JESUS: DID HE KNOW WHO HE WAS?

CONTENTS

I. THE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST

II. OUR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP TO JESUS CHRIST

“We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,

begotten not made, of one Being with the Father.

Through Him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven: He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man."

The Nicene Creed, (325 A.D.)

“We believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God. He is the eternal Word, born of the Father before time began, of one Being with the Father, and through Him all things were made. He was incarnate of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, and was made man: equal therefore to the Father according to His divinity, and inferior to the Father according to His humanity, and Himself one, not by some impossible confusion of His natures but by the unity of His person."

Paul VI, Credo of the People of God (1968 A. D.)

Nihil obstat: R.J. Cuming D.D. Censor

Imprimatur: Ralph Brown V.G. Westminster, I-XI-78

The Nihil obstat and Imprimatur are a declaration that a book or pamphlet is considered to be free from doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions or statements expressed.

JESUS Did He Know Who He Was?

EDWARD HOLLOWAY STL

I. THE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST

The doubts raised by some theologians concerning the personal psychology of Jesus Christ, lie at the root of that derogation from Christ's true Divinity which vitiates some modem theological writing. In this section we ponder the problem of Our Lord's knowledge both human and divine, in an effort humbly to offer a constructive answer.

"Jesus: did He know who he was?" To which question it may be replied that even to pose the question in this way is an implicit denial of the Divinity of Christ and of the eternal pre-existence of the Son before his Incarnation as man. Yet, the problem of the personal psychology of Christ does fascinate us, and that problem lies at the root of the derogation from the sincerely believed Divinity of Christ which is always the supreme heresy within the Christian Church from the time of the Arian crisis until this present day.

It is said that we look in vain for any help from the ancient Fathers of the Church or from the great Scholastics. It was not their sort of problem. They lacked our knowledge of the complex nature of man, of the interaction of soul and body, all the fact and mere theory in which the modern world has grown and deepened since the time of Darwin and of Freud. The Fathers, they say, did create a synthesis of human and divine wisdom, but one lacking in precision as well as in modern science. As for the Scholastics of the Middle Ages, all they really did was to turn the organising and analytic genius of their essentially Nordic minds to perfecting, and then filing away in the categories of' the mind the untidy, voluminous outpourings of the Fathers. There was nobody who ever did our thing.

Achievement of the Fathers

This type of comment is less than half-true. In the first place the fierce controversies concerning the nature of God as Trinity and Unity, and the Christological problem of God made man, dominated the theology and the Councils of the Church for the first five centuries. Out of it all there came a theology embodied in Creed and Council of the Person of Christ and of the distinct natures in him of God and of Man which is as sharp and fine as hammered silver. The concepts so clarified are perfectly intelligible in what they state, and in what they distinguish. The criticisms of men like Hans Küng of this theology of the Fathers do not seem correct. It may be not so much that the Fathers are vague, or that the meaning of terms have changed with the centuries, as that what is so clearly taught is just not found acceptable or believable.

That is another issue, and the Fathers cannot be blamed for that. The Fathers of the Church and the early Councils may have lived before the age of 'existentialist' philosophies, but they certainly succeeded in working out what must be true of Jesus Christ, however hard it is to hold in a mental picture what it feels like to be the Person of Jesus Christ, both God and man in natures. What the Fathers did not do, and might have dismissed as the near blasphemous searching into the unfathomable, was to ask the question hinted at above. This is the question which modern man does ask himself, - what does it feel like to be God made man? For this is what the modern, existential problem of the consciousness of Christ as 'divine' and then as 'human' does reduce to. Frankly, we are never going to get a really satisfactory answer to the question of what it feels like to be God made man: we are not going to empty out the 'mystery' because no finite psychology can measure the reality of being God.

Legitimacy of the Problem

Is it then an illegitimate question to pose, this question of the self-consciousness of Christ? It does not seem so. We are trying to make intelligible to ourselves how it is conceivable to combine in the unity of one person, one "I" or the one "Me" the reality of being both God and man. We are trying to fill in with some detail the neat, beautiful but very small scale and generalised 'map of Christ' made by the scholastic theologians, into the living Person of Jesus, seized upon and embraced. It is rather like the difference between looking at a good map of some countryside, and being able to take in from a light aircraft the whole majestic scene rolling below. The map is so true and so useful, and yet it is so very inadequate compared with the living reality in all its relationships and dimensions. Once again, a warning to be humble however. Only by making Christ a mere man are we going to be able fully to 'understand' Him and then we are not understanding Christ, but ourselves magnified large, but distorted as in one of those ancient, imperfect mirrors that St. Paul spoke of (1 Cor. 13 : 12) and naming the illusion 'Jesus Christ'. Then the Divinity of Jesus will have gone, and there will have recurred that most ancient of all heresies by which man makes God in his own image and likeness, first in the temptation of the Fall, and then again in his estimation of Jesus, 'who He is'.

First of all, is there any class of people who can help us? Yes: and the type of theologian one has criticised is not likely to understand them because he is so far removed from them.

There are some men from 'outer space' who have left traces in writing on our planet, men who, so to speak, have travelled the vast immensity of God, and made exceptional discoveries. They have left records, but few can decipher accurately the hieroglyphics! We are referring to the mystics, but most of all to the great mystic saints of the Christian Church. That is why one did not lump the Fathers of the Church in together with the Scholastic saints and theologians, when speaking of the very Nordic, (and today the problem is still in the same area) minds of the European scholastic theologians. St. Thomas Aquinas is undoubtedly a mystic, but the language and the insights of the mystics do come over much more clearly in the Fathers of the Church, as also in the great contemplatives (not all of them canonised) of the 13th to the 17th centuries in Europe. The exciting clue from the mystics is that they did know from experience, just a little bit about "what it feels like to be God". So much so, that some great and holy souls, and who were less perfect and wise than saints like St. John of the Cross, fell into error and became virtually pantheists, unable to separate their own being from the being of God. Yet, they made this mistake only because of the personal experience of mutual communion in intimacy of being and joy, between themselves and God, as they experienced that union within their own being or 'psyche', to use a modern term which is quite valuable. So here is our first clue: what the mystics, especially those who were fully orthodox say of their experience of the communion of their own human nature with the being of God. For the hypostatic union of divine being and human reality in Jesus Christ is a union and communion of distinct realities, (i.e. of distinct natures, the uncreated and the created) within the one eternal Person of God the Son, who IS as 'One with the Father'.

Union and Consciousness

If the union of savoured wisdom and love between the mystic and God is so great from this commingling which prompts a living grace within the creature, what must be the union and communion between the divine nature and the human, in the eternal Person of God made man? For the personal being of Jesus Christ is the one and indivisible Person of God the Son. There is no other personality in Jesus Christ, even in the most modern, psychological, and existential sense after the Incarnation. Whatever is of the psyche of man (i.e. human nature in Christ as a living individual) is taken up into the Person of God the Son: that Personality abides and remains unchanged. Since it proceeds within the being of God, nothing can be added to the "I" or the "Me" which it expresses. Again: from the testimony of St. John, - "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God . . . through Him all things came to be . . . And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us".

