Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Crucifixion as Incarnation in extremis

In an earlier thread, Vito Caiati  states:

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 [in horrific] pain but without the terrors of the unknown that plague us ordinary human beings.

I responded:

But then Christ is not fully human. The orthodox line is that he is fully human and fully divine. To be fully human, however, he has to experience the horror of abandonment which is worse than physical suffering. The scripture indicates that he does: "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" On the cross, Christ experiences the terrifying doubt that he was deluded in thinking himself the Son of God or perhaps even that there is a God in the first place. If he didn't experience at least the first of these, then the Incarnation is not 'serious' and he didn't become one of us in full measure.

And then this Good Friday morning it occurred to me that I may have gotten this idea from Simone Weil, an idea that I discuss in At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron which I uploaded to Substack on Good Friday three years ago.  There I wrote:

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis.  Christ’s spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed  to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment and the full horror of the human predicament.  He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional. 

The darkest hour.  And then dawn. 

The reason?

If God were to become one of us, fully one of us, a slob like one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh?  Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery?  That is Weil's point.  The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death.  For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all human beings,  define being human. 

But Vito has a response:

I would suggest that when we speak of Christ’s humanity, we are referring to a human nature that is not deformed by original sin. Thus, the human nature that he shares with us is the prelapsarian one intended by God [for us before the Fall].

But this complicates the theological picture. For not only is the man Jesus born of a virgin, supernaturally impregnated by the Holy Spirit, the virgin Mary cannot be a transmitter of Original Sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception: the BVM had to be conceived without Original Sin.  The further theological 'epicycle,' even though it does not render the whole narrative incredible, does make it more difficult to believe.

But even if it is all true, Original Sin, Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, Weil's point would seem to retain its merit. Perhaps it could be put like this. For the redemption of such wretches as we are, God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, would have to enter in full measure into our miserable animal predicament if he is to be fully and really human.

It is almost as if there is a whiff of docetism in Vito's suggestion.   It would be instructive to work through all of the Christological 'heresies.'

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Bill Vallicella

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25 responses to “Crucifixion as Incarnation in extremis”

  1. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Given your philosophical learning and sophistication, these are rough intellectual waters for me to enter upon with you, but I’ll give it a go.
    It seems to me that the question revolves around what it is to be “fully and really human.” For you, it necessitates that Christ, a prelapsarian, sinless being, must “enter in full measure into our miserable animal predicament,” that is, not merely to experience all the misery of embodied, mortal existence but to do so with all ignorance, fears, and doubts of other human beings. My problem with this view is that it implicitly calls into question not only Christ’s innocence but also his divinity and all that flows from it, including his omniscience. Is it not enough that he experiences all the “whips and scorns” of human wretchedness—intense physical pain, despair, and death—as we would have had our essential natures had not been deformed by sin, by accident. He actually suffers in body, in the flesh; he actually feels deep despair (but as described by Brian and not out of doubt about God or his own mission); he actually dies, his spirit leaving his body, which lies in the tomb lifeless until the morning of the Third Day. Nothing human is denied by this interpretation, for all that is essential to our human nature is preserved, and only the postlapsarian, contingent penalties of sin that have wounded this divinely intended nature are absent from it.

