Why Christ Died on the Wood of the Cross, and Whether He Suffered Every Kind of Suffering

Orientation #

He picks up in the middle of q. 46, a. 4 (the second of Thomas’s seven reasons why Christ died on a cross), finishes the article’s replies, and begins a. 5. He breaks before the friars’ reading, promising to read Benedict XVI’s recent remarks on Mozart’s Requiem during the break.

The class, in order #

1. Opening: why some men are more intelligent (“why did God make Augustine and Thomas”) #

A student’s question — why did God make Augustine and Thomas so much more intelligent than us? His answers: (a) God gives everything to creatures and receives nothing, so He wants some creature to be superior, to be a cause of goodness for others — here, a cause of enlightenment; Christ as God enlightens every man coming into the world, and if no Augustine or Thomas were around to enlighten other men, nothing would be like God in that. (b) A student adds Thomas on the angelic hierarchy: God enlightens angels directly, yet the higher angel enlightens the lower — as the soul gives life to the body immediately but moves the hand through the arm. If all were equal, no one would enlighten anyone.

Not to recognize this inequality is a kind of pride and a rejection of God’s plan — the “democratic idea” that everything greater is equal, which would end all learning from others. Aside: Harvey Mansfield at Harvard gives two grades, one for the office (inflated) and one that is the real grade; graduates thank him for the real one.

2. Second reason: satisfying on wood what was taken from the tree (“restoring what Adam had taken”) #

This kind of death is most suitable for satisfying for the sin of the first parent, which was taking the fruit of the forbidden tree against God’s command; fitting, then, that Christ satisfy on the wood, restoring what Adam had taken. Psalm 68 [Vulg.]: “what I did not take, I paid back.” Augustine, Sermon on the Passion: Adam had contempt for the command, taking from the tree, “but whatever Adam lost, Christ found on the cross.”

Discussion of what the cross was: Romans fixed one upright and the criminal carried the crossbeam (patibulum); a student cites Catherine Emmerich that the cross was made of several specially prepared woods. He notes Thomas only says lignum, not arbor — and that lignum is the Vulgate’s word for the Garden of Paradise, the “wood,” as we say an area is wooded.

3. Third and fourth reasons: the air and the ascent (“in excelso ligno, raised up”) #

Third (Chrysostom, Sermon on the Passion): he suffered on a high wood and not under a roof, that he might cleanse the nature of the air itself; the earth too felt a like benefit from the blood dropping down. On John 3:14, “it is necessary for the Son of Man to be exalted,” Chrysostom understands being suspended on high, sanctifying the air as he sanctified the earth by walking on it and the water by being baptized. He finds this the less obvious of the reasons but interesting — especially since the air is the place of the devils.

Fourth: by dying in the air he prepares an ascent for us to heaven — “if I am exalted from the earth, I will draw all to myself” (John 12). Cajetan is right that Thomas seems to have inherited the mind of all the Church Fathers, so much did he venerate them.

4. Fifth and sixth reasons: universal salvation, and the cross as teacher’s chair (“the chair of the master teaching”) #

Fifth: it fits the universal salvation of the whole world. Gregory of Nyssa: the figure of the cross, divided from the middle contact into four parts, signifies the power and providence of the one hanging on it diffused everywhere. Chrysostom: with hands extended, with one he grasps the old people (the Jews), with the other draws those from the Gentiles.

Sixth: by this kind of death diverse virtues are designated. Augustine (On the grace of the Old and New Testament): not in vain did he choose such a death, that he might be the teacher of the breadth, height, length and depth of which the Apostle speaks. Breadth = the transverse beam, pertaining to good deeds, for there the hands are; length = the wood from the transverse down to the earth, where one stands, persists and perseveres — longevity; height = the part above the transverse, where the head is, the high expectation of those hoping as they should hope; depth = the part hidden in the earth, whence the whole rises, signifying gratuitous grace. Augustine on John: the wood in which the suffering one’s members were fixed was also the chair of the master teaching.