How subtle, refined and total that Unity which defines the personality of Christ, when he possesses himself as “I” in the simplicity of the divine being! For that is how Jesus was, and is, and still now is. We men understand God whether in the essential order of what God is, or in the living, the existential order of Him, possessed in the knowledge of faith, and loved, only through analogies. Yet, they are intrinsic likenesses, for God is the master model upon whose being we are made. The likenesses, the analogies, the comparisons do help. Mystery remains, the insight is inadequate, but true as far along the way as it can go. There are natural mysteries as well: mysteries that still remain with us, but which are a little better understood than in the beginning of our race, but even so, only very partially grasped. We still have a long way to go. When the first cave dwellers looked upon the milky way on starry nights, what they saw corresponded to facts, but how inadequate was their grasp of what they saw! All the same, from that modest beginning we have moved on to the moon, and if our race does ever get into real space it will all have begun from very simple men pondering the heavens on starlit nights.

So let us return to human consciousness, and look for more clues. When a man says "me" he infers a personal unity of his being which encloses in one consciousness all that is knowledge, joy, and experience in his personal being. It takes in all, from the love of God possessed as a conscious experience of person unto person, to the feel under his fingers of the stubbly hairs upon his chin, - and those will continue their relentless, vegetative life for some time after death itself. So "Me" encloses the centre of the spirit of a man, which is aware of God let us say, in the union of a contemplative love, and also of stubbly hairs, as part of that "Me". The stubbly hairs are not aware of "Me", much less of God possessed and loved. This is the total manner in which that which we call person in a man unifies and infuses all things in the one reality of 'myself’ but changes nothing of the vegetative, or for that matter of the molecular and atomic nature of 'stubbly hair'. Neither does the stubbly hair detract from or fade out the reality of the soul, which as spirit surges up to and cleaves to the Living God, in the surging of the grace of God which is poured into it from above.

When Jesus Christ experiences himself as "Me" there is only the one existential subject of attribution and of predication. It is this person who affirms "Me", and the person who knows himself in all his dimensions of being. We men know ourselves in a twofold dimension when we 'know' ourselves pondering perhaps, if a scientist, the equation which is a new breakthrough in the understanding of matter itself: if a theologian, then perhaps a new insight into the works of God, an insight which is savoured as 'wisdom'. At one and the same time we may be aware of the throb in an ageing backbone which prompts a spontaneous shift of position in our chair. There are two dimensions here in the union of one personality, in one conscious experience of 'myself'. Animals obviously have bodily sensations, but only in the one dimension, and without full, self-conscious reflection of themselves as "me", as myself centred within myself, in an environment, but yet free within it as intelligent being, and force. Only very dimly and from afar are we going to grasp the dimensions in which Jesus Christ knew, and still does know Himself in the dimension of God, and in the dimension of man. Christ we suggest knew himself in two dimensions: as God, one with the Father in being, a dimension which never fluctuates, changes, or can change, and in the dimension of a man. But let us say rather more than 'as a man', as the 'Son of Man', the man in whom and through whom all men are called into being, and upon whose body as its crown, all the natural material universe converges and does hold together. Let us bear in mind that the Creed 'Quicumque' who ever it was that composed it, says as much a long time ago. It is not true that those ancient Fathers never did any existential' thinking. They learned a lot by pondering on the reality of God as revealed, and the reality of their own selves as well. As the years go by it is possible, just possible, that we may drive a motorway through the uncharted tangles of the "Christological problem". I hope we do, but if we do we will find ourselves for all our modem compasses and techniques, following as the best line, a persistent, well marked track winding on before us from long, long ago. And there will be persistent reports of a caravan and of an explorer ahead of us ..... Archbishop Athanasius I presume, Your Grace?

There is a tendency to overlook that the reason why some fashionable theologians end up with a mere man when they come to investigate Christ is that they have fundamentally wrong presumptions on quite other things.' We cannot even begin to under stand the theology of the Incarnation if we are not fully convinced that God is a personal being, and that He transcends his creation. You are not going to get much correct either, if you identify matter and the soul in a common order of being and energy, and also deny original sin as a real fall in the state and the status of man's nature. If the thinker makes a wrong start in his perspective in the subconscious or even 'unconscious' mind then he will tend to draw everything else into agreement with those wrong underlying presuppositions. In meditating the meaning of Christ, should the theologian be wrongly orientated at lift-off, no amount of corrections from some theological Houston of the mind, is going to make any worthwhile difference in mid-course. Such a theologian will wander out of a correct orbit for ever in his theology of Christ as true God and true man. That is why one does not hope for much from Hans Küng's comment to the German bishops, concerning their criticisms of his book Christ Sein 'some of my Christological tendencies may need correction'. You cannot correct a false orientation except by coming back to base and starting all over again.

No Clash of Consciousness in Christ

There cannot be two separate principles of consciousness in Christ, this would indeed make him a 'hybrid' as the critics of the traditional teaching of the Church protest, for it would put two points in Christ for the affirmation of "Me". There cannot be a double "Me" in our Lord, or in anybody else. In truth the traditional teaching of theology has never made Christ a hybrid. There may be development in our further understanding within finite limitations of the psychology of the Person of Christ, but if there is development, it will have to be slow, patient, very humble development. We rightly try to put into an existential, which means to say into a more living and graphic picture of meaning, the content of statements made in theology which are very true, very necessary, but also very abstract. Remember what was said about the difference between the best of maps, and the vision of the countryside unfolding below from a low flying aircraft. For there are pitfalls when we speak of "the divine consciousness of Christ" and of "the human consciousness of Christ". Is there any permanent link in existence between these two, or are they successive and in created time mutually exclusive states of experience? If they are exclusive states of experience, then on earth it could happen that "Jesus did not know consciously who He was", and it becomes difficult indeed to predicate of Jesus Christ a real unity of being, as being is lived and understood at the level where one says "Me".

There cannot be successive states of being in Jesus Christ which exclude each other as states of consciousness, and scholastic philosophy does provide us with a clue in understanding why. In passing let it be said some medieval concepts, - substance and accident, the relationship of act and potency etc., may need to be corrected and realigned, (which is different from being dropped) but others need only to be reapplied against a wider background of knowledge. Among those which need only to be reworked in a wider context are, one suggests, the concepts of the analogy of being, and the concept of "person". The scholastic theologian said that "actus sunt suppositorum" which may I hope be translated honestly enough as, “all activities in a being are predicated of the person of that being". That means that all events that happen within my being are mine and are focused through that peak of control and direction within my being which says again "Me". In the order of our living experience this means that all activities of the spiritual and rational order which involve awareness and responsibility must be predicated of the person as the summit of life, of knowing, and of awareness. In Jesus Christ the divine person is the person of God the Son, and nothing can be evoked in the human life experience of Jesus Christ, which is not evoked within the self-consciousness of God the Eternal Word. The Eternal Person of God the Son is aware at all times, for in Him was Life and that life is the light of men.

