God became man. It’s a simple enough assertion if you don’t think about it too hard—of course God became man. He loves the world so much that He sent His one and only Son, and whoever believes will not perish, but have eternal life, etc. etc. Jesus is God, and Jesus is man, and when they tell you this again and again from the age when lamb sock puppets teach you to pray before snack time, it becomes a mere fact of life. Sure, God became man, so what?
God became man to then die on a cross, but what does this even mean?
Various peoples, proclaims Pope Paul VI, “have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father” (“Nostra Aetate”). That is, the idea of some divine, even relational, power that rules over the universe is not unthinkable; for some it is a natural conclusion. We joked in class about how thinking about the Trinity is easy—a mysterious, three-personed being who created the world and is above all things—it is, in some ways, quite intuitive. The trick is getting from this all-powerful ruler of the universe to the strange collection of carbon atoms, rational soul, and divine Word, who walked besandaled down dusty middle eastern roads, used too many metaphors with his too literal disciples, did some miracles, ticked a lot of people off, died on a cross, rose again, and ascended to heaven.
The mystery of the incarnation is just so immense that our brains can’t handle it. Unless we really set our minds to it, we don’t even want to try and comprehend, and we don’t even know what we’re missing. Anselm of Canterbury understood this when he addressed the lethargy of his soul in recognizing its sin. While he did not necessarily write on how the incarnation worked, he recognized the immense significance of the incarnation, along with his failure to recognize its immensity. It is no coincidence that his first two meditations before “Meditation on Human Redemption” are meant to stir up feelings of fear and lament, respectively, so that the soul might be able to “[s]hake off [its] lethargy” and contemplate the strength of salvation found in Christ (230). He looks into the gaseous sludge of his sinful soul, and a variety of emotions bubble forth as he imagines how much Christ has done for him, as he meditates on Christ’s suffering and the promise to make him an “heir of God and co-heir with [Christ]” (236). All of this is only possible because Jesus is God and Jesus is man.
We agreed in class that Anselm’s meditations are devotionally satisfying. His meditations are moving, rousing indeed to the soul while addressing the necessity of man’s redemption through Christ’s death. But they do not satisfactorily address our yearning to reason about the incarnation itself. Yes, standing in awe of the immensity is great; but we also want to understand the immensity. It’s frustrating, this inability to wrap our heads around something so significant and so paradoxical as our God being born as a human baby.
Hugh of St. Victor takes it upon himself to work through the mystery of the incarnation, examining the relationship of the Trinity and how this connects to the union of Jesus’s humanity and divinity. His explanations were, to me, quite enlightening as he addressed various aspects of the incarnation—how divine operation works within it, the extent of Christ’s humanity, person versus nature. I found his connection between Jesus’ assumption of sin-free flesh and our own remission of sins especially thought-provoking:
“...whatever man is a Christian, by what grace that man was made Christ from His beginning, from the Spirit himself this one was also reborn from Him from whom that one was born. The remission of sins takes place in us by the same Spirit by which it was effected that He had no sin” (218).
He goes on to defend Jesus’s death from those who would accuse it of being self-serving and argues against those who insist God couldn’t possibly die. At the heart of it all lies the Trinity and the relation of Son to Father and Holy Ghost.
So I was surprised when we discussed how Hugh’s writing was not logically satisfying. Near the end of class, we considered how the mystery of the incarnation is made clearer when we think in terms of Mary—she is, after all, the creature through whom God enters His creation. Hugh’s focus on the Trinity, on the other hand, seems too abstract, rendering the incarnation even more unthinkable. Yet I did not feel altogether dissatisfied with Hugh’s reasoning; and I asked myself, why do I find this reasoning sufficient?
According to Hugh, it is of the utmost importance that God becomes man. When the Son assumes flesh, humanity is joined to divinity, to the Trinity itself. The whole point is this unity, that “we might be one with [Christ]...and through Him himself also be one with the Father” (250), and only through the actual incarnation of Christ can this union take place. All members of the Trinity are at work throughout the incarnation; it is through grace by the Spirit that Christ’s flesh was cleansed and freed from sin before joining to the Word (218), and it is the Father’s will with whom the Son aligns his own (223)—and we humans get to be a part of this relationship: “[t]he Son of God was made Son of Man that He might make sons of men sons of God” (206).
Upon further contemplation, I’m forced to admit that Hugh is perhaps no more satisfying in his foray into metaphysics than Anselm is. And yet, if we can understand why the incarnation happened, and if we understand that Christ is fully God and fully man, even if we have no idea how it happened, is that really such a travesty? As Hugh writes (though, I do imagine him being rather exasperated as he wrote it), “If you do not understand, nevertheless believe. It can be believed, if it cannot be understood” (240).
And perhaps that's why I did not feel such great dissatisfaction after reading Hugh. Contemplating on the declaration that, through the incarnation, humanity is now part of the Trinity, is enough for me. It sounds like a cop-out, I know; but I believe, even though I do not understand, even though we can not understand.
So what is the incarnation?
Easy, says my Sunday school self: Jesus. Can I have a graham cracker now?
KY
Works Cited:
Anselm of Canterbury. The Prayers and Meditations, with the Proslogion. Translated by Sister Benedicta Ward, Penguin Classics, 1973.
Hugh of Saint Victor. On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. 1951. Translated by Roy J. Deferrari, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2007.
Paul VI. “Nostra Aetate.” The Holy See.
Yes! You show beautifully why both Anselm and Hugh end up being at once satisfying and disatisfying—in exactly the terms that Anselm said he was working: believing in order to understand. The distinction between understanding why the Incarnation happened as opposed to how is an important one: you are right that both Anselm and Hugh do better at answering the former than the latter. And, indeed, as you suggest, perhaps this is sufficient for faith. How, then, does one explain faith? Perhaps that is the question! RLFB
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