Therefore, the question of precise language is extremely important for the preservation and development of the true Catholic faith. One of the most important functions of the Catholic theologian is to know exactly what can and what cannot be said consistent with the revealed Christian doctrine. The history of Christian belief or dogma may seem more like a history of heresies. But it is often the case that an outrageous statement or a view that is “offensive to pious ears,” male sonans, or contrary to the living faith of the Church, occasions a clarification and more exact formulation of the true faith, thus contributing indirectly to the development of Christian doctrine in the history of the Church. Therefore each new formulation, like homoousion, must be understood in the historical context of the speculative problem; in this case it was a Greek philosophical problem that needed a Greek theological solution consistent with divine revelation. The true development of Christian doctrine is never a case of abrogating or denying an earlier profession of faith, but always a more explicit profession of the one true faith in the face of given historical obsessions or preoccupations of a certain time in human history. It is only God himself who has no history. Everything created by God and governed by his immutable providence has a very definite history, one that is irreversibly unique and destined to manifest the glory of God.
V
THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION
The Catholic faith professes a firm belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Word Incarnate, in the literal sense of the word “divine,” meaning God himself. That is:
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God ( Deum de Deo ), Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten ( genitum ), not made ( non factum ), one in Being ( consubstantialem ) with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation ( propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem ) he came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man ( et homo factus sit ).
This is the ancient profession of faith approved by the Council of Nicaea (325), more fully formulated by the First Council of Constantinople (381), and recited weekly by the faithful in their Sunday liturgy. It is a belief that Jesus of Nazareth, “born of a woman, under the law” (Gal 4:4), is in his unique personality the Only Begotten Son of the Father, one in nature with him, truly God and at the same time truly man, and born as we are of a woman, “one tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15). Quite simply, it is a belief that the historical Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary, is one divine Person in two natures, one divine, the other human.
For St. Thomas, John the Evangelist proclaims for us in a special way the “mysteries of Christ’s divinity.” For him, St. John’s Prologue is a canticle of the Word become flesh, “full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). The reality of who he is, therefore, is announced in the first strophe of the Prologue: In the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God, And the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
To Thomas’ Aristotelian mind, the first two phrases declare the existence ( an est ) of the Word and the other two declare the reality of who he is ( quid est ). The first phrase declares “when” he was, namely, in the beginning. The second declares “where” he was, namely, with the Father. The third phrase declares who he was, namely, God. The fourth declares the “manner” so as to exclude the two basic errors concerning the Word: (1) the error of gentiles, such as pagan Greeks and Romans, who thought there were many gods, and the Manichaeans, who thought there were two gods, one good, the other evil; and (2) that of the Arians, who thought that the Word was less than the Father, different in substance, and created by the Father. Both of these errors are excluded by the fourth phrase, that the unique Word was with the Father from the beginning and identical with him in nature.
In typical scholastic fashion Thomas sees in these four lines of the first strophe a refutation of all the errors of both heretics and philosophers. As for the heretics, there were (1) some like the Ebionites and Cerinthus, who denied the existence of Jesus Christ before his conception in the womb of Mary; that is, they thought Christ to be no more than “a mere man” who later deserved to be called “divine “ being “adopted” by the Father and “accepted as the Christ” by his disciples. To this group belong Paul of Samosata (3rd cent.), Photius (9th cent.), Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Kung (20th cent.), and in a certain sense, Nestorius, about whom more will be said later. To all of these the Evangelist says, In the beginning was the Word. (2) Then there were those like Sabellius (3rd cent.) who denied the real distinction of Persons, thinking that “Father’ and “Word” are two masks for the one true God (see Note 111). To these the Evangelist says, And the Word was with God, insisting on their distinction in Person. (3) Then there were the heretics like Funomius (d. 394) and the other extreme Arians, who insisted that Jesus, though pre-existent to his incarnation, was very much unlike ( anomios ) the Father. To them the Evangelist says, And the Word was God. (4) Finally, there was Arius himself and all the semi-Arians, who said that the Word was less than the Father and created by him. To all these the Evangelist says, He was in the beginning with God.
As to the philosophers, there were (1) the pre-Socratics, who all, except Anaxagoras, were pure materialists, whether they acknowledged one or many elements as “nature,” or only atoms in space, for them the universe came about not by Intelligence, but by chance. Against these the Evangelist says, In the beginning was the Word ; all things come by his agency, not by pure chance. (2) Plato, however, admitted the reality of things immaterial, but for him these were subsistent, immaterial Forms, or Ideas, separate from God as well as from matter. Against this the Evangelist says, And the Word was with God. (3) The later Platonists, especially Plotinus (c. 205-270 B.C.). acknowledged the existence of’ the One, from which proceeded Mind ( Nous ) containing all the Ideas, but who was less than the One. Lest anyone think that the Word was “with God” in this sense of being less than him, the Evangelist says, And the Word was God. (4) Finally, Aristotle placed the ideas of all things in God, and acknowledged the identity of intellect, act of intellection, and reality intellected (or known) in God, but he thought that the world was co-eternal with him, that is, created from all eternity by God. For St. Thomas, the word he in St. John ( hoc in Latin; houtos in Greek) implies that he “alone” was in the beginning with God, excluding not other Persons, but any other co-eternal nature.