The consciousness of Christ which stands in experiencing his own being as ME, must be self-consciousness in two dimensions, in the experience of his divine being and in the experience of himself as man through his "being human" - his human nature as lived out. It is summed up starkly and simply in the gospel of St. John in the words: "Truly, I say to you before Abraham was made I AM (John 8 : 58). When Christ said those words he had been engaged in the very human and distracting hurly-burly of a noisy bout of heckling from the leaders of the Jewish people. No doubt he was very much experiencing himself as a man, but always within the overriding context of his essential being, of which it is true to say simply I AM. With a sense of awe it is urged upon the reader that this was no abstract statement of claim by Jesus Christ, but the existential statement concerning his person, his being, and his self-experience. It is also the divine person in Jesus which as principle of finality in being sustains the experience of his human life as well and the full range of the sensitivity which accompanies it. This is the mystery of the Incarnation, and we will never plumb its depths, either in the abstract, the 'map like' order of what we state about Our Lord, or in the existential, the 'living sight' order of our efforts to comprehend the psychology of Christ. Indeed, we will be even less accurate in the 'existential’ and psychological order, because we are trying to understand what it feels like to experience oneself as God. Only God, I am afraid knows what it is like to be God. If there is an order of analogy between our experience of ourselves as one person in the distinct orders of matter and spirit, and the experience Christ had of himself as divine and human, we may get some little understanding but it is the knowledge of analogy, and it is going to be a far off thing. We may do a little better in the state of the beatific vision, which is why the consciousness of the mystics does offer us some help, they were on the way. It will not be so much a help in understanding how Jesus felt his being, as a valid means of refuting the claim of self-contradiction, which some moderns bring against our classic theology concerning the distinction of natures and yet the unity of person in Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Do we mean that Jesus did not really sleep, that as a man he never "lost consciousness" in that sense? No, we do not. In any case that sort of "unconsciousness" is only a matter of degree, otherwise even the lightest of sleepers would not respond to a loud noise! But it does mean that Jesus was never confused, ignorant, "doubtful of what to do” and all the other things alleged concerning Him. It belonged to the mission of Christ as a person to know that he was as man, the Heir of the Ages, the Messiah, the climax of the Law and the Prophets. His divine personality would communicate to the human soul and the brain of Jesus the full understanding of the scriptures, their import and meaning. Whether we call this 'infused knowledge' or some other term is not relevant. It is knowledge proper to the nature and person of God the Word, and proper to the nature of Christ as Son of Man: that sort of knowledge would flow naturally in the deepest sense of 'nature' into the full human understanding of Jesus Christ, for all the scripture and all the revelation of God before, was until He come and fulfil it in Himself. But Our Lord would not have looked upon the 'lilies of the field' and have known all their botanical and biological affiliations and properties. Nor would he have understood in his human mind, through his human brain, - all about jet engines and TV sets in advance of the age. That would have been against his nature as man. On the other hand, God who knows all things does not know those things in that sort of way either. There are no pictures in God, no picture ideas" of things, no neurone impulses, and all that very low grade, creaturely way of understanding. God knows and understands everything in the simple intensity of an I AM which is all intellect, power, joy and love in one infinite, centred act of being. We find it very hard to grasp this manner of knowing and being at all. Christ would have experienced all of this as God in his person which takes in his divine and his human dimension. But in the human dimension this process would not evoke mental pictures, or 'phantasms' or ‘species impressae' or anything else we like to call the accompaniments of human understanding. The only knowledge Christ would have in that way as man would be what he learned from direct natural experience, and what was communicated to his brain through the union of his soul with the Divine person in Christ. That is to say, the knowledge of that which pertained directly to his work and mission as both God and Man. If one is reluctant to call this 'infused knowledge' it is only because this expression does not stress that it is the natural communication of the divine purpose in Christ to his human experience.

The Meaning of "God was in Christ"

In the interplay of the divine personality upon the human psyche of Christ the experiences of the mystics help us towards at least some beginning of understanding. The mystic can be aware of God always and permanently in the higher states of contemplation, knowing God as 'Him' in an abiding joy, not as something or somebody a long way off, as 'Father, - way up there' as most of us might do. This experience of God in no way excludes the suffering of the most exquisite spiritual pain in the soul of the mystic, either in that personal purification of being known as 'the dark night of the soul' ,or through the contemplation through God of the obscene ravages of sin upon the beloved children of God. In men like Padre Pio it is very likely that we are in the same presence of an abiding joy which, in union with Christ in the vision of sin, suffers continuously in a spirit of reparation, with Christ nailed to the Cross. In the case of Padre Pio, whose sanctity of course must be left to the judgement of the Church and not presumed as a cult, it could be the immediate cause of the stigmata he bore. We are informed that the stigmata left him either at death or a little before he died. In one personality, joy and pain can coexist together. To understand what is meant by the 'dark night of the soul' the reader must be referred to the works of St. John of the Cross, especially the book which bears that title, and also to the writings of St. Teresa of Avila.

In the soul of Jesus Christ, the union of the divine person with his living humanity would give, despite that union in fulfilment we name the beatific possession of God, - it is more than just 'vision' - a pain beyond all power of man to comprehend. Some theologians say that in the state of beatitude the created spirit cannot suffer, that suffering belongs only to the state of pilgrim, to man as 'viator' or traveller on earth. In the state of 'heaven' a spirit which has achieved its salvation is now 'comprehensor' or 'possessor' of God and that this rules out all suffering. Yes; - but they always forget that Jesus was 'comprehensor' or possessor of the Father by divine nature, the Father was his source of joy in very being before the Incarnation. When Jesus took human nature upon himself he made himself 'viator' or pilgrim for our sake. He passes to his possession of total joy in his human psyche only after the resurrection. In Jesus as man, the joy of perfect possession would much increase the sorrow and horror of contemplating the work of sin as 'The Mystery of Iniquity' : the devastation of the Vineyard of which he is the Heir. Therefore, his sweat became as drops of blood dripping down upon the ground. This is the truth concerning Jesus Christ, that God in Christ suffered through his Divine Person, but in his human reality or psyche: but it is God who suffers, loves, and redeems. It is the person who does the work.

And what are we to say of the relationship between that divine personality and his human reality in such states for instance as sleep? First of all, as we have said already, sleep is a lowering of the full awareness of that aspect of consciousness which is dependent on the brain.

Sleep is not total unawareness, sleepers can be awakened by a shake, by noise, by discomfort. Part of the bodily works so to speak are shut down for maintenance and repair, but even in sleep we are not unconscious, only less conscious. There is no evidence, because we do not 'remember' during sleep in full detail, that the soul in its own centred powers is also partly unconscious. Consciousness itself, while a centred experience in the unity of our one personality, has its own different dimensions and in its bodily dimension it has differences of intensity. We do not habitually 'remember' the events of our early childhood, and yet under deep hypnosis a startling detail of 'memory' can be evoked from that lost consciousness of ours.

Are we to think that during sleep the soul is not, in its own spiritual powers still in active union with God or not enjoying the communion of that love? The mystic saint at least can be conscious of the love of God as the last bodily experience before sleep, and the first awareness of reawaking. It would seem that 'in between' that joy of the soul is still there and still playing upon the brain, but simply 'muted' in its physical accompaniment like all else passing within the brain in the still mysterious condition we call sleep. When we can fully understand and explain ourselves, the different dimensions of consciousness within our own being, and the centred nature of our one personality, which says Me to all that happens: - then we may be in a better position to assert what could not have happened in the personality of Christ, in the interplay within his person of the divine and the human. Meanwhile humility to the rule of faith becomes us better than arrogance.

