Sublime

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.

a theology of ‘the whole Christ’, totus Christus, which allows for a sophisticated account of how we both combine and distinguish between speaking of the Word in its eternal selfhood, the Word incarnate in Jesus and the Word considered as the actively unifying principle of the believing community’s life.

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 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

Aquinas keeps two things firmly in view here – the necessity of affirming that the sonship of the Word is eternally and intrinsically an aspect of divine life; and the essential importance of understanding that the Persons of the Godhead are one in action.

nothing can be said of Jesus of Nazareth that is not in a strict sense spoken ‘about’ the Word of God, considered as the final ground or condition of the historical identity of Jesus.

attempting to keep the devotional and the critical together in one interpretative process:

there is an analogy between the way in which the Word unites with Jesus in a union without confusion or separation (to borrow the language of Chalcedon) and the way in which Jesus unites with the believing community.

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