Pints With Aquinas - 149: Did Jesus know he was God? With Fr. Dominic Legge, OP

Starting point is 00:00:00 G'day, you big bloody champion. How are you? Matt Fradd here. Got a question for you. Bet you know what it is. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, well, you know, like, what would that be? You know, like, what would you ask him? Well, in today's episode, we're joined around the table, the bar table, that is, by a Dominican priest, Father Dominic Legge, to discuss this question. Did Jesus know that he was God? Hmm? Huh? Ever wondered that?

Starting point is 00:00:41 All right. Good to have you back here at Pints with Aquinas, the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy. Don't tell anybody, but I think Father Dominic Legg is just my favorite guest to have on the show. He is a really intelligent man, and he's also really capable of breaking sophisticated philosophy and theology down so that we can understand it. And so this was a

Starting point is 00:01:06 fascinating discussion in which we talk about the brilliance of Thomas Aquinas, how and why Aquinas has been sidelined in the church in previous centuries, and maybe even today, why we all need a lot more of Thomism in our life, what that means. And then we discuss the central question, you know, did Jesus know he was God? And then at the end, because we talk a lot about the natures of Christ and the person of Christ, and so I ask, you've got to stick around to the end to hear this question, okay? So, if we can argue that Mary was the mother of God, right, by saying, you know, Mary is the mother of Jesus, Jesus is God, therefore Mary is the mother of God, can we also say that God died on a cross,

Starting point is 00:01:45 right? If Jesus died on a cross and Jesus is God, doesn't it follow that God died on a cross? We're going to answer that question as well. So stick around to the end. This was a fascinating chat. Are you familiar with the Matt Fradd Show? You should be because I'm doing these long, awesome sit-down chats. I'm actually just about to interview a Dominican for our next Matt Fradd Show, Father Gregory Pine. So you're going to love that. We're going to talk all about St. Thomas. The one coming up, I should say, on the 13th is with Luke and Gomer from Catching Foxes. That's the one that's about to release. So you need to go subscribe to my YouTube channel right now so you don't miss any of this. Now,

Starting point is 00:02:22 if you've been following my work at the Matt Fradd Show, you'll know that we have this really between two ferns type background, which is not a good thing. We really want to upgrade it. The reason we haven't upgraded it is because it costs a lot of money to do these recordings. But I think we're almost at the point where we can upgrade it. Think about this. Think about how difficult it would be to have a priest on my show right now. Like Father Michael O'Loughlin from Catholic Stuff You Should Know has agreed to be on my show. But Father Michael O'Loughlin wears a big black kind of cassock thing. So he would literally look like a head with two hands if he came on my show. We can't have that. So here's what I want you to do. There is a link just at the top of the show notes here. I want to show you the

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Starting point is 00:04:28 I do know and I recognize it and it helps all the work we're doing here. So a big thanks. Again, you can go to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd, or if you hate Patreon, donate to me directly at pintswithaquinas.com slash donate. Sound good? All right, you little buggers. Here is my interview with Father Dominic Legg. Get that beer out. Or if you've is my interview with father dominic leg get that beer out or if you've given that up for the great fast get that can of water out here we go father dominic leg thanks for being back on the show it's great to be with you how's things going at the domestic institute things are great we're cooking with gas over here there's things going at the Thomistic Institute? Things are great. We're cooking with gas over here. There's lots going on. We're in the middle of the semester and we've got literally dozens of events happening constantly. So that's lots

Starting point is 00:05:16 to keep up with. And there's more Thomism out there than any one person can probably swallow in one drink, but it's going great. And what's your goal with the Thomistic Institute in addition to just expanding to more campuses? Or is that primarily it? No, actually, our goal really is to go deeper with the thought of Thomas Aquinas in the kind of renewal of Thomism, that is to make Thomism a central part of the current intellectual life in the church and on the university campuses around the country and around the world, for that matter. For a long time, Thomas Aquinas was considered to be a central figure in the Western tradition and in the Catholic tradition in particular.

Starting point is 00:06:06 And then in the 20th century, there was a kind of desire in some quarters to kind of relativize Aquinas, to kind of push him to the margins. I think that's really been an unhappy development. It's not helped people understand the truth. It's not been good for Catholic theology either. And I think that Aquinas just has a lot of – he has a lot of wisdom. There's a lot of wisdom that can answer contemporary questions, very relevant questions. And his wisdom, his answers are actually extremely relevant even if he was writing 800 years ago. And so our goal is to really kind of give a kind of new rebirth of

Starting point is 00:06:47 interest in Aquinas. I think, to be honest, that's already happening. And we're just trying to be an agent in that, you know, to kind of help that along. And so to bring Aquinas into contemporary conversations in dialogue with contemporary disciplines on today's university campuses, that's an important part of what we do. But, of course, we're also helping sponsor real academic research into Aquinas. So that's some of what we do here at our school, the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception. That's also known as the Dominican House of Studies here in Washington, D.C. So we have our courses, our MA and PhD program.

Starting point is 00:07:27 And, well, actually, it's an STD. We're turning it into a PhD. STD stands for Doctrine Sacred Theology, in case you were wondering. To be clear. Yes. And so, that's going really well. What do you think the impetus was to push Thomas to the sidelines? I mean, not long after his death, there was a lot of people who came out and started criticizing him, and then you have kind of nominalism through Occam. Is that kind of where it began or what? Well, in a certain sense, yeah, you're right. You know, there was a reaction against Aquinas' ideas in certain quarters. There was a famous, like there was a famous, like, there was a Franciscan who wrote a famous correction of Aquinas, and then the Dominicans responded. This was after, shortly after Aquinas' death. Dominicans responded with a correction of the correction.

Starting point is 00:08:15 Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. That reminds me of the incoherence of the incoherence of the philosophers. Exactly, right. No, it's the same kind of thing. But, you know, by the 17th century, St. Thomas Aquinas was a stream, well, even earlier in the 16th century, St. Thomas was an extremely important figure for Catholic theology in general. You might remember stories about the Council of Trent. there were some important Thomists at the council, and a lot of Thomistic reflection on the mystery of the, you know, the Christian life and of the sacraments that the Council of Trent was dealing with made it into the final version, really, of the decisions

Starting point is 00:09:00 of the Council of Trent. And again, at the first Vatican Council, you know, that's the late 19th century, which is really dealing with a kind of rationalist modernism, and so the importance of the right understanding of faith and reason, and really in a certain sense at the First Vatican Council, the theology of Aquinas on that question became just the official Catholic teaching. I mean, they pretty much took, they actually, you know, were deeply inspired by Aquinas. There was an earlier council, even, that just took excerpts out of Aquinas and put them into the council's act. You can't better it. I mean, you can't say it any better than he did. You may as well just cut and paste. So that was pretty good.