For in all this fascinating material we find tentative clues to the manner in which what is caned the theandric, i.e. the 'God-Man' interaction could operate in the eternal consciousness of the Divine, and in the human dimension of consciousness of one and the same person. In Christ we do not have a divine ME and a separate human 'me' : we have one personal ME of God and of man. Christ's relationship to his humanity is that of my manhood, there are not two subjects of attribution or of predication, there is not a hybrid being of God and man, nor a dual personality truly distinct as the duality of natures in Him is distinct. We may wonder when the “I am” in which Christ stands eternally to the Father in the Holy Spirit, dawned fully within the dimensions of Christ's human soul and brain after the 'pictured' manner of knowing through the brain? The incident of the finding of the youth Jesus in the temple shows that the calm I AM in which Christ must always exist unto himself had by then passed into the full physical recognition of what this meant in his relationship to the world around and his vocation in it. This was the age, twelve to thirteen years, when he dedicated his legal manhood to God, in the temple, according to the Mosaic Law. That is why the impact of the incident clearly overwhelmed Mary and Joseph. In effect he said to them: "why did you look for me as a truant, or as an undutiful son - did you not know that I would be in my Father's house, and about his business?" The phrase means both to be in one's house and about one's business. He meant it literally, to use the in-word he meant it 'existentially' and Mary and Joseph got his message. He called God 'My Father' in a communion of unity of being which we cannot, and which we do not experience within our own consciousness. Therefore his mother 'kept all these words, pondering them in her heart'. (Luke 2 : 46-50)

Finally, it comes down to this: God was in Christ reconciling mankind to Himself (2. Cor. 5:19) just as St. Paul states. We will never understand the humanity of Christ, unless we start from the Divinity of Christ. We must begin from the one person and not from the natures. If we start from the natures we end up by making Christ two persons at first, and then one nature, by the elimination of either the divine or the human. This is the precise course which all the early Christological heresies did take. We have to begin where St. John begins, with “In the beginning was the Word" and end up with “and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us". This is the experience of the unity of personality in Jesus Christ which belonged to the apostles, and through them belongs to the Church. This is our Faith. Anything less leads to Humanism in theology and derogation from the Divinity of Jesus. Significant of a false nuance in this respect, seem to this writer the words of Hubert Richards when at the end of an article entitled significantly enough "The faith of Jesus Christ" (The Sower, July 1972) he writes: 'Moses, Isaiah, Paul, Jesus, thinking in terms of their own day, expressed the truth in that particular way: what must be the truth for me, who think in terms of a 20th century background which they did not share? That is the important question. If Jesus, thinking in the terms of his day, could express his relationship to God in those terms, how must I express it today? To answer this question will really put me in touch with the word of God. That is the only absolute".

This is the presentation with a touch of rationalist arrogance - "Moses, Isaiah, Paul, Jesus and me" of Jesus the great saint, a man only, upon whom we 20th century men can improve somewhat, even as the 30th century men will improve upon us. But we say rather: "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in being with the Father, through whom all things were made". We confess that "of His Fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace". The nature and being of man does not change with the ages, all that happens is that as man's knowledge increases, so his intellect works and develops from a greater store of passed on knowledge. Teilhard de Chardin has said very rightly that in mankind social tradition, the passing on of wisdoms and skills, is more important than genetic inheritance as the vehicle for the improvement of the human race. One would agree, but add that which Teilhard does not always seem so sure about, - that we are not becoming more godlike simply as the ages go by. We become more clever because we start from a larger store of wisdoms, but we do not deepen interiorly in being by any continued physical evolution. Men we are, and men we stay, with the nature of man unchanged. The Word made flesh, who dwelt among us, had in fact thought about that factor of social inheritance and its importance for us as well. Therefore He founded a Church with His, with God's own authority, and of it He said: “I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now but when He, the Spirit of truth is come he will teach you all things, and bring to your minds everything I have said to you. He will receive of Mine, and will make it clear to you". (John 16 : 12-15)

Yes: Jesus Christ "knew who He was", even during that Passiontide when some would deny that he experienced living Divinity: "Jesus answered them: Do you believe now then? The hour comes, it is already come, when you shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for The Father is always with me. These things 1 have spoken to you that you may have peace. In the world you shall have distress. But have confidence, for I have overcome the world". (John 16 : 31-33).

II. OUR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP TO JESUS CHRIST

Many theologians today happily accept God Transcendent, the Father, but demean or calumniate the Son (e.g. Hans Küng and the authors of “The Myth of God Incarnate "). This theological error has important and seriously damaging results at the psychological and pastoral level. It destroys the spiritual lives not only of laypeople, but also the spiritual lives of priests, Religious, and Church students who cannot relate to such an emasculated Jesus as their true God. This section complements the argument concerning the Personality of Jesus: - "who He is"?

How do we relate to God? Well, first of all He made us, and our very being depends upon his knowing us and willing us. This dependence within our being emphasizes the transcendence of God, which is an important attribute to stress at the present time. It means that we are not made out of God or woven out of God. We do not share ‘one common stuff of being' which embraces equally God, the universe and mankind. We are brought out of nothing at all, and into reality by the sole willing of us by God. We are intelligible for what we are, and what we are made to enjoy (i.e. our nature) through God's prior knowing us for what we are, in the divine mind. We do not participate either physically or spiritually in the actual living being of God Himself.

So this puts us in quite a different relationship to God from everything else in creation, and especially from everything in the universe of matter-energy. We can say 'cousin' to every atom in the whole cosmos, being formed according to the flesh as part of a long ascent of being, of action and of interaction which embraces all the moving matter and energy of all the universe. It is not so with God. Neither should we try to mesh God up in the space and time series in which the history of matter is worked out. Space and time are only the energy relationships of matter, (or at least in ourselves of beings partly compounded with matter,) as material being and energy comes into being, becomes, and changes to develop or to decay. God spans it all in the eternal I AM: You could say that God is the outside bounding line of space and time itself. It is not so much true that God is present everywhere, as that everywhere and all times and places, all futures and the present and the past are spanned by God's I AM. Therefore they are all 'present' unto God. Therefore it is doubtful whether we do well to try to solve problems like the action of grace and God's knowledge, and the free will of man, by such theological concepts as the 'scientia media', the 'intermediate state of knowing' in God which is conceived as halfway between the knowledge of divine vision and the decree of God's direct will. In God everything is the knowledge of vision, there are no indeterminacies at all. We must not put God into the 'time series' with our selves in any way. Even if we cannot understand it all with our finite, puny minds the answer to every problem will lie in the ever present play of the divine being of God upon the created will. That interplay for us may be in the past, in the present, or in the future still for us to come. But for God, it is all one living present. If we wish to think of God in the 'existential' order, in the order of the living and the dynamic so beloved of theologians today, then perhaps we ought to think of God in the joy of God's own personal life, and then we will be thinking of God in the totality of His Divine Consciousness in the Blessed Trinity. We would then say not I AM, but WE ARE. WE ARE will just as much bound all space and time, and contain all space and time, and I suppose one ought to write WE ARE WHO AM, to express both the Three Divine Persons and the unity of One Living God. Admittedly to write WE ARE WHO AM, does make grammatical difficulties for us mortals, but does it make a contradiction to the mind? It does not seem to do so. It enables us to express the personal life of God, and yet to relate the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to what they are. When we do this, we will find the answer in the 'existential' order to be We are Who am. It does have some bearing actually on trying to enter into a human understanding (which must always fall short of the living reality) of the problem of the personality of Our Lord. But to attempt to follow it through, would be too hard an exercise for the readers of this pamphlet, and would be outside its scope.

God as 'Our Father'

We are not made out of one common stuff of being with God, as the Pantheist would assert. Moreover, Jesus Christ is God by nature and person as much as God the Father is God by nature and by person. Here there seems a paradox in the way some people behave as between the Father and the Son. The unconscious distinction they make in their relating to the Father and the Son suggests an error of theology and then of faith. It is an error which destroys the spiritual life of the layman, and even more surely, because the latter ponder the theme more profoundly, the spiritual lives of priests, Religious and Church students. Nobody is imputing deliberate ill-will to another, but there is factual evidence of an unconscious diminishing of the full, complete Divinity of Jesus Christ. In the matter of divinity we cannot have an incomplete or a partial profession. Divinity stands in a total integrity of confession.

