Whether Christ's Pain Was the Greatest of All

Orientation #

He does not say what came before or after; he simply takes up the sixth article (“to the sixth one goes forward”) and reads it through, translating from the Latin as he goes. Neighbouring classes treat the fittingness of death by crucifixion and, later, whether Christ suffered according to his whole soul.

The class, in order #

1. The six objections read out (“to the sixth one goes forward”) #

He reads the objections that Christ’s pain was not the greatest:

1. Pain grows with the weight and length of what is undergone; some martyrs sustained longer and braver passions — Lawrence broiled on the gridiron (aside: “turn me over”), Vincent whose flesh was lacerated with iron nails.
2. Virtue of mind mitigates sorrow — so much so that the Stoics held sadness does not fall in the soul of the wise; but Christ had the most perfect virtue of mind, hence the least sadness.
3. The more sensitive the sufferer the greater the pain; the soul is more sensitive than the body, since the body senses from the soul; so the pain of a separated soul, or of Adam in innocence, would exceed Christ’s, who assumed a body with natural defects.
4. Loss of a greater good causes greater pain: the sinner loses the life of grace, better than the life of nature, and Christ was to rise on the third day, so lost less than those who remain in death.
5. Innocence of the sufferer diminishes pain, and Christ suffered innocently — “I am like a lamb brought to the victim.”
6. Nothing in Christ was superfluous, but the least pain would have sufficed for human salvation, having infinite power from the divine person; so the greatest pain was superfluous. (Student: “he could prick his finger” — yes, sufficient, but this is a matter of what is fitting.)

Sed contra: Lamentations, in the person of Christ — “Pay attention and see if there is a pain as my pain.”

2. Pain and sadness distinguished (“pain in the strict sense is tied up with the sense of touch”) #

Christ’s suffering included true pain of both kinds: sensible pain, caused by bodily injury, and interior pain, caused by the apprehension of something harmful, more strictly called tristitia, sadness.

• Strictly, pain goes with the sense of touch; sadness is more spiritual — envy (a bad sadness), pity, loneliness are sadness rather than pain.
• His example: his mother sent him a photograph of his dying uncle, thin as a rail from cancer of the esophagus, writing “it pains me to see this” — pain used of pity, covering both, as Thomas partly does here.
• The parallel on the good side: pleasure names more the bodily thing, joy the more spiritual — C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. (Aside about Lewis’s letters and reputation: “happens to the best of us.”)

3. First reason: the causes of the pain (“the cause of sensible pain is the injury of the body”) #

Sensible pain: death by nailing on the cross is most bitter, since the nails are driven into the nerves and the most sensitive parts, the hands and feet; the hanging weight of the body continually increases it; and it is long, since the crucified do not die at once like those killed by the sword. (Aside: in some sense the guillotine is more merciful, as well as more efficient; Dante’s “show him my head afterwards.”) Interior pain, from three causes: (i) all the sins of the human race, for which he made satisfaction, ascribing them to himself — Psalm 21, “the words of my crime”; (ii) especially the fall of the Jews and others, and of the disciples scandalised in the Passion; (iii) the loss of bodily life, naturally horrible to human nature.

4. Second reason: the perfection of the sufferer (“optime complexionatum — well balanced body”) #

Christ’s body was best complexioned, formed miraculously by the Holy Spirit; as Chrysostom says of the wine at Cana, what is done by miracle is more potent than others — the best wine. Hence in him the sense of touch was most vigorous, and pain follows on its perception. His soul too, in its interior powers, most efficaciously apprehended all the causes of sadness. Attached to this:

• Aristotle’s saying he often returns to: a man with a good sense of touch has a good mind (likewise a good imagination); the basic notions of the human mind come more from touch than from sight — “good” from tapping, substance and nature from the interior sense, sympathy and pity from being “touched.” He recalls a commencement address at Assumption on the neglect of the sense of touch.
• Counter-case, the merely mathematical mind: very good at the math, but cannot “couldn’t quid” [ed.: quid — see the whole]. Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg were not believers but were musical (Einstein’s violin and Mozart, Heisenberg a good pianist, for whom music gives meaning to life); he recommends the Nobel Prize site for their lectures and biographical sketches. Plato “never met a mathematician who could think.” Students add: his father wrote that one cannot divorce music and culture from the intellectual life, with an unnamed target he later learned was Karl Rahner, who lived in a vacuum; and a brilliant Canadian politician hyperdeveloped in one area and wholly underdeveloped elsewhere.
• The mathematician’s equivocation: a “triangle” on the globe from the north pole to the equator giving more than two right angles — obviously equivocal. And the rolled-up paper tube held beside the hand so a hole seems to pass through it: does the hole really exist? An optical illusion.
• “That’s the example I always use with Christ’s sensitivity, because most people don’t appreciate that his body was more perfect, therefore he suffered more than we do”: Mozart as a child faints when the trumpet is blown, his ear being soft; a trained ear suffers when the choir is off pitch where the tone-deaf hear nothing; likewise a developed palate for wine is pained by ordinary drink.
• On the interior side: we suffer from the evil we see — mothers killing their own babies; Christ far more aware of its perversity. Saints shown the state of a soul in mortal sin say they would die if they looked again; people who cannot understand hell do not understand what it is to turn from God, nor how evil even the devil is (“you don’t mess with him”). Asides: Fr. Ripperger’s book on exorcism; those who go about the world and the UN perverting nations — “if the devil can get us to kill our own children, he must really hate us.” A student recalls a decade of the Psalms on suffering from the evil of others.

