come so faith hope and love those first through three things i spent some time talking about they're aimed you might say they're inclined teleologically they're oriented toward yeah uh you know union with god in the beatific vision uh and as we'll see in a moment also god became human to remove the obstacles so now i turn to the second table um you know what what was god doing in in withdrawing us from evil or with our remedying our misery you might say medically taking care of us he says the first thing he says he talks about the devil he's uh that's that's the topic that may not always be mentioned by modern people though as we know pope francis mentions the devil often like uh the new testament and like many ancient philosophers even aquinas believes there are uh immaterial beings angels and there are not all the angels are good there's also evil and so there is it's not it's not a god but there are immaterial forces of evil that can sow seeds of chaos and confusion in the human world and because in a sense angels are superior to human beings you have a history of human beings in religious behavior in their religious traditions uh either trying to placate angels or worship angels or practicing magic doing something other than orienting themselves towards god and getting confused about how to uh relate to the angels and what aquinas says first about evil is interestingly like quite that god just developed through the incarnation god has established a direct relationship with us you might say he bypasses any idea that we need to go through him through the angels so that we understand we can immediately relate to god and and therefore we don't be subject to the angels through strange rituals or placations that could in fact lead us into dark corners by all kinds of magic or bargaining or a superstitious ritual now you may say well that is that got much to do with anything in our day and age well actually in some ways this first idea created our day and age because we live in a world where we think the human being is in a certain sense the highest intellectual reality but the reason we take ourselves so seriously as a very high intellectual reality is in part because the angels got pushed out the reason they got pushed out in part was because of our the seriousness which with which western catholicism took the incarnation you might say this way if god became human then human beings are very important in the history of ideas the sense that the human being is at the center of the cosmos is strongly uh aided by the emphasis on the incarnation of because god didn't become an angel became a human being so you might say angel relativism took place in part because of christianity and if you look at ancient cultures even ancient philosophical cultures like the platonism of the third and fourth centuries prior to the time of christ but certainly also other religious traditions that exist today this place of immaterial spirits can be very significant it's also true of course in tribal cultures and you can look at that in different continents if you look if you're sociologists of religion and you look at anything from like navajo rights then as they were studied in the 19th and early 20th century to ancient near eastern religions in the middle east or if you look at hawaiian religion i mean there's it's a it's very complicated and there are many diverse trends but one thing that you see is that pantheons of spiritual agents are a common feature of many ancient cultures whether tribal or more develop you know sort of technologically more developed and christianity has a way of both maintaining the idea that there are there is a kind of hierarchy of spirits but without the absolutization of them because they're subject to a higher principle which is god and human beings have a direct connection to god so you might call this first reason kind of almost like cosmic therapy you know receiving a kind of therapy of our way of seeing ourselves in the cosmos because the incarnation not taking ourselves is too insignificant secondly because we are taught thereby a great deal about man's dignity and how we should not sully it with sin all right so like belief that we can actually be transformed uh the other another chur you know classic patristic author origen has the famous homily where he says believe that you can be transformed and that's sort of the second idea is that if god bothered to become human even despite our own sort of finitude mortality you know sort of the seeming tininess in the cosmos there's actually something about us that's a remarkable dignity and we need to cherish and value that and not give in to despair and despair can be very related cosmic despair you might say can be very related to sin to resignation in the face of our evil inclinations our weaknesses so basically to fight to be a more dignified person is related to the belief in our own spiritual dignity in the face to the incarnation thirdly because in order to do away with man's presumption the grace of god is commended in jesus christ though no merits of ours went before so the third reason is humility god has saved us by taking the first initiative yes but if god who's so transcendent is our creator and is so vast and infinite has condescended to become human if god has you might say taken this this route of lowliness of humbling himself by taking on the form of a human nature then how much more are we capable of becoming humble in in the face of god in the face of christ in the face of one another and humility as aquinas notes is very is one of those beautiful things in a human being so the acquisition of humility is deeply related to beauty we you know we think about moral righteousness often and very um i don't know i mean i want to say moralistic tones i mean tones of adjudication of good and evil but also beauty beauty is a very important part of good and