Would God Have Become Incarnate Without Sin? Original Sin and the Timing of the Incarnation (ST III q.1 aa.3–5)

Orientation #

He refers back to “these thirteen reasons that we saw between the two Summas” for the fittingness of the Incarnation (prev. lecture), and announces at the end of a. 4 that “the next two articles are going to be about whether he should have come earlier” and how long he should have stayed; a. 5 is done in class, a. 6 is left for next time. The previous class compared the reasons for the Incarnation in Summa Contra Gentiles IV, 54 with the ten in the Summa Theologiae; the next concludes q. 1 (a. 6) and begins q. 2 on the mode of union.

The class, in order #

1. Article 3, the objections (“if man had not sinned, nevertheless God”) #

The question: would God have become incarnate had man not sinned; he says at the outset Thomas will hold that, “as far as we know from Scripture, it’s because of man’s sin”. He reads the five objections:

1. Cause remaining, the effect remains; Augustine (De Trinitate XIII) says many things besides absolution from sin are to be thought of in the Incarnation. He links this to the thirteen reasons of last time: “many reasons for the incarnation apart from sin”, so “a person might wonder a little bit”.
2. Omnipotence should show itself in an infinite effect; no pure creature is infinite, but in the Incarnation infinitely distant things are joined, and the universe is perfected when the last creature (man) is joined to the first (God). Aside: man is “the minor cosmos”, so in joining human nature God joins the whole universe to himself.
3. An a fortiori argument: sin did not make human nature more capable of grace; after sin it was capable of the union, the greatest grace; God does not withhold a good of which nature is capable.
4. Predestination is eternal; Romans 1:4, Christ “predestined to be the Son of God in power”; so the Incarnation was necessary before sin, “if he didn’t foresee our sin”.
5. The Incarnation was revealed to the first man (“bone of my bones”, the “great sacrament” of Ephesians 5), but man could not have foreknown his own fall, any more than an angel could (Augustine, Super Genesim ad litteram). A student asks whether Ephesians 5 refers to marriage; he agrees: Eve from the side of Adam, the Church from the side of Christ; and (a student adds) Eve was both body and bride of Adam, as the Church is body and bride of Christ.

2. Sed contra: Augustine and the name Jesus (“came to seek and to save”) #

Augustine on Luke 19:10 (“the Son of Man came to seek and to save what had perished”): if man had not sinned, the Son of Man would not have come; and the gloss on 1 Timothy (“Christ came into this world to save sinners”), from Augustine: no cause of Christ’s coming except to make sinners safe; “take away the illnesses, the wounds, and there is no need for the medicine”. He adds Matthew: “call him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins”; Jesus (like Joshua, Jesse, Isaiah) means saviour, whereas Christ means anointed; the name itself seems to say what Augustine says.

A student found the fifth objection “a non sequitur”; he looked up Augustine on Genesis and it did not help. The class works out its sense: Adam’s sleep was a mystic sleep (common among the Fathers, a student says), in which he was given knowledge of the Incarnation but not of his sin; so even without sin he would have had that prophetic knowledge. Another student: would matrimony be a sign of Christ and the Church if Adam had not sinned? Left open.

3. Body of article 3: Scripture and modesty (“some about this have opined diversely”) #

The point: what comes from God’s will alone, above what is owed to the creature, is known only through Scripture, and Scripture everywhere assigns the Incarnation to the sin of the first man.

1. His Marietti edition notes the “some” who held the other side: Albert the Great (Sentences III) and Alexander of Hales (an earlier Summa Theologiae): “respectable people”.
2. Thomas: to the contrary view “it seems we’re rather to assent”, so he “seems to definitely think we should assent to what Augustine says”, but is “a little careful”.
3. The reason: human nature is not owed the Incarnation; gifts above what is owed are known only from Scripture; hence “more suitably” the Incarnation is ordered to the remedy of sin, “although the power of God is not limited”: he could have become man without sin. He calls this reason “modesty”.

Student question: the Old Testament appearances of angels (Justin Martyr and others read them as Christ), God walking with Adam, the three visitors to Abraham: are these incarnations? Answer: not incarnation but a foreshadowing, “a revelation from God in the form of a man”; some such apparitions are in the imagination, some outside in the senses (the angels at the tomb) (he recalls the treatment “in the missions”); like the Lamb “slain from the beginning of the world” in the Apocalypse, figured before but “really only a man once”.

