Summa III, Q.53: The Resurrection of Christ – Why It Was Necessary, the Third Day, Christ as First to Rise, and Rising by His Own Power

Orientation #

He begins by returning to the prologue of q. 27 to locate where the class now stands: the fourth and last of the four parts on what the incarnate Son did and suffered — his exaltation — the third part (his exit from this world, his death) having just been finished (prev. lecture). He maps the four questions on the resurrection (qq. 53–56), then ascension, session at the Father’s right hand, judicial power (qq. 57–59), with q. 60 beginning the sacraments.

The next class takes up q. 54, on the quality of Christ’s risen body.

The class, in order #

1. Where we are: the fourfold division (“fourth, about those things which pertain to his exaltation”) #

• Prologue of q. 27 divides the matter fourfold: (1) his entry into the world, (2) the progress of his life in this world, (3) his exit from this world, (4) his exaltation after this life.
• He compares this with the division in the Matthew commentary, which is threefold: entry, progress, and then Thomas’s third and fourth both fall under Matthew’s third.
• Prologue of q. 53 divides the resurrection into four considerations, one question each: the resurrection itself (53), the quality of the one rising (54), the making known of the resurrection (55), the causality of the resurrection (56). Then 57, 58, 59 for ascension, session, judicial power; 60 begins the sacraments.
• Aside: as in the Summa Contra Gentiles, the sacraments are attached to and follow upon the consideration of the incarnation and all Christ did and suffered.

2. a. 1, objections: “whether it was necessary for Christ to rise” #

He notes it is strange Thomas should even ask this.

1. Damascene (bk. IV): resurrection is a second rising up of what was dissolved and had fallen. Christ did not fall through sin, nor was his body dissolved. — He flags in advance that there was a separation of soul and body.
2. To rise up is to be promoted upward; but Christ’s body remained united to his divinity after death, so it could not be advanced higher. — He flags the coming distinction: personal union vs. natural union of soul and body.
3. What is done about Christ’s humanity is ordered to our salvation; the passion suffices, freeing us from guilt and punishment.

• Sed contra: Luke 24:46, “Oportebat — it was necessary for Christ to suffer and to rise.” He had to do both. “It’s pretty definitive there. But Thomas likes to think things out.”

3. a. 1, body: the five reasons (“it was necessary for Christ to rise for five reasons”) #

He asks, with amusement, whether any student has heard a priest preach “five reasons” for the resurrection last Easter.

1. Commendation of divine justice: God exalts those who humble themselves on account of God (Luke 1:52, the Magnificat). Christ humbled himself to death on the cross out of charity and obedience, so it was necessary he be exalted to the glorious resurrection. Psalm 138: “you know my sitting down (the humility of the passion) and my rising up (the glorification).” He links this to dividing the articles of faith on Christ’s humanity into articles of descent and articles of ascent: the resurrection answers to the death, the ascension to the descent. Example: a teacher comes in, sits down, gets up.
   • From the Matthew commentary: it is easier for Christ to lie down in death and get up than for us to lie down to sleep and get up in the morning — he has more power than we do. (“Some of us have more trouble getting up.”)
   • Aside: he has been reading an autobiography of a saint [name unclear in recording] who says, “Don’t do what I tell you to do if your superiors command something else”; humility is always seeking to be humbled.
2. Instruction of our faith: the resurrection confirms faith in Christ’s divinity. 2 Cor 13: crucified from our infirmity, he lives from the power of God. 1 Cor 15: if Christ did not rise, empty is our preaching, empty our faith. Psalm 29: what use in my blood — the gloss: if I did not rise at once, my body would be corrupted, I would gain nothing. He reads this as saying Christ rose by his own power and divinity.
3. Lifting up of our hope: seeing our head rise, we hope to rise (1 Cor 15; Job 19, “I know that my redeemer lives… in the newest day I will rise from the earth”; “this hope is deposited in my bosom”).
4. Informing the life of the faithful: Romans 6 — as Christ rose by the Father’s glory, so we walk in newness of life; Christ rising dies no more, so reckon yourselves dead to sin, living to God. He applies it: rising from one’s sins, striving to avoid sin. He wonders aloud whether this reason belongs to charity, since it concerns our life, and settles that Christ is here exemplar for us to follow — as with the ascension, we keep our thoughts up there.
5. Completing our salvation: he sustained evils by dying to free us from evils, and was glorified by rising to promote us to goods. Romans 4: handed over for our sins, rose for our justification. He remarks this pairing — died to free from evil, rose to bestow good — is a point Thomas makes more often than not.

