THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
CHAPTER I
THE METAPHYSICS OF THE INCARNATION
THERE is from the very beginning of our Lord’s earthly life the substitution of the personal element for the purely legal element. He is a mysterious personality, and the whole success of His religion lies in His being trusted, in His being followed, in His being understood ; the main precept of His religion is a personal precept of love for one another. In other words, instead of material legal observances He established the great observances of the human heart, of mutual understanding, of mutual support, of mutual love. Bear ye one another s burdens, and so you shall fulfil the law of Christ. (Gal. vi. 2)
It is the triumph of His grace to keep human beings in the oneness of religious faith without imposing upon them any strict obligation of uniformity in external ascetical practice. He Himself, in His own Person, is the unifying force of Christianity. His first disciples followed Him in the simplicity of their new friendship, carried away by His ineffable charm. No doubt they gloried in being the followers of so great a rabbi, and yet they had no external observance to make them into a school. How could they be the followers of a teacher without fasting, whilst the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast so frequently? In other words, how could any man be a disciple of another man unless he carried in himself the badge of that man s mastery in the way of a fast, or an ablution, or a prayer?
Men hold their fellow men together with the chains of some external austerity ; no man can be another man s master in truth and reality without putting upon the neck of the disciple the iron yoke of bodily observance ; yet it was to be the achievement of the new rabbi to have a school whose only observance it was to believe and to have confidence in Him, and to have friendship and love one with another. By this shall men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another. (St. John xiii. 35) “Can the children of the marriage fast as long as the bridegroom is with them? . . . But the days will come, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they shall fast in those days” Fasting has its part in the formation of a Christian. But you are not Christ’s disciple simply because you fast four times in the week, whilst John s disciples fast thrice, and the Pharisees twice. By this shall men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.
The early attraction to Christ and fidelity to Him have all the joyous liberty of a nuptial feast ; attachment and fellowship are all the surer because the feast is bright and gay ; serious work is to be done after the feast, but the memory of the feast remains the undying tie of attachment.
The peace and the prosperity of the Christian cause are all in that. All conversion, all sanctity, must be associated with Christ’s Person and the human persons with whom our lot is cast. Sanctity may indeed have certain secondary variations. With some souls Christ’s Person is the predominating element ; with other souls, thoughts active thoughts are concerned more directly with the visible human persons ; but persons it is, and Christian religion is in danger where legal observance of some sort begins to crowd out the personal element, when all spiritual efforts are directed towards the scrupulous carrying out of a system of observances for their own sake without a personal purpose.
The spirit of Christianity, despite its ascetic purity, is diametrically opposed to such a material conception of the ethical life, and the temporary successes it may obtain are but the harbingers of final catastrophe. It is our Lord’s exclusive privilege to be Law, or better still to be a substitution for all law. The human mind is jealous of such a position because the human mind resents being bound to a person ; but as our Lord’s Person is a Divine Person, as it is the second Person of the
Trinity, the jealousy of the human mind is not warranted in the case of Christ.
The Pharisees took umbrage at our Lord’s Person much more than at His doctrine. Abstract laws or external observances never arouse hatred and jealousy, just as they do not arouse love and sympathy in the measure in which a person arouses those feelings.
The great theological doctrines therefore concerning our Lord’s Person have an intimate connection with our Lord’s spiritual position in the world, because our Lord is nothing if not a Personality. His Grace is nothing if not a grace of love and of mutual understanding. There is no profit from the Gospel unless it be the perfecting of the human mind and the human heart. A man may invent an ascetical system and find other men to submit to it, but no man can make of his own person the irrevocable voice of conscience, the all-satisfying food of heart and mind. Our Lord is the only Person who ever could.
No man can make of the relations of other men with their fellow men the badge of true discipleship ; our Lord is the only exception, and no one questions His authority and right to do it. The teachings therefore of Christian theology about our Lord’s Person ought to be of intense interest to every follower of Christ, and His being a Divine Person should fill us with unbounded joy.
The history of Christian sanctity shows in innumerable souls an intense personal love for Christ : such is the historical fact. The question may be asked whether such deep personal friendship with one that is not of this world would be at all possible if He were not a living Divine Personality.
In other words, Is not the Personal Love of Christ such as history reveals it, a psychological proof of His Divine Reality ?
One thing is certain : it does not exist elsewhere the personalities of the non-Christian religions are not the elements of the human conscience such as Christ is.
It would be a great mistake, therefore, to think that what we might call the metaphysical truths of the Hypostatical Union are barren and unpractical verities ; they are, on the contrary, indispensable to any rational explanation of our Lord’s position with the human race. There is in Christ a kind of multiplicity of spiritual presence that makes Him the personal spiritual friend of millions of souls ; He has a kind of universality of presence and action, which interferes in no way with the intense individuality of His relations with particular souls. Such is the Christ of experience and history. In His humanity He has for all practical purposes the illimitability of Divinity itself ; He is truly the Universal Friend, and yet no one ever was such an exclusively personal friend to individual members of the human race.
Now, such intense individuality with such comprehensive universality has but one explanation : Hypostatic Union, or Divine Personality, the mystery of one human nature existing through God s personal existence. In our own days more than ever, philosophical minds dread the rule of a mere individual, however holy that individual may be. It does not seem as if an individual being could ever be such as to give satisfaction to the mind of a race. So we find constantly in modern theologies the substitution of the ideal for the individual. Such efforts at substitution are anything but blameworthy ; it is certain that no merely human individual could ever furnish a complete ideal for mankind, could ever be a life-giving, practical ideal for the human race. But, on the other hand, modern theologies are quite wrong in applying that process of substitution to Christ ; there is no need of substituting an ideal Christ for the historic Christ, precisely because the Christ of the Gospels, the Christ of Catholic theology, possesses in truth and reality an infinitude of Personality. There is no limitation in Him. With out that infinitude of Personality, as far as the race is concerned, an ideal Christ would be indeed preferable to a concrete personal Christ.
This is why I say that the great metaphysical principles underlying Hypostatic Union are of immense practical import. I do not mean that individual souls do make those great truths a practical study ; they simply possess Christ, and are happy in the possession. But for the philosophical mind that begins to consider Christ’s position with mankind, the metaphysics of the Incarnation are indispensable.
