Annotatio CLXXXVI

”Save me, O God, for the waters have come in even unto my soul.” — Psalm 68:2

Hilary, bishop of Poitiers, inserted into the explanation of this Psalm several sentences by which he seems to hint that the humanity of Christ was, by its own nature, free from grief and misery¹ — and that hunger, thirst, sorrow, fear, and the other infirmities of soul and body were not natural to him, but voluntarily assumed for our sake. For in the preface of the Psalm he thus speaks: “Having thus gone through the lot of all human passions, he speaks and grieves according to our infirmities [which he] took upon [him] — himself indeed placed outside the necessity of fear and of grief, yet accommodating himself to these things which he assumed: that he who was born a man of our flesh might speak out of the complaints of our griefs and the prayer of [our] infirmity.” And after these things, expounding that [verse], “In my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink,”² he added: “But he said, prophetically, that he thirsted — because all our [passions] which were in him are infirmities not natural, but assumed.” This matter he pursues far more copiously and clearly in book 10 On the Trinity, where he strives to show that there was in Christ no fear of death — taking his argument from this: that if Christ had dreaded death, he would have feared either on account of the spirit or of the body, neither of which could happen. For, according to the spirit, he desired death with so great an ardor of mind that he could not fear it; and, according to the flesh, he likewise could not fear — inasmuch as he knew that he had flesh by nature impassible, which, although enemies could cut and pierce with blows, strokes, and wounds, yet they were not able to affect with pain. His words are these: “Perhaps there will be [some] who think that Christ feared death: let them determine for what thing they judge death was terrible [to him] — for the spirit, or for the body? If death is terrible to the spirit, [then] Christ would fear the infernal chaos, while Lazarus was rejoicing in the bosom of Abraham — [but] these things are foolish and ridiculous: [to think] that he — having power to lay down the Soul and to resume [it] — should fear to die, [he who was] to die, for the sacrament of human life, under the liberty of his own will. There is no fear of death in the will of one dying and having power; nor, in the hand of death, does [it] long remain: because both the will of dying and the power of reviving are outside the nature of fear, since death cannot be feared, [being] both in the will of dying and in the power of living. But perhaps the pain of the body hanging on the cross, and the violent bonds of the binding cords, and the wounds of the driven-in nails, are [matter] for fear: let us see, therefore, of what body Christ is — into which, although a blow might fall, or a wound descend, or the knots press together, or the suspension lift [him] up, these things would indeed bring the assault of suffering, yet would not inflict the pain of suffering — as some dart, or [something] piercing water, or pricking fire, or wounding the air. All these [agents] their nature inflicts, that it may pierce, prick, and wound; but the suffering inflicted does not retain its nature in this [case], since it is not in the nature [of things] for water to be bored, or fire to be pricked, or the air to be wounded — although it be the nature of the dart to wound, and” to prick, and to bore. The Lord Jesus indeed suffered — while he is struck, while he is hung up, while he is crucified, while he dies; but the suffering, rushing upon the body of the Lord, did not exercise the nature of suffering: for although it raged with a penal ministry, yet the power of the body, without the sensation of pain, received into itself the force of the pain raging [against it]. That body of the Lord would indeed have had the nature of our grief, if our body has this of nature: to tread the waves, and walk upon the floods, and not be weighed down by [its] entrance [into water], nor yield with the footsteps of one standing on the water — [and] to penetrate even solid things, nor be barred by the walls of a closed house. But truly, if this alone be the nature of the Lord’s body — that it is borne by its own power upon moist things, and stands upon liquids, and runs through structures — how is the flesh, conceived of the Holy Spirit, judged [to act] according to the nature of a human body? That flesh is from the heavens, and that man is from God, having indeed a body for suffering (and he suffered), but not having a nature for grieving; for that body is of its own proper nature — [the body] which is transformed into heavenly glory on the mountain, which by its touch puts fevers to flight, which from its own spittle forms eyes,” etc.

In the commentaries on Matthew also there are certain sayings of this author, not abhorrent from the sense of the proposed narration, which — studying brevity — I omit. I pass over, too, several sentences of Jerome and Augustine that lend color to this dogma, which thou wilt more conveniently inspect above, in Annotation 162, and below, in Annotation 115 of the following book.

Peter [Lombard], bishop of Paris, in book 3 of the Sentences, distinction 15, interpreting Hilary’s discourse amicably and benevolently,³ says that he took away from Christ neither the true sense of fear, grief, and suffering, nor the natural necessity of fearing, grieving, and suffering, but [only] the cause and merit [desert] of suffering, grieving, and fearing, which is in us. For in us there is a natural necessity of suffering, brought in on account of Adam’s sin; but in Christ there is truly a natural necessity of suffering — not inflicted by a defect of human conception, but voluntarily assumed of his own free will.

Claudianus [Mamertus], bishop of Vienne in Gaul, who preceded Peter by nearly seven hundred years, in the second book On the State of the Soul, so excuses Hilary that he pronounces him plainly to have erred, in these words: “Hilary of Poitiers, among the many [excellent things] of his lofty disputations, thinking in a certain [matter] otherwise [than truly], disputed these two things contrary to the truth: one, that he said nothing incorporeal is created; the other, that Christ felt nothing of grief in the passion. But since he abolished the defect of this opinion by the virtue of [his] confession, he so sustains the pen of reprehension that he suffers no loss of merit. Wherefore it is fitting to give faith to the expounders of the divine Scriptures [only] so far as they accord with the tenor of the same truth.”

Justinian Augustus, a man in other respects Catholic, so adhered to the Hilarian dogma that he commanded by an imperial edict that it be publicly taught in the church by the priests, and received by all the people, and firmly believed.⁴ A witness of this thing is Evagrius, in book 4 of the Ecclesiastical History, chapter 39, writing thus: “Justinian the Emperor put forth an edict in which he decreed the body of the Lord [to be] incorruptible, and said that it was by no means capable of the natural and blameless passions, but that the Lord ate before the passion in the same manner as he ate after the resurrection; and that his most sacred body [received] no mutation or alteration from the very [moment] in which it was formed in the womb, neither in the voluntary nor in the natural passions, nor even after the resurrection: to which opinion he compelled the priests everywhere to assent. Against him wrote Anastasius, bishop of Antioch,⁵ and demonstrated to him, with great wisdom and eloquence, that the divine Apostles and the holy Fathers both knew and handed down that the body of Christ was corruptible [and subject] to the natural and blameless passions.” These things Evagrius.

John Damascene, in the book On the Hundred Heresies, chapter 84, reports that this error was peculiar to the Escharodocite heretics,⁶ in these words: “The Escharodocitae, who are also called Gaianitae, venerate the body of the Lord [as] incorruptible from its very formation; and they confess indeed that the Lord sustained suffering — I mean hunger, and famine, and thirst, and toil — but they say that he sustained [them] not according to the manner which is in us, nor as [one] serving the laws of nature.” I suspect that Damascene imposed on those heretics the surname Escharodocitae for this reason: that they ascribed to Christ a certain insensible and impassible hardness of flesh, which — however much bruised by blows and wounds — would suffer nothing of pain. For among the Greeks ἐσχάρα signifies the callous hardness of flesh drawn over by inveterate wounds, which has no sense of pain; and δοκητής [means] “an approver [one who holds an opinion]”: so that Escharodocita sounds nothing else than “an approver [maintainer] of a hard and impassible flesh.”