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  2. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    One final point concerns the reason for the Incarnation. While the weight of orthodox opinion finds this in man’s fall from grace and his need for redemption (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, for example), the Franciscan tradition, which draws on the thought of Duns Scotus, while not denying “the saving work Christianity attributes to Christ,” affirms that “God’s main reason for the Incarnation was simply to be united with the human nature of Jesus Christ….thus, “even if there had been no sin at all and no need of salvation, Christ would have become incarnate anyway…God acts first for his own good and secondarily for our own good. And what God wanted, for himself, was to become Incarnate in Christ” (Thomas M. War, Ordered by Love: An Introduction to Duns Scotus, 136-37). And what underpins this want is love: “The Love of God in himself and the free desire that God has to share that love with another who can love him as perfectly as he loves himself, i.e. the Christ. … The Incarnation, then in Duns Scotus, becomes the unrepeatable, unique, and single defining act of God’s love. God, says Scotus, is what he is: we know that God exists and we know [because of Christ’s coming] what that existence is: Love” (Seamus Mulholland, OFM, “Incarnation in Franciscan Spirituality: Duns Scotus and the Meaning of Love.” http://www.slr-ofs.org/uploads/9/5/5/8/95584600/incarnation_in_franciscan_spirituality_-_scotus.pdf).
    Without necessarily endorsing Scotus’ position on the Incarnation, it allows us to stand back somewhat from the notion of the Fall and original sin as its prime cause. And this, in turn, perhaps frees us from insisting that Christ must experience suffering and death in precisely the manner that we, who live under the shadow of sin, do.

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  3. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito,
    Part of what makes this topic so difficult is that the very idea of one person having two distinct natures is a very difficult one. (The notion of person here is the Boethian one: an individual of a rational nature.) It is difficult because it seems contradictory. The divine nature includes the attribute, omniscience, among others. The human nature does not include omniscience; indeed, it excludes it: nothing human qua human is omniscient. The result is that one and the same suppositum, hypostasis, individual, is both omniscient and not omniscient. This violates the law of noncontradiction (LNC).
    So right here we fact a huge difficulty when it comes to understanding the Incarnation. Of course, solutions have been proposed. If I am right, however, the solutions lead to problems of their own that are just as bad or worse than the original one.
    On your view the God-Man is prelapsarian in two senses: as God and as man. When God or rather the Logos (2nd Person of Trinity) becomes man, he does not lose his omniscience (or any other omni-attribute). The Logos remains omniscient. You remember the Angelus from your boyhood: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
    Who is the subject of this omniscience? That is: who is the omniscient knower? Is it the eternal Logos or is it the man dying on the cross?
    And who is it that dies on the cross? It cannot be eternal Logos. You say: >>he actually dies, his spirit leaving his body, which lies in the tomb lifeless until the morning of the Third Day.<< What does 'he' refer to, and what does 'his spirit' refer to? Does 'his spirit' refer to the eternal Logos, or does 'his spirit' refer to the soul of Jesus of Nazareth, who is a soul-body composite? Furthermore, does Christ die the way we die? We die body and soul. (Xianity is not Platonism, though it has Platonic elements.) But the God-Man does not die the way we die. For the eternal Logos cannot die. How then can God sacrifice his only begotten Son (Logos)? The problems ramify. How are we to understand Redemption? Given the gravity of Adam's sin, no mere man can be the Redeemer: only God can redeem man, and bring man back into right relation with God. He does this by sacrificing his only begotten Son. But this Son (Logos) cannot die and so cannot be sacrificed. We are just scratching the surface of the conundra.

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito,
    I read your remarks on Scotus @ 1:42 after I had written my post @ 2:32. More tomorrow perhaps. Happy Easter!

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  5. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    Bill & Vito: Like Bill and Weil, I think to ascribe omniscience to Jesus – perfect knowledge of all things regarding God’s plan and purposes – is to eliminate that most essential aspect of a human experience in a crucifixion: the terror of dying in disgrace, pain, suffering, and alone. Elimination of that human terror on the cross would diminish, I think, the significance of the Incarnation.
    Rather than perfect knowledge, I place Jesus’s human perfection as perfect obedience to the Will of God. On this reading, omniscience about all things is not necessary. All that’s necessary is that Jesus knows that God wants him to go to Jerusalem and be killed, and the Gospels tell us that Jesus had a more or less direct line during his ministry to God’s Will in such matters.
    On the assumption that God’s Will is known with some specificity, obedience is something that anyone can do, making Jesus perfect obedience a real human possibility. The problem, however, is with the imperfect, limited knowledge of we finite beings, especially in cases where obedience might expose us to risk, injury, or death. Therefore, a precondition to obedience in the face of such uncertainty is the necessity of faith in God, that He is Good and His Will is for the good. With such faith, obedience becomes possible and something any human can do; without it, the uncertainty of our finite knowledge and the risk involved in obeying God makes perfect obedience impossible.
    Now, if Jesus had perfect knowledge of all things, then he would not need faith to obey God. Faith is the trust placed in God in the face of “things unseen.” Jesus, of course, had perfect faith, which means that he did not have perfect knowledge of all things and that he was therefore subject to the same temptation of other human beings to lose faith and disobey God. But he never succumbed to that temptation, which made him perfectly obedient to the Will of God.
    But didn’t he lose faith on the cross? What of his lament “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” Jesus was then quoting from the first line of Paslm 22 and I take it as indeed a moment of despair. But despair is not identical with losing faith. On the contrary, it is a moment, a very human moment, when the temptation to lose faith is at its maximum. And it is not insignificant that Psalm 22 begins in despair but ends in a display of faith in God’s saving power and Kingship over the world. So too with Jesus, a moment of what’s sometimes called the dark night of the soul, fortified nevertheless with perfect faith in God.