Asides: Fra Angelico’s painting, with all the saints looking at the cross, most doing some penance, and Thomas there trying to understand it — “what is the meaning of this?” — which is the attitude proper to the cross as cathedra. John Paul II in a letter on catechesis: one of the most popular and sublime images of Christ the Teacher is the crucifix. Also: Christ was not thrown from the cliff at his hometown — he did not choose to die that way.

5. Seventh reason: the wooden figures (“this kind of death corresponds to many figures”) #

Augustine, Sermon on the Passion: in the flood the human race was freed by a wooden ark; Moses divided the sea with the rod and prostrated Pharaoh; Moses cast wood into the bitter water and made it sweet; from the wooden staff he brought forth waves from the spiritual rock; Amalek was overcome by the rod of Moses extended with his outstretched hands; the Ark of the Testament is believed wooden. Through all these as through steps we come to the wood of the cross.

Fitting, he adds, that Christ be the son of a carpenter — given wood’s significance here — and that a poor carpenter’s son would work in wood. Most of his life between the birth and the public life is hidden, only the Temple episode recorded; one of the Marian orders has a devotion to that hidden life at Nazareth. Aside on his father’s factory: his brother Mark remarked that the men in the wood shop seemed more human in their attitude to life than the welders in the metal shop.

“So on your exam, you’ll be asked for those seven reasons.” Notice how intelligent and how loving Thomas is in all these details; a preacher on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross could unfold these seven and be asked where he got such wonderful ideas.

6. Reply to objection 1: truth must answer the figure (“just as the animal was sacrificed on wood”) #

The altar of holocaust, where animals were sacrificed, was made of wood (Exodus 27); so far the truth corresponds to the figure — as the animal was sacrificed on wood, Christ is sacrificed on the wooden cross. But correspondence in all respects is not required, for then there would not be a likeness but the truth itself (Damascene, book III). Chrysostom in particular: his head was not amputated as John’s, nor was he sawn in half (as Isaiah is customarily said to have been — a student notes this may not be explicit in Scripture, perhaps apocryphal), so that Christ’s body might be preserved whole, integral and indivisible, and give no occasion to those who want to divide the church. And in place of the material fire of the holocaust there was the fire of charity. “Very good, Thomas. Very good.”

Asides: Thomas’s remark, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, on “he must increase, I must decrease” — the one stretched out on the cross, the other shortened by losing his head. And the Mozart story: brought in to play along beside another violinist at his father’s quartet evenings, before long the other man put his violin down and let Mozart play the whole part (from a Life of Mozart, perhaps Alfred Einstein’s, a distant cousin of Albert). A student mentions Thomas holds there will be pleasures of sense compatible with the final state, in eye and ear — so music in heaven properly speaking, but no steaks, wine or beer; St. Bridget of Ireland said we would sit around a lake of ale (she did not say we would drink it).

7. Reply to objection 2: the ignominy of the death (“holding in contempt the confusion”) #

Christ refused to take on detracting passions that pertain to a defect of knowledge, of grace, or of virtue — but not those that pertain to an injury inflicted from outside. Hebrews 12: he sustained the cross, holding in contempt the confusion, as opposed to glory. He connects this to the ten reasons for the Incarnation given earlier: what is new in the Summa Theologiae against the Contra Gentiles is the singling out of the curing of our pride and the knowledge that we did not get these things from ourselves.

8. Reply to objection 3: “cursed is he who hangs on the wood” (“became accursed for us”) #

Augustine, Contra Faustum XIV: sin is accursed, and consequently the death and mortality that come from sin. Christ’s flesh was mortal in having a likeness of the flesh of sin — not sin, but the punishment for sin, which is death. So Moses calls it cursed as the Apostle names it sin (“he who did not know sin was made sin for us”). Nor is there any greater envy in saying he was cursed of God, for unless God hated sin he would not have sent his own Son to take it on and take it away. To confess him accursed for us is to confess that he died for us — Galatians 3: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made accursed for us.