4. Replies of article 3 (“Flesh blinded thee, but flesh will heal thee”) #

• To 1: all the other causes pertain in some way to the remedy of sin. Unfallen man would have been filled with the light of divine wisdom and perfect in justice; because man, deserting God, “collapsed to bodily things”, it was fitting that God through bodily things exhibit the remedy. Augustine on John 1:14: flesh blinded thee, flesh will heal thee; Christ came to extinguish from the flesh the vices of the flesh. So “all those thirteen reasons have something to do with the remedy of sin”.
• To 2: the infinite divine power is shown in creation from nothing: the further something is removed from act, the more power is needed to bring it to act, and between nothing and something there is “kind of an infinite distance”. For the perfection of the universe it suffices that the creature be ordered to God as end; personal union exceeds the limits of nature. “The main reply is in the first sentence there.”
• To 3: a twofold capacity in human nature: (a) according to a natural power, which God always fills, giving each thing according to its natural capacity; vs. (b) according to the divine power to which every creature is obedient ad nutum; God does not fill every such capacity, otherwise he could make no creature except as he has made it (shown in the First Part): “he could have made us with more grace”. Nothing prevents human nature being led to something greater after sin: God permits evils that something better be elicited (Romans 5:20; the Paschal candle’s “O happy fault”). Examples: the patience of the martyrs impossible without something bad; the death of our Lord out of love for us impossible without Judas. “What’s kind of interesting”: the greatest thing God ever made, the Word made flesh (as in the Summa Contra Gentiles), would not have taken place without the fall. “God says, You won’t get the best of me; I’ll do something even greater because you’ve done this.” Human analogues offered: “if someone takes your cloak, give him your cloak as well”; Psalm 68, “that which I stole not, that I paid”.
• To 4: predestination presupposes foreknowledge of future things; as God predestined some to be saved through the prayers of others, so he predestined the Incarnation as a remedy of sin (“more easily solved”).
• To 5: an effect can be revealed to one to whom the cause is not revealed; Adam could know something of the Incarnation without foreknowing his own fault. “Not everyone who knows the effect knows the cause”; even the philosopher often knows that without knowing why.

Aside: teaching high school, the answer to “why a happy fall?” was “they fell down together”: one reason boys and girls should be taught separately.

5. Student challenge: is it really left open? (“Christ has a role in creation apart from redemption”) #

A student notes Thomas “leaves it open” (possible, but Scripture points the other way); another reports a Christology professor citing Paul’s hymns (Christ “firstborn of all creatures”) for a role in creation apart from sin. His answer: Thomas does not deny that something besides redemption is brought out in the Incarnation; the union of human nature to God brings everything back to God. The psalms praise God through angels, then the material world, then man last; the three children’s canticle likewise; Thomas follows that order in the Summa (angels, gross material world, man); the Greeks called man “a little cosmos”; so there is an appropriateness in man’s nature being joined to God. But whether that reason alone would move God to become man “depends upon the divine will, which is revealed in Scripture”; we cannot reason it out from God’s nature; Thomas says only that we should assent “more” to this, the evidence being greater. A student adds the Creed, “for us men and for our salvation”; he notes all such texts speak “given the fact of the fall”, not that it could not have been otherwise. Aside: a student mentions John Paul II on Adam progressing to the beatific vision without dying; he does not take it up.

6. Article 4: original or actual sin? (“greater in two ways”) #

The question: did Christ come chiefly for actual sins or for original sin? Objections:

1. The graver sin is more opposed to salvation; actual sin is graver, since original sin deserves the least punishment (Augustine, Contra Julianum). He glosses: actual sin divides into venial and mortal; original sin is a different kind, peccatum naturae.
2. To original sin is owed only loss of the vision, not pain of sense; but Christ satisfied by the suffering of the cross, a pain of sense, not by loss of the vision (he never lost it); so he came chiefly for actual sin: “a pretty good argument”.
3. Chrysostom (On Compunction of Heart II): the faithful servant regards common benefits as given to him alone, as Paul, “he loved me and handed himself over for me” (Galatians); our own sins are actual; so we should think he came chiefly for actual sins. Example: if one man died for you, you would be grateful to that one man; so with Christ. Sed contra: John 1:29, the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, “as if these are the common ones”. Body:
4. Christ certainly came to delete both original sin and all sins added afterwards; not that all are deleted, through men’s defect in not adhering to him (John 3:19), but he exhibited what suffices for all (Romans 5).
5. He came chiefly for the greater sin; but “greater” is said in two ways: “Thomas always sees distinctions that we don’t see.” Intensively, as the more intense whiteness: so actual sin is greater, having more of the voluntary (Second Part). Extensively, as the whiteness on the greater surface: so original sin is greater, having infected the whole human race, where actual sin is private to one person.
6. Hence Christ came chiefly for original sin, citing Aristotle (Ethics I): the good of the nation is more divine than the good of one. He expands: it is lovable to make one man (friend, son) happy, more divine to make a city happy; God cares for the whole universe as we cannot; caring for the common good makes us more like God. “The economic defends the common good.”