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  6. BV Avatar
    BV

    Thanks, Tom. I hope to respond before too long. It’s Easter morn, and I am off to mass with my wonderful Catholic wife. I bless the day I found her over 40 years ago. So I will set aside my displeasure/disgust with Bergoglio and his leftist crew and suck it up. In any case, not everything about the Novus Ordo mass is bad.
    Happy Easter, everybody.

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  7. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Tom,
    I value your contribution to this discussion, but I fear that your position results in the denial of the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures, divine and human, in one person. This is implicit in your contention that “Rather than perfect knowledge, I place Jesus’s human perfection as perfect obedience to the Will of God” and “Faith is the trust placed in God in the face of “things unseen.” Jesus, of course, had perfect faith, which means that he did not have perfect knowledge of all things and that he was therefore subject to the same temptation of other human beings to lose faith and disobey God. But he never succumbed to that temptation….”
    In this conception of Christ, his divine nature is deprived of two of its essential attributes, omniscience, which, consequently, reduces the intellect of Christ to the merely human, and perfect goodness, since he, like other men, is tempted by sin. Here, we have Christ as the almost perfect man of faith, rather than as the God-Man. In saying this, I admit that the problem of conceiving of the divine and human in one person is truly daunting and, I suspect, something that outstrips our powers of cognition. Thomas Joseph White wrestles with it in the fifth chapter of his The Incarnate Lord, “The Necessity of the Beatific Vision in the Earthly Christ,” and although I do not claim that what he has written there is beyond criticism, he, following and developing the thought of Aquinas, defends the orthodox claim that “Jesus of Nazareth possessed in the heights of his human intellect the beatific vision. That is to say, Christ as man possessed the immediate, intuitive knowledge of his own divinity, the divine life that he shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit [237] …. The immediate knowledge of God (or the beatific vision) is a necessary element in his humanity due to the duality of the natures that are present in the life of the Son of God and their simultaneous cooperation in one personal subject.” (274). In this conception of Christ’s interiority, the distinction knowledge/faith that holds for us mere mortals is overcome.

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  8. BV Avatar
    BV

    Tom T,
    (There’s a Tom O who shows up here, so you should not refer to yourself simply as ‘Tom.’)
    Anyway, your comment is excellent!
    >>Now, if Jesus had perfect knowledge of all things, then he would not need faith to obey God. Faith is the trust placed in God in the face of “things unseen.” Jesus, of course, had perfect faith, which means that he did not have perfect knowledge of all things and that he was therefore subject to the same temptation of other human beings to lose faith and disobey God.<< I think you correctly understand the relation of faith to knowledge. Faith in God excludes knowledge of God. You don't say it, but I hope you agree that faith is inferior to knowledge: better to have knowledge than faith. Metaphors can mislead, but I think it OK to say: better to see face-to-face than "through a glass darkly." Whether that glass be a dirty window or a 'looking glass,' i.e., a mirror. The rest of what you say in the passage I just quoted follows. But I wonder about the the sentence immediately following. >>But he never succumbed to that temptation, which made him perfectly obedient to the Will of God.<< I agree with the initial clause, but what at most follows is that Jesus was perfectly obedient to *what he took to be the will of God,* not to the will of God. How could he KNOW what the will of God was for him if Incarnation limited his knowledge? If he is a "slob like one of us" in the words of the '90s hit, he is in the same boat with us. How do I KNOW what God's will is for me? How did Tom Merton's abbot, Dom James, know that God's will was that Merton stay put at Gethsemani and not fly off to theological conferences? (If he had stayed put, he would not have met his end at a young age near Bangkok.)

