Christ's Resurrection as Cause of the Resurrection of Souls; Why It Was Fitting for Christ to Ascend, and According to Which Nature

Orientation #

He begins in the middle of q. 56, a. 2 (having done a. 1, on Christ’s resurrection as cause of the resurrection of bodies), then takes up the prooemium and first two articles of the question on the Ascension. He defers the third objection of q. 57, a. 2 to a later article, “lest we proceed… disorderly,” and closes by asking for a break.

The class, in order #

1. Objections: resurrection of Christ as cause of the resurrection of souls (“the bodies rise up through the what human dispensation”) #

Point: four objections that Christ’s resurrection causes only bodily, not spiritual, resurrection.

1. Augustine (on John): bodies rise through the human dispensation, souls through the substance of God; but Christ’s resurrection pertains not to the divine substance but to the human dispensation.
2. Body does not act on spirit; Christ’s resurrection pertains to his body.
3. Since all bodies rise (1 Cor 15) but not all souls — some go to eternal punishment (Mt 25) — the causality cannot be the same.
4. The resurrection of souls is by remission of sins, done through the Passion (“he washed us from our sins in his blood,” Apoc. 1); so the Passion, not the resurrection, causes it.

Aside: he notes Thomas puts the same thought in the sixth stanza of the Adoro Te Devote.

2. Digression: the three goods and the three events after the death of Christ (“the goods of the soul, the goods of the body, and then exterior goods”) #

Point: the Greek division of man’s goods maps onto what follows Christ’s death. Descent into hell (beatific vision) = good of the soul; resurrection = good of the body; ascension = exterior good, being in the right place. He notes the ascension is the most neglected, being in the Apostles’ Creed but not in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan.

3. Sed contra and body of q. 56, a. 2 (“He rose on account of our justification”) #

Sed contra: Romans 4:25 — justification is nothing other than the resurrection of souls; and the gloss on Psalm 29 (“at evening weeping, in the morning joy”) makes Christ’s resurrection the cause of our resurrection, of soul now, of body in the future.

Body: Christ’s resurrection acts in the power of his divine nature, which reaches both. For from God the soul lives through grace and the body lives through the soul. So the resurrection has instrumentally (instrumentaliter) an effective power toward both. It is also an exemplar of the soul’s resurrection: Rom 6, “as Christ rose… so we should walk in newness of life,” and reckon ourselves dead to sin. So: efficient (instrumental) and exemplar causality.

He asides on the order of the articles: bodily resurrection was treated first, perhaps as more known.

4. The Anaxagorean way of dividing (“everything is inside of everything”) #

Point: the three-good division is not exclusive. Anaxagoras said everything is in everything; we name a thing from what it has most of, absolutely or in comparison. So the resurrection is called the good of the body without excluding the soul. Example: Macbeth is called a tragedy though there is a little comic relief in it.

5. Replies to the four objections (“by partaking of God… not by partaking of a holy soul”) #

1. Augustine means souls rise by participation in God’s substance — by partaking divine goodness souls become just, not by partaking any creature; whereas our bodies are made glorious by partaking the glory of Christ’s body.
2. The efficacy toward souls is not from the risen body’s own power but from the divinity to which it is personally united.
3. Resurrection of souls pertains to merit, an effect of justification; resurrection of bodies is ordered to punishment or reward, effects of the one judging. Christ does not justify all, but judges all. He adds the argument for bodily resurrection: the body should share the reward or punishment of what was done in the flesh.
4. Two things concur in justification: remission of guilt and newness of life by grace. As regards efficiency (divine power), both Passion and resurrection cause both. As regards exemplar causality, the death is properly cause of remission of guilt (we die to sin) and the resurrection cause of the newness of life. The Passion is also a meritorious cause; the resurrection, he says, is not.

Aside (on reply 1): Thomas defends Augustine as he defends Aristotle — e.g. the Metaphysics text (inferred: Book XII) that seems to say God knows only himself; Thomas shows God chiefly knows himself and in knowing himself knows all that can be his effect. Aristotle elsewhere criticises Empedocles for making us know what God does not.

6. Prooemium of q. 57 and the first objections to the fittingness of the Ascension (“those things which have themselves in the best way”) #

Six articles listed: fittingness; according to what nature; by his own power; above all bodily heavens; above all spiritual creatures; the effect. (He notes Thomas’s disputed questions De spiritualibus creaturis, eleven articles.)

Objections to a. 1:

1. Aristotle, De Caelo II: what is best disposed possesses its good without motion (motion is acquiring what one lacks). Christ was best disposed — highest good as God, supremely glorified as man. He stresses: your body will not be as glorious as Christ’s.
2. Everything moved moves for something better; nothing accrued to Christ in heaven — his soul no wiser, his body no more glorious.
3. He assumed nature for our salvation; it would be more saving for us that he stay and converse with us (“there will come a day when you desire to see one day of the Son of Man, and you will not see it”).
4. Gregory, Moralia XIV: his body was in no way changed after the resurrection; yet he did not ascend at once (“I have not yet ascended to my Father”); so neither should he after forty days.

