Vito Caiati writes,
I am struggling, in particular, to understand what [Thomas Joseph] White is proposing with regard to the hypostatic union on pages 82-84 [of The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology , The Catholic University of America Press, 2017]. He follows Aquinas in affirming “a substantial union of God and man. . . . [in which] the two natures remain distinct, without mixture or confusion, and [in which] the union must not occur in the nature of Christ ” (82). In this substantial union, “The hypothesis [hypostasis] of the Word does not replace the human soul of Christ. . . . However, just as in man the body is the instrument of the soul, so in the incarnate Word, the human nature of Jesus is the instrument of the Word. . . . [in that] the humanity of Jesus is united to the Word as an intrinsic, ‘conjoined instrument. . .“ (83).
I do not understand what is being affirmed here. If the Word is “united” to the humanity of Jesus “as an intrinsic ‘conjoined instrument’” has not something been done to this humanity that renders it more than human? In other words, can one really hold that in this process of union, the natures remain distinct? I am particularly confused because White appears to argue for precisely this position in affirming that “in Christ there is no autonomous human personhood or human personality. He is the person of the Son and Word made human, subsisting in human nature” (83). Well, if this is so, what import does his human soul have on his thoughts and actions?
The Word (Logos) is the Second Person of the Trinity. It is the one person ( hypostasis ) that has the two natures, the divine nature and the human nature. Thus there are not two persons, the Second Person and the human person of Jesus; there is only one person, the Second Person of the Trinity. This latter person is the person of Jesus. If there were two persons, a divine person and a human person, then that would be the Nestorian heresy. (I could explain later, if you want, why this heresy is a heresy.) In other words, the person of Jesus is the eternal Word, not a human person. There is human nature in Jesus, but no human person in Jesus.
But this is not to say that the man Jesus merely embodies the Word, i.e., it is not to say that the Word is to Jesus as soul to body. That would be the Apollinarian heresy. The Word in Jesus does not merely assume a body; The Word assumes (the nature of) a fully human man, body and soul. So while there is no human person in Jesus, there is a human soul in Jesus. Here, perhaps, we have the makings of trouble for the Incarnation doctrine on White’s Thomistic construal thereof, as we shall see in a minute.
In sum, one person, two distinct natures, one divine, the other human. The person is divine. The natures are individual natures. They are not multiply realizable or multiply instantiable like rational animal which is found in Socrates and Plato equally but not in an ass. (Schopenhauer somewhere quips that the medievals employed only three examples, Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to run athwart a tradition so hoary and noble?) And yet the individual natures are not themselves self-subsistent individuals. They need a support, something that has the natures. This is part of the meaning of hypostasis . There has to be something that stands under or underlies the natures. The hypostatic union is the union of the two natures in one subsistent individual, the Word. (White, p. 113)
Now this one divine person is united to the (individual) nature of Jesus as to an essential, not accidental, instrument. But this union is not identity. There is no identity of natures or confusion of natures. The divine and human natures remain distinct. They are united, but they are united essentially, not accidentally.
Caiati asks, " Can one really hold that in this process of union, the natures remain distinct?" Yes, if union is not identity. So I don’t see a problem here.
Caiati also asks, “what import does his human soul have on his thoughts and actions?” This is a much more vexing question, and I rather doubt that we are going to find a satisfying answer to it within the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme that Fr. White employs.
Who is it that is thinking when Jesus thinks? Suppose he is debating some rabbis. He hears and understands their objections and thoughtfully replies. Is it the Word who is the subject of these mental acts? Is the Word thinking when Jesus thinks? If yes, then his human soul is not the ‘seat’ of his intellectual operations. Suppose Jesus feels hunger or thirst or the excruciating pains of his passion. Does the Word feel these pains? How could it if it is impassible? If it is not impassible and does the feel Jesus’ pains, then what role does the human soul in Jesus have to play? How can Christ be fully human, body and soul, if his human soul plays no role either intellectually or sensorially?
There is also the will to consider. If Jesus is obedient to the end, and does the will of the Father, then he wills what the Father wills. “Thy will be done.” He would rather not undergo the Passion, but “not my will but thine be done.” This makes sense only if Jesus has his own will, distinct from the Father’s will, a will ‘seated’ in his human soul. That is, the faculties of willing have to be different, even if the contents of willing are the same. But then it is not the Word that wills in Jesus.
On the other hand, if the human soul in Jesus is indeed the ‘seat’ of his intellectual and voluntative and sensitive and affective functions, then the person in him, the Word, is severed from his soul. But this drains ‘person’ of its usual meaning which includes soulic functions. The one person in two natures threatens to become a mere substratum or support of the two natures.
White’s view is that the Incarnation, although ultimately a mystery, can be rendered intelligible to the discursive intellect. I doubt it. -end of quote
