At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

A Good Friday meditation at Substack.

Addendum 4/4/21. Vito Caiati writes,

I have been pondering the profound and poignant Good Friday meditation, “At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron,” that you just posted on Substack.  The Weil text that inspired your post leaves me, nevertheless, with a tormenting question, one which arises from her conviction that when an iron spike rips through the flesh of a human hand, “The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation.”  However, does the assumed equivalence between the overwhelming pain and suffering of human beings whose flesh is pierced by iron and that of Christ really hold, for it is the Second Person of the Trinity who is crucified and, as such, a Being who is omniscient? However the admixture of the divine and human natures of Christ are conjoined in his Person, we cannot assume, without falling in heresy, that one of those natures, with its inherent intellectual capacities, ceases to be operational at certain moments, so that on the Cross only the human nature is present. If both natures are present, than the divine nature of Christ faces death with the divine knowledge of those things that are hidden from other men, in particular the certainty of God’s existence and the knowledge of His nature,  the destiny of the soul after death, its relation to God, and so on.  Thus, while Christ’s physical suffering is comparable to ours, his emotional suffering is not: He is in a unique and privileged existential position, one that derives from his absolute knowledge of all things, which permits him to die without the terrors of the unknown that plagues us ordinary human beings. Thus, it would seem that the analogy of his suffering and ours holds but only to a certain point and not absolutely. Am I wrong on this?

Well, Vito, I can't say that you are wrong. Indeed, I think you are right about an implication of the orthodox and traditional "two natures, one person" understanding of the Incarnation.  If Christ is one person with two natures,  then both natures must be "operational" to use your word at all times during Christ's earthly sojourn. (What happens after the Ascension is a further question.) But if there is no 'switching off' of the divine nature during the Crucifixion, then how can Christ experience fully the human predicament in which the worst of suffering is not mere physical suffering but the latter together with the utter desolation of abandonment?  Recall that the traditional understanding, hammered out over a number of Church councils, was that Christ is fully man, and of course fully God as well.  And to experience fully the horror of the fallen human predicament, one would have to experience the spiritual and emotional agony of abandonment, and this to its highest degree.  "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Who is speaking here?  Not the Second Person of the Trinity. A man is speaking, no ordinary man, of course, but a man nonetheless who came into the world in the usual way, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.   There is no satisfactory clarification of this state of affairs, at least none satisfactory to the discursive intellect.  This is because the Incarnation as traditionally understood is logically contradictory.  I have discussed this many times. (See Trinity and Incarnation category.) In the present context, the contradiction takes the following form. The man dying on the cross is the God-Man; he is one person (hypostasis) in two (individual) natures. Now who cries out in extremis to the Father? Not a nature, hence not Christ's human nature.  A nature can do no such thing. A person can. But there is only one person on the cross, the Logos Itself, the Word, God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. So the Second Person is crying to the First Person: Why have you forsaken me? That's absurd, i.e. logically impossible (given the background theological assumptions). God cannot forsake God. Don't forget: Trinity is not tritheism.  God is one.

I would say that that the absurdity of the Incarnation, which was recognized by Tertullian, Kierkegaard, Shestov, et al. is what allows the heresies to arise such as the one espoused by Simone Weil.  The heresies are attempts to make rational sense out of a combination of ideas unintelligible to the discursive intellect.  They have a logic to them.

Could it be that some contradictions are true, and that the Incarnation is one of them?  Call that the dialetheic way out. Or you might take the view that no contradictions are true, and that, in reality the Incarnation is non-contradictory; it is just that our cognitive architecture makes it impossible for such weak reeds as we are to understand how it is non-contradictory. Call that the mysterian way out. You could also ditch both Trinity and Incarnation (as traditionally understood) and go Unitarian.