Lesson 5: Jesus Christ – God and Man (Part 1) BY FATHER ROBERT ALTIER.

[The class begins with a greeting by Father and the recitation of the Our Father.]

Tonight we are going to spend our entire time talking about our Blessed Lord: Who is He, what was His mission, what did He do for us and how. To put it into context, we go back a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about original sin, and we remember that after original sin we no longer know how to act the way we were created to act, and, worst of all, we are no longer able to get to heaven, because we need sanctifying grace to be able to get to heaven.

Adam and Eve lost sanctifying grace when they sinned; therefore, they no longer had the capacity to get to heaven. Life simply has no meaning if you cannot do what you were created to do. What good is it? You were made for a purpose, and suddenly you are not able to fulfill the purpose for which you were created.

When we look at this, we have to understand why because people would think, “Well, that sounds kind of harsh.” But just think about things on a natural level. An offense is more serious depending upon the person against whom the offense is committed. If you decided that you did not like what I was saying and you punched me, well, not a whole lot is going to happen. If you decided that you did not like what the President of the United States had to say and punched him, you are going to get lots of activity. And if you decided that you did not like the Pope and punched him, you would get excommunicated from the Church. As you see, the exact same act, depending on the person upon whom the act is committed, has a whole different offense attached to it. It is a greater offense depending on who it is. Well, when we sin, it is an offense against God; and God, of course, is infinite. Because it is an offense against an infinite Person, it has infinite consequences. It is an infinite offense.

Remember, we have already seen that the only thing impossible for God is to do something which would be a logical contradiction. Since God made us with an immortal soul and a free will, He could not simply obliterate us. That was not an option. He was stuck with us. Once He decided to make us so that we would be immortal, He could not get rid of us. But the problem is that we look at sin and we realize that sin is like a debt and it has to be repaid.

We have offended an infinite God, an infinite Person. That needs to be atoned somehow. Well, the debt could not be written off because of justice. God can do whatever He wants, obviously, but God is a just God. Since we had committed this offense, as a matter of justice He was not going to say, “Forget it.” There needed to be atonement for the offense.

At the same time, however, we could not pay it because we are finite. So once again, we were stuck. Only God can pay for the offense because only God is infinite. Since the offense had infinite consequences, only an infinite person could atone for what we had done.

Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier

Lesson 5: Jesus Christ – God and Man (Part 1)

[The class begins with a greeting by Father and the recitation of the Our Father.]

Now the difficulty is that we cannot pull it back because we are finite. We are finite creatures and the offense is infinite; therefore, we cannot fix the problem. We can cause the problem because we have offended an infinite God, but we cannot fix the problem because we are finite and we cannot reel it all back in. So then we ask the question: What was God to do? Could He just have wiped us all out? Could He have just said, “Forget it. I’ve had it with these creatures and I’m going to obliterate them all”? No, He could not. Remember, we have already seen that the only thing impossible for God is to do something which would be a logical contradiction. Since God made us with an immortal soul and a free will, He could not simply obliterate us. That was not an option. He was stuck with us. Once He decided to make us so that we would be immortal, He could not get rid of us. But the problem is that we look at sin and we realize that sin is like a debt and it has to be repaid. We have offended an infinite God, an infinite Person. That needs to be atoned somehow. Well, the debt could not be written off because of justice. God can do whatever He wants, obviously, but God is a just God. Since we had committed this offense, as a matter of justice He was not going to say, “Forget it.” There needed to be atonement for the offense. At the same time, however, we could not pay it because we are finite. So once again, we were stuck. Only God can pay for the offense because only God is infinite. Since the offense had infinite consequences, only an infinite person could atone for what we had done.

The solution to our problem is our Blessed Lord. Jesus Christ shed His blood for the remission of our sins. The obvious question is: How does that work? How does somebody else shed his blood so that our sins could be forgiven? We have to be able to look at exactly what the situation is. The “how” regards the person of Christ. Because it is human beings who sinned, it is only a human being who could remove the sin. That is a simple proposition. In other words, if you did something, a dog cannot make up for it. Saint Paul points out in his Letter to the Hebrews that the blood of bulls and goats could never take sin away; it could only cover it up. All of the holocausts and sin offerings of the Old Testament could not remove our sins because they were from the blood of animals, which are creatures less than we. Since it was human sin, an animal could not take that away. We need somebody who is human to be able to take away our sins.

