THIS doctrine of the one person and two natures of Christ Our Lord, which is simply the answer to the questions who and what He is, is so vital to the understanding of what He did, and indeed to the understanding of all that we ourselves are and do, that we must examine it in more detail. There is not the tiniest scintilla of truth in it which will not cast a great beam of light. The tendency to dismiss the vast mass of Christ's revelation upon it and the Church's meditation upon His revelation as mere theology can come only from a
Notice that it was the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity who became man, not the First, nor the Third, nor all Three. For the redemption of the world why was the Second Person chosen? Some hint at the answer will be found in what we have already seen about the special relation of the Second Person to God's original plan of creation. God designed this creation according to the design of His intellect: and it is by way of intellect that the Son of God proceeds within the Blessed Trinity. God made this universe as a mirroring in the finite of His own perfection: but the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is that same mirroring in the infinite. As St. John tells us in the prologue to his Gospel, all things whatsoever that were made were made by the Word of God Who was with God and Who was God. Given this special linking of one Person within the Blessed Trinity to God's original plan for this universe, it seems fitting that, when owing to the sin of man there was damage to be repaired, the repairing should fall to the same Person, and that He who had established all things should, in St. Paul's phrase, re-establish them. Thus it was the Word who became Flesh and dwelt among us that we, believing in His name, might be
God the Son took to Himself a human nature, not merely wearing it as a disguise or taking it up as an instrument He might use, but making it His own as my nature is my own, making it His own so utterly that we can express the new relation only by saying that He, God the Son, became man. He did not take a human nature simply to be able to do the things that a man does, to act the part of a man, to pass for a man. Let us say it again. He became man. To the question what are you? He could answer with no mitigation or reservation "I am man". That would not have been the whole answer, for it would not have reached His Divine Nature. But it would have been wholly true. The relation between His nature as man and His person was as direct, as intimate as the relation between my nature and my person. He could say "I am man" as completely as I can say "I am man". Indeed He could say it with better title for He was more of a man than I:
This nature He took was a real human nature and a complete human nature. Take the reality first. The human nature of Christ was not simply a human body animated by a human soul, thus possessing all that the definition of a man requires, suddenly appearing among us. He actually belongs to us. His soul was a direct and individual creation of the Blessed Trinity, just like your soul and my soul;
Of a human mother, Mary. But not of a human father. In the sense in which other human beings have a mother and father. He had a mother only. The bodies of other human beings result from the action of an element supplied by their father upon an element supplied by their mother. In the case of Our Lord the effect upon the female element normally produced by the male element was produced simply by a creative act of the will of God. Thus He is a member of Adam's race on His mother's side; He is a Jew on His mother's side; but not upon His father's side, for in the order of human generation He had no father. He was descended from Adam as we all are, but not as much as we all are. None of us derived our souls from Adam, but we all derived our bodies from Adam; whereas He derived His body from Adam only as to part. It follows that we are all related to Him— through her, and only through her: we are all His maternal
His was a real human nature: and it was a complete human nature, lacking nothing whatever that human nature requires for completeness. We read in Hebrews He has been through every trial, fashioned as we are, only sinless—sin not being required to complete human nature, but always operating to diminish it. To grasp the completeness of Our Lord's manhood, we have only to consider the elements of which manhood is composed, body and soul. His body was a real
He was born as an infant and grew through boyhood to manhood; in His body He knew hunger and thirst; when His body was scourged, it bled; when it had a weight to bear too heavy for it, it fell; when it was damaged beyond a certain point, it
Just as He had a human body, He had a human soul to animate it, a soul which like other human souls was a created spirit. My soul is sorrowful even unto death.
Again, His soul had the faculties of intellect and will, human intellect and human will. He who by His divine intellect had all wisdom could in His human intellect grow in wisdom. (Lk.ii.52.) Not My will but Thine be done, thereby indicating that though His human will was totally united to the divine will, there was question of two wills and not one.
