Scotus Academicus, Tomus septimus: De Incarnatione Verbi Divini

Note 1. The defects of the human body are of a twofold kind: for some are purely natural and free from vice, such as hunger, thirst, weariness, etc.; others are infected with a certain stain of turpitude, such as concupiscence, sicknesses, and those which are properly reckoned under the name of passions. Moreover, of those natural defects some are general, belonging to the whole human race, such as death, hunger, thirst, etc.; while others are special, found only in certain men, and have particular causes from which they arise, such as leprosy, sickness, deformity, etc. Now these special defects arise from various causes; for they are either contracted from nature, namely by reason of a deficient formative virtue, such are those sicknesses which are called hereditary, for instance bodily weakness, the loss of some part, deformity, etc.; or from the intemperance of climate and air; or finally from the disordered affections and actions of men, from which enormous and varied diseases daily spring up. It is asked, therefore, whether Christ had all defects of this kind, both general and special.

Note 2, or rather to be repeated from what has been said: that there was true flesh in Christ, and like ours in all things as far as natural things are concerned, except sin and its contagion: for he was conceived and born of a woman, nor did he fall from heaven; nor wholly impassible, as some Acephali wished, who on this occasion were divided into two sects, since others, at the instigation of Severus, said that the body of Christ, while he lived on earth, was tried by suffering and subject to corruption and passibility: while others on the contrary contending denied that he truly bore these things, whose leader was Julian of Halicarnassus, and afterwards Gaianus. Gaianus lived under the Emperor Zeno about the year 476; but Julian under the Emperor Phocas about the year 604. Moreover, some proceeded to such folly that they thought Christ had no bodily magnitude according to his flesh, but walked upon the sea without bulk and incorporally; that this also was the opinion of Theodoret the Pharanite Monothelite Martin I attested in the Lateran Synod, in the second Constitution. Indeed Leontius of Byzantium relates in book 2 of the three books which he published against the Eutychians and Nestorians that certain men who thought catholically concerning the two natures of Christ nevertheless thought with the Eutychians in this, that they boasted the body of Christ before the resurrection was incorruptible. Furthermore these heretics were called Aphthartodocetae, from the Greek preposition ἀ, which means without or not, and from the word φθαρτοῦ, which denotes subject to corruption and death, and from the verb δοκεῖν, which in Latin is the same as I think, because they held that the body of Christ was neither subject to death nor passible. Besides, as Nicephorus writes, book 18 of his History, cap. 12, the Catholics who opposed these heretics called them Phantasiasts and Manichees, because they seemed to assert that the body of Christ was only apparent and phantastic; whereas on the other hand the heretics insulted the Catholics and called them Phthartolatrates, as if worshipping a body subject to corruption, and also called them Skenolatrates, as if adorers of a tabernacle: nay, what is far worse, this error of the heretics at one time so pleased the Emperor Justinian, otherwise pious and catholic, that by a public edict he commanded it to be taught in the Church of God that the body of Christ was always incorruptible and never had irreprehensible passions, as Nicephorus writes, book 17, cap. 29.

Note 3. All Catholics agree that it was not necessary, in order that Christ the Lord might satisfy God the Father sufficiently for sins, that he suffer the punishments of the damned, as Calvin impiously blasphemes in book 2 of his Institutes, cap. 16, § 10. For truly if Christ ought to assume and suffer the punishments of the damned, especially so that he might free us from them: yet he could snatch us from those punishments even without suffering them, but by suffering others equivalent: not indeed according to the proportion of pain, but according to the dignity of the person suffering and satisfying; and consequently there is no reason, no authority whatsoever, that would lend the slightest support to the blasphemy of Calvin. No authority, I say: for what is brought forward from Isaiah cap. 53, namely that Christ was bruised for our iniquities and truly bore our languors, is not to be understood as though he ought to suffer the same torments which we were going to suffer in hell; but only that, for the expiation of our sins, that adorable Savior was truly given over to pains and to death. Nor does anything favor him in what he adduces from the Apostle, Heb. 4, where Christ is said to be tempted in all things by similitude of flesh without sin; for the particle all is not understood of all the punishments which sinful men must undergo in vengeance for their crime, but only of the hardships and calamities of this life.

