Summa III, Q. 23: Adoption – Does God Adopt Sons, and Is Christ an Adopted Son?

Orientation #

He says the priesthood question was finished last time, and today takes up the fourth of the five questions set out in the proemium of q. 20 — adoption — and perhaps the fifth, predestination. Verified sources place the whole class in Summa III, q. 23, aa. 1–4, with the opening minutes still near the end of q. 22. The neighbouring classes treat the priesthood of Christ (q. 22, aa. 4–6) and the predestination of Christ.

The class, in order #

1. The division of the five questions (“the rule of two or three”) #

He re-reads the proemium of q. 20: things belonging to Christ in comparison to the Father — said of Him relative to the Father (subjection, prayer, priesthood) and said of the Father relative to Him (adoption, predestination). Point: if you read only the last sentence you would say Thomas divides into five; but the proemium first divides into two, then subdivides three and two — “so he follows the rule of two or three. So we don’t want to let him get away with it.” Then the four articles of q. 23: whether it belongs to God to adopt sons; whether to God the Father only (“interesting that is put in there”); whether being adopted is proper to men; whether Christ can be called an adopted son. Christ himself only appears in article 4, but the first three are needed first.

2. Article 1: does it belong to God to adopt? (“no one adopts except an extraneous person”) #

Objections as he reads them: (1) the jurists (canon lawyers) say one adopts only an extraneous person, but no one is extraneous to God the creator — St Francis called things brother and sister; (2) adoption is introduced because of a defect of natural sonship, and God has a natural Son; (3) one adopts so that the adopted may succeed to the inheritance, but no one succeeds God, since “he himself never kicks the bucket.” Sed contra: Ephesians 1:5, He predestined us for adoption, and God’s predestination is not void. Corpus: a man adopts insofar as from his goodness he admits another to share his inheritance; God is of infinite goodness, so he admits creatures — most of all rational creatures, made to his image and capable of divine beatitude — to share his goods. Beatitude is the enjoyment of God, by which God himself is blessed and “rich”; one’s inheritance is that from which one is rich. He notes Thomas’s use of riches (aside: dives, and the hymn “in your light we shall see light”). Difference from human adoption: God makes a man suitable (idoneum) for the heavenly inheritance by the gift of grace, whereas a man chooses one already suitable. He ties this to the old point about love: our love is aroused by goodness found in another; God’s love causes the goodness in the one he loves.

3. Replies of article 1 (“the same piece of Euclid”) #

Reply 1: man is not extraneous as regards natural goods, but is extraneous as regards the goods of grace and glory. Aside: Homer calls Zeus father of men and gods — if he is your father, in some sense he has adopted you; and St Paul to the Athenians cites the poets (he cannot recall the wording). Reply 2: it belongs to man to act to supply his own need, to God to act for the communicating of the abundance of his perfection (he recalls largitas in Thomas’s prayer before communion). As creation communicates the divine goodness by a likeness, so adoption communicates the likeness of natural sonship — Romans 8:29, “conformed to the image of his Son.” A childless man who adopts acts from a need; God has no such need. Reply 3: spiritual goods can be possessed by many at once, bodily goods cannot. Example: an apple pie brought to class cannot be given whole to each; but the Pythagorean theorem can be taught to all, and each walks away with “the same piece of Euclid.” Hence bodily inheritance requires succeeding one who dies; a spiritual inheritance passes whole, without harm to the father. Aside: his brother Richard on who gains more, teacher or student — the teacher understands better, and does not have less for sharing; and the early Greeks, for whom the only change is change of place, so teaching would be transporting knowledge out of the professor’s head, leaving him “more and more ignorant the longer he was teaching.” He flags Thomas’s last clause as “kind of a strange thing”: God can be said to die in us as he is in us by faith, so that he may begin to be in us by the vision of his own nature — as we say someone lives on in being remembered; when faith gives way to face-to-face vision, that way of living in us ceases. “Kind of subtle guy, this Thomas.”

4. Article 2: is adopting proper to the Father? (“does it belong to the whole Trinity”) #

He notes Thomas quietly shifts the question (titled of the Father, argued of the Trinity) and lets him do it. Objections: (1) in human things only one who can generate sons adopts, and generating in divine things belongs to the Father alone; (2) by adoption we become brothers of Christ (Romans 8:29, firstborn among many brothers), and brothers are sons of one father — John 20, “I ascend to my Father and your Father”; (3) Galatians 4: God sent his only Son and the Spirit of his Son that we might receive adoption — so adopting belongs to him whose it is to have a Son and a Holy Spirit, i.e. the Father alone. “I’m convinced, aren’t you?” Sed contra: Romans 8:15, the spirit of adoption in which we cry Abba, Pater; but saying “our Father” to God pertains to the whole Trinity, as with other names said of God relatively to creatures (cf. the earlier article in the Prima Pars: Father is said first of the Father to the Son, but also of the Trinity in reference to us). Aside on feminists: “what those feminists would think of this kind of consideration, I don’t know.”