evil to become a beautiful soul to become a soul that's not ugly and the virtues make the soul beautiful and humility is beautiful and pride is ugly and so working against spiritual ignobility and ugliness and working towards spiritual um lowliness of heart and humility is is part of is related to taking the incarnation seriously god is himself the first two in condescension to us became lowly and exhibited the humility jesus's human humility is an exhibition of the intensity of the charity of god which invites us to humility this is also related to the fourth reason where he says you know he curbs man's pride because we're not really we're not the saviors of the world now the medievals might think about this in a different way than us but you know we have to think about being our own saviors in a slightly different and i'd say even more intensive way because we're so convinced as modern human beings that it's all on us we're going to have to create the perfect political society the most technologically advanced society the most efficient society the best organized kind of social policy policies need to be put in place of course these efforts are reasonable but the point is we're still bound by mortality we're still bound by ethical fragilities you know really terrible moral weaknesses and compromises and we're not going to repristinate ourselves through our collective efforts we're not going to save and divinize ourselves through technology we're not going to download our brains onto hard drives and figure out some way to preserve our personalities like you see in these fantastic tv movies we're going to die and we're going to be judged and we're relative we're not first in the world and so the incarnation helps us acknowledge that you might say after the fact of god already resolving the problem for us it's like god catches you and he says okay now admit you're falling and i admit it it's easier when you've been caught right so the incarnation is is god sort of saying okay i got you but now you know you have a problem you got to work on okay and he i'm going to help you work on it fifthly in order to free man from the enslavement of sin and now he talks about the idea that god became human in order to make us just and aquinas develops anselm's great theory here i'm not going to read it i'm just going to describe it to you briefly and it's the theory is this the human being in grace originally is meant to be in friendship with god had we never lost grace we would live in friendship with god and to live in friendship with god is to be in a certain proportion proportionate righteousness of god a kind of rightness of integrity of order a certain justice where we at justice really means order for requires a right order where we give god what is his do acknowledge him in the way we ought to and also god communicates to us as our creator and as our redeemers when he gives us grace he communicates to us what does our do um not in the sense that god owes us something but since once he creates us he maintains a just order and integrity order in us if we mess that up by singing against god then two things need to happen one is we need to somehow restore our own inner integrity and life with god and secondly we need to be reconciled with the justice of god now you might say wait wait wait wait okay i know where you're going with this uh we need to be justified because we need someone to render us just before god okay i got that but why can't god just do it all through mercy why can't he just say okay human race is sin the human race has fallen into this dis integrity disorder i'm just gonna zap them with grace and i'm gonna forgive them by pure mercy well actually aquinas says he could have done that but the the best way to do it the most fitting way is not just to save us by mercy but he says it's more merciful if he reconciles us also with the divine justice the justice here is not like justice is judging you with severity to put you in hell justice here is god putting all things right in according to his ordering wisdom and in accord with his righteousness and his his holiness and his goodness so if we've defamed the goodness and holiness of god if we've become unjust and the human race there's a lot of injustice not only in our all our individual lives we've done things that are unjust to other people and no doubt before god but also there are just catastrophes of injustice in the human race where we we have just done really terrible things and continue to do terrible things so in the face of our systemic injustice whether it's personal or collective god gives us you might say a twofold justice the first justice is that of christ as man because being full of grace jesus is sinless loving and obedient and perfectly humble and just so where we have been unrighteous god has become humanly righteous for us you could say he's restored us to integrity jesus is the one who's just the humanly just the humanly righteous one and he shares his grace with us we participate in christ grace by faith hope and love and we can be healed inwardly healed and transformed by the grace of christ so that we begin to assimilate and well you might say be assimilated to christ's own righteousness all right so god becomes a human being who's perfectly righteous and by grace and then communicates that grace of righteousness to us the righteousness of christ to be justified to be rendered gracious gracious just and righteous in christ grace okay he does it by mercy but the other thing he does is he communicates to us the human race in christ his infinite justice as god why because christ is god he's not just human he's also god so what he does as human as one who's human among us he also does in such a way that there's an infinite dignity of justice to his actions if christ is crucified he's crucified as human nature through that moral righteousness i'd spoke