These things therefore premised, three points remain to be determined: First, whether the body of Christ was truly passible and subject to the common defects to which other men are subjected. Second, whether he had private sicknesses. Third, whether he had the defect of deformity.

First Conclusion. — THE BODY OF CHRIST THE LORD WAS TRULY PASSIBLE, AND SUBJECT TO SENSITIVE PAIN AND TO THE COMMON DEFECTS OF MEN. This is of faith, whose contrary error was condemned in the Council of Ephesus, Anathematism 12.

It is gathered moreover from various texts of sacred Scripture: First indeed Isaiah 53, where the Prophet pronounces concerning Christ: Truly our languors he himself took, and our sorrows he himself carried, etc. Hence Matthew 4 we read that after he had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterwards he hungered. And John 4, But Jesus being wearied with his journey, sat thus upon the fountain, etc.

The same the ancient theologians and holy Fathers teach excellently, saying that just as Christ is truly believed to have died, as no Christian doubts, much more did he suffer the other affections which precede and bring death, as Tertullian rightly argues, book 2, Contra Marcionem, c. 27. Now, he says, that I may dispatch the rest briefly, whatever you still gather together as trifling, weak, and unworthy, for the destruction of the Creator, I will set forth by one simple and sure argument: God could not have entered into human contacts unless he had assumed human senses and affections, through which he might temper to humbled human mediocrity the intolerable force of his Majesty — things unworthy indeed for himself, but necessary for man; and thus already worthy of God, because nothing is so worthy of God as the salvation of man. For if God, and that a most sublime God, cast down the summit of his Majesty with such humility as to subject himself even to death, and to the death of the cross; why should you not think that some littlenesses were fitting even for our God, yet more tolerable than Jewish insults and gibbets and sepulchres? Thus St. Athanasius in the book De Incarnatione: The body of Christ, he says, having a substance common with the others; for it was a human body, although formed by a new and unusual miracle from the Virgin alone; nevertheless since it was mortal, like other similar bodies, it underwent death. For as Ambrose writes, he who assumed a body ought to undergo all things that belong to a body, that he should hunger, thirst, be distressed, be saddened. And St. Leo: Therefore the property of each substance being preserved, and both coalescing into one person, humility is received by Majesty, infirmity by power, mortality by eternity; and that it might repay the debt of our condition, the inviolable nature was united to the passible nature. Then St. Fulgentius: And he clothed himself with our flesh together with the condition of human mortality; he received our soul also together with the infirmities without the stain of human infirmity. And the same elsewhere says that the sadness and perturbation of soul which the Son of God had voluntarily in his soul, he had in such a way that he does not deny even the passions of the human soul to be true from the will, and voluntary in truth. And because the Divinity assumed a true man, the same endured all the infirmities of human nature, true ones indeed, but voluntary within the same truth of human nature alone.

