THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
CHAPTER IV
CHRIST THE WONDERFUL
A GREAT deal of man s happiness comes from the power of admiration. To admire something is like a stream of fresh water flowing over the soul s surface; children are so happy because for them there is so much to wonder at. The deep solemnity of their untarnished eyes is the solemnity of wonderment. Woe to the man who has nothing to wonder at! his soul has lost all freshness, and his eyes are lustreless and vacant.
If at any time of our lives we cease to wonder, the fault must be all ours. The world in which God has placed man is an eternal wonder; admiration is the only thing which establishes a kind of equality and proportion between man and the vast world in which man lives. We do not understand the marvels of the universe. We see very little of the universe ; we live, each one of us, in a very small corner of it ; the universe is not ours, but it becomes ours through admiration-being so immensely greater than ourselves, we wonder at it, and our wonder grows as the immensity of the universe opens out more and more to the ripening intelligence. What we lose in proportion we gain in admiration, and we feel all the happier through our wonderment. It is the saddest thing in the world to have one s lot cast with people who have lost the gift of admiration. It is the cruellest and darkest captivity of the heart; it is external and internal darkness. It is the hardest purgatory of the soul ; it would be hell itself but for the hope that the day will come that will set us free from the companionship of the unwondering souls, and place us amongst the spirits whose life is unending admiration. Let me be surrounded with the young and the infants, whose every movement and every sound is the expression of some wonderment, and I shall feel that my heart swells again with a happiness it has not known since childhood.
Christ the Son of God could never be man s eternal life if He were not man s eternal wonder. A Christ whom we could fully comprehend, whom we could understand through and through, could never be our life and our hope because we could not wonder at Him any more. It is an indispensable condition in all true and lasting admiration that the object of our admiration should always be greater than our knowledge of it, and that through the growth of knowledge, far from finding limits in the thing to be wondered at, we should be convinced more and more of the inaccessibility of those limits.
Love, no doubt, is born from knowledge and understanding; but short-lived and fragile would be the love which would be commensurate with knowledge and understanding. Love is best and strongest there where we know enough of a person to understand that there is in the person vastly more than we actually know. Every genuine and undying love lives not in the Holy of Holies, but merely in the Holy with its eyes fixed on the unapproachable Holy of Holies.
We find strong love for Christ the Son of God, a love that is as fresh as a spring morning, as unchanging as the eternal hills, only where there is the belief in Christ’s divine nature, because then alone the created spirit has a scope for endless wonderment. Love dies when it finds a limit; limits are incompatible with love. If a good man s motive is explained to me, I shall wonder at his courage and unselfishness not so much on account of what he did, as on account of the character which the deed reveals. If I knew the man to be incapable of another such act, I could not love and admire him any more ; in fact, my sentiment towards him is shaped much more by what I suppose him to possess than by what I saw him do. To make of Christ a human being is to deprive Him of the attribute of incomprehensibility; sooner or later we shall understand Him fully. Such theology would be the cruellest thing, as it kills in the soul the most life-giving element of all religion wonderment that is always old and always new.
All admiration comes from depth. We admire what we know to be inexhaustible, unfathomable. It must be deep calling out to deep, if admiration is to be whole-hearted and overpowering.
Our Lord is indeed the Wonderful because in Him deep calls out to deep, because in Him there is a succession of spiritual regions, the one more beautiful than the other. Our Lord is not some thing simple, He is something very complex, some thing very deep, and it is only unhealthy minds that require a simple Christ, so simple indeed as to leave Him without grace and divinity. The first article of the Christian creed concerning our Lord’s
Sacred Person is this: He is one Person in two Natures. This duality of natures, so indispensable to Christian theology, is the great wonder, is the thing that makes Christ wonderful, because through that duality deep calls out to deep. There is in Him a human nature full of grace and truth; but when that human nature is searched into, it gives at once evidence of something deeper still the divine nature. But this duality is merely the shortest possible expression for multiplicities of beauty which Catholic theology has undertaken to describe. Our Lord has all the perfections of man, He has the perfections of Divinity itself, and He has a perfection which is all His own something between angelic perfection and Divinity. Those gradations of perfection, I repeat, unhealthy minds reject as burdensome; they crave for a simple Christ, but the simplicity they crave for is more the characterless transparency of common glass than the wonderful power of the hard diamond with its innumerable facets and its scintillating multiplicity. This gradation of perfections in our Lord’s Person, so noticeable in Catholic theology on our Lord, is what makes Him so wonderful, because it is deep calling out to deep; or, to change the metaphor, it is mountains rising up higher and higher, and when you have reached one summit you find yourself at the foot of another giant amongst the mountains. So we find in practice that the most innocent and most loving of Christ’s faithful revel in the theology of Christ’s duality of natures, because a simple and loving follower is a born admirer, and his only fear is lest perchance a day might come when he could not admire any more. In this spirit then let us try to understand the wonderful multiplicity of Christ’s perfections such as it is taught by Catholic theology.
