The Personality of Christ by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapters IX and X

THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB

CHAPTER IX

HOW COMPLETELY OUR LORD’S HUMAN NATURE IS DIVINE

ST. THOMAS (second question) asks himself this question : Is Hypostatic Union natural to Christ as man ? One sees the meaning of his interrogation. We have said that Hypostatic Union is nothing else than the personal existence of the Word, being directly the existence of Christ’s soul, and of Christ’s body.

The question, then, of St. Thomas is this : How far is this union between Divine Personality and human nature natural to the human part of our Lord’s Person?

First of all, it could not be natural in the sense of its flowing as it were from the human, the created part of Christ ; a creature of whatever rank could never have in itself the power of such a union.

It all comes from above. There is, however, another point of view. Our Lord’s human part never was without that divine existence ; neither His soul nor His body existed even for one instant in an un-divine way ; and it is on that account that it may be said that Hypostatic Union is natural to Our Lord as man, because as man He never knew any other sort of existence. It does not seem to imply contra diction that an adult human personality should be at a given moment hypostatically united with a divine person. But in that case, Hypostatic Union could not be called natural, as it succeeded a created human personal existence, and the Mother of that hypostatically assumed human nature could not truly be called the Mother of God. Our Lady, on the contrary, is truly the Mother of God, because Her Child never existed otherwise than as the Son of God.

However, we have not exhausted the subject yet. There is one more way for our Lord’s human nature to be naturally divine, more excellent than the mere fact of His never having been anything but divine. It is this. The mode of Our Lord’s formation in the womb of His Blessed Mother was such that the result had to be human nature with divine existence. She conceived from the Holy Ghost, and conception from the Holy Ghost is necessarily the origin of a nature that must have divinity. So Our Lord as man is naturally God, because the way in which He was conceived admits of nothing else.

This is clearly expressed in the archangel’s message to Our Lady. The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the Power of the Most High shall overshadow thee, and therefore also the Holy that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. He shall be called the Son of God, precisely because the Holy Ghost will overshadow her, so that Our Lord as man is God, in virtue of his conception through the Holy Ghost.

It might be said therefore that in Hypostatic Union the human nature is as divine as divine can be, not only because it always has been divine, but it is divine because, through the laws of the conception, it had to be divine.

The grace of the (Hypostatic) Union is natural to Him in His humanity according to a propriety of His Nativity, as He was thus conceived from the

Holy Ghost, that one and the same person should be naturally the Son of God and the Son of Man.

We ought never to think of Christ’s humanity as in any way separable from His Divinity, as prior to it, or as being the object of a predestination by itself. It was always divine, and according to St. Paul’s energetic expression Christ Jesus . . . being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God. 2 There seems to be no inherent contradiction in the supposition that a living, grown-up human person might be united with a divine person hypostatically at a given moment. Human personality, then, would be swallowed up by Divine Personality. But such a union would differ in many things from the Hypostatic Union that is in Christ. The greatest difference, a difference which perhaps would constitute an infinite difference, would be this, that in such a supposition the human nature would not be divine by the very laws of its conception and birth.

The hypothesis would safeguard Hypostatic Union, but it would not be Christianity, and the mother of the privileged human being would not be the Mother of God ; she would be the mother of a man who became God, which is a totally different thing. The Church in her struggle with Nestorianism established the doctrine not only of the substitution of Divine Personality for human personality in Christ, but also the title of Mary to divine maternity, because her Son was conceived in such a wise as to be necessarily God.

In my hypothesis the man thus elevated to Hypostatic Union, though truly the Son of God, would owe endless gratitude to God for the favour. In the Hypostatic Union that is in Christ it could not be said that Christ’s humanity owes a debt of gratitude for its privilege. It has Divine Personality, divine existence through the laws of its birth ; Propter proprietates Nativitatis ipsius, as St. Thomas says in the article I have cited.

Nothing short of Hypostatic Conception can give us a complete idea of Christ. His flesh is all divine, and from the very beginning of the Nestorian controversies, the champions of orthodoxy appealed to the mystery of Christ’s body in the Eucharist as an argument in favour of the personal union, from the very start, in Christ. This very fact that we acknowledge that the only begotten Son of God died in His flesh, rose and ascended into heaven, qualifies us for offering the unbloody sacrifice in the Church and, by participating in the holy flesh and precious blood of the Redeemer, for receiving the mystical blessing so as to be sanctified. We receive it not as a common flesh, nor as the flesh of an eminently sanctified man, or of one who has received dignity by being united with the Logos or by divine indwelling, but as the true life-giving and proper flesh of the Word. For since He is, as God is, in His own nature life, and is become One with His own flesh, so has He imparted to this flesh a life-giving power. 1 This profession of faith, formulated in the council of Alexandria A.D. 430 under the presidency of St. Cyril, preparatory to the great Ephesine council, shows how clear and definite the views of Christian thinkers were as to the extent of Christ’s divineness.