And so we need to ask the question now: Who is Jesus Christ? Before we go any further, we need to get at the heart of who the person of Christ is. We are saying that it is human beings who sinned, and therefore we need a human being to make up for the sin. Is this Jesus Christ? Is Jesus Christ a human person with a human nature? Does that describe the person of Jesus? We just said we need somebody who is human in order to take away our sins. Is that Jesus Christ?

The answer is “no.” That is what is known as the Arian heresy, and that was condemned in the year 325 at the Council of Nicea. Nicea is the council that gave us the Nicene Creed, which is what we pray every single Sunday at Mass. When we look at our faith, we realize this is not something new or novel; this is something that goes way, way back. We have the Apostles’ Creed, which goes back to the first century. Then we have the Nicene Creed, which goes back to 325. We are human persons and we have a human nature. And we have already seen that a human person with a human nature is not enough to take away our sins because human persons are finite beings and there is an infinite consequence to our sins. Therefore, it requires somebody who is more than just human.

Well, if that is the case, we can look at it and say, “We believe that Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity.” We have already seen that there are three Persons in the Trinity, and our Lord is the Second Person of the Trinity. Therefore, He is God. Because He is God, He can take away an infinite offense. And because He is God, He is a divine person. Therefore, the question now is: Is this Jesus, a divine person with a divine nature? Is that the person of Jesus Christ?

The answer, once again, is “no.” That is what is known as the Monophysite heresy, and that was condemned in 451 at Chalcedon. If God the Father were to stand before us today, God the Father is a divine person with a divine nature. God the Holy Spirit is a divine person with a divine nature. Before Jesus became man in the womb of His mother, He is a divine person with a divine nature. So far, we have seen that we need somebody who is divine to make up for our infinite offense, but we also need somebody who is human because it is human beings who are the offenders. In justice, God was not just simply going to send His Son – the Monophysite heresy – but in His mercy He also had to give us a way that we could do it ourselves, but not all by ourselves, because that would be the Arian heresy.

So it seems like a pretty obvious answer then. We need somebody who is both human and divine. Is this Jesus, a divine person with a divine nature and a human person with a human nature? We now have someone who is both human and divine. Is that the person of Jesus Christ?

The answer is “no.” That is the Nestorian heresy. Most of these heresies, by the way, are named after the person who perpetrated the thing. Nestorius was a priest who put forth this idea. Arius was a bishop who put forth the first one. The second one, the Monophysite heresy, was actually put forth by a guy named Eutyches, so it is sometimes called the Eutychean heresy. Monophysite simply means “one nature;” it is two Greek words meaning “one nature.” In other words, according to that heresy, there is only one divine nature that is there and He is not human. The Nestorian heresy was condemned in 431 at Ephesus, and we will certainly be talking more about that next week because Ephesus is the council that declared Mary to be the Mother of God. What Nestorius said is that only the human person died and that Jesus is two persons in one body – a perfect schizophrenic. Nestorius said that He is both a divine person and a human person. He claimed that Mary gave birth to a human person, and that somehow or another he became divine after a while. So therefore, Mary is not the Mother of God, but only the mother of a human person, and on the Cross only the human person died. Well, you can see that these heresies which were being pushed are not attempts at being irreverent. In fact, they are attempts at trying to understand and to be reverent, but they are wrong. So the Church needs to be very clear about that.

A person can only be one person. You cannot be two persons. But we have already seen that Jesus had to be both human and divine. By nature, He is a divine person. He is a divine person from all eternity; that cannot change. What happened is that a human nature was added to the divine nature. Jesus Christ is a divine person with a divine nature and a human nature; only one person with two natures. That is who Jesus Christ is. He is both God and man, not merely God, not merely man, and not two persons. He is one person with two natures. The two natures are completely bonded together, but there is only one person. That means He has two minds and He has two wills. He has a divine mind and a divine will. He has a human mind and He has a human will. You need to understand that your brain is not your mind. So Jesus was not running around with two brains. Your mind is a faculty of your soul. Your soul is separated into the mind and the will. Jesus, as God, has a divine mind; as man, He has a human mind. As God, He has a divine will; as man, He has a human will.