That same truth, says Vazquez, the ancient Catholic theologians proved by this following argument, as Nicephorus relates, book 17, cap. 29: if Christ did not have a passible body, nor the sense of passion, it follows that Christ is not ὁμοούσιος to us, that is consubstantial; thus argues Damascene, book 3, De Fide, cap. 28. But the heretics, as the same Nicephorus narrates, answered in this manner: How do you say that the body of Christ after the resurrection is incorruptible, and yet consubstantial to us; so also do we say that before the resurrection it was incorruptible, yet consubstantial with us. But the Catholics objected again, that the body of Christ after the resurrection is incorruptible, yet consubstantial to us, and that it has incorruptibility from the grace of God, not from its own nature. But again the heretics answered: We too say it was incorruptible before the resurrection not by nature but by the grace of God, and yet consubstantial with us. This however the Catholics repelled from those things which are said in Scripture concerning Christ; for when he is said before the resurrection to have hungered, we cannot but concede the sense of hunger in Christ; for although after the resurrection he is said to have eaten, yet he is not said to have hungered, which is far different; for hunger is a certain pain in the mouth of the stomach proceeding from melancholy; but the pain of an exterior sense is the adherence of a certain quality disagreeing with nature. Add also, in support of the Catholics, that if the body of Christ before the resurrection and after it were incorruptible and impassible by the grace of God, its assumption would seem idle, since it would never have been left in its natural state, especially if those things which the Gospel narrates as done in the body of Christ were done not truly but only according to phantasy. So Vazquez from Nicephorus. — That moreover Christ the Lord fittingly assumed the defects and passions of the human body, the Seraphic Doctor clearly proves in 3 dist. 15, art. 1, qu. 1, by a threefold reason drawn from the threefold end for which Christ put on human flesh, namely for the price of our salvation, for the example of virtue, and for the prop of our frailty. For the price of our salvation, because he had purposed to redeem us not with corruptible gold and silver, but with his own most precious blood, and to lay down his life for our lives. But for this he would not have been suitable unless he had assumed a deficient and passible nature; and therefore he ought to have had our defects and penalities in himself. From another cause also this very thing was fitting, namely for the example of virtue, and especially of humility, patience, and piety, through the mediation of which one arrives at heaven, and in which Christ willed us to imitate him, according to that saying: Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart, etc. The third reason is on account of the prop of our frailty, on account of which, he says,

the rational nature has in itself difficulty in believing truths, irascibility in hoping for arduous things, and concupiscibility in loving goods. And therefore Christ willed not only to be assimilated to us in nature, but also in defects and penalities, that by manifesting in himself the truth of human nature he might furnish a prop to our reason for believing; yet by showing the immensity of his mercy through the assumption of our misery, he furnishes a prop to the irascible for hoping; by showing the magnitude of his benevolence he offers an incentive to the concupiscible for loving him. And therefore although such defects may seem unfitting to be found in Christ if considered per se; yet if they be referred to their end, a great fitness of congruity is found.

You will object 1. Just as the defect of fault conflicts with supreme justice, so the defect of frailty and impotence conflicts with supreme power: but it did not befit the supremely just God to have the defect of fault either in himself or in the nature assumed: therefore by equal reason it did not befit him to have the defect of penalty and impotence. — The Seraphic Doctor distinguishes the major in the same place: that both conflict equally, if both infirmity and guilt are compared to the divine nature — this he concedes; for in the divine nature as no injustice can be, so no impotence can be: if both are compared to the assumed nature, he denies it; since in the assumed nature infirmity can be the matter for the exercise of virtue, for the virtue of fortitude is exercised chiefly in enduring terrible things, especially those which bring death; hence with respect to the assumed nature frailty is not related to power in the same manner as vice is related to justice; for vice, however taken, always renders the subject blameworthy, whereas infirmity and impotence render the subject more praiseworthy when joined to the inferior virtue of the soul which confers merit.

You will object 2. Just as fault, which has no subsequent punishment, is not judged ordered by justice, so also punishment, which has no preceding fault: but the defects and penalities in Christ have no preceding fault: therefore they cannot inhere in him in an ordered way: but Christ could have nothing disordered in himself: therefore neither could he have defects and penalities. — The same Seraphic Doctor distinguishes the major: punishment which has no preceding fault is disordered, if it is inflicted coercively and involuntarily — this he concedes; if it is accepted voluntarily and out of charity, he denies it. But Christ assumed the penalities not from necessity but from infinite charity, by assuming a mortal body; since it was free for him to assume a glorious and impassible body; but that he might attest his immense love toward men, he willed to be made like his brethren in all things by similitude of flesh without sin: whence the Apostle, Heb. 12, exhorts that we run by patience to the fight proposed to us, looking on Jesus the author and finisher of faith, who having joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame.