5. Digression: to whom is the Our Father addressed? (“the ascent of the mind to God”) #

He raises the Te Deum, where “Father” occurs twice, the second time in a Trinitarian context. His argument: the definition of prayer is the ascent of the mind to God and the asking of suitable things from God — not from God the Father in particular; so if the definition is right, the Our Father must be understood as addressed to God, though it may be appropriated to the Father. Christ’s own teaching on prayer (“if your son asks for an egg…how much more your heavenly Father”) keeps the ambiguity. Student exchanges: the prayers of the Mass, especially the extraordinary form, are clearly geared to the first Person; he grants a little ambiguity, and notes that at the end of the Canon everything is brought to the Father through the Son and the Holy Spirit. A student reports a pope (Innocent?) explaining three senses: God as Father because all creation comes forth from him; our Father because we are adopted through Christ; who art in heaven because his paternity is unique and before everything.

6. Corpus of article 2 (“genitus, non factus”) #

The natural Son is begotten, not made (the Creed); the adopted son is made — John 1:12, “he gave them power to become sons of God” — though adopted sons are sometimes said to be generated, by a spiritual regeneration which is gratuitous, not natural: born again of water and the Holy Spirit; James 1, “he voluntarily generated us by the word of his truth.” (One would not say the Father voluntarily generated the Son.) Though to generate is proper to the person of the Father, to make any effect in creatures is common to the whole Trinity, because of the unity of nature, which is the same as their power: where there is one nature there is one virtue and one operation — John 5, “whatever things the Father does, these also the Son does,” and not as a tool but equally, from the same power. Therefore adopting belongs to the whole Trinity. “He’s convinced me now.” Digression on Abelard: in the Sic et Non he sometimes argues dialectically and leaves the question undissolved, which the school of St Victor held against him; a student thought the work merely collected the opposing sides — he answers that it still leaves things up in the air, without going back to the Fathers and the Church’s teaching. Also: Thomas speaks as if the Fathers were forced by heretics to go into these things and defend them; left to themselves they would worship and admire rather than presume to understand. Augustine: heresy is necessary for theology to develop.

7. Replies of article 2 (“likeness is a slippery thing”) #

Reply 1: human persons are not one in nature secundum numerum, so one operation of all in one effect is not required; in divine things the nature is one in number. He adds Thomas’s point that God is not a lowest species divided into Father, Son and Spirit as man is into Socrates, Plato, Aristotle — there really is a different man in each case, but not three gods. Hence likeness cannot be observed everywhere. Digression on likeness: Monsignor Dionne on Plato’s Sophist (inferred locus as he gives it) — likeness is a slippery, dangerous thing; in Aristotle’s book of places (Topics) the fourth tool is the tool of likeness, which Aristotle calls the consideration (skepsis) of likeness, because one must see in what way things are alike and not exaggerate it. This is how the mind makes mistakes: “I’ve got a mind, God’s got a mind; I reason, therefore God must reason too.” That is why the tool of difference comes before the tool of likeness — if you don’t see the difference you will misuse the likeness. A student applies it to the Incarnation (“he’s a man like we are, so he doesn’t know who he is, discovering himself”). Aside: Rush Limbaugh calling Obama “the man boy.” Reply 2: we become brothers of Christ as having the same Father, but he is Father of Christ in one way and ours in another — which is why the Lord says “my Father” and “your Father” separately. He is Father of Christ by generating him naturally, proper to him; our Father voluntarily by making, common to the three. So Christ is not the Son of the whole Trinity as we are. “He means what he says and says what he means.” Aside: he has decided John is the greatest book ever written and will spend the rest of his life on it; Thomas’s commentary gives Chrysostom’s and Augustine’s two ways; “no wonder he would trade the city of Paris for Chrysostom.” Reply 3: adoptive sonship is a likeness of the eternal sonship, as all things made in time are likenesses of the eternal; man is likened to the eternal splendour of the Father through the clarity of grace, attributed to the Holy Spirit. So adoption, common to the whole Trinity, is appropriated to the Father as author, the Son as exemplar, the Holy Spirit as impressing the likeness of that exemplar. He recalls the article on appropriation: power to the Father, wisdom to the Son, goodness to the Holy Spirit — and asks why in the Creed only the Father is called Almighty: an appropriation, subtle, yet said every Sunday. Thomas’s reason: power is appropriated to the Father because power, as Aristotle defines it, is a beginning (principium), and also by the negative way — the old man grows weak, but contrast the divine Father who does not. “We have sinned and grown old; our Father is younger than we.” Contrast God the Father with King Lear.