This truth is called the hypostatic union. Again, hypostatic is in Greek. You put it into Latin and it simply says substantial. It is a substantial union. We talked about the difference between substance and accidents. The substance is the thing which makes it what it is, the underlying substructure. It is a substantial union, which means it cannot be separated. Our union with God right now is an accidental union. Even if we get to heaven, we will still maintain only an accidental union with God. In other words, we could lose our union with God. If we commit a mortal sin, we lose that relationship with God. The virtue of charity is removed from our soul, and there is a separation from God. If it were a substantial union that we had with God, we would be God and we could not be separated because we would be God Himself. Even in heaven, therefore, our union with God will be an accidental union because even though we will be united with God for eternity it will not be a substantial union, or else we would become God. That simply is not going to happen. In Jesus, however, it is a substantial union. The human and divine natures are substantially united in the one person of Jesus Christ. It is not an accidental union. They cannot be separated from one another. It is a perfect union of two natures in one person.

There are couple of other heresies that came up along these lines that we need to address. It is not sufficient to say that Jesus had a body which was truly human, but did not have a human soul. There are some who suggested that. There are all kinds of heresies with regard to who the person of Jesus is. There were some who said that he does not have a fully human soul. We have to hold that He has a fully human soul because there were some who said that He had an animal soul. Animals have souls that we would call “sensitive” souls. They can sense things. They can move around. They have all the five senses and they can use those, but they do not have the mind and the will. There were some who said, “Jesus took on a human body, but an animal soul, not a human soul.” That is completely wrong. That, by the way, is a heresy called Apollinarianism, named after a guy by the name of Apollinarius. Apollinarius said that Jesus had a human body but an animal soul, and therefore He was not fully human. The problem with that, as the Fathers of the Church would say, is that which has not been assumed has not been saved. If Jesus did not take on a human soul, it means our souls are not saved. What good would it be if our bodies were saved but not our souls? It would be pretty worthless. He had to become wholly human in order for us to be saved. And because human persons are made up of body and soul, Jesus had to have a full human nature, body and soul.

We need to be very clear: Jesus Christ is not a human person. Jesus Christ is a divine person. He is God. He is only one person. He is a divine person with a human nature to go along with His divine nature. That part is very important to understand. And our Lord received His human nature from His mother. It is a point that I always marvel at, because you see how God presents the truth long before humanity is ever able to grasp it. In the ancient world, they had no clue that a woman added anything to the nature of a child. They believed that a woman was merely a seedbed, because they could only operate upon what they saw. They did not have microscopes and all the medical ability we have today. And so what they would say is that the man simply planted the seed in the woman, the woman was the seedbed, and the seed began to grow. Right from the very beginning, the Church said that Jesus received His human nature from His mother. How? How is that possible from their mindset of old? Well, we understand it because His mother did in fact provide something to His person that they did not even understand. Here you see that fifteen hundred years before they could understand what a woman was adding to the conception of a child, the Church was already teaching this truth because it was revealed by the Holy Spirit. Even if they could not fully understand, they were able to teach what the truth was.

Anyway, in this hypostatic union, each of the two natures of Christ continues unimpaired, untransformed, and unmixed with the other. If you want to think of hypostatic (as I mentioned, it means substantial), you could call it “personal”. It is a personal union. It is the union in the very person of Christ. Thus, the two natures come together and are united in the one person of the Word. Nature, again, is the principle of operation in any being. Therefore, nature is active; it does things. So it follows that if Jesus has two natures, He also has two kinds of activities. Possessing both a human and divine nature, He also exercises both human and divine activities, things like thinking and willing, which proceed from the spiritual faculties of the will and the intellect. Those are common to both. Those are divine activities and they are also human activities. But in His human nature, He walks and He talks and He sleeps and He does all the things that we have to do as human beings. In His divine nature, He creates, He performs miracles, and He does all kinds of things that are part of the divine nature. It is the same person operating on two different levels, but with the perfect unity of one person.