You will object 3. St. Hilary, who in book 10, De Trinitate, openly says that Christ as man had truly no sense of pain, hunger, thirst, and the other penalities with which our bodies are afflicted, but only in appearance and according to appearance. For disputing against certain Arians who, that they might prove the Son inferior to the Father and not consubstantial with him, said that his Divinity was somehow capable of suffering and truly suffered, and thus accommodated pain, sadness, fear, and the like not to the nature of man assumed by the Word but to his very Divinity. Disputing against these, says St. Hilary:

Many of them will have it from the impulse of the Passion, and from the infirmity of suffering, that he was not in the nature of an impassible God, so that he who feared and grieved was either not in that power of security by which he would not have feared, or in that incorruption of spirit which does not grieve, but trembled with fear at passions of a nature more eternal from God the Father, and groaned at the atrocity of bodily punishment.

Then, bringing forward texts of Scripture by which Christ the Lord is declared to have labored with sadness or fear; he shows that he had no cause for a death or penalty to be feared, since he knew that his body was not subject to penalty nor to be dissolved by corruption: and to demonstrate this, he subjoins:

Man therefore Jesus Christ, he says, the Unigenitus God through flesh and Word, as son of man so also Son of God, took true man, deficient from himself toward God according to the similitude of our man: into whom although blow might fall, or wound descend, or knots press together, or suspension raise up — these things indeed brought by the impetus of the Passion, yet they did not inflict the pain of the Passion; like some weapon piercing water, pricking fire, or wounding air, which does not retain its nature when this passion is inflicted upon it; since it is not in the nature of fire to be fairly pierced, or air to be wounded, although it is the nature of a weapon to wound and prick and pierce. The Lord Jesus Christ indeed suffered while he was struck, while crucified, while dying: but the Passion rushing upon the body of the Lord neither was not a Passion nor yet exercised the nature of Passion; since it served that ministerial penalty, and the power of the body without sense of penalty received the force of the penalty raging within it. And he brings forward the reason why he judged the body of Christ was not vulnerable like our bodies, namely because it was of a perfection and formation far more excellent than our bodies. Indeed that body, he says, would have had the nature of our pain if our body has that property of nature that it treads the waves and walks over the billows, and is not weighed down in its going, nor do they give way under the footprints of one standing on them; that it penetrates solid things too, nor is shut out by the barriers of closed houses: but if such is the nature of the Lord's body, that by its own power, its own soul it is carried over moist things and stands on liquids and runs across structures, what is judged by nature of human flesh conceived of the Holy Spirit, etc. In which words he clearly signifies that that insensibility of the body of Christ proceeds from the state and condition of its nature; wherefore iron could not exercise its force upon it, nor could other instruments of inflicting pain confer any harm.

That such was the opinion of St. Hilary Claudianus Mamertus openly confesses in book 2, De statu animae, where speaking of St. Hilary he says:

Among very many of his most lofty disputations he is said to have maintained two things more broadly than the truth: one, that nothing created is incorporeal; the other, that Christ felt no pain in his Passion. If his Passion was not true, then our redemption also could not be true. But when blessed Hilary abolished the fault of this opinion by the power of his confession, he so bears the stylus of reprehension that he does not suffer detriment to his merits.

