Summa III q.16 a.2–4: 'Man Is God', the 'Lordly Man', and Saying Human Things of God

Orientation #

He begins straight into article 2, remarking that it is fitting Thomas took the two questions (“God is man”, “man is God”) together, and that Thomas will be brief here “because the first question has cleared up a lot of these things” (prev. lecture). At the end he looks ahead to the next article, whether what is of human nature can be said of the divine nature — answer, he says, no.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2, the three objections (“Whether this is true that man is God”) #

• Obj. 1: the name God is incommunicable — Wisdom 14 reprehends idolaters for putting this incommunicable name on wood and stones; so it seems unfitting to say it of man.
• Obj. 2: whatever is said of the predicate is said of the subject. He recognises this as “the great rule in the book on syllogism, the Prior Analytics”: if A is said of all B, A is said of whatever B is said of — animal of all dog, so animal of whatever dog is said of. But God is the Father, God is the Trinity. So if man is God, man is the Father, man is a Trinity. “Sounds like a perfectly good syllogism, right? Shows the danger of syllogism” — when syllogism was first discovered people fooled around with it and got into all kinds of trouble.
• Obj. 3: Psalm 80 — “there shall not be in you a recent God”; but man is something recent, for Christ was not always a man.
• Sed contra: Romans 9:5, “from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is above all the blessed God” — Christ according to the flesh is man. Aside: “see how Augustine says you need the epistles of Saint Paul” — he clears up a few things.

2. The body of article 2 (“this is true and proper: man is God”) #

Supposing the truth of both natures and the union in person and hypostasis, man is God is true and proper, just as God is man. Reason: the name man can stand for [supposit for] the hypostasis of human nature, and so for the person of the Son, which is the hypostasis of the human nature in Christ; and of the person of the Son God is truly and properly said (as had in the First Part). Aside on Thomas’s “good clear mind”: Urban IV asked both Thomas and Bonaventure for an office of the Blessed Sacrament, and when Bonaventure saw Thomas’s he tore up his own — humility.

3. Reply to obj. 1 and the geometrical likeness (“You remember my little geometrical example?”) #

Reply: the idolaters attributed the name of God to stones and wood according as they are considered in their own nature, thinking there was something divine in them. We do not attribute the name of the deity to the man according to his human nature, but according to the eternal suppositum, which by the union is also the suppositum of human nature.

His diagram: a line with an endpoint; the endpoint is the divine person, the line the divine nature. A human nature drawn on its own would have its own endpoint — its own human person. But the human nature was drawn to his own person, so the same endpoint is the term of both lines. “Notice one line is not the other line, but they have the same endpoint.” He flags the limits himself: “in many ways it falls short”; “the unlikeness is there too”; joking that he may be called before the CDF for it.

Asides: Aristotle’s words (Metaphysics, inferred) that we should try to say some things better than our predecessors and other things as well as they said them — with Thomas, if you can say it as well, be satisfied; rarely better. The Shakespeare digression: the man with the photographic memory who could top any line with a line of Shakespeare; Washington Irving at the end of his life; people saying Shakespeare expresses their feelings better than they can. His favourite: Juliet’s father — “death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.” Dickens borrowing a line from Macbeth. Mozart on melody — you can’t define it, you can only hum it; Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn.

4. Reply to obj. 2, and what fallacy it is (“Therefore, you are my father”) #

Thomas’s reply: Father is said of God according as God stands for the person of the Father; it is not so said of the person of the Son, since the Son’s person is not the Father’s. So Father need not be said of man, of whom God is said in so far as man stands for the person of the Son. In his gloss: the major is not said of the middle in the way the middle is said of the minor.

The class question: is this fallacy of equivocation or fallacy of accident? — since there are not two different meanings. His example: “You are a man; a man is my father; therefore you are my father.” A man has one meaning in both premises, but does not stand for the same person — so the conclusion fails. A student: “unless he’s a priest” — and he answers, now you are equivocating, two senses of father, now you are going into equivocation. These are the first two fallacies, one from words, one from things.