Digression on the Fathers’ contra works. Vatican II on the teaching of priests: read Scripture first, then the Fathers for what they contributed to the individual mysteries — but their theology is ad hoc, provoked by a particular error (Contra Faustum, contra Arius, contra Sabellius, who took “the Father and I are one” as one person, whereas it is one God, not one person). They reverenced Scripture so much that they did not try to penetrate it except as forced to by attack. In Thomas one sees theology as a whole — that is one reason to read Thomas. Reading Thomas you are not reading one man; he speaks with the strength of all the Fathers before him, as Aristotle inherited the mind of Plato and the earlier Greeks and drew out whatever is good in them. Descartes and the moderns, by contrast, each stand on his own.

Also on Faustus: Augustine went to meet the great Manichaean and discovered he did not know the liberal arts — if he cannot handle the trivium and quadrivium, how trust him on the highest things? And, prompted by Augustine’s rhetoric: Aristotle in Rhetoric III says you should kill your opponent’s seriousness with jesting and his jesting with seriousness — Cicero called the Rhetoric a golden river. Examples: Lincoln, accused of being two-faced, “if I had another face, would I be wearing this one?”; Reagan refusing “to take advantage of Mr. Mondale’s youth and inexperience”; and, to Geraldine Ferraro’s charge that his policies were not Christian, “when I heard her say it, I just turned the other cheek.”

9. Article 5, objections and sed contra (“whether Christ sustained all sufferings”) #

1. Hilary, De Trinitate X: the Only-begotten, achieving the sacrament of his death, consumed in himself every kind of human suffering, as he testifies in bowing his head and giving up his spirit. He comments: maybe a distinction is needed — true in some way, not in another.
2. Isaiah 52: my servant shall understand, be exalted and greatly sublime, and many shall be stupefied over him, so inglorious will be his appearance among men. Christ was exalted in having every grace and every science, at which many were stupefied; so it seems he was inglorious in sustaining every human passion.
3. The Passion is ordered to liberating man from sin, and Christ came to liberate from every genus of sin; therefore he ought to suffer every genus of passion. (Popular writers say he was scourged for sins of the flesh and crowned for sins of pride — sins of flesh and of spirit.) A student compares von Balthasar’s position that Christ had to despair and undergo the torments of the damned or we are not really freed; he calls it strange.

Sed contra: the soldiers broke the legs of those crucified with him but did not break his — something he did not suffer; a student ties this back to his body not being divided.

10. The body of article 5: species and genus (“not every species, but every genus”) #

As regards species it was not necessary that Christ undergo every human suffering, because many species of passion are contrary to one another — burning by fire and drowning by water. If you are thrown in the water with a millstone you are not going to die at the stake, and vice versa; they cannot both be undergone. And he speaks of passions inflicted from outside, since passions caused from within, such as bodily sicknesses, he ought not to suffer (as said above). A student recalls the reason: sickness comes either from a defect in the formative principle — but here that principle is the infinite power of the Holy Spirit — or from bad living, which did not happen either.

As regards genus he suffered every human passion, in four ways:

• On the part of men: from Gentiles and Jews, from males and females [transcript garbled — he cites “the maids accusing Peter”], from princes and their ministers (the high priests) and from the people; Psalm 2, “why do the Gentiles rage and the people meditate vain things… the kings of the earth stand up, the princes come together against the Lord and against his Christ” — the Psalms are prophetic, “a fifth gospel.” Also from his familiars and known: Judas betraying, Peter denying.
• On the part of the goods in which man can suffer: in friends deserting him; in fame, through blasphemies; in honor and glory, through mockery and contumelies; in things, being stripped of his garments; in soul, through sadness and fear; in body, through wounds and scourging.
• As regards the members: in the head, the crown of thorns piercing; in hands and feet, the fixing of nails; in his face, blows and spittle; in the whole body, scourging.
• According to every bodily sense: touch, by scourging and nails; taste, by myrrh and gall; smell, in the fetid place of cadavers called Calvary; hearing, by the voices of blasphemers and mockers; sight, by seeing his mother and the beloved disciple weeping.

