Christ's Power over His Body and His Will (ST III q.13 a.3–4), with Digressions on 'the Way, the Truth, and the Life' and God as the End of Understanding Creatures

Orientation #

He says we are “up to Article Three here, Question Thirteen,” and at the end notes “a little break here between thirteen and fourteen,” where Thomas turns to the defects Christ assumed. Verified sources place the class in ST III, q. 13, aa. 3–4, with a closing stretch on Summa Contra Gentiles (he says “third book… chapter twenty-five”; the matcher registers SCG I, ch. 60 — follow the transcript). The previous class treated whether Christ received knowledge from the angels and whether his soul had omnipotence absolutely and over creatures.

The class, in order #

1. Opening digression: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (“I was reading the Catena Aurea there in John”) #

Both Augustine and Thomas allow more than one sense of the letter in Scripture, so these words admit several readings.

• Thomas’s reading, which fits the context (you know where you are going and how you get there): as God, Christ is truth itself and life itself, the end; as man, he is the via, the road — as quoted at the beginning of the Tertia Pars.
• Theophylact’s reading (in the Catena Aurea): the way = the practical or active life, truth = the contemplative life, life = what is common to both.
• His own coupling with the end of Matthew: “make disciples of all nations” = faith, hence the creed = truth; baptizing = the sacraments, hence life (baptism, Eucharist, confession restoring life after mortal sin); “teaching them whatever I commanded you” = the way.

2. Why the Catechism has four parts, not three (“Why don’t they follow … Faith, hope, charity”) #

He recalls asking Msgr. Manuel Ram (ASR; at Assumption) why the Catechism of the Catholic Church has four parts instead of the three of Augustine, the Catechism of Trent, and Thomas’s catechetical instructions; the Monsignor said “I don’t know.” His own answer: the first three parts are exactly the order of the end of Matthew — creed, sacraments/liturgy, moral theology — tied to way/truth/life (though in a different order); prayer is set fourth and divided against the other three, since you pray in order to believe (“I believe, help my unbelief”), to understand what you believe, to prepare for the sacraments, and to get God’s help to do his will.

• Aside: a beautiful Augustine text in the Catena Aurea on why there is no envy in heaven — from the perfection of charity: I rejoice in the clarity of your vision, clearer than mine, because I love you so much.
• Aside: the Catholic World Report on a Jesuit being corrected again — a book titled Jesus, Symbol of God “sounds awfully fishy,” and the author had headed the Catholic Theological Society; joke on Haight-Ashbury.

3. Q. 13, a. 3, the three objections (“Whether the soul of Christ had omnipotence with regard to his own body”) #

1. Damascene (bk. III): all natural things were for Christ voluntary — willing he hungered, thirsted, feared, died. But God is called omnipotent because everything he wills he does. So Christ’s soul was omnipotent over the natural doings of his body.
2. Human nature was more perfect in Christ than in Adam, in whom by original justice the body was wholly subject to the soul, nothing happening in the body against the soul’s will. Much more, then, in Christ.
3. The body is naturally changed by the soul’s imagining, the more so the stronger the imagination (as had in the First Part); Christ’s imagination and other powers were most perfect.

• Aside on imagination, attached to obj. 3: a Welsh legend that whoever sleeps on a certain mountain wakes blind, mad, or a poet. He ties the three: the lover is called blind because he works from imagination rather than his senses; Homer represents the poet as blind, and the legend of Homer’s blindness may mean he was no eyewitness of the Trojan War but had it all in imagination; the madman too works out his imagination. Hence Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.” A novelist told him that strictly the novelist is mad while writing. Imagination can indeed affect the body — something horrible makes you shiver.

4. Sed contra and the body of a. 3 (“he ought to be likened in all things to his brothers”) #

Sed contra: Hebrews 2:17 — likened in all things to his brothers, especially in what belongs to the condition of human nature; and it belongs to that condition that the body’s well-being, nourishment and growth are not subject to the command of reason or will, these natural things being subject only to God the author of nature. (He glosses with Christ’s “which of you can add a cubit” — you can’t; joke: “that was before hair coloring.”) His answer, the governing distinction, repeated from the earlier articles:

• The soul of Christ in its own power and nature: as it could not change outside bodies from the course and order of nature, so it could not change its own body from its natural disposition, “because the soul by its own nature has a determined ratio to its own body.” He notes Thomas uses proportio for what we call ratio — “we’ll forgive him for that,” it is common in modern speech.
• The soul of Christ as a tool united to the Word of God in person: to its power every disposition of its body is wholly subject, because the power of the action is attributed not properly to the tool but to the chief agent — so such omnipotence is attributed more to the Word than to Christ’s soul. Example: it is chiefly Michelangelo who made the Pietà, not his hammer and chisel — though they had something to do with it.
• Aside: a former student teaching in Texas addressed an email to him as “Brother Thomas,” then apologized; “quite a compliment.”