Modern illustration: Feuerbach — the human mind is infinite, the infinite is God as the theologians say, therefore the human mind is God; hence the claim not to be atheists but to hold man’s mind the highest divinity (Marx in the preface to his doctoral thesis, taking it from Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity). Any medieval theologian would see the equivocation on infinite at once. Parallel in Physics I [he calls it “natural hearing”]: Melissus takes beginning in time and infers infinite magnitude — Aristotle points out that beginning in time and beginning in magnitude are two meanings. Same word, different pair of meanings, same kind of mistake. He notes that knowing a fallacy does not immunise you, but not knowing it leaves you much more apt to be caught by it. And: his old teacher Kasurik (ASR uncertain) maintained Augustine said somewhere that the only part of logic worth teaching is the part on fallacies — “I don’t think exactly this is the part where Augustine really said this.”

5. Reply to obj. 3 (“the suppositum of human nature is not recent, but eternal”) #

Though the human nature in Christ is something recent, the suppositum of that nature is eternal; and God is said of man not by reason of the human nature but by reason of the person/suppositum. So no recent God is posited. It would follow if man stood for a created suppositum — as those must say who lay down two supposita in Christ.

6. Article 3: may Christ be called homo dominicus? (“Lordly man”) #

He calls it “a strange question” — Augustine is responsible for it.

• Obj. 1: Augustine, De 83 quaestionibus: counsel should be taken that those goods are expected which were in that homo dominicus — speaking of Christ. An argument from the authority of the great Augustine.
• Obj. 2: as dominion belongs to Christ by the divine nature, humanity by the human; but God is said humanatus, made human — Damascene, Book III: humanatio shows the joining to man. So man may be called lordly.
• Obj. 3: as dominicus is said denominatively from dominus, so divinus from Deus; but Dionysius names Christ “the most divine Jesus.”
• Sed contra: Augustine in the Retractations — “I did not see whether it is rightly said that Jesus Christ is homo dominicus, since he is indeed Lord.” He reads since he is indeed Lord as emphatic, like the Psalm’s “but indeed I will offer sacrifice.”

His own puzzlement before the answer: Thomas on Thomas the apostle’s “My Lord and my God” — he professes the human nature as well as the divine; Christ can be called Lord even according to his human nature. “So he can be called Lord by human nature — why not Dominicus? Because Lord is even stronger.”

Digression on Christus and Jesus: which signifies more the human nature? Christus — as God he is not anointed; Jesus means Saviour, and as God he saves too, even more. Compare the two professions of faith: Matthew 16, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”; John, “these things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” — Jesus is subject there, and both natures are professed. Also the Adoro te devote: “in cruce latebat sola deitas, hic latet simul et humanitas, ambo tamen credens atque confitens” — the complete profession must include both natures.

7. The body of article 3 (“it ought not to be said denominatively”) #

• Homo Christus Jesus designates the eternal suppositum, the person of the Son, since there is one suppositum of both natures.
• Of that person, God and Lord are said essentially, not denominatively; to say them denominatively would take away from the truth of the union.
• But Dominicus is said denominatively from Dominus (the definition of denominative is in the very first chapter of the Categories). Therefore it cannot truly and properly be said that that man is dominicus; rather that he is the Lord. — Aside: John on the shore after the resurrection, “It is the Lord.”
• If homo Christus Jesus designated a created suppositum, as the heretics who posit two supposita hold, then that man could be called dominicus, as taken up into a share of divine honour, as the Nestorians posit. In our way, human nature is not said essentially divine but deificata — made divine, not by change into the divine nature but by union to it in one hypostasis (Damascene, Book III).