Neither God the Father nor God the Son can be more or less divine. Divinity is indivisible. The official teaching and the witness of the Catholic Church is not in question, that can never fail God, the People of God, nor the world at large. There is however a 'dual' or contrary magistracy of teaching from a number of very influential Catholic thinkers, both clergy and laymen, and this can be part of the reason why a vocation to the priesthood disintegrates either at a training college, or before ever a young man gets round to offering himself, in the quiet decision of the mind and heart. Whether in priest or lay person doubt at the core of one's being concerning the literal and full Divinity of God in Jesus, is lethal to a lively and a generous faith.

The paradox of behaviour we mentioned works this way: the transcendence of God in the Father (i.e. a personal God, distinct from creation) is still in the main accepted by such thinkers. Even this far there are exceptions nowadays. People do not hesitate to pray to God every day as 'Our Father who art in heaven'. This Father in heaven is so named only by analogy with ourselves, not in any sense directly similar. He has no wife, nor are we born of a divine 'Mother' on a par with the 'Father'. Our Father in heaven is all spirit in his being, and He was never incarnate as man. Yet, some modern writers are not abashed at referring endlessly to 'the Father', sometimes to the exclusion of offering any rational proof to the young that He exists at all. Why do they not complain that we have made the Father so divine, so other than us so non-human that He is no longer meaningful to us, and to the imperfect, sinful and sorrowful reality of human parenthood? But no, they happily accept the 'Father' and demean or calumniate 'the Son' who is incarnate while still remaining 'of one being with the Father' in the same reality of being God. Godhead my friends, is not something you can lay aside like a shirt in the heat, as some people seem to think that Jesus did!

What Sort of Jesus Do We Want?

What sort of Jesus do we want, what sort of Jesus do we relate to in the Catholic Christian faith? Is it 'a brother' - so one with us as man that he is only a man, albeit a Superman? Certainly this is the Christ of the recent Anglican deviant in theology The Myth of God Incarnate (SCM Press. 1977) and in this writer's judgement from reading him, it is also the Christ of Hans Küng. We cannot raise up to God a fervent people and priesthood from the depiction of a Christ who is man indeed, but not literally God: a Christ portrayed through gospels which are criticised as neither historical nor literally true, a Christ made to exist in a personality which did not pre-exist his Incarnation, and who is subject to ignorance of his divine being: a Man-God, not the God-Man, who did not know who he was, came only gradually to the knowledge of his 'divinity', who shouted aloud in despair on the cross and failed to rise in the flesh upon the third day. To a Jesus like this, nobody can pray with the allegiance of the whole mind and heart. To a Jesus like this one cannot give a total assent of faith, and to his moral law of fulfilment, an assent which is absolute through the whole course of one's own personal life and through every age of mankind in history. Because this Jesus leaves more than a doubt concerning his status, He cannot be loved psychologically in the state of human perfection and to the mortification of the concupiscence of the flesh. The priest cannot accept celibacy for such a Jesus, nor the layman or laywoman renounce divorce, nor the teenager deny himself sexual intercourse or any other pleasure of the mind and the body. One may be missing too much, Jesus is not really God, there may be nothing else on the other side of death's divide: Maybe we do live on only in the consciousness of our children . . . . . . .

First of all, we do not want Our Lord to be 'just like us' in order that he can 'understand our sins, sorrows and temptations'. Such a Jesus is only a saint, even if a very great saint. We have always adored, loved, and followed as disciples a Jesus Christ who is as much transcendent, as much God as is the Father, even as we profess that Jesus every Sunday in our creed: God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God: a confession which could not be clearer, nor more intractable to historic relativism. Unless Jesus is God transcendent in very being, his unique mission is neither unique nor of any use to us. Because we are not redeemed in Him in any deep and interior sense, we are not transformed into his Divine sonship by adoption. There is nothing to adopt us into, unless Jesus is literally of one being with the Father. Likewise, the Humanist's Jesus cannot be our Saviour and the Bread of our life. The Catholic Christian faith teaches that by union and holy communion with the Divine

Being we grow and are nourished in the life of grace, to the measure of the perfect Manhood of Christ, and the inner likeness of God. God is our environment: the sun, the earth, the shower, the radiant energy giving us life: what all of these are to physical life, so God is in his very being to the soul that was made directly by Him, made to live through Him, made to grow to the full likeness of God in that 'supernatural' order which is more simply the divine order. Unless Jesus Christ can be the food and life of the inner man, there is no explanation of what the Church has taught concerning his Eucharist, nor anything unique that He can do for us. A Supersaint can lead you towards God, but he cannot say “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" nor call himself "the Bread of Heaven which gives life to the world". These are attributes only of the Divine. This is why it makes a blinding sense, a sense as much above mere reason as the sun is above an electric lamp, for Christ to say: "for my flesh is real food, my blood is real drink: he that eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides within Me, and I abide in him: as the Living Father has sent Me, and I live through the Father, so he that eats of Me, the same man shall live through Me". (John: 6th chapter, all should be read). No wonder that from that day "many went back and walked no more with Him” ! They got his message, the message of the claim to be literally Divine, not only in very being, but in work and function for the very being of man. Yet, these words make a most perfect sense in relationship to God the Living and the Transcendent. This sort of expression is not the thing men make up when they desire to aggrandize their heroes or their saints. This sort of thing, a nonsense of the merely human to claim, but the utter truth if spoken uniquely of the function of God in our regard, is not the sort of 'myth' the Hebrew mind could think up.

Rightly then the merely Humanist theologian detests St. John and his gospel for it is full of this type of blinding coherence, of a claim true and totally coherent only of a divine relationship of Jesus Christ to every human being. The rationalist theologian, as he tries to discredit the validity and the historicity of what is said by John, has to answer the question how a man, working out a myth of Jesus Christ from his own lyrical and history limited imagination, can so clearly and so succinctly express things which are uniquely true, and uniquely valid, but only if Jesus is indeed the Living God incarnate? It is a question such theologians never do succeed in answering. If Jesus never said such things, never claimed such things, who or what so formed the mind of John in a succinct coherence, true only of the Divine being? There is no psychologically intelligent explanation unless the mind of the transcendent Divine: - "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, have seen with our eyes, have watched, touched with our hands: the Word who is Life" (1 John The Prologue) formed the mind of John to understand and to express what no sincere, balanced Jew, no human being at all, had ever thought or dared to say concerning 'a man' before. We can say much the same of St. Peter, who speaking of his experience upon the mountain on the occasion of the 'transfiguration' of Jesus Christ, (Luke 9 : 28-36) tells us what he knew and understood from that experience, when he teaches that in Christ we are made "co-sharers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1: 3-4 & 16-18) an expression appalling at any time, but unthinkable from the natural psychology of a rugged Galilean fisherman. For a man like Peter, God was, apart from the impact of the Living Christ, as much One only incommunicable Allah as for any Moslem believer today. The natural psychology of Peter we see well in his conservative double-dealing over the incidentals of the Mosaic law, a behaviour and a lack of coherence which earned him the sarcastic reproof of St. Paul; behaviour too, so very different from the vivid and coherent testimony to the Divinity of Jesus and the meaning of The Messiah, which rings through both the epistles which derive from Peter.

