The key to understanding this is the meaning of "work:" only persons work because only persons are subjects, and work is the self-gift of a subject. Everything else "functions."
Joseph Ratzinger :
“The topic of the suffering God has become almost fashionable today,
not without reason, as a result of the abandonment of a theology which was
one-sidedly rationalist and as a result of the rejection of a portrait of Jesus
and a concept of God which had been emasculated, where the love of God had
degenerated into the cheap platitude of a God who was merely kind, and hence
`harmless.’ Against such a backdrop Christianity is diminished to the level of
philanthropic world improvement, and Eucharist becomes a brotherly meal. The
theme of the suffering God can only stay sound if it is anchored in love for
God and in prayerful attention to his love. The encyclical Haurietis aquas
sees the passions of Jesus, which are summed up and set forth in the Heart, as
the basis, as the reason why, the human heart, i.e., the capacity for feeling,
the emotional side of love, must be drawn into man’s relationship with God.
Incarnational spirituality must be a spirituality of the passions, a
spirituality of `heart to heart;’ in that way, precisely, it is an Easter
spirituality, for the mystery of Easter, the mystery of suffering, is of its
very nature a mystery of the heart.
“Developments since the Council
have confirmed this view on the part of the encyclical. Theology today is
certainly no longer confronted with a Stoic ethos of apatheia, but is
faced with a technological rationalism which pushes man’s emotional side to the
irrational periphery and allots a merely instrumental role to the body.
Accordingly, the emotions are placed under a kind of taboo in spirituality,
only to be followed by a wave of emotionalism which is, however, largely
chaotic and incapable of commitment. We could say that the taboo on pathos
renders it pathological, whereas the real issue is how to integrate it into the
totality of human existence, the totality of our life as we stand before
God. (…)
“All this shows that Christian
spirituality involves the senses, which are structured by and united in the
heart, and the emotions, which are focused on the heart. We have shown that this kind of
heart-centered spirituality corresponds to the picture of the Christian God who
has a heart.”[1]
The ontological grounding of this
is the following from Benedict: “It is common enough for the theological
textbooks to pay scant attention of the theological development which followed Chalcedon
“It was to this
question, after two centuries of dramatic struggles which also, in many ways,
bore the mark of imperial politics, that the Third Council of Constantinople
(680-681) addressed itself. On the one hand, it teaches that the unity of God
and man in Christ involves no amputation or reduction in any way of human
nature. In conojoining himself to man, his creature, God does not violate or
diminish him; in doing so, he brings him for the first time to his real
fullness. On the other hand (and this is no less important), it abolishes all
dualism or parallelism of the two natures, such as had always seemed necessary
in order to safeguard Jesus’ human freedom. In such attempts it had been
forgotten that when the human will is taken up into the will of God, freedom is
not destroyed; indeed, only then does genuine freedom come into its own.”[2]
The key to
understanding this is to go to the Scripture that says, “I have come down from heaven,
not opt do my own will, but the will of him who sent me” (Jn. 6, 38).
Benedict says, and I repeat: “Here it is the divine Logos who is
speaking, and he speaks of the human will of the man Jesus as his will, the
will of the Logos. With this exegesis of John 6, 38 the Council indicates the
unity of the subject in Christ. There are not two `I’s in him but only one. The
Logos speaks in the I-form of the human will and mind of Jesus; it has become
his I, has become adopted in to his I, because the human will is completely one
with the will of the Logos. United with the latter it has become a pure Yes to
the Father’s will.”[3]
These
remarks are incalculably important because they save us from a reductionism of
the human will to be an objectivized “part” of the divine Person that is not
the divine Person willing, but that somehow or other wills independently as a
will. In this way, it is “parallel” to the divine but not divinized and yet
autonomous.
Once you do
that, you will now tend to say, as does Weinandy, that the human will - and
humanity of Christ in general - will suffer, but not the divine Person. In this
regard, perhaps Bernard Lonergan can be helpful:
“Q. Who
suffered under Pontius Pilate?
A. Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord.
Q. Did he
himself suffer, or was it somebody else, or was it nobody?
A He himself suffered.
Q. Did he
suffer unconsciously?
A. No, he
suffered consciously. To suffer unconsciously Is not to suffer at all. Surgical
operations cause no pain, when the patient is made unconscious by an
anesthetic.
Q. What does it
mean to say that he suffered consciously?
A. It means
that he himself really and truly suffered. He was the one whose soul was
sorrowful unto death. He was the one who felt the cutting, pounding scourge. He
was the one who endured for three hours the agony of the crucified.
Q. Do you mean
that his soul was sorrowful but he himself was not sorrowful” [Weinandy]
A. That does
not make sense. The Apostles’ Creed says explicitly that Jesus Christ, his only
Son, our Lord, suffered under Pontius Pilate.
Q. Do you mean
that his body was scourged and crucified but he himself felt nothing?
A. No, he felt
all of it. Were our bodies scourged and crucified, we would feel it. His was
scourged and crucified. He felt it.
Q. Is not Jesus
Christ God?
A. He is.
Q. Do you mean
that God suffered?
A. In Jesus
Christ there is one person with two natures. I do not mean that the one person
suffered in his divine nature. I do mean that the one person suffered in his
human nature.
Q. It was
really that divine person that suffered though not in his divine nature?
A. It was. He suffered. It was not somebody else that
suffered. It as not nobody that suffered;”[4]
The thrust of Lonergan’s dialogue
is to point out the confusion – the reification of faculties into personal
agents – objects (faculties) into subjects (persons). Only persons – or
subjects – suffer since only subjects exist and are the agents or patients of
action.
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