Starting point is 00:09:46 You know, Thomas Aquinas was kind of at a high watermark there. But then in the middle of the 20th century, well, it started in the early part of the 20th century. There was just some sense that maybe things had gotten too rigid, too narrow. The questions had become just, I don't know, not, there wasn't enough appreciation of the riches that you can find in the Church Fathers and things like that. Yeah. And so, there was an attempt to go back to those other sources, kind of over against Aquinas. Which is funny because Thomas, in a sense, is a synthesis of the Fathers as well as the

Starting point is 00:10:24 philosophers. Like, when you read him, you're almost reading the, I know he lacks some of the church fathers that he didn't have access to, but he really kind of puts them all together as he argues for his positions. Exactly, yeah, you know, sexy subject to talk about, but it's actually a really interesting, really interesting subject. Aquinas was sent to be the lector in Orvieto, which was where the papal court was for a time. That's a city just a little bit north of Rome. And so, he had access while he was sent basically to be like the theologian of the papal curia in a certain way, to teach classes to the papal curia, if you can imagine that. And he had access to the Vatican archives, effectively, to the papal archives. And he began to do research into the early church councils, which no one in his age even read anymore. So, these were now effectively largely unknown to theologians in the West. He went through the library,

Starting point is 00:11:40 he rediscovered them, and he started writing about them. And so, starting with Aquinas, in the 13th century, you have an explosion of interest in the Church Fathers. And then, of course, he was asked by the Pope to write the Catena Aurea, which is his commentary on the Gospels, which is all just quotations from the Church Fathers. So, that's, of course, it's extraordinary. That would be an undertaking today, even with, you know, Google and these different ways you have to kind of look into the Church Fathers' writings, but to not have a computer and to be able to, you know, for those who aren't aware, Thomas doesn't add any of his own commentary. He just looks at the four Gospels and says what all the Church, what we know from what the Church

Starting point is 00:12:22 Fathers had to say on those particular passages. It's an amazing collection of books. Yes, there's a modern project to try and do something like this called the Christian Commentary on the Scriptures, if I may be slightly remembering the title wrong. And it tries to do largely the same thing. And actually, the secret is if you if you look at aquinas's catena aria like a lot of the quotations that they're putting into their modern commentary look kind of like they just took it out of the catena aria i mean i'm sure that's not quite fair they've they've done they've done other work there too but um and they didn't

Starting point is 00:13:01 even have coffee in europe until the 17th century so So he wasn't even slamming back coffee to get all this done. That's right. No, he was getting up early in the morning. He was, you know, he said his mass. He did his prayers and then he went right to work. Now, this is, you know, this is why he also had secretaries. And there's the famous story about him having multiple secretaries going at the same time, kind of like a, you know, one of these chess grandmasters who can play four games

Starting point is 00:13:30 blindfolded at the same time, or maybe even many, many more games than that. Aquinas had different secretaries reportedly working on different projects at the same time. So he'd be, he'd be dictating so fast and he'd be switching from one to the other, you know, because they couldn't keep up with him. It's amazing. Yeah. I want to get to today's topic, but before I do, I have a weird thought experiment for you. Suppose Aquinas was never born. Now, I know that he obviously shaped massively the theological landscape in the church after his time, but what would we be reading?

Starting point is 00:14:01 What would we be pointing to? The same people Aquinas was? You know, Augustine, Gregory? Yeah, I think so. I mean, what was the standard textbook in Aquinas' age? It was the sentences of Peter Lombard. Now, that was a very limited set of extracts from, I mean, it's a big book, but it was a fairly limited set of extracts from the—it's basically the opinions of the church fathers. And that's what the sentences mean. Sentences mean like the opinions, the sayings. And so Peter Lombard kind of collected that as a fairly modest set of sources that he had.

Starting point is 00:14:38 But it became this kind of standard textbook in the West for studying theology. And that's what Aquinas studied when he was preparing. Of course, his, no, who was his tutor? Well, Albert the Great. Yeah, Albert himself wrote a Summa. I mean, maybe he kind of outshone his teacher, and maybe we'd be reading more of what Albert wrote if Aquinas hadn't have come on the scene. Yes, absolutely. You know, when you read Albert, you know, Albert's very interesting, but he doesn't

Starting point is 00:15:11 quite have the same luminous kind of synthesis that Aquinas is able to give you. It's, I mean, Aquinas really, when you read him against his contemporaries, so you're seeing people who are of the same epoch, you really do begin to appreciate his genius. I have come to believe that the real genius of Thomas Aquinas is not so much that he's incredibly original. When you get to know him and you begin to do the research into his sources, like what we've been talking about, often you discover that he's not as original as you might have thought. Exactly. Well, even the five ways, I mean, all those five ways, they don't come from him. They originate from other philosophers like Aristotle and Islamic philosophers. That's right. So he's drawing on things like that. But what was his genius? His genius was, I think he understood things extremely well and extremely quickly, and he understood the

Starting point is 00:16:07 whole. So, someone who has a grasp of the whole, when he learns a new fact, a new theory, he's able to see how it fits into the synthesis of the whole. And that is what Aquinas was able to do that no one prior to him was able to do nearly as well in the medieval period. He, you know, and there's this incredible new discoveries, church fathers, you know, documents of church fathers, at the same time, the works of Aristotle, at the same time, you know, all of the other, you know, the latest scientific research that was going on around Aquinas. Incredible work in biblical scholarship happening at the same time as Aquinas. The Dominicans were at the forefront of that. It was happening in the same, the very same priory where Aquinas was living in

Starting point is 00:16:50 Paris. They produced the first, basically like a lexicon of the New Testament. They did it all, again, without computers. You know how they did it? They assigned, they had a team of like 50 Dominicans. They assigned each of them a part of the alphabet, you know, so they'd say, like, Brother Matt, you're going to have like, a through a m. And now you go through the entire Bible, and you write down every place that a word that begins with a occurs. That's what they did. Wow. They produced a work that, I mean, it's like the first Google before you had a computer. It took years for a team to do that, but it became the standard reference for biblical scholarship. And I mean, that's the kind of thing that Aquinas was a part of. I wonder if Aquinas hadn't have ever been able to integrate, if you want, Aristotle with the truths of the Catholic faith. If the enemies of the Church, like C.J. of Brabant

Starting point is 00:17:50 to some extent, would have used Aristotle against the Church, who knows how history would have been different, you know? Well, or if the Church would have had a very negative judgment about Aristotle in the end. I mean, there were a lot who wanted to, I mean, they saw the bad way that Aristotle was being used by people like CJ, and they wanted to kind of react against it. And Aquinas was arguing, you know, actually, no, there's a legitimate way to use the truth wherever you find it. You know, Aquinas has a line that he repeats a number of times, that every truth, no matter by whom it is spoken, is from the Holy Spirit. And that's really interesting. I mean, he really did believe that, and it gave him a kind of – he has an openness of mind, but also a confidence in the truth of the faith.

Starting point is 00:18:49 I mean, he wasn't so open-minded that, like, his brains fell out. Yeah, you know Father Thomas Joseph White, my confrer, who plays the banjo and sings bluegrass music? white, my confrere, who plays the banjo and sings bluegrass music. And he sings an old bluegrass standard called, how do you spell broad-minded? I spell it S-I-N. Very good. But no, I mean, Aquinas was actually very, he was very open to new knowledge. It's amazing because, I mean, we live in a day and age right now, whereas if you concede any points to the opposition, then you're a heretic. Like to even admit that Obama made a good point, say, here now and again, you know, or for a Democrat to say, well, I agree with this policy of Trump's, but overall, I think he's a disgusting character. It's like we're not even allowed to concede any of that.