Now when did this hypostatic union occur? When did the two natures of Christ join? It is an important question because some of the Gnostics and some of the people who pressed heresies much later on suggested that it was when the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus at His baptism. This, again, is something which is condemned. And that, by the way, is the heresy which is called “adoptionism.” It is the idea that God looked down and saw this guy who was such a great guy that He decided this guy should be His own son: “I think I’ll adopt him as My own and make him God.” These heresies came about because they could not handle that God was born as a man, that the Child born of our Lady is in fact God. That is what it all comes down to. There is this knee-jerk reaction and hatred for Our Lady that makes many people reject the truth about Who Jesus is. In fact, to this day, if you talk with most Protestant Christians, they are going to fall into the Nestorian camp because they refuse to acknowledge that the Child in the womb of Our Lady is God and they refuse to acknowledge that Mary gave birth to God. Therefore, in order to try to get around that point, they wind up falling into one of these various heresies. Some of them still fall into adoptionism, which says that at the Baptism of Jesus He became God when the Holy Spirit descended upon Him. Well, that is a bit of a problem, because at our baptism the Holy Spirit descended on us too and we did not become God! We became adopted children of God at that moment, but we did not become God. So it is an entirely different thing. The hypostatic union occurred at the moment of the conception of Jesus Christ in the womb of His mother.

Will the hypostatic union have an end after the Last Judgment? In other words, right now we can say that Jesus needs His humanity because He stands before the throne of His Father pleading on our behalf, showing Him the wounds that He incurred for us, and therefore we can see why He still needs it. But once the world ends and the last person is in heaven, there will no longer be any need for His human nature to be there, so is that going to end? The answer is “no” because it is a substantial union; it cannot be separated. There cannot be any way that He will be able to separate Himself from Himself. Try that yourself. See if there is a way you can separate yourself from you. You cannot because as a person you are a substance. We have all these external things that are accidental to who we are, but we cannot separate ourselves from the substance of who we are because that is who we are. Jesus is a divine person with a human nature and a divine nature, and that cannot ever be separated. That was decided at the council of Constantinople in the year 381, and it is the reason why this phrase was added to the Creed: and of His kingdom there will be no end. What that little phrase means is that the two natures of Christ substantially united to one another in this hypostatic union will never end. That is something which will remain for all eternity.

Revelation tells us that God became man in Jesus Christ, but it does not tell us how this was accomplished. We must recognize that the assumption of a human nature in the unity of a divine person is something which is purely supernatural. When we were talking about the Trinity, we said that the Trinity is an absolute mystery. We said also that the Incarnation is an absolute mystery. The word Incarnation means “in the flesh.” The fact that God is in human flesh is an absolute mystery which we will never be able to grasp fully, even in the next life. An absolute mystery is one whose reality could not have been known without divine revelation. Even after the revelation of God with regards to this truth of the Incarnation, we cannot prove its intrinsic possibility. It is beyond the power of human reason, but it is not contrary to reason.

That is the very reason Jesus kept His divinity hidden. He called Himself the Son of Man because nobody could see that He was God. They had to make a complete act of faith, just as we do. He did not walk the streets glowing. If you think about what happened at the Transfiguration, as extraordinary as that is, the real miracle was not that Jesus was transfigured on Mount Tabor but that He was not that way 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for His whole life. He kept it hidden so nobody could see that He was God. They had to make that act of faith. If you look at Saint Mark’s Gospel, it is very fascinating that there is only one human person who ever acknowledges that Jesus is God, and he is a pagan. The demons all acknowledge that He is God. “I know who You are – You’re the Son of God,” they would say. But the only human person to ever acknowledge that Jesus is the Son of God is the centurion at the moment of Our Lord’s death: Surely this man was the Son of God. In Saint Matthew’s Gospel, one of the constant themes is that they did not understand. Just read it. It comes up over and over again when talking about the apostles: They did not understand. They could not; they could not grasp it. Who can? It took hundreds of years to be able to work these things through. It is not something that will be easily grasped. Now we cannot fully understand it, and even in eternity we will not.

Do you know what is the most wonderful thing? Even Jesus in His human nature cannot grasp this fully. In His divine mind, He understands it perfectly and grasps it fully. He is God; He understands it perfectly; He has an infinite mind. But His human mind is finite, and this is something infinite. Therefore, in His human mind, Jesus Himself cannot grasp this mystery fully. So do not feel badly if you do not get it entirely because you never will and neither will He. Pretty wonderful. We get to look at Him for the rest of eternity and be completely caught up in mysteries like this. But even in His own humanity, He gets to be caught up in this mystery and be completely blown away by it. It is a wonderful thing.

