THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
CHAPTER VII
THE CONTINUANCE OF THE HUMAN NATURE IN CHRIST
THE present chapter is written in order to explain how the concept of a Divine Person absorbing and replacing the individual human nature in Christ would be pantheistic, whilst there is no pantheism, but a most glorious assertion of God’s personal-ness, in the replacement of human personality by the Personality of the Word. It is the oldest and most sacred of Christian dogmas that with this mysterious substitution of personality, Christ’s human nature is as entire and as intact as my own nature. He is as perfectly human as I am. His humanity has indeed been immensely elevated by every kind of supernatural grace, but it has not been replaced nothing in it has been superseded. How an individual nature is a distinct reality from personality I have already explained. Therefore there remains the necessity of showing how the Incarnation could never be a substitution of nature without its giving rise to monstrous philosophical consequences, whilst there are no such alarming results with the substitution of personality.
Nature is essentially the stream of life, born in the mountain fastnesses. It is all movement, all activity, all consciousness. Modern philosophies, being essentially dynamic and phenomenalist, are nature philosophies; they are hardly ever personality philosophies; they only busy themselves with modes of acting, without bothering about modes of being, and in their own generation they have been wise enough. Now, the idea of a stream suggests to me a comparison, which I think very useful in this most abstruse matter. Engineering skill has replaced for many a stream, at least sectionally, its original banks with artificial banks. There is no end to the power of the engineer ; if he be given time and money, he might replace the banks of the Rhine with a stone dyke from Switzerland down to the North Sea. But no engineer, with an empire to finance him, will ever replace the stream itself by one of his own invention. The birth of streams belongs to the unalterable cosmic laws. I must crave the reader’s pardon for suggesting an analogy between man’s mechanical achievements and this most spiritual subject, Hypostatic Union. But have we not a great authority to justify the use of similitudes And with many such parables He spoke to them the word, according as they were able to hear.
Let the stream stand for individual nature. That God should in His own Person be personality to it is like replacing the original banks of the river with a more durable one. But that Godhead should replace nature itself would mean that the river is no longer the river it was ; it has lost its identity. It would not be a stream of life that comes from earthly sources ; it would be simply an outflow of Divinity.
But to return to more exact thought, life cannot be replaced by a Higher Life ; thought cannot be replaced by Higher Thought ; consciousness cannot be replaced by Higher Consciousness : but life, and thought, and consciousness may be appropriated by a Higher Owner. The function of nature is to live; the function of personality is to own.