Starting point is 00:19:44 We have to just demonize the opposition. So we can learn a lot from Aquinas there. I think he's a disgusting character. It's like, we're not even allowed to concede any of that. We have to just demonize the opposition. So, we can learn a lot from Aquinas there. I think that's right. I mean, I think it's important to find, you know, actually, in terms of really living a life where you're consecrated to the truth, isn't that what Jesus asked us to be? You know, He consecrated Himself in the truth. He consecrates His disciples in the truth. He wants us to be disciples of the truth. It makes a very big difference that you actually have a kind of intellectual charity by which, you know, you take seriously what other people say, and you listen to them. Now, of course, sometimes you can't have a conversation with people. And, you know, I'm afraid that sometimes on the contemporary university campuses, you know,

Starting point is 00:20:24 people are not so interested in the truth. They're interested in, you know, political, scoring political points. But that's an impoverishment of the university. It's a corruption of what it should be. Well, and that's funny because we're getting back to, I mean, university etymologically comes back to what we said Aquinas did, right? He incorporated all these truths, which he discovered, into one whole, one systematized whole. Yeah, that's right. We're fragmenting it all. Okay, let's talk about the topic of discussion today. Did Jesus know he was divine? This is a, I'm really glad that

Starting point is 00:20:56 you suggested we talk about this topic. I went to Taizé. You familiar with Taizé in France? Sure. My understanding is it's known to be somewhat of a liberal place where Catholics and Protestants sort of come together, which nothing wrong with Catholics and Protestants coming together. But I remember they celebrated something like a mass and there was like one line for Catholics to receive communion and one line for Protestants to receive their communion. It was kind of bizarre. receive their communion? It was kind of bizarre. But one of the questions they had us reflect upon in our small groups one day was, and with no guidance and no solution, was, did Jesus know He was divine? So, maybe I'll just throw that question out to you. Did Jesus know He was divine, and how on earth do we know that if the Bible doesn't say it explicitly? Well, it's a very interesting question, you know, fathers, there was not a lot of doubt among those who profess an orthodox belief in Jesus that he knew he was God. place that this issue actually starts popping up is with the Arians. I don't know if you remember

Starting point is 00:22:07 your history of dogma. Arius was a priest of Alexandria who is the origin of the Arian heresy, and the reason we have the Council of Nicaea was for the condemnation of Arius. Arius said, effectively, Jesus is not truly God. He said that the Son of God, the Word of God, is like a lesser creature and not true God. So, you know, now in the Nicene Creed, we say God from God, light from light, true God from true God. That's all against Arius, saying, no, he's, you know, the Son is true God. Well, Arius's point was that if the Son is a creature and began to exist at a certain point in time, then he wouldn't comprehend the Father. And so, there would be a kind of, he would, like any other creature, he would be finite while God is infinite. And so,

Starting point is 00:23:03 there would always be this gap between the knowledge of the Son and the self-knowledge of the Father. So the church fathers reacted very strongly against that because, I mean, they saw the issue of Christ's knowledge as connected to the issue of his own divinity. And then, I mean, I suppose we could just look at the Bible and start talking about what evidence we find there. But anyway, that's the sort of remote origin of the question. So, we know Christ was one person who had two natures. Has someone raised the question, did he therefore have two intellects or if just one intellect how do you explain him having a divine and human intellect well right so um this is uh this is

Starting point is 00:23:54 one of the things that you find in in aquinas like very in a very detailed way breaking down his understanding of of christ's own self-knowledge and or Christ's own knowledge and his self-knowledge. So, the first question we have to ask is, like, is the Son divine? Is the Son really God? And obviously, Aquinas is going to say yes, and Orthodox Christianity says yes. And if you don't accept that, you're, you know, you're like out of the picture of Orthodox Christianity from a very early point, you know. So, the Council of Nicaea, 325 AD, is one of the, you know, the first great ecumenical council. All right. So, that's like very clearly part of the faith of the church from the very beginning and clarified at the beginning. Then you had questions arise about whether Jesus had a complete human soul. Did he only have a human body?

Starting point is 00:24:49 And did the word, the word of God, the logos, take the place of his human soul or his human mind? And there were some who said that. And actually that position, which actually was a variation on the Arian position, that position was also ruled heretical early on in the church's history. So you have the declaration, I believe it was the First Council of Constantinople that determined that. And so you have now a profession of faith that Jesus is true man and true God. So if he's true man, he has everything that a human being has, and that includes a human mind and a human soul. So, it means he has a human intellect and a human will, and those are different from his divine intellect, the divine intellect of the word

Starting point is 00:25:40 and the divine will of the word. Now, it doesn't mean that they diverge in the sense that Jesus' will would have ever willed something as man apart from what God the Father willed or what he as God willed. But it's to say that you have to distinguish these powers in his human soul from his divine will and his divine intellect. Because in fact, if we want to be good Trinitarian theologians, we also have to say that the will of the Father and the intellect of the Father is exactly the same as the will of the Son and the intellect of the Son and of the Holy Spirit for that matter. So all three divine persons have one divine intellect and one divine will. That's part of divine simplicity. So, the human mind of Jesus is conformed to that divine

Starting point is 00:26:37 intellect and will, but is actually distinct. So, in other words, if he's going to be true man, he has to think human thoughts, and he has to be true man, he has to think human thoughts, and he has to think about them. He has to think these thoughts in a human way. One after another. So, that is part of what it means to talk about the incarnation. So, one of the profound mysteries of the incarnation is to try and think that through. I love, here's one of the reasons we love Thomas Aquinas. He is so succinct. And this first objection from Article 1, I just love when he writes in syllogisms because it's so clear and

Starting point is 00:27:13 even convincing before he shows you the error in it. So maybe we can just look at this first objection here. So this is the objection that would say Christ didn't have any knowledge except divine knowledge. and the objection goes thusly, to use a pompous word, it would seem that in Christ there was no knowledge except the divine, for knowledge is necessary that things may be known thereby, but by his divine knowledge Christ knew all things, therefore any other knowledge would have been superfluous in him. That's a good objection. Yeah, that is, and that's getting at the heart of the matter. I mean, this is, as we were talking about human, like, intellectual charity, you want to give the best argument

Starting point is 00:27:52 against your position, take it seriously. Aquinas does that here. Do you want to maybe, do you have the objection there in front of you, the reply? Yeah, I do. I do. Yeah, the reply to the objection. Do you want to read it and explain it to us? Yeah. Sure. So, the reply is, Christ knew all things with the divine knowledge by an uncreated operation, which is the very essence of God, since God's understanding is his substance, as the philosopher that is Aristotle proves, and he quotes the metaphysics of Aristotle, or he quotes, he cites it.

Starting point is 00:28:20 Hence, Aquinas goes on, this act could not belong to the human soul of Christ, seeing that it belongs to another nature. Now, let's come back to that in just a second to distinguish these two natures. Therefore, if there had been no other knowledge in the soul of Christ, it would have known nothing. The soul of Christ would have known nothing, and thus it would have been assumed to no purpose, since everything is on account of its operation. So there, Aquinas is distinguishing two natures in Christ. He has a divine nature, it's absolutely perfect, and he has a human nature, also a complete human nature. So this is the Council of Chalcedon makes very clear that, and Aquinas knows that council. It's something that he regularly cites in this part of the Summa.