And what shall we say of St. Paul, - that sophisticated Paul, no peasant he, but a Roman citizen by birth, a man learned in the literature and culture of the pagan world as well as in the best and most orthodox teaching of the Jews! Paul it is who is aware that God, and God alone is the Environer of mankind, in whom we all live and move and have our being: Paul teaches a Christ through whom all reality whatsoever angel, man, and matter is created, a Christ through whom all things do hold together, as in one vast equation of acting and interacting beings, held together and centred upon God the creator made man (Col. 1 : 17). Paul teaches a Jesus who being in the form of God "thought it no robbery to be equal to God" an expression without meaning, unless it means that Jesus is of one being with God. Even in the so-called 'primitive' witness of Matthew and Mark, what do we make of the sending of missionaries in the name of The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, when we know the meaning of that expression 'in the name' for Hebrew tradition, and the power of divinity which resides within it? Of that Name the devout Jew reverenced so much the power, the 'manah' or aura of the divine surrounding it, that when he met it in the scrolls of the scriptures he did not speak it out, but from very awe substituted the title 'Lord' instead. Such basic evidence could be much multiplied and quite unnecessarily, for the testimony of the infant Christian Church, of the creeds, the Fathers and the General Councils is all to the objective, the literal, and the Transcendent Divinity of the one Person, truly God and truly man, of Jesus the Christ.

Concerning Test and Temptation in Christ

It is a mistake to interpret, indeed to translate the words of the apostle in the Letter to the Hebrews to mean literally tempted like us in all things except sin. The word which in Hebrew would correspond to what the writer of Hebrews had in his Jewish mind (even if he did write in Greek) has no such sharp and specific overtone. It just as well means to 'try' or to 'test', well shown in the fact that some people are trying to get a retranslation of the 'Our Father' using either the word 'test' or the word 'trial'. Every temptation in the narrower meaning of the word, the meaning in which temptation derives from the desire in fallen man, is also an assault, a test, or a trial in the general sense. However, not every great 'trial' also means the temptation which derives from human addiction to passion or to pride. In us fallen men there is the temptation which follows from the disordered desires of our nature: there is the element of an inbuilt addiction, and it shows in a multitude of things, but especially temptation through sexual desire, drink, or drugs etc. All the things which cause the agony of renunciation in any form of addictive temptation add only the character of the fall to the stress. Temptation, in the sense of the agony of trial, is the same whether the agony arises from some form of passionate desire, or from the agony of pain, and sorrow inflicted from outside by others. A young man may be 'racked' by passionate desire, but is the agony of the martyr on the rack any the less, or any less temptation because it does not proceed from the moral weakness built into human nature?

It is all trial and test. There can also be the agony of the 'temptation' to withdraw from a work, a way of life, a donation of one's being to the work of God for the good of men. Such an agony of temptation, which is found in the lives of the saints, but also sometimes in the lives of humble good men and women, is the desire to escape from suffering, persecution, or rejection in matters which are not obligations placed upon us under pain of direct sin. Great can be the agony of the revulsion of nature, even of sheer reason, in a great and dedicated soul, the temptation to 'give it all up' and retire from a work which seems hopeless and unrewarding. Such a great, many sided stress must have attended upon the work of Christ as God made man, even as it attended upon St. Paul, and upon so many missionaries of Christ after him. (cf. 2 Cor. 11: 20-33) When we add many sided pain and human ingratitude to a work which is not a matter of God's commandment, not a matter of an intrinsic breaking of God's law of goodness and truth, then there can be an appalling 'temptation' to give up, without any question of the type of weakness which derives from a fallen nature.

In the garden of Gethsemane is it not obvious that the tortured body and soul of Christ endured just such a stress? He did not have to die for us, it was his gift to us. In his image it has been true that saintly men and women have persevered, also under great pain and stress, with a work, their gift to God, which was no matter of necessity under sin, not an intrinsic obligation. It has always been true, throughout all human history that 'never was so much owed by so many, to so few'! We may say that the saint is under an obligation to carry out the will of God, because he or she knows that will as an obligation of love and friendship towards God, even if the obligation is not 'under sin' as in the case of observing the Ten Commandments. Let this be granted: - it is the greatness of their saintly love for God, and for their brethren which makes the obligation of their vocation absolute upon them. It is the same greatness of love, and of understanding in a pure mind which increases the agony and stress beyond measure of the pain they experience in the rejection and persecution of men. This is temptation if you like to use the word, but a very different sort of stress from that induced by lust for money, power, revenge, or bodily delectation. Christ did not have to redeem us by going the whole way of things according to what inevitably human ignorance and wickedness would pile upon him.

Surely this is the meaning of the command to Peter: "put up the sword into its sheath. Do you not understand that I can ask my Father and He will give me even now more than twelve legions of angels ... the chalice that my Father has given me, shall I not drink it"? (Matt. 26 : 35 & John 18 : 11).

There is also another sense in which Christ as man could suffer trial and 'temptation' like us, but without suffering the particular temptations which proceed from the concupiscence of addictive desire in fallen mankind. Earlier when speaking of the knowledge Jesus had of his Divine Person in the being of God it was said that God in his spiritual being does not understand through pictures in the brain, nor by reasoning in a piecemeal manner as we do. God possesses all his knowing in the one unity of knowing and loving Himself as I AM. In the personality of Our Lord this inner knowledge would be lasting self-assertion and joy possessed in the communion of his being with the Father, and the Holy Spirit. In that possession of eternity and in the vision of the whole economy of God in joy, Jesus would know the victorious will of God in peace and in joy as a reality proceeding within his very own being in communion with His Father. Yet, this would be perfectly compatible with an appalling grief and sense of pain, at the contemplation in his human reality or psyche, of the ruin of the beautiful work of God in men, and in the rejection of his own love and kingship. There would be in this vision through the human soul of Jesus Christ, the pain of love suffering as he contemplated through that divine knowledge of vision which would permeate his own human soul from its union with the divine being, the understanding of the scandal of the little ones, of that abortion of young souls, which is an even more terrible reality and degradation within the creation than the abortion of young lives in the womb. The manner in which the permanent joy of possessing his own being in the Divine Essence, and its overflow into his human reality as the beatific vision, can be combined with an unspeakable pain proceeding from the power to suffer of that limited human constituent now one with his personality since the incarnation, is too considerable a subject to develop. The student however may find matter for meditation in an earlier work i.e. Catholicism, in chapter thirteen, and especially pp. 264-5.

There does not appear to be any intrinsic imperfection at all in the tortured humanity of Jesus appealing to the Father with his 'if it be possible let this chalice pass from Me'. This is the expression of the supreme agony of trial or temptation wrung from Christ. It follows upon an 'ignorance' if one may use that word, fully natural to even his most perfect human nature. For just as sin is not the will or desire of God, and cannot be understood from any interior logic or wisdom of its own, so also it is impossible for Jesus himself, and much less any of us, even a great. saint, to understand the intrinsic reason why the victory of goodness over sin and death must be won by totally subjecting oneself to the power of evil, going down 'into sheol' and rising again by the power of the Father, triumphant for ever over every evil power. For the 'Mystery of Iniquity', the mystery of the working of sin and evil, and of the manner in which the Divine prevails against it, exceeds the intrinsic power of all created nature to know, even of the most perfect spiritual nature, and the nature of Christ as Man is the most perfect spiritual nature. We can take comfort from it ourselves in a humble way, when we appeal to God as does the Psalmist, almost with a sense of outrage, to bestir Himself and come like a mighty warrior and hurl down the malicious and the wicked who are even now inflicting such cruelties on the beloved ones, and trying to wrest them out of the hands of their God. We too have to submit our wills to the knowledge and the will of the Father, as did Christ in his human psyche (for one wishes to avoid using the word 'personality' which is divine in Christ, and this word 'psyche' does express the human reality in Christ, if the reader knows what psyche means) because as sin in itself is illogical and non-rational so also we cannot 'work out' from our human minds the right and proper manner by which God brings salvation out of it.

