Why God Became Man: Summa III, Question 1, Articles 1–2

Orientation #

He begins “up to the first article here”, the first question of the Tertia Pars whose prologue was introduced last time (prev. lecture). He refers back to “the two senses of necessary” as “mentioned before”, and to a previous course on love with Thomas (“the first effect of love is to unite”). Looking forward, he proposes comparing the ten reasons here with the “about eight” in the Summa Contra Gentiles, “maybe” next. The next class carries out that comparison with SCG IV, ch. 54.

The class, in order #

1. Article 1, four objections against the fittingness of the Incarnation (“it is not suitable for God to become flesh”) #

He reads the four objections of q. 1, a. 1, glossing each.

1. God from eternity is the very essence of goodness, so it was best for him to be as he was; he could not be better. He was without flesh; so best to remain so.
2. Things infinitely distant are unsuitably joined — like a painter joining a horse’s head to a human body. God is most simple, flesh most composed (human flesh especially). Aside: All’s Well That Ends Well — a commoner marrying the duke’s son; “they just don’t do that”; here it is God and man.
3. Body differs from the highest spirit as malice from the highest goodness; God cannot assume wickedness, so the uncreated spirit cannot assume a body. He flags this as “a Manichaean argument” and says he would not have thought even to answer it.
4. It is unsuitable that the one who exceeds the great be contained in the least, and that the one caring for the whole universe be drawn down to little things — hidden in the little body of an infant, taken from the throne of the universe into the virgin’s womb. This is Volusianus writing to Augustine. “Aren’t you convinced now?”

2. Sed contra: the invisible things made visible (“goodness and the wisdom and the justice and the power”) #

Point: the whole world is made so that the invisible things of God be shown through visible things (Romans 1:20; “the Apostle” for Paul is an example of antonomasia, cf. last class). Damascene, beginning of book III: the Incarnation shows at once God’s goodness (he did not despise the infirmity of our plasma, our makeup), justice (he did not overcome the devil by mere power but by justice — neque vi rapuit, the devil in putting Christ to death overstepped his bounds), wisdom (for a most difficult situation he found the most suitable solution), and infinite power (nothing greater than God becoming man — “the greatest thing that God has made”; Thomas brings this out more in the Contra Gentiles).

3. The body: goodness communicates itself (“suitable to man to reason”) #

Argument as he gives it:

1. To each thing is suitable what belongs to it by reason of its nature — as reasoning is suitable to man because he is rational. “Get that into your head.”
2. The very nature of God is goodness (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 1); so whatever belongs to the notion of the good is suitable to God.
3. It belongs to the notion of the good to communicate itself to others (Divine Names ch. 4; bonum est diffusivum sui).
4. So it belongs to the highest good to communicate himself in the highest way to creatures — this is the fifth thing Thomas shows about God’s goodness in the Summa.
5. This comes about most of all by his joining a created nature to himself so that there is one person from three: the Word, the flesh, and the soul (Augustine, On the Trinity XIII). Conclusion: it was suitable for God to become incarnate. Student objection: if he is so good he could have become an angel too, or something greater. Answer: this is not about the greatest creature but about his joining a creature to himself; why man rather than angel is a separate later question. He adds: no grace given to any particular human being could equal the grace of the union, so nothing greater could be bestowed on human nature. He notes Thomas argues here simply from God’s goodness — not all that can be said, but the fundamental starting point; and remarks that Thomas, having the objections, “most beautifully determines the matter, as Aristotle would say.”