8. Article 3: is being adopted proper to the rational creature? (“who is the father of the raven?”) #

Note first: the article is in the passive — not who adopts, but who is adopted. Objections: (1) God is Father of the irrational creature too — Job 38, “Who is the father of the raven, or who generated the drops of dew?” (a defence of St Francis’s hymns, he says, though Francis cannot be expected to bring out the distinctions); (2) “sons of God” properly seems to belong to the angels — Job 1:6, the sons of God assisting before the Lord (“Goethe took that idea over there,” for his devil). He is unsure what the objection means, and a student helps: the first objection came from below the rational creature, this one from above; and we have no clear name for the class. (3) A property belongs to all having that nature, as visible to all men — but being adopted does not belong to every rational nature. He notes the senses of property: Porphyry’s full sense, belonging only, always and to all; but being a logician is a property of man in the sense of belonging only to man, not always and not to all. Sed contra: adopted sons are heirs of God (Romans 8), and such an inheritance belongs only to the rational creature. Corpus: adoptive sonship is a likeness of the natural sonship; the Son proceeds naturally from the Father as his understandable word, one with the Father. Three ways of being likened to the Word: (a) by reason of form only, not intellectuality — the house built outside is like the artist’s mental thought as to the species of the form, but not as to understandability, since the form in matter is not understandable; thus every creature is likened to the Word, being made through the Word (John); (b) as to form and intelligibility, as the science in the student’s mind is likened to the thought in the teacher’s — thus the rational creature by its very nature (“having taught in college all these years, I wonder sometimes”); (c) according to the unity it has with the Father, through grace and charity — John 17, “that they may be one in us, as we also are one.” Only this third likeness perfects the notion of adoption, since to those so assimilated the eternal inheritance is owed. Hence adoption belongs only to the rational creature, and not to all, but to the one having charity poured forth by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5) — whence the Spirit of adoption of sons, Romans 8:15.

9. Replies of article 3 (“the angels first received adoption”) #

Reply 1: God is Father of the irrational creature not by adoption but by creation, according to a first partaking of likeness, insofar as it is assimilated to the thought by which it is made. Reply 2: the angels are called sons of God by the sonship of adoption — non quia ipsis primo conveniat, sed quia ipsi primo adoptionem filiorum perceperunt: not because it belongs to them first, but because they first received it. He stresses this does not make them more sons than we are; the saints are as much sons of God as the angels. A student asks whether an angel can be called a rational creature: yes — as with Boethius’s definition of person, individua substantia rationalis naturae, where Thomas says rationality is used broadly, to include the angelic and even the divine. Aside: Boethius is “the greatest mind between Augustine and Thomas,” and he takes over Augustine’s teaching on the Trinity; St Victor was called another Augustine. Reply 3: adoption is a property not falling upon nature but upon grace, of which rational nature is capable; so it need not belong to every rational creature, only that every rational creature be capable of it — as with being a logician. Asides: “some have great potential”; Niels Bohr keeping his paper locked in his desk for fear of being laughed at; the man who argues all day and comes home to his wife saying “dear, I think you’re mistaken” — “not the logical thing to say to him.”

10. Article 4: is Christ as man an adopted son? (“nullo modo”) #

Objections: (1) Hilary — “the dignity of power is not lost when he adopted the humanity of flesh”; (2) Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints — by the same grace that this man is Christ, each man from the beginning of faith is a Christian; but others are Christians by the grace of adoption; (3) Christ as man is a servant (Philippians), and it is more worthy to be an adopted son than a servant — so much more is he an adopted son. He flags this as an interesting argument, “a topical place”: what is less apt to belong belongs, so the more apt does. Sed contra: Ambrose, On the Incarnation — we do not call the Son by nature an adopted son, but call him by nature a son who is the true son; and Christ is the true and natural Son (1 John). Corpus: sonship belongs properly to the hypostasis or person, not to the nature — “it is I who am the son of my father, Victor Berquist, not my nature”; in the Prima Pars sonship is a personal property constituting the person. In Christ there is no person or hypostasis other than the uncreated one, to which it belongs to be Son by nature. Adoptive sonship is a likeness, a participation, of natural sonship; but what is said per se is not said participatively. Therefore Christ can in no way — nullo modo — be called adopted. “That’s pretty strong there, Thomas.” Thomas adds: for those who posit two persons or hypostases or supposita in Christ, nothing reasonably prevents the man Christ being an adopted son. Student exchange: if I am an adopted son by grace, and Christ’s human soul has grace, why not? He answers by holding to the corpus — grace is in his human soul, but “son” is the name of a person, and this person is the natural Son of God, so this person cannot be called adopted. Another student formulates it: we have grace as a gift given, he has it as overflowing from his divine nature.