But you see that God is going to require that we make an act of faith in Who He is. We have the Scriptures and we know they are divinely inspired, but even with that we can read through them and still walk away saying, “I don’t personally believe it.” It requires a personal act of faith. God is going to reveal some things to us that we can grasp easily, and He is going to reveal other things that require a total act of faith. This is one of them. It requires complete faith to be able to believe that Jesus Christ is both God and man. That is Who He is. You can see that it makes perfect sense. We can reason it out, we can talk about all these things, but we are never going to be able to prove it. If He were standing here right before us today, we would see a man. We would not see somebody who looked liked God. What does God look like? He does not have a body. The person who would be standing in front of us would be God, but how could you prove it? You could not prove it scientifically, you could not prove it medically – only by faith. When you look at faith, remember the old saying: “For someone without faith, no proof is sufficient; for someone with faith, no proof is necessary.” We simply accept it on faith. Not foolish, unreasonable things – God is never going to ask us to do that; He made us as rational creatures, so if there is something unreasonable or stupid, no, we do not need to accept that. But when we see that the things He has done and revealed are in fact perfectly reasonable, beyond our comprehension but perfectly reasonable and rational, then we can make that act of faith without scientific proof, because that will never be there.

Who brought about the Incarnation of the Word of God? When we were talking about the Trinity, we said that outside of the immanent Trinity all activities are common to all three Persons because God operates according to His nature, and His nature is shared by all three Persons equally. The hypostatic union, then, was caused by all three Persons of the Trinity operating in common. This nature must be the principle of activity in all operations which take place outside of the Trinity. The Incarnation of the Son of God in space and in time is such an activity; it is something outside of the immanent Trinity itself, and therefore common to all three Persons. However, having said that, it is also necessary that we make very clear that only the Second Person of the Trinity became man. Simply put, that means the Father and the Holy Spirit did not become incarnate in Jesus Christ. Only the Second Person of the Trinity took a human nature to Himself.

Who died on the Cross? Before we can answer that question, we have to ask: What is death? Is death the end of existence? No. Death is the separation of the soul from the body. At the moment we die, our soul separates from the body. The soul, as we have seen, is immortal. The soul cannot die, the body can. When we look at somebody laid out in a coffin at their wake, we say, “That was a good person.” It is the body of the person, but the soul and the body have now been separated. The personality, which resides in the soul, is gone. The body is still there, but in our minds we recognize intrinsically that connection and we acknowledge that body as being who this person is. If death is the separation of the soul from the body, God was able to die. Not in the Nietsche sense of “God is dead” – that was on the front page of Time magazine about 30 or 40 years ago and it is just sheer stupidity – but, in this case, God was able to die because it is a person who dies. And the person who died on the Cross is Jesus Christ. Jesus is God. He was able to die because He took a body and a soul to Himself, and the soul was able to separate from the body. A nature cannot die, only a person can die. Just as a mother does not give birth to a nature and you do not look at somebody in a coffin and say, “What a good nature,” a person dies, not a nature. So the divine person in His human nature died on the Cross. Therefore, God died in Jesus Christ because Jesus’ soul, like ours, can continue without His body. His soul and His divinity are substantially united. Therefore, at the moment of His death, His human soul left His human body and remained united with his divinity, and His human body laid in death. So when anybody would look upon Him, they would acknowledge that the person of Jesus died. But that does not mean that His divinity stopped existing or that as God there was no longer any divinity there, but rather because He is one person and that person is God, God died in Christ. It would not be true to say that Jesus suffered and died in His divine nature because His divine nature is incapable of suffering and death. Remember what we said at the very beginning: Only an infinite person can make up for an infinite offense. So it is the person who had to die.

If you think about that point I just made, He did not suffer in His divine nature. God cannot suffer. That is, God qua God cannot suffer. God is perfectly happy. No matter what we do to offend God, He does not suffer. But because Jesus took a human nature to Himself, He had a body that allowed Him to suffer, just like ours. If we were scourged, if we were beaten, if we were crowned with thorns, we would suffer. It would hurt terribly. And so it did in Him. But in His divinity, He did not suffer at all. The person suffered, the person died, but that was because the person had a human nature which allowed Him to be able to suffer and die.

