Christ the Heart of Creation

Lombard’s eagerness to distance himself from the language of the humanity as a homo assumptus, a complete individual entering into union with the Word, leads him to a theory that risks evacuating the humanity of its coherence as a genuine item in the created world.

what is impossible is that the three Persons should assume a single pre-existing human hypostasis – that is, a pre-existing principle of agency determining the particular historical identity of the individuated nature.22 Individuated nature is an abstract idea, and becomes concrete only when activated in the form of a self-continuous agent among ag

the strong pressure to accept a ‘heavenly power’ model is repeatedly resisted in the name, initially, of the need to affirm without ambiguity the vulnerability of Jesus to suffering

The Word’s eternal ‘way of being God’, as God the Son, structures and actualizes the agency of this real finite substance; nothing is changed in the Word’s way of being God, and nothing changes in respect of the essence of God.

Gilbert, in essence, locates the crucial aspect of the union at the level of what makes the Word to be the Word or Son, the proprietas personalis: this – because it is not the same as the definition of the divine essence – is communicable to and in finite agency, and when so communicated, without reserve or interruption, constitutes a finite agent

What Thomas’s claim amounts to is that the ‘act of being’ in virtue of which the Word of God is the Word of God is the sole ground of the act of being in virtue of which Jesus of Nazareth is Jesus of Nazareth considered as an active finite agent; and the implication clearly is that there can be in Jesus no finite act of being in virtue of which he

unity in active communication – in the conformity of the vehicle to the content of what is being shared by God.

the Word is not an individual instance of divinity in the way that Jesus is an instance of humanity, and so to deny that there is any isomorphism between the divine supposit and what we normally understand by human individuality.

What it means for infinite causality/agency to be at work is that a system of finite causes is operating – not that a more impressive instance of finite causality is invoked to complete the picture. To use infinite agency to close a gap is to rob it of its infinite character.