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  9. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito and Tom T,
    Vito responding to and disagreeing with Tom:
    >>That is to say, Christ as man possessed the immediate, intuitive knowledge of his own divinity, the divine life that he shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit [237] …. The immediate knowledge of God (or the beatific vision) is a necessary element in his humanity due to the duality of the natures that are present in the life of the Son of God and their simultaneous cooperation in one personal subject.” (274). In this conception of Christ’s interiority, the distinction knowledge/faith that holds for us mere mortals is overcome.<< Trinity: three persons, one nature. Incarnation: one person, two natures. It has to be that one person who enjoys the immediate knowledge of God. Now who is that person? Is it the 2nd person of the Trinity? Or is it the soul of the man, Jesus. Don't forget: Jesus is a soul-body composite. The God-man relation is therefore not 1-1 with the soul-body relation. They are different relations. In the Incarnation, the 2nd person did not merely take on a body; he took on a man (a soul-body complex in the Chalcedonian orthodoxy that presupposes the anthropology of the Peripatetic).To fail to see this is to fall into the heresy of Apollinarian heresy. So again: who is the seer of the *visio beata*? Who is the knower of the beatific knowledge? If is is the 2nd person, then He suffers on the cross -- which contradicts the impassibility of the divine persons. Furthermore, if the 2nd person of the Trinity is the one person of the two natures, then the 2nd person dies on the cross (in reality and not merely apparently as on Docetism). But the 2nd person is eternal and cannot die, and what's more, since the three persons are one and the same God, then how avoid the heresy of patripassionism? So what should we conclude? That Jesus has no beatific knowledge on earth? Should we perhaps embrace Nestoriansim acc. to which there are not only two natures but also two persons?

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  10. BV Avatar
    BV

    Simone Weil’s Suggestion, echoed by me, and in some measure by Tom T, is in the vicinity of kenotic Christology. “If God were to become one of us, fully one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit’s hostage to the flesh? Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery?” Wikipedia: >>In Christian theology, kenosis (Ancient Greek: κένωσις, romanized: kénōsis, lit. ’the act of emptying’) is the “self-emptying” of Jesus. The word ἐκένωσεν (ekénōsen) is used in the Epistle to the Philippians: “[Jesus] made himself nothing” (NIV),[1] or “[he] emptied himself” (NRSV)[2] (Philippians 2:7), using the verb form κενόω (kenóō), meaning “to empty”.<< And see here: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2021/05/kenotic-christology-explained-and-defended/
    >>Kenotic Christology does not say that the Son of God, God the Son, the Word/Logos stopped being divine in the incarnation. That is a total misunderstanding of kenotic Christology. Rather, building on several New Testament passages such as Philippians 2:7-8 and Luke 2:52 and Mark 13:32, kenotic theologians believe and teach that the Son of God voluntarily restricted the use and knowledge of his attributes of glory and power such as omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence in order to experience human existence.<<

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  11. BV Avatar
    BV

    Along similar lines to Vito’s suggestion @1:42 is Bulgakov:
    https://thebyzantineanglocatholic.blogspot.com/2008/03/bulgakov-on-incarnation.html