This is a typical example of how much a scholastic theologian like St. Thomas could see in a single strophe of John. Everything St. Thomas says in his commentary on the first strophe is entirely true and correct, but he does not mean to imply in any way that St. John had these ideas in his mind when he or his scribe wrote these opening lines of the Prologue. Here is an excellent example of St. Anselm’s “Faith seeking understanding,” or “an example of meditating on the rationale of the faith.”
The climax of the entire Prologue for Thomas is the direct statement, And the Word was made flesh (Jn 1:14), because taken literally and strictly it excludes all errors concerning the one person and the two distinct natures in Christ, one fully divine, the other as fully human as we are. In this profession of faith lies the mystery of the Incarnation. Everything else in our Christian belief, that God became man “for us and for our salvation,” that “by dying he destroyed our death,” that “by rising he restored our life,” and that “he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” depends upon the basic mystery of the Incarnation, namely, that Jesus of Nazareth, born at a definite time in history of the Jewish Virgin Mary, is one unique person, “the Son of the living God,” who united in his person two wholly complete and distinct natures : human and divine.
In this note we will restrict our analysis to the mystery of the union of the human and the divine in the one person of Jesus Christ. Among the many so-called Christological heresies concerning this central mystery of Christianity, we will restrict ourselves to the three most common ones: (a) Christ was not really “divine” either in his person or in nature; (b) Christ was not really “human” like all the rest of mankind, and not “one tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15); (c) there were two persons in Christ, one human, the other divine. But first we must begin with a preliminary note to focus the real problem.
Today it is common among historians of Christianity and Scripture scholars, at least since the time of H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768) to distinguish between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith (see Sebastian Bullough, O.P., “Scripture Survey: From Wrede to the New Quest,” Blackfriars, 44, 1963, 79-82 ) . Perhaps Rudolf Bultmann more than anyone else today has sharpened the distinction between Geschichte (the existential significance of history) and Historie (the empirical study of historical facts as objectively real). Although there are no two words in English to convey the difference between geschichtlich and historich, the whole of Bultmann’s work manifests the distinction which is fundamental to modern Christian studies and beliefs (see especially the article of Claude Geffré, “Bultmann on Kerygma and History,” Rudolf Bultmann in Catholic Thought, ed. T.F. O’Meara, O.P., and D.M. Weisser, O.P., New York: Herder and Herder, 1968, pp. 167-95). Although the bibliography on this important modern distinction is vast, and although there are many ways to exemplify the distinction between “historical science” ( Historie ) and “existential history” ( Geschichte ), we will limit our brief and simple observations to the mystery of the Incarnation.
Simply put, Historie deals with what little we can know of the historical Jesus precisely as a human being said to have been born in Bethlehem of Jewish heritage, whose mother’s name was Mary, and who was put to death. Many Protestant theologians have given up the quest for the “historical Jesus,” claiming that all our knowledge is colored by a later reaction, expressed in a kerygmatic manner, by the so-called evangelists and preachers long after the factual historical events, which had by then ceased to be important. Geschichte, on the other hand, is the Christ event, the impact on a human being of the escatalogical challenge put to each individual today as it was at the end of the first century through the basic kerygma. In other words, many Protestant theologians (and some Catholic ones) do not think that much, if anything, really certain can be known of the historical man known as Jesus of Nazareth. For most of them, the historical Jesus was an ordinary, idealistic Jewish man little different from other Jews at the beginning of the present era; perhaps in his idealism he was a “great man” who came to a tragic death and was buried.
The main thing is that much was said about him after his death and burial. And what was said is the reaction of living men accepting an eschatalogical challenge. Today the challenge made to the early Christians is made to each of us, the challenge of the existential acceptance of Jesus as “the Christ of faith.” Inevitably the acceptance of the Christ event by the early Christians expressed itself in a multitude of “myths” that sprang from the believer. The most important of these “myths” was the “deification” or “divinization” of Jesus by the believer. For Bultmann it is the myths alone that are really important. When Christ is “demythologized” there is nothing left but a tragic life of a man called Jesus. Thus the quest for “the historical Jesus” is not only vain and futile, it is also un-Christian and of no salvific value whatever. It is empty Historie, having no contemporary existential significance.
Bultmann puts the matter simply when he says: “The saving efficacy of the cross is not derived from the fact that it is the cross of Christ: it is the cross of Christ because it has this saving efficacy. Without that efficacy it is the tragic end of a great man” (quoted by C. Geffré, op. cit. , p. 181).
This whole approach to the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith seems to be at the root of Hans Kung’s best seller, On Being a Christian (trans. E. Quinn, Garden City: Doubleday, 1976, from Christ Sein, Munchen: R. Piper, 1974).
