Summa III, Q.54: The Quality of the Risen Christ – A True Body, Glorified, Whole, and Still Bearing His Wounds

Orientation #

He begins directly with the prologue to q. 54 (“one ought to consider about the quality of Christ rising”), reads the four articles in order, and closes with “that’s a good place to stop, maybe.” The previous class began the treatment of the Resurrection at q. 53 and the next takes up q. 55 on the manifestation of the Resurrection.

The class, in order #

1. The four questions of q. 54 (“the quality of Christ rising”) #

The division: (1) whether after the resurrection Christ had a true body; (2) whether he rose with the integrity of the body, all his parts; (3) whether his body was glorious; (4) about the wounds appearing in his body. He notes “he didn’t have a spiritual body” is a popular opinion nowadays, and jokes that time “sometimes doesn’t heal all wounds.” (Note: he reads the order as truth–integrity–glory–wounds, but the class treats glory as art. 2 and integrity as art. 3.)

2. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“did not have a true body”) #

1. A true body cannot be with another body in the same place; Christ came in with the doors closed.
2. A true body does not vanish from sight unless corrupted; Christ vanished from the disciples’ eyes — the Emmaus episode.
3. Every true body has a determined figure; Christ appeared “in another likeness” (Mark 16) — students supply effigy, hence “in effigy,” a copy, image, likeness.

Sed contra (Luke 24): the disciples thought they saw a spirit, i.e. a fantastical body; removing this, he says “feel and see, a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see me to have.”

3. Article 1, corpus (“that is said to rise, that has fallen”) #

From Damascene (bk. IV): what rises is what fell. What fell in death was the body, in so far as it was separated from the soul, its formal perfection. So a true resurrection requires the same body united again to the same soul; and since the truth of a body’s nature comes from its form, the risen body is a true body of the same nature as before. If the body were fantastic, it would not be a true resurrection but an apparent one — “so it sounds like heresy, I guess.”

4. Article 1, replies: closed doors, vanishing, changed figure (“if you grasp the way that it did, it is not a miracle”) #

• Reply 1 (closed doors): some say it entered not by miracle but from the condition of glory, being with another body in the same place — whether a glorious body can do this is deferred to the treatise on the resurrection. For now it suffices to say: not from the nature of the body but from the power of the divinity united to it. Augustine (Paschal sermon, whose authenticity he notes is doubted): if you grasp how it was done, it is no miracle — “where reason fails, there is the building up of faith.” And on John: the bodily pile where the divinity was — closed doors did not stand in the way of him who was born with his mother’s virginity remaining inviolate. Gregory says the same. Aside: another Augustine text on mole / density — “what is not great in mole, to be more is to be better” — the pair bonitas molis / bonitas virtutis.
• Reply 2 (vanishing): Christ rose to the immortal life of glory; a glorious body is spiritual, i.e. subject to the spirit — not spiritual in the sense of not being a body. For total subjection, every action of the body must be subject to the will of the spirit. Seeing happens by the action of the visible on the sight (On the Soul II). Therefore a glorified man is seen when he wills and not seen when he does not — “so if you want to hide from me in the next world, you can.” Christ had this both from the glorified body and from his divinity. Chrysostom’s instances: passing through the midst of the crowd that would throw him off the hill; Gethsemane, where they did not recognise him — “you’re not going to know anything unless I permit you.” Even non-glorious bodies can miraculously be unseen; he recalls a saint (Gerard Majella, uncertain) who hid this way. So Christ vanished not by corruption or resolution into the invisible, but because by his will he ceased to be visible to them — either still present or departing by the gift of agility. Aside: in heaven everyone will want to see what the saints looked like in the flesh (Augustine wanted to see Christ in the flesh, and Rome in its glory); you might want to be invisible a while to avoid the gawking — “a conveyor belt for the really popular saints.”
• Reply 3 (figure): Severianus, Paschal sermon: no one should think Christ changed the figure of his face — i.e. the lines of his members — since nothing disordered or deformed was in a body conceived of the Holy Spirit needing correction. He took on the glory of clarity: the likeness/appearance changed in becoming immortal; he acquired the glory of the face but did not lose its substance. He never appeared to the disciples in his glorious species; as it was in his power to be seen or not, so it was in his power that from his sight there be formed in their eyes the glorious form, or the non-glorious, or a mixture. “A little difference suffices that someone be seen in an alien appearance” (modica differentia). Examples: trick pictures where the same face with a few surrounding changes looks completely different; newspaper photos of Prince Philip and his bride-to-be, flattering in one shot and not in another.

5. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“whether the body of Christ was glorious”) #

1. Glorious bodies shine with light (Matt. 13, “the just will shine as the sun”), and shining bodies are seen by their light, not by colour; Christ’s body was seen under the species of colour.
2. A glorious body is incorruptible; Christ’s was touchable (“touch me and see”), and Gregory says what can be touched is necessarily corruptible, and what cannot be corrupted cannot be touched.
3. A glorious body is not animal but spiritual (1 Cor. 15); Christ’s seems animal, since he ate and drank.

Sed contra, Philippians 3: he will reform the body of our humility, configured to the body of his clarity.

6. Article 2, corpus: three reasons (“appears to be so for a threefold reason”) #

1. Christ’s resurrection is the exemplar and cause of ours (1 Cor. 15); the saints rise with glorious bodies (“it is sown in ignobility, it rises in glory”); the cause is more potent than the caused, and the exemplar than the exemplate — much more, then, was Christ’s risen body glorious.
2. By the humility of his passion he merited the glory of the resurrection: “now my soul is troubled” (passion) followed by “Father, clarify your name” (the glory of the resurrection).
3. Christ’s soul was glorious from the first instant of his conception by perfect enjoyment of the divinity, but by dispensation the glory was kept from redounding to the body, so that redemption might be accomplished by his passion. The mystery of passion and death completed, the soul at once shone its glory into the body taken up again.

He judges this “pretty definitive… pretty solid stuff.” Digression (allergies): did St Thomas have allergies? — Heisenberg’s hay fever drove him to the island off the German coast where he had bright ideas; then the German bomb effort, his capture and removal to England, the secret microphones, and their surprise at Hiroshima — “if Hitler had gotten the bomb before us, we’d all be Nazis today.”

7. Article 2, replies: colour, touch, eating (“received according to the way of the receiver”) #

• Reply 1: whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver; since the body’s glory derives from the soul (Augustine, To Dioscorus), the clarity of the glorified body follows the colour natural to the human body — as differently coloured glass receives the sun’s splendour according to its own colour. And as it is in a glorified man’s power to be seen or not, so his clarity may be seen or not; thus Christ appeared in his own colour without clarity.
• Reply 2: bodies are called palpable not only by resistance but by density; rare and dense follow on heavy and light, hot and cold and the other contraries, which are principles of corruption in elementary bodies. So what is touchable by human touch is naturally corruptible. A body resisting touch but not disposed according to the four tangible qualities — e.g. a celestial body — is not called touchable. Christ’s body was composed of elements and had the tangible qualities required by human nature, so it was naturally touchable; had it nothing more it would be corruptible, but it had the glory redounding from the blessed soul — Augustine to Dioscorus: God made the soul so potent that from its fullest beatitude there redounds into the body the fullness of health, the vigour of incorruption. Aside to a sniffling student: “you’re not yet enjoying plenissima beatitudo, that’s for sure.” Gregory: the same nature, but another glory.
• Reply 3: Augustine, City of God XIII: after the resurrection the Saviour is in spiritual but true flesh; he took food and drink not from need but from power. Bede’s comparison: the thirsty earth absorbs water one way, the sun’s ray another — the one of indigence, the other of power. So eating did not show an animal body needing food, but manifested the nature of the risen body. Digression: no-calorie soda — why drink what has no nutrition? just taste; flavoured water, caffeine as diuretic, “maybe it’s penitential”; the Heinekens accumulating at home from his brother-in-law and nephew, and Wednesday students bringing him a bottle each; beer with popcorn or pepperoni pizza.

8. Article 3, objections and sed contra (“did not resurrect whole or entire”) #

1. Flesh and blood belong to the integrity of the body, but “flesh and blood do not possess the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 15) — “so the devil can quote scripture, right? Thomas too.”
2. Blood is one of the four humours; if he had blood he would have the rest, whence corruption in animal bodies — so his body would be corruptible.
3. The risen body ascended into heaven, but some of his blood is kept as relics in some churches. Student exchange: the Lanciano miracle in Italy — but that is the Eucharist, the myocardium and the five drops of blood.

Sed contra: “a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see me to have.”

9. Article 3, corpus: same nature, another glory (“whatever had fallen through death”) #

Same nature, different glory; hence whatever belongs to the nature of the human body was in the risen body — flesh, bones, blood and the like — and integrally, without diminution; otherwise it would not be a perfect resurrection, since what fell in death must rise. “The hairs of your head are all numbered” (and Luke 21, not a hair perishes) — “all these bald guys, I see you’re meeting him.” To deny the flesh, bones and other parts is the error of Eutyches, bishop of Constantinople, who said our risen body will be impalpable and subtler than wind and air, and that the Lord, after confirming the disciples’ hearts by letting them touch what was touchable, returned to that subtlety. Gregory disproves this: Christ’s risen body was not changed again — “Christ rising from the dead dies no more” (Rom. 6). Eutyches retracted at his own death: Gregory narrates that near death, taking hold of his skin, he confessed in hac carne omnes resurgemus. Further: if it was unsuitable for Christ to take a body of another nature (a heavenly one, as Valentinus asserted — rejected in the Summa Contra Gentiles) at his conception, much more so at the resurrection, since the same body taken for mortal life is resumed for immortal life.