Sed contra: John 20, “I ascend to my Father and your Father” — Thomas notes “my” and “your” hold in somewhat different ways.

Asides: Teresa of Avila’s sense of Christ’s presence, and “I will have you converse with angels and not with men.” The founder of Opus Dei: there is more distance between you and God than between you and a two-year-old — Warren Murray suggesting “than between you and a cockroach,” since the distance is infinite. Compare Thomas on God knowing lowly things: the gap between lowest and highest creature is nothing to the gap between the highest creature and God.

7. Body of q. 57, a. 1 and the four replies (“place ought to be proportioned to the thing in place”) #

Body: place must be proportioned to the thing placed. By the resurrection Christ began an immortal, incorruptible life in his human nature; our place is the place of generation and corruption, the heavenly place the place of incorruption. Hence it was fitting he ascend.

1. Only God possesses his good without motion, being wholly immutable (“I am the Lord and I do not change,” Mal 3:6); every creature is in some way changeable (Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram VIII), and the assumed nature remains created. (Aside: some heretics now want God to change, “all shook up with our loving him.”)
2. Nothing accrued as regards the essence of glory, body or soul; but something accrued as to the suitability of place, which belongs to the bene esse of glory, and of this fittingness he could have a joy — not newly beginning to rejoice but rejoicing in a new way, as over a thing fulfilled (gloss on Ps 15, “delights at your right hand”). Discussion of the gloss’s obtutibus — the gazing or sight of men, taken away.
3. His bodily presence was withdrawn, but the presence of his divinity remains (“I am with you all days”); Leo: he who ascended does not desert his adopted ones. A student notes his bodily presence in the Eucharist, “in between.” Then three reasons the Ascension was more useful than his staying, divided by faith, hope and charity:

• faith, which is of things unseen (John 16, the Spirit convicting the world of justice; Augustine: the faith of the faithful will be the condemnation of the unfaithful; “blessed are those who do not see and believe”);
• hope (John 14, “I go to prepare a place… that where I am you also may be”); “where the body is, there the eagles will be gathered”;
• charity, raising affection to heavenly things (Col 3, “seek what is above”; Mt 6, “where your treasure is”); and because the Holy Spirit is love, “it is expedient for you that I go” (John 16); Augustine: you cannot receive the Spirit while you persist in knowing according to the flesh.

4. Though a celestial place was congruent, he deferred the ascension to prove the truth of the resurrection — Acts 1:3, shown living by many arguments through forty days; the gloss: dead forty hours, he confirmed himself living forty days; or the forty days signify the present age (man from the four elements, instructed against transgressing the Decalogue).

Asides: the translation of “eagles” as “vultures” in newer Bibles, and his brother Mark’s mountain-climbing story about the birds circling the stragglers; the martyr Aquilina, “little eagle,” misspelled on the calendar; a painting of the Ascension at the University of St. Thomas, and the “haunting words” that some doubted; the joke of Peter’s good news and bad news on Easter Sunday (“he wants to talk about last Friday”). He tells the listener this is raw material for an Ascension sermon, to be broken up as “pre-chewed food.”

8. q. 57, a. 2: objections that Christ ascends as God (“no one ascends to heaven except the one who descends”) #

1. Ps 46, “God ascends in jubilation,” said of God before the incarnation.
2. It belongs to the same one to ascend as to descend (John 3; Eph 4); Christ descended as God, since human nature was not in heaven before.
3. By ascending Christ ascends to the Father, but as man he does not arrive at equality (“he is greater than me”).

Sed contra: Eph 4 with the gloss — what ascends is what descended; he descended by taking human nature.

Asides: where does Thomas get these arguments? “From the students’ exams” — the many ways students misstate the definition of motion; and the student who, misreading the board, wrote a paper on Scotus’s doctrine of “thinness” instead of haecceitas (“thisness”).

9. Body of a. 2: the two senses of secundum quod (“the condition of the one ascending, and the cause”) #

Point: the phrase secundum quod can mark either (a) the condition of the one ascending or (b) the cause of the ascension.

• As condition: ascent cannot belong to the divine nature — nothing is higher than the deity to ascend to, and ascent is local motion, which cannot belong to what is immobile and not in place. So Christ ascended as man, not as God.
• As cause: he ascended by the power of his divinity, not of his human nature; so he ascended as God. Augustine (Sermon on the Ascension): of what was ours, the Son of God hung on the cross; of his own, he ascended.

Student exchange: is there a meritorious cause on the part of the human nature? He allows there might be — Thomas says by his death he merited his resurrection, and by his descent into hell his ascension; a student adds, by his lowly coming, his glorious coming at the end.