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  12. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Thank you both for your comments. There is, of course, a lot to unpack here and I am not known around here for my brevity. So I will try to restrict my comments to a couple of key points I was trying to make.
    Vito, you say that my “position results in the denial of the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures, divine and human, in one person.” I agree it seems that way. However, I was not denying, but intentionally eliding, the whole puzzle of the hypostatic union in order to highlight a couple of important features of Jesus’ human nature: his obedience to God’s Will and the dependence of that obedience on Jesus’ faith in God.
    But I did leave a hint as to the participation of the divine nature in Jesus where I say “Jesus knows that God wants him to go to Jerusalem and be killed” and “Jesus had a more or less direct line … to God’s will.” As Bill points out, as a human being Jesus could not “know what the will of God was.” But as divine he most certainly could, and did, because he had a “direct line” to God.
    For the moment, let’s call my pedestrian euphemism of a “direct line to God” the beatific vision. Now all I know about the beatific vision is what you write, Vito, but I ask you both: if Jesus as divine had an “immediate, intuitive knowledge of his own divinity, the divine life that he shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit,” what sort of content must this direct line to God have been for Jesus to perform his Incarnate mission? The total omniscience of the Godhead? I don’t see why. The only argument is that omniscience is a necessary part of the divine nature, but then so is omnipresence throughout creation and in all of time. God willingly gave up – sacrificed! – His omnipresence to become a particular man at a particular moment in history. Why then is it incomprehensible that He also limited His omniscience in the Incarnation to the human scale of things, a scale that is steeped in uncertainty about the most important things, how to live and how to die?
    Because, again, what knowledge does Jesus need to complete his earthly mission? Only the knowledge of what God wants him to do. Let me ask you both this: assume that you receive certain knowledge that God wants you to go and do a particular thing right now, a particular thing that entails some risk of public shame, injury, or even death. As Christians, since you have the (assumed) certainty of knowing God’s will, why would you need any more information? In theory, you wouldn’t, but as human beings, you are troubled by the lack of understanding as to why God wants you to do this thing, and at a minimum will probably commit the sin of hesitation.
    But that need for further information in the face of the (assumed) certainty of God’s will is a lack of faith in God. Jesus had no such lack; due to his divine nature, he knew what God wanted him to do and in faith that was good enough for him, so he “set his face to go to Jerusalem” without hesitation in perfect obedience.
    But that Jesus had to rely in faith on a bare command of God to go to Jerusalem, without more information, is precisely what makes the Incarnation a true human instantiation of the Word. Jesus as divine was completely certain as to what God wanted him to do, but as a human being, he did not understand in full why God wanted it done. It was this very lack of complete understanding of God’s will that put the divine nature of the Word in precisely the situation fallen humanity is in. And this makes the Crucifixion as terror-filled and painful a death for Jesus as for any human being. And yet, even so, he obeyed, even unto death on the cross.
    The garden of Gethsemane scene captures well the operation of the two natures of Christ in a single person. Jesus in his divinity was certain of what God wanted him to do, but humanly he was troubled because he did not know whether or not there was some other way to accomplish God’s purposes that did not involve his suffering and death. So he prayed for God to “take this cup from me,” but concluded with an absolute statement of obedience born of faith: “Yet not my will, but yours be done.”
    NB: I drafted this comment before Bill posted on kenotic Christology and have subsequently only edited it for typos and grammar. Needless to say, that Christology appears to match what I am getting at here. However, I would supplement the short quote provided. Not only is the Son of God voluntarily restricted “in order to experience human existence,” but also to be a real, practical model for us as to how we are to live in the human condition we find ourselves in. As I said in my original comment, “On the assumption that God’s will is known with some specificity…with faith [in God], obedience becomes possible and something any human can do.”
    P.S. Bill: I do agree that knowledge is better than faith, especially knowledge of God’s will. But in this world for beings like us, the pursuit of knowledge depends on a form of faith. There are no presuppositionless philosophies and it is always important to know what we do not know. Hence we can only move forward in faith that we understand things better today than yesterday and have discerned God’s will correctly, and then rest in the forgiveness of sins when we inevitably get it wrong.

