In the immediately preceding theological thread, Dr. Caiati reminded me of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press, 2017). So I cracked open my copy and found some notes from October 2018, one batch of which I will now turn into a weblog entry.
'Hypostatic Union' ". . . refers to the divine person of the Word uniting a human nature to himself in his own person." (113, emphasis in original) This is the familiar one person (hypostasis)- two natures doctrine. The one person is the Word (Logos), the second person of the Trinity. The union is called hypostatic because it is the union of two natures in one hypostasis. The two natures are divine nature and human nature. Both natures are to be understood as individualized, not as universals. They are natures of one and the same self-subsistent individual, the Word. There is no "confusion of natures," which is to say that the two natures are really distinct, distinct in reality and not merely in our thought, though not separable in reality. These two natures are nonetheless essentially together: neither can exist without the other. It is not as if there is "merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God." (113) There is only one being, the Word, which possesses two distinct but really inseparable natures. Fr. White then concludes:
Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of the person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son [the Word or Logos or second person of the Trinity] existing as man.
I have two questions.
First, is human nature conjoined to the Word at every time? It would have to be given that the two natures are essentially, and not merely accidentally, united. The Word is essentially divine. So if the two natures are essentially united, then the Word is essentially human: it possesses essentially a human nature. That implies that at no time is the Word not in possession of a human nature. Now the Incarnation is the acquisition by the Word of a human nature. The Incarnation is an event -- call it the Christ event -- that occurred at a particular time in a particular place. Before that time, the Incarnation was at best prophesied. A contradiction would seem to ensue:
1) The Word possesses human nature at every time;
2) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature at every time.
How do we negotiate this aporetic dyad? More simply, how remove the contradiction? Can it be removed without adding 'epicycles' to the theory that raise problems of their own?
My second question is a modal counterpart of the first. The Incarnation is a contingent event. There was no necessity that it occur. Had Adam not sinned there would have been no need for a Redeemer. Man would have continued blissfully in his paradisiacal, prelapsarian state. The soteriological significance of the Incarnation is that only by the Son's becoming man and suffering the ultimate penalty could man be restored to fellowship with God. For the offense against God was so great that only God could expiate it. But if the divine and human natures are united essentially in one person, the Word, then, given that the Word is a necessary being, it follows that the Incarnation is a necessary event. A second contradiction seems to ensue:
3) The Word possesses human nature in every possible world;
4) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature in every possible world.
(4) is true because there are worlds in which there is no Fall and thus no need for Incarnation. For those who don't understand Leibnizian 'possible worlds' jargon, the contradiction amounts to saying both that the Word is and is not human necessarily. Bear in mind that if x has a property essentially, and x is a necessary being, then x has the property necessarily.
There is a third question the 'exfoliation' (unwrapping) of which I will save for later, namely, if the Word has a human soul in virtue of having human nature, how does that human soul integrate with the conscious and self-conscious life of the second divine person? A person is not merely an hypostasis or substratum, but one that is conscious and self-conscious. A person is not an object but a subject or a subject-object. A number of further difficult questions spin off from here. Time to hit 'post.'
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