4. a. 1, replies (“nevertheless fell through death”) #

1. Christ did not fall through sin but fell through death: as sin is a fall from justice, death is a fall from life — you are not in as good a state as before. Micah 7: “Do not rejoice over me, my enemy, because I have fallen, for I shall rise up.” And though his body was not dissolved by incineration into ashes, the separation of soul from body was a certain dissolution.
2. The divinity remained united to the flesh after death by the personal union, but not by the union of nature (soul united to body as form, constituting a human nature). So when the body was reunited to the soul it was promoted to a higher status of nature, not of person — there is no human person there; it had remained united to the divine person.
3. The passion worked our salvation properly as regards the removal of evils; the resurrection as the beginning and exemplar of good things.

5. a. 2, objections (“whether it was suitable for Christ to rise the third day”) #

1. Members should be conformed to the head; our resurrection is deferred to the end of the world. “It’s not fair” — he calls it the democratic objection.
2. Acts 2: it was impossible for Christ to be detained by hell and death; while dead one is detained; so he should have risen the same day — especially given the gloss above (no use in the blood unless he rose at once).
   • He stresses the pattern: the two objections fall apart in opposite directions, one saying at once, one saying at the end of the world. “It’s the custom of those erring to go to extremes” — like virtue, which lies between an excess and a defect: courage between cowardice and foolhardiness.
3. The day begins from sunrise, but Christ rose before sunrise (“while it was still dark,” Magdalene at the monument, the stone already rolled away). So he did not rise on the third day.

• Sed contra: Matthew 20 — handed over to be mocked, scourged, crucified; the third day he rose.

6. a. 2, body: quickly, but not at once (“some delay between the death and the resurrection”) #

Expanding the second of the five reasons (instruction of our faith): our faith is about both the divinity and the humanity, and one does not suffice without the other.

1. To confirm faith in his divinity, he had to rise quickly, not at the world’s end.
2. To confirm faith in the truth of his humanity and true death, some delay was necessary: if he rose immediately, the death would seem not a true death, and hence neither a true resurrection.
3. The third day suffices, because within that time signs of life do not appear in a man who seems dead.

• Further fittingnesses: it commends the perfection of three — beginning, middle, end, “the number of everything,” as Aristotle says in De Caelo et Mundo I (he mentions this was also this morning’s topic). Mystically, Christ by his one death, light because of justice, destroyed our two deaths, of body and of soul, dark because of sin — hence one whole day and two nights in death (Augustine, De Trinitate IV). Also: the third time begins (before the law, under the law, under grace), and the third state of the saints begins (under the figures of the law, under the truth of faith, in the eternity of glory).
• Aside: someone wrote about Protestant preachers arguing Christ must have died on Wednesday, so that Thursday–Friday–Saturday give three days in the tomb, with Scripture “mixed up” — he answers that one must understand figures of speech. He compares the neighbour, not a Catholic, puzzled by “the brothers of Christ.”

7. a. 2, replies (“free among the dead”) #

1. Head and members are conformed in nature but not in power; the head’s power is more excellent. To show Christ’s excellence of power he rose the third day, ours is deferred to the end. (“Makes a nice safe distance between us and power.”)
2. Detention implies force; Christ was held by no necessity of death but was “free among the dead” (Ps. 87) — an expression he calls interesting. He remained in death some time by his own will, insofar as he judged it necessary for the instruction of our faith. Keep in mind the reason Thomas gives, not any necessity. On “at once”: something is said to happen at once because it happens in a brief time — as a couple say they will marry “right away,” or “I’m going right away” and hasn’t gone yet.
3. He rose around dawn, the day beginning to brighten, signifying that he leads us through his resurrection to the light of glory — just as he died toward evening (Vespers), the day tending into darkness, showing that by his death he destroyed the darkness of guilt and punishment. Nevertheless he rose “on the third day” taking day as the natural day of twenty-four hours: Augustine (De Trinitate IV) reckons the night up to dawn to the third day, from midnight, and takes it that day takes its beginning from night — the first day being from light into darkness because of man’s coming lapse, the reckoning of man’s restoration from darkness into light (2 Cor 4: “You were once darkness, now light in the Lord”). So even had he risen at midnight it would be the third day; but since he rose at dawn it can be said even taking the artificial day, caused by the presence of the sun (a student remarks on the oddity of the term “artificial”). Mark 16 says the sun now risen; John says it was still dark — no contradiction (Augustine, On the Agreement of the Gospels): as the day rose the remainder of darkness was drawn out; Mark’s “sun rising” means not that the sun was seen on the earth but that it was coming into the parts near it.