This preliminary note on the contemporary, mainly Protestant, approach to Christology has been introduced here solely to show how radically different is St. Thomas’ approach to the mystery of the Incarnation. For St. Thomas (and all those before him in the Catholic faith) it is the historical Jesus who is one divine Person, the Only Begotten Son of the Father, who became man by being conceived of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, thereby uniting to himself a truly complete human nature, subject to all the natural ills and pleasures that man is heir to, including suffering and death (but not sin).
(a) The most common error concerning Jesus Christ is the one we have just been talking about, namely, that he was not truly divine in his Person as the Only Begotten Son of the Father or in his nature, which is consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit. This heresy has assailed the Catholic faith from its very inception, and, as we have seen, some Protestant theologians embrace it today. The mystery of the Incarnation (or “coming in the flesh,” in carne ) does indeed baffle human credulity, and it cannot be accepted without the gift of faith that comes from the Holy Spirit in baptism.
At first, not even the apostles and the immediate disciples of Jesus knew what to make of the Son of Man, the miracles he worked, the doctrine of salvation he preached. Nor did they know what to make of his constant references to God as his Father, to his doing the will of his Father, to the close presence of the Kingdom, to the Father’s Kingdom being already at hand, and to the death he was to suffer and to his ultimate victory over death. It was only with the coming of the Holy Spirit that the disciples began to understand the reality of the historical Jesus they had come to know and love. Even after his death and resurrection, Cerinthus and a large Jewish sect called the Ebionites refused to accept Christ as anything more than “a mere man” ( purus homo ). Various theories of “adoptionism” were common throughout the second and third centuries. This was the view that Jesus was born a mere man, but later (some put it at the baptism by John) he deserved to be “adopted” by God, much as parents might adopt an attractive boy as their son. Every form of “adoptionism” implies a “subordinationism” of Jesus, at least as a creature. It was inevitable that Arianism of one kind or another should errupt in the fourth century. Every form of “Arianism” from the extreme “anomeanism” of Eunomius to the semi-Arianism of Eusebius of Caesarea (who baptized Constantine as he lay dying on the battlefield) denied the identity of nature in the Father and in the Word, who in the fullness of time became flesh.
It was inevitable that a subdued question raised since the first century should come to a head in the Arians of the fourth century. The question was: What is the relation between Jesus, the Son of Man, and the Father, who is Yahweh? How are Jesus, born of Mary, and the Father “One”? The only possible answer consistent with the biblical writings was the unbiblical term ( homoousion ) “consubstantial.” The neo-Platonism of Plotinus unmistakably influenced Origen and many other Greek Christians. For Plotinus the Logos or nous emanates from the One and is less than the One, just as the Spirit emanates from the Logos and is less than it. Neo-Platonism together with the natural inability to accept any “man” as “God” inevitably resulted in the widespread Arianism of the fourth century. To appreciate even inadequately the threat Arianism posed for the Church even after the Council of Nicaea (325), one might recall how at one time the great St. Athanasius seemed to stand alone ( Athanasius contra mundum ), and how even St. Jerome in the West could say that the whole world woke up one day to find itself Arian. The fourth century, beset as it was by various forms of Arianism and the dubious “freedom” of the Church, was the greatest age of the Fathers, both Greek and Latin, in the history of the Church. It was the “golden age of the Fathers.” Through them the Holy Spirit preserved orthodoxy through a development of doctrine and a flowering of heroic sanctity unparalleled since the age of the martyrs.
Possibly the climax of the fourth century came with the Council of’ Rome in 382 under Pope St. Damasus I, in which the whole development of Christian doctrine up to that date was summarized in the Tomus Damasi, and the canonical books of Sacred Scripture were fixed as we have them today (see Denz. 152-180).
The relation of Nestorianism to Arianism will be discussed under heading (c).
(b) The second most common heresy concerning the Incarnation is, in fact, the direct opposite of the first. Just as the first cannot accept a man who is God, so the second cannot accept a God who became man. Just as Arianism (and all forms of adoptionism, subordinationism, and the like) is a kind of naturalism that sees Jesus as a creature, so this second heresy (in its many forms) is a kind of spiritualism that disdains matter as something unworthy of being a creature of God at all. Basically it is a denial that Jesus had a real human body, and that he really suffered and died. In its earliest form it is called Docetism (from the Greek, dokeo, “I seem”) and existed as a tendency rather than a formulated and unified doctrine, which considered the humanity and sufferings of the earthly Christ as apparent rather than real. Evidence of its existence in the early Church is to be found in 1 John (4:1-3) and 2 John (v 7); see also Colossians (2:8-9). But it reached its zenith among the Gnostics of the second and third centuries (see G. Bareille, DTC, IV, cols. 14841501, s.v. “Docetisme”). Besides Gnostics like Serapion, Bishop of Antioch (190-203), there was Marcion (d. c. 160), who claimed that Christ, who was an “emissary” of the Father, suddenly appeared preaching and teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, and was not born of woman at all, but whose passion and death were the work of the evil Creator God of the Old Testament.