5. Third reason: the purity of the suffering (“he permitted each one of the powers to act”) #

In others, interior sadness and even exterior pain are mitigated by some consideration of reason, overflowing from the higher powers to the lower. In Christ this was not so: he permitted each power to do what was its own, as Damascene says.

• Toothache diminished by distraction, as against Christ allowing no such overflow.
• Used elsewhere against those who say Christ did not know who he was: a wisdom book says knowledge brings sorrow, so supreme knowledge brings supreme sorrow — and Christ has supreme sorrow.
• The overflow the other way: after a student’s Wednesday seven-to-nine session he is so awake he cannot sleep — the higher overflowing into the lower.

6. Fourth reason: voluntarily assumed and proportioned (“proportional to the magnitude of the fruit”) #

The passion and pain were assumed voluntarily for the end of liberating man from sin; hence he assumed such a quantity of pain as was proportioned to the magnitude of the fruit that would follow. All these causes taken together make it manifest that Christ’s pain was the greatest. Aside: “you’ve got all the material for your sermons now” — with Thomas there is hardly a more interesting author, but one must take time to digest, or get intellectual indigestion, he says so much in a page. John XXII (as he has it) said one can learn more from years studying Thomas than a lifetime studying the Church Fathers — though Thomas is built on them.

7. Reply 1: the martyrs (“proceeds from only one of the things foreset”) #

Lawrence and Vincent’s argument takes only one head, bodily injury, the cause of sensible pain; from the other causes named in the body, Christ’s pain is far more augmented.

8. Reply 2: moral virtue, the Stoics, and Aristotle (“constituting in it a middle, as in a proper matter”) #

Moral virtue works one way on interior sadness, another on exterior sensible pain. It directly diminishes interior sadness, constituting a middle in it as in its proper matter — a middle not according to the quantity of the thing but according to the quantity of ratio, i.e. that the emotion not exceed the rule of reason. The Stoics, thinking no sadness useful for anything, held it wholly discordant from reason and to be wholly excluded; but in truth some sadness is good, as Augustine proves in City of God XIV, when it proceeds from holy love — being saddened at one’s own sins or others’; and it is useful for satisfaction, 2 Corinthians 7, “the sadness which is according to God works penance unto salvation” [ed.: he hesitated over the last word]. So Christ, to satisfy for the sins of all, assumed the greatest sadness — “his soul is sad unto death” — greatest in absolute quantity, proportioned to the sins of all men, yet not exceeding the rule of reason. But moral virtue does not directly diminish exterior sensible pain, because such pain does not obey reason.

• Stoic jokes: Shakespeare calls the Stoics “stocky,” like a piece of wood you whack and it just takes it; Jerome on Evagrius — “either the man’s a stone or he’s God”; the Greek told his son had died: “I always knew he was mortal.” Against them, Christ himself sorrowed at the death of Lazarus [ed.: unnamed] and moderate lamenting of a friend, son or parent is right.
• Sadness that is not good: it can lead to death or despair — Judas, who hanged himself. Also Christ weeping over Jerusalem, that he would have gathered them under his wings.
• C. S. Lewis on what Aristotle means by the purgation of pity and fear in tragedy — some mitigating and tempering of the emotions.
• That sadness can be reasoned with: you can “talk to your sadness.” His stone-chip story on the road to Quebec in a new car — a tailgating driver’s stone marked the side, and “I’m a philosopher, I don’t take it too seriously, I was mortal anyway.” But bodily pain does not so yield: his wife’s day-long toothache. Eleazar in Maccabees, tortured for refusing sacrifice: pain in his body, joy in his soul.

9. Reply 3: the separated soul and Adam (“we do not compare it to the pain of the separated soul”) #

The pain of the separated soul belongs to the state of future damnation, which exceeds every evil of this life, as the glory of the saints exceeds every good of this life; so when we call Christ’s pain greatest we do not compare it to that. (He notes he does not know whether Thomas means only the damned or also souls in purgatory — left open.) Adam’s body could not suffer unless he sinned and became mortal and passible; and per impossibile, had he suffered in innocence, his pain would have been less than Christ’s, for the reasons given in the body.