There is one more consideration that finds a natural place here : St. Thomas says 2 that Hypostatic Union is something created. This doctrine, strongly emphasised by Aquinas, whilst containing a world of wisdom, might be easily misleading, as implying apparently an inferiority of divineness for Christ’s humanity.

That Hypostatic Union is a created thing ought to be clear to everyone, after a little thought. In Hypostatic Union Divine Personality replaces human personality ; or, what is more to the present purpose, Divine Personality is united with an individual human nature. Now such a union is brought about by God’s creative Omnipotence, uniting the two extremes into the One Ineffable.

If creative Omnipotence did not intervene, a human nature could never have divine existence, Divine Personality, except in the pantheistic sense. Personal being outside God is always the result of a creative act of God. Now the circumstance that personal being exists before namely, the second Person of the Trinity does not alter the case. It had to be given to an individual human nature, and such granting, or such uniting, supposes as much a creative act as the production of personal being ex nihilo. In this sense Hypostatic Union is something created, aliquid creatum. It is the result of a created act, but a result that implies a series of infinitudes. For though Hypostatic

Union be something created, in no sense is it something finite. To be a created thing and to be a finite thing are not necessarily synonymous. Philosophers admit degrees in Infinitude : there are greater infinitudes and lesser infinitudes. In order to explain Hypostatic Union exhaustively, no doubt every kind of infinitude ought to be pressed into service : it is deep calling unto deep. But one thing is certain : it has no finite element, though it be a created marvel. Christ’s human nature no doubt has finite elements, but that thing that makes the nature divine, Hypostatic Union, is all made up of Immensity and Illimitability.

CHAPTER X

THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH

THE commonest theological formula stating the Mystery of the Incarnation is this : God was made man/ We have scriptural authority for it in the words of St. John’s Gospel, first chapter : And the Word was made flesh/

St. Thomas makes an exhaustive study of the various formulas that express the wondrous mystery, in the sixteenth question of his third part of the Summa. It shows amongst other things how various were the aspects of the mystery known to the great thinker.

Now the formula God was made man has his full approval. It is a true statement. His interpretation is this : God is said to have been made man, because a human nature began to have being through the personality of a divine nature that pre-exists from all eternity/ l

In other words, for God to become man is merely the fact of a Divine Personality doing duty of personality for a particular human nature. Such office, Divine Personality did not exert from all eternity, but started it in time, in the hour which had been predestined. So it is both orthodox and grammatical to say : God became man.

Many of us would feel easier in our minds with that other formula, Man became God/ as it expresses better the elevation of human nature through Hypostatic Union, as it seems to contain no narrowing of the Godhead, but a broadening of manhood. Yet St. Thomas rejects the formula as misleading. His reasons are best given in the third article of the thirty-third question, where he treats of Christ’s conception. I give his meaning. We say with great propriety of language that God became man ; but we cannot say with any propriety that man became God. God merely assumed what is human ; but this human element never existed before the assumption. If it had existed it would have had a separate personality. Now it would be against the nature of Hypostatic Union to unite Divine Personality with a pre-existing complete human being having already personal existence.

In other words, the reason why it cannot be said that man became God is this, that the human part of Christ never had a personal existence of its own. The Godhead that created it in Mary’s womb performed the functions of personality in it from the first moment of its existence.

This, and no other, is the reason why the two propositions, God became man, and man became God, are not convertible propositions. Divine Personality existed in Itself from eternity, before it discharged the office of personality to a human nature. But the human nature never existed before it was given Divine Personality. Its creation and its being raised to Divine Personality are not two divisible moments.

But, on the other hand, St. Thomas admits the convertibility of the two propositions : God is man, and man is God. It is the factum est ( became ) the theologian does not like when Christ’s human nature is spoken of in connection with the possession of perfect Divinity. Only a pre-existing thing becomes properly something new, has new relations, new functions. St. John describes in his first chapter the life of the Word before the Word became flesh/ There is no history of Christ’s humanity before it became divine. Its history starts with its being supported in existence by the Personality of the Word.

But man is God, and God is man. For some minds the first formula is more prolific in spiritual consolations ; for other minds the second formula is more delightful. One is as good as the other, from the point of view of theological accuracy. By the first we mean that Divine Personality has replaced human personality ; by the second we look directly at the human element having its existence through Divine Personality. The first is no narrowing down of limitless infinitude, the second is limitless broadening of finiteness.