Starting point is 00:29:14 It's one of the things he discovered when he was at the papal court in Orvieto. And so knowing Chalcedon, he knows that you have to say that there's a complete humanity and a complete divinity in Jesus. Okay, if that's the case, then what about his actions? And Aquinas would say, knowing something is a kind of operation, you know, it's an activity. So, anything engages in an activity according to its nature. So, the divinity knows according to its divine nature, and Christ's humanity knows according to its human nature. So, when you have a difference of natures, you're going to have a distinction of operations. And actually, that was the Third Council of Constantinople, which Aquinas also

Starting point is 00:30:07 cites earlier in this article. That was one of the councils that followed the council of Chalcedon, where there was, you know, it's part of the development of the church's understanding of Christ. They're asking these various questions. Was Jesus really, was the Son of God really divine? Yes, that's the council of Nicaea. Did he have a human soul? Yes, that's the Council of Constantinople. Did he have one person or two? Only one person, two natures. That's the Council of Ephesus. Then two complete natures, each one doing what is proper to it. That's the Council of Chalcedon. And then in the Third Council of Constantinople, which is the kind of endpoint of this big process stretching over several hundred years,

Starting point is 00:30:51 each nature has its own proper operation. And so Aquinas is building on all of that when you get to this question about Christ's knowledge. So when he says that his human knowledge would have been superfluous, is the answer to that, well, yeah, but he still had to have it since he had everything a human has? Or what do you say to that? Well, is it superfluous? No. Now, just think about this. Okay, God is revealing himself to the world. He reveals himself not by, you know, sending, not by a skywriting airplane that, you know, writes text in the clouds. It's not a book that comes down out of heaven. He takes flesh himself. And in taking flesh, he communicates in a human way, his identity, and in a actually rather sophisticated

Starting point is 00:31:40 way. I mean, look at the gospels, how how the Gospels teach. You know, it's Jesus himself draws his disciples, those are his learners. I mean, that's literally what disciple means. He draws the circle of followers around him, and he begins to teach them and progressively teach them, initiating them more and more deeply into the truth that he has come to reveal. And above all, what is that truth? I am God, right? I mean, it's not the kind of thing that you just like show up on somebody's doorstep and say, hey, by the way, I am divine. You know, it's not a recipe for convincing people that what you're saying is true. And in fact, he needed to kind of slowly and progressively initiate them into that. So it actually is very

Starting point is 00:32:33 important that he be able to do that in a human way, really using his human nature so that it's a true human nature. And it truly does things that the human nature is made to do, which means he's experiencing the world around him, and he's thinking about the things that he encounters. He's not surprised by what he encounters because he already knows everything that is in man. You see that in John's gospel. Jesus knows the thoughts of his adversaries, and John adds in there, not that anyone needed to tell him anything about man, because Jesus himself knew what was in man. So, he has this, the gospels show us, he has this kind of mysterious knowledge, but he has it in a properly human way. That means it's in time, and it is using all of the same sorts of things that we use in our minds, like he has an imagination, he has senses, his senses really do what they're supposed to do,

Starting point is 00:33:41 so he really experiences things in the world, and that generates images in his mind, and he can think about those. But he's not surprised by what he discovers because he has these higher forms of knowledge that are also informing his mind. So, what are we to make of verses such as where Christ says that he doesn't know the day or the hour of his return? Is that just that he's speaking from his human intellect? And if that does mean that, what does that mean? So, that was one of the favorite lines of the Arians, actually, to try and say that the Son is not divine because he has a kind of lack of knowledge. And so, the church fathers fighting against the Arians immediately pushed back on that and said, no, he, as God, he must surely know this. Then you have a variety of interpretations that you find in different

Starting point is 00:34:33 church fathers of that line. Some say, well, he knows it as God, but he is not authorized to reveal it. And so, he says, you know, he puts it that way because it's like, it's not for you to know. Sounds like the double truth, not the double truth theory. It sounds like the, you know, withholding knowledge, you know, like the Nazis at the door. What do you call that? Sorry. Well, I mean, he doesn't say, I don't no that's true um what what he says is uh he says the son of man doesn't know the day or the hour uh well we might need to look at the actual at the actual text i don't remember exactly here we go heaven and earth will pass away it's from matthew 24 35 through 37 but my word shall not pass away but of of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven nor the Son, but the Father alone. So, the Son doesn't know.

Starting point is 00:35:31 Right. So, the question is, in what sense is he talking about no there? That's what the church fathers are asking. And when they interpret that passage, some of them will say, well, it doesn't mean that the Son absolutely doesn't know in his divine knowledge. But what it means is that he doesn't know as part of the dispensation or revelation that he's come to give. Others will say, well, he doesn't know it in his human knowledge, but he knows it as God. Or he doesn't know it in certain parts of his human knowledge. So there's a variety of interpretations along those lines. That is the verse that people who want to press back against Christ's knowledge will use. There are other things that he says,

Starting point is 00:36:24 you know, about how all things have been handed over to me by my father, you know, he who sees me sees the father. So, it raises questions about, well, what is the character of this knowledge? Yeah. So, it seems to me, unless I'm reading it wrong, that this third objection almost gets us right to the question we're discussing right now, because this article is whether he had any knowledge besides the divine. But the idea of did he know that he was divine seems to be addressed here in the third objection. Do you agree or is there another place we should look to? I can read it. Yeah, why don't you read it?

Starting point is 00:37:01 He says, further, the union of the human nature with the divine took place in the person, as is clear from above. Now, according to some, there is in Christ a certain knowledge of the union. And I guess that's kind of what we're talking about, the knowledge of the divine and the human. That would be the incarnation, right? Or the, yeah, the divine person of Christ, whereby Christ knew what belongs to the mystery of incarnation more fully than anyone else. Hence, since the personal union contains two natures, it would seem that there are not two knowledges in Christ, but one only pertaining to both natures. And let me quickly read the objection and I'll have you help me understand this. The reply is, on the part of what are united, we hold there is a knowledge in Christ,

Starting point is 00:37:54 both as to his divine and as to his human nature, so that by reason of the union whereby there is one hypostasis of God and man. The things of God are attributed to man, and the things of man are attributed to God, as was said above, but on the part of the union itself, we cannot admit any knowledge in Christ. I want to know what that means. For this union is in personal being, and knowledge belongs to person only by reason of a nature. Yeah, this is a very interesting question. So what is Aquinas getting at here? He's asking, when he asks, does the union itself produce knowledge? Okay, so that's key to understanding what he's saying here. So you notice in the reply to the objection,

Starting point is 00:38:42 this is the reply to objection three, we're in question nine, article one of the Terzioparas. He says, on the part of what are united, we hold that there isn't knowledge in Christ. So what are united? Well, it's the divine nature and it's the human nature. Okay, so on the part of the divine nature, there's divine knowledge. On the part of the human nature, there is human knowledge. there's divine knowledge. On the part of the human nature, there is human knowledge. And so, he says, on the part, this is continuing, so that by reason of the union, whereby there's one hypostasis of God or man, that is one person. Hypostasis is a Greek word, a kind of technical

Starting point is 00:39:19 term for what subsists. And if it's in a rational nature, we're talking about a person. So there's one person, one who in Christ, and the who is there, it's the Son of God, it's the eternal word. And there's, I mean, this is just a very rough and ready way to think about person and nature in Christ. You have one who and two what. There's a divine nature and a human nature, but there's only one person there. Okay, so you have one person, two natures. Each nature has its knowledge proper to it, and you can attribute things from one nature to the other in virtue of the fact that they're both the natures of the same person. But when you're talking about what is the union itself, the union is just the fact that these natures are joined. So when he says, but on the part of the union itself, we cannot admit any knowledge, that is to say, it's not like the union produces a third knowledge.

Starting point is 00:40:27 That's right. Okay. The union, when he asks, what is, for example, the grace of union in Christ? That's a unique grace. What is the grace? It's that this man is God. It's that this man is God. So it's the eternal word of God uniting to himself a human nature.