5. Replies in a. 3 (“the word of Damascene should be understood as regards the divine will”) #

1. Damascene’s words are to be understood of Christ’s divine will — Christ has two wills, one in his human nature, one in his divine. As Damascene says in the foregoing chapter, it was permitted at the pleasure of the divine will that the flesh suffer and undergo what is proper to it. Hence the Gospel speaks of Christ disturbing himself, letting himself feel anxiety at his coming death: a permission of his divine will.
2. Original justice did not give Adam power to change his body into any form whatever, but to conserve it without harm — a power Christ could have assumed had he wished. But there are three states of man: innocence, guilt, glory. As it belongs to glory to take on comprehension, and to innocence immunity from sin, so in the state of guilt one assumes the necessity of undergoing the penal things of this life.
3. A strong imagination is naturally obeyed by the body as regards some things: (a) local motion, since imagination is apt to be the source of change of place (De Anima III) — Damascene’s example of the man walking on a plank: on the ground you could do it, placed on high you would probably fall from fear; (b) alteration according to heat and cold and the like, since the passions of the soul follow imagination and move the heart, and through the commotion of the spirits the whole body is altered. He glosses: “spirits” here does not mean spirit as opposed to body, but very fine things — “I could say, electricity and so on.” But dispositions having no natural order to imagination — the shape of the hand or foot — are not changed by it, however strong.

• Attached aside: Thomas argues that angelic understanding is above ours and therefore above imagination, since Aristotle (De Anima III) shows we do not understand in this life without turning to images. We imagine a man when we think what a man is, a triangle when we think what a triangle is — and hence it is hard to think about the soul, an angel, or God, which cannot be imagined.

6. Q. 13, a. 4, objections and sed contra (“omnipotence in regard to the carrying out of its own will”) #

He prefers “carrying out” to “execution” — “forget that terrible word execution.”

1. Mark 7: entering the house he wished no one to know, but was not able.
2. A command is a sign of the will (as said in the First Part), yet the Lord commanded things whose contrary happened: Matthew 9, he warned the blind men he had enlightened that no one should know, but going out they spread his fame through the whole land — as happened several times in the Gospel.
3. What one can do oneself one does not ask from another; but the Lord asked from the Father in prayer what he wished to come about — Luke 6, he went up the mountain and was praying all the night. Sed contra: Augustine, Questions of the New and Old Testament — “it is impossible that the will of the Savior not be fulfilled, nor is he able to will something he knows ought not to come about.”

• Aside: “Thomas is always getting into some difficulty that he’s got to resolve,” like some kids always getting into trouble.

7. The body of a. 4: two ways of willing (“as being to be fulfilled by himself”) #

1. What Christ’s soul willed to be fulfilled by himself: whatever he willed, he was able to do — for it would not befit his wisdom to will to do by himself something not subject to his will.
2. What he willed to be fulfilled by divine power — e.g. the resuscitation of his own body and other such miracles — which he could not do by his own power but as a tool of his divinity.

• Student exchange: in the Breviary (ASR “Tenorium”) they speak of the body of Christ taking on the soul again after death. Scripture sometimes says he rose, sometimes that he was raised. Did the soul grab the body, or the body the soul? He leaves it open — “I don’t know” — but a student’s answer, which he accepts: both are tools, both being united to the person.

8. Replies in a. 4 (“what was done, one should say that Christ willed it”) #

1. To Mark 7, from Augustine: what was done, one should say Christ willed. What was done was with the Gentiles, to whom the time of preaching had not yet come, yet not to receive those coming to the faith would be of envy; so he did not preach to them, but he saw — and thus it was done. He calls the passage “very obscure.” Alternative: this will of Christ was not about what was to be done through him but through others. Then the epistle of Agatho, received in the sixth synod (his text says Constantinople III): “the maker of all things and Redeemer, wishing to hide in the earth, was not able” — reducing this to his human will, which he assumed in time.
   • Discussion with the class: was the not-being-seen done by divine power rather than by his human will? The upshot: the inability to hide belongs to the human will, since his human will could not do this except as a tool of the divine. Examples raised: the road to Emmaus and Mary Magdalene not recognizing him; passing through the crowd that would throw him off the cliff. Asides: Sherlock Holmes in disguise, betrayed by a word; St. Athanasius sailing down the Nile calling to those hunting him — “Have you seen that heretic Athanasius? I hold the opinion that he’s not far away.”
2. To the cured who disobeyed: with Gregory (Moralia XIX), by commanding silence about his powers the Lord gave an example to his servants, that they should desire to hide their own powers, yet that others might profit by their example these be told of, even unwillingly. So the command designates the will by which he refused human glory — John 8, “I do not seek my glory” — while absolutely, especially by his divine will, he wished the miracle published for the profit of others.
   • He warns the class twice: “you don’t have the two wills in opposition here” — the human will did not necessarily will that it not be known, but that he not seek glory for himself; so not contrary, and one may be ordered to the other.
3. Christ prayed both for what was to be done by his divine power and for what was done by his human will, because the power and operation of his soul depended on God, “who does in all willing and perfecting” (he cites Philippians 2; and “without me you can do nothing”).