— But the outstanding princes of theology labor all the more attentively to preserve the sound and integral doctrine of this luminary of the Church, defender and pillar of faith, because they heard St. Jerome in epistle 7, the one to Laeta, advise that the books of Hilary be run through with unimpeded foot. Therefore the Master of the Sentences, dist. 15, and St. Thomas, 3 part, qu. 18, art. 3, ad 1, expound the aforesaid opinion of St. Hilary in such wise that they judge his mind to be that Christ did not feel the pain inflicted on account of sin; whence, since he had in himself neither cause nor merit of pain, he did not even receive the force of penalty with the sense of penalty: and they teach that this was expressed in his words when he says: Not having the nature of grieving: for his nature must not be estimated from the condition of our nature, since it was begotten in an unusual manner. But Alexander, qu. 17, memb. 1, art. 2, expounds it in such a way that he wishes St. Hilary taught nothing else than that Christ did not feel pain except at the arbitrament of his will; so that there was in him no necessity either of grieving or fearing such as is in us. Hence he felt pain not unwillingly, but accepted voluntarily, etc. But the Seraphic Doctor brings forward three answers, to which all the sayings of others for explaining the mind of St. Hilary are easily reduced. The first, which the Master of the Sentences also hands down, is that Hilary denied of Christ not pain but the cause of pain, namely sin; not the truth of pain but its necessity; not the perception of pain but the perturbation, which withdraws the soul resisting the pain from its own state. That this is evident from the whole series of the passage. Does he fear, he says, who goes forth to meet armed men coming to seize him? and was there infirmity in the body at whose encounter the terrified ranks of the pursuers fell down? What infirmity then do you think ruled over that body, whose nature had such power? And a little below, speaking of the ear of Malchus restored at the touch of the hand of Christ, he says: If this was the power in the body of Christ, by what faith, I ask, is it defended that he was naturally infirm, to whom it was natural to inhibit the whole nature of human infirmities? Comparing therefore the powers of words and deeds, it cannot be doubted that infirmity was not in the nature of that corporeal nature, to which it belonged by the power of its nature to repel every infirmity of bodies, and that that passion, though inflicted upon the body, did not yet introduce into the body the nature of grieving: because although the form of our body was in the Lord, yet the form of our vitious infirmity was not in the body which came forth from the Virgin from the conception of the Holy Spirit. From these things appears what was the mind of St. Hilary, namely that the passion of Christ arose not from necessity or infirmity, and that the punishments which he bore brought into him no sense of pain contrary to his will; in which he differs from us who suffer with a reluctant mind.

— Philip, abbot of Bona Spei, explains it in the same way. Which exposition, that it may be understood, it must be presupposed according to the principles of St. Augustine that pain, which is called corporeal, is not in the body but in the soul, and that it is nothing else than the reluctance of the mind arising from the fact that the body suffers something displeasing to it. Pain of the flesh, says Augustine, is only an offense of the soul from the flesh, and a certain dissent from its suffering. Wherefore, when the soul cannot attend to the wounds of the body, as happens in lethargies, then most true is the saying of St. Hilary that the edge of a weapon piercing the body inflicts no more pain than if it pierced water. But the matter stands almost in the same way if the mind attending to the pain does not resist it: for pain is posited not in attention alone but also in reluctance. Hence if the mind then perceived the cause of pain, namely the wound, because it perceived it; yet it would not properly feel pain, because it did not resist it. And accordingly, since the will of Christ was superior to all punishments to be inflicted, and since it was most constant in the purpose of obeying God the Father by satisfying for men, torments could bring him no reluctance; and thus excellently says St. Hilary that the flesh of Christ suffered, but that the passion did not reach the soul; for he was indeed wounded for our iniquities, but since he was offered because he himself willed it, those wounds did not cast down his soul with an internal sense of pain. Yet that he bore our pains and carried our languors, insofar as pain is commonly conceived as an external injury or change of the natural state of the body which the mind perceives, whether meanwhile it resist or consent, St. Hilary teaches in the places to be cited below.

— The second answer of the Seraphic Doctor is that

St. Hilary does not exclude the sense of pain from Christ according to the human nature, but according to the divine: whence those words are to be referred to the person of Christ; for the understanding of the sayings, he says, must be taken from the causes of speaking. For Hilary in the words premised wished to exclude the error of Arius, who said that Christ suffered in his whole self.

So also Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, expounds the mind of St. Hilary:

Since therefore, he says, St. Hilary says that blows and wounds brought passion to the man assumed by the Son of God, yet did not inflict the passion of pain, as if a weapon pierced water etc.: it is the same as if he said, the man assumed felt the impetus of the passion and the force of pain, the God assuming did not feel; and this he declares a little later saying: the power of the body, that is, the Divinity assuming that body to other bodies(?) remains, so that there be sense: the power of the body without sense of penalty with respect to the divinity assuming. And in this manner of speaking truly and with the faith of the Christian religion safe, it can be said that Christ or the body of Christ suffered and did not suffer, grieved and did not grieve, died and did not die.

