In the prologue of St. John's Gospel we
read, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth."
St. Thomas Aquinas meditated carefully on this passage and we see the fruits of it in
his treatment in the third part of the Summa Theologiae of the grace and knowledge of Jesus
Christ.
That's the theme of this video.
The truth of the divine Word's incarnation
is Aquinas' starting point.
The word of God assumes a human nature to the unity of His person, something that the
theological tradition calls the hypostatic union.
This union is the foundation for speaking about the grace and knowledge that Jesus has
as man in his human nature.
In fact, Aquinas says that we can rightly speak about the union of natures in Christ
also as a grace.
He calls it the grace of union, which simply refers to the fact that an individual human
nature is united to the Son of God in person, so that Jesus Christ is the true Son of God.
It's called a grace because Christ as man does not merit or deserve this union.
It's purely gratuitous.
It founds His very existence as man.
As we discussed in the previous video, this
union does not itself change Christ's human nature.
Even though that human nature is joined to the Son according to being and subsistence,
it remains really and truly human and it continues to have the powers, capacities and even some
of the defects and limitations of a human nature.
According to Aquinas, this means that in addition to the grace of union, it's necessary for
Jesus to receive habitual graces in his human nature, in his human soul.
As we discussed in earlier videos on grace,
habitual grace is a supernatural quality of soul that raises up the human nature to share
in the divinity and disposes a human being to act in a supernatural way.
Jesus himself received such graces in his humanity.
He needed them precisely so that his humanity would be a fitting instrument of his divinity.
That is, as man he needed his human powers to be rightly disposed to do the things that
he was going to do and suffer.
Saint Thomas emphasizes that Jesus having habitual grace is a scriptural truth.
We see it especially in the strong testimony in scripture that Jesus was filled with the
Holy Spirit in his humanity such that the spirit led him into the desert and ultimately
to his passion and death on the cross.
St. Thomas' teaching on this point is beautiful
and important, but it's often been entirely overlooked.
St. Thomas explains that the Holy Spirit is the divine person most closely associated
with the created gift of habitual grace because the Spirit's personal properties are to be
love and gift in the Trinity.
The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as their mutual love, and he has an
eternal aptitude or fittingness to be given to creatures in time as the uncreated gift
of sanctification.
More specifically, wherever the supernatural virtue of charity is present in someone's
soul, the Holy Spirit is there making that soul like the Holy Spirit himself who proceeds
by way of love.
When the Father sends the Word of God into
the world as man, he does not come alone.
Rather, the Word comes breathing forth love, namely the love who is the divine person of
the Holy Spirit.
And he breathes that Spirit first of all into the human nature that he assumes.
In fact, Aquinas thinks it would be impossible for the incarnate word to be separated from
the Holy Spirit.
Where the Son of God is present, there also you will find the Holy Spirit.
Aquinas teaches therefore that Christ's humanity
receives the Holy Spirit in full and that's why he has the fullest possible share of the
Spirit's created gifts.
Jesus possesses every grace, every virtue, every charism possible to a human being.
Christ always has this fullness which gives him a unique kind of possession of or dominion
over the gifts of the Spirit.
This is especially important for understanding the New Testament portrayal of Jesus' earthly
life.
Jesus is not like other prophets who have to wait for the Word of the Lord to come to
them.
At every moment He is the Word in person and He has the fullness of the Holy Spirit's power
at his disposal.
For Aquinas, there's another extremely important
facet of this truth.
Because Jesus receives the Holy Spirit in full as man, his humanity becomes the fountainhead
of grace for the whole world.
Indeed, this is precisely what the gospels portray.
It's Jesus who breathes forth the Holy Spirit on the world.
This is what St. Thomas calls the capital grace of Christ.
This capital grace is really identical to, it's really the same as Jesus' grace as an
individual man, as his habitual grace.
But we're now viewing it from a different angle.
Jesus, as man, receives the Holy Spirit in full and so now as the Head of the Church,
which is his body, He gives the Holy Spirit to the world.
What about the passages in the gospels that
say that Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man?
Aquinas says Jesus adapted Himself to the people around Him.
So even with his disciples, he only gradually revealed the true heights of his divine identity.
He was always filled with the Holy Spirit.
He was always full of grace, but he didn't always manifest that to other people.
So the visible acts of grace that Jesus performed did increase and become greater over time.
This brings us to another marvelous facet
of the mystery of the Incarnation; Christ's knowledge.
Here we have to distinguish Christ's divinity from his humanity.
The triune God has and is one divine intellect.
According to a classical understanding of God, the Father and the Son have one divine
mind.
But Christ is also truly man and as man, he has a complete human mind, with a human intellect
distinct from the divine intellect, with a distinct human knowledge.
Now this is a challenge to the way many people today think about what it means to be a person.
The Son has both a divine mind, identical to the Father's and also a second and distinct
human mind with a human intellect and a human will.
Does this mean that Christ is two persons?
Not at all.
Because for Aquinas, person is a metaphysical term that refers to a subsisting individual.
While the activity of thinking or knowing or being conscious, this is something that
a subsisting person does.
So because the Son has one subsistence, he is one person.
Because he has two natures, he has both a divine mind and a human mind.
Let's focus on Christ's human knowledge.
St. Thomas was unique among medieval thinkers in giving special attention to this.
Aquinas says that Jesus has three kinds of
human knowledge.
First, he has the beatific vision.
That's a direct vision of the divine essence in the highest part of his human mind.
Aquinas thinks it's very important to say this precisely because Jesus is the Word of
God in person who has come to reveal the Father to the world.
He's the Father's word in the flesh and He becomes man precisely in order to embody in
this world the inner truth from the Father.
So if Jesus were only to have the kind of partial knowledge that the prophets had, he
himself would have lived in the obscurity of faith and couldn't be the very source of
faith itself.
That would mean that Jesus could not be the
savior of the world, nor would he be able to perfectly conform his will to the Father's
will.
In other words, to Aquinas' mind it's essential to the Incarnation that the Word made flesh
be full of grace and truth as St. John's Gospel says.
Next, Jesus also has infused supernatural knowledge.
This is different from the vision of God itself.
It's like having the knowledge that other prophets have, although Jesus has it in greater
fullness.
Finally, Aquinas teaches that Christ has acquired
human knowledge.
That is through his normal human experiences, Jesus' human mind works like ours do.
He has an imagination and a memory.
He knows the world through his senses.
Given the height of Jesus' supernatural knowledge, he's not surprised by his experiences, of
course, but he really does have a human mind like we do.
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