about before he's a he's a witness to the truth he's a witness to justice and love he dies for the good and not because of ill and he humbly offers his life for us and that's all human righteousness by which he justifies us by the graces of his by by grace and by merit but he also does so as one who's lord who's infinitely just and so there's an infinite righteousness to the cross not just not just the finite righteousness of christ or the sort of immeasurable righteousness of his human grace and his human heart there's the infinite righteousness of christ's deity of the god man who is crucified and so he unites us uh through his grace not only with himself as man or with the righteousness of his you know the righteousness of christ as man with the infinite justice of god as given to us as a gift now you say well why doesn't it change me more yeah why am i changed by faith hope and charity well the answer is we are changed we are changed as we cooperate with faith hope and love progressively and and uh according to the the measure god at wills and also god wisely leaves in us weaknesses so that we realize our dependence in christ and we grow through free cooperation to cooperate freely with grace we have to pray for the grace we have to use the sacraments as they're intended to be used by going to confession and and you know participating in christ's mystery of the church in the ways he intends for us and we can be changed we can live lives where we are gradually improved but we also remain frail so that we learn to turn not to ourselves as the source of our remedies but to christ who gives us the infinite justice of the godhead and the finite you might say justice of his human nature as gifts all by mercy so that we can live in friendship with a god now that doesn't mean that aquinas thinks we can't lose all this or that we have to accept that you know we don't need to embrace christianity we don't need to embrace the mystery of salvation we can also uh live it badly we can forfeit it like the mystery of human real free will is real and he says later in the summer that after baptism it's very significant we still die he asks why don't why if god has done all this for us why do we still die after baptism and he has different reasons there but one reason he's you know from augustine he says well if we were if we were baptized then we became immortal because we were baptized everyone would get baptized in order to be immortal but that wouldn't change anything about love for god right so you can't have people achieve the redemption has to be a redemption of the human heart as well as human and human mind as well as human body so it's not like god's just going to give you uh a return to eden you move forward from the first tree of eden to the second tree of the cross and the redemption takes place at the second tree which is a continuation of the mystery it's not a rewriting of history or blotting out of it it's a continuation fulfillment of history and so you know after christ is crucified and his bodily undergoes bodily glorification of his body and soul he opens a way for us through his redemption to be united with god and i said already through faith hope and love and through imitation of christ in this life in view of union with god next but it does take place in and through the ongoing mortality that we experience because of our bodily weaknesses and our emotional fragilities and even more you know seriously in a certain way the evils that continue to um affect the human race because of our personal sin because of the collective sin of the human race because of the sin of others so christians you might say live now the mystery of the redemption of christ on a battlefield it's not a return to the the order of eden or some order that might have been had we never fall into this drama but rather through the thicket of drama we walk after christ in view of union with him by faith hope and love imitating him in and through the mystery of death in view of the mystery of eternal life and eventual resurrection right so it requires faith it requires hope it isn't just as it were something seen it also is in a way for us meritorious to contemplate god in the darkness of faith and sometimes on the consolation or light of faith to walk towards the mystery that you know god is initiated through the incarnation of the crucifixion resurrection so you know what what i'm intimating here at the end is the why did god become human that opens up into a lot of questions like why does god become human and suffer why didn't he just fix everything at one go uh why didn't god become human more than once why didn't god become human in in different continents why is it all transmitted by one people in one apostolic community one church why does he institute the sacraments so that they accompany us how does this relate to our own bodily death how does this relate to our hope in life after death for the soul and eventually the transfiguration of this material world and the resurrection of the dead how are all these things connected right so you see how the question at the beginning can open up into a vast panorama but i think i've probably fulfilled my duty in introducing the very idea i said i would and i've spoken for far too long so now i'll open the floor and take your questions great talk father um our first question is from massachusetts bob asks and i'm going to read it out for bob god is thought to be pure act then how does the son of god assume potentiality like human nature because it seems like a contradiction yeah okay great question so it's an old question it's a good question uh which is asked even very early on in especially in the fifth century controversies between nistorius and cyril of alexandria how can god become human and not as it were um delimit the perfection of his divine nature you have different aspects to this problem and