10. Reply 4: the worth of the life lost (“the more he knows it to be better”) #

Christ was pained not only at the loss of his own bodily life but for the sins of all, a pain exceeding that of any contrite man, since it proceeded from greater wisdom and charity (which increase the pain of contrition) and was for all sins together — Isaiah, “truly he bore our sufferings.” Further, Christ’s bodily life was of such dignity, especially from the divinity united to it, that its loss even for an hour was more painful than any other man’s loss of life for any length of time — “that’s very interesting that Thomas brings it up.” Whence Aristotle, Ethics III: the virtuous man loves his own life more, the more he knows it to be better. Aside: a famous biologist unsure of an afterlife, whose lifetime of research all comes to nothing. And Christ exposed this most-loved life for charity — Jeremiah, “I give my soul into the hands of my enemies.”

11. Replies 5 and 6: innocence, and power with justice (“the just one perishes, and there is no one who recognizes”) #

Reply 5: innocence diminishes the pain in one respect, since the guilty man suffers on account of both pain and guilt, the innocent only on account of pain; but sadness is increased by innocence insofar as he apprehends the punishment or harm as more undeserved, and others are the more reprehensible for not sorrowing with him — Isaiah 57, “the just one perishes, and there is no one who recognises” (he glosses considerat as “considers, reconsiders, thinks about it again”). [This reply is left somewhat tangled in his reading.] Reply 6: Christ willed to free the race from sin not only by power but also by justice; so he attended not only to the power his sadness had from union with the divinity but also to how much pain would suffice, according to human nature, for such satisfaction.

His words #

• “dolor” — pain; “I suppose that would be the pain, right?”
• “tristitia” — sadness, the interior pain from apprehension of something harmful; more spiritual than pain of touch.
• “stocky” — Shakespeare’s mockery of the Stoics, wooden, taking the whack.
• “optime complexionatum” — “well balanced body,” best complexioned.
• “couldn’t quid” — his phrase for seeing the whole, what the merely mathematical mind lacks [ed.: from quid est, the “what it is”].
• “maxime” — greatest, in absolute quantity.
• “quantity of ratio” — the mean in passions measured by not exceeding the rule of reason, not by the quantity of the thing.
• “per impossibile” — used of Adam suffering in the state of innocence.
• “considerat” — “considers, reconsiders, thinks about it again.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 46, a. 6 — objections, body, replies (verified source).
• Lamentations, in the person of Christ: “see if there is a pain as my pain” (sed contra).
• Psalm 21: “the words of my crime.”
• 2 Corinthians 7: “the sadness which is according to God.”
• Isaiah: “truly he bore our sufferings”; Isaiah 57: “the just one perishes.”
• Jeremiah: “I give my soul into the hands of my enemies.”
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III, on the virtuous man loving his better life.

Mentioned

• Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV, on good sadness.
• Damascene, on Christ permitting each power to act as its own.
• Chrysostom, on the wine at Cana.
• Jerome on Evagrius; a Stoic saying; Shakespeare on the Stoics.
• Thomas’s “second part” on the ethical matter, the middle in the passions.
• An unnamed wisdom book: knowledge brings sorrow.
• Maccabees, Eleazar under torture.
• C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy; Lewis on Aristotle’s purgation of pity and fear.
• Fr. Ripperger on exorcism; Dante; Plato on mathematicians.

His questions #

• Did some martyrs suffer longer and braver passions than Christ? — Lawrence and Vincent argue only from bodily injury; Christ’s other causes of pain far outweigh it.
• Is pain the same as sadness? — Strictly, pain goes with touch, sadness with the apprehension of harm; Thomas here partly uses “pain” for both.
• Why was Christ’s sensible pain the greatest? — Crucifixion pierces the nerves of hands and feet, the hanging body increases it, and death is slow.
• Why did Christ’s perfect body make him suffer more? — Best complexioned by the Holy Spirit, his sense of touch was most vigorous, as a trained ear suffers most from bad music.
• Why was his suffering “pure”? — He let each power act on its own and did not let reason’s consideration overflow to mitigate the lower.
• Did the most perfect virtue of mind not give Christ the least sadness? — Virtue sets the mean by reason’s rule, not by quantity; he took the greatest sadness without exceeding reason.
• Is the separated soul’s pain not greater, being more sensitive? — It belongs to the state of damnation, beyond every evil of this life, and is not what is compared here.
• Does Thomas mean only the damned, or purgatory too? — left open.
• Did Christ lose less, rising on the third day? — His life’s dignity from the divinity made its loss even for an hour more painful than any man’s loss for any time.
• Was the greatest pain superfluous, since the least would suffice? — He freed us by justice as well as power, so the pain was such as human nature required for satisfaction.