One of the central tenets of the Catholic
faith is the claim that God became human.
Jesus is the word made flesh, the Son of God who has taken upon himself a human nature
in both body and soul.
One of the classical questions in Christian theology then is why did God become human?
What is the point?
This is the famous question of the motives of the Incarnation.
The third part of Aquinas' famous Summa Theologiae is concerned with the mystery of Christ
and the Sacraments.
Significantly, Aquinas begins the first question of this entire third part of the Summa with
the question, why did God become human?
He unpacks his treatment of the question in
several distinct ways.
First, Aquinas begins by asking whether it
is fitting that God should become incarnate.
The objection could be made after all that it is unreasonable to believe in the Incarnation
because it's unfitting for God to become human.
There are non Christian religious traditions that have posited this objection of course.
In Aquinas' own day, the most important of these would have been the Albigensians who
objected that material bodily existence leads to suffering and privation, therefore matter
is a principle of evil or deprivation so God could not fittingly have taken on a material body.
Meanwhile, Aquinas was also aware that some
critics in the Islamic tradition objected that an Incarnation of God is not in keeping
with God's transcendence and divine sovereignty over creation.
Therefore, they argued that an Incarnation would give us the wrong idea of who God truly is.
Aquinas responds to these objections by appealing to God's goodness.
Goodness is a principle trait of God and he argues that it is proper to goodness to communicate itself.
God has created us by giving us being not because he needed to, but as a gratuitous
expression of his goodness.
Likewise, he offers us the grace of participation
in divine life as a free expression of his own goodness.
So fittingly he can also become incarnate as a way of communicating his goodness and
expressing his love for humanity.
St. Thomas then asks whether it is strictly necessary for God to become human in order
to redeem the human race.
Could he have redeemed us without becoming human?
Here are Aquinas distinguishes.
He notes that God could have saved us without employing the means of the Incarnation, but
he then argues that it was the most fitting means, the most express way to communicate
grace and salvation to the human race.
Most fitting here means something like most
effective but also most tangibly good, most beautiful, most wise.
St. Thomas is presuming the reality of the Incarnation in faith as an act of God and
and is seeking within faith to understand the wisdom of God, why he's done things this way.
He argues that the Incarnation does two main things for us.
It effectively unites us to our true good or leads us to our true homeland and secondly,
it effectively permits us to withdraw from evil.
The Incarnation unites us to our true good in several ways.
First, it unites us to God intellectually
because we come to know who God truly is in virtue of the Incarnation.
After all, he's spoken to us in human words and lived a human life among us.
Secondly, it deeply strengthens our hope because we see God's commitment to us.
He has truly willed to become human, so he is truly engaged with us in our concrete lives.
Third, it inspires our love of God and charity because we see that God loves us intensely
enough to suffer human death for our sake.
Fourth, it provides us with a model of how to live through the imitation of Christ.
Finally, it communicates divinization or union
with God.
God became human so that we would understand that we can truly be united with God by grace.
After all, it's a greater work for God to become human than for God to beatify a creature
by granting it the vision of God.
The Incarnation allows us to see how serious God is about inviting us to eternal life.
As noted, the Incarnation also saves us by aiding us to withdraw effectively from evil.
Here too, Aquinas lists a series of interconnected ideas.
First, the Incarnation frees us from idolatry
and the confusion that leads to false divinization of the powers of the world.
Because we know who God truly is in Christ, we're better able to distinguish the world
from God and to serve and worship God in himself, loving him for his own sake.
Second, the incarnation teaches us the grandeur of the human dignity of man.
If God became human, then human beings have a principle place in the visible creation
and enjoy the honor of being made in the image of God, they should not sully their lives
by sin.
Third, the Incarnation is a remedy to human
presumption.
We cannot as a human race save ourselves merely through political programs or individual heroic effort.
The Incarnation grounds us in realism because it manifests the truth that we all need to
be saved by God and his mercy.
Fourth then, the Incarnation cures our pride.
God himself was born into a poor and unassuming family and died a death of indignity by public crucifixion.
God teaches us to have a sober view of ourselves, to associate with the lowly and to be humble
and merciful.
Finally, the Incarnation is a work of atonement.
That is to say Christ restores a right order of justice between human beings and God because
he is the human being who truly obeys God and loves God as one ought to.
Because Christ is man, he can restore a right relationship between sinful humanity and God.
Because he is God, his human activity of restoration has an infinite dignity and worth.
So for example, when Christ obeys on behalf of the human race, his human activity has
an infinite value or merit.
Consequently, he has the power to atone for
human sins and capacity to merit the salvation of the whole human race.
As we can see, Aquinas begins with a very simple, straight forward question.
Why did God become human?
However, as he begins to provide an answer, what unfolds is an exploration of the very
logic of the Redemption itself.
As such, Aquinas illustrates in a particularly beautiful way what theology is at its best.
A study in faith of the mystery of the divine wisdom itself.
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