THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
CHAPTER VI
THE REPLACEMENT OF HUMAN PERSONALITY BY DIVINE PERSONALITY
IT is the oldest and truest expression of the philosophy of the Incarnation to say that in Christ there is no human personality, but that the human personality in Him has been replaced by Divine Personality. The great struggles of orthodoxy against Nestorianism resulted in the adoption of this formula by the Church. Christ is a human individual nature, without a human personality; in Him the Divine Personality of the Word does the functions of the human personality, and it does infinitely more, as behooves a Divine Personality. The maintenance and reality of the one individual human nature, detached as it were from its congenital and native element of created personality, and endowed with Divine Personality, is another dogmatic result, brought about by the Church’s long strife with Eutychianism and its various ramifications. The separability of personality from the individual rational nature by Divine Omnipotence, and its replacement by a Divine Personality, must always be factors of Christian metaphysics, if our system of thought be such as to allow for Hypostatic Union.
Any sanctification, any unction of the Spirit, any supernatural grace that is not a substitution of human personality in Christ by the Personality of the Word, is not Incarnation, is not Hypostatic Union ; it is merely one of the ordinary works of supernatural grace. There are no limits to the powers of the Holy Ghost, to the ways in which He may elevate the rational creature above its own plane to a similarity with God. But sanctifying grace carried to its millionth power could no more be Hypostatic Union than extreme cultivation of voice in me could be a training of my mathematical powers. Hypostatic Union is a marvel of a different order, though not so different as not to be found in the same rational being, as not to have certain secret affinities with it.
Hypostatic Union requires first of all the absence of a congenital element in the individual nature: its native created personality. All the other supernatural elevations, worked by the Holy Ghost, far from starting with the absence of some natural endowment, presuppose on the contrary every native perfection and responsibility.
The missing, or rather discarded created element, finite personality, is not elevated or glorified by the Holy Ghost, but it is replaced directly by a reality of the same order but of infinite altitude, the Personality of the Word. The ideas contained in the terms elevation and replacement express well the mutual relation of ordinary sanctification, even of the highest order, and Hypostatic Union. The Holy Ghost elevates to a higher plane the existing realities of the rational creature in ordinary sanctification. In Hypostatic Union the Second Person of the Trinity takes the place of a created element that ought to be there under ordinary circumstances, but has been left out to give place to an infinitely adorable substitute.
Such replacement could never come about, in a creature, unless the replacing Personality were Infinitude itself.
First, infinite power is required to interfere in a created being with the element of personality, for only a God of infinite creative power could make a responsible personality exist outside Himself; personality is God’s divinest work, and as He alone places it within the creature, He alone can give it a substitute.
Secondly, such replacement requires what I might call Infinitude of subtleness on the part of the Person, thus superseding inside an individual created nature its congenital personality.
Thirdly, there must be in the replacing Personality an Infinitude of personal worth, precontaining in its oneness all the created personal worth possible. By personal worth I mean here the worth that accrues to an individual rational nature from its privilege of being such and such a person, with respective rights and responsibilities that stretch into eternity. Now, our masters in theology are far from being blind to the fact that not to possess its native congenital personality would be to the rational nature an immense disadvantage, unless the substitute be not only infinite, but also such as to precontain in itself what it conies to replace.
Suppose it to be a metaphysical possibility that my personality might be replaced, say, by the personality of a high spirit, it would be doubtful whether I should be the gainer or the loser. A finite spirit could never replace within me a con genital, essential element of my being without my being less myself.
But with the second Person of the Trinity, in whom all things are as in their eternal prototype, Christ’s humanity has acquired boundless riches of personal worth, though it be without a created personality. For Divine Personality is infinitely congenital to it. Nothing short of this replacement or substitution by Divine Personality of created personality will do justice to the traditional view of Christ, the Son of God. I make so bold as to say that Hypostatic Union, thus stated with theological exactness, is indeed worthy of the admiration of the keenest intellect. The whole difficulty resolves itself into this question: Is it possible for Infinite Personality to do inside an individual created nature the function of finite personality?
It is in this, and in no other sense, that God is said to become man.
No doubt many minds, unacquainted with Christian theology, think of a transformation of Godhead into manhood when they hear the phrase, and they naturally revolt at it at once. Their mental recoil would be more than justified if incarnation were such a transformation.
But that the phrase should mean, as it does mean, that Divine Personality does duty within a human nature, for a created personality they seem hardly to realize; yet it puts quite a different face on the matter.
Other theologies, still admitting an incarnation, at their best speak of a mere indwelling of Godhead in the Man Christ, an indwelling of indefinite character, and bristling with metaphysical difficulties, when one comes to probe it.
Catholic theology, the child of the great councils of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, by adopting the replacement of personality by Personality, whilst giving the link that unites Godhead and manhood in Christ a link that is almost palpable has not burdened man’s intellect with a revolting metaphysical novelty.
That there are within the human individuum separabilities, if not actual separations of realities, is practically admitted by every serious system of philosophy. No philosopher could dream of man as of a non-composite being. Our dogma goes, it is true, to the root-separabilities, and thinks of Deity as being capable of replacing certain created elements without there arising pantheistic results.