Starting point is 00:40:52 Okay, yeah. That's all that we're talking about when we're talking about the union. Does the union change the nature? I see. Okay, this was the issue at the Council of Chalcedon. you at the Council of Chalcedon, because the argument of the heretical position put forward by this priest named Eutyches was that when the human nature was joined to the divine nature, the human nature was changed, and as it were, almost swallowed up into the divine nature, so that you get some new thing, which is not just human. It's like divino-human, you know, it's like some mixture of human and divine. You know, William Lane Craig falls into that. He thinks that Christ has one will. Right. So, this is exactly the patristic

Starting point is 00:41:36 controversy that Pope Leo the Great, in his beautiful, you know, he has this famous letter that he wrote in response to this, which was included in the formal acts of the Council of Chalcedon. It's called Leo's Tome, or his letter to Flavian. You can find it pretty easily online if you just Google those words. And Leo, it's a beautiful letter where he talks about how the human nature was taken up by the word, but without changing it. So each nature continues to do what is proper to each nature. So up by the word, but without changing it. So, each nature continues to do what is proper to each nature. So, he's passable as man, he's impassable as God, for example. And, you know, as man, he thirsted as God, he could not thirst, that kind of thing. So, the point is that

Starting point is 00:42:21 the union itself does not change the humanity. Then you need another principle in Christ's humanity that is proportionate to human nature, that is the reason for its supernatural elevation as human. And that principle is the habitual grace of Christ. So, that's why, you know, Christ really does receive grace in His humanity, which elevates His mind so that it can know God perfectly. And that's the human mind of Christ. Yeah, I mean, He has a human mind. Right. So, when we say that, did Christ know He was God, we're saying, well, His divine intellect knew that. But we're also saying his human intellect knew that? Well, that's absolutely Aquinas' position, and I would say that's,

Starting point is 00:43:10 you know, pretty much the very strong evidence for that from the Bible and from the... But of course, a human intellect isn't developed when you're three months old. So, are we saying that at three months old, Christ's human intellect knew that he was divine? Yeah, that's a great objection. Aquinas does say that it did. Yeah. Why does he say that?

Starting point is 00:43:32 Because he is the Word incarnate who is coming to reveal to the world the truth about God. So, he doesn't, as soon as he has a complete human nature, he has in a kind of miraculous way this elevation of the human mind so that he's able to know. Now, he doesn't, I mean, as a little baby, is he going to be able to express himself? No, at least it would be extremely unfitting. So he develops in a normal human way, and he doesn't display this knowledge right away. But Aquinas thinks that he had the knowledge from the beginning, so there's no moment in his life where all of a sudden he wakes up and realizes. Oh my, me! Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:44:21 So he manifests his knowledge in a way that's appropriate for his age. But he always had that knowledge in the highest part of his soul. Okay, and that's not because he had no other choice. He was just saying because it was more fitting he would manifest that knowledge appropriately. You're not saying that he was unable to. That's Aquinas' argument. Now, here, you know, it's helpful to kind of try and think in Aquinas' thought world. in the manger in his human intellect knew that he was the second person of the blessed trinity and would die and rise well i guess he in his human intellect he may not have known that that he was going to die and rise from the dead that would be his his divine well aquinas thinks

Starting point is 00:45:13 that he did know that but um but now think about i'm being red pills just by way of just by way of of church history of church art um if you go to an art museum and you look at medieval paintings of Mary and the child Jesus, Christ often looks... Christ building a crucifix and stuff, yeah. Yeah, and he often looks like... I went to the museum with my mother here at the National Gallery here in Washington, D.C., which has a lot of these virgin and child medieval paintings. And she said, I don't like any of these because they don't make Jesus look like a little baby. He looks kind of like he's got the face of an older person. And actually,

Starting point is 00:45:52 that was very intentional. They painted the paintings that way because he's supposed to be a wise child. He's wisdom incarnate who has come to redeem the world, to reveal God to the world. So actually this is the medieval mentality. Well, I would say it's the biblical mentality in a certain way. And it's very much in Aquinas. So what's the bigger picture here to try and start thinking in the way Aquinas was thinking about this mystery. He was thinking about it in terms of we live in a world of obscurity and darkness and ignorance. Like, the most important things actually are very hard for us to know. And the most important thing is for us to know something about God and our eternal destiny, like our way to God. And that's precisely what we don't know

Starting point is 00:46:47 naturally and what we have to struggle to figure out by looking at the world around us, and we'll never know it adequately. So, God wanted to save us. In order to save us, we need to know, as rational creatures, where we're going. That's part of how God respects what he's made in his creature, that he wants to save us by way of knowledge. He shares his knowledge with us. So he sends a redeemer to us who is going to reveal the truth to us. And so the truth in person takes on a human nature. He takes on that human nature. Now, it needs to be a complete human nature so that it's going to really be adapted to revealing to other human beings that divine truth. It's like the most full revelation is in the very mind of Christ. And he comes precisely in order to reveal.

Starting point is 00:47:35 So Aquinas' way of looking at it is, okay, we give to the humanity of Christ everything that is required for it to be a true humanity. So we have to say that it's in time, it changes, he gets hungry, he gets thirsty, he can suffer, he can even be killed. But what he doesn't have is ignorance, because that is not actually proper to what it means to be human. that is not actually proper to what it means to be human. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, I get that. But what about ignorance of future events? Why isn't that proper to what it is to be human?

Starting point is 00:48:15 It's not like Adam prior to the fall knew he was going to fall. Yeah, but I guess the question is, does it make you a not human if you had some measure of the future revealed to you? It would certainly seem supernatural or something added. Yes. Okay. It's supernatural, but it's not contrary to being human. Okay. That's, that's a coincidence.

Starting point is 00:48:34 It sounds like then the human nature of Christ was put on steroids in some way then. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely supernaturally elevated to the maximum that a human nature can be. That's Aquinas' way of thinking about it. It's the maximum that a human nature can be aided with every possible grace. you know, no one knows the hour, not even the sun. The way I've heard Catholic apologists explain that away is by saying he means from his human intellect. But what it sounds like you're saying is, according to Aquinas, no, the sun, even in his humanity, would have known the day and the hour. Yeah, I mean, the way Gregory, so for example, Gregory the Great analyzes this and he says, Gregory the Great analyzes this and he says, Jesus knew the date of the last judgment as man,

Starting point is 00:49:34 but he didn't know it from his human nature. He knew it as from his divinity. So when he says, not even the son of man knows, what he's saying is he doesn't know it from anything in the world. He doesn't know it from his own humanity. He knows it as something that he is receiving as this high supernatural knowledge. In his human nature, though. But in his human nature, he really doesn't know it in his human mind. Yeah, so this is where I'm getting a little confused, because earlier you said, like, even in the crib, even in the cradle, Christ knew in his human intellect that he would be crucified. Yeah, oh, Aquinas absolutely thinks that. So then he must have known in his human nature, he must know what the day and hour is.