8. Replies of article 3 (“I do not will myself to have said it”) #

• Ad 1: Augustine retracts these words: “Wherever I have said that Christ Jesus is the homo dominicus, I do not will myself to have said it” — afterwards seeing it should not be said, although it can be defended by some reason, since one could say that man is called dominicus by reason of the human nature which the name man signifies, not by reason of the suppositum. He is emphatic that this is a defence, not Thomas’s or Augustine’s own assertion: “watch your p’s and q’s here.” Aside: the washing of the feet is an example of humility — it must be a very important virtue, that on such an occasion he chose it; and a man who lacks the humility Augustine and Thomas have, “I wouldn’t trust him.”
• Ad 2 (humanatus): the one suppositum was first of the divine nature, from eternity, and afterwards in time made the suppositum of human nature — on the diagram, that point was always the term of the first line, and in time became the term of the second, drawn to it. Hence humanatum: he took on human nature, not a man (that would give another person). But not conversely: the suppositum of human nature did not take on a divine nature; so it cannot be said that the man is made God, or that he is lordly.
• Ad 3 (divinum): divine is customarily said of what God is said of essentially — divine essence, divine substance, divine Word, divine person (like “the person of Plato”), differing only in mode of signifying. But dominicus is not said of what Lord is said of: we do not call a man who is dominus “lordly”; rather what belongs in any way to the Lord is lordly — dominica voluntas, dominica manus, dominica possessio, dominica oratio (the Lord’s Prayer). So Christ himself, who is Lord, is not lordly; but his flesh is the Lord’s flesh and his passion the Lord’s passion. Joking parallel: we can call him American but not “presidential.”

9. Article 4: can what is of human nature be said of God? (“God suffered and died”) #

• Obj. 1: opposites cannot be said of the same; God is uncreated, unchangeable, eternal, human nature created, temporal, changeable.
• Obj. 2: to attribute what pertains to defect to God is derogatory to the divine honour and pertains to blasphemy — and to die, to suffer are defects.
• Obj. 3: to be assumed belongs to human nature, not to God.
• Sed contra: Damascene — God receives the idiomata proper to the flesh; God is called passibilis, and the God of glory was crucified. Aside on idios: an idiom is what is proper to a language; an idiot is a man who lives in his own world.

10. The body of article 4: Nestorians against Catholics (“the same hypostasis is supposited by the name of both natures”) #

• The Nestorians divided the voces: what pertains to the human nature not said of God, what pertains to the divine not said of the man; only names common to both natures (Christ, Lord) carry both. So they conceded Christ born of the Virgin and Christ from eternity, but not that God was born of the Virgin or that the man was from eternity — hence Christotokos, not Theotokos. Nestorius: whoever attributes passions to the Word of God, anathema (the twelfth anathema of Ephesus is cited on the other side).
• Cyril, contrariwise: if anyone divides the voces of the Gospels and Apostolic writings, or what the saints say of Christ or Christ says of himself, between two persons or hypostases, applying some to the man and some only to the Word — let him be anathema.
• Digression on the Greek–Latin trouble: hypostasis in Greek is used of the person and more generally of the individual substance, but Latin substantia can stand for the nature — “that’s why Jerome was saying there’s poison under the word here.”
• Thomas’s reason: since there is the same hypostasis of both natures, the same hypostasis is supposited by the name of either nature; so of the man can be said what is of the divine nature, and of God what is of the human.
• But: in a statement one must note not only that of which the predicate is said but by what it is said of it. The predications are not distinguished on the side of the subject, but are distinguished as regards that by which each is said — the divine things by reason of the divine nature, the human by reason of the human. Augustine, De Trinitate I: we distinguish in Scripture what sounds according to the form of God and what according to the form of the servant — and he notes that form here does not stand for the nature of the thing as Aristotle would say. Augustine adds that “a prudent, foresightful, diligent, loving and pious reader will understand” — “This is you, gentlemen. I hope.”