The co-existence in Christ of a human intellect with the divine intellect may at first seem more difficult to conceive than the co-existence of the two wills. A human intellect proceeds toward knowledge discursively as the philosophers say, step by step as ordinary men say. The external world makes its impact upon the bodily senses; and from the evidence of the external world which thus gets through, the soul forms its concepts, and compares its concepts to form judgments; and as its experience increases, its knowledge grows. But all this in a necessarily limited way. It does seem difficult to conceive that the one identical person who, by His divine nature, knew all things could also proceed to acquire by the operation of His human intellect scattered sparkles of the infinite light of knowledge in which He already lived. It is, I say, hard to conceive, yet not inconceivable. The human nature and the divine nature belong to one person, but they are not one nature. The one person could operate, really and truly, in both natures. If Our Lord wanted to lift a load He could have lifted it either by the effortless fiat of the divine will or by the hard effort of the human muscles. Our Lord's human nature was a reality. His human senses and His human intellect were reality. His human senses could not do other than receive the impact of the external world; His human intellect could not do other than act upon their evidence to form concepts and judgments. The Godhead did not swallow up the manhood.
While
we are upon this question of Our Lord's human intellect, there are two other
things to be said about it. It has been the steady teaching of theologians that
Our Lord's human intellect had both infused knowledge and the Beatific Vision.
What it must have been like for the one human mind to move along so many roads
at once we cannot well picture.
But there is no contradiction in the idea of
the mind moving by one road to a goal it has already reached by another.
The
point to be grasped is that neither infused knowledge nor beatific knowledge
are beyond the power of human nature to receive from God.
Many men have had
infused knowledge—though not continuously;
and all the saved will have beatific
knowledge.
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Our Lord then as man had a real body with a real soul, with a real intellect and a real will. His emotions were real, too: He loved St. John; He wept over Jerusalem and over dead Lazarus;
But if Our Lord had a real human nature with a real natural life, then He needed the supernatural life, too, to accomplish those things which are beyond the power of nature. By merely human natural power. He could not see God direct any more than we could; but His human nature was capable of receiving sanctifying grace, just as ours is. The work of grace in the soul is, as we have seen, appropriated to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. The Second Person as God possessed all things; but as man He needed the indwelling of the Holy Spirit both for that elevation and sanctification which every human nature needs, and for the special guidance and illumination His human nature needed for the unique work which as Son of God He was to do in it and through it. Our Lord then had sanctifying grace in His soul. He did not have faith or hope because, possessing the Beatific Vision He did not need them; but He had charity in the fullest measure possible to a creature— for, at the risk of wearying, we must constantly remind ourselves that His human nature was a creature:
His charity, like all charity, was love of God and love of neighbour. There is a modern fashion for concentrating on Christ's love for men and either totally ignoring His love for God or regarding it as an amiable weakness. It is easy enough to maintain this attitude if one has either not read the Gospels, or had read them sketchily as a boy and forgotten them. For Christ Our Lord Himself His Father's will was paramount and His one joy was in doing it: indeed it is — yea, rather blessed are they who have the word of My Father and keep it.
Readers of this book who may be making a serious study of the Gospels for the first time will almost certainly be startled by the place that prayer to the Father takes in Christ's life. His first recorded words are that strange answer to His mother when after Could you not tell that I must needs be in the place which belongs to my Father? (Lk.ii.49.)
His last words as he was dying on the Cross were: Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit (Lk.xi.46).
Here
again, as with the co-existence of human and divine know-ledge in the one
Person, the mind sees a real problem.
If Christ was God, in what sense was He
praying to God?
It is idle to try to avoid the difficulty by answering that the
Second Person of the Blessed Trinity was speaking to the other two Persons.
Assuredly He was, but this converse within the Divine Nature is not the prayer
we have in mind here, nor indeed is it prayer at all.
Christ also prayed as we
pray, as the creature prays to the Creator.
And here precisely is the
difficulty. What is done in the nature is done by the Person.
To say that
Christ prayed as the creature prayed to the Creator is to say that God the Son
prayed the prayer of a creature.
It is difficult, but it is precise.
When God
the Son took to Himself a human nature and was the Person in that nature, He
took upon Himself all the obligations that a person has to his nature, and one
such obligation is to express its creatureliness to its Creator.
His prayer was
the expression of a human nature in all the manifold relations that the human
nature has to God;
and because it was God Who uttered that human prayer it was
the perfect human prayer.
Nothing could be more repaying for ourselves than to
study it closely.