i've written actually a lot about this in my book the incarnate lord that father thomas mentioned at the beginning of the talk and there's a good book by thomas wine andy well he's got two does god change and does god suffer both on this topic so i'll just refer you to those as if you know for like longer studies uh but uh the short answer is it's very important when god that when we talk about incarnation to always distinguish the two natures so god becomes human but god doesn't the the harmonization of the son of god does not entail the fusion or confusion of the two natures so the divine nature is not in any way delimited according at least traditional theology he doesn't undergo any self-emptying or canosis of his divine perfections the divine perfection is maintained god remains you say as you said pure act infinite in his power and goodness and so forth but he acquires a finite human nature capable of suffering and so he truly is human and he truly is god and there's no confusion of the two natures so that then you ask well how can they be united ha it's the famous question and the famous answer is given by cyril of alexandria initially they're united hypostatically let's say in the one person of the son of god so the son who's eternally lord and god perfect in his divinity now begins to exist from the first conception in the womb of the virgin mary and throughout his bodily human life and now in the resurrection he continues to subsist as one who's human the human god's becoming human doesn't either subtract from or add to the perfection of his deity he remains perfectly god even as becomes perfectly human as god he's unable uh to he might say evolve or become less perfect or undergo suffering and in his human nature he develops he lives in time among us he can undergo development and um also suffering he's got the bodily potentiality and spiritual potentiality of those of the spiritual faculties of his soul and he has an ordinary human history like us now the reason god can be among us without in a way as it were delimiting himself is because god as the creator is he who is he who gives being to all things he's not the creation but he's more interior to all creatures than they are to themselves because he's the cause of their very being so god is present to everything that is including right now all that we are everything you can see your own body and soul all that is god is more interior to us than we are to ourselves simply because he's giving it all to exist to be he's giving existence everything so he can become present in a new way to the incarnation by being human without in any way going you might say outside of himself or having to travel through the world or something like that because he's already omnipresent but this is a new form of presence in which the son of god the eternal word becomes hypostatically present say personally present in joining a human nature to himself without dimini without in any way being diminished in his deity but now existing as one who's truly human that's mysterious but it's not contradictory okay um our next question is from rome and juliana asks could you please talk a bit about the centrality of the passion in the mystery of salvation when we pray the creed we lower our heads when the incarnation is mentioned but not the passion the cross is the symbol of the church and it is said that christ crucified is where we see the perfection of all virtue why is that is it because it shows the depths of our brokenness and that we would crucify the lord is it because through suffering jesus shows a love for god and us that is most completely disinterested yeah okay so let me say just two things briefly this is an immense question i mean so first thing to say is not only theologians but whole liturgical traditions within the church can emphasize different mysteries of christ in a more special way so god's becoming human and the incarnation is one fundamental mystery of salvation god's crucifixion or god being crucified in his human nature is another and then the bodily resurrection of christ who is now alive in the resurrection inaugurating the recreation of the world and remaining in a hidden way in his kingdom is another mystery and you know for example in the orthodox church it's a famous point about the liturgy that on those years when the annunciation which is the beginning of the incarnation when virgin mary receives the announcing of the of the incarnation for the archangel gabriel when the when the annunciation falls on the same day as good friday in the orthodox church they they celebrate the liturgy of the annunciation right so that that emphasizes more the aspect of the incarnation than than you might say good friday or crucifixion that would never happen latin church because of the emphasis on crucifixion latin church then you have the second my point isn't that one of those is right or wrong it's just there are different points of accent accentuation and that's one of the salutary things about theology is to think about how how to balance as it were the way these mysteries are connected to each other the second thing i just want to say briefly is there are many reasons associated with you might say the logic of divine truth and love is manifest in multiple ways in each of these three mysteries incarnation crucifixion and resurrection when you look at the crucifixion i think probably most people would say most theologians at least would say the central reason that it is emphasized as the mystery of our salvation is because it manifests the love of god for us in the most intensive way because he suffered for us others though would infla emphasize rightly also another aspect you can emphasize the christ's human self offering as the principle of merit that christ who's sinless and full of grace he who's without sin is obedient and loving there where we fail to be loving and