7. Replies of article 4 (“cured in each one as if in one alone”) #

• To 1: that argument concerns intensive magnitude.
• To 2: pain of sense is not owed to original sin in the future retribution, but the sensible pains of this life (hunger, thirst, death; a student adds ignorance) proceed from original sin; so Christ, to satisfy fully for original sin, willed to undergo sensible pain and death. The objector wrongly took sensible pain as only the penalty for actual sin.
• To 3: Paul’s words, as Chrysostom explains, do not diminish the gifts of Christ spread through the earth, but Paul reckons himself the occasion of them (the class discusses how to render obnoxius: “the cause of the harm”); benefits given whole to each, “as if to no other”. One who regards them as done for himself need not judge them not given to others. So Christ came chiefly for the sin of the whole nature, yet the common sin is cured as perfectly in each as if in one alone; and by the union of charity each ascribes to himself what was given to all: “what you do for my friend, I consider done for me”, as Christ says.

8. Article 5, objections and sed contra (“from the beginning of the human race”) #

The question: should God have become incarnate from the beginning of the human race? “It was puzzling when I first read this article… why did he delay?”

1. The Incarnation proceeds from the immensity of God’s love (Ephesians 2); charity does not delay to help a friend in need (Proverbs 3:28, “don’t say to your friend, go and come back tomorrow”). “A pretty convincing argument”; “it’s usually Scripture against God now”; “the devil can quote Scripture”.
2. Christ came to save sinners (1 Timothy 1); many who perished in diverse ages would have been saved. “Those guys didn’t have the sacraments, didn’t have the Scripture. I don’t know how he’s going to get out of this one.”
3. The work of grace is no less ordered than nature; nature takes its origin from the perfect (Boethius, Consolation); the Incarnation is the perfection of grace (John 1: “full of grace and truth”). Sed contra: Galatians 4:4, “the fullness of time”; the gloss (his text identifies it as Ambrose): the time defined by the Father in his wisdom; therefore the most suitable time.

9. Body of article 5: why not sooner (“one does not give medicine except to the infirm”) #

Not before sin: no medicine for the healthy (Matthew 9: “I have not come to call the just, but sinners”). Nor immediately after sin, for four reasons (the first three “basically the reasons he gives in the Summa Contra Gentiles too”):

1. The condition of human sin, which came from pride; man was to be liberated by growing humble and recognizing his need of a liberator. The gloss on Galatians 3: with great counsel God first left man to his free will under the natural law, to learn the powers of his nature; failing, he received the law; the sickness remained, not by the law’s fault but by the vice of nature; so, knowing his infirmity, he would “shout for the medicine”. His expansion: left to himself man does not even know what is good; under the law he knows and does not do; then he is ready to receive both truth and grace from Christ. A student: today the consciousness of sin is disappearing; he: “they don’t think they need him.”
2. The order of progress in goodness, from imperfect to perfect (1 Corinthians: first the animal, then the spiritual; first the earthly man, then the heavenly): the nature of man to be brought from an imperfect to a perfect stage.
3. The dignity of the incarnate Word: the greater the judge, the longer the series of heralds that should precede (gloss on Galatians 4, “Augustine, I guess”). Example: the announcer preceding the president at the State of the Union.
4. Given here only: lest the fervour of faith grow tepid with length of time; towards the end of the world charity will grow cold (Matthew 24:12; Luke 18:8, “will he find faith upon earth?”): “a very frightening thing”. A student objects that this belongs rather to a. 6 (the delay); he: had Christ come at the very beginning, the long stretch would have made faith tepid even sooner. The two passages make one think of Antichrist; the Church seems more fervent in Acts and perhaps the Middle Ages than now. Asides: Jim Francetic, “if you know enough to go to the hospital…”; the Irishman in the waiting room, “I hate to feel this bad and be healthy”. A student cites Bonaventure: delay increases desire and fervour, as with the prophets.