Starting point is 00:50:14 So maybe must is too strong of a word, but it would seem to follow that if he can know future events in his human nature, he can know about this future event, namely the day and the hour. Yeah, I think the distinction is between knowing it in his human nature and knowing it from his human nature. Oh, okay. Yeah, so in one way you're knowing, I mean, he knows it as man, but he knows it as something that is being divinely infused into his mind. That's not to know it from his human nature, it's to know it in his human nature. I think that's the distinction. That's very interesting. Anything else you want to talk about before I throw some questions your way that we've got from some of our folks? Well, let me just lay out, just in brief, a kind of overview of how Aquinas thinks this works in Christ. So, the big picture is what we've just been talking about, that he is the wisdom of God incarnate. He's the

Starting point is 00:51:06 word of God incarnate, and he comes to reveal absolutely in the absolute highest possible way, the way back to the Father. So, for Aquinas, it's actually, it's very important for salvation, for the whole history of salvation, that Jesus have this kind of full human knowledge, full, salvation, that Jesus have this kind of full human knowledge, you know, the highest possible human knowledge of God. So, yes, it's a limited knowledge. I mean, we should add that. It's not the same as his divine knowledge. He doesn't know, like, everything that God could do, for example, because in a certain way, that's infinite. What he knows is what God actually will do. And he knows that because he has been sent to reveal perfectly to the world who God is. So, he needs to not be a receiver of revelation. He needs to be an agent of revelation. So,

Starting point is 00:52:04 that's the whole, and for Aquinas, like, that's the whole point of the incarnation. The whole point of the incarnation is not that there's a really smart guy who has learned something and is now, like, letting you in on what he's figured out. It's that actually God is entering history and using a human nature as an instrument of his divinity to communicate the truth about himself to the world. So that human nature needs to be filled to the maximum that a human nature can with the knowledge of God. And so that's Aquinas' account. Now, he breaks it out into, you know, some further distinctions, but that's the overarching principle.

Starting point is 00:52:43 And, you know, by the way, also, it turns out to be important for Aquinas that Jesus really knew you when he was on the cross. Why? Because he wasn't just dying for humanity in general. He was dying for you, Matt Fradd. And he knew your sins, and he voluntarily took them upon himself out of love for you. So it's actually connected to how he saves the world. Like he, as man, accepts and loves you in particular. And that requires this kind of very, very big human knowledge on the part of Jesus, which is not incompatible with a human

Starting point is 00:53:27 intellect. You know, we can think of a human mind kind of like a computer, and it only has so much, you know, so much hard drive space, but that's not the way a human intellect really works, right? It's a spiritual reality that has a kind of, there's a depth to the human mind that can surprise us, even in psychological and neuroscientific research. We've been surprised at some of the things we've discovered there. So, Aquinas very much has that view. Okay, that's the big picture. Then I'll just be very brief here. He thinks that there are then four types of knowledge in Christ. The highest is the divine knowledge. So that doesn't belong to his human nature. That's just his divine knowledge. His human mind, he thinks, has three kinds of

Starting point is 00:54:15 knowledge. It has beatific knowledge. That's the way his human mind gazes on the face of the Father. his human mind gazes on the face of the Father. He sees the Father, and if you see the Father, then in a certain way you see everything there is to know. Then he has infused supernatural knowledge. This would be like the knowledge that a prophet has, where the Holy Spirit fills the mind with light and helps you know by way of images, proportion to the human mind, something about the future or something

Starting point is 00:54:54 about God, something so that you can teach about God. But Aquinas distinguishes these two things because seeing the Father's face is like unmediated by any images. You just see God himself. Whereas infused knowledge, this is like prophetic knowledge, that's a kind of light that is given to the mind that uses images, like uses your imagination and your memory, for example. And so that is important for Aquinas also to say that Christ had this kind of infused knowledge. And then thirdly, Jesus has his own natural human experiential knowledge. That's just like the knowledge that you get when you wake up in the morning and you walk downstairs and you see the things that are in the living room. So you see them through your senses.

Starting point is 00:55:43 And Jesus knew those things too. He's of course not surprised that those things are there because he knew by his beatific vision and his infused supernatural knowledge, everything that God is going to do in the world. But now he's learning it in a different way. It's sort of like if I tell you about Washington, D.C. and then you come to visit me here, you already knew something about Washington, but now you know it in a different way. It's sort of like if I tell you about Washington, D.C., and then you come to visit me here, you already knew something about Washington, but now you know it in a different way because you've experienced it through your own senses. And that's the way Aquinas breaks down Christ's knowledge according to those categories. Yeah, fascinating stuff. I mean, we're talking about really complex things here. I imagine there might be some people listening to

Starting point is 00:56:23 this thinking this is all rather complicated, but when you consider the fact that the eternal and infinite God became a zygote, you know, it's going to be kind of mysterious to some degree, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, also what you learn about Jesus in the Bible, in the Gospels, is quite mysterious. I mean, he behaves in rather mysterious ways. You know, he doesn't seem surprised when the voice from heaven says, this is my beloved son. Listen to him. You know, he doesn't say, oh, are you talking about me?

Starting point is 00:57:01 And he teaches like the Sermon on the Mount. He teaches with an authority that Moses did not have, Moses who saw God face to face. And Christ says, well, Moses said this, but I say, you know, he doesn't say the word of God came me, and therefore I'm handing it on to you. He just says, I say. Wow, we've heard these stories so many times that we don't really grasp the full magnitude or the intensity of them. Well, if you think about, like, if you just assume that Jesus is only man and not divine, then what hubris to say that if you've seen me, you've seen the Father, or that I have the authority to forgive sins, or that, you know, Moses, who handed on,

Starting point is 00:57:54 you know, the revelation to the whole people of Israel, I'm greater than him. Something greater than the temple is here. Exactly. Or even to basically reconfigure the whole of Judaism around himself, where the new covenant is in my blood. I mean, that's really stunning. Yeah. Yeah, we don't read it through Jewish eyes. I think that's part of the blessing that Brant Petrie's been to the church

Starting point is 00:58:23 and trying to help us to put on Jewish lenses, as it were. That's right. Yeah. Let's take a look. Thank you very much, by the way. I know we could talk another five hours or more about this stuff because it gets complex, but you're a great teacher and I certainly learned a lot already. I just wanted to ask you a few questions that have come in from some of our listeners. Melissa Tolosi says, did Mary know Jesus was God?

Starting point is 00:58:44 Did Joseph? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, what does the angel say to Mary at the Annunciation? Actually, that's very interesting. When the angel says, he says, I don't have the text in front of me, but the power of the Most High will overshadow you. What is it? The, I need my Bible. No worries, I can look it up on here. And that he shall reign, oh golly, we both need to look it up. We're terrible Catholics, aren't we? I know, no,

Starting point is 00:59:19 it's the Spirit of the Lord will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. And then he who is— I'll edit some of this out. Yeah, I'm looking for it in my Bible here, right here. To everyone listening, I totally won't edit this out. I'm going to say it, and then I'm going to forget, and it's going to go up like this. Here we go. The Holy Spirit—

Starting point is 00:59:41 Yay! Luke 1.35. The angel said to her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called Holy, the Son of God. Okay, that's pretty good. When the church fathers and then later someone like Aquinas reflect on this passage, they actually do see a reference to the Holy Trinity here. So, the Holy Spirit, that's obvious. The power of the Most High, what's that referring to? Well, the Father. And then you have the Son, the Son of God,

Starting point is 01:00:19 who is holy, who she's going to conceive. When Augustine reflects on this, he talks about how Mary had such faith that she conceived in her flesh what her faith conceived in her mind. And Aquinas takes that and runs with it. I mean, if you just stop and think about that for a minute, it is really extraordinary. just stop and think about that for a minute, it is really extraordinary. So for us, what our mind grasps by faith remains, you know, somewhat obscure, perhaps, ephemeral. Maybe we sometimes even struggle to, like, really hold on to it. You know, we feel like we don't know it well enough. You know, we feel like we don't know it well enough. Augustine's point is that Mary's faith was so extraordinarily high, you know, the highest possible faith, really, for a, you know, of any human being, merely human being.