obedient there where we have been lacking in perfection and therefore christ has redeemed us from the he's the source of he's atoned for our sins he's some made reparation for our sins and been the principle he's the principle of our of of the merit of our grace in that respect so you can elucidate different reasons another reason people that's classic is to say the crucifixion reveals the powers of evil in the world so it you might say it teaches us a lot about who we are uh before god and and our real like it exposes the the syndrome of evil in history and it shows the the the power of divine goodness to uh triumph even in the darkest night of evil and so therefore shows the power of god to vanquish evil in the world and gives us hope even in the face of every human tragedy and and moral failure because we see that everything can be used by god even god's own human crucifixion to bring about a greater good you know so that the odyssey questions there about how god works in the world in the face of our human um confrontation with evil so there's a lot you can say right but and so you know i i nothing it's always wrong to kind of pit these things against one another but where you place the priorities is is is based on sort of different theological sensibilities and and you can have theologians can argue more for one than another okay thanks father our next question is from jerusalem and jude mary wants to ask god could could god become man without being born of a woman he is god and with him everything is possible why was it fitting then that he is born of a woman or is this a non-event for example the theology of the incarnation and having no salvific undertones i don't understand the last part of the question but i would say i mean you know that's another it's a good question as to what's going on in the divine what we call the divine maternity god having a human mother um it's clearly important that god is i mean in the christian tradition jesus is fully human in it you might say in an ordinary way he has a human body like ours capable of suffering he has a human emotional life like ours that undergo psychological development in or in an ordinary developmental way perhaps healthier than ours in some way some ways but i mean fundamentally the structure of his emotional appetites and passions is the same as ours his human animal psychology so to speak the way it develops through stages of life and he has a human intellect by which he learns from the world and the human will by which he makes ordinary moral choices and develops and has intentions and manifests uh you know different moods and humors and and intentions in his um in his apostolic ministry and so jesus is really human really really really human and i mean god could do anything you know there are you know the the but christianity is not a science fiction film you know you wouldn't get a tradition of a billions of people believing it if it were um and it's true that people can believe a lot of crazy things it's just fact you know and superstitions exist but i mean the sort of power of the christian understanding is that god truly became one of us in all we are including uh undergoing the ordinary history of conception fetal gestation eventual menstruation the womb and human birth and the experience of being nurtured uh and growing and being educated by a human mother and an adoptive human father and having an ordinary human life among us even learning a work trade and so forth okay so um the the logic of all that i think on a deep level is god does not interrupt the history of the cosmos we're not going to see cosmic events happen where god just as it were stops the film the way human beings would make would might do in a surreal or imaginary portrait of reality on in a science fiction film he's con he's committed to the nature the natural structure order of the cosmos why is that well the real deep reason is he created it i mean it has god doesn't just care about us he cares about the whole creation and he created the cosmic order the world of microscopic vegetative and animal life that surrounds us and which is as it were the presupposition for our emergence he's committed to it and it's going to continue with certain integrity and so when he becomes human he enters into that cosmic history he doesn't obliterate it now we could also talk of course about the virgin mary what her discipleship means why jesus doesn't have a human father that's a miracle why does that matter it images the fact that he has a transcendent fatherhood that there's an eternal mystery of father son and holy spirit in god and so you know there's other interesting things about the miracle of the virginal conception of jesus but um the fundamental emphasis on the marian component here is not something exceptional about jesus though there is the exceptional miracle of his origins um which is it matters but it's the more fundamental truth is he really became one of us he had a human mother like us you know who is his best it was the greatest disciple wow thanks father um our next question comes from belgium and michael's going to ask you the question himself okay okay uh father thomas good evening um and greetings from from leuven in belgium um thanks for your interesting talk um could you comment on the question whether god would have become man without the fall um and the reason i'm wondering it is that if christ is the bridegroom of the church um and therefore also our bridegroom uh doesn't the domestic position seem to imply that he became our bridegroom in order to save us instead of saving us because he had already decided from the very beginning of the world to become our bridegroom um i would not imply sort of instrumentalization of the spousal love between between god and mankind okay it's a great question so there's a famous article that comes right after this one that i didn't get to