4. Replies to the four objections; the diagram of point and lines (“has this been changed at all”) #

• Ad 1: the objection supposes God became better by becoming man. The Incarnation is not fulfilled by God changing from his eternal status but by his uniting the creature to himself in a new way — “or rather, as you’d better say, it to himself.” The creature is by its own account changeable, so it is suitable that, having first not been at all and then being produced, it first was not united to God and afterwards was. His “simple and inadequate” picture: a point A is the person, line B from it the divine nature; a human nature created by itself would be a separate human person; but draw line C from the same point A — line B is not changed at all, the second line is simply drawn to that point. So the one person, the Word, now subsists in both natures; nothing is added to the divine nature; the human nature is drawn to the divine personality. Had it been created by itself without being drawn to him there would have been another person — the Nestorian heresy.
• Ad 2: being united to God in unity of person was not suitable to human flesh by the condition of its nature, but it was suitable to God according to the infinite excellence of his goodness, for man’s salvation. He glosses: mercy, not justice; human nature did not deserve it. Thomas thus grants the truth in the objection and brings out what it leaves out.
• Ad 3 (the Manichaean one): every condition by which a creature differs from the Creator is instituted by God’s wisdom and ordered to his goodness; God, uncreated, unchangeable, bodiless, produces creatures mobile and bodily; the evil of punishment is brought in by God’s justice for his glory; the evil of guilt is committed by receding from the art of divine wisdom and the order of divine goodness. So it is suitable for him to assume a nature changeable, bodily and subject to punishment, but not the evil of guilt: “everything we have except our sin.”
• Ad 4 (“easily solved”): with Augustine to Volusian, Christian teaching does not hold that God is so infused into flesh that he abandons the care of the universe or is contracted into that little body. That is the thinking of men who can think of nothing but bodies. Aristotle, Natural Hearing IV: the common opinion of the Greeks that whatever is must be somewhere, so being in place is a property of what is, and everything is a body. Personal aside: when my soul leaves my body, will it be somewhere? — hard for the imagination. God is great not in size but in virtue, so his power suffers no straitening in a narrow place. Comparison: a man’s word going forth is heard at once by many and whole by all; so the word of God, remaining, is everywhere whole. Boundary: God remains God in becoming man — not as a sphere becomes a cube and ceases to be a sphere.

5. Article 2 objections; the two senses of “necessary” (“without which the end cannot be reached well”) #

Point: was the Incarnation necessary for the repair of the human race? He reads the objections, inserting the distinction already given before: necessary as that without which the end cannot be reached vs. that without which it cannot be reached well. Example: can one philosophize without logic? Yes, but not well (Albert the Great: the early Greeks before Aristotle and Plato made many mistakes for lack of logic). So the question is in which sense it was necessary for Christ to become man.

1. Nothing of power came to the Word by assuming flesh; he could repair nature without it.
2. Nothing more would seem required than that man satisfy for sin (“collapsed through sin — a good description of us”); God does not require of man more than he is able, and is more prone to mercy than to punishing, so as he imputes the sin, he would impute its deletion by the contrary act.
3. What most pertains to salvation is that God be reverenced (Malachi 1:6: “If I am the Lord, where is my fear? If the Father, where is my honour?”); men reverence God more when they consider him raised above all and remote from the senses (Psalm 112, Excelsus super omnes gentes Dominus; “who is like our God?”; the Fourth Lateran Council: no likeness of creature to God without a greater unlikeness). God becoming like us diminishes our regard of him as above us. “Interesting objection.” Sed contra: that by which the race was freed from perdition is necessary for salvation; John 3:16 — the Incarnation spoken of as the way to eternal life, so it could be placed under God as end. He notes Thomas will not give the whole teaching on the necessary — for that go to “the fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V, on “necessary” (inferred)]; here he gives the two senses in terms of the end.

6. The body: necessary in the second way (“a more suitable way of healing our misery”) #

Thomas’s two senses: (a) that without which a thing cannot be — food for preserving life; (b) that through which something arises better and more suitably — a horse for a journey (“I can get home without a horse”). He exemplifies with logic: to know the conclusion of a syllogism you must know the premises — first sense; logic for philosophizing — second sense. De Koninck: Thomas a most humble student of Aristotle; in reading Thomas you read Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Albert; Cajetan at the beginning of the Summa: he so reverenced the Fathers he seems to have inherited the mind of them all. Contrast: reading modern philosophy he has the impression of reading one man only; he never understood the distinction “Augustinian, not Thomist.” Result: in the first way the Incarnation was not necessary — God by omnipotence could repair nature in many other ways; in the second way it was. Augustine, On the Trinity XV: not that another way was lacking to God, to whose power all things are equally subject, but that there was no more suitable way of healing our misery. Aside: Benedict XVI, asked at a Roman university what he enjoyed as a student, named Augustine and Bonaventure, not Thomas; Pius X or Paul VI would more likely say Thomas; the Confessions is the most read work of Augustine.

7. Five reasons: promotion of man to the good (“God was made man so that man might become God”) #

Thomas divides: no more suitable way to move man to the good, and none to move him from evil. Here there are ten reasons (in the SCG “about eight”, almost the same but differently ordered) — a comparison he may make.