Digression on Latin: secundum quod with the little ly is medieval Latin trying to supply the article Latin lacks; in principio erat verbum against en archē… ho logos, where the article signals “the Word” by antonomasia. Latin grammarians copied Greek grammar and misordered the cases — the ablative tacked on though it functions like the Greek genitive; English grammar inherited the confusion. Msgr. Dionne on Thomas thinking so well in Latin though Greek is superior; Warren Murray on the English novel surpassing the French.

Digression on the Creed: the six articles can be divided as descent and ascent, or in three — the coming into this world, the death (the main thing) with its three effects, and the second coming to judge. And his attempt in class to reason out man’s chief good: interior goods over exterior, then goods of the soul over goods of the body — a student objected, “nobody thinks that you think, Berquist. Girls and money.”

10. Replies of a. 2 (“he is said to ascend in the heart of man”) #

1. Those Old Testament authorities are said prophetically of God as to be incarnate. Or: ascending can belong to the divine nature metaphorically, as God is said to ascend in the heart of man when man subjects and humbles himself to God. Parallel: “my soul magnifies the Lord” — not making him greater, but in her soul; likewise when we bless God. A student’s parallel: could we say God “comes over” us, because we come under him?
2. Augustine (on the Creed): the one who descends and the one who ascends is the same God-Man. Descent is twofold: (a) descent from heaven, attributed to the God-Man as God, not local motion but the emptying of Philippians — taking the form of a slave, emptied not by losing his fullness but by taking our littleness, so not deserting heaven but taking an earthly nature into the unity of his person; (b) the local descent into the lower parts of the earth (Eph 4:9), belonging to him according to the condition of his human nature. He qualifies: the soul does not change place, but its power is applied there, as with angels.
3. Christ ascends to the Father insofar as he ascends to sitting at the right hand, which belongs to him in one way as God, in another as man — deferred to a later article.

His words #

• human dispensation — Augustine’s term for the economy of Christ’s humanity, contrasted with “the substance of God”.
• Anaxagorean way of dividing — naming a thing from what it has most of, since “everything is inside of everything”; not exclusive division.
• instrumentaliter — having power “as a tool” of the divinity.
• exemplar — “the second kind of cause,” formal, as Christ’s rising is the pattern of our newness of life.
• by antonomasia — naming by pre-eminence: “the Apostle” = Paul, “the Philosopher” = Aristotle, Homer as “the poet”, ho logos.
• proemium — the little preface listing the articles (“as Monsignor Dionne would say”).
• bene esse — the well-being of glory, as distinct from its essence.
• obtutibus — the gaze or sight (of men), in the gloss on Psalm 15.
• secundum quod — “according as”; two senses: condition of the one ascending, or cause of the ascension.
• haecceitas — Scotus’s “thisness” (misread by a student as “thinness”).

Texts #

Read in class

• Summa Theologiae III, q. 56, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Summa Theologiae III, q. 57, prooemium
• Summa Theologiae III, q. 57, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Summa Theologiae III, q. 57, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Quoted within: Rom 4:25; Rom 6; 1 Cor 15; Mt 25; Apoc 1; Ps 29 with gloss; Aristotle, De Caelo II; Mal 3:6; Ps 15 with gloss; John 14, 16, 20; Acts 1:3; Col 3; Mt 6; Ps 46; John 3; Eph 4:9-10; Phil 2; Augustine on John, De Genesi ad litteram VIII, Sermon on the Ascension, On the Creed; Gregory, Moralia XIV; Leo.

Mentioned

• Thomas, Adoro Te Devote, sixth stanza
• Thomas, De spiritualibus creaturis (eleven articles)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles
• Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (inferred); De Anima; on Empedocles
• Teresa of Avila, Life
• Shakespeare, Macbeth; the Federalist Papers citing “the poet”

His questions #

• Is Christ’s resurrection the cause of the resurrection of souls, or only of bodies? — Of both: instrumentally by the power of the divinity, and as exemplar of the newness of life.
• What is the ascension for, in the division of goods? — The exterior good, being in the right place.
• Why does Thomas treat the resurrection of bodies before that of souls? — Perhaps because it is more known.
• Why do all bodies rise but not all souls? — Resurrection of souls pertains to justification, of bodies to judgement; Christ justifies not all but judges all.
• Is the resurrection a meritorious cause? — No; the Passion is, “his death”.
• Was it fitting for Christ to ascend, when nothing accrued to him? — Yes: place must suit the thing placed, and nothing accrued to the essence of his glory, only to the bene esse of fitting place.
• Why did he wait forty days? — To prove the truth of the resurrection by many signs; the gloss adds symbolic readings of the forty.
• Does ascending belong to Christ as God or as man? — As man, if secundum quod names the condition of the one ascending; as God, if it names the cause.
• Is there a meritorious cause of the ascension on the part of the human nature? — Possibly: by his descent into hell he merited his ascension.
• In what sense does Christ ascend to the Father, if as man he is not equal? — Left open, deferred to the later article on sitting at the right hand.