Clearly, we cannot put the question
of grace and nature behind us until we realize that we have not framed it in
the correct terms, i.e. in terms of
Christology and the meaning of Christology on the notion of Creation,
particularly that of St. Thomas Aquinas. Therefore, rather than thinking of grace
and nature in objective terms, it occurs to me that we should be thinking about
them in terms of Revelation itself, i.e. the Person of Jesus Christ and the
architecture of His Persona. Hence, we are talking about Chalcedon (451) and
Constantinople III (680-1) which deliver the account that Jesus Christ is one
Person with two “natures,” one uncreated as divine, the other created and
human. And it is necessary to clarify that as uncreated and created, they are
ontologically distinct and are not to be confused nor mixed. The final tally
yields the conclusion that the divine Person of Christ lives out His relation
to the Father through both “natures” as the Protagonist of all activity,
understanding by that that the divine nature does not act or will, and that the
human nature does not act or will, but rather that it is always His unique “I”
as Son Who acts and wills. Newman makes this point powerfully when he suggests
that the death of Jesus Christ was not something done to him, but He died by His own free act as divine Persona. He
was most active when He was dying. It was His act as Self-gift. It was
the divine Persona of the Son Who died: “His passion was an action; He lived
most energetically, while He lay languishing, fainting, and dying. Nor did He
die, except by an act of the will; for He bowed His head, in command as well as
in resignation, and said, ‘[Father, into thy hands I commend My Spirit,’ He
gave the word, He surrendered His soul, He did not lose it.” [2]
Hence, Joseph Ratzinger clarifies that the “natures” of
Christ are not in parallel but rather “compenetrate” insofar as it is
always the “Person” Who is acting and willing according to those natures.
Failure to keep this in mind points one in the wrong direction of trying to
solve the problem of how to resolve the relation of uncreated and created when
one is
as Creator and the other doesn’t have to be as created.
This is insoluble since we are not talking about the same plane of reality.
The
situation becomes even more interesting when you realize that the Person of
Jesus Christ as God-Man is the very center of reality itself and everything has
been made by, with and for Him. This is the testimony of St. Paul in that “He
is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. For in him
were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things
invisible… All things have been created through and unto him, and he is before
all creatures, and in him all tings hold together.”[3]
St. John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and
the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made
through him, and without him was made nothing that has been made.”[4]
Robert Barron glosses: “Individuals, societies, cultures, animals, plants, planets
and the stars – all will be drawn into an eschatological harmony through him;
rather, is the active and indispensable means by which these realities come to
be. This Jesus, in short, is the all-embracing, all-including, all-reconciling
Lord of whatever is to be found in the dimensions of time and space.”[5]
Can we
take that seriously? We had better,
since He also said: “heaven and earth will pass away, my words will not pass
away.”[6]
And
what does it mean? It means what Robert Barron says it means: that we are to
decipher the meaning of uncreated/created, divine/human, supernatural/natural
from the relation of the relation of the “natures” in Christ. Where else are we
to go since He alone has words of eternal life? We must keep in mind that when
we speak of the humanity of Christ, we are talking of something created, which the divine Person of the
Son assumed into Himself as His own. It is His own, but it is created. That is,
the Creator has entered into His creation and taken the fertilized egg of the
Virgin as His own to become Himself. And since, He is the revelation of not
only who God is, “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10, 30), but who man is, “Feel
me and see that a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have” (Lk.
24, 39). Hence, the logic compels us to solve the dualisms of
uncreated/created, grace/nature, supernatural/natural within the Christology
since all of creation is to be interpreted there.
That
said. How does one go about knowing the sensible world? And the answer must be
sought in knowing Jesus Christ since He is the center and meaning of the
sensible world. It is only in Him that we can know the relation of the divine
and the human. And so, the question is how
do we know Christ? And the answer that is given in the Ratzinger
hermeneutic of “Who do men say that I am?” concludes that Simon is able to say:
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” by entering into the prayer of
Christ.[7]
That is, since Christ reveals that He is Son, and He and the Father are one
(Jn. 10, 30), Jesus can be nothing but pure relation to the Father, which, when
incarnate, takes the form of continuous prayer . that is, the divine Person of
the Son, in time and space, manifests a continuous flow and output of prayer as
self-gift to the Father.