The Christ of God made man for us was well able to know fellowship with us in our ignorances, sins, and temptations without our wishing upon Him the impossible conditions of a flawed and self-divided fallen nature. The Letter to the Hebrews makes the context of that compassion of Christ fully clear: "who in the days of his flesh on earth, with a great cry and burst of tears offered prayer and supplication to Him who was able to save him from out of death, and was heard for his enduring dutifulness (in Greek: eulabeia). And though He was indeed the Son of God, through the things he suffered He learned obedience". (Hebrews 5 : 7-8) In the Divine being the final will of God and all its reasons is known within the divine being as "It Is". There is no indeterminacy whatever. In the human being as we possess it, even in the human psyche of Christ joined to the divine person, it seems to this writer (though one suggests it with diffidence) that since the course of sin the 'Mystery of Iniquity' cannot be known from any intrinsic principle of goodness, wisdom, or truth, that its outcome can only be known in the knowledge of vision spanning all eternity, which belongs to the divine nature alone. That is why, one suggests, Christ could truly say that as man and as Messiah not even He knew the 'Last Day' the 'end of the world' depending as it does so much upon the interplay of divine power against the forces of evil and of man's free evil will. In a very wonderful way, when speaking to the disciples, Our Lord, who could hardly have given them a detailed understanding of the inner mystery of the Trinity on that occasion, told them a wonderful truth. For as God indeed He does know all things in vision, but as man, not even He from the principles of his human nature, could know the total detail of the interlocking battle of the Mystery of the Kingdom against the Mystery of Iniquity. Therefore he said 'nor even the Son, but only the Father'. He had however on that occasion spoken of himself in the same context as 'not even the angels of God, nor even the Son' for he was speaking not as the Eternal Word, but as Son of Man.

But, to return to the testimony of the inspired Letter to the Hebrews: whether stress and test proceed from the force of physical pleasure yearning against the truth and righteousness of God, or whether it be the lonely heartbreak of suffering endured from the gift to God of one's whole self, under free vow, it is all one and the same pain. It is endured for obedience sake, and it teaches obedience in the bearing: it is the perfection of faith, of hope, and of love.

In Jesus Christ the Fullness of the Godhead Bodily

We are made in the image and likeness of God to be fulfilled only through God. We go to God, not to anything lesser, for the only truth that can be absolute, the only good that can be all beatifying, - and also the only commandment that carries a total sanction of necessary obedience. This has always been our relationship to the Father, through the Old Testament, and it is the same with the Son, in the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. We go to the Son, and Him Incarnate for the fullness of Way, Truth, Life, and Bread. Becoming Son of Man for us, he reveals that we are willed and made with Him as the root and stock of our kind, through His Flesh upon which the bases of the universe and the laws of its ascent are aligned. It is of God that our nature is born, and the enfleshment of God in Christ is given that in Him as Universal King and Lord of Lords our destiny in the divine and supernatural order, which includes our redemption, might be given to us as Sons of God for the sake of Christ. The adoption of our human nature is through Christ, into the Divine nature and into the divine inheritance, and not into anything created.

St. Paul has said it all for us in that brilliant Letter to the Colossians, in which he reacts against a Gnosticism which was already beginning as a heresy not merely among converts from the Greek philosophies and the oriental Mystery rites, but from a Gnosticism among the early Christians who derived from the Pharisees. The type of this error can be read in the Jewish books called the Pseudo-Epigrapha, written mostly in the last century before Christ or possibly into the period which saw the lifetime of Christ on earth. Paul writes: "As therefore you received Christ the Lord, so live in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit which is according to human tradition and not according to Christ. For in Him the whole fullness of the Godhead does dwell bodily, and you have come to fullness of life in Him who is the head of all rule and authority". (Col. 2 : 6-10) No orthodox pharisee, and such Paul was, could possibly conceive from the rabbinical schools of that day, or from any natural cultural development of Pharisaism of such a phrase as 'the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form' nor of its consequence claimed for Christ: 'the fullness of life, in Him who is the head of all rule and authority'. This is manifestly the affirmation of a new revelation claimed for the status of Christ, and learned of Christ. Beyond doubt it ascribes a Divine Person to Christ, in spite of his being also 'in the flesh'. As we have seen before in the case of St. Peter, who states an identical doctrine in his second Epistle, the natural cultural attitude of the devout and orthodox Jew to God, in the time of Christ, was almost identical with the attitude of the devout Moslem to Allah in our time. Indeed, with deep respect to the Moslem faith, from one's own reading of the Koran at least, ninety per cent of the doctrine of Mohammed seems to be a restatement of the basic teaching of Moses and the Old Testament.

The simple pastoral priest, the unacademic church student, the worried sister and the confused layman should be sure of one thing to the rejection of all else. Their basic Catholic way of 'going to God' directly through prayer and adoration is correct, is natural, and is also supernatural, which means of the divine. After that, the same uncomplicated souls can be sure from the entire historic testimony of the Church that they are also utterly right in going to Jesus Christ uniquely and unequivocally as My Lord and My God and they can be sure that their Christian discipleship of Jesus is more than the acceptance of an absolute light and an absolute truth. It is also the communion of the one and only true moulding of life, morals, and personal fulfilment, from our being personally configured upon the Person of Christ. He is literally Divine, but as human of the womb of Mary He is also the norm of man's only perfection, and the only ‘way' of man's approximation to the life of the Godhead. We live in Him and through Him: that is what the Eucharist is all about. The counsels of perfection of the Catholic Church are the perfection lived by Jesus, and by his more intimate disciples. The holiness of Christ is the holiness by which all Christian people are saved, and all men of goodwill, through Christ's desire for them. The same holiness of Christ is the standard of the commandment to be perfect, as even our heavenly Father is perfect. The grace of Christ is the life more abundant in the likeness of God's Divinity, which surges within the created spirit from the vivifying communication of Christ's love: He is our holy communion, and that is why He gave us Holy Communion.

No Such Thing as 'The Myth' of God Incarnate

For the student we add, there is no such thing as 'The Myth' of God Incarnate. There have been some theologians of late professing their belief in the real Divinity of Jesus, but saying that the word 'myth' may rightly be used of the subject-matter of Christology, because we are dealing with the reality of 'mystery' in religion and human history. Since positivist and rationalist language is inadequate here they say, and the precision of exact science quite impossible, the word and concept of the myth is permissible. But even in its most strictly professional and theological sense, the 'myth' is the kernel of a truth imperfect in itself, and imperfect in our under standing and expression of the Divine.' The term may not be used of Jesus Christ. The Incarnation of the Eternal Word, is the giving of the Last Word, the full truth, and the perfect expression of God in bodily form. The Incarnation is the consummation in the uniquely true, of every valid but imperfect truth contained in all the myths. For in Christ God speaks a word of final clarity in The Word, and endows his Church besides with the gift, out of the same divinity, of an infallible Magisterium. The man who uses the word ‘myth' of Christ, while professing that he is a full and orthodox Christian, shows that he does not understand either his theology or his anthropology. The expression is of course best avoided altogether, even in the subject-matter of the Old Testament, because of its popular connotation of 'fairy tale' or 'legendary story'. In some sense it might be tolerated of the whole sweep of the Law and the Prophets to Moses and beyond, because this is indeed an imperfect dispensation both in essence and in expression. But used of the dispensation of the New Testament in Jesus Christ, unless the word conceals a deviant theology of Christ's Divinity as it usually does, it is simply an illiteracy of theology. And the reason is again stated by John with his usual coherence: "For the Law was given by Moses (myths, if you like) grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man has ever seen God: the Only-Begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made him known " (John 1 : 18) The aspiration of man to God through priest and prophet is until Jesus Christ. All imperfect aspiring, imperfect revelation, and imperfect authority is fulfilled in the One who knows God even as God knows Himself, - because He IS in the bosom of the Father. This is the end of 'myth' used in Christian theology, in any sense which is theologically defensible. It is also the beginning, by the same token, of the era of divine magisterium on earth, and among men. The theologians we criticize are rarely able to recognize it, or to see that the magisterium claimed for the Church of Christ is an inevitable corollary of his literal Divinity.