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Thus, God and man, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in our nature. Our Lord moves through the Gospels: thirty years of all but complete silence, then three years' healing, teaching, in crowds or with the Twelve or alone in the prayer of God, moving steadily towards the thing He had come to do. But He must not remain for us simply a luminous figure, upon Whom we dare not gaze too closely, upon Whom we need not gaze too closely. In Christ, God is showing Himself to us. Not to look at that which is shown would leave the showing vain. Growth in the knowledge of Christ is growth in the knowledge of God, which He is; and of man, which He is. Quite literally we cannot grow to our capacity in the knowledge either of God or of man if we do not grow in the knowledge of Christ. He is our best approach to the knowledge of God because, as we have seen, here God is to be studied not simply in His own nature, infinitely glorious but remote from our experience, but in our nature, finitely glorious and thronging with experiences that we have shared. He is our best approach to the knowledge of man, because man, like everything else, is best studied in its most perfect specimen— only defective knowledge can result from exclusive
This growth in the knowledge of Our Lord is not simply a matter of learning texts and seeing the detail of this or that episode of His life. We must get to know Him, as we know a person. But this involves something else, which I find it rather difficult to convey. I have already made one effort. I shall try again. A knowledge of a person has to be personal. There is no such thing as an abstract knowledge of a person which all who know him possess: there is your knowledge of a person and my knowledge of a person, and we may both know him intimately, but your knowledge will not be the same as mine. Knowledge of a person is a relation between that person and us: it is not only what is to be known about the person, but our reaction—the reaction of our whole self, intellect, will, emotions—to the person. As I have said any number of men may know another man intimately, and not only intimately but truly, yet if they could compare their knowledge there would be vast surprises. It is so with any man: there are elements in him which one friend will respond to and another not, and which those who respond to will respond to at different levels of intensity. It is so, above all, with Christ Our Lord because of the very perfection of His human nature, its depth and universality. No one of us can see and respond to all that is there, no two of us will see and respond to the same things in Him. What is vital for each one of us is that we develop our own
That is why I shall not here attempt a description of the man Christ Jesus. I could at most give my picture of Him which is not more valid or valuable than someone else's merely because it is mine. Nor is there any reason why I should try to impose my picture of Him upon others of His friends. It is for each one to develop His own personal intimacy by meeting Him. And the first place to meet
But if it would be at once impertinent and pointless to present the reader with a portrait of Christ by me, instead of letting him meet Christ for himself, it may be well to draw attention to certain elements in what I may call roughly the modern view of Christ Our Lord which may already be in the reader's mind, and which therefore he may bring with him to the reading of the Gospels and think he is finding in the Gospels. The mind needs to be cleansed of this particular error in order that it may be prepared to see the Christ who is
The error I have in mind is the picture of Christ as all love— love in this context meaning a sentimental weakness about human beings. This error is carved into almost all the statues one sees: one feels that the artists are not close or recent readers of the Gospels. It is enshrined in the line "Gentle Jesus meek and mild", an admirable line when it was written but now, by the wearing down of language, an appalling travesty. Meekness is a great and in-tensely dynamic virtue, so is mildness. But that is not what the words mean in the English of today. "Meek and mild" has become a term of contempt for the type of character which, if it does not deserve contempt, at least merits no particular admiration. It implies a passivity, a willingness to be pushed about, an amiable desire for niceness all round. It is doubtful if the money changers whom He cast out of the Temple would have called Him mild, It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs (Mark vii.27).
It might be well, before proceeding to a new reading of the Gospels in the intent of meeting Christ, to begin with the twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel where you will find His terrifying attack upon the Scribes and Pharisees: nothing could more violently purge the mind of the picture of ineffective niceness.
Woe upon you, Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, that swallow up the property of widows, under cover of your long prayers. ... Woe upon you, Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that encompass sea and land to gain a single proselyte, and then make the proselyte twice as worthy of damnation as yourselves. ... Woe upon you, Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that scour the outward part of cup and dish, while all within is running with avarice and incontinence. ... Woe upon you, Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that are like whitened sepulchres, fair in outward show, when they are full of dead men's bones and all manner of corruption within. ... Serpents that you are, brood of vipers, how should you escape from the award of hell?
This is not the whole of Christ, but it is an element too often overlooked. It is an element not only in His character: what we must at every cost grasp is that it is an element in His love. Note that at the very end of this vast invective Our Lord utters one of the ???