That prayer is the humanity of
Christ at work – a human intelligence, will, emotion – manifesting the
ontological relation of the Son “compenetra ted with and by the Father. And so
we can ask: what is creation? Robert
Barron says: ”it is nothing but a relationship to God.” Which means that it is
not a substance. It is a receptivity. It is the human body, soul, intellect,
will, emotion, imagination of Jesus Christ taken from the Virgin and made act by the one act of existence
that is the divine Person Himself.[8]
That ”Esse” that is the Son is not “being” (or “Supreme Being,” “First Cause,”
“Necessary Being,” “supreme Perfection,” or “Final Cause”) in the genus of
being like other “beings,” but the pure actuality of “Being Itself.” It is the Ipsum
Esse of the Creator as pure flow of His divine Self to the Father. That means that Uncreated Esse makes the
created human nature of Christ be, and this with such
benevolence and tenderness that it is not annihilated or damaged but enhanced
and fulfilled totally and completely since it was made for this as image and
likeness from the beginning. The human nature of Christ, then, is the very
meaning of creation. It is not “substance” but “receptivity” of the act of
Creation, and since it is not in parallel as though standing in its own
ontological autonomy but receptively compenetrated by the divine Person Who
assumed it It subsists as the divine I
in relation to the Father (and “for us”) rather then “substanding” by itself.[9]
Barron quotes Aquinas from his De
Potentia, q.3, art 1, ad 17 that says: “God simultaneously gives being and produces
that which receives being. And thus it does not follow that his action requires
something preexisting.” He
remarks that “the Zen-like language… is undermined in the context of creation. The
creature cannot be ‘something’ outside of God that receives as a relational
accident some influence from the Creator. Rather the creature is the act by
which it is created. The relationship between Creator and creature, in other
words, is primary and elemental and the ‘substances’ involved – God and the
world – are derivative, metaphysically secondary. T he giver-r receiver language,
inextricably tied to a metaphysic of substance, cannot be applied to the act by
which finitude itself is constituted. In
question 7 Aquinas had shown that God is not a ‘’thing,’ not an individuum; in this
response to objection 17 he hints at something just as radical, namely, that
the creature too is not a ‘thing’ but sheer relationship.”[10]
On my
reading, “Laudato Si” of Pope Francis seems to be all about this relational-mystical
view of creation as the extension of the humanity of Christ. Notice how Francis,
quoting St. Francis, begins with “our common home is like a sister with whom we
share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. ‘Praise
be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs
us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.”[11]
[1] “Henri
de Lubac on Nature and race: A Notre onSome Recent Contributions to the Debate,”
Nicholas J. Healy, Communio Winter 2008 535-564.
[2]
John Henry Newman, “Discourse 16, “Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His
Passion,” Mixed Sermons.
[3]
Col. 1, 15 -18
[4]
Jn. 1, 1-4.
[5]
Robert Barron, “The Priority of Christ,” Brazos Press (2007) 134-135.
[6]
Matt. 24, 35.
[7] J.
Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Thesis 3, Ignatius (1986) 25-27.
[8]
St. Thomas, S. Th. III, 17, reply:”a human nature is united to the son
of God hypostatically or personally, and not accidentally. Consequently, with
his human nature he does not acquire a new personal existence, but simply a new
relation of his already existing personal existence to the human nature.
Accordingly, this person is not said so subsist not only in divine nature but
also in human nature.
[9]
The non-sequitur of generally accepted ontology that has Ipsum Esse giving esse to
a receptor which must have esse to be able to receive esse and limit esse
[10]
R, Barron, ”Thomas Aquinas’s Christological Reading of God and the Creature,” Bridging The Great Divide,
Rowman and Littlefield (2004) 102,
[11]
Pope Francis, “Laudato Si” #1
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