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  13. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Tom,
    Thanks for your thoughtful response. One important point of disagreement. You write:
    “The total omniscience of the Godhead? I don’t see why. The only argument is that omniscience is a necessary part of the divine nature, but then so is omnipresence throughout creation and in all of time. God willingly gave up – sacrificed! – His omnipresence to become a particular man at a particular moment in history. Why then is it incomprehensible that He also limited His omniscience in the Incarnation to the human scale of things, a scale that is steeped in uncertainty about the most important things, how to live and how to die?”
    “[However,]The union of which we are speaking is a relation which we consider between the Divine and the human nature, inasmuch as they come together in one Person of the Son of God. Now, as was said above (I:13:7), every relation which we consider between God and the creature is really in the creature, by whose change the relation is brought into being; whereas it is not really in God, but only in our way of thinking, since it does not arise from any change in God. And hence we must say that the union of which we are speaking is not really in God, except only in our way of thinking; but in the human nature, which is a creature, it is really. Therefore, we must say it is something created” (Aquinas, ST III, q.2, ar.7).

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  14. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Vito: thank you for your comment. I was not precise in my terms in that paragraph and did not mean to imply that God is changeable. I tend to get too colloquial sometimes (I think Bill subtly pointed that out once). As for the rest of it, I will have to yield to the Angelic Doctor until I can get more of a handle on how that passage impacts my argument.
    But I have something else for you, regarding your comment on 3/29 at 01:42 PM.
    >>And what God wanted, for himself, was to become Incarnate in Christ … And what underpins this want is love: “The Love of God in himself and the free desire that God has to share that love with another who can love him as perfectly as he loves himself … The Incarnation, then in Duns Scotus, becomes the unrepeatable, unique, and single defining act of God’s love.”<< Your comment intrigued me, that the Incarnation was not only about Christ on the cross and our redemption. It was also about God's love and the "free desire … to share that love with another who can love him as perfectly as he loves himself." Although I haven't read it in years, this reminded me of Kierkegaard's more theological book, Practice in Christianity, in which there was not much emphasis on our need to be saved from sin. It was more about the particular form of the Incarnation in Jesus Christ and how that form needed to be as lowly as possible, indeed so lowly as to be offensive, because … that was the only way, SK argued, for God to have a truly mutual love relationship with man. If I remember that book correctly, SK seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of the Franciscan tradition and Duns Scotus as you present it. And yet, I do not recall any reference in the Hong notes or his journals and papers to the Franciscans or Duns Scotus on this particular subject. I intend to pick that SK book back up and read it from this new (for me) perspective on the Incarnation. I downloaded your linked pdf and Bill's Bulgakov reference and I take it you recommend Thomas War on Duns Scotus. Is there anything else you might point me to on this particular issue? Thanks!

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  15. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Tom,
    Thanks again for your, as usual, articulate and thoughtful comment.
    I am a complete amateur in these matters, my training and expertise is confined entirely to the social and economic history of pre-modern Europe, so take my suggestions with that in mind.
    Yes, I recommend the little book by Thomas M. Ward, Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus. Written for non-experts in scholastic philosophy, it provides a good overview of the themes and content of Scotus’ thought, including his understanding of the Incarnation. Although I have reservations about some of the argument in Stephen Finlan’s Problems with Atonement, the book offers a well-researched historical and theological discussion of the development of the theory of the Incarnation as Atonement, seeking to show its variances from the thought of St. Paul and offering a brief survey of some patristic and medieval alternatives to it, mainly that of Abelard (unfortunately nothing here on Scotus). On two other medieval thinkers who preceded Scotus in seeking to explain the Incarnation in terms other than that of atonement, you might want to look at the essay “How Original Was Scotus on the Incarnation? Reconsidering the History of the Absolute Predestination of Christ in Light of Robert Grosseteste” by Daniel P. Horan (https://www.academia.edu/1652209/How_Original_Was_Scotus_on_the_Incarnation_Reconsidering_the_History_of_the_Absolute_Predestination_of_Christ_in_Light_of_Robert_Grosseteste)
    More generally, for the philosophic problem of the Incarnation, I, again as a complete amateur in these matters, have found value in Thomas Morris’ The Logic of the Incarnation. His position and that of other contemporary philosophers on this question are well summarized by David Werther, “Incarnation” ( https://iep.utm.edu/incarnat/).