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Jerusalem, Jerusalem, still murdering the prophets, and stoning the messengers that are sent to thee, how often have I been ready to gather thy children together as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and thou didst refuse it.
Love is a more complex thing, in itself and in Christ, than our shallowness always knows, more complex and more extreme. It is a curious phenomenon, which will lead a psychologist of the future, perhaps, to a deeper understanding of the mind of our age, that it has effortlessly and one would say automatically sorted out the tenderer elements in Christ to the total ignoring of the fiercer. In the Sermon on the Mount, for instance (Mt.v. to vii.) every one has heard of the eight opening phrases: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the patient, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for holiness, the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, those who suffer persecution in the cause of right. But practically nobody remembers that in the long sermon that follows these opening phrases Our Lord threatens His hearers with hell no
The
plain truth is that we must bring to our meeting with Christ no preconceived
ideas of what He ought to be,
but a determination to learn what He is.
He is not to be measured by our standard,
for He is the God Who made us.
He is the standard.
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I shall say no more of what in our modern phrase we call the human personality of Christ (be careful of this phrase: Christ Our Lord was not a human person, though He had a human nature: but the word personality as used today has got separated from the philosophical word person and only means the general effect of a person's character and temperament). What we must now consider is a certain difficulty that may strike us as we read the Gospels. It is part of the difficulty already discussed arising from the two natures of Christ. The person very rightly utters His nature, this one Person who had two natures rightly utters each nature. But the result is two quite different sets of utterances. I and the Father are one, He can also say The Father is greater than I.
In the one case it is the "I" who totally owns the divine nature and expresses a fact about His divine nature, in the second case it is the same "I" who owns a human nature and expresses a fact about His human nature. We must habituate ourselves to this dual utterance, holding firmly in the mind that in either utterance the person speaking is God the Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Here again we must aim not at a mere verbal awareness, but at a realization of the man who was God. For the most part, I think, we tend to concentrate upon what it means that God took to Himself a human nature and became man. But we must also consider what it must have meant to this man, really man as we are man, to know that He was God. We see what it meant to His apostles as they came gradually to be aware that the man was God: it stunned their human minds, then revitalized their human minds with its glory. We must try to see also what it meant to Christ Himself to be aware that He was God, for it was with a human mind that He was aware of it, a mind
What the blaze of the glory and the wonder of the knowledge must have been we can barely begin to conceive: but that bare beginning of conceiving we must attempt. Here again each must do it for himself. As the Apostles themselves grew to the knowledge of the fact, they could only be (as we should be without the clue) utterly bewildered. They saw him acting and speaking as man; they saw Him acting and speaking as man has no right to act and speak, as only God rightly could. But they had no concept born of experience of one person with two natures, for there never had been such a person any more than there ever would be such
Their bewilderment was not simply the difficulty of reconciling two sets of statements from the same person, one set entirely true of Him as God, one set entirely true of Him as man. The difficulty goes deeper. Until they realized that He was God they must have been uncertain even of His virtue as man. This is a truth which a great deal of modern talk quite incredibly overlooks. The phrase "Christ was not God but He was the perfect man", can surely only be the product of a long and heroic abstention from Gospel reading. If He was not God, He was not a perfect man: He was a totally intolerable man. He that loveth father and mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. If the speaker was not God then he was a man of an egoism so monstrous that no word short of insanity would fit it. And in one way or another this note runs through all Our Lord's sayings. If He was God, then He was perfect man; if He was not God then He was a very arrogant man. But we know He was man, but He was different. And the difference was not only in that He had a divine nature in which also He acted and spoke. Though the divine nature and the human did not mingle, though there was, so to speak, no spilling over of the divine into the human, yet even in the activity of the human nature many things had of necessity to be different because the person whose nature it was was God. He loved the companionship of the Apostles, and they loved His companionship. But He knew the difference and they felt His difference. He never asked their advice; never argued with them or indeed with anyone. He was the Master and He taught, and men must either accept His teaching or reject it: there was no place for argument about it. Nor did He ever pray with His Apostles: He taught them how to pray, but His own prayer was alone with the Father. Still they loved Him as no other man has ever been loved, though still not in the measure of His love for them. They were desolate without Him. And the one of them that He loved most summarized the doctrine of Christ's Godhead God is Love.