11. The replies of article 4 (“not according to the same, but according to diverse nature”) #

• Ad 1: opposites cannot be said of the same according to the same, but nothing prevents it according to diverse things. Christ is immovable according to the divine nature, movable according to the human. A student asks: as God can he eat? — No; but as man he showed his true humanity by eating with the apostles even after the resurrection. “See how people get in trouble right away.”
• Ad 2: things pertaining to defect attributed to God according to his divine nature would be blasphemy; not so attributed according to the nature he took on. A sermon of the Council of Ephesus (he names Theodotus/“Theodorus”, ASR uncertain): God does not count as injury what is an occasion of salvation for men; nothing abject he chose for our sake injures that nature which cannot be subject to injuries; he made his own the lower things that he might save our nature. “Pretty good, this guy.”
• Ad 3: to be assumed is not said of God, because it belongs to human nature not by reason of the suppositum but by reason of itself — on the diagram, the point was not drawn, the line was drawn to it. And he flags that the next article gets a different answer: whether what is of human nature can be said of the divine nature — no.

Closing aside: someone had pencilled the answers in; he dislikes editions that print the answer in bold — students go through and get the answers without the reasons.

His words #

• stand for — supponere; a name stands for the hypostasis/person, not for the nature.
• suppositum — the individual that subsists; in Christ one and eternal, of both natures.
• recent — his rendering of recens, new; the human nature is recent, the suppositum is not.
• natural hearing — [ed.: Physics].
• homo dominicus — “lordly man”; dominicus said denominatively from dominus.
• humanatus / humanatio — made human; the joining that is to man (Damascene).
• deificata — made divine by union in one hypostasis, not by change of nature.
• idiomata — Greek, the properties proper to a nature; from idios, one’s own.
• vocal sounds — his rendering of voces, the statements or expressions said of Christ.
• fallacy of the accident — the second of the two first fallacies, from things, not from words.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 16, a. 2 (whole article with objections and replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 16, a. 3 (whole article with objections and replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 16, a. 4 (whole article with objections and replies)

Mentioned

• Wisdom 14; Psalm 80; Romans 9:5; Matthew 16; John (profession of faith; “It is the Lord”; the washing of the feet); Thomas the apostle’s “My Lord and my God”
• Aristotle, Prior Analytics (the rule of the syllogism); Categories ch. 1 (denominatives); Physics I (Melissus on beginning); Metaphysics (inferred — saying things better than our predecessors)
• Augustine, De 83 quaestionibus; Retractationes; De Trinitate I
• John Damascene, Book III; Dionysius (“the most divine Jesus”); Cyril; Nestorius and the twelfth anathema and a sermon of the Council of Ephesus; Jerome on hypostasis
• Thomas, Adoro te devote
• Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity; Marx, preface to his doctoral thesis
• Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth); Dickens; Washington Irving

His questions #

• Is “man is God” true and proper? — Yes, supposing both natures and the union in person, since man can stand for the hypostasis which is the person of the Son, of whom God is properly said.
• If man is God and God is the Trinity, is man a Trinity? — No: God stands for the Father/Trinity in one premise and for the Son in the other; the middle is not taken the same way.
• Is that a fallacy of equivocation or of accident? — Of accident: the term has one meaning but does not stand for the same thing; “you are a man, a man is my father” is the model.
• Does saying “man is God” posit a recent God? — No: the human nature is recent, the suppositum eternal, and God is said by reason of the suppositum.
• Can Christ be called homo dominicus? — No: God and Lord are said of him essentially, and dominicus is denominative, which would undo the truth of the union; his flesh and his passion, however, are the Lord’s.
• Why then is God said humanatus? — Because the eternal suppositum became in time the suppositum of human nature; the reverse did not happen, so the man is not said made God.
• Why is divinum allowed but not dominicum? — Divine is said of what God is said of essentially; lordly is said only of what belongs to the Lord, not of the Lord himself.
• Can what is of human nature be said of God? — Yes: the same hypostasis is supposited by both names — against the Nestorian division of the voces — though each is said by reason of its own nature.
• Can opposites be said of Christ? — Yes, not according to the same but according to diverse natures: immovable as God, movable as man.
• As God, can he eat? — No; as man he ate with the apostles even after the resurrection, showing his true humanity.