The Personality of Christ by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter VIII

THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB

CHAPTER VIII

AMEN, AMEN, I SAY TO YOU, BEFORE ABRAHAM WAS MADE, I AM. (John VIII, 58)

THE text that I chose for the title of this chapter is one of the many passages of the Gospel narratives that show how even medieval theology, with all its high metaphysics of the Incarnation, never goes beyond the theology of the Evangelist himself. It may state the matter in terms different from those of the inspired writer, but it does not state anything beyond the inspired writer’s expression.

The above text is quite clear; its authority is undoubted; the Jews saw the purport of Christ’s solemn asseveration: He gave Himself the age of the Deity itself. They pick up stones to punish the blasphemy there and then.

The declaration of His having unchanging divine existence, implied in the words Before Abraham was made, I am, was not, humanly speaking, directly intended by Christ, but was brought about by the allusion of the Jews to the death of Abraham and to Christ’s comparative youth. It was the Jews, not Christ, who introduced the subject of Abraham. The unexpected turn the controversy took shows how clear to Christ’s consciousness was the realisation of His own superiority to time and space. I now quote a casual remark of St. Thomas, which he makes in connection with something else, but which shows that the mind of the great theologian habitually moved in a sphere which I might call the sphere of St. John’s Gospel. The doctrine contained in the remark is an intellectual consequence of the metaphysical principle laid down by St. Thomas for the understanding of the Hypostatic Union. Yet intellectual consequence though it be, it is a natural commentary on the Gospel text quoted above. Although the human nature in Christ be something new, nevertheless the personality of that human nature is not new, but eternal. And as the name "God" is predicated of the man (Christ) not in virtue of the human nature, but in virtue of the personality, it does not follow that in the Incarnation we introduce a new God. But such a consequence would follow, if the man (in Christ) had a created personality, as those who put two persons in Christ (Nestorians) would be compelled to speak. Before Abraham was made, Christ is, because eternal Personality has replaced created personality. The thing represented by the term is belongs to personality.

Christ had eternal Personality, therefore He is eternally.

Christ’s human nature did not exist from eternity; it was formed in Mary’s womb. But it exists in virtue of an eternal existence, the Divine Personality. Suppose a man had lost his eyes or his hand; suppose the eyeball or the hand to be restored to him by Divine Power it is certain that the eye or the hand would be much younger than the man’s main organism. At the same time the new members would share the age of the whole organism, as they share its general vitality and power of existence. This comparison is used by St. Thomas in order to express how there is oneness of being, oneness of existence, and therefore oneness of age in Christ’s Personality, though there be in Him the human element inserted at a given period of history into the vitalities of Divine Personality.

The seventeenth question, from which the comparison is taken, is what may be considered the sublimest height of the metaphysics of the Incarnation. It contains two articles, and the second article is the climax of speculative thought: Whether there be only one "to be" in Christ. The answer is in the affirmative.

The replacement of personality which I have spoken of is the definition of Christian councils. It would be a sufficient formula to enable us to state the mystery. St. Thomas has drawn all his conclusions from that great ecclesiastical definition. All our views of Christ, all our love for Him, are not only modified by it, but actually born of it. But when St. Thomas begins to raise the question whether there is only one existence, one to be/ in

Christ, he evidently dares a high thing, more than seemed to be originally authorised by the language of the councils. Yet an affirmative answer to the question is the only thing that does justice to words like those of the text: Amen, Amen, I say to you, Before Abraham was made, I am. That human organism that speaks, IS, exists, has being in virtue of the existence that is Eternity itself, just as the miraculously restored eye lives in virtue of the life of the old organism. For St. Thomas, the conclusion that eternal existence is the existence of the nature formed in Mary’s womb seems to offer no difficulties. He arrives at it as calmly as you arrive at the conclusion that you want food when you are hungry. Existence follows personality, he says; for it is only a personality that makes a rational nature exist finally. Now, Christ’s human nature has Divine Personality; therefore it has Divine Existence. It is God, because it exists through God’s existence. Such is the meaning of that wonderful second article of quest. 17. Its calmness is as surprising as its speculative sublimity. Like the Divine Master who thought it no profanation to utter the words, Before Abraham was born, I am, in spite of the uproarious tumult it raised amongst the Pharisees, St. Thomas, the great master of theology, thinks it no exaggeration to say that Christ’s humanity has the same existence with the eternal God. After all, it is a smaller truth than to say that it has the same personality with the eternal God.