10. Replies of article 5 (“not yet, not yet”) #

• To 1: charity does not defer aid, but observes the opportunity of conditions and persons; a doctor who gave the medicine at the very start would profit less or do harm; so the Lord did not give the remedy at once, lest men despise it from pride, not yet knowing their own infirmity. Example: Monica asking the bishop to correct Augustine, and the bishop’s “not yet”: not lack of charity, but Augustine was not yet teachable (recalled from Msgr. Dion). Augustine even says sins of the flesh, which more manifestly show a man fallen, may cure proud celibates of pride; Bernard: had the Blessed Mother not been humble, her virginity would not have mattered.
• To 2: Augustine (Six Questions of the Pagans) first answers that Christ appeared when and where he knew many would believe, and some would not believe even were the dead raised; but Augustine reproves this in On Perseverance: we cannot say the Tyrians and Sidonians would not have believed, since Christ attests they would have repented. The solution is Paul’s: “not of him who wills or runs, but of God having mercy”; those he foresaw would believe he chose to aid, others not, judging otherwise in his predestination, hiddenly but justly; his mercy in the liberated and his justice in the punished. “That’s a hard teaching”: he recalls first reading Augustine in his cousin Dolly’s two volumes; why do some get better parents, teachers, friends? One should not be too curious to assign reasons; mercy and justice are seen somewhat in this life, more in the next.
• To 3: “the old distinction of the ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]: in diverse things the perfect is before the imperfect in time and nature, since what brings others to perfection must be perfect; in one and the same thing the imperfect is before in time though after in nature. So the eternal perfection of God precedes; the imperfection of human nature precedes in duration its consummate perfection in union with God. His gloss: ability is before act in the thing that goes from ability to act, but simply act is before, because what brings it to act is already in act; those who make matter the beginning of all things commit the fallacy of “simply and not simply” [ed.: secundum quid et simpliciter], a mistake outside speech, “very common”; they think only how the egg is before the chicken, not how the chicken is before the egg. Aristotle, he insists, answers which came first.

11. Closing aside: why the two Summas start differently (“the greatest thing God has made”) #

In both Summas God is considered as maker and as end; in the Summa Theologiae the Incarnation falls under God as end, in the Summa Contra Gentiles under God as maker (“the Word was made flesh, the greatest making”). That may be why the Summa Theologiae begins with suitability (tied to the end), while the other asks first whether and how he was made man, and why last.

His words #

• “the minor cosmos” / “a little cosmos”: man, whose union with God joins the whole universe to him.
• “modesty”: his name for Thomas’s reason that gifts above what is owed are known only from Scripture.
• peccatum naturae: original sin as a sin of nature, distinct from venial and mortal actual sin.
• “intensively” vs. “extensively”: the two ways a sin is “greater” (whiteness more intense vs. on a greater surface).
• ad nutum: every creature obedient to the divine power “at a nod”.
• “ability” [ed.: potency]: before act in the thing that changes, after act simply.
• “simply and not simply” [ed.: secundum quid et simpliciter]: the fallacy of those who make matter first.
• “ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX].
• obnoxius: Paul reckoning himself “the cause of the harm” (a. 4 ad 3).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 1, a. 3 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 1, a. 4 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 1, a. 5 (whole article) Mentioned
• Augustine, De Trinitate XIII; Super Genesim ad litteram; on Luke 19:10; gloss on 1 Timothy; on John 1:14; Contra Julianum; Six Questions of the Pagans; On Perseverance; Confessions (Monica and the bishop)
• Scripture: Romans 1:4; 5:20; Ephesians 2, 5; Luke 19:10; 1 Timothy 1; Matthew 1 (name Jesus), 9, 24:12; Luke 18:8; John 1:14, 1:29, 3:19; Galatians 3, 4:4; Proverbs 3:28; 1 Corinthians (animal/spiritual); Psalm 68; Apocalypse (Lamb slain)
• Chrysostom, On Compunction of Heart II; Ambrose, gloss on Galatians 4; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
• Albert the Great, Sentences III; Alexander of Hales, Summa
• Aristotle, Ethics I; Metaphysics IX; Summa Contra Gentiles IV (parallel reasons); Bonaventure; Bernard; Justin Martyr

His questions #

• Would God have become incarnate if man had not sinned? As far as Scripture shows, no; the Incarnation is ordered to the remedy of sin, though God’s power was not limited to that.
• Why did the greatest thing God made depend on the fall? God permits evil that something better be elicited: “O happy fault”; “you won’t get the best of me”.
• Are the Old Testament apparitions of God as a man incarnations? No: foreshadowings in imagination or sense; Christ was “really only a man once”.
• Did Christ come chiefly for actual sins or for original sin? Chiefly for original sin, which is greater extensively (the whole race), the common good being more divine.
• Why did Christ undergo sensible pain if that is not owed to original sin? Because this life’s sensible pains (hunger, thirst, death) proceed from original sin, which he came to satisfy for.
• Why did God not become man at the beginning of the human race? No medicine before sickness; and after sin man had first to learn his infirmity and pride, progress from imperfect to perfect, be preceded by heralds, and not grow tepid.
• Why does the fourth reason (tepid fervour) belong here rather than to article 6? Had he come at the very start, the length of time would have cooled faith even sooner.
• Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Aristotle answers: ability is before act in the thing that changes, but act is before simply.