1. Faith: the end is made more certain by believing God himself speaking (Augustine, City of God XI: that man might walk more confidently to truth, Truth itself, the Son of God having assumed man, founded faith).
2. Hope, most aroused by this (On the Trinity XIII: nothing so necessary to arouse our hope as to be shown how much God loved us; what greater sign than that the Son of God deign to share our nature). Gloss: the first effect of love is to unite (prev. course on love), so uniting our nature to himself is the greatest sign of love, and we hope in the one who loves us — as children hope in parents.
3. Charity, most aroused by this (De catechizandis rudibus — “the rough guys”: Augustine advised his friend to narrate what God has done for us so as to show God’s love; “if we were slow to love, at least let us not be slow to return love”). He recalls: nothing arouses love for another more than the experience of their love; God’s love arouses both hope and love — “seems to be what Pope Benedict does a lot.”
4. Right operation, in which he gave us an example. Augustine’s “little bit of dialectic,” which he loves: man should not be followed though he can be seen; God should be followed but cannot be seen; so that man be shown one both visible and to be followed, God became man. Example: Heisenberg on the need to come under a man like Niels Bohr — one needs someone visible to follow, but no visible man is entirely worthy. From Augustine’s sermon on the birth of the Lord — “what a Christmas sermon.”
5. Full partaking of divinity, the beatitude of man, given us through the humanity of Christ: “God was made man so that man might become God” (Augustine’s sermon on the Nativity; other saints say the same). Mnemonic he offers: faith, hope, charity, then doing, then the end.

8. Five reasons: removal from evil (“lest he prefer the devil to himself”) #

1. Man instructed not to prefer the devil to himself nor venerate the author of sin (On the Trinity XIII: once God joined human nature to himself in one person, those proud malignant spirits no longer dare put themselves before man because they lack flesh). This appeals especially against a Manichaean, who thinks flesh evil; it lends piquancy to John’s synecdoche “became flesh” (prev. lecture) — down to the flesh the devil does not have. Aside: he has come to think the world-wide acceptance of abortion “something very diabolical” — the devil, lost while we are still capable of salvation, would find no greater satisfaction than our killing our own offspring; a rage against the Incarnation and motherhood. Students: diabolic cultures always demanded human sacrifice, often children (Moloch); breaking the strongest bond, mother and child, requires something diabolical. Shakespeare: the “common enemy of man.”
2. Instructed how great is the dignity of human nature, lest we stain it by sinning (Augustine, On True Religion: God showed how high a place human nature has among creatures by appearing to men in a true man; Leo the Great, sermon on the Nativity: Christian, recognise your dignity, made a sharer of the divine nature; do not degenerate into your old vileness).
3. Taking away man’s presumption (another name for pride): the grace of God, no merits preceding, is commended to us in Christ the man (On the Trinity XIII). Aside on Thomas quoting rather than rewriting: Aristotle says try to say some things better than predecessors, others as well as they did; what can’t be improved need not be; Einstein on some pieces of Mozart — perfect is not perfectable.
4. Pride (superbia, haughtiness), the greatest impediment to adhering to God, is argued against and healed by so great a humility of God (Augustine). Gloss: John 13–17, Christ preparing the apostles, which Thomas divides in three — by example (ch. 13), by words (14–16), by praying for them (17); compare a father’s duties: give good example, instruct in words, then pray they profit. The foot-washing is an example of humility, and the chapter ends with “as I have loved you”: no real love without humility; humility in some sense the foundation of the other virtues. Pride is hard to move — Augustine on self-love possessing him; roots hard to get out; John XXIII and Teresa of Avila always working at it; it needs something as radical as God emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, obedient even to death.
5. Liberating man from slavery (On the Trinity XIII): it had to be that the devil be overcome by the justice of the man Jesus Christ — he has some authority over sinners under original sin, but Christ was in no way under it, so in attacking Christ he overstepped and is justly deprived of his kingdom. Thomas adds the same kind of dialectic as before: a pure man could not satisfy for the whole race; God does not satisfy (he did no sinning); so Christ must be both God and man — as man to satisfy, as God to satisfy efficaciously. Infirmity receives from power, humility from majesty; one mediator who can die by the one and rise by the other; unless true God no remedy, unless true man no example. “Many other utilities above the comprehension of the sons of men.”