Did Jesus have the Beatific Vision in this life? The Beatific Vision is the face to face vision of God. Beatific means “blessed” or “happy.” When we get to heaven, assuming we go that direction, we will enter into the Beatific Vision; we will see God face to face. Did Jesus have that even in this life? The answer is “yes,” from the very first moment of His conception. Jesus is God. His humanity and His divinity are substantially united, not accidentally united. In other words, when we talked about being in the state of grace, that does not mean you are in heaven. We are united with God, and yet we are not in the Beatific Vision because it is an accidental union. But Jesus is God, and in His humanity He is completely and substantially united to the divinity. Therefore, even in His human nature, in His human mind and His human will, He was united with God. He was in the Beatific Vision from the very first moment of His conception. For us, it is the consummation of grace. It is also the attachment of the soul to God through grace and glory, but again that is an accidental union of the created soul. As I mentioned, the soul of Christ is attached substantially to the Word of God (that is the hypostatic union), so that means the union of the human soul of Christ to His divinity is even more intimate than what we will have when we get to heaven. In the womb of His mother, the humanity of Jesus was more profoundly and intimately united with the divinity than we will be when we get to heaven and are united with God because His is substantial and ours is accidental. If this intimacy existed from the first moment of His conception, then it follows that He would have enjoyed the Beatific Vision even in His human nature from the first moment of His conception. We can also say that He must have what He gives to others since all effects are contained within their cause. Jesus is the cause, or the source, of salvation and heaven for us. He is the cause of the Beatific Vision for others; therefore, He has to have it before He can give it to someone else. There is an old Latin phrase: Nemo dat quod non habent – “No one can give what he does not have.” That is the same reality here. He could not give us the Beatific Vision unless He had the Beatific Vision Himself. From the very first moment of conception He had it.

Then the obvious question is: How can this state of perpetual Beatific Vision be reconciled with the Agony in the Garden? Here is someone looking at God face to face, completely caught up in the Beatific Vision, and yet He is in agony. How do we deal with that? Well, a distinction needs to be made here between the spiritual powers of the soul and the sensitive powers of the soul. You have to understand that your senses are rooted in your soul. The ability to touch, to feel, to see, to hear, and so on, is in the soul not in the senses. For instance, think about your sense of sight; if the ability to see resided in your eyeball, you could pluck your eye out and hold it behind your back and see what is behind you. But the power of sight does not reside in your eyeball; the power of sight resides in your soul. When everything is properly connected and working the proper way, then the sense power is able to find a physical expression in and through the eye. The brain is the physical organ that allows the things of the mind to be able to be expressed in a physical way. We can see that the senses, which also are a part of our body, have their root within the soul. The powers of those senses reside in the soul. So we have the spiritual powers of the soul and we have the sense powers of the soul. The joy of the Beatific Vision is in the spiritual faculties of the soul. The overflow of bliss into the body is accidental to the nature of glory, and in the case of our Lord it was withheld, as we already talked about. The only time that we know of when He allowed that to be suspended was at the time of the Transfiguration, when suddenly He began to glow and what was going on spiritually within Him was expressed physically in that glow that Our Lord had. Think about Moses. He came down from the mountain and he glowed. The things that were going on in his soul were so powerful that they overflowed into the senses. That happens quite frequently. The charismatics came up with the term “slain in the Spirit,” and they thought they had invented something new. They did not.

One of the nice things of being alive in our own day is that we have two thousand years of saints who have already walked the path, and not only that, some of these extraordinary people have written it down. So all we have to do is read it, get on the path, and walk it! We do not have to reinvent the wheel; it is already done for us. The master of prayer in the Church is Saint Teresa of Avila, an extraordinary woman who did not have a whole lot of education, yet wrote some of the most profound and beautiful things that you are ever going to read. Saint Teresa talks about what she would call the suspension, or the sleep, of the senses. What happens in prayer if God is doing something in your soul that is more powerful than your spiritual faculties can handle, is that it overflows into the sense faculties. Because the spiritual faculties are higher than the sense faculties, if God’s action is more than what the spiritual faculties can handle, that means it is way more than your sense faculties can handle and so you immediately go out. It is like tripping a switch. The circuit breaker breaks, basically. You can be wide awake doing just fine in one instant, and the next instant it looks like you are sound asleep, but you are not. You are just out. Then you come back to, usually about 40 to 50 minutes later, and you have no clue what happened in between. The power of the Holy Spirit was working so much in your soul trying to do something in there that it overflowed into the body. When a person grows to a point of holiness where they would not go out any longer, then what is happening in the soul would actually be able to be expressed through the senses in the body. That is a situation like Moses where he began to glow because his level of holiness was such that when God was working in his soul in a very profound way it was able to be expressed through his senses. Rather than knocking him out, it simply came out in a glow. The same thing can happen to us. Do not pray for that. People would think you were a little odd if you walked around glowing. But the fact of the matter is that those sorts of things can happen.