In following the teachings of Catholic theology concerning our Lord’s Person we are like the explorer whose mission it is to find out the course of a river. There are two ways of doing it. Sailing first for days on the endless expanse of the ocean, he comes to the mouth of some mighty Amazon, where it is difficult for a long time to distinguish the river from the ocean. Up he sails towards the river s source, borne onward by the inflowing tide as it contends for mastery with the current. After many days of journeying the river will lose to him its individuality; it is not one, but many rivers he has to explore; it is the water shed he is interested in more than in the individual river. Or, if the traveller chooses, he may begin his expedition on the mountain-top, follow one course; go down with it to the main stream, sailing down the main stream in the consciousness that sooner or later he will find himself entering the boundless ocean. There is a particular joy in the anticipation that the stream that carries him will become a limitless sea.
This second way of exploring would be more conducive to admiration than the first, because a traveller thus progressing from the mountain spring towards the ocean, passes from marvel unto marvel till all the marvels are merged in the marvellous ocean. This last simile represents the natural mode for man to find out the marvels of the Son of God. There is first His external human life; it is the mountain stream, fresh, powerful, of heavenly transparency, running in the deep ravines of His human sufferings. This mountain stream of the mortal life is absorbed by His spiritual life, His sanctifying grace, His angelic perfections of intellect, His glorified body ; this again, vast and infinite though it be, is absorbed finally by a much greater infinitude the infinitude of His Divinity.
St. Thomas acts not as the second but as the first explorer: he begins from the ocean, the Divinity, and follows up the great system of waters to the human sources of Christ’s life. A glance at the disposition of the questions and articles in the third part of the Summa shows clearly the movements of this great theological explorer. He begins with Hypostatic Union the presence of the Infinite Godhead in Christ; then he speaks of Christ’s sanctifying grace, of Christ’s supernatural virtues. He speaks of Christ’s grace as the head of the human race; he speaks of Christ’s knowledge, angelic and human; he speaks of the human power of Christ’s soul, of His prayer, of His priesthood, of His adoption, of His predestination, of His adoration, of His mediation. It is still the main stream with the tidal movements of the ocean mixing with its waters and swelling them. Then he comes to the human life: Christ’s virginal conception, His nativity, His baptism, His doctrine, His miracles, His passion, His death, His ascension, His resurrection.
I must crave the reader s indulgence for keeping his attention to the simile of a water-course. In order to be fully applicable to the present subject, instead of supposing a system of converging streams that come down from the mountain, we ought to suppose a system of streams flowing on level land so that the tides might come up to the very spring of the most humble brook. Nature has no such water system as far as I know; if it had, it would be a splendid illustration of a great mystery: the merely human actions of our Lord, besides flowing towards the infinitude of the Divinity, are constantly being swelled by the tidal movements of Divinity rushing along the channels of the human actions, and mixing with the waters of human sanctity. The stream that is a tidal stream has a double nature, so to speak: first there are the stream s own waters, and then there are the waters of the sea, carried along the native waters of the stream. So in the Wonderful there are many streams flowing into streams, but over them all there flow the waters of Divinity. No doubt it is this penetration of Divinity into every human act of Christ that compelled St. Thomas to adopt the method of exploration from sea to land.
I shall adopt the same method here for the instruction of those for whom this little treatise is written; the devotional method, however, which is essentially the wondering method, begins with our Lord’s human life, begins with the Hail, full of Grace and from the Virgin Mother, the sweet daughter of David. Then it journeys to the Word who dwells in the bosom of the Father, going from sweetness unto sweetness. It is not the only instance where the theoretical presentment of heavenly things follows an opposite course to that of the practical realisation of those things.