Summary

Let us stress by way of revision in conclusion, that to say 'the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form' implies only One Personality in Christ, in the common man's understanding of the word ‘person'. There is only one focus that says "I" in him, whether Christ says "before Abraham was made, I AM," or whether he says of his human psyche "my soul is sorrowful even unto death". When we go to the Father, we go as to one Him, when we go to the Son, we go as to one Him, when we go to the Holy Spirit, we go as to one Him: in this context we are talking of the three Persons in God. At all times the one Him of Jesus is the divine Him. In the matter of suffering, - if somebody pulls savagely at the hairs on your arms (or so I am told,-at your beard!-) the pain can be quite sadistic torture. The pain itself is evoked not in the personality, but in the nature. It has its origin in the living matter, and not first of all in the spirit. But it is still my pain whether it is evoked in the body and causes some accompanying pain in the soul, or whether it begins in the spiritual substance of the soul, and is communicated to the body as an accompanying 'depression'. As my pain it is focused through one spiritual personality, and attributed to that summit of my existence which says 'me'. In the case of Our Lord Jesus Christ, no pain can be evoked through the summit of his personality, for that is Divine, and beyond the reach of any loss. Nor has the Divine the capacity to sense or experience loss: it is, as divine, beyond the reach of sin and death. But in the living, sentient, human soul and body of Christ there is evoked a pain above all human pain other than his own: a pain of the spirit and of the flesh which was freely endured, could always have been sinlessly refused (it was his gift) and is always focused through and attributed to that which in Jesus says 'Me'. That which in Jesus says ME is the Divine Person of God the Son. The agony of Jesus is therefore the agony of the Divine Son of God. The pain of Christ in his living, human reality is also increased beyond our comprehension by both the perfection of his living communion with the Father, and the focusing of that suffering through the Divine "I" or "ME” in which his Personality stands to the Father and the Holy Spirit in the unity of the being of the Godhead. For it is through this relationship to the Father and to the Holy Spirit that his work for men is defined, willed, and even after the Fall, carried through in painful Redemption. This internal relationship of the Son as Messiah and Son of Man, to his Father, explains the attribution to the Father of the raising of the Son from the dead. For it is as the Son victorious and vindicated that the Father should present Christ as the Heir of the Ages, and confirm him in the inheritance which is his own. For Jesus "came unto" his own things and his own received him not" (John 1 : 11) The same relationship to the Father in the Love who is the very Person of The Holy Spirit, explains also the shock, the horror, and the bloody sweat in his human self; the agony in Gethsemane.

There is more to be worked out in this subject-matter than can be hinted at in these pages. If one hint may be given, for perhaps the serious and thoughtful student of the things of God to ponder upon, it could be this: is there not a certain difference in Jesus Christ between his joys and his sorrows? Every human joy in Him, since all He does as man is in perfect union with the divine will in Himself and in his Father, must become an accompaniment, while remaining a human joy, of the Joy which defines the divine being in itself and belongs to the mutual joy of the persons of the Blessed Trinity. The human joy of Christ must in this sense overflow from the divine joy, for it cannot add to the divine joy or prompt it. Not so with the sufferings of Christ: there is not in Christ an accompanying pain and sorrow in his divine nature, for loss or lesion is impossible for the divine in the divine being. It is true then, as St. Paul states that after the resurrection, "death has no more dominion over Him" for all pain is of death and sin, and now even the glorified body of Christ is the overflow of the joy of the divine Person in the divine being, triumphant as God and as Man. It is also true that we who are his members on earth do, in a very real sense, not just in metaphor, "fill up in our bodies (and in our souls) what is wanting to the Passion of Christ". We are still membered into Christ, although He has passed beyond the sway of mortal time, while we remain within it. We have then the privilege, in his likeness, and in the extension of his vocation in our own bodies, of filling out in our own selves the concomitant of his passion. We have also the assurance from this continuity of His vocation in our poor flesh, that "if we have died with Him, we shall also rise again with Him".

We go to God as the principle and source of our joy and our fulfilment. We seek union with the divine joy and fulfilment in the divine being. We do not expect the 'Father' in order to be Father to experience the pains and weaknesses of our finite and fallen nature, in His divine nature and being. So too, with Our Lord Jesus Christ: his suffering and obedient pain is truly human, and is much increased by the beatific possession of the Father and of the Holy Spirit within his human spirit as well as within his Divine Spirit. It is as human with us that our divine Lord experiences a compassion, a fellow suffering with ourselves. But it is as Divine in his own single ME, in his divine personality, that he knows, understands, loves, and fulfils us unto eternity. He gives us all that we do want from God, more than we could want, or would dare to ask for from God. Incarnate, Jesus the Logos, the Eternal Word, is more and not less God for us, as the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form. Go to Him then in prayer naturally and easily, as both God and as Man and let no empty deceit of human philosophy or of 'the elements of this world' rob you of your rightful inheritance in Our Lord, Jesus Christ.

APPENDIX

The Witness of the Fathers

‘We give to nothing created the glory of divine adoration: God forbid. This is the error of the pagan and of the Arian in our regard. But the Lord of all created things, the Word of God, the same made flesh do we adore. Certainly that flesh of His taken by itself belongs to the order of His creation, but it has been made the flesh of God Himself. We do not adore the flesh of His manhood apart from the Living Word; nor when we would adore the Word, do we distinguish Him against his flesh, but as we have said before, we acknowledge and worship the Word made Flesh, knowing well that the same Word existing in the manhood is very God. For we are not so fatuous that we would say to Our Lord -'Master, get thee from thy flesh awhile, that I may now adore Thee!'

St. Athanasius: Letter to Adelphius.

"If we wish to express the sacred Mystery of the Incarnation accurately, we should rather say that God is man, than that man is God. Not that the latter proposition is not altogether Catholic in its wording, but the former expresses the history of the economy (if I may so call it) and confines Our Lord's personality to his divine nature, making his manhood an adjunct: whereas to say that man is God, does the contrary of both of these - leads us to consider Him a man primarily and personally, with some vast and unknown dignity superadded."

John Henry Cardinal Newman: Essays Critical and Historical 1, 74.

“We declare that He is perfect both in His divinity and in His humanity, truly God and truly man composed of body and rational soul, that He is consubstantial with the Father in His divinity, consubstantial with us in His humanity, like us in every respect except for sin. We declare that in His divinity He was begotten of the Father before time, and in His humanity He was begotten in this last age of Mary the Virgin, the Mother of God, for us and for our salvation. The one selfsame Christ, only-begotten Son and Lord, must be acknowledged in two natures without any commingling or change or division or separation; that the distinction between the natures is in no way removed by their union but rather that the specific character of each nature is preserved and they are united in one person and one hypostasis. He is not split or divided into two persons, but that there is one selfsame only-begotten Son, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ. This the prophets have taught about Him from the beginning; this Jesus Christ Himself taught us; this the creed of the Fathers has handed down to us."

Profession of Faith, the Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451.

www.faith.org.uk

Table of Contents

I. THE PERSONALITY OF JESUS CHRIST

II. OUR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP TO JESUS CHRIST