Same-ness and Likeness: Bodied/Disembodied Experiences, Divinity & Pain

Like the other students in class yesterday, I found myself slightly out to sea amidst the arguments surrounding the Incarnation - Hugh of St. Victor’s style is unyieldingly logical, which is terrifying, in the face of the unknowable -- and I struggled to understand whether Anselm was proposing a definitive argument.

I am going to turn, then, first to the scriptural examinations of the Incarnation, from which I image I might derive some slightly greater sense of clarity. In Timothy, we have a clear, concise reference to the incarnation - he says ‘without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up on into glory’ (3:16, KJV).

How does this fragment of scripture help us understand the way that Christ’s embodiment is like (and unlike) our experiences? Hugh is deeply concerned with the relationship between our own understanding of our experiences and the interpretations possible of the Incarnation, and he is right to be: it seems deeply human to assume that Christ’s bodiliness is either only surface-level (experiencing, for example, painful events without the sensation of pain), or dangerously akin to our own, so deeply human that all divinity is erased.

We must, to some extent, rely on the ‘mystery of godliness’: much as trinity and perhaps glory are incomprehensible, we must start our understanding of the Incarnation from a position that presumes impossibility - from there, we must follow Anselm, and ask God to help us comprehend (or, perhaps more interestingly, to ‘see’ - what does it mean to align belief with sight?). Our understanding of the Incarnation must start from the most basic points: we understand what it is to live in a body. We understand what it is to be born, to feel pain, to die. We can see these events occur in others, it is a small leap in belief to understand the events of an eyewitness who watches Christ suffer and die to be real and bodily.

The struggle is the understanding of who or what resides in the body, and how that inhabitation came to occur: how did God place himself/his Son into a body, and what was that experience? Was pain experienced as like to humans, and if so, why and how? Must the divine body experience pain, and is it ‘pain’ beyond the context of human experience? Is suffering less valuable if it is not painful?

In Phillippians, we read that Christ:

Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:

But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:

And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. (2:5-8, KJV)

Christ is ‘made in the likeness’ of men: this does not presume same-ness. This concept of ‘likeness’ is spread through Hugh of St. Victor’s argument, and the concept is, at times, problematic for him -- per my questions above about pain, he worries that in meditating on the concept of ‘likeness’, people might assert that “the flesh [of Christ] in all those instances which have been displayed in it and about it as kinds of suffering took on indeed a likeness of suffering and pain, but endured no pain or suffering at all.(Hugh of St. Victor).” For Hugh, this idea that ‘in the likeness of’ may divorce Christ from an experience of some type of ‘true’ embodiment is problematic, as it suggests that the promise of God to the world signified in the body of Christ is somehow insincere, if the sacrifice of son/self is a painless or disembodied one.

I am, in questions of Incarnation, most interested in the final piece of this line from Philippians, that Christ is ‘found in fashion as a man’, humbles himself, and ‘becomes obedient unto death’. My interest is two-fold: first, I am interested in the division of found/foundry -- is he ‘found’ in the sense of blacksmithing, created as an object, his eternal being, existing prior to this time with God, cast into mortal form? Or is he ‘found’ in the sense of lostness, either Chrirst himself becoming aware of the distinction between bodied/disembodied experience or God finding purpose in Christ as an embodied form? I am intrigued by the agency of this last sentence, of the idea of God humbling himself and becoming obedient - I think that, in this sentence, is a rich well of the sort of 'likeness' that Hugh addresses. Unlike humans, God has the agency to turn towards humility and obedience freely - he suffers no consequences in death, (though this is not to say that he does not suffer in the experience of death). He is 'like' us in that he becomes humble, unlike us in the freeness of the choice. And yet, the choice itself exposes the greatest and best likeness of all - the likeness of our capacity as loving beings. God, expansive and unknowable, chooses the greatest expression of love - he chooses to actually experience his creation, to suffer and die 'like' us. His great love is that he permits 'likeness' to become real. And our great likeness - our great likeness is the ability to, in small ways, imitate and experience this capacity for love, which is shared between our beings, human and divine.

Peace & blessings,

Joan