Otherwise if the aforesaid Doctor had wished to understand against the most common faith of the Church, against the definition of all the holy Fathers, the flesh of Christ to be insensible and devoid of pain, he would by no means have referred to the man assumed by the Son of God as like us in the aforesaid opinion: for what similitude is there between sensible and insensible, suffering and devoid of pain? This Lanfranc wrote against Berengarius objecting against St. Hilary the error concerning the insensibility of the body of Christ, in an Epistle to Romuald, abbot of Poitiers, related by Baronius, tome 2 of the Annals, 1088. Which exposition seems to be handed down by St. Hilary himself, canon 31 on Matthew against the Arians, writing thus:

The whole sense of those men is, that they think fear of death fell upon the Son of God, who assert that he was not brought forth from truth nor existed from the infinity of almighty substance but was made from nothing through him who created him, and therefore in him anxiety of body, therefore passion of spirit along with the passion of the body: therefore fear of death, as one who was able to fear death and could die.

But he expounds his opinion most clearly in the Enarration on Psalm 53:

He is not to be understood as given over to passion from necessity of nature rather than from the sacrament of human salvation, and to have willed rather than been compelled to subject himself to passion: and although the unchangeable divine nature no injurious perturbation would offend, nevertheless the passion accepted was voluntary, destined indeed itself to fulfill the penal office, yet not about to bear the sufferer in actual sense. Not that it had not the nature of being harmed, but because pain does not feel from the nature of the Divinity. God therefore suffered, because he voluntarily subjected himself to passion; yet he did not fall from the power of his own nature so as to grieve; for there follows: I will sacrifice to thee willingly, etc.

— The third answer, which Bellarmine embraces in book 3, De anima Christi, cap. 8, together with very many others whom Vazquez relates, dist. 59, cap. 1, is that truly this luminary of the Church suffered an eclipse in this part, but at last, its light multiplied, appeared more radiant through his retraction; for the Seraphic Doctor relates there: I heard William, Bishop of Paris, relate that he had seen and read through the book of the retraction of Hilary. That Hilary retracted his error in that little book, St. Thomas teaches in 3 dist. 15, and Albert in the same place, and Claudian Mamertus above. — And although this book of retraction now does not appear and has perished through the injury of time, nevertheless one may gather that St. Hilary held an opinion contrary to the former assertion, and truly Catholic, from his commentaries on the Psalms: for explaining Psalm 68 upon these words, Save me, O God, for the waters have come in even to my soul, he writes thus:

For when the waters entered even to the soul, he became subject to the death of the cross, when the impulses of various passions broke through even to the death of the soul. And a little later: Truly both the power and might of these entering passions is from nothing else than from the assumption of flesh: for the terror of our infirmities could not fall upon God: nor could the passions exercise themselves except through the flesh of our body as subject matter. And again: The Lord was struck, receiving our sins and grieving for us, that health might be restored to us through the resurrection from the dead, he having been stricken even to the infirmity of the cross and of death. Likewise: Every terror, he says, of the tempest raging against us fell upon us, etc. Then also he began to be able to suffer and to die, descending into the depths through the setting of death. And below: Therefore there was not in the Unigenitus Son of God natural infirmity, but assumed, because on account of God he took up these reproaches of passions.

By which words St. Hilary truly testifies that God took up grief and fear not by his own nature but in the flesh assumed. And again he asserts that God assumed flesh of the same nature as the flesh of Adam after sin, weak, and truly grieved: But he had not spared, he says, first that Adam formed of the clay of the earth, whom he cast out of Paradise after his fault, lest touching the tree of life he should remain in eternity of punishment, so that Adam, taking up the second from the heavens the nature of his body, and struck by an equal death, might call it back again into eternal life, without the eternity of punishment. Him therefore thus struck by God they pursued, adding to the pain of wounds the pain of this persecution: for he grieves for us according to the Prophet, and was esteemed vile in pains: you see how manifestly he is said to have borne not only wounds, that is perforations; but also the pains of wounds: which is plainly contrary to what he wrote in the place of the tenth book On the Trinity. Nor does it matter that none of the ancients noted this error in Hilary, nor that St. Jerome admonished Laeta that his daughter run with unimpeded foot through the Epistles of Athanasius and the books of Hilary, that she delight in their treatises, their intellects, in whose books the piety of faith may not waver: for not all errors into which some of the Fathers fell were noted by others: whence it could happen that St. Jerome too passed it over and did not observe it. Or I say that it would have been in vain for this error to have had to be noted by them, which St. Hilary himself had erased by his own retraction and contrary documents: for by this reason not all the lapses of St. Augustine, which he himself corrected in the books of his Retractations, have been noted and condemned by subsequent holy Fathers and ecclesiastical writers.