11. Replies of article 4 and the closing anecdote (“Hilary spoke improperly”) #

Reply 1: as sonship does not belong properly to the nature, neither does adoption; so Hilary’s “the humanity of flesh is adopted” is improprie locutio — he was not mistaken, he spoke improperly, taking adoption for the union of human nature to the person. “Let’s not repeat that way of speaking.” Reply 2: Augustine’s likeness holds as regards the beginning — as each man without merits has that he is a Christian, so that man without merits had that he was Christ — but differs as regards the end: Christ by the grace of union is a natural son, another by habitual grace is an adopted son. Habitual grace in Christ does not make one who is not a son into an adopted son; it is an effect of his sonship in his soul — John 1, “we saw his glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Reply 3: to be a creature, and to be in servitude or subjection to God, regards not only the person but the nature, which cannot be said of sonship; so the cases are not alike. Christ was subject to the Father in his human nature, but was not an adopted son in his human nature. Closing anecdote on the importance of person: he was told that De Koninck, before the definition of the Assumption, argued to Pius XII that Mary would not be in heaven if her body were not joined to her soul, since the soul is not strictly the person — “Peter is in heaven” is a synecdoche, the name of the person given to the part. Then break.

His words #

• proemium — Thomas’s prefatory division of a question into its parts.
• rule of two or three — his name for Thomas’s habit of dividing into two or three members before subdividing.
• idoneum / suitable — God makes a man fit for the heavenly inheritance by grace; man adopts one already fit.
• largitas — God’s bounty, as in Thomas’s prayer before communion.
• secundum numerum — one in number; the divine nature is one in number, human natures are not.
• skepsis / consideration of likeness — Aristotle’s name for the fourth tool in the book of places (Topics).
• appropriation — assigning what is common to the Trinity to one Person (power to the Father, wisdom to the Son, goodness to the Spirit).
• property (senses of) — Porphyry’s full sense: only, always, to every; a looser sense, “only” but not always or to all (logician of man).
• genitus non factus — begotten, not made: the natural Son, against the adopted son who is made.
• improprie locutio — improper speech; Hilary’s “adopted humanity.”
• nullo modo — in no way; Thomas’s verdict on Christ as adopted son.
• individua substantia rationalis naturae — Boethius’s definition of person, with “rational” taken broadly to include angels and even the divine.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 20, proemium
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 23, aa. 1–4 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Ephesians 1:5; Romans 5:5, 8:15, 8:29; Galatians 4; John 1:12, 5, 17, 20; James 1:18; Job 1:6, 38
• Hilary on Christ; Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum; Ambrose, On the Incarnation; 1 John (on the true Son)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa I, on sonship as personal property and on names said relatively to creatures (inferred)
• Boethius, definition of person
• Aristotle, Topics (“book of places”), tools of difference and likeness; Aristotle on power as principium
• Plato, Sophist (inferred), on likeness as slippery
• Abelard, Sic et Non; Homer; Nicene Creed; Te Deum; Philippians (form of a servant)

His questions #

• Does it belong to God to adopt sons? Yes — from his infinite goodness he admits rational creatures to the inheritance of beatitude, making them suitable by grace.
• If we are already God’s creatures, how can we be extraneous to him? Not extraneous as to natural goods, but extraneous as to the goods of grace and glory.
• Does adopting belong to the Father alone or to the whole Trinity? To the whole Trinity, since making any effect in creatures follows one nature, one power, one operation; but appropriated to the Father.
• Is “Our Father” addressed to God the Father in particular or to God? By the definition of prayer (ascent of the mind to God, asking suitable things of God) it is addressed to God; some ambiguity remains in the prayers of the Mass.
• Why are the angels called sons of God in Job? They are adopted sons — not because it belongs to them first, but because they first received the adoption.
• Can an angel be called a rational creature? Yes, taking “rational” broadly as in Boethius’s definition of person.
• Is being adopted a property of rational nature? Yes, as a property falling upon grace, not nature: every rational creature is capable of it, not every one has it.
• Is Christ as man an adopted son of God? In no way — sonship belongs to the person, and in Christ there is only the uncreated person, Son by nature.
• Why then is Christ called a servant as man, if not a son by adoption? Because creaturehood and subjection regard the nature as well as the person, which sonship does not.