The Personality of Christ by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter VII

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.

The Personality of Christ by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter VI

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.

The Personality of Christ by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter V

THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB

CHAPTER V

AN ATTEMPT AT DEFINING PERSONALITY

THE word personality is a word to conjure within our own days. The power of personality is the theme of every good work of fiction as well as of every good biography. A theological writer is of all writers the one who might be seen biting his quill for long moments of embarrassment for lack of the proper word, as society has taken his word from him and given it a different meaning. The term personality holds as great a place in theology as in literature, but the roles it acts are vastly different. It is true that the more modern meaning of personality a powerful individualistic character is not unwelcome to a theologian, as his Christ is the most winsome of all persons ; but he has a much older right to the term personality/ and in his attempt to explain Christ s attractiveness he has to delve down in the hidden mysteries of much more austere concepts, and personality is winsome because it is something so solid ; and it is with this view of personality, as the austere foundation of being, that the theologian is primarily concerned.

Locke s definition, or rather description, of person is as good as any other, outside the Aristotelian and scholastic sphere of thought. This being premised to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for. Which, I think is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times .and places ; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me, essential to it : it being impossible for anyone to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive. 1

With Locke, the orthodox theologian says that a person is (essentially) a thinking, intelligent being ; that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself, as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places. The scholastic applies a similar definition to Deity itself, to the pure angelic spirit and to man. Yet, to the scholastic mind, Locke s definition of a person is not adequate. The scholastic asks with Locke why is it that a thinking being can think of itself, as itself, and it is his answer to that question that shows in him the deeper metaphysician. The English philosopher says that a thinking being thinks of itself, as itself, by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking.

Locke makes consciousness the reason of self-consciousness, which is evidently a tautology. It is as if I denned my power of running through that movement that makes me run. The scholastic, though denning a person a thinking being, with self-consciousness ( to consider itself as itself is another expression for self -consciousness), has a deeper underlying metaphysical element which saves him from Locke s tautology, and it is that deeper under lying element which is the cause, so to speak, that makes the individual person. Self-consciousness, deep and mysterious as it is, is not so deep and so mysterious as self-being. The first is merely a result of the second. Now, the scholastic maintains that self-being underlies self-consciousness, as the cause underlies its effect, and he says that a person is constituted primarily through self-being, through the fact of having one s being as an exclusive and total property.

We all know Tennyson s immortal verses describing the gradual formation of the individual self-consciousness .

The baby new to earth and sky,

What time his tender palm is prest

Against the circle of the breast,

Has never thought that this is I :

But as he grows he gathers much,

And learns the use of I/ and me,

And finds I am not what I see,

And other than the things I touch.

So rounds he to a separate mind,

From whence clear memory may begin,

As thro the frame that binds him in

His isolation grows denned.

This use may lie in blood and breath,

Which else were fruitless of their due,

Had man to learn himself anew

Beyond the second birth of Death.

In Memoriam, XLV.

Yet this very evolution of the thought of the isolated supposes an isolated possession of existence at the start. Now it is that perfect appropriation of being by the I long before there is a conscious distinction of oneself from other beings, the scholastic considers as the thing that makes a person. Scholastics are divided amongst themselves how to explain such an exclusive appropriation of being. Such differences of opinion cannot detract from the metaphysical value of the main principle, that a person is radically and eternally sui juris, a rational being with rights, and responsibilities, and duties that can never be shifted on to someone else s shoulders. Personality means incommunicable appropriation for weal and for woe of one s deeds. The highest manifestation of personality is moral merit and moral demerit, the fact through which a free act of the rational will is so entirely the property of the rational agent that God Himself cannot be held responsible for it, in the last instance, without contradicting Himself. Moral responsibility is well calculated to open out to us a view of the might of personality. Let us think for one moment that both highest bliss in heaven and profoundest misery in hell are states for a spirit which God Himself could not transfer to another spirit without injustice.

Self-consciousness the pet metaphysical reality of modern philosophies is not so deep and so permanent a thing as moral responsibility, that all-important factor of Christian philosophy. A man may be perfectly conscious of his doing a certain act without his being responsible for it, as there is the possibility of his not having been a free agent in the matter.

The fact of moral responsibility is the most immediate result of the element that makes a person. Moral responsibility is not that element itself, but it is its first fruit its direct result. In moral responsibility we show that we have our being in our own hand. How could I ever be made to answer eternally for an act of mine, if that act were not mine with the exclusion of every other moral or ethical partnership ?

Self-consciousness is near the root of our being, but it is not the root yet, and there is even the possibility of the act of which I am conscious not

being all my own act.