9. Back to the plan of the treatise (“go back to the proemium there at the beginning of question seven”) #

The division at q. 7: after the human body and human soul assumed, Thomas treats the coassumpta — what was taken on along with them — divided into things belonging to perfection (grace, knowledge, power; power now finished with this question, in its threefold division) and things belonging to defect. The proemium of q. 14: the defects Christ assumed, first the defects of the body, then the defects of the soul. He notes the proportion: four articles on the body, ten on the defects of the soul — “shocking” that he should have defects of soul at all; “he’s really thorough.”

10. Closing digression: SCG III, ch. 25, that God is the end of understanding creatures (“What am I for?”) #

The third book divides: God the end of all things (through about ch. 24), then his providence over all, then his special providence over us; ch. 25 shows he is the end of all understanding creatures, with ten arguments.

• The question that drives it: I know what this class is for, and my ballpoint pen, knife, fork and spoon — what am I for? Answer: to understand God.
• God is the end not because he gets anything from the universe, but because everything else tries to be like him so far as it can. Plato and Aristotle both say that animals and plants reproduce in order to be as like God as they can: unable to be immortal as individuals, they get a kind of immortality by reproducing their kind. “You have to admire those old pagans.”
• Whatever good we pursue is good because in some way like God, who is goodness itself; so we ultimately pursue God.
• Shakespeare’s two reasons for using reason — that reason is godlike, and that “he that made us with such large discourse … gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused” — get tied together: he wants us to use our reason so that we may be like him.
• Thomas’s gradation: you are like God in having understanding; more like him when you actually understand something; most like him when you understand God, since God understands himself and everything.
• Another of the ten: our end is what we most love, desire and delight in; when a man knows something of God he enjoys this and wants it more than all other knowledge. Objection he raises himself: with Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) that men who have never tasted the higher pleasures go to excess in the lower — so this argument would not strike a man with no experience of thinking about God, one taken up with the newest computer thing. He grants the point but keeps the argument: even a not-too-good person, once exposed to thinking about God, says “this is really interesting.”
• Aside: “I was thinking of Thomas this morning — he sees God as he is now. Tell me about this, Thomas; at least pray for me that I get there.”

His words #

• “ratio” — his rendering of Thomas’s proportio: the soul by nature has a determined ratio to its own body.
• “tool” [ed.: instrument] — the soul/body of Christ as tool united to the Word in person; power of action belongs to the chief agent, not the tool.
• “carrying out” [ed.: execution] of the will — he rejects “execution” as a “terrible word.”
• “spirits” — not spirit as opposed to body, but “the very fine things,” “I could say, electricity and so on.”
• “the coassumpta” — things taken on with the human body and soul, divided into perfections and defects.
• “the three statuses of man” — innocence, guilt, glory.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST III, q. 13, a. 3 — objections, sed contra (Hebrews 2:17), body, three replies
• Thomas, ST III, q. 13, a. 4 — objections (Mark 7; Matthew 9; Luke 6), sed contra (Augustine), body, three replies
• Thomas, ST III, q. 14, proemium; ST III, q. 7, proemium
• Thomas, SCG III, ch. 25 (discussed from morning reading)
• Within the articles: Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa III; Agatho’s epistle, received at the sixth synod (Constantinople III, per his text); Gregory, Moralia XIX; Augustine, Questions of the New and Old Testament (he notes one of these is Ambrosiaster)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Catena Aurea on John (Theophylact; Augustine on envy in heaven)
• Aristotle, De Anima III; Nicomachean Ethics
• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; “such large discourse … godlike reason” [ed.: Hamlet] (inferred)
• Scripture: John 14:6; Matthew 28 (end of the Gospel); John 8; Philippians 2; “without me you can do nothing”
• Catechism of the Catholic Church; Catechism of Trent; Augustine’s and Thomas’s catechetical instructions

His questions #

• What do “I am the way, the truth, and the life” mean, and can they be tied to the end of Matthew’s Gospel? — Way/truth/life answer to teaching-the-commandments, the creed, and the sacraments; Thomas takes way = Christ as man, truth and life = Christ as God.
• Why does the Catechism have four parts instead of three? — The first three follow the end of Matthew (creed, sacraments, morals); prayer is divided against all three, since we pray to believe, to understand, for the sacraments, and to do God’s will.
• Whether the soul of Christ had omnipotence with regard to its own body? — No, in its own nature, having a determined ratio to its body; yes, as tool of the Word, but that omnipotence is attributed rather to the Word.
• Could a strong imagination change the body? — In what has a natural order to imagination (local motion, heat and cold through the passions and the spirits), not in the shape of hand or foot.
• Why is it hard to think about the soul, an angel, or God? — Because in this life we do not understand without turning to images, and these cannot be imagined.
• Whether the soul of Christ had omnipotence for carrying out its own will? — Yes for what he willed to be fulfilled by himself; what he willed by divine power he did as tool of his divinity.
• Did the soul take the body again, or the body the soul, in the Resurrection? — Left open; both are tools, both united to the person.
• Were Christ’s two wills in opposition when he commanded silence and yet willed the miracle published? — No: the human will refused human glory, the divine willed the publishing for others’ profit; one may be ordered to the other.
• What am I for? — To understand God, being most like him when we actually understand him.