um and it's a famous dispute which you could talk you could not only give a another talk on it you could teach a whole class about it or you could write books about it and that's about whether it's a famous speculative question debated among medieval theologians would god have become human even had we never sinned i mean was that the point from the beginning did god create the cosmos and the world of creatures in order to create human beings in order eventually to become human i mean was that you might say is that the centerpiece of the cosmos for god to become human and saint albert the great who was aquinas's teacher thought something like that who was a dominican and uh duns scotus famously argues that this is the case great franciscan theologian but bonaventure another great franciscan theologian holds the same position as aquinas which i'm about to elaborate and then i'll just talk about it for a second so when aquinas ask the question the first thing he says is we don't know we don't know if god would have become human had we never sinned because we depend on revelation to know the intimate intentions of god the inner life of god and we don't have in revelation an explicit and clear unambiguous revelation as to whether god would have become human even had we never sinned however then he says in so far as revelation reveals something to us so that i mean that first point is important because aquinas is against the idea of hypothetical counterfactual theology like trying to make up in theology truths about god or make up or speculate about truths about god that are outside the boundaries of what god's revealed to us because you know it's epistemic humility you only kind of know the things god's revealed to you otherwise you need to have uh recourse to philosophy we're not doing philosophy here we're looking at god's revealed and there's a kind of asceticism the theology we can wonder about it but we can't necessarily answer it and we need to be careful not to leap outside the boundaries of what we really have authority to say or can rightly say based on what god's revealed authoritatively but then he says as for the speculation it does seem as the creed says for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven that's safe for our salvation he became incarnate so it seems god became incarnate in order to save us or redeem us and that raises the question of whether the incarnation is just a means to an end well in a certain sense i think aquinas does think that god did not need to become incarnate except because we sinned and you say well wait does that mean he doesn't think the incarnation is ultimate and i think the answer is in a sense yes he does not think that is correct he does not think the incarnation's ultimate so what is the ultimate mystery for aquinas i think in his theology it's pretty clear what it is it's the trinity god is the trinity a mystery of the communion of fathers and holy spirit and he created us from the beginning angels and human beings and the whole cosmos to share by grace of participation in the divine life of the contemplation of god the trinity so his theology is utterly theocentric and trinitarian trinitariano centric and after we've fallen after adam and eve or the first human couple fell the first human civilization fell and we fell into the world of sin and death and you might say benightedness spiritual disorientation god became human to draw us back up into the original gift of union with the trinity the trinity is the ultimate mystery the trinity has manifested itself to us in the incarnation now you could still argue that i mean i think there's a lot of strength to that argument i like it because it's theocentric what i worry about with saying that the ultimate mystery is the incarnation is that it makes it in a way strangely about us like god created the world in order to become one of us um well he he really created the world i think in a way ultimately so we could enjoy god for god's own sake um and god is really the center of creation but the humanity of jesus is the centerpiece of creation after the incarnation and cajutine who's a dominican responding to scotus on this has i think a lovely kind of way of taking it we should say god created us for union with the trinity the universe is centered on the trinity but after the fall god did something even greater than he had done in the first creation and a way as a way to respond to sin with even greater mercy by doing something yet more potent more profound than he'd done initially and he did that by becoming human so the second greatest thing in the universe is the incarnation and so he used as it were the occasion of sin to do something even yet greater so i think you can move take a step toward the scotus position that way with kadhitin while still retaining aquinas's emphasis on the fact that he became human for our salvation so that we could be united with god but this is a massive question and there's a lot of ink spilt and theologians debate about it quite a lot it's a it's a beautiful debate and an important one well thanks father uh our next question is from delaware elizabeth is going to ask you her question hi father um elizabeth you're very fake it's very faint i'm not hearing you quite that well hi can you hear me this is good okay sorry the connection's not that great here um so yeah this is elizabeth yang from delaware it's good to see you um i'm doing well yeah hanging in there so yeah it's getting bitingly cold here so um but uh uh it's good to be here um i just wanted to ask probably two very maybe very basic questions but uh the first one is how do we perceive or understand secular human efforts to exercise or attain justice in light of aquinas's notion of justice so i'm wondering how we can relate those to um and especially in light of what's going on right now in the world in terms of you know the