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  16. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Vito. Thank you!

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  17. BV Avatar
    BV

    Tom writes:
    >>But I did leave a hint as to the participation of the divine nature in Jesus where I say “Jesus knows that God wants him to go to Jerusalem and be killed” and “Jesus had a more or less direct line … to God’s will.” As Bill points out, as a human being Jesus could not “know what the will of God was.” But as divine he most certainly could, and did, because he had a “direct line” to God.
    For the moment, let’s call my pedestrian euphemism of a “direct line to God” the beatific vision.<< One question here is whether a mere man can KNOW (where knowledge entails OBJECTIVE certainty, not mere subjective certitude/certainty) the will of God. I would say No. But I admit that the point is disputable (reasonably disputable, not just able to be disputed). But Tom makes a mistake when he conflates "the direct line to God" with the Beatific Vision (visio beata). The VB is available to all of us if we 'go to heaven.' We will then experience the ultimate in that felicity which is appropriate to our finite natures. And, I take it, different individual souls will get more or less depending on their 'qualifications.' So the doctor angelicus will experience a deeper and happier vision of God than your humble correspondent, if he is permitted the vision at all. None of us, however, will be absorbed into the Godhead and become identical to God. In Christian metaphysics, the soul-God duality is at best mitigated, but never eliminated as it is on, say, Advaita Vedanta. By contrast, the "direct line to God" is available only to the God-Man. Therefore, The Beatific Vision is not the same as the "direct line" to God. Now a note on terminology. I think 'Jesus' should be used only to refer to the man Jesus of Nazareth. It remains an open question -- to some if not all -- whether Jesus is the Christ. 'Christ' is a title, like 'Buddha.' 'Jesus Christ' refers to the God-Man. Do we agree?

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  18. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Bill:
    >>One question here is whether a mere man can KNOW (where knowledge entails OBJECTIVE certainty, not mere subjective certitude/certainty) the will of God. I would say No. But I admit that the point is disputable … << I do not dispute the point and I believe I was clear that certain knowledge of God's will is not available to us in our present condition. However, it is a critical part of my argument that the God-man, Jesus Christ, does have certain knowledge of God's will - but only in part. See my next comment. >>But Tom makes a mistake when he conflates “the direct line to God” with the Beatific Vision (visio beata) … By contrast, the “direct line to God” is available only to the God-Man. Therefore, The Beatific Vision is not the same as the “direct line” to God.<< I referred to the Beatific Vision because Vito had introduced it into the discussion, but intended it as a stand-in for the notion of omniscient knowledge that we started with. Thus, the original question was, did Jesus Christ have divine omniscience in the specific sense of the immediate, certain, objective, and complete knowledge and understanding of God's will, purposes, and plans? My answer was, yes, he did have such a direct line to God's "thinking," but only in part. The core premise of my argument was that Jesus Christ's perfection was not in knowledge but in obedience. And that lead to the question, how much knowledge must Jesus Christ have had to be perfectly obedient? In answering this, I was proposing a sort of epistemological bracketing. To be obedient, one needs only to know what is commanded with sufficient specificity and concreteness. Thus, God tells Jesus Christ that he must go to Jerusalem where he will be killed; of that he is certain. Does he need to know any more information than that to be obedient? I don't think so. So my argument was that Jesus Christ in his divinity had a direct line to God such that he knew with certainty what he was commanded to do, but due to the Incarnation and the consequent restriction of his divine omniscience, he only had at most an all too human belief or opinion about the rest of God's plans and purposes. As we human beings know, belief or opinion is a thin reed when the stakes involved are life and death. It is this latter human situation that dictated the necessity of faith, that Jesus Christ must have had perfect faith in God to be perfectly obedient. >>Now a note on terminology.<< We agree.