— But let that one of these answers be chosen which shall seem best.

You will object 1. He did not have a passible body who was devoid of all passion, whom neither pleasure nor pain nor any movement of human affection invaded, who ought not to eat except to remove the suspicion that he was pure spirit: but this is the opinion of St. Clement of Alexandria concerning Christ: therefore so far is it from being heretical that rather it is confirmed by the reckoning of the more ancient Fathers of the Church. That St. Clement defended it is manifest from book 5 of the Stromata, page 168: Such indeed is he who is endowed with knowledge, he says, that the affections which arise in order that the body may endure do not usually fall upon him, namely hunger, thirst and the like: but that in the Savior indeed the body should require the necessary ministries of the body as body in order that it remain, is ridiculous. For he ate not on account of the body which was contained by holy power, but lest those who conversed with him conceive otherwise concerning him, as certainly certain later men judged him to have appeared by vision and phantasm; but he himself was devoid of passion, as one upon whom no motion of affection fell, neither pleasure nor pain. — I answer, that St. Clement excludes from Christ only the necessity of hunger and thirst, disordered passions, and movements of affections creeping in without consulted reason. But he does not deny that he truly suffered hunger and thirst and the other affections out of condescension. His body indeed, insofar as united to the Word of God, did not require the necessary ministries of life, because the infinite power of the Word could preserve it without those and contain it by holy power: he willed nevertheless to be tempted in all things by similitude without sin, lest he be thought to have assumed a phantastic or apparent body. That moreover he judged Christ truly to have suffered is evident from his Exhortation to the Gentiles, cap. 19, where he says: Believe the man who is man God, believe the living God who is man, who suffered and is adored, believe the servant dead, etc. And book 2 of the Paedagogus, cap. 8: How alien it is, he says, that we who have heard that the Lord was crowned with thorns, insulting the venerable Passion of the Lord by sport, should have our heads crowned with flowers. This can be confirmed by the words of Origen, who, from the doctrine of the Church and school of Alexandria, in which he had heard St. Clement as master, writes thus in book 2, Contra Celsum: If, as Celsus says, Jesus felt no pain or molestation during that time: in what way could those who afterwards followed use Jesus as an example of enduring any laborious and troublesome thing for virtue's sake, if he truly did not suffer as man, but only in appearance?

Second Conclusion. — CHRIST DID NOT ASSUME THE PRIVATE DEFECTS OF MEN, SUCH AS INFIRMITIES, LEPROSY, ETC.

Proof. Christ assumed only those defects which conduced to the work of redemption; but private infirmities and languors did not conduce to the work of redemption, nay greatly hindered it, since they would have been the cause why Christ could not have devoted himself to the conversion of men and the preaching of the Gospel: therefore he ought not to have assumed those defects.

Then, those special defects arise either from the weakness of the formative virtue, or from disordered actions, or from the vengeance of sin: but under none of these headings could those defects be found in Christ.

You will object 1. That prophecy of Isaiah 53, where he speaks thus of Christ: Truly our languors he himself took, and our sorrows he himself carried, and we thought him as it were a leper, and struck by God and humbled. But he was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins. — I answer, that the Prophet is not to be understood of morbid languors or peculiar infirmities which arise from the intemperance of the human body, but of those languors and pains which he received inflicted bloodily by the cruelty of the Jews at the time of the passion: for by so many scourges and so many wounds his sacred body was torn, that truly he appeared to men as it were a leper, and there was in him no beauty nor comeliness.