10. Article 3, replies: flesh and blood, humours, relic-blood (“not the nature but the guilt of flesh and blood”) #

• Reply 1: “flesh and blood” there means not the nature but the guilt of flesh and blood (Gregory, Moralia XIV), or their corruption — as we speak of sins of the flesh. Augustine: at the resurrection there will not be the corruption and mortality of flesh and blood. Flesh in its substance will possess the kingdom; flesh understood as corruption will not — whence the Apostle continually adds “nor will corruption possess incorruption.” He notes how a person can be taken up with that text, and jokes about “Brother Marcus” marrying later in life.
• Reply 2: Augustine, same book: a molesting persecutor presses — if blood was in the risen body, why not phlegm, choler, melancholy and the rest, the four humours? (Aside: whichever you had most of gave your temperament.) But whoever adds must beware of adding corruption, lest he corrupt the sanity and chastity of the faith. Divine power can, with the visible and tractable nature of bodies remaining, take away the qualities it wills: motion without weariness, power without fatigue, the power of eating without the necessity of eating. “So we can have pizza and beer in heaven — but we won’t need it,” and won’t be hungry for it. Asides: what will the cooks do? Mozart’s talents won’t be wasted, conducting the praise of the Lord.
• Reply 3: all the blood that flowed from Christ’s body pertains to the truth of human nature and will rise in his body, and the same holds of all particles pertaining to the truth and integrity of human nature. The blood kept as relics in some churches did not flow from Christ’s side but is said to have flowed miraculously from a certain image of Christ. He remarks the objection could have been put more simply from the blood shed at the scourging and along the way of the cross; he supposes Thomas thinks of the reward, that all the body’s suffering is rewarded in rising. Student exchange: blood is replaced in this life anyway, every cell within seven years (“I take it on faith”); his own hospital transfusion, where the doctor skipped the second pint because of infection risk and because “you replace this pint yourself.”

11. Article 4, objections and sed contra (“ought not to rise with the wounds”) #

1. The dead rise incorrupt (1 Cor. 15), but wounds and scars pertain to corruption and defect — unfitting for the author of the resurrection.
2. He rises whole, but the openings of wounds are against integrity, since through them the body is discontinued; mere signs of the wounds would suffice for sight, as sufficed for Thomas (“because you have seen me, Thomas, you believe”).
3. Damascene (bk. IV): after the resurrection some things are said of Christ not according to nature but by dispensation, to certify that the body that suffered is the body that rose — the wounds are for this. But cause ceasing, the effect ceases; once the disciples were certified, the wounds would not remain. And it does not befit the unchangeableness of glory to assume something that would not remain forever.

Sed contra: “Put your finger here and see my hands, and put your hand in my side.”

12. Article 4, corpus: five reasons for the wounds (“a perpetual triumph”) #

1. For the glory of Christ himself — Bede on Luke: not from any impotence of curing, but that he might carry them as a perpetual trophy of victory. Augustine, City of God XXII: perhaps in that kingdom we shall see in the bodies of the martyrs the scars of the wounds they bore for Christ’s name, not as deformity but as dignity — a beauty of virtue shining in the body though not of the body. He flags that Thomas puts this first, and that the beheaded “have to see some other way.”
2. To confirm the disciples’ hearts in the faith of the resurrection — “the one reason you would think of primarily, right? But Thomas gives that second. That’s kind of interesting.”
3. That in supplicating the Father for us he may always show by what kind of death he underwent for man — showing how much he loved us.
4. That he may convince those redeemed in his blood how mercifully they were helped, by exposing before them the traces of his own death.
5. That at the judgment he may announce to those justly condemned how justly they are damned. Augustine, On the Creed: Christ knows why he preserves the wounds in his body; as he showed them to unbelieving Thomas, so to his enemies — “Behold the man whom you crucified; you see the wounds you inflicted; you know the side you pierced; through you and on account of you it was opened, yet you did not wish to enter.” “That’s powerful… that’s terrible.”