9. Replies to the article-2 objections (“some satisfaction can be said to be sufficient in two ways”) #

• Ad 1: the objection proceeds by the first sense of necessity; Thomas admits God could do it otherwise — that is not the necessity defended in the body.
• Ad 2: satisfaction sufficient in two ways. Perfectly (condign, condigna): worthy to recompense the fault by a certain equality — a pure man’s can never be, because the whole nature was corrupted by sin and no one person’s or many persons’ good recompenses the loss of the whole nature; and because sin against God has a certain infinity from the infinity of the divine majesty, an offence being graver the greater the one offended (“if I kick the king I get more trouble than if I kick you”); so a suitable satisfaction needs infinite efficacy, as of God and man. Imperfectly: as accepted by someone contented with it though not condign — a pure man’s satisfaction is sufficient this way; and since everything imperfect presupposes something perfect sustaining it, every pure man’s satisfaction has its efficacy from Christ’s. So: we cannot satisfy perfectly without a God-made-man — the necessity of the body.
• Ad 3: God in assuming flesh did not lessen his greatness, so not the reason for reverence, which is rather increased by growth in our knowledge of him — by approaching us he draws us more to knowing him. “A pretty good answer.” Aside: Teresa of Avila’s devotion to St Joseph, insisting others make the same appeal, naming her foundations after him; De Koninck’s remark that after the Marian century, with Mary’s mysteries clarified, mysteries of Joseph might be clarified next, in providence’s order — Christ, Mary, Joseph.

His words #

• “suitable” — conveniens, his rendering throughout for the fittingness of the Incarnation.
• “plasma / our makeup” — Damascene’s term for our infirm nature.
• antonomasia — “the Apostle” for St Paul.
• bonum est diffusivum sui — the good communicates itself to others.
• “one person from these three: the Word, the flesh, and the soul” — Augustine’s formula.
• “grace of the union” — the good conferred on human nature which no particular grace equals.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics] — Aristotle, book IV, on “whatever is must be somewhere.”
• “great in virtue, not in size” — God’s magnitude as power.
• “necessary” in two senses — without which the end cannot be reached; without which it cannot be reached well.
• “dialectic” — Augustine’s pairing of two difficulties and their untying (visible/followable; man cannot, God does not satisfy).
• presumption — “another name for pride”; superbia — pride, haughtiness.
• condigna — condign, satisfaction worthy by equality; vs. sufficient “as accepted.”
• synecdoche — “the Word became flesh” (from last class), given piquancy by the devil’s lacking flesh.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 1, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, four replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 1, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body with ten reasons, three replies).
• Within these: Romans 1:20; John 3:16; Malachi 1:6; Psalm 112; Damascene book III beginning; Dionysius, Divine Names chs. 1 and 4; Augustine, On the Trinity XIII and XV, Epistle to Volusian, City of God XI, De catechizandis rudibus, On True Religion, sermon on the birth of the Lord; Leo the Great, sermon on the Nativity; Fourth Lateran Council on likeness and greater unlikeness.

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, the “about eight” reasons for the Incarnation (locus not stated; next class treats SCG IV, ch. 54 per context).
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing (Physics) IV; “the fifth book of wisdom” on the necessary [ed.: Metaphysics V (inferred)]; Aristotle on saying things better than or as well as predecessors (locus not stated).
• Albert the Great on the early Greeks lacking logic.
• Cajetan, commentary at the beginning of the Summa.
• John 13–17 as Thomas divides them.
• Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well; “common enemy of man.”
• Augustine, Confessions; Teresa of Avila, autobiography and Foundations; Heisenberg on Bohr; Einstein on Mozart; De Koninck on Thomas and on Joseph; Benedict XVI’s Roman speech.

His questions #

• Could God be any better than he was from eternity? No — the Incarnation is not a change in God but a new union of the creature to him.
• Isn’t the third objection a Manichaean argument? Yes; answered by distinguishing what is assumable (changeable, bodily, subject to punishment) from the evil of guilt.
• Has the first line been changed at all when the second line is drawn to the point? No — nothing is added to the divine nature; the human nature is drawn to the divine person.
• If he’s so good, couldn’t he have become an angel too? A separate later question; here the point is the joining of a creature to himself, and no grace equals the grace of union.
• Is logic necessary for the philosopher? You can philosophize without it, but not well — the second sense of necessary.
• To know the conclusion of a syllogism, must you know the premises — which sense of necessary? The first sense: without them you cannot know the conclusion.
• In what sense was it necessary for God to become man? The second: not that another way was lacking, but no more suitable way existed.
• How does the Incarnation help us not to prefer the devil to ourselves? The proud spirits dare no longer put themselves before man, since they lack flesh which God assumed.
• Did assuming flesh lessen the reason for reverence? No — his greatness is not lessened, and reverence grows with our knowledge of him.