Aaron Riches Quotes

In the womb of the Virgin Mary, God “becomes” human, receiving from her the body that makes possible the “passion” of God; while on the Cross, through the Jewish flesh given of Mary, the divine Son is truly crucified. In the same way, in the Eucharist, Christians receive the very flesh the Logos received of Mary and united to himself, that “truly life-giving flesh of God the Word himself.” Only insofar as God receives the passability of human flesh does he become crucifiable and sacramentally givable.

To illustrate the nature of this theandric reciprocity, Thomas invokes, as an example, the physical touch of Jesus’s hand: “he wrought divine things humanly, as when he healed the leper with a touch.” The touch of a human being is not in itself miraculous, and even in Jesus this human action is not humanly healing. The miraculous fact of the healing power of this human touch, rather, as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, “proceeds from God as the principal cause and from Christ’s human nature as the instrumental cause.” Jesus works divine things humanly. More ultimately, Jesus wills the divine will of salvation humanly. And so he wills theandrically in the sense that what he wills has an “infinite value” that “derives from the divine suppositum that is the agent which operates”. The deifying effects of the Incarnation are thus contingent on the theandric fact of the interpenetrating unity of divine-human operations.

To suggest that the grief of Christ issues from his perfect wisdom andcharity would confirm that true sorrow is human and therefore cannotcorrespond to despair, since the hopelessness of despair would yield nothingabout which to sorrow. If life is meaningless, there is no reason tomourn. Truth is what makes grief authentic and real, and so it followsthat Truth Incarnate, come down from heaven to our vale of tears, wouldgrieve at the highest pitch. The “tragic experience of the most completedesolation”49 depends on “the knowledge and experience of the Father.”50Or as Adrienne von Speyr puts it: “The Father is never more present thanin this absence on the Cross.

Orthodoxy, however, entails a revolution in our metaphysical conception of the relationship between God and humanity, and therefore between the uncreated Unum and the maior dissimilitudo of the creature before the Unum. Properly understood, the apostolic confession of the unity of Christ does not stand midway between a “too unitive Christology” on the one hand, and a “too differentiating Christology” on the other; rather, it wholly recapitulates the nature of the difference of man before God.