Love such that we cannot understand Part I

The title I’ve given these two talks, Love such that we cannot understand, comes, slightly adapted, not from St Thomas’ most obviously theologically weighty treatments of the Passion, though I’m going to be focusing later on some of what he has to say in the Summa Theologiae, including a backward glance at some of the articles we’ve already been reflecting on, but from a sermon. This was one of a series on the Apostles’ Creed,[1] preached in the last years of his life, touchingly, in Naples; the celebrity preacher and academic (to use wildly anachronistic language, obviously, but perhaps there’s something in it) returning to the place where he first met his vocation as a preaching friar, to speak to a mixed congregation of town and gown, quite possibly in the local Neopolitan dialect: the manuscripts that survive are in Latin, but this is not Thomas’ own text, being reconstructed from notes taken by someone in the congregation. I’ve adapted it as the title of this talk for two reasons. First, because I wanted to draw attention to the way in which it’s all too easy to categorize St Thomas according to a distinction that would have been unthinkable to Thomas himself or to any of his contemporaries: remembering him as a giant of scholastic theology but forgetting that he was also a preacher of the divine love. Secondly, I want to draw attention to a distinctive element of his thinking about the Passion, which springs precisely from the same faith that made him so great a preacher.

Aquinas is famous – or, in some people’s eyes notorious – for perhaps unparalleled precision of theological thought. To some, that is appealing – the clarity of Thomas’s intellect offering a particularly striking instance of how humans, with our finite rationality, reflect the infinitely luminous wisdom of the God in whose image we are made. To others, it is appalling: at best a forbiddingly arid intellectualism, at worst a matter of angels on pinheads, of relentlessly asking questions whose answers have no conceivable relevance to our condition. I presume, that since you are here this weekend, you are all of the former rather than the latter persuasion. But what is immediately important for us to see today is that Thomas’s astonishingly detailed and articulate account of Christian doctrine doesn’t mean that he thinks he has the last word on everything, simply because not everything can be said, or thought, by the created mind.

One of the things that Thomas says with most precision, after all, is precisely this: that while we can know that God is, we can never fully know what God is. He and his actions are always beyond, always greater, always mystery in one of its various technical theological senses: that is to say, mystery not as puzzle and confusion – neither the mysteries we associate with Agatha Christie nor the mystery of just where I’ve put my keys as I head out the door. And nor are we talking of mystery as perhaps a near synonym for the irrational, but rather mystery as what we might call supra-rational: those truths which we accept on faith, and which we do our best to explore, but which are finally simply too big for us to comprehend in their fullness. And so here too, with the great mystery of our salvation: it is a manifestation of the love of God that is greater than anything we could ask or imagine that brings Christ to Calvary and through death as our way back home to God. So, love such that we cannot understand. And a lifetime spent dwelling on its implications, even a lifetime such as St Thomas’s, will never uncover all of its depths.

All this, perhaps, explains something of the distinctive texture of Thomas’s approach to our topic today, which might at least at first sight seem bewildering, even frustrating, but which I think is actually richly exciting. Not too put too fine a point on it, while Thomas says a lot, is positively garrulous in fact, about the Passion, he never claims to pin its significance down definitively or, as the philosophers would say, univocally. And that means he doesn’t provide us with one single understanding of how the death of Christ brings about our reconciliation with God which we can oppose to theories we might associate with other theologians, or other Christian traditions. Indeed, Thomas warns us away from thinking about the Cross in any way that suggests it’s only about any one thing, even – as we shall see – a thing as important as the forgiveness of sins.