Moral responsibility is much nearer that root, for it implies in the last instance an exclusion of every other created will in my act of will. But it is not the root yet, just as will is not the whole man, the whole spirit. It springs from the root, and the root itself is personality. For a person is essentially a rational being that has responsibility, or, anyhow, may acquire it in time.

Moral responsibility is to my mind the natural key to the mystery of personality.

It may be objected that moral responsibility is too theological a fact to be made into a starting-point for the quest of personality, chiefly moral responsibility that stretches into the next world. My answer is that I am writing a theological book, not a philosophical one, for people to whom moral responsibility, implied in the words merit and guilt/ is an intellectual certainty.

Moral responsibility and self -consciousness almost seem to touch in the phenomenon of the consciousness of duty, of the conviction intellectual if there ever was one embodied in the notion : I ought. Yet the two things, though converging, are still different. Moral responsibility is a fact quite independent of inner consciousness, or rather we know that we have the merit as well as the guilt of our practical answers to the I ought as we have followed the voice or have disobeyed it.

There is an old scholastic axiom, Actiones sunt suppositorum Acts belong to the person/ Nothing could be truer, if we bear in mind the mystery of personal responsibility for our deeds.

I should describe personality as that reality within the creature that makes the creature s acts to be entirely his acts, with their full responsibility a responsibility stretching into eternity. It matters comparatively little how we explain that great appropriation of being that underlies responsibility. That it is a wonderful and potent reality is clear to all those who admit moral responsibility. That it is a reality that pervades and dominates our whole being is again manifest from the results of responsibility, which affects our whole life, for weal or for woe. It is necessarily what schoolmen call a substantial reality, a reality that is not merely accidental but one that is co-extensive with the individual being itself.

Before leaving this chapter I must say a few more things in order to remove certain misgivings that might arise in our minds at the hearing of some expressions made use of here as, for instance, appropriation of being, exclusive possession of being, exclusive responsibility of one s moral acts. Is it not the first rudiment of piety to believe firmly that our being is the property of God, from whom we have received it ; that our good acts, chiefly of the higher, the supernatural order, are the doings of the Spirit of God within our own created will ?

The answer to such difficulties will be a further illustration of the greatness of created personality. Nothing is truer than the fact that all our being comes from God, by creation. But God s creative power is, so to speak, at its best in the production of a being that is so complete as to have a responsibility all of its own, just as God has responsibility. Pantheism, which means emanation of things from God, as opposed to creation of things ex nihilo, is warded off most conclusively by that duality of responsibility.

That God should be able to produce outside Himself a being whose very constitution brings about within itself a responsibility that may put it eternally into opposition to the God that created it is the greatest achievement of God s creative power. So likewise with the share of God s grace in our moral acts, both natural and supernatural. No amount of divine influxus will ever take away the fact that it is my own act. St. Thomas would say that the divine influxus is of such a nature as to make my act more mine than ever. Such is his constant answer to objections about the preservation of free will under the divine influxus. Just as God s creative act at its highest results in a personality distinct from Him, so God s elevating act this is a good expression for the supernatural influxus of grace results in a meritorious deed that is the free will s own glory.

I have said already that even amongst school men there are accidental divergences of opinion as to the precise definition of that far-reaching element in the created being that makes for absolute duality between God and His rational creature, even when God fills His creature with the graces of His own Spirit.

The older philosophy takes a personality to be something entitatively static. The modern philosophies make it into something that is practically all dynamic.

The older philosophy has the great advantage over its modern sister that it does the one thing and omits not the other. It allows for all that love of life which is the characteristic of dynamic philosophy. The older philosophy grants all and every one of the transient phenomena of psychic life postulated by modern thought. But behind the phenomena of conscious life there are for the schoolmen the static and stable elements from which life with its endless variations flows, and which give it continuity and oneness.

Personality is one of those static elements ; perhaps it is the principal static element ; it is the centripetal power in our very complex individualities centripetal precisely because it is static. Such stability is not only perfectly reconcilable with the perennial flow of our conscious psychic life ; it is its salvation, just as the deep banks of a river keep the river from becoming a nondescript swamp. Or better still, personality, the static thing in man, is to consciousness, the dynamic thing in man, what the mighty mountain range is to the stream : in its soaring solitude and unbending solidity flows the winding stream with all the charm of its rippling motion and babbling song.

Before concluding the chapter I want to emphasise once more that the thing which I call moral responsibility is not personality itself, but that it is an element of personality, and in its brightest manifestation responsibility allows us a deep plunging peep into the abysmal mystery of personality.

The Personality of Christ by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter IV

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.