Starting point is 01:01:19 Her faith was so high that when she conceived this truth by faith, when the angel announces to her that she will conceive a son, it actually happens in her flesh. So, Aquinas, when he analyzes this, talks about how this is how the Holy Spirit works the conception of Christ. It works it through the faith of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the message that is being given to her so that it's like the Holy Spirit is entering the highest part of her mind, and then it, as it were, actually takes shape in her womb. This word of God that comes to her by faith. That's extraordinary to think about it that way, because there's, of course, no human seed there that's being given to Mary. It's a purely miraculous conception in her womb. So, that's extraordinary. Now, in contrast, Aquinas will say, Jesus did not have faith. Why? Because he saw with his human mind, face to face, he saw directly. So, there was no need for

Starting point is 01:02:37 him to believe. He was not a believer. He was the revealer. Everyone else is a believer. He was the revealer. Everyone else is a believer. So, in answer to the line in that famous evangelical song, Mary, did you know that your baby boy is Lord of all creation? Aquinas says yes. I think Aquinas would say yes, yeah. Wow, fascinating stuff. Imagine trying to explain that to Joseph. Yeah, well, I mean, Joseph, now, Joseph is another interesting question. You know, you look at Joseph in the New Testament. Where does the revelation come to Joseph in the New Testament? Through these dreams. Angels appear to him in a dream. Is there any other Joseph

Starting point is 01:03:18 in the Bible who has divine messages that come via dreams? Yes, actually, it's Joseph in Genesis. So, it's rather surprising, actually, Joseph in the New Testament is kind of a retelling, it's a reappearance of Joseph from the Old Testament. And there's so many literary overlaps there. And I mean, of course, as a Catholic, I would say it's not just a literary artifice because God is the author of not only scripture, but also of history. So God can bring it about that these incredible, what we might say, look like coincidences in history. Well, they're not coincidences. They're part of his providential design. So God arranges it that you have a second Joseph who is in a way the father of a new chosen people, which of course are the body of Christ. So he's a foster father, but he is in a way the patriarch of the church.

Starting point is 01:04:28 Yeah. Let me ask you two more questions. Paul Binner says, I had an otherwise pretty solid priest question this, the idea that Jesus knew he was God. He heard in seminary that Jesus was the most surprised person of all when he was resurrected. What? the most surprised person of all when he was resurrected. What? He says, it seems like that position ignores a bunch of Scripture, all of the miracles that Jesus performed, for starters. My question is, how can someone with even a cursory knowledge of Scripture hold that position? I guess that's a psychological question, but it is probably more of a prevalent

Starting point is 01:05:00 belief than we'd like to think. of a prevalent belief than we'd like to think? Yeah, well, unfortunately, there have been a lot of seminaries over the last 50 years that have taken this view and taught it as, you know, well, you know, now we know, because we're sophisticated modern people, that all of this is kind of superstitious projection onto the figure of Jesus, and the real Jesus, if he was a human being, could not possibly have had this kind of supernatural knowledge. And in fact, if you look at the trends in scripture scholarship, this is going back all the way into some Protestant forms of scripture scholarship even in the 18th century. These kinds of views were already being put forward. And in fact, they were being put forward as specifically anti-supernatural

Starting point is 01:05:53 presuppositions. So, basically, what I mean to say is, you say, okay, we're going to read the Bible with the presupposition that it's a historical document. And so, I'm going to read, say, the Gospel of Mark or the Gospel of John as a historical document. And then I'm going to try and sift out from that what is pure history and then what piety has superimposed on the figure of Jesus. So, when you use a method like that, which is already in the very method itself, it presupposes that you will not find anything supernatural that belongs really to history, then, ta-da, the result is you don't find anything supernatural. And you say all of that was projected by the later Christian community onto the figure of Jesus. So actually, if you want to

Starting point is 01:06:50 be sophisticated as a historical matter, you got to bracket all that stuff and set it aside. You know, Joseph Ratzinger wrote strongly against this view. And as Pope Benedict in his book, Jesus of Nazareth, if you go to that book and, you know, the first volume of Jesus of Nazareth, the first, the introduction and then the first 20 pages or so, he's really dealing with that question. And he dismantles that whole problem and says, you know, you can only access the real historical Jesus through the historical witness that people handed down to his true identity. And what did the writers of the, and what is the best evidence that we have, the best historical evidence are the gospels and the letters of St. Paul. Like it's all,

Starting point is 01:07:36 it's in the New Testament. And what does St. Paul bear witness to? What do the gospels bear witness to? A truth of faith that Jesus is the Son of God and that he rose from the dead and he worked these miracles and that he was, you know, revealing things to people. And that's the central message that they're trying to communicate. If you bracket that off, you're basically being ahistorical because you are setting aside the best historical evidence. Now, of course, history as a method does not have immediate access to the supernaturalness of the things that Jesus revealed. As a method, it can only assess the text as a witness to what, you know, say the apostolic, you know, the apostolic age or what the apostles themselves preached. But what we can determine is that the apostles themselves really believed this and they really did preach it. And then the question is, will you believe it?

Starting point is 01:08:41 Yeah, there is this temptation, isn't there, just to kind of scrub the Gospels of all that's supernatural. It really does come down to a lack of faith. We want like a prophet. We don't want God. We want a wise man to help us live happy and enlightened lives in this one. Well, I mean, once you bracket faith in the study of—I mean, there's a lot of important things that you can learn if you just read the New Testament, for example, as a historical record, you know, and you're just trying to figure out historical facts. That's interesting, and you can do that. But you're not

Starting point is 01:09:16 reading it to try and understand what it's trying to tell you. And if you think that it's trying to tell you something, then that, of course, calls for a different sort of reading. It means that you actually, like as a historical matter, the Gospels were trying to tell you that Jesus is God. History may not be able to adjudicate whether they're telling the truth or not, but you have to at least see that that was the historical claim being made about Jesus. Yeah, there's a sort of arrogance to it, isn't there? Because those two ways of reading Scripture, the kind of deconstructionist way is, I am Lord over this thing, and I'm going to disseminate it, and I'm going to separate this

Starting point is 01:10:01 over here and this over there. Whereas if I come to it expecting it to teach me, I'm its servant in a sense, which is a much humbler position. Yeah, that's right. Final question. We've been talking a lot about Jesus Christ, the person of Jesus Christ, the natures of Jesus Christ. So we can show that Mary is the mother of God just through a syllogism. Mary is the mother of Jesus. Jesus is God. Ergo, Mary is the mother of God. Okay, so does this argument work? Jesus died on a cross, Jesus is God, therefore God died on a cross. Can we say God died on a cross? Yeah, actually, Aquinas takes up this question, and many questions like it. The doctrine is, it goes by a complicated sounding name, but it's actually the doctrine itself is not so complicated. It's called the communication of idioms.