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  19. EG Avatar
    EG

    I suppose the thing that always bothers me in most of these commentaries is that there is an (arrogant?) assumption of knowing what limit-concepts are (death, omniscience, god, [ultimate] purpose in life, life-meaning, etc), and then deploying them in both didactic and rhetorical argumentative flourishes or premises, and I think we don’t quite know as much as we think we do, we merely believe we do, and that makes a rather profound difference. In some sense, we *still* know far less of the things we want to, even after hundreds (thousands?) of years and hundreds of different thinkers contributing.
    This is less a failing of our own ability but in some sense, the firm reality of the heights we aim at scaling (and the inevitable way we are interdependent in what we know.)

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  20. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    EG,
    “I suppose the thing that always bothers me in most of these commentaries is that there is an (arrogant?) assumption of knowing what limit-concepts are (death, omniscience, god, [ultimate] purpose in life, life-meaning, etc), and then deploying them in both didactic and rhetorical argumentative flourishes or premises, and I think we don’t quite know as much as we think we do, we merely believe we do, and that makes a rather profound difference.”
    You confuse belief and knowledge. Speaking for myself, and assuming that the other two participants in this discussion, Tom and Bill, would not disagree, no one here asserts knowledge of the great mysteries of existence to which both philosophy and religion seek to provide answers from earliest times. Rather, in speaking of the Incarnation and Atonement, the main topics of our exchange, we are striving to understand what might be rationally believed. This is essentially an exchange among theists who either believe in the foundational claims of orthodox Christianity or are open to those claims. Philosophy is certainly part of the discussion, and when its concepts are employed, as rigorously by Bill, they serve to remind us of weaknesses and apparent contradictions (at least to the discursive intellect) of our arguments. All of this serves to clarify belief, which I—and I think Tom—would hold to be, in Bill’s precise terminology, “rationally acceptable, but not rationally compelling (rationally coercive, philosophically dispositive).” Thus, no one operates under the “(arrogant) assumption of knowing” as you rather glibly claim.

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  21. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito,
    Well said in general and this in particular:
    >>This is essentially an exchange among theists who either believe in the foundational claims of orthodox Christianity or are open to those claims.<< Here is a further question: What is the central motif of Christianity? The Incarnation or the Resurrection? What I am getting at is this: a man who is dead can be brought to life by the power of God. This is so whether or not the man is the 2nd person of the Trinity. So I say: the central motif is the Incarnation.

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  22. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    I agree: Incarnation

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  23. EG Avatar
    EG

    Vito/BV,
    Then forgive this ignorant fool. More and more, as I listen, look around, read and try to understand, the more I realize I know nothing, not with any certainty to engage interlocutors like yourselves. I will return to listening in the hopes I might learn something.

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  24. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Vito: I concur, well said. I like my proposal that Jesus Christ’s perfection lies in obedience rather than knowledge, but did I intend it as a rationally compelling argument? Good heavens no! It is a premise that I hold revisable depending on how it plays out in this discussion and as I read and meditate on the scriptures and the Christian life in general going forward.
    Bill: I agree the central motif is the Incarnation. But that presents a question about sub-motifs. Is the Incarnation about the Crucifixion or the life of Jesus Christ in his earthly walk? Or, is it both (i.e., God is capable of multi-tasking)? On this question, see Vito and my comments above about the Franciscan/Duns Scotus take on the Incarnation, 3/29 at 01:42 PM & 4/1 at 04:32 PM, respectively.

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  25. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    EG,
    You are too hard on yourself. Each of us is trying in his own way and to the best of his ability to dispel some of the mystery that surrounds the big questions of existence. So, if you have something to say, you and those who read what you write can gain something. Early this morning, for instance, you provided me with the chance to set down briefly my thoughts on the distinction between knowledge and belief, which was a good start on the day, since it provided me with a chance to write, which I enjoy, and to think critically, which is not always easy for an old man to do before the sun comes up.

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