8. a. 3, objections (“whether Christ first rose”) #

1. Elias and Elisha raised the dead (Heb 11: women received their dead from resurrection); Christ before his passion raised three dead. He recalls Augustine’s reading of the three as three stages of sin: the girl raised in her bedroom — sin still inward; the young man carried outside the wall — sin gone out into the exterior act; Lazarus — habitual sin, confirmed by repetition. “So there’s hope for you, no matter which state of sin you’re in.”
   • He ties this back to the fourth of the five reasons: as Christ rose to die no more, so we rise from our sins by confession with intention not to sin again. And a woman he knew [Carol, or the Carmelite in the British capital — unclear in recording] had a meditation always to revere the sinner, since Christ in the tomb was able to rise.
2. Matthew 27: at the passion the monuments were opened and many bodies of the saints who slept rose and appeared in the city.
3. As Christ’s resurrection causes ours, so his grace causes our grace (John 1, “of his fullness we have all received”); but others had grace before him in time — the fathers of the Old Testament — so they might likewise reach bodily resurrection before him.

• Sed contra: 1 Cor 15:20, Christ rose the first fruits of those sleeping — the (interlinear) gloss: before in time and in dignity.

9. a. 3, body and replies: perfect and imperfect resurrection (“that someone is liberated… from the very possibility of dying”) #

• Resurrection is a repair from death to life, in two ways: (i) from death in act only — one begins to live again in some way after being dead; (ii) liberated also from the necessity and even the possibility of dying — this is true and perfect resurrection. Reason: so long as one lives subject to the necessity of dying, death in a way dominates him (Rom 8:10, “the body is dead on account of sin”); what can be, is said in some way to be, i.e. potentially.
• Christ is first in perfect resurrection: he first arrived at a life penitus immortal (Rom 6: Christ rising dies no more). Others rose before him by an imperfect resurrection, as signs and figures of his.
• Reply 1: those raised under the Old Law and by Christ returned to life so as to die again — Lazarus, the little girl, the widow’s only son, and the two in the Old Testament. “I got to go through it twice. It’s not fair.”
• Reply 2 (the saints of Matthew 27): Thomas reports two opinions.
  • Some say they returned to life not to die again, since a second death would be greater torment than never having risen; and so, as Jerome on Matthew says, they did not rise before the Lord rose — the evangelist says they came out of the tombs after his resurrection, into the holy city, and appeared to many.
  • Augustine (Epistle to Evodius) reports this opinion and presses difficulties: (i) how then is Christ the firstborn from the dead, if so many preceded him in that resurrection? (ii) if one answers that it was said by anticipation — the tombs opened by the earthquake when Christ died, but the bodies rose only after he had risen — it still remains how Peter says of Christ, and not of David, that his flesh did not see corruption, on the ground that David’s tomb is among us; for it is hard to see David left out of that resurrection of the just, he from whose seed Christ is commended. (iii) It also breaks the word of Hebrews, that the old just are “not without us” made perfect, if they were already constituted in the incorruption promised for the end.
  • So Augustine seems to hold they rose to die again; and Jerome on Matthew seems to agree — as Lazarus rose, so many bodies of saints rose, to show the Lord rising — although in the sermon on the Assumption it is left in doubt. “But the reasons of Augustine seem to be much more efficacious.”
  • He notes a footnote: that sermon on the Assumption is not Augustine’s.
  • A student finds the David argument striking: it comes well after the resurrection and Pentecost, and Peter proves the resurrection because David cannot have been speaking of himself, his tomb being among us — if David had risen and vanished, they could have said “he is not there anymore.”
• Reply 3: as what preceded Christ’s coming was preparatory for Christ, so grace is a disposition for glory. What pertains to glory — the soul’s perfect enjoyment of God, the body’s glorious resurrection — had to be first in time in Christ as author of grace; but grace comes first in the things ordered to Christ. So others could have grace before Christ, but Christ is first in glory of soul and glory of body.
• Long aside (after the David discussion): the newspaper report on Lee Harvey Oswald’s exhumation — the body was there, the wooden casket had deteriorated, and the old casket is now to be auctioned, perhaps for a hundred thousand dollars; jokes about satanic buyers, relics from the Holy Land, Jackie Kennedy’s mirror, Michael Jackson’s other glove.

10. a. 4: whether Christ was the cause of his own resurrection (“No one takes my soul from me”) #

Objections:

1. Whoever is raised by another is not the cause of his own rising; Christ was raised by another — Acts 2, “whom God raised up, dissolving the sorrows of hell”; Rom 8, “he who raised up Jesus Christ will vivify also our mortal bodies.” A student notes Scripture also speaks of the Father raising him; someone answers that if the Father raised him, he raised himself, since he is God.
2. No one merits or asks from another what he himself causes. Christ merited the resurrection by his passion (Augustine: the humility of the passion merited the glory of the resurrection), and asked the Father (Ps. 40, “have pity on me and raise me up”).
3. Damascene (bk. IV): resurrection is of the body, not the soul, since the body fell to death; but the body cannot unite to itself the soul, which is nobler than it.