13. Article 4, replies (“not less integral, but more perfect”) #

• Reply 1: the wounds do not pertain to corruption or defect but to a greater heap of glory, being signs of virtue; and in those places of the wounds a certain special beauty appears. He finds this striking — the martyrs who “want to be invisible” will also want their wounds seen; a student adds that the wounds are a perpetual source of wonder among the saints, since we expect a mortal body to have wounds and not a glorified one.
• Reply 2: though the openings involve a solution of continuity, this is recompensed by a greater beauty of glory, so the body is not less integral but more perfect.
• On Thomas: the text seems to say he not only saw but also touched — it suffices for his own faith to see what he saw, but he worked for us that he might touch what he saw, making it more certain. Aside: Doctor Carroll’s point that it is providential Thomas was sent to India, afflicted with the mental plague that tangible reality isn’t real — and the “Thomas Christians.”
• Reply 3: Christ willed the scars to remain not only to certify the disciples’ faith but for the other reasons given, whence they remain always. Augustine To Consentius on the resurrection of the flesh: the Lord’s body in heaven is as it was when it ascended. Gregory, Moralia XIV: if anything in Christ’s body could be changed after the resurrection, it would be against Paul’s true sentence, since change would be a kind of return to death — which only one denying the true resurrection of the flesh would say. Hence the wounds Christ showed will never be removed from that body.

His words #

• “Effigy” — a copy, image, likeness; from the objection’s in alia effigie; “that’s why you get the word ‘in effigy’.”
• “Fantastical body” — an apparent, not a true body [ed.: corpus phantasticum].
• Bonitas molis / bonitas virtutis — greatness of mass vs. of power; “what is not great in mole, to be more is to be better.”
• “Spiritual” of a glorious body — “subject to the spirit,” not “not being a body.”
• “Agility” — the gift by which the risen body departs unseen.
• Modica differentia — “a little difference suffices that someone be seen in an alien appearance.”
• “Potior” — the cause is more potent than the caused, the exemplar than the exemplate.
• “Clarity” — the brightness of the glorified body, received according to the natural colour of the body.
• “Palpable / touchable” — by resistance and by density; the four tangible qualities.
• Plenissima beatitudo — the soul’s full beatitude, whence the vigour of incorruption redounds to the body.
• “Guilt (culpa) of flesh and blood” — the sense of “flesh and blood shall not possess the kingdom.”
• “Perpetual triumph” — the wounds as a victory trophy carried about.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 54, prologue and aa. 1-4 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies).

Mentioned (within those articles)

• Scripture: Luke 24; Mark 16; Matthew 13; 1 Corinthians 15; 2 Corinthians (the “sown in ignobility” text, as he cites it); Philippians 3; Romans 6; John 12 (“Father, clarify your name”); Luke 21; John 20 (Thomas).
• Damascene, bk. IV; Augustine, Paschal sermon (authenticity doubted), on John, To Dioscorus, City of God XIII and XXII, On the Creed/Symbol, To Consentius on the resurrection of the flesh; Gregory, homily after the Pasch, Moralia XIV; Chrysostom; Bede on Luke; Severianus, Paschal sermon.
• Errors named: Eutyches of Constantinople; Valentinus (rejected in the Summa Contra Gentiles).
• Asides: the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano; Doctor Carroll on Thomas in India.

His questions #

• If the risen body were fantastical, what follows? — It would not be a true resurrection but an apparent one.
• How did Christ enter with the doors closed? — Not from the body’s nature but from the power of the divinity united to it; whether glorious bodies can of themselves be with another body in a place is deferred to the treatise on the resurrection.
• Why did he vanish from their eyes? — Not by corruption, but because by his will he ceased to be visible to them, whether still present or departing by agility.
• Did the resurrection change the figure of his face? — No; the lines of the members remained, the appearance changed by the glory of clarity, and a little difference suffices for an alien appearance.
• Was his risen body glorious? — Yes, for three reasons: it is the exemplar and cause of ours, he merited that glory by the humility of the passion, and the glory of his soul, held back by dispensation, then redounded to the body.
• If it was touchable, was it corruptible? — Naturally touchable and, of itself, corruptible; but incorruptible by the glory redounding from the blessed soul.
• Did he eat because he needed food? — No; as the sun’s ray takes up water by power, not indigence, he ate to manifest the nature of the risen body.
• “Flesh and blood shall not possess the kingdom” — does it deny flesh in the risen body? — No; it names the guilt or corruption of flesh and blood, not its nature.
• What about the blood kept as relics? — All blood that flowed from Christ rises in his body; the relic blood is said to have flowed miraculously from an image of Christ.
• Why keep the wounds? — Five reasons: his own glory as a perpetual trophy; confirming the disciples’ faith; showing the Father how he died for us; convincing the redeemed of his mercy; and announcing to the damned the justice of their condemnation.