This idea of Incarnation-as-likeness arises from the New
Testament itself. We read in Hebrews, “For we have not a high priest, who can
not have compassion on our infirmities: but one tempted in all things like as [pro similitudine] we are, without sin.”[2]
Similarly, we read in Philippians, “But [Christ Jesus] emptied himself, taking
the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men [in similitudinem hominum factus]…”[3]
Notice that both of these passages use a form of the Latin similitudo, translated into English as “like” and “likeness.” But similitudo also would have very specific
connotative resonances for medieval Latin readers trained in the writings of Quintilian,
who used similitudo to name the
rhetorical gesture of comparison itself.[4]
With this in mind, the action of the Word in the Incarnation has a rhetorical quality:
he crafts likeness in the assumed human flesh in the same way as a rhetor brings
images together to illuminate his speech. Hugh, as he opens his discussion of
the Incarnation, points to exactly this exchange of likeness: Christ-like-man
so that men-can-be-like-God: or as Hugh himself writes, “For God himself
deigned to be humbled, descending to human things that afterwards he might
raise man up to the divine.”[5]
Put another way, the Word’s act—His speech—proves a consonance between the
divine and the human.
Yet how are we to read the word like in “one tempted in all things like as we are”? The answer to
this is in no way obvious, since like can
suggest both the most casual coincidence of qualities (e.g. the sky is blue
like my blue dress) to the most intimate co-inherence of identities (e.g. my
beloved is like my own body to me).
Hugh is accordingly cautious about how the idea of likeness
is employed in theological discussion, since a misapplication of the idea can
lead to heresy and error. He shows how the idea of likeness can be misapplied
while discussing those who have been “found to have thought wrongly, asserting
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.”[6]
For Hugh, using the idea of likeness in this way leads to the idea of the Incarnation
as a kind of empty parody, a hollow simulacrum in which the postures of
suffering are assumed but not the visceral content of physical pain. Such
likeness is little more than mockery: we might think of the bullying gestures
of those who imitate the disabled. They may have attempted a temporary physical
likeness, but that likeness is ultimately empty and, more importantly,
alienating—so that the identity of the one who suffers and the one who mocks share
in nothing: in fact they are pushed further apart from one another. The bully’s
so-called likeness actually opens a breaching aporia of wounding disparity that
becomes more and more difficult to repair.
How else, then, can likeness
be invoked?
Given more space, we could look to 2.1.3, where Hugh uses
comparison in a typical way, showing how the Father’s operation in the Son’s Incarnation
is like a father arranging a marriage for a son,[7]
but I’d like to look to a less typical use of comparison that occurs later on
in the same section, when Hugh asserts that “all that the Father does…the Son
does. Not even so do I mean…similar…but the very same thing.”[8]
To help us comprehend how the Father and the Son are alike in their works, Hugh
rhetorically invokes comparison—but ultimately in order to reject the
comparison. Hugh says that the divine cooperation is not like “when I say: ‘I
do the same thing that you do…’” Hugh goes on: it is not like when we are both building houses; neither is it like we
are building the same house. Rather, it is like what a “man does with fortitude
and…[what]the fortitude of man does…”[9]
Here, we see a complex chain of similes—several rejected, until through an
exploration of unlikeness a truer likeness can be found, and this true likeness
is to be understood in terms of absolute co-inherence, one without confusion:
strength cooperates with the man’s body, and the man’s body with strength. Comparison
is used apophatically until it can be used cataphatically to reveal a true
likeness.
In these instances, Hugh pushes the rhetoric of comparison to
its limits: proposing likenesses that ultimately dissolve in the face of
further meditation. Put another way, comparison is useful not just for pointing
out likeness, but also for its moment of incoherence, when divine difference
reasserts its reality over earthly similitude. In this way, Hugh’s rhetoric
allows difference to co-exist within communion, imitating a Trinity whose very
being derives from the sustenance of an essence shared by distinct persons. Yet
the Trinity, in the Incarnation, has extended the possibility of communion-in-difference
to humanity itself. As Hugh writes, “God assumed man; man passed over into God”
but without either undergoing a change in “substance”[10]—that
is, humanity’s distinct nature is not obliterated before communion with the
divine becomes possible.
-Dawn Treader
[1] Hugh
of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, ed. Joseph
Saint-George, trans. Roy Deferrari (Ex Fontibus Company, n.d.), 213.
[2]
Heb. 4:15. All English translations of Scripture are from the Douay-Rheims
Version. The Latin is taken from Biblia
sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem published by Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft in
2007.
[3]
Phil. 2:7.
[4]
For a fascinating discussion of the way Quintilian reconceives of how
comparison can aid arguments, see Samuel
McCormick, “Argument by Comparison: An Ancient Typology,” Rhetorica: A
Journal of the History of Rhetoric 32, no. 2 (2014): 148–64,
https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2014.32.2.148.
[5] Hugh
of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, 205.
[6] Hugh of St.
Victor, 226.
[7] See
Hugh of St. Victor, 208–9.
[8] Hugh of St.
Victor, 209.
[9] Hugh
of St. Victor, 209–10.
[10] Hugh of St.
Victor, 216.
This is lovely: "Comparison is used apophatically until it can be used cataphatically to reveal a true likeness."
ReplyDeleteYou have captured beautifully Hugh's use of similitude as a rhetorical device to explore the reality of the Incarnation—for what is the Incarnation but a move from God's speaking to God's presence in the flesh? If you do not know it already, I think you would enjoy Karl Morrison's "I am You" on the hermeneutics of empathy, precisely, the way in which empathy is a process of understanding made possible through the logical categories of likeness, continguity, and contrast. Your meditation shows how Hugh works in all three to show what can—and cannot—be said about God's likeness to his creatures, even as his creatures are said to be like God. Lovely. RLFB