Starting point is 01:10:49 And that just means idioms is like predicates, you know, so like you have a sentence with a subject and a pred and then you have a predicate like died on a cross, and can you put those together? And in what way – like how can you put them together in a way that gives you the truth, and what are the dangers there? So when Aquinas talks about this, I mean, really, he's building on great insights from the church fathers and the early church councils, which had to deal with this problem a lot. In a certain way, it was one of the key problems, one of the key questions that arose in a lot of the patristic disputes, like with Nestorius and the mother of God. Actually, that's one of the famous places where it was actually clarified. Because there the question is, can you say something of Christ's human nature, of the divine nature? That's the issue. So clearly the man Jesus dies, right? Or the man Jesus has a human mother. Okay, can you say the mother of the human nature of Jesus is the mother of the divinity? Well, she's not the mother of the divine nature.

Starting point is 01:12:14 Okay, so who is she the mother of? Well, she's the mother of the person. Yeah, that's the issue in the controversy over in Historious. Are there two persons? Does each nature have a person? No, there's one person and it's only one who. So the who is the eternal son of God. She is the mother of Jesus, which means she's the mother of the eternal son of God. Therefore, you can say that she is the mother of God because the son is God. But the only way you can get there

Starting point is 01:12:42 is because you go through the person. So there's one person who has these two natures. So you predicate it of the person, what belongs to each nature. So by the same logic, you can say, for example, God dies on a cross or God suffered in the passion, something like that. What you cannot say is the divine nature suffered. And what you have to understand when you say that God died or God suffered on the cross is that it's God insofar as Jesus has a human nature and a divine nature, and he suffered according to his human nature.

Starting point is 01:13:27 Yeah, because I suppose the problem with that second sort of idea about Jesus dying on a cross, God dying on a cross, is that it kind of puts this confusing idea in people's minds that maybe God went out of existence or something. Yeah, that's right. Or you begin to think that these things, you know, that the divine nature, the divinity is changing or something like that. That's part of the issue. So, Aquinas is very careful to distinguish that, but without confusing the issue. So, if you want to know more about this, and we could do another session on this, Matt, if you want to. It's question 16 of the Terziah Pars.

Starting point is 01:14:10 Oh, good. I'll look that up. Christ in His Being and His Becoming. And he has 12 articles, and he just goes through article one, is this true? God is man. Number two, is this true? Man is God. If you go further down, number six, the Son of God was made man. Is that true? Number seven, did man become God? Number eight, is Christ a creature? Wow, what a powerful question here, 16. Yeah, so there's a lot of really interesting stuff there. That's Aquinas working out what is called the communication of idioms. Oh, look at that. I learned something else. I always love having you on the show. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time,

Starting point is 01:14:56 Father Dominic. Tell our listeners how they can connect with the Thomistic Institute. connect with the Thomistic Institute? Yeah, well, they can check us out at our website, ThomisticInstitute.org. That's Thomistic, T-H-O-M-I-S-T-I-C Institute, all one word, .org. Or you can find our podcasts, all of the lectures that we put on around college campuses. We put on about, at this point, 250 lectures a year. And so all of those go up on our podcast app. You know, it's not a podcast like yours, Matt, with a host and, you know, interesting banter. It's really just raw content. It's high-octane philosophy and theology. You can't listen to it while you're bandying about the kitchen and doing other things. I mean, you've got to, I find when I listen to it, I got to really concentrate.

Starting point is 01:15:47 But it's good stuff. And it's been, I mean, we've been amazed at how interested people are in it. We just, we crossed a million listens. I'm sure that's long in the rear view mirror for you, but it's all relative. We crossed a million listens last November and we're on track to get another million in less than a year. So we're really happy about that. And it's great. We have new content up every weekday. Yeah, it is fascinating how much you guys crank out. So all of our listeners here at Pints with Aquinas, help us spread the news about the Thomistic Institute, listen to their podcast, subscribe to it, tell everybody you know about it. The whole point of Pints with Aquinas is to help people understand the person and the thought of Thomas Aquinas. And no one does that better than the Thomistic Institute. So thank you so much for

Starting point is 01:16:33 all the work that you're doing. Yeah, if I can throw out one more promo, it's just that we have these chapters on college campuses. We're now at roughly 40 campuses around the country. And if you go to our website, you can sign up for our email list and then you'll find out about the events at the campuses near you. If you live near campus, we'd love to have some Pints of Aquinas listeners show up at some of our talks.

Starting point is 01:16:53 Emily Sullivan, or not Emily Sullivan, Barry, is it now, Emily Barry? No, no, it was Emily Barry. That's right, I knew her before she was married. She told me at a recent Thomistic Institute talk, she had three guys in the front row wearing Pints with Aquinas shirts. Well, it doesn't surprise me. Good to see them representing.

Starting point is 01:17:10 How can I get a Pints with Aquinas shirt? That's my question. Would you like a Pints with Aquinas shirt or beer stein? Which would you prefer? Whatever you want. No, the beer stein. I would use the beer stein. Immediately after this, I will send you one.

Starting point is 01:17:21 You just have to email me your address, okay? And I'll send it to you right away. Oh, I'd love that. Yeah, yeah. Terrific. All right. In fact, we'll get some pictures of Dominicans drinking. Very good. All right. Thank you so much, Father. Great talking with you. Wasn't that amazing? I would love to hear your thoughts on today's episode. Just tweet at me, at Matt Fradd, and I'll love to retweet some of your thoughts about today's show. Feel free to use the hashtag PintsWithAquinas. And yeah, throughout today and tomorrow, I'll be retweeting people who are tweeting at me. So be sure to do that.

Starting point is 01:17:54 Thank you so much. As I mentioned in the beginning, if you want to support all the work that I'm doing at PintsWithAquinas and the Matt Fradd Show, you can do that. You have two ways. Go to Patreon.com slash Matt Fradd or go to pintswithaquinas.com slash donate. If you give 10 bucks a month, you get access to an ever growing audio library of exclusive content like my recent interview with Michael Knowles from The Daily Wire. You'll get access to audio books of papal encyclicals and letters from St. Thomas Aquinas that you can easily listen to. You'll get a signed copy of my new book, Does God Exist? A Socratic Dialogue and the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas. I will send you

Starting point is 01:18:28 Pints with Aquinas stickers. I might even send you a Pints with Aquinas car magnet. All that just for 10 bucks. And when you donate, you're helping me do all of this work here with Bible History Podcast, Pints with Aquinas, The Matt Fradd Show. Thank you so much to all of you who support me. This is such a wild adventure. So many cool people, or not just cool people, any people are being reached by this stuff to help them be more cool, which I think is a nice thing. And I can't do any of it without you. So a big thanks. If you are a Patreon supporter, or if you just support me directly, go do something nice for yourself today. All right? Buy yourself a coffee or a bag of sweet peas

Starting point is 01:19:11 and just, you know, tell yourself, I am a good person and just dig into that bag of peas. Sweet peas, yeah. So, all right, I better go because, you know, I have stuff to do. All right, yeah. So, all right, I better go because, you know, I have stuff to do. All right, bye. Who's gonna survive?

Starting point is 01:19:33 And I would give my whole life to carry you, to carry you. To carry you, to carry you And I would give my whole life To carry you, to carry you And I would give my whole life To carry you, to carry you To carry you, to carry you, to carry you, to carry you, to carry you. There were birds in your tears falling from the sky Into a dry riverbed that began to flow down to A cross towering high up above the water

Starting point is 01:20:33 And maple trees surrounded it leaves caught flame With golden embers

Pints With Aquinas - 149: Did Jesus know he was God? With Fr. Dominic Legge, OP

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