• Sed contra: John 10, “No one takes my soul from me, but I lay it down and again take it up” — and to rise is nothing other than to take up the soul again.
• Body: through death the divine nature was separated neither from Christ’s soul nor from his flesh; both remained united to the divine person. So the dead Christ’s soul and flesh can each be considered two ways: by reason of the divinity, and by reason of the created nature. By the power of the united divinity, the body resumed the soul it had laid down and the soul resumed the body it had dismissed — 2 Cor 13, crucified from our infirmity, he lives from the power of God. Considered according to the power of the created nature, they could not be reunited, and it was necessary that Christ be raised by God.
• Replies:
  1. The divine power and operation of Father and Son is the same; so both follow — he was raised by the Father’s divine power and by himself. He compares: the Holy Spirit proceeds from the power of the Father, but it is the same power in the Son, so he proceeds from the Son.
  2. Christ prayed for and merited his resurrection insofar as he is man, not as God. He puts the question to the class: can God merit anything? — no; God does not merit our love.
  3. The body according to its created nature is not more powerful than Christ’s soul; it is more powerful according to the divine power, which, united according to the divine nature, is more potent than the body according to its created nature. So by the divine power body and soul mutually resumed each other, not by the power of the created nature.
• “So Thomas rests his case there.” Break before the next question.

His words #

• Premium [ed.: prooemium, prologue] — the division-text at the head of q. 27 and q. 53.
• “Articles of descent / articles of ascent” — his division of the articles of faith about Christ’s humanity; resurrection answers to the death, ascension to the descent.
• Personal union vs. union of nature — the divinity to the flesh after death, vs. soul to body as form constituting a human nature.
• “Democratic objection” — his name for a. 2, obj. 1 (members should get what the head gets).
• Foolhardiness — his English for the excess opposed to courage.
• Natural day (twenty-four hours) vs. artificial day (caused by the presence of the sun).
• Perfect resurrection vs. imperfect resurrection — freed from the possibility of dying, vs. freed only from death in act.
• Penitus — “entirely, completely” immortal.
• Primogenitus a mortuis — the firstborn from the dead.
• “Free among the dead” — Ps. 87, of Christ not detained by death.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, prologue to q. 27 (the fourfold division)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 53, prologue and aa. 1, 2, 3, 4 (full: objections, sed contra, body, replies)

Mentioned (quoted or cited within those articles or by him)

• Luke 24:46; Luke 1:52; Micah 7; Job 19; Psalms 29, 40, 87, 138 (Vulgate numbering); Acts 2; Matthew 20; Matthew 27; Mark 16; John 1; John 10; Romans 4, 6, 8; 1 Corinthians 15 (incl. 15:20); 2 Corinthians 13; Hebrews 11; Hebrews (on the old just “not without us”)
• John Damascene, bk. IV (twice); Augustine, De Trinitate IV; Augustine, Epistle to Evodius; Augustine, On the Agreement of the Gospels; a sermon on the Assumption (footnote: not Augustine’s); Jerome on Matthew; the gloss (interlinear) on 1 Cor 15:20 and on Ps. 29; Aristotle, De Caelo et Mundo I
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on Matthew; Summa Contra Gentiles (placement of the sacraments)

His questions #

• Where are we in the treatise? — In the fourth part of the prologue of q. 27: Christ’s exaltation, beginning with the resurrection (qq. 53–56).
• Was it necessary for Christ to rise? — Yes, for five reasons: divine justice, instruction of faith, lifting of hope, informing the life of the faithful, completing our salvation.
• How did Christ “fall,” if he did not fall by sin? — By death: as sin is a fall from justice, death is a fall from life.
• If the divinity stayed united to his body, how was the resurrection an advance? — An advance in the status of nature (soul rejoined to body), not of person.
• Why the third day, not at once, nor at the world’s end? — Rising quickly confirms faith in his divinity; some delay confirms the truth of his death and humanity; three days suffice since no signs of life appear in that span.
• Was Christ detained by death for those days? — No; he was “free among the dead” and remained dead by his own will, for the instruction of our faith.
• Did anyone rise before Christ? — Only by imperfect resurrection (they died again); Christ is first in the perfect resurrection.
• Did the saints of Matthew 27 rise to die no more? — Two opinions; Augustine’s reasons (firstborn from the dead, David’s tomb, “not without us”) seem much more efficacious, so they rose to die again.
• Could others have grace before Christ? — Yes; but Christ is first in glory, of soul and of body.
• Was Christ the cause of his own resurrection? — Yes, by the power of the united divinity; by the power of the created nature soul and body could not have been reunited.
• Can God merit anything? — No; God does not merit our love. Christ prayed for and merited his resurrection as man.