reckoning with um you know racial sort of our racial past in the united states and um the racial history and uh all that so so that's my first question and then the second is could you elaborate or explicate the notion that jesus defines human humanity that he reveals what it means to be truly quote unquote human um so so those are my two questions thanks okay let me those are both big questions i'm going to deal with them briefly i'm going to deal with the second one first so the second one is about how is jesus most human i mean in some sense he's human just because he has the same human nature as us but our human nature can take on different modes let's say different ways of being so we can be more sinful or less sinful and another thing i mean we can be you know more more virtuous more morally perfect less morally more vitiated more more uh virtuous and the second thing is we can be in a state of grace and or more or less in a state of grace and more affected by the healing and elevating effects of grace as we see in the great saints okay so acro christ's human nature is sinless most virtuous and inundated with holiness and grace and so he he embodies in a certain way what it is to be most human because he's uh free from vice oriented towards virtue and and radiant with holiness uh in a way that's greater than that of any of the other saints but is in a way you might say the exemplum the example or measure of holiness in other for all of the saints so no saint is holier than christ in his humanity and his sacred humanity so his way of being human is more perfect he's equally human to us in you might say nature he has the same human nature as us we're all equally human but he's um more perfect in his way of being human now with regards to justice i mean obviously you know we could spend a lot of time on that other subject which is sort of aquinas on justice and how we could relate it to our contemporary uh cultural arguments about justice and transgressions to justice regards to for example let's just take race which is what you mentioned um aquinas has a whole you might say secular theory of justice based on philosophy that's perfectly compatible with the contemporary problematic i mean it acquires a really robust understanding of justice developed out of aristotle but which he develops in his own original ways which has to do with fundamentally the acknowledgement of what is due to each one in a rational way both in regards to personal relations and with regards to political relations and this can be acknowledged in various ways he calls social distributive and commutative i won't go through all of them but basically the one we're looking at is uh that you're alluding to fundamentally commutative justice to recognize the dignity that is proper to each one that is that accrues to them in virtue of their being human okay so then there's other things about how each person can participate in the common good at social justice and how each person can receive from the common good what is their due based on their own needs or limitations that's distributive justice so is a very powerful tool his idea of justice for how you can recognize each one's equal right to participate each one's needs each each one's equality before the law each one's need to participate in the common good of society and each one's uh need to receive a proportionate aid okay and then you can look at things like racial injustice historically and say that part of the issue is the fundamental acknowledgement of human dignity now you know it may sound like this is too easy a thing to say but part of the fact of the matter is historically one of the ways that europeans reached the idea of radical racial equality across the world was through aquinas's teaching it had to do with uh the theologians from salamanca when the portuguese and spanish arrived in the new world and they they encountered uh indigenous societies that were non-literate and you had um pop you know europeans arrive and immediately try to enslave them or make them subservient and you had franciscan and dominican theologians who wrote back to the the um salamanca school and asked for literary treaties that would help them argue for the dignity of the of the native populations and it's pretty it's it's pretty established that this is one of the major sources of modern human rights theory based on aquinas's theories of human dignity based on our common nature and the justice principles of justice that accrue to it okay then you could get into questions that are more subtle prudential questions about reparations about social egalitarianism and whether distributive justice needs to see in certain cases whether people you know should receive i don't know you know if you've had an oppressed cis in class should there be scholarships to universities that reach out to those people in a deciduous way to try to you know create greater educational quality social upward mobility and you know we could go into other cases but you know the point is you have to have a fundamental theory of human dignity and see how social justice uh distributed justice and community of justice accrued of people because of that ontological dignity and then you can begin to analyze what's wrong um with you know patterns of injustice coherently i think part of the problem we lack today is a is a sufficient deep shared theory of justice uh and of course that would take us into other realms about other other available theories and their their their strengths and shortcomings all right thank you so much well we have three more questions and there's one from uh wuhan in china uh all right why don't we take one more question and then we'll we'll liberate our participants we'll take this last question okay 10 go ahead oh hello uh father thomas we met in wuhan can you remember me yes it's great to hear from you this is happy to meet you here