Anyway, with our Lord, this point of allowing what was going on in the spiritual faculties to overflow into the sense faculties was kept hidden and the only time He allowed it to come forth, as I said, was at the Transfiguration. But because of this reality, Jesus remained sensitive to sorrow and suffering in His senses. He could feel everything that was going on in His body, even though in the spiritual faculties of His soul He was in the Beatific Vision.

Was there any ignorance in Christ? Not in the pejorative sense but in the proper sense, meaning simply: Was there anything He did not know? The primary object of the immediate vision of God is the Divine Essence, and that is what Jesus saw in His human intellect. In His humanity, He was looking at God face to face. However, a human intellect cannot comprehend God completely. God is infinite, and the finite mind of a human being is finite; therefore, in His human mind, Jesus did not know everything that was knowable about God. In His divine mind, He is God; He knows everything. In His human intellect, He could not grasp everything that is knowable about God because His human intellect is finite. The finite cannot contain the infinite, so there are some things about God Himself that Jesus in His humanity would not have been able to fully comprehend.

Now the secondary object of the immediate vision of God is found in those things that are external to God, everything that is not God Himself. The extent of this knowledge depends upon how perfectly God is known by the creature. The higher you go in holiness (in other words, the more perfect you become in this life), the more perfectly you will know everything because you grow closer to God, and as you look at God you are able to see everything else more clearly. When you listen to the saints and you see the simplicity and the clarity with which they were able to cut through things or to see the truth in things, that is why. They are looking at God, Who is absolute truth, and they are able to see very clearly. While the rest of us are trying to wade our way through the swamp of all the junk that is in the way, they just rise right above it and they see right to the heart of it because they are seeing God much more clearly. They know Him more perfectly because of their holiness. Well, because of the hypostatic union, Jesus knew everything that pertained to Him and to His mission as the Redeemer of the world. He knew absolutely everything in His humanity of what God expected of Him and the reason why He was sent into the world. He is God. Nonetheless, He cannot contain everything of God because God is infinite. But what pertained to Him and to His mission as the Redeemer of the world, He knew in His human intellect perfectly.

With regard to this knowledge, Christ could communicate to us whatever pertained to His mission. What did not pertain to His mission is called incommunicable knowledge. There are lots of things Jesus knew that He did not have to communicate to us because it would not have been good for us to know, either because we did not need to know it or it had nothing to do with the reason why He came. Imagine what He could have done out in Saint Joseph’s shop. With the knowledge and intellect He had, He could have done some very profound things. He could have built Himself a racecar if He had wanted to. They did not know what an internal combustion engine was back then, and it would have wowed them if this thing had come ripping out of Saint Joseph’s shop! So He was not going to do that. There is a false gospel that was condemned, the gospel of Thomas, where it actually has Jesus on the shore of a brook one day making little sparrows out of clay. When His mother calls Him for dinner, He just simply waves to the sparrows and they become real birds and fly away. It has Him as a little boy, and He gets angry at one of the kids, hits him, and the kid dies. Again, these are not real stories. It is an apocryphal gospel; it is not something which is real. But with regard to the things that would not be good for us to know, the fact of the matter is that He did not communicate them. He is God. He knew exactly when the world was going to end. Why did He not tell us? Because it would not have been good for us. What if we were sitting around here today saying, “You know what, Jesus told us that the world is not going to end for another couple of thousand years, so we have nothing to worry about. Eat, drink, and be merry!” No, instead He set it up so that every generation would think it might be in their time. What did He say? To watch for floods, famines, earthquakes, wars, pestilences, and so on. Has there ever been a time when there weren’t those things? No. So every generation looks at the evil of its own generation and says, “We might be it and we need to stay on guard.” It is really a merciful thing that He did not tell us these things or else the vast majority of souls would be lost forever. He wants us all to go to heaven, so therefore we have to stay on our toes, spiritually speaking, if we are going to be able to do that.

Back to the mind of Christ, there is no ignorance or error in Christ’s human soul due to the hypostatic union. The only thing we can say that He lacked is that part of God which is beyond what His human mind was able to grasp. But with regard to everything else, there is no ignorance at all. None.

[End of Lesson 5]

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