He notes where the genus/species distinction is learned: Porphyry’s Isagoge — “I asked my colleagues, who’s read the Isagoge? Nobody had; some had not even heard of it.” Compare the Contra Gentiles argument that nothing is said univocally of God and us: every name said univocally is genus, species, difference, property or accident, and he eliminates them all — a complete division taken from the Isagoge.

11. Replies to objections 1 and 2 (“as regards sufficiency… as regards suitability”) #

To Hilary: understand it of omnia genera, not omnes species. (Aside: as one says Shakespeare or Homer excels in every genus, tragedy and comedy and what lies between.)

To the second: the likeness is to be noted not as regards the number of sufferings and graces but as regards their magnitude — as he was sublime in gifts of grace above all others, so he was dejected below others through the ignominy of the Passion. He glosses: the man capable of great happiness is capable of great misery; one who is not capable of much happiness is not capable of much misery either — which is why the great tragedies are about a man who was in some way sublime, for if you are already down below you have not far to fall.

Finally, the distinction of sufficiency and suitability: even the least suffering of Christ — “you prick his finger” — was sufficient to redeem the human race from all sins; but according to suitability it was fitting that he undergo all the genera of passions.

His words #

• “genus of death” — Thomas’s hoc genus mortis, this kind of death.
• lignum — wood, not “tree”; the Vulgate’s word for the Garden of Paradise, which is called “the wood.”
• patibulum — the crossbeam carried by the condemned, fixed to the standing upright.
• stillicidium — the dropping (of blood) upon the earth, in Chrysostom’s reason.
• “chair of the master teaching” — cathedra, Augustine’s name for the cross.
• “detracting passions” — those implying a defect of knowledge, grace or virtue, which Christ refused, as against injuries inflicted from outside.
• “species” — “the particular kind,” as opposed to genus; the distinction learned from Porphyry’s Isagoge.
• “sufficiency” vs. “suitability” — the least suffering sufficed to redeem; suitability required all the genera.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 46, a. 4 (reasons 2–7 and replies to objections 1–3)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 46, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1–2)
• Quoted within these: Psalm 68 [Vulg.]; Augustine, Sermon on the Passion; Chrysostom, Sermon on the Passion; John 3:14; John 12:32; Gregory of Nyssa; Augustine, On the grace of the Old and New Testament; Augustine, On John; Exodus 27; Damascene, book III; Hebrews 12; Augustine, Contra Faustum XIV; Galatians 3; Hilary, De Trinitate X; Isaiah 52; Psalm 2

Mentioned

• Porphyry, Isagoge
• Aristotle, Rhetoric III (jesting and seriousness)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (nothing said univocally of God and us; reasons for the Incarnation)
• Thomas Aquinas on the hierarchy of the angels
• Vatican II on the formation of priests (inferred — he says “in Vatican II there, in the thing where Thomas… the teaching of priests”)
• John Paul II, letter on catechesis; John Paul II and Benedict XVI on Mozart’s Requiem
• Augustine, Confessions (meeting Faustus)

His questions #

• Why did God make Augustine and Thomas so much more intelligent than us? — So that one creature might be a cause of goodness, here of enlightenment, for others, in likeness to God who enlightens every man.
• Was Christ crucified on an actual tree or on finished beams? — Thomas says only lignum; historically an upright fixed in place and a patibulum carried by the condemned.
• Must the truth correspond to the figure in all respects? — No: then it would not be a likeness but the truth itself (Damascene).
• Why was he not beheaded like John, or sawn like Isaiah? — So that his body might remain whole and give no occasion to those who would divide the church.
• How is he “cursed” if he was sinless? — He bore the punishment of sin, which is death; to confess him accursed for us is to confess he died for us.
• Did Christ sustain all sufferings? — Not every species (many are contrary, as burning and drowning), but every genus.
• Where do you learn the distinction between species and genus? — Porphyry’s Isagoge.
• How is Christ made like the servant in Isaiah 52? — Not in the number of sufferings and graces but in the magnitude of both.