Third Conclusion. — CHRIST HAD NOT THE DEFECT OF DEFORMITY, BUT WAS RENOWNED FOR EXCELLENT BEAUTY AND GRACE.

It is proved first by those oracles of sacred Scripture by which Christ is foretold as to be endowed with singular beauty. Thus Gen. 49, His eyes are more beautiful than wine, and his teeth whiter than milk. Thus Ps. 44 it is said Thou art beautiful in form above the sons of men: which text the sacred Interpreters expound of the bodily comeliness of Christ the Lord. Which indeed Nicephorus confirms, book 1 of his History cap. 10, where he narrates that Christ was beautiful and of fair figure such as befitted a man; so that his beauty was joined with gravity and modesty: wherefore St. Jerome on chapter 53 of Isaiah testifies that the form of Christ was most elegant and most beautiful, so much so that by sight alone he drew all men to himself with potent allurement. That very splendor, he says, and majesty of the Divinity hidden, which shone forth even in his human face, was able from the first glance to draw beholders to himself.

This truth can be proved equally from the fact that for beauty only these three things are required: the best temperament, proportion of members, and due color; which three things his divine formative virtue sufficiently indicates were in Christ. For what is born of the Virgin of the Holy Spirit is.

They could object against this conclusion certain holy Fathers and ancient theologians: above all Clement of Alexandria, who in the Paedagogus, after many things disputed concerning true beauty, finally proves by the example of Christ that it ought to be placed in soul and virtue, not in the elegance of body. For the Lord himself, he says, was deformed in appearance, the Spirit testifies through Isaiah. And we saw him, and he had no beauty nor comeliness: but his form was unlovely beyond men. And who is more excellent than the Lord? Then he regards not the beauty of flesh, which deceives by a certain appearance; but the true beauty of soul and body: of soul indeed beneficence, of flesh truly immortality. — And in the third book of the Stromata: The very Head of the Church, Christ, he says, passed through the flesh lacking beauty and deformed, that he might teach us to look to the state of body devoid of beauty belonging to the divine principle. And in book 6: The Lord, he says, did not without reason will not to make use of the form of the body, lest anyone admiring elegance and beauty depart from the things which are said.

Thus in Origen, Celsus the Epicurean objects that the body of Christ is said to have been small and deformed and by no means noble. To whom Origen answers, that it was written beyond controversy that the body of Jesus was deformed, yet not ignoble, as he expounds it. — Tertullian also in the book De carne Christi, cap. 9, detracts beauty from the flesh of Christ, and says this very thing made him the more admirable: But the earthly condition of flesh, he says, is not wonderful. Itself it was that which made his other things wonderful, when they said: Whence has this man doctrine, and these signs? Even among those despising his form this was ⟦rox?⟧. So much was the body neither of human honor, much less of heavenly brightness. While even among us the Prophets are silent concerning his lowly appearance, the passions themselves, and the insults themselves speak: the passions proved the flesh human, but the insults dishonored. Would anyone dare with utmost nail to scratch a new body, to contaminate that face with spittings, unless deserving it? The same he signifies also in chapter 4 of book 11, Against the Jews. — But I answer, that the aforesaid Fathers and ancient theologians were led by a weaker argument to assert these things of Christ; for the passage of Isaiah upon which they chiefly rely in their assertion is to be understood of Christ suffering and wounded and torn with blows, not of the natural form of his body, as St. Chrysostom praised above explains, when he says: For he was admirable not only when working miracles, but even when simply regarded he abounded in immense grace; and the Prophet signifying this sang: Thou art beautiful in form above the sons of men. But when Isaiah says: He had no beauty nor comeliness, either speaking with regard to the glory of the Divinity, that hidden and inexplicable one, he speaks thus; or narrating those things which happened at the time of the passion, namely that dishonor which he sustained hanging on the cross, and the rejection which he displayed throughout the whole time of his life.