The Victory of Christ (Christological Trilogy) by Vonier Dom Anscar

Author:Vonier, Dom Anscar [Vonier, Dom Anscar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Assumption Press
Published: 2013-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

XII

Christ’s Certainty

In the chapter on Christ’s superiority we have already touched on the main principles of a most important topic in theology, the radical immunity of Christ from the powers of evil. In the present chapter we go one step further in the consideration of Christ’s positive certainties concerning, not only His ultimate, but also His immediate triumph. It is taken for granted that the personality of Christ is essentially a mystery; Hypostatic Union can never be understood by man, nor can man estimate the consequences of that Union inside the personality of the God-Man. We cannot understand how our Lord possessed at the same time the glories of the Godhead and the infirmities of the Manhood; how He was omnipotent and weak; how He was impassible and passible.

Nestorianism, which divided Christ into two Persons, would apparently facilitate matters as, in the hypothesis of Nestorius, one could speak in Christ independently of Godhead and independently of Manhood, attributing to each its respective privileges and responsibilities. But the Catholic faith in the Oneness of Person in Christ makes such independent attributions heresies. The human in Christ has always to be considered in the light of the divine, and the death of Christ is not a merely human state, but the state of a divine Person.

Too frequently, I think, the analysis which devout writers pretend to undertake of what they call the “interior life of Christ,” is tainted at bottom with crypto-nestorianism; they readily read into Christ a life of thought and sentiment which is in reality the psychology of an independent human person, not of a human nature that is part of a divine Person. In no matter ought one to proceed with greater caution than in defining the activities of Christ’s inward life.

We hold, moreover, that Christ’s human mind, from the first moment of His conception, had the clear Vision of God, which it never lost. This circumstance alone would place Christ beyond all standards of human comparisons: no man knows what may be the workings of a created intellect when it is illumined through Beatific Vision. So we have at every turn this great fact, that Christ was absolutely certain of His future victory; the regularity of earthly seasons was to Him of less certainty, in a manner of speaking, than the advent of His triumphant glory. He knew with utmost clearness the price of the victory, and as for the actual coming of the day of glory for Himself, His mind had it present as a fact that was as good as accomplished.

So we have in our Lord’s public utterances this constant reiteration of the certainty of His victory. Of doubt and hesitation concerning this all-important issue there is not a single vestige in the sacred Gospels. At no time does our Lord speak hesitatingly of His future, as if such hesitation were humility or meekness of heart; on the contrary, He glories publicly in the fact that no man has the power to hurt Him in any way.

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