i i have uh actually i'm not even born in germany and i i will ask a very basic uh question regarding the uh difference between proteins illuminations teaching and and inclination maybe a very basic question i want to hear about your opinion or comments on the essential difference between did you say protagonists yeah emanation immunizations determination yeah yeah and in incarnation yeah you know it's interesting the i mean the famous discussion of this is in augustine because augustine was a platonist very influenced by plutonius highly influenced by platinus and his conversion from platonism to christianity was occasioned in part by his acceptance of the incarnation as a more perfect way of you might say embracing the philosophical life i mean as you know in the ancient world philosophers often when they talked about philosophy in the ancient greco-roman world it was it meant that it meant what the word says in greek philosophy friendship with wisdom which means it wasn't just an attempt to explain reality but also a way of life a kind of you might say almost like a an intellectual religious vocation of the greek and roman philosophers and a quiet augustine was on the search for that uh you might say ultimate way of life and truth uh that led him into the manichaeans and he goes dissatisfied with them and he read the neoplatonus but he felt like there was something lacking in the neoplayness and it was actually reading athanasius athanasius life of anthony about the holiness of saint anthony in egypt when he began to believe that something more perfect can be lived in this world as a way of wisdom as a way of philosophical life and that's what led to the converged famous conversion scene in the garden they're reading that book when he runs out of the garden in the confessions but what he says is it's interesting the neopl the platonists like latinus believe in the emanation of the word the eternal word the logos the reason of god that's behind the order of the world but what they don't believe is that god would fittingly humble himself to become a human being and take on human flesh because they believe matter is such a lowly principle that it's incompatible with the dignity of the divine right so if god is really divine and is intellectual and if there's the emanation of logos or wisdom or word you might reason the emanation of eternal reason from the one then it's unfitting or impossible that god should rightly become human because the flesh is so lowly a principle that he who's immutably perfect couldn't take on such an imperfect state now you know augustine says there's a more perfect expression of god's humility and love and goodness in becoming human then the neoplaton is understood and he says they lack the humility to accept that god became human and so forth okay aquinas in this question i've been talking about the art the first articles actually about that it basically says is it totally unfitting for god to become human such that it'd be actually impossible like just god is so perfect he can never take on the imperfection of matter and he says there that uh god can god fittingly his argument is based on divine goodness he says god is infinitely good now it's proper to what's good to fittingly communicate itself to another that's a very strong claim he takes from a neoplatonous dionysius the area that the idea that if you're the good the good is diffusive of itself right so a person who's morally good does good for others uh but you know um there's a way like for example the goodness of human fecundity is to transmit life you know through having children i mean there's lots of examples you could give of this kind of principle and and and see if you can make it work you know apply it you know to talk about different kinds of goodness in the world and how they're communicating there's communication of being you might say a person is a good teacher no no claims about myself if a person's a good teacher they can they can really defuse knowledge they're good at teaching okay right so that's the idea the diffusiveness of the good okay says god doesn't have to become incarnate but if he is infinitely good it's fitting that he should defuse his goodness in the most maximal way possible and because it's good of him to create us as rational animals in material bodies it's also good of him to become incarnate and manifest himself in the flesh for god to take on human physical existence to manifest his goodness all right so aquinas doesn't do it quite as politically as augustine but he does make this argument that with the neoplatons they saw that god was there was this emanation of wisdom in god or emanation of reason but they didn't see the imminent the divine goodness and the way god could manifest the goodness he that he has the infant goodness he has especially by communicating himself most perfectly to the creature by becoming human and so that's an interesting theological polemic against a philosophical position and that's another interesting part of the whole study of this uh subject so i'd like to thank everybody for being president tonight i'd like to thank those of you who persevered for your great patience uh this talk like others that are online with us live streaming will eventually be up on youtube and it can be shared we'd like to um thank you for your presence tonight and encourage you to join our facebook page and also you know put your email address in on our website at the angelicum domestic institute website if you'd like to receive regular updates and of course sign up for our future events thank you it's great to be with you and have a good night

Channel: Angelicum Thomistic Institute

Views: 3,185

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Keywords: Catholic, Theology, Angelicum, Aquinas

Id: 0_x0k5QHQBI

Length: 72min 52sec (4372 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020