Anyone who studies theology at university is quite likely to have read accounts – I imagine that of the Swedish Lutheran theologian Gustav Aulen, in his book Christus Victor -is probably still the best known – of the history of Christian doctrine that set out a range of understandings of what was achieved for us and for our salvation in and through the events of the first Holy Week in a way that invites us to make a choice between them. Typically, differences between these various “theories of the Atonement” are portrayed in terms, first, of agency and secondly, of outcome. In other words, different theologians, or different schools of theological thought provide different answers to two sets of questions about the implications of what we affirm every Sunday in the Nicene Creed, when we say or sing that God became incarnate, suffered under Pontius Pilate, died and was buried, and rose again on the third day for us and for our salvation. First, when we consider how it comes about that we are set at rights with God by the Passion and death (and the Resurrection) of Christ, who does what? What is the role of God in our salvation, and what is our own? And, secondly, what exactly is it that the Cross achieves? What, in the final analysis, is salvation?

A common sketch of the history of Christian doctrine suggests that some early theologians simply looked at the events of the first Holy Week and saw in them a cosmic battleground, where good defeats evil, without bothering much to ask how this comes about, whilst others, picking up hints from the NT itself, where Jesus speaks of giving his life “as a ransom for many” worked out elaborate theories suggesting that the ransom price was the life of Christ paid to the devil, who had, so to speak, kidnapped humanity at the Fall. Later, on, in the High Middle Ages, and under the influence of the culture of feudalism, it is often held, another view began to prevail: humanity has offended God’s honour by disobedience, not only in Eden but ever since, thus generating the need to pay a debt not to the devil but to God Himself, to whom is due our perfect obedience. That price, again, is the life of Christ. After the Reformation, in Protestant theology, this analogy from civil law morphed into metaphors drawn from criminal law, so that Jesus is regarded not so much as paying compensation to God as enduring punishment from him – a distinction we’ll return to. More recently still, though not without antecedents in the writings of Medieval figures like Peter Abelard, many have found it more compelling to think of the atonement in terms of sympathetic human response to the sight of the Crucifixion: looking at the Cross to which in, the words of one popular Lenten hymn “my sins have nailed him, yet he bleeds and dies for me”, we are rightly horrified and resolve not to sin again.

These views of the Atonement are generally known as the classic account, the objective and the subjective theories respectively, and they are sometimes assumed to be more or less exclusive. I have sometimes found it helpful to think of them in terms of lines from three well-known Easter and Passiontide hymns. So, in the classic account – the battlefield one – we have a description of “how Judah’s Lion burst his chains and crushed the serpent’s head”; in the version of the objective account associated, for example, with St Anselm, in which Christ pays a debt to his Father on our behalf, we are reminded that “there was no other good enough to pay the price of sin”, whilst the subjective theory asks us to reflect on the fact that “love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all”.

But what is so striking about St Thomas Aquinas’ discussion of the Passion is that, as it were, he sings all three of these hymns simultaneously. He picks up images and ideas from a variety of sources, sounding at once objective and subjective, an advocate of something like the classic account, and something like an objective theory and something like a subjective one. And, in consequence, if we are tempted to think of these understandings of the Cross of Jesus along a historical trajectory, Thomas sometimes sounds astonishingly modern, sometimes, even from the perspective of the 13^th century, positively old-fashioned. All this makes the point implicitly that he states explicitly in that sermon from which we began: the love of God shown at Calvary is simply too big for us to understand, too big to capture either in concepts or in images. And, of course, the great thinkers and pray-ers of the Christian tradition, including those we conventionally think of as devising “theories of the atonement” have always known this.

In various places in his writings and in various different ways, Thomas flags up this multifaceted approach: so, he will deal with the sufferings of Christ as a pattern for us to emulate, and with what those sufferings actually achieve. He will show us the Cross as the ultimate proof of God’s love for us, and emphasise how we ought to respond. He will indicate how the Cross provides us with evidence for how God sees us as his beloved children on whom he fittingly bestows the greatest gift of love imaginable, and how it brings about a real change in our status. He will show us how the Passion both frees us from our sins and wins us a place in heaven.

So, with all this in mind, let’s take a look at one of Thomas’s most sustained treatments of the Passion which, as you’d expect, is found in the third part of the Summa Theologiae, devoted as it is to Christ as our way home to God.

Even before he reaches the section explicitly devoted to the Passion, Thomas prepares the way, and it’s interesting to see how he does this. The Prologue to the Third Part of the Summa speaks of Christ coming to save us from our sins, and Thomas soon goes on to ask that celebrated question: whether the Incarnation would have happened if the Fall had not.[2] His answer to that question, in fact, is a little more nuanced than is sometimes supposed. He doesn’t, actually, entirely rule out the possibility: he can’t, really, because this would make divine action contingent on human action, and on sinful human action at that, as though Adam and Eve force God to do something in response to their disobedience. And some of what he says in these early questions of the Third Part of the summa, where he is concerned to show that it is appropriate – fitting – for God to have become incarnate seems to be in some degree of tension with the idea that Christ would definitely not have come if there had been no Original Sin. He speaks, for instance, of how it is and natural for the good to diffuse itself,[3] which can certainly be read as suggesting that an all-good God would have sought the most intimate closeness to a beloved humanity, whether or not Adam and Eve had eaten the apple. But he is convinced that since we know – on the basis of Revelation, that this is what actually happened – first the Fall and then the Incarnation – it is better to concentrate on that fact. Consequently, he will go on to consider how the Incarnation is a fitting response to the felix culpa in the Garden of Eden, the necessary sin of Adam that won for us such and so great a Redeemer, as the Easter Exsultet has it: there’s little point in doing counter factual history, fun though it sometimes is.

But importantly, it’s the Incarnation as a whole that Thomas is considering here, not simply the end of Jesus’ earthly life. Whilst it is true that there would have been no advantage in his having been born for us if we had not profited by his redemption, and while the Passion and death – and indeed the Resurrection and Ascension – are all central to this – it is in fact the whole of Christ’s incarnate lie that achieves that reconciliation with God that we conventionally call redemption.[4]

A further preliminary to his treatment of the Passion comes in some remarkable articles where St Thomas explores what we might call the texture of Christ’s humanity, asking in particular whether it was appropriate that this humanity should be subject to what he calls defects of body and soul, by which he means all those limitations inherent in simply being a creature which lead to both physical and psychological suffering, as well as those that are in some sense the result of the Fall, given that this nature was created precisely for unspeakably close unity with divinity. As regards the body of Christ he says that it is fitting for three reasons[5]

The first of these is directly related to one aspect of what he will go on later to say about how Christ saves us from sin, and it’s one that needs careful handling. Bodily weakness and infirmity, are for Thomas among the consequences of Original Sin We can truly say, therefore, that Jesus bears our sins in the sense that he, though personally sinless, wills to be afflicted in these ways, thus taking upon himself the punishment due, not to him but to sinful humanity. It is thus “useful for the purpose of the Incarnation” that Jesus be subject to physical suffering. That at first sight might sound rather shocking, as though Thomas is, not to put too fine a point on it, a Proto-Protestant, even, indeed, a Proto-Calvinist, an advocate of what is known as penal substitutionary atonement, the idea that, in order to satisfy perhaps a rather arbitrarily conceived sense of divine justice, someone has to take the rap for contraventions of that justice, and so God ends up crucifying his Son. It goes without saying, of course, or should, that by no means all of our Protestant brothers and sisters do hold to such a view of the meaning of Calvary (as a former Anglican, I can assure you that I certainly never did), and indeed the form in which I have just stated it is doubtless a crude and simplistic caricature of the way in which any of them do – but I think it also ought to go without saying that no Catholic should. That this is not what Thomas means by talking about Jesus making satisfaction for sin and suffering in our stead will, I hope, become clearer later on.  But for now, it’s important to note that there is for Thomas genuine, objective, significance for our salvation in the intensely physical suffering of Jesus, and the “defects” of his human body that make this possible.

But these defects have two other purposes also. First, God incarnate being prey in this way to physical infirmity like the rest of us helps to assure us that the humanity of Jesus is no mere illusion, since we are used to seeing people suffer: if Jesus had appeared serenely immune to pain it might have been tempting to deny that he really was one of us. (Of course there were those in the early centuries of the Christian Church’s existence who did precisely deny this – and were condemned as heretics).

Secondly, the sufferings of Jesus have pedagogical value: they teach us how to bear our own afflictions – and this is a point that Thomas makes repeatedly in all of his treatments of the Passion.

So, if we move on to think about what Thomas calls “defects of soul”, it would clearly not have been appropriate for Jesus to be a sinner, but there are other kinds of defect of soul besides moral ones, if again we understand by defect the limitations inherent simply in being a creature, rather than those caused by the distortion of that creaturely status brought about by Original Sin. Thus Thomas is comfortable with the idea of Jesus experiencing both sorrow and fear – as indeed anyone reading the New Testament in any remotely straightforward way has to be. He does, though, think that this experience is subtly different from ours, in that while in our case our rationality is sometimes overwhelmed by emotional distress, this was not the case with Jesus: in him, both sadness and anxiety are proportionate to their cause. I think there is room for debate about what precisely this means, but again, it’s important to note that the psychological suffering of Jesus was real, and far from compromising the moral perfection necessary for him to be our Saviour. But I’d like to come back to another, rather exciting aspect of this at the end of my second talk.  [6]

So much for the background. When Thomas finally comes to consider the Passion in tis proper setting in the life of Christ, Thomas announces that he will do so from  a variety of different perspectives [give refs]. So he will consider whether it was strictly necessary that Christ die in order that we might be liberated (that’s the verb he chooses) but also questions about the nature of Christ’s subjective experience of the Passion. Does he – or should he – experience every conceivable kind of human suffering for instance? Was it appropriate that he die where and when he did, was it appropriate that crucifixion should be the means of his execution, was it appropriate that he should die between two thieves?

We don’t have time to focus on all of this, still less to explore all the other places in which Thomas treats of the Lord’s Instead, we’re going to concentrate on just a few articles from the Third Part of the Summa Theologiae before turning finally to one other place in which we find Thomas saying some very interesting things about the Passion of Christ and, how it relates especially to those lesser passions we all experience in our lives.

So the first article I’d like us to think about together is the third article in question 46 of the tertia Pars[7], where Thomas asks whether the Passion was in fact the best means by which God could have freed humanity from its predicament – having, in the previous two articles established that he could, in principle, have done this some other way but that, being God, he necessarily does choose the best means. And in showing why the suffering and death of Christ is the best way, he makes an eloquent case for not seeing salvation, rather reductively, as exclusively about the forgiveness of sins, suggesting that there are many other dimensions to the liberation brought us by the suffering and death of the Lord. What are some of these aspects of Christ’s gift to us at Calvary?

First, it encourages us to return love for love: we look at the Cross and are compelled to respond in gratitude to so great a gift. It also provides us with an example to emulate, an example, among other things, of “obedience, humility, constancy and justice”. The death of Christ, moreover, can be looked at positively as well as negatively: not only does it free us from our sins; it also wins us heaven. Finally, it underscores human dignity, both by emphasising the greatness of the price that has been paid to set us free (and consequently also emphasising our moral responsibility to live worthily of such a redeemer) and by bringing it about that, although of our own strength we are unable to struggle free from our fallen state, nevertheless, because Christ is truly human as well as truly divine, we can speak of a human conquest of the devil.

What is already striking here is precisely the way that Thomas really does drive a coach and horses through the kind of tidy categories of atonement we were thinking about earlier. We look at the Cross and, moved by the suffering of Christ, resolve to love him – and Thomas calls this part of the liberation won for us by the Passion. But he does not make this mechanism by which we are saved from our sins as an exclusively subjectivist account of the Atonement would have us do: Indeed he specifically calls this one of the ways in which the Cross liberates us besides forgiveness of sins. And the death of Christ merits the glory of heaven for us: there is an objective work that Christ does on our behalf, then, but not in a way that implies we are simply passive recipients of our redemption – it also provides us with examples of virtue that are, Thomas says, requisite for human salvation.